Muse 03 – Blog & AdSense Management
Introduction
I have this site that I’ve owned — just the domain, really — for over 10 years. I’ve run it in various forms, and it became a blog two years ago. Back then I chose WordPress because it supposedly could do anything, but managing it turned out to be brutal. I spent a full month just getting it up and running, and whenever I wanted to tweak the finer design and layout, I couldn’t even figure out where in the mountain of code to start.
And here comes my most dreaded chore — number 03: managing the blog and AdSense.
- Chore 01: Organizing a 20-year-old Gmail — https://ed.or.kr/2026/09/26/muse01/
- Chore 02: Sorting out card statements — https://ed.or.kr/2026/09/27/muse02/
- Chore 03: Managing the blog — https://ed.or.kr/2026/09/27/muse03/
I couldn’t take before-and-after photos like a plastic surgery clinic, but here’s the result of about 8 hours of work. Even at a glance, there’s less dead space, and the content and ads are packed in neatly. Let me walk through what was done, one by one.
A quick note
For Muse to work on my blog directly, the wp-admin folder on the hosting server had to be made accessible from abroad (= the US). That’s hosting-management territory — at first it didn’t work, but I just asked the AI and fixed it in no time.
Work completed
Looking at today’s list of blog and AdSense tasks, the depth and expertise went far beyond what an amateur like me could manage — tedious jobs that even a professional would find annoying, all knocked out one after another.
Style
- Restored the image frame borders on published posts (missing CSS was the culprit)
- Added top margin to H1/H2/H3 (1.8em) — no more forced line breaks
- Adjusted the top and bottom margins of the logo
- Matched the editor’s blockquote font size to the published posts (rem → px)
- Made ad blocks visible in the editor (dotted border + “Ad area” label)
Ads
- Turned off AdSense in-page auto ads; kept anchor and vignette ads
- Manual layout: sidebar 300×600 (below TAGS), sticky 300×250, one in-content ad in the body, end-of-post multiplex
- Disabled two single Ad Inserter ads (below the title, end of post)
- Added a new 728×90 leaderboard ad in the header (slot 7070013173)
Header redesign
- Logo on the left + banner on the right; navigation moved to a full-width bar below the header
- Nav bar readability fix: white text with a reddish-brick (#b03a2e) hover
In progress
- Halve the whitespace below the navigation bar (<==== the hardest problem of them all)
The funny thing is, the toughest task of the day — that gap in the middle of the site — is something Muse has now been trying to fix for 30 minutes. I can’t help wondering whether its tokens are melting away. Watching Muse burn through its lifeline tokens for over an hour — trying, failing, and trying again — I even started to feel a sense of respect for it.
(Update) Muse finally cracked it — after 56 minutes and 136 steps of exploring, trying, and verifying!!!!!
That “unsolvable problem” is solved.
The cause was the top margin of .cm-content (about 65px); I cut it in half to 32px. I confirmed in the editor preview that the gap is halved on both the homepage and post pages.
The live site may not reflect it right away because of server caching — it’ll show up once the cache expires.
Wrapping up
Running a blog is one of those areas where knowledge of servers, hosting, web design, and everything in between all comes together. I’ve tried all kinds of automation services over the years, but none of them ever fixed exactly what I needed the way this did. The empty top-right corner of my site had been an eyesore — for two years I just lived with it because I had no idea which layer to fix. Now it’s all cleaned up. As I’ve said many times, the fact that this all runs as a free service is genuinely delightful, and I believe the AI industry — led by Meta — is headed for great success!
