I’ve updated Lucia’s Linky Love for WP 2.3. Sort of. It turned out the plugin already worked for WP 2.3. However, I did make a two mods at user request:

1. Josh Spaulding requested the ability to dofollow trackbacks immediately. That function now exists.
2. Tricia identified a bug that appeared to sometimes occur when people left “names” with apostrophe (that is “‘”) in them. I think I coded corrected.

If you’d like the new version, download Lucia’s Linky Love for WP 2.3. Unzip. Place in plugin folder. Deactivate the old version, activate this one.

If you notice any problems, let me know so I can fix.

A word or caution
Trackback spam can be particularly pesky. I have seen a rash of semi-innocent looking scraper blogs that post snippets of your content. I call these Daegan Spam. If you keep those trackbacks and visit later, you will notice the blogs get redirected to irrelevant thin-affiliate sites for commercial products. This causes you to link into a “bad neighborhood”, which is a bad thing.

I’m planning a tool to help us find these things months later, “just in case”, but haven’t thought through the best way to do it yet.

Meanwhile, be very vigilant about trackback spam. When in doubt delete.

In the “irony” department

I found a bug in “Hide Sponsored Categories Plugins” for 2.3. It only happens for categories that have apostrophe’s in their name. I have such a category. It’s the one for “Lucia’s Linky Love!” So, I’m currently running the old version. Needless to say, I’ll be fixing that bug!

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 11 comments

I updated Hide Sponsored Categories plugin to run with WP 2.3. I’ve been running the updated version for a week here at this blog (which still uses WP 2.2). I also tested it at my test blogs, one of which runs on WP 2.2; one runs on WP 2.3.

What’s “Hide Sponsored Categories” used for?

The main use is to permit bloggers to place all sponsored posts in categories like “PPP”, “ReviewMe”, “Smorty”, “Sponsored Reviews”, “Loud Launch” and etc, but not display those labels publicly. Using these categories is convenient for bloggers, but displaying them violates Pay Per Post Best Practices.

So, by using the plugin, you can have convenience and still conform to best practices. You can create private “meta-categories” that don’t display but which are active for the purpose of:

• using the built-in WP search tool to find all “sponsored” posts when you, the blogger, are logged in and managing your blog.
• using “logic” to filter “sponsored” posts in some way. For example, you can use Kontera Control to keep Kontera ads out of sponsored posts while showing the ads in all other posts. You can use “No Old Spam Links” to “nofollow” all links in Sponsored Posts after your contractual obligation to follow has expired.

Due to changes in how WP handles categories, I had to make quite a few internal modifications. The new plugin should:

• Still work with WP 2.2, particularly when you call the categories using normally available template tags I checked the display with every default template provided by my installation of WP 2.2.



• Now work with widgeted sidebars; see the sidebar widget to the right? I only tested how widgets worked on two or three themes. (This should be enough, but if you have difficulties, let me know.)
• Works with WP 2.3. If you use WP 2.3 and widgets, use the widget to insert the custom functions. If you don’t use widgets, you must make replace the normal WP template tags found in sidebars with special purpose template tags. For your convenience, I described these in the user admin panel for the plugin.

From the user point of view, the plugin mostly works the way the original one does; the user instructions are found in Hide Sponsored Categories.. That page still has the link to the old version– which doesn’t work for WP 2.3, and doesn’t work with widgets.

To get the new version, download this:
Hide Sponsored Categories

After one or two people use the new version and give me feedback, I’ll describe the new options in better detail and update all documentation.

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 2 comments

An updated version of Kontera Control for WP 2.3 is working on my two test blogs, my diet blog and here:

1. Test blog 1: uses WP 2.2.3. I activated widgets on the sidebar, and it’s currently displaying the “Raindrops” theme.
2. Test blog 2: uses WP 2.3; it’s currently displaying a weird version of my normal theme. (The oddities have nothing to do with the plugin.)
3. Neglected diet blog: uses 2.1.2, with no widgets.

Notes:
Tricia had trouble with the version I emailed her. Maybe I attached something other than what I thought was the final version? (I sometimes click “save” and end up with extra copies in odd folders on my mac.) So to avoid issues with email snafus, I zipped the version that is actually running right here on my blog. You can down load by clicking Kontera Control for WP 2.3

To use: Download Kontera Control for WP 2.3, unzip. Upload to plugins. Deactivate old version of Kontera control. Activate this version. If you like, visit the Options page and adjust options. Look at blog to see if the plugin is working.

I think there should be no problems. However, until at least a few people other than me have tested, ya’ never know. If you experience any problems, please copy the error message and send it to me. The precise words in the gooble-dy-gook message help me. (Knowing there are no words helps too.)

After that, just deactivate this version and reactivate the old one.

Changes

Changes compared to old version:

1. Fixed a bug that occurred when widgets were used. That bug made Kontera Control think posts were comments.
2. Found a few formatting issues on the control page.

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 5 comments

Today brings a flood of announcements that Google has knocked down many blog Page Ranks. This is thought to be due to a number of factors including excess numbers of paid posts. So, it is natural that I should hurry up and update “No Old Spam Links”, the plugin that lets you automatically “nofollow” sponsored posts after your contractual obligation to “follow” has expired.

In principle, this plugin may help protect your PR. In practice? Matt Cutts’ has never commented on “No Old Spam Links” and is likely unaware of it. So, who knows?

That said, here are the recent changes to the plugin:

1. I discovered and fixed a bug that sometimes when widgets were used. I fixed the bug.
2. I discovered and fixed a bug that sometimes occurs when you have no specific people in your “nofollow” list. Unfortunately, this bug was affecting my knitting blog so I was giving out way more followed paid links than I intended! Way more.)(Yes, my knitting blog’s page rank dropped; I’ll elaborate on this in a separate post.)
3. I tested the new version with WP 2.3. It works fine.

So, if your worried about excess followed paid links, I suggest you install No Old Spam Links. If you aren’t worried about Google, or you are waiting for them to announce the plugin helps, then don’t use it.

Other plugin news:

1. Tricia is testing the new version of Kontera Control at her WP 2.2 blog. I’m testing at my test blog. She was the one who alerted me to the general issue of plugins going buggy when widgets are used.
2. I updated “Hide No Sponsored Categories” but I’m letting it sit a few days so I can do a better job detecting any bugs. The future version should work for WP 2.3, be compatible with widgets (in fact, it is widgetized) and hopefully work for all versions of WP 2.2 and above. I also coded to detect problems with early version of WP and inform the user why the options page doesn’t display. (This was, btw, the update from hell because my favorite WP category hook vanished!)

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | No comment

I’m updating Kontera Control to work with Wordpress 2.3 and address pesky issues that Tricia of Feverish Thoughts and Loren of Today’s Gizmo’s alerted me to. Guess what? You can help me.

If you use Kontera Control and have experienced any problems or observed any strangeness, please:

1. Describe the problem.
2. Tell me the name of your theme.
3. Describe any widgets or other plugins you use — comments and categories widgets and plugins are usually the most crucial ones for me to know about. (If you don’t know your plugins and widgets off hand, I’ll ask you by email.)

Why will this information help me? Consider what happened with Tricia’s Theme.

Tricia had an issue with Kontera ads appearing in posts in the ‘Sponsored Category’ after she widgetized her site using the Raindrops theme — the plugin had worked before widgetizing.

Deactivating the widgets did not cause the error to go away. (It’s odd the error doesn’t go away when you de-widgetize … but… whatever.)

By testing Kontera Control using Tricia’s theme on my test blog, I discovered the precise incompatibility which is: The Rainbows widget somehow fills the global “comment variable” (called $comment) in a way that causes it to be “true” even outside comments.

This is a bit pesky, and caused my Kontera Control to fail, because I anticipated that “$comment” would be “false” outside comments. Silly me.

(Turns out it’s very, very easy to work around this. But, I need to figure out precisely what went wrong first.)

Anyway, if you are having an issue, give me as much detail, and as soon as possible. That way, I can get the fixed version of KC out by Friday, (which will make Tricia very happy!)

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 3 comments

If you are monetizing your blog, or just want lots of traffic, you need to organize your Wordpress templates so that search engines give you the highest possible rank. We all know that one of the things you must avoid is duplicate content. But did you know that Google may think you have duplicate content even though you don’t?

Remember I wrote that about a month ago? Maybe you wanted to fix the problem, but you didn’t like adding a hunk of code to your header? Well, if you didn’t add the code, your posts may still load with both an address like this “http://mydomain.com/mypost ” and “http://mydomain.com/mypost/”.

Google thinks those are two different pages with the same content. This can hurt your page rank; so it’s best to fix it.

Well, I’ve made adding the code easier: I wrote a plugin! My main motivation was that I got tired of having to scroll past the several lines of code when editing my header file.

Now, to insert the code to fix this up, do this:

1. Download Canonical URL Fixer . Unzip, place in your plugin folder, activate. (Nothing happens yet.)
2. Open your Header.php file for your theme. Ordinarily, the first line says this:
    
   <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
    
   Stick one line ahead of that line so the top of the file now looks like this:
    
   <?php if(function_exists('makeURLCanonical')){ makeURLCanonical();} ?><br /> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"><br /> ?>
    
3. Tell your friends about the plugin. Make sure you mention they can get the plugin here, and tell them the talented Sebastian identified the problem and came up with the fix.

It’s just a simple plugin, and one line of code. But, it will eliminate this particular type of duplicate content and should help your page rank (which will mean more money in the long run.)

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 3 comments

Regular readers may remember I’m working on a plugin to create a little text box containing text links ads. The ads could be affiliate links, my own resources or anything I like. I’m

Right now, the plugin:

1. Fishes out ‘Amazon.com‘, ‘Clickbank‘ and ‘general’ links from the ‘aLinks’ database at random, and turns them into a little text link box similar to the one you see to the right.
2. Redirects the “Clickbank” and “general” links. This turns them into “nofollow” links so you can sell without transferring your page rank to the product page. (Maurice of They Cayman Host suggested this.
3. I can insert the box outside post content; outside the content. When I place the box outside content, I can adjust the color and size of the box. You can see one of these in the sidebar.
4. Permits the user to insert ads inside a post by placing &lt!–injectad–> anywhere they like. I placed that code in the DIV box to right justify the box. However, inside content, I don’t yet permit customization of the ads. The box is outlined in grey, five ads appear, and you can’t adjust the width.
5. Piggy-backs off “aLinks” a WordPress plugin that will auto-link words in a blog content. This lets me defer writing certain parts of the user interface until I identify the full functionality I want from my plugin.

For my purposes, the functionality is already pretty nice. Hoever, I find I discover what I want to change as I actually use it. So, for now, I plan to slap one of these ad in the sidebar and then hunt down some decent affiliate programs that permit me to just run text. Over the next week or two, I’ll also be adding whichever features I feel I need most and which I can figure out how to do easily.

In the short term, I’ll be adding functionality to let people customize the box width and colors when this is used inside posts, and to change the ‘Ad’ message in the lower corner.

This plugin isn’t available yet, and it doesn’t have a name, but you’ll be seeing the ads in various locations from time to time.

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 2 comments

Andy Beard is hankering for titles like Muhammad Saleem uses to lure in StumbleUpon traffic:

Notice the title is centered, and there is a break after the colon?

I suspect it can be done with CSS, but I’m wretched at that. So, I wrote a plugin called Nifty Titles.

Other features

1. Doesn’t add the break in the feed. (Or at least it didn’t at my test blog.)
2. Only shows in the page title.
3. As far as I can tell, doesn’t screw anything up.
4. Right now breaks on the “:” only. I could code a “candy” to give authors more control and/or permit breaking on “?”.

Will this lure in StumbleUpon Traffic? Tell me what you think.

—-
Note: After clicking publish, I notice this does something ugly in the admin panel. That will be easy to fix in the morning. In the meantime, if you have suggestions about breaking on “?” or “!” or anything else, let me know. It’s easy to do.

—
Update: I modified to a) fix the ugliness in the admin panel, add a after the first “:”, “?” or “!” but only break if there are at least 20 characters before the punctuation. (I want something easy to use that doesn’t ever look stupid.)

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 7 comments

Wow, between Sep 24 1:14 am Sep 25 6:07 am, 13 people all from IP address 60.75.111.14 posted to thank me for “Lucia’s Linky Love!” I feel so overwhelmed with the gratitude pouring from all parts of the globe.

Here we have two blog visitors from France:

forum | forum@hotmail.fr | forumyum.com | IP: 160.75.111.14
thank you

tılsım adası | tilsimad@hotmail.fr | tilsimadasi-dizi-izle.blogspot.com | IP: 160.75.111.14
thank you very good job

A celebrity:

hilary duff | hilary_d@hotmail.com | hilaryduff-music. blogspot.com | IP: 160.75.111.14
waooovv good very thanks

A nice note from ‘evden eve nakliyat’, who must think this blog is written by more than one young man:

evden eve nakliyat | askliyat-@hotmail.com | evdenevenakliyat-b. blogspot.com | IP: 160.75.111.14
thank you boys

Look, ‘evden eve nakliyat ‘ changed his email address (there by ensuring he would never ever get any link juice.)

evden eve nakliyat | evdenevenaaskliyat-@hotmail.com | evdenevenakliyat-a. blogspot.com | IP: 160.75.111.14
thank you very good

‘etkileyici msn nickleri ‘who must be fascinated reading “thank you” over and over:

etkileyici msn nickleri | etkileyici-msn-nickleri@hotmail.com | etkileyici-msn-nickleri.blogspot.com | IP: 160.75.111.14
thnak you i read all comment,this site super

msn nickleri | evdennsdf@hotmail.com | guzel-msn-nickleri.blogspot.com | IP: 160.75.111.14
thanks nice working

Someone, who like the others, is using a keyboard with no “Caps” key:

forum | forum@hotmail.com | komple.org | IP: 160.75.111.14
thank you good work

‘evden eve nakliyat’ using yet another email address:

evden eve nakliyat | evdenevenakliyat@hotmail.com | evdenevenakliyatcim.net | IP: 160.75.111.14
thank you yoru work

Does anyone even know where “.gz” is? Do they really want me to visit their site map?

msn nickleri | msnnick@hotmail.com | hayalbahcesi.net/urllist.txt.gz | IP: 160.75.111.14
thank you from your writing

conquer online | coonline@hotmail.com | hayalbahcesi.net/sitemap_1.xml.gz | IP: 160.75.111.14
nice collection

I always love smilies.

knight online | knightonline@hotmail.com | hayalbahcesi.net/sitemap_index.xml.gz | IP: 160.75.111.14
thank you good job

Fortunately, this is the last one, but notice they are very very grateful!

tsubasa | tsubasa@hotmail.com | hayalbahcesi.net | IP: 160.75.111.14
thank you very very much

Well…. these notes of gratitude are very sweet. But, I think these grateful people need to learn that to get a follow they must match all three of the following at once:

1. The “first name” in the name field. (That is if lucia lijegren and lucia of Lucia’s linky love match.
2. The full email address and
3. The top level domain.

I mean, it’s just a shame that after all that effort with a broken keyboard, they never got a “follow”. Or were these “extremely relevant comments” added these using ‘Blog Comment Poster“? (Yes, such things exist. Yes, I’m making sure I learn their features. No, I don’t think you should buy it.)

Of course, when I saw all 13 matching IP’s I hurled these into Akismet’s spam maw. I’m sure you’ll do the same when ‘evden eve nakliyat’ from IP: 160.75.111.14 visits your site. But he probably won’t visit because by now, I’m sure Akismet has figured out that IP: 160.75.111.14 is a spammer.

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 6 comments

People are discovering AdBlocker Plus, so I figure it’s time to make it easier to insert ads that don’t get blocked into a Wordpress blog. I looked for a Wordpress Ad Plugin that let me create and insert a banner of simple text-link type affiliate ads into my blog, but couldn’t find what I wanted. Then, I realized I could write a “proto-plugin” in 30 minutes, so I did.

My current “proto-plugin” fishes out the affiliate ad key phrases out of the database used by aLinks and display them as text ads on each post. If you look to the bottom of this post, you’ll see my ads inside an orange box.

I figure this little plugin will help me promote these various products and display them on both my knitting blog and here. Currently, all the plugin does is: a) create a box, b) pull two ads from my database and c) displays them after the post content.

I’m planning to make this niftier (if only for myself). But, before I do, I was looking for suggestions. Any and all suggestions are welcome. Here are features I already plan (because I want them!):

1. Let the blogger place the box where they prefer either inside their post, sidebar or between posts.
2. Let blogger format the box size, color, border thickness etc.
3. Let the blogger specify which group of affiliate ads they want to display (clickbank, amazon, general etc.)
4. I don’t know.. what else seems important? Make them blink?

I don’t want to have tooooo many options, but key ones that might make this attractive to bloggers who want to monetize would be useful.

Oh… and of course, if you know of a plugin that already does a good job rotating random text-based affiliate ads, let me know. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel.
—
Update: I’m fiddling with the plugin. Ads will appear, disppear and have “issues”.

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 7 comments