Archiv für die Kategorie „Wordpress“

WordPress 3.1 ok

“404-to-start” plugin will send every 404 page not found error directly to start page or any other custom page/site you like to overcome problems with search engines.

This will help you solve problems with external bad links which are not under your influence.

Chose between 301 – Moved permanently (default) and 302 – Moved temporarily.

Changelog

1.3 (03.03.2011)

• Set custom target Url (any page or site you like)

1.2 (24.02.2011)

• tested with WordPress 3.1

1.1 (10.02.2010)

new settings menu

chose between 301 and 302 redirect

tested with WordPress 3.0.5

1.0 (02.01.2010)

first Version

Download from WordPress repository.

WordPress 3.1.3 ok

Geotagmapper will add geographical identification meta data to the header of your webpage. The data (latitude and longitude) will automatically be retrieved by Google maps. You only have to specify your address.

It is really easy to handle and self-explanatory.

Download from WordPress repository.

Changelog

1.5.1 (28.05.2011)

• Test wird WordPress 3.1.3 -> ok
• Bugfix: “Fatal error: Cannot redeclare my_plugin_options()“

1.5 (25.02.2011)

• test with WordPress 3.1 -> ok
• translations

1.4 (03.07.2010)

• now multilanguage
• added German

1.3 (18.06.2010)

• tested with WordPress 3.0 ok
• Switched from XML to JSON data import

1.2 (16.06.2010)

• ability to insert geodata in frontpage, pages or posts only
• creating function to place data manually into templates

WordPress 3.2 ok!

NOW WITH ABILITY TO CREATE UNIQUE CONTENT

Create a complete unique new post on a random old one and promote it to the top of your blog.

It is really easy to handle and self-explanatory.

Compared to other plugins which do pretty much the same my plugin uses the build in functionality of WordPress’ own “cronjob”. This makes the whole part much more stable and (what is even more important) bypasses workload away from the server.

Every promotion is registered in a log file.

Download

Download directly from WordPress.org repository.

FAQ

Is there anything I should be aware of? Any limitations?

Yes! This plugin should no be used with permalink structures that include dates.

Please explain me the settings’ values

Old Post Spinner (OPS) checks if a certain amount of time has passed. If so it promotes (or duplicates, depending on the settings) a random post to any position you like.

E.G. take this values:

• Minimum interval between old post promotions: 2000 minutes
• Random maximum interval (added to minimum interval): 500 minutes

Now OPS will every 200 0+ X minutes (where X lies somewhere random between 0 and 500) pick up one old post and promote (or duplicate) it to the defined position.

OPS will take into account which posting categories you never want to promote

You can also specify an minimum age for a post to be considered.

What will happen? Let’s take 10 posts ordered by age with No. 1 the as the youngest one. OPS picks the, let’s say, sixth post and give it the current date to promote it to position number one.

If you want a post to be promoted to position 3 OPS will place it, regarding the date, exactly in the middle between number 2 and (the old) number 3, which now will drop to position 4.

What is the difference between duplicating and promoting?

Promoting will move the post to a new position, whereas duplicating will copy a post to the new position, so the latter generates a new post.

What are the best practice values?

They are installed as default values. Minimum interval: 2000 minutes, Random interval: 500 minutes, Post age: 14 days. But maybe you should experiment with your own values. It’s up to you.

What do you mean with spinning?

Spinning means the creation of a new “spinned” content. That will create a new and unique post every time it gets promoted (or duplicated).

How do I spin the title and the content?

That requires a bit of handwork. You can manually add multiple synonym versions of any sentence and any word you want. That is done by using the characters |, { and }. I give you an example:

Hello, my name is {Jack|Jim} and I love {Tennis|Golf}.

Using this spinning instructions sentence will generate this four different result sentences every time your article is promoted:

• Hello, my name is Jack and I love Tennis.
• Hello, my name is Jack and I love Golf.
• Hello, my name is Jim and I love Tennis.
• Hello, my name is Jim and I love Golf.

So, with a little bit of extra afford you are able to create a complete unique post every time.

Just add as many synonym sentences as you like between the curly brackets ”{“, “}” and separate each synonym sentence by Pipe “|”.

You can nest your sentences as well:

Hello, my name is {Jim|{Handsome|Ugly}Joe}.

Will result in:

• Hello, my name is Jim.
• Hello, my name is Handsome Joe.
• Hello, my name is Ugly Joe.

IMPORTANT: Please post this spinning instruction sentences in the extra Old-Post-Spinner meta box of WordPress (see the screenshot) and NOT into the normal text and content form fields

What will happen if I only want to spin the title or the content?

No problem. If you only fill in spinning instructions on the title, then only the title will be spinned. The content won’t change. Same with the content, if you only want the content to be spinned, than leave the spinning instructions on the title empty.

What date will the promoted posts get?

Posts promoted to first position will get the current date. Posts below first position will be placed right in the middle of the enclosing posts.

Why should I use a category to ignore from promotion?

Some posts are simply not meant to be spinned. Especially if they are date-related. E.g. you should place posts with news into an omitted category.

But how do I hide the category from my blog?

If you don’t want this category to appear in you blog you can use the “AVH Extended Categories” plugin.

How can I recover the original dates?

All original dates are stored as custom fields. The name is “ops_original_pub_date”.

How can I support you?

That is nice of you. You can donate via Paypal.

How can I promote my newly dated posts to twitter now?

I think you should consider to use a service like twitterfeed.com. It will pickup your promoted posts and send status messages to twitter.

Do you have other plugins?

Check out my other WordPress Plugins.

Where do I post my feedback?

Here

Changelog

2.4.0 (06.07.2011)

• testing with WordPress 3.2 -> OK
• small security bugfix

2.3.3 (10.06.2011)

• testing with WordPress 3.1.3 -> OK
• removing schedule cron value when deactivating as well

2.3.2 (12.04.2011)

• small security bugfix

2.3.1 (25.03.2011)

• bugs fixed on test routine, when entering wrong values

2.3.0 (15.03.2011)

• using minutes instead of hours

2.2.1 (26.02.2011)

• testing with WordPress 3.1 -> ok

2.2 (19.02.2011)

• tested with 3.0.5
• more FAQs
• new screenshots
• more log entries to check for
• more translations

2.15 (04.12.2010)

• tested with WordPress 3.02

2.14 (11.08.2010)

• tested with 3.01
• new screenshots

2.13 (11.07.2010)

• Fresher design of meta boxes
• new wording
• correcting typo errors

2.12 (11.07.2010)

• creating a brand new permalink when duplicating
• fixing a bug where not unique permalinks could get deleted

2.11 (10.07.2010)

• now detects an existing “Google XML Sitemaps Generator for WordPress”-Plugin and starts creating the sitemap on request

2.10 (09.07.2010)

• tuning the visual design

2.02 (08.07.2010)

• small bugfix where on rare occasions (special PHP/server configuration) OPS creates an error

2.01 (07.07.2010)

• adding more logging messages

2.00 (06.07.2010)

• Now you can even duplicate a unique post instead of only promoting it

1.21 (05.07.2010)

• delete spinning instructions as well when removing of plugin

1.20 (25.06.2010)

• NOW WITH ABILITY TO CREATE UNIQUE CONTENT (Read FAQs on that, please)
• fixed little date bug

1.10 (18.06.2010)

• first multi language version
• German added

1.09 (18.06.2010)

• tested for WordPress 3.0 – ok
• log folder error message now appears inside admin header

1.08 (17.06.2010)

• fixed unnecessary warning messages on development systems

1.07 (16.06.2010)

• moving log folder to wp-content path to face some problems when updating

1.06 (15.06.2010)

• fixing problems some might have with the creation of log folder

1.05 (12.06.2010)

• new FAQs
• checking of implausible values
• new screenshots

1.04 (08.06.2010)

• better logview (check for still not existing log file)

1.03 (07.06.2010)

• small bugfixes

1.02 (06.06.2010)

• using build in WordPress Cronjob
• better logfile view

1.01 (05.06.2010)

• little bugfixes, wording
• including of deinstalation routine to delete all data
• implementing a better log file viewer

1.00 (04.06.2010)

• first Version

S T I L L   B E T A

As it says, an empty plugin considering all the advices given in

http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_a_Plugin, http://codex.wordpress.org/Creating_Options_Pages and http://planetozh.com/blog/2009/09/top-10-most-common-coding-mistakes-in-wordpress-plugins/

Including:

• multi language ability
• uninstall routine
• data delete routine (avoid orphaned data)
• coding advices
• security aspects (validating user inputs, nonces)
• external third party stuff (Ajax, CSS, Javascript)
• shortcode
• WordPress scheduler (“cronjob”)

Download from WordPress repository

Changelog

0.1 (17.02.2011)

• first Version

Mit Schrecken musste ich feststellen, dass mein WordPress-Template auf einem mobilen Endgerät mehr als bescheiden aussieht, fast unleserlich ist und ewig zum Laden braucht. Das musste in Angriff genommen werden.

Wer seine eigene Website auf mobile Anwendbarkeit testen will, kann das unter ready.mobi erledigen. Dort erfolgt eine genauere Analyse für:

• MIME Typen
• Character encoding
• Pop up Fenster
• Alt texts für Bilder
• Nutzen der Stylesheets
• Tabellen
• Übergroße Bilder

Und es besteht die Möglichkeit, die Seite mit einem Emulator zu besuchen.

Nach dieser schlecht gelaufenen Analyse habe ich mir drei verschiedene Plugins vorgenommen.

• viewMobile
• WordPress Mobile Edition
• MobilePress

Ich habe mich für MobilePress entschieden, weil es einfach zu installieren ist und ein eigenes Template eingebaut hat. Und vor allem scheint es auch immer noch gepflegt zu werden. Man installiert es wie jedes beliebige Plugin. Eventuell muss noch der Webseiten-Cache geleert werden, falls man ein Cache-Plugin installiert hat. Das war es auch schon.

Ein jetzt durchgeführte Test gab bei fast allen Punkten “grünes Licht” und vor allem kann man mein Blog jetzt auch ohne Kopfschmerzen auf einem Android-Handy lesen.

Ein  sehr guter Artikel mit Tests zu 9 anderen Plugins findet sich aktuell bei Dr. Web.

Let me give you some advice I made over the last 15 years in online business which certainly will destroy some of the money making ideas which the net if flooded with.

1. Don’t do evil

Google is right, in both ways, in  punishing others from trying to cheat on them and in not working for the Chinese despots.

Grey or black hats will never win the long run. They may make a fast buck from clicking on their own ads, buying links or stealing traffic with  other techniques. But sooner or later they will lose, the thousands of engineers at Google, Bing and Yahoo will beat them.

Do you really think Google is stupid?

You know what will happen if you try to sneak your way through for a free ride? They will track you down all of the sudden and your reputation will be down the drain for a very long time. Once caught in the act you will have to give up your domains, your server (as your whole IP will be punished) your accounts and your identity.

Cheating and lying after all can be very stressing. You have to remember your tricks, your stolen identities, your hundreds of password. Working the non-evil way is simply less stressing. It let’s you concentrate on your business, your customers and your competitors.

2. It’s a long run

Like life itself, business for sure is a long run. Some guys might made a fortune from a (foresight) simple idea which they sold after 3 days to a competitor. But the vast majority of entrepreneurs in every business will have to work hard, very hard. If you are not willing and able to work at least 12 hours a day, seven days a week for the next three years you will never make it.

You should really love what you do, otherwise you won’t survive the fall backs. Without a passion for what you do you will take every downturn personal. If you don’t feel a real passion you should stick to your 9-to-5. After all it’s not that bad to have a regular pay check. Don’t lie to yourself in what your are capable and what not.

3. Find  a real market

This is important. From what I found out in the last 12 months: Niche Markets and Niche Marketing are a myth.

There are two ways to make money in sales: You sell something really expensive (House, Yacht, Ferrari) to one person or you sell something inexpensive to many people. This is the idea of the “Long Tail” in sales. The problem is that people working niches are sitting on the lowest level of the marketing hierarchy. So they only sell inexpensive goods to very few people.

An example: Assuming an average click price (the price you get when somebody visits your page and clicks on an ad) is 0,20 Dollar and the an average click through rate of 2% (how many of the people who visit your site actually click on an ad), you would need 250.000 unique page views to gain an income of just 1.000 Dollar. That makes 1 Million views for 4.000 Dollar. Seeing this figures someone must be very optimistic to even thinking about to make a living with this. And I doubt very much that the amounts are more with other typical multilevel products (“How to”-PDF, Spam services, Auto-Blog-Robots and the like)

The only guys making money from it (and compared to their affords it’s still very little money) are the once who sell you the shovels, the once who sit on top of the hierarchy. Even in the gold rush only the sellers of shovels made big money. The same is with people selling you the next worthless PDF document in multi level marketing. Ever seen the long, very long same looking scroll down selling papers with fake customer testimonials? You know what I mean.

If you want to make money you have to concentrate on already working Bricks and Mortgage business and find ways to leverage it with online tools. That’s all.

It’s not Hocus Pocus. You will not be the one to invent the next Twitter. After all, Twitter is making zero money until now. How long will you survive with no money?

Trust your guts, if you have one. You will never make a living of trying to sell goods that people in reality don’t need. Ask yourself, have you ever bought one of your products yourself in the past? And I am not referring to worthless SEO products, they are crap in any ways.

Skip the romantic ideas of the next Real McCoy.

I know what I am talking about. In the last couple of months I was able to drive thousands of unique new visitors to different websites a day. And all I got from it was about 1-2 Dollars Adsense click revenue from it a day. Aside that no leads, no sales, nada. Every bump makes more money from refund bottles. I didn’t study economics for that!

4. SEO is not a business, it’s a support

I know guys who spend countless hours in researching the newest hacks for beating the Google engine. Believe me, this is futile. If your offline, real life business is wacky or a dead born horse, it won’t help you if you invest time (which is always money) in SEO.  I know males like to fine tune every nuts and bolts of their gimmicks. Get real, get away from that.

Concentrate on your real business, the one that pays your bills. No matter how boring it may be. Write sale letters, find better wholesalers, detect new channels of distribution (online or offline), collaborate with partners to save marketing costs. This drives your success.

SEO is too much alike stock market trading. After all no one really knows what leads to success. If someone really knows, do you think he would tell you the way to go? And then if there is a 100% bullet proof receipt everyone would use it, hence every little advance would  soon melt off. Better concentrate on your core business.

5. Set your targets

All right, maybe this should have come earlier. But it’s never too late.

To be successful you have to set and measure your targets. Sounds logical, doesn’t it? I bet that most of you reading this have never even taken this serious. Meaning not only thinking about the target of becoming rich and famous with your business, but sitting down with a pen and paper and writing your targets down.

Do you have targets for live and business? Targets on private, intellectual or health related issues? Do you have short or long running targets? No?

Let me give you some advice on that. Your targets ought to be S.M.A.R.T.:

Specific – Define your targets to the point. Find 1000 new relevant followers on twitter. Write an 500 word article on my business every week. Talk to 1 new wholesaler every month personally. Phone your best 10% customers every 3 months and ask them for their opinions on your business.

Measurable – To control your success your targets must be quantifiable. It’s as simply as that. Don’t say “I want to earn more at the end of the year”. Say “I want to increase my sales by 50% compared to last year. Don’t say “I want to attract more new customers”. Say “I want to find 10 new unique customers through social media contact till the end of this week.”

Attainable – To be practical give yourself attainable targets. Those targets are the long runners. “I want to sell my business in 10 years for a capital monthly income of $ 2000.” or “I want to be the most sucessfull solo real estate agent in my area 5 years from now. Your ratget should be challenging but never out of reach.

Realistic – Separate your realistic targets from the attainable. Realistic targets means measured by the tools, sets and assets you have now. This doesn’t mean you will never achieve new goals. But then they refer to to attainable targets. I have to confess, it’s not easy to divide the attainable targets from the realistic once. But I had to stick to SMART schema somehow.

Timely – The last one. As Keynes said: “On the long run we are all dead.” Means that you can achieve every goal if you wait long enough. To measure your targets it’s inevitable to set deadline. “… until the end of January”, “… until end of fiscal year”, “.. three days before beginning of the new sales campaign.” And don’t you ever let yourself into temptation to postpone your timeline. People find excuses for everything. If you don’t hit the spot by time it simply means you have not achieved the goal.

And now. NOW! sit down, take a pen and paper and define your targets. 3 for today, 3 until shorter reference and 3 for your long running goals.

[Reference on this chapter goes to Tamar Weinberg ]

6. Control control control

Once you set your targets you have to control them.

And like with the time line you must stick to your settings. When you’d define a success being 10% rise of sales, than 8% is not.

When you fail in reaching your targets, you have to analyze why. Even if it were circumstances out of your reach, you should have foreseen them. That is what clever management is about, to take the unexpected into account.

Long running targets of course must be controlled by milestones so you don’t get surprised and still have time to turn the steering wheel into the right direction. Remember the bigger the target the longer it takes for the ship to react to your actions.

And always be truthful to yourself. If you are not going to make it than leave it. It’s not a shame to resign, it’s a shame to run into ruin just because you love your unsuccessful business too much and you don’t have the heart to sound the death knell.

7. Know your customer

Nothing is as easy nowadays as knowing your customers. With your ear inside the social media stream and Google Analytics only a click away, you should not have any problems at all to identify your customers general needs and concerns and the their experiences with your product or services.

Use the tools to get and stay connected.

But take your time, don’t rush. Learn the language inside your community, don’t lie, react.

And don’t spam! Don’t flood the net with useless stuff, please don’t. Don’t write yet another article on how great article writing is. We all know that already, stupid!

8. Don’t exaggerate

Remember how we all hated the big loud mouthed kids at school? It hasn’t changed. No one likes people how obviously lie to their customers about the performance. And no one likes companies which are too stupid to realize that. Do you like companies which exaggerate? I don’t.

9. Know your competitors

This is an important part of analyzing the market

Who is the leader, what do they do? How do they communicate? What are there prices and services? Do they have special promotions? What makes the top three competitors unique to the rest? Do you know that? Do you think you can cope? Do you think you can beat them? If not, stop and find something else.

Visit your competitors websites, read there sales letters. Collect their RSS-feeds. Read in their community. Read about them in the web. Do they have strong and defending fans or do you think there buyers are not that loyal?

Do yo have the nerve and capital to face all that?

10. Socialize

For god’s sake make yourself visible in the web. A good product is nothing without people knowing about. Be smart, use Guerillia tactics. Think new, think fresh. Or ask (apay) others to think for you. Be funny. Be honest. Post your letters. Have a company blog. Let your visitors be part of the product development process. Use feedback to polish you products. Canalize discussion. Focus on the most wanted and needed features. And most of all identify bugs and product errors.

Again: be honest.

Nothing is more valuable as the input of an angry customer. But don’t provoke it on purpose, of course.

As stated before, building a reputation that helps selling your products, that bonds your customers, that even turns some of them into evangelists, takes time.

Auch Konsolen-Hasser wie ich, müssen anerkennen, dass manche Dinge eben per Kommandozeile einfacher zu erledigen sind. Als herausragendes Beispiel kann man das Verarbeiten von Logs nennen.

Wie sonst sollte man vernünftig Apache Log Files verarbeiten?

Als Inspiration diente mir ein Artikel von Chris Hope.

Dazu nutzt man eine Kombination aus zwei Befehlen: tail und grep.

• tail liefert die letzten Zeilen einer Datei
• grep (oder egrep) filtert Suchergebnisse auf Dateien weiter lesen..

Auch Bilder können Traffic auf sich ziehen und das nicht zu knapp.

Wenn ich den Google Analyzer starte, so sehe ich regelmäßig, dass viele meiner Bilder in Googles Bildersuche gefunden werden.

Wie schafft man das? Natürlich indem man alles HTMLmögliche macht, um die Bilder mit SEO-Techniken zu spicken: weiter lesen..

Many of us, who had programmed a little WordPress plugin are not familar with Unix/Linux. Maybe they never even used a CLI before. Therefor I’d like to show how you can upload your developed plugins to the WordPress.org repository from Windows without any command line hustle.

But maybe you should read this before:

• Developer FAQ
• How to Use Subversion

We are going to use the best Subversion Windows Tool, which is Tortoise. It will integrate seamlessly with Windows Explorer, so no need to enter any complicated commands by hand.

Installing Tortoise and first steps

• Register and login at WordPress.org
• If you want to add your plugin to the repository you have to apply for space on the WordPress.org repository. Now wait for a confirmation mail. The last time it took me three days.
• Download Tortoise and use default parameters to install. You will have to restart Windows afterwards.

 

Adding your files to the wordpress.org repository

• Create a folder on your local drive, e.g. “…/Wordpress/plugins”
• Right click on folder and chose “SVN checkout”
• Enter the URL of repository which you receive in the confirmation mail: http://svn.wp-plugins.org/your-plugin-name, e.G. http://svn.wp-plugins.org/geotagmapper (this is one of my plugins) and press OK. You will receive some checkout information.
• Copy the plugin files you created to the local folder. Put everything in the trunk/ directory for now.
• Let subversion know you want to add those new files to the repository. Select every file of your plugin, right click, “TortoiseSVN/Add…“
• Now check in the changes back to the central repository. Select the file, right click, “SVN Commit…“, then give a message to the check in.

Done. You just addedd your plugin to he wordpress.org plugin repository. Wait 15 minutes for the system to automatically wrap your files into a zip file and put it on the wordpress plugin page.

By the way, did you see how the icons changed? This was done by Tortoise to show you the different update status of every file and folder in a glance.

In part 2 of my tutorial to come I will give you more details about how to handle different versions of your plugins and we will look at some of the most asked questions and problems.

The Internet is about give and take. It is not a one way street. Why would somebody prevent search engines to follow links to other sites? Are we all that selfish? Are we really scared that Google might take away some of our mystic Page Rank?

So give back something of your “link power” and don’t use rel=”nofollow”.

For those of you who don’t know what I am talking about read the discussion on wikimedia.org.

WordPress has the nasty habit to use the “nofollow’” attribute by default. The plugin “Do Follow” will help you to overcome this malaise. Just upload and activate, done!

You can always use general filters for comment spam like “WP Spamfree“. Those and a little bit of handwork should be enough to handle all kind of link spam.