Problems with wp-o-matic plug-in
I had to fight with it for two days before making it work as I wanted to. At first, when you try to add a feed it will tell me that SimplePie couldn’t process it. So I had to go and install Simple Pie core first, before doing anything else. Once you add a new campaign and put a feed in there, the plug in will tell you that it fetched successfully 0 posts. Then I checked if something went wrong in the database table WP-o-matic creates. The problem was that it encoded the & symbol into & and it couldn’t fetch any posts. The solution is to open the wpomatic.php file and find the AddCampaignFeed() function, it somewhere around the 1000th line. Then locate the following line:
and change it to:
This will decode the
However, after the fix, some of my amazon feeds were still not working and the script kept fetching 0 posts. The solution to this problem is to go to Feedburner.com and process your feeds through their system. Once you do that, copy and paste the feedburner feed URL and it will work without a hitch.
There’s a new version of WP-o-matic coming soon. V 1.5 will be available at http://wpomatic.com. Thanks to the developers for the wonderful plug-in.
Flash for great charts
I’ve been working on a statistics script for the past couple of days. While I was wondering on how am I going to represent the data, a friend mentioned the flash animated charts, which Google uses throughout their network. I did a quick research on that matter and found a neat script (actually, a whole project), which I think is worth blogging about. It’s called Open Flash Chart Read more »
Make one array’s keys, another array’s values
PHP June 1st, 2009
Have you wondered how to name all the key’s of an array to another array’s values? Use this script to swap values with keys in any array:
foreach ($a as $key => $value) {
$b["$value"]=$key;
}
?>
What keywords do people use to find your site?
Outsourcing, PHP, SEO, School May 25th, 2009
It’s time for a quick Monday afternoon snippet, which will allow you to see what keywords do people use to navigate to your web site. It uses a text file to store the results. Only counts the last 100 hits. The script will display in a table format the IP of the referral, the search engine they came from (either Yahoo or Google), the keywords they typed in and the date of the visit. Read more »
Attached Files:
A web of scam
Common May 23rd, 2009
Recently I decided that I just need to own a Mac Book. So what would a programing nerd like me do first, when they decide to buy a Mac Book? Check the deals online of course!
After searching for a week for the perfect MacBook and, of course, the perfect price, I had found deals for a MacBook Pro 17″ for as low as $450. Actually, Read more »
How do you manage you ads?
Well? Do you hard code your ads or do you use a sophisticated ad management plug-in?
I don’t do either. Here’s what I do to manage ads throughout a website. As every other solution, this is simple and resource efficient as well.
1. I create a directory to store text files, let’s call it ads. Then put an Adsense piece of code in a text file in that folder and name the file ad1.txt and create another one ad2.txt.
function printAd($name) {
$adsdir='ads';
return file_get_contents($adsdir.'/'.$name.'.txt');
}
function adSearch($text) {
$s='/\[ad=(.*?)\]/e';
$r='printAd("$1")';
return preg_replace($s,$r,$text);
}
// test
$post='<p>[ad=ad1] This is a post, which contains an ad.</p>';
$post.='<p>Different ad in the second paragraph [ad=ad2]</p>';
echo adSearch($post);
?>
This quick snippet allows you to easily manage all of your adsense ads in your posts. Additionally, if you want to place an ad in every post automatically, you can always do it by calling printAd() before you parse the post’s body.
Another outsourcing service
Outsourcing May 18th, 2009
Here are my first impressions on Guru.com (and I’m not giving a link to it.)
Very well designed website. Has a nice structured advanced search, which helps you filter projects according to your expertise. Once you create an account, you have a percentage bar, which shows you how complete your profiles are. You can have multiple profiles within a single account. Each profile represents a category of projects. Read more »
Four steps to your online business success
Here’s how I see my path to a private villa in Hawaii and a complete financial independence.
1. Create a good website.
The way I see it, you’ve got 3 basic options. Which ever you pick, make sure your web site is a web 2.0 service and utilizes smooth graphics and unobtrusive animations and/or effects.
1. Think of a new and unique web service, which no one else has ever done before.
2. Clone or copy a popular web service
3. Use a customized CMS and fill it in with thousands of articles on a hot topic.
2. Popularize it and drive traffic
Having the best web site in the world won’t do you much if you get 15 hits a day. You’ll have to set a budget for optimizing the content and the entire web site, so it is easily found in most, if not all, search machines. Now, I’m not talking about submitting your website to Google and calling it a day. Consider $2000-$2500 spent on advertisements and link building if you want to get the job done fast, effective and efficient. Maybe you should research those software outsourcing websites for any help you might want to get.
3. Monetize that traffic
Depending on the nature of your project, you can get profit from hundreds, if not, thousands of sources. Paid ads, affiliate marketing, AdSense, Bitvertiser… Options are basically limitless.
4. Sell it
Keep a good record of everything that happens with your website. As with every other kind of project, web sites also come to a point, where they are at their peek and further optimization or profit increase is impossible (or at least you think so). That is the time, when you should carefully examine any opportunities of continuing development and if you don’t find anything to keep you from selling it, DO IT!
Hope you are not angry for the 3 minutes of your life you lost to read this funny, but true to some extent post.
Cheers, T.
Outsourcing sites reviews and comparisons
Outsourcing May 17th, 2009
As I talked in my previous post on Outsourcing, it is indeed a good (or at least some) way of earning money. Now in this post, I’m going to list some outsourcing web platforms and try to highlight their features. Read more »
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About
Anthony Hristov, 22 is after a BsBA degree and has been professionally in web design since 2005.
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