Dharmarketing

I’m playing with a new plugin on two travel blogs to find the best Mexico vacation spots and Caribbean cruises.

The plugin is called WP VideoTube, and here’s how it works — you set it up to pull videos from YouTube based on keywords and embed them in your blog.

Admittedly I’m not a big fan of autoblogging. But if you have domains lying around that you’re not using, might as well set them up to make a little advertising income, draw traffic from long-tail keywords, and increase the value of your domain. The free version of the plugin lets you use three keywords, but you’ll soon see the obvious benefit of using the upgrade, which allows unlimited keywords.

So far, the Mexico blog is making me about $1 a day in AdSense revenue, and I have ClickBank, Shareasale and CJ links on it, too. The cruise site hasn’t made any money yet, but I just built it.

If you’re looking for a cool place to go on vacation, I’d recommend a holiday in Tulum, Mexico. With the economy the way it is, you could also find a good deal on a Mexican cruise.

WP-United appears to break blogs when you update to WP 2.5.+. Just a note.

To prove that you can put your WordPress pages into a rss feed as well as posts, I’ve built a page feed for my yoga blog.

As mentioned in the previous post, I used Grouper Evolution’s regex plugin to make it happen.

The parsed page is http://www.yogaknoxville.com/pages/, which I built using a page template (do me a favor and don’t link to it). The Improved Include Page plugin made it easy to create the list of pages with extracted content once I modified it a bit to display the page titles linked to their permalinks. I also asked the plugin to strip out all html tags, this has both advantages and disadvantages, but it was the lazy way to make the formatting look decent.

The only real downside to this method is that you need to add each page to the template by hand. This is great if you only want to include a few pages. Not great if you have a ton of pages. The ability to add all pages at once while excluding those you don’t want to show up would be a major improvement.

If there’s interest, I can put up the template example and the modified plugin for download. It’s too late at night to worry over it at the moment.

Even better news. Now that we have a rss feed with pages, we can remix it (or “mash” it) with our posts feed, producing a feed with both posts and pages. You can do this with the new edition of CaRP Evolution.

Quick: Skip the yammering and take me to the the how-to!

So I’ll admit it, I’m a former SiteBuildIt (SBI) customer. I’m still a great fan and an affiliate. I migrated to WordPress for my own sites primarily because it’s much cheaper ($299 a year for SBI versus free for WP, not counting hosting, time, and whatever other tools you end up buying), but also because I wanted to learn the nitty-gritty of how to build a web site.

Little did I know it would take me about 3 years to learn how to do with WordPress just about everything SBI could do at the click of a mouse…

…including putting your static pages into a RSS feed. Today I spill the beans. Read the rest of this entry »

WARNING: Appears to break in WP 2.5.

I’ve just completed the Bipolar theme you can see in use here.

The theme is quite lean, boasting some great features:

1. The theme supports tags, new to WordPress 2.3.
2. Title tags are SEO optimized, so you won’t need a plugin to do the job.
3. The theme is widget-ready.
4. It’s ready to nest a phpBB2 forum within the blog via the WP-United mod for phpBB (optional).

The last one is a big one, because most themes need some major tweaking to get the forum to look halfway decent. I spent a couple of days getting WP-United running then designing a theme that looks good with phpBB’s subsilver template and thought, what the heck, I’ll make it public.

This theme will NOT work on WordPress versions prior to 2.3 without revisions.

Here is a screen shot:

Other points of interest:

• The forum.php template is included for your forum page. I recommend you use it instead of the default page.php for the forum (if you have one).
• The theme is CMS ready — if you create a page named “home” using the default page template, you can make a page named “blog” or “posts” or whatever using the included blog.php page template, which mimics the index.php. Then all you need to do is go to “options” and “reading” in your admin section, and set up your static front page. You’re ready to go.
• To set up WP-United in a way that would work so that I could keep WordPress in the root directory, I had to rename the WP index.php (in the WP root, not the file by the same name in the theme directory) to index-old.php, then rename the blog file included with WP-United to index.php. In the latter file, I had to type in the path to my phpBB installation. I used the absolute path: ‘forum’ — it was maddening getting it going, but armed with this knowledge it should take you no time. This was the only workaround I could figure out for the trailing slash that kept appearing, causing a White Screen of Death.
• With this theme, you can select “full page” in the WP-United setup in your phpBB admin (once you install the mod). You won’t need to change the style sheet. But it does slow things down. I like how it looks with the sidebar, but it’s your call.

The XHTML validates on your WordPress pages. Note that the XHTML does not validate on your forum pages.

Of course I can’t make you do it, but I ask that you keep the links in the footer — they’re for a good cause.

To install this theme, first download it (zip or tar version), then unzip the whole folder, uploading it into the “themes” folder inside “wp-content,” found in your WordPress root directory. Select the theme from “presentation” in your blog’s admin area.

To make this theme work with WP-United, you will first need to have both WP 2.3 and phpBB installed. Then you will need the WP-United mod for phpBB installed (I recommend using the ‘easymod’ mod to do it). Please note that I have just told you everything I know about making WP-United work, so please use the WP-United documentation, forum, or support for further help and information.

Recently I was getting all kinds of errors when trying to access the feed to one of my categories on one of my other blogs, republishing the “Oak Ridge” category feed from my main yoga blog, Yoga with Santosh, to a “group” blog, Oak Ridge Yoga.

(So far I’m the only member of the group. But I can still dream of others writing my content for me, can’t I?)

By trial and error, I identified the Permalink Redirect plugin as the culprit. It had been holding my category feeds hostage for over a year, and I didn’t even know. I disabled it. Category feeds work just fine now.

So I deleted Permalink Redirect. Forever.

Of course, as soon as I figured it out who the culprit was in my plugins folder, I found that several other people had come to the same conclusion and written about it on their sites. Sometimes a little bit of search mojo goes a long way, and my mojo hadn’t worked, apparently. So if you find this post, you’re welcome in advance for the minutes or hours you would have wasted without my kind help.

The nice thing about the Permalink Redirect plugin was that it added trailing slashes to urls.

Who cares about trailing slashes?

You should. Because Wordpress adds them to the ends of your urls, treating every post and page as its own subdirectory.

Not everyone who links to your pages, though, will add the trailing slashes. That goes for the search engines, too.

And what that means is, the same page will be counted as both a page and a folder. Your analytics will be funky, and search engines may be confused, perhaps even splitting page PR.

You need to fix it to make your site more search engine friendly. This can be a small but important step in your on-page search engine optimization (SEO).

There’s an easy remedy in your Apache .htaccess file. And I used my search mojo to see that someone has already described the cure so I won’t have to: Two Wordpress plugins you don’t need… and shouldn’t use.

I found a couple of bugs in the last beta release of the theme. I’ve been using this theme on several sites, and it’s been going great.

Here’s what will be fixed in version 1, to be released next week:

1. Fix links to “related info” and “comments,” that you may have noticed are a little funky.
2. Put the code for the recommended plugins into the theme in a way that it will work whether you’ve actually got those plugins activated or not.
3. Take out the Feedburner stuff. With a Feedburner redirect you won’t need the Feedburner code I threw in there (with varying degrees of success) anyway.
4. Fix some of the bookmarking and feedreader links.

I’ll make another announcement when it’s ready for download.

Anyone find any bugs I didn’t already mention?

AutoSEO is now available for download. It’s in beta version, so please tell me about any bugs. I’m working on the readme file.

AutoSEO is a 3-column format, largely free of browser hacks. It has been tested in IE6, IE7, Firefox 1.5, Opera 9.02, and Netscape 8.1. I’d appreciate feedback from Mac users.

AutoSEO uses valid XHTML and CSS Read the rest of this entry »

I just finished my first WordPress theme ever, AutoSEO.

AutoSEO is a 3-column theme that takes advantage of WordPress’s native search-engine friendly organization.

A few plugins are needed to make the AutoSEO theme run smoothly on WordPress 2.0, and a few other WordPress plugins come highly recommended.

Read the rest of this entry »