Hurray! I have been able to do some stuff that wasn’t directly related to the API or backend code for the ComLuv database! This Monday has been an awesome day for productivity.

I have fixed the errant phpmyadmin on my plesk server so I can view my massive innoDB database. (and make backups)

I added a plugin to make adding youtube videos much easier to a ComLuv blog post.

I implemented a site wide footer text links box on the network.

I added a new widget to allow Comluv blog owners to become an affiliate to sell those ads.

I edited every single themes footer to make sure it all worked hunky dorey.

I wrote a “spoonfed” tutorial to show people how to make money with their comluv blog.

I answered ALL support tickets and resolved them.

I got fiddyp back up and running!! Some DNS issues were making it a bit invisible but a quick change of my DNS A records means I’ve got a place to ramble again.

Yey for me. I feel awesome enough to take the rest of the day off

Here is a widget and plugin combined for Stumbleupon and WordPress. I rewrote it from scratch to be a little better, thanks to the suggestion of mcangeli in the comments!

This will display a list of titled links to up to 10 of your last pages that you gave a thumbs up to with Stumbleupon, it can also show as icons for web page, image, flash file, quicktime. Use it as a widget or as a plugin.

Upload it and activate it to see a widget called ‘Stumbled’ in your tray, drag it to where you want it to be displayed on your blog and click the options square to add your Stumbleupon username, how many of your last thumbs up sites you want to display, choose to display as Text links or Icons. If you chose to display as text then you can put in the maximum amount of characters to show.

You can also use it as a plugin if you don’t like widgets, see below for code examples..

here’s what it looks like in the sidebar as icons..

here it is as text..

and the options….

Just download the zip file below and extract the folder, upload the whole folder to your plugins directory and activate it in WordPress, then, visit the widgets section under Presentation and drag it to the sidebar, click the square to change the options and that will be it!

For non-widget-ers, you can use it as a plugin by using this syntax..

stumbled_as_plugin(username,quantity to show,text or pic,html before list, html after list,max length of characters);

ie. for showing text links with a numbered order..

if(function_exists(stumbled_as_plugin)) {
stumbled_as_plugin("glytch",10,"text","<ol>","</ol>",33);
}

will show this…
<?php if(function_exists(stumbled_as_plugin)) {
stumbled_as_plugin(“glytch”,10,”text”,”

“,”

“,33);
}?>

Or as images with no numbering..

if(function_exists(stumbled_as_plugin)) {
stumbled_as_plugin("glytch",10,"pic","","",33);
}

will show this…

If you have any problems with it, please let me know!.

Download Stumbled Widget & Plugin For WordPress

There’s a few bloggers commenting on a new widget called Blogrush, it’s a service that is supposed to increase your traffic by sharing links to relevant stories on other Blogrush users blogs and your posts being displayed on theirs and so on.

It’s a great idea and I expect it will work for a while with all the buzz happening but, here are 7 reasons why I wont be using it…

1. The rich get richer…

The person with the most traffic and established blog will benefit most, sure if you refer them and they get the 10,000 views a day on their pages to give you your credits and all the other people referred by you and them get you credits (10 levels they say) then surely there’s going to be the situation where there’s more credits than available blogs? I thought about this and it seems they can just rotate the links to be shown enough times on high traffic blogs so it uses the credits up.

If you have 1000 credits and your link is on five or six high traffic sites, it will only be seen for a very short time before it gets pushed out by another site. 5 blogs getting 200-300 hits a day means your link will only be shown for part of a day.
If you already have lots of traffic, you will get even more! but, if you only have a few hits (credits earned) a day then your links will be gone in no time at all.

2. You lose credibility

What I don’t like the most’est is the referral nature of it, people will be referring others, not because it’s a great site or service but only for the traffic they can harvest from it. They wont care if your blog is good or not, they just want the credits! Not to mention the inevitable, someone creating an extremely high traffic spammed page with a widget it on it so they can rack up credits by displaying links to yours and other peoples sites, showing your blog link on a spam site is bound to affect your credibility with the search engines. Showing a link to your blog on a spam site will lower your value to surfers

3. You’re working for someone else

It’s MLM for nothing, now MLM and word of mouth are great tools for promotion but only if you get something valuable enough for it, like money! (I worked very hard with elottery and make a bundle from it, I plan on doing the same with uVme). If you’re going to promote someone else’s product then you should get paid for it with money, not promises of ‘exponential’ traffic. I feel that Blogrush is benefiting only Blogrush, they are getting everyone else to build their list for them, they’ll have thousands if not tens of thousands of peoples email address and topics of interest, powerful stuff when you want to market to targeted people!.

4. You will be sold stuff by email

I would expect to receive marketing emails from Blogrush after registering with them, maybe not straight away but definitely in the future. Their privacy policy states

If you are a registered user of an Income.com website and have supplied your email address, Income.com may occasionally send you an email to tell you about new features, solicit your feedback, or just keep you up to date with what’s going on with Income.com and our products.

Their main site is due to launch soon and it’s targeted at entrepreneurs, so you can be certain they’ll be hocking a “make money with this” product real soon.

5. Where is the luv?

If you’re gonna put links to posts that are on other peoples blogs, why not do it for your loyal readership? Send traffic to your readers blogs, proper linkluv!

6. You could be promoting your competition

They say it only links to similar sites and articles but, if you’re in business as an affiliate or you like to promote your own stock then the last thing you want to do is send someone to another site where they can get the same thing!

7. No control on the quality of external links

I’d prefer to link to posts and blogs that I have personally found to be useful, that way the reader knows I’ve approved that site and my credibility isn’t damaged by sending someone to a high traffic splog that just happens to have some of the same things I write about! Why tell your readers, go read this on another blog, I haven’t visited it yet or endorse it but go there anyway!

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t smell anything ‘evil’ about the service, in fact, I think it’s an extremely clever way to create a buzz (not to mention create a massive list of people and their likes and dislikes), it’s just not for me, I think I’ll stick with writing good content and only linking to sites that I have found or are for the people that participate in the discussion here.

It’s a clever tool but, I think blogrush and income.com will benefit the most from it. You don’t get something for nothing when you download a tool from someone that makes money from marketing! It’s one of the first rules listed on marketers ebooks, build a list and market to it, or, provide a tool for free and then ‘upsell’ to the takers.

Here’s a little plugin I made for Stumbleupon visitors, I got the idea while playing with the Digg This plugin.

Hello Stumbler plugin will display a note at the top of your post (or wherever you put the call) when it detects that the person viewing the page came through the Stumbleupon button and ask them to give you a thumbs up.

Simply download the plugin, upload it to your plugins directory and activate it. Once you have done that, go to your single post template page and add the following command under the entry-content line (click image to see example).

?php if (function_exists(hellostumbler)) { hellostumbler();}?>

It’s as simple as that! I have tried it by showing the link if this blog is the referring page and it works, hopefully it will do the same when the post is stumbled upon with the toolbar button (it’ll take me ages to stumble and stumble until this post shows to truly test it, but it should work!).

If you came here via a stumble button press, please let me know if you can see the “thanks for stumble-ing” message at the top of the post. thanks!

Download the plugin here Hello Stumbler

[edit]To see a tutorial on how I made this plugin, see here: wordpress plugin sourcecode tutorial

I made another widget! I had a hard few hours trying to figure out why my last widget wasn’t saving it’s options, I had to go through every single bit of code to figure it out and it turns out that I had missed an equals sign! just a piddly little character can throw a spanner in the works!

Now I know whats up, I can churn out widgets left, right and center!

Here’s my latest one…

It’s called GetCookie, it’s a widget that can’t be seen.
Just input your affiliate site URL into the options and save. The widget will add a hidden layer to the html and load the affiliate site in the background without the user knowing.

What’s the point? hehe, the point being ;

If someone visits this blog, they will receive the cookie my affiliate site sends when a user surfs there via my affiliate link. They can then go off and carry on surfing, if they come across the site without an affiliate link (ie. if they search Google for the product and click through direct to the company url from the results shown) then the affiliate site will think that they came through my link because of the cookie they got when they visited my blog.

The widget obfuscates the code so someone looking at the source wont be able to see the call to the affiliate page. (the previous post about decoding bin2hex gives a hint at the obfuscation code)

Here’s the options on the widget:

I only wrote it for myself so I didn’t have to manually put the code into the template code. You can download it here:

GetCookie Widget

Download and extract file, upload getcookie.php into your plugins directory and activate it. You can then see “get cookie” in your widgets tray, drag it to your sidebar and click the options icon to add your affiliate url (as above) and you should be good to go.

I’ve tested it with a few different affiliate links in Firefox and it worked. If you have any problems with it, let me know. Note: if your affiliate site has a break frames function on it’s page then this widget wont behave.

If your affiliate company finds out you’re using a method like this then you’ll probably be banned!!

self ping