When Aaron Wall, a well known SEO expert, predicted Drupal to be the wave of the future, I was just about getting very comfortable with WordPress. At the time I felt like taking the position on the subject but restrained myself because I did not much about Drupal even through I already fell in love with WordPress. Aarron raffled some feathers for sure when he wrote:

Drupal is more powerful than what the average blogger needs to run their site, but it has so many features and options that it can allow you to bolt many things onto your blog that you would not be able to do very easily with something like WordPress or MovableType.

Back in those days, and even today to some degree, a Drupal user was/is perceived to be more sophisticated, since better knowledge of PHP and some coding skills are needed to allow Durpal to perform the miracles for you.

Whether or not I have become more sophisticated in terms of coding skills or programing is very questionable. I am however developing taste for Drupal. Today I have no choice but to wholeheartedly agree with Aaron – Drupal is the way of the future. So much so, that I am planing to convert some of my well established websites to Drupal as soon as Drupal 7 is officially released.

Why Drupal And Why Now?
It’ very simple. Durpal allowed me to do things other platforms could not. More about it in my follow up posts.

One of the most detracting factors – user interface appears to be the thing of the past for Drupal with it’s version 7 release. See the slideshow bellow to judge for yourself:

Since the arrival of WordPress 2.9, the “canonical” element is automatically generated in your website’s header. While it is an excellent way to tell some search engines not to index certain pages (lets presume for a second that search engines really listen ), there some instances you my not necessarily want the “canonical” element generated on your website. Instead of helping your SEO efforts, the canonical element may actually hurt your website.

If you use Datafeedr Plugin with current (or 2.9+) version of WordPress, you might need to consider doing some tweaking to your WordPress installation. Why? Because every “product page” on your website has canonical link element in the header pointing to your “store page”. What does it mean? Well, it is like asking search engines not to index your “product pages”.

So how do you tell your WordPress not to generate canonical link element in the header?
One way you can do it is by modifying your theme’s functions.php file – this method however did not work on my WordPress 3.0 installations.

Another way you can disable canonical element is by modifying your “wp-includes/default-filters.php” file. All you need to do is to find the line 197 that says:

add_action( 'wp_head', 'rel_canonical' );

and change it to:

//add_action( 'wp_head', 'rel_canonical' );

You can delete that line entirely if you wish. But you need to do this every time you are upgrading/reinstlling your WordPress.
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What is Datafeedr??? Datafeedr is a nifty WordPress plugn that allows you to create an affiliate website featuring thousands of product in minutes. Click Here To Learn More About Datafeedr!

Over the last few years I have tried several different solutions that allowed me to create affiliate websites featuring thousands of products from my merchants. Two of my favorites so far were a) WordPress Datafeed Import Script – a script for WordPress that allowing you to import merchants datafeeds creating a blog post for each product and b)AffiliSotre- a stand alone script that also allowed you to easy create affiliate websites using datafeeds from your affiliate networks and merchants.

One of the big tasks associate with both above mentioned scripts was the preparation and cleanup of datafeeds before adding them to your websites, since every network has their own way of formating their datafeeds. Needless to say when I came across Datafeedr- I was sold immediately.

If you are inexperience programmer like myself, Datafeedr maybe the way to go. It does however require some basic knowledge of WordPress and it is not free, but good folks at Datafeedr are rather confident about their products and offer a 30 days money back guarantee.

Since the Datafeedr is the most expensive solution I have used so far. I will spend considerable amount of time writing about my experience with this plugin, it’s features and even their affiliate program. While I am immensely impressed with some Datafeedr features, there are few features I would like to see improved or added.

If you would like to read more about my experience with Datafeedr- make sure to subscribe to my blog or follow me on Twitter.

My friend Mark from Digital Product Reporter is at it again, coding and having some fun…. This time with WordPress of all things. Who knows maybe he will come around to fall in love with the best blogging platform out there.

Mark recently have release a neat little eBay plugin for WordPress, and I think eBay “junkies” can appreciate it. I have not been an affiliate with eBay until I got my hands on Mark’s plugin so I will probably offer no opinion on how this plugin can be improved.

Once installed on your WordPress, plugin pulls in the latest auctions from eBay by keywords specified by you. It displays the eBay items starting from the auction to end the soonest. Once an auction is completed it moves the item is replaced by the next auction in line. So on many levels this is a sort of “set it and forget it” plugin- as it continues to do the work for you without you giving it any attention.
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At the time of giving my shout out to PepperJam Store Builder, I was not able to embed that code into my post as my blog is powered by WordPress. Today PepperJam announced that they have added a feature that allows affiliates to grab the code specifically optimized for the WordPress. This new enhancement will help many affiliates like myself, not so much technically inclined, to create pages in seconds using WordPress. Below is the live example and proof that the code is working in WordPress flawlessly.