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I Am Developing Taste For Drupal

Fr Vlad Zablotskyy — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 17:51:00 +0000

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:

Drupal 7 – What's new from an end-user perspective ?

View more presentations from davyvdb.

In the Affiliate Marketing community, WordPress is probably the most popular platform. I think however that Drupal deserves a more prominent place among affiliates, both as blogging platform as well as website developing tool. At minimum, Drupal 7 has a great chance to be a popular alternative to other platforms.Similar Posts:

Tip For Datafeedr Users: Removing Rel Canonical – Why And How?

Fr Vlad Zablotskyy — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 15:24:11 +0000

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!Similar Posts:

Taking A Closer Look At Datafeedr

Fr Vlad Zablotskyy — Tue, 12 May 2009 16:37:07 +0000

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.Similar Posts:

eBay WordPress Plugin From Affomatic

Fr Vlad Zablotskyy — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 22:49:06 +0000

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.

Below you can see the plugin in action for keyword “Wii console”. As you can see it does very good job. One recommendation I would offer mark is to explain to users how they can modify, hopefully through CSS, the output of the data this plugin is displaying. As it may not exactly fit your theme’s design. Otherwise I find this plugin really cool, if nothing else it got me to sign up for eBay affiliate program.

[AffomaticEbay]Wii Console[/AffomaticEbay]Similar Posts:

PepperJam Optimizes Store Builder For WordPress

Fr Vlad Zablotskyy — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 04:07:29 +0000

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.
Similar Posts:

WordPress 2.5. Goodbye Fantastico! Hello Simple Scripts!

Fr Vlad Zablotskyy — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 05:17:22 +0000

The snapshot to the right should speak for it self. That’s right I have updated my WordPress installation to the latest version. While several plugins are not compatible yet with the latest version of WordPress, Semiologic Extract Terms Plugin being one of them, I am still glad I went ahead through this upgrade.

This is the first time ever that I have upgraded the WordPress to the latest version long before it became available via Fantastico. In fact I said goodbye to Fnatastico for good. Unless you are hosting your blog with Bluehost, Hostmonster or FastDomain, you probably have not heard about Simple Scripts. You can on my other blog about initial impression Simple Script made on me.

I have to say that ability to upgrade your scripts within hours of them being available on the Internet sounds like a sweet idea.

Just a quick tip. If you decide to test the Simple Script, before doing anything else back up your databases as well as your current installations. If upgrading a installation made by Fantastico, do not opt to create new administrator and new database. Just fire up the script and at the end replace the new wp-config.php with the one you backed up, or enter the information needed to connect to your database in wp-config.php file.

On a personal note. I do hope many other web hosting providers will integrate Simple Scripts into their control panels. Feel free to point your own web hosting provider to Simple Scripts. I can’t praise enough Simple Scripts. This new way of installing and upgrading self-hosted platforms like WordPress will come very handy around the times when “crucial security updates” will be implemented. Unlike Fantastico, Simple Scripts will have the latest versions available for installation within hours, not weeks.

And of course as always, since this upgrade took place less than an hour ago I ask you to please report to me any bugs you may encounter.Similar Posts:

Smart and Easy Linking With aLinks

Fr Vlad Zablotskyy — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 16:17:49 +0000

Do you find yourself linking to a particular blog or website often? Do you link to your older posts? Do you promote a particular product and would like to associate your affiliate links to a keyword or a key phrase? Would you like some of these tasks to be done automatically as soon as certain keyword is mentioned in your post? If you answered yes to one of the question you may be interested in the WordPress plugin called aLinks.

I have had my eyes on several plugins meant to do these sort of things. Some of them were free and some were not. After taking a closer look at aLinks, I have come to conclusion that this plugin will suite my needs completely.

The plugin comes with four four modules allowing you to:

turn keywords into links to your own blog posts- might be very useful if you often links to your older posts
turn keywords into links to any URL of your choice- as an affiliate I find this feature to be the most beneficial
turn keywords into links to to the gada.be website- I never heard about this website until now
turn keywords into links to Amazon.com – amazon affiliates might find this option useful

There are other aLinks modules available, including a module that allows you to link to your Commission Junction merchants. If you are a savvy programmer, you might be able to come up with your own module. If you do so, make sure to stop by here again and let me know about the module you have created. For time being, the module that I will be utilizing the most on my blogs are those allowing me to link to URLs of my choice. There is an option to cloak your links as well.

Finally I would like to thank Mark from 45n5 for pointing me to this plugin, even though he thinks that WordPress sucks. Similar Posts:

Redirection Plugin- Pure Necessity For WordPress Blogs

Fr Vlad Zablotskyy — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 06:20:37 +0000

Implementing redirects for your website sometimes can be a very difficult and even painful process. I have learned it first hand when I decided to move 500+ posts about affiliate marketing from my old blog. It tuns out that htaccess file, while being very useful, can not handle unlimited amount of redirects. Having implemented about 200 of 301 redirects, I have soon discovered that visitors to my old blog where looking at 500 misconfiguration error page. Fortunately (HT: Andy Beard) I was pointed to Redirection Plugin. I quickly realized that this plugin is a must have plugin on any WordPress powered website. It does not require Apache htaccess, since it works entirely “inside” the WordPress. This plugin can be very useful if you are an affiliate marketer and need to cloak affiliate links without having to mess with htaccess file.

This plugin can be trully called the King of redirects. Here are some key functionality features of the plugin.

Creating a redirect is quick and easy. Takes literally few seconds by filling out a simple form:

Offers 6 different type of redirects and 6 different methods:
- Simple Redirection
- Redirect based on login status
- Redirect to a random WordPress post
- Redirect to one of several URLs
- Redirect based on referrer
Methods of redirects:
- 301 Permanent redirect
- 302 Moved
- 307 Temporary redirect
- 404 Not found
- 410 Gone
- Pass-Trhough
Once the redirects are set up on your blog, it offers statistics of how many times the redirect was accessed as well as the date when it was accessed last:

It will monitor for you every time your website serves 404 not found page to your visitors. In fact in it provides you with a RSS feed of the latest 404 outputs by your site so you can act quickly if needed:

It can automatically create a 301 redirect when post slug changes:

This feature can be of great use if you decide to change the post slug after your page was indexed by a search engine. I personally will benefit from this feature. I change the post slugs quiet often after discovering a misspelling, some times weeks after it was indexed.

If you ask me which plugin is the most useful to a WordPress blogger. I would have to say that Redirection plugin has to be among the top three plugins that every WordPress user must have.Similar Posts:

Classifieds On WordPress Blog

Fr Vlad Zablotskyy — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 18:52:04 +0000

As I was watching one of Marks recent videos, I really liked the idea of providing some sort of free classifieds on your blog. If you are a programmer like Mark, it probably takes you a minute or two to whip up a script for that purpose. But if you are handicapped in the area of programing, you look for the solutions out there. I was surprised that with thousands of plugins out there there is really none specifically made for that purpose.

JunxterAds came the closest to what I was looking for. I really liked the Google API integration on their live demo. Seemingly it was perfect solution for a blog that has a lot to do with real estate. However the support for the WordPress plugin is non existent . It is hard to tell if they ever moved beyond the demo version of their website. With this widget you would be able to both to sell or offer for free classifieds system to your readers. I like the idea. I hope they would continue to invest in developing the widget.

TDO Mini Forms is the solution I have settled on. With this plugin you can allow your visitors to submit a post to your blog without need to be a registered user. You can specify that all of these posts can go into a particular category- classifieds. Then you just need to exclude posts from that category on home page and/or other pages. The beautiful part about WordPress is that it can output RSS for every thing on your blog. You can manage and offer subscriptions to only “classifieds” category.

So with that being said I have set up Free Classifieds at Go Beyond MLS. If you know anyone who is in real estate business send them my way for a test drive of my system.Similar Posts:

Still Following

Fr Vlad Zablotskyy — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 05:49:18 +0000

In the past I have supported the No Nofollow movement. On occasions I may have been overly strong in my opinions when I saw other bloggers removing nofollow attributes for the sake of inviting more comments. The truth is that nothing invites more comments as the valuable content of your posts.

To me nofollow is a way of giving credit to the source. After all, we do that all the time when we cite articles from news website or even from other blogs.

Having said that, I have become increasingly frustrated in my battle against the comment spam. It appears that across the globe certain lists of “dofollow” blogs are circulating. I do not know how else to explain behavior of certain “spammers” jumping from one dofollow blog to another leaving the same messages while using “certified used car salesman” as their name commenting on our blogs.

Making my blog less attractive to these spammers yet rewarding my regular readers, I have decided to use Lucia’s Linky Love Plugin. There is one review of this plugin that comes to my mind. Andy Beard once wrote:

I was going to liken this plugin to a Ferrari, because it is built to be fast, but it is probably more like a Subaru, not just fast but designed for rugged terrain and can handle the twists and turns of comment spammers without slowing down.

Not being a programmer myself there are times I use plugins because they work. Lucia’s plugin not only works, it makes sense. I am excited to finally try it on one of my blogs.

Make sure to visit Andy’s list of nofollow and dofollow plugins. While you may want to reward your regulars readers, you may also want to have a little more control over the “link juice flow” around your blog. Andy’s list has them all plus links to the solutions on removing nofollow on other popular platforms- Blogger/Blogspot, Moveable Type and Typepad.Similar Posts: