Affiliate Marketing Blog by James Little

It’s been a while since Wordpress 2.3 was released in September but today should see the release of Wordpress 2.5.

I’ll likely be online later tonight to give it a test drive and I’m sure we will see loads of plugins and themes that have been broken by it, but here are some of the new features:

• New admin interface (looks quite neat)
• Widget based dashboard (wooo!)
• Built in Avatar support
• Tag management
• Full text feeds
• Automatic plugin upgrades(!)
• Built in Gallery feature

Just need to get a built in forum and bbPress integration and I’ll be a happy man.. Hopefully that will come in the next release.

Download will be from the usual place.

I might also upgrade Ciarans blog, which went live last night and should be added to your RSS reader!

As regular readers will already know (after the Christmas Post) I have been experimenting with online videos recently and have now setup my first vlog (video blog) - a personal project called Diet Blog TV.

The site is a bit of an experiment as I want to know a few answers to the following:

1. How easy is it to setup a vlog in Wordpress
2. How easy is it to distribute video via channels like YouTube, MySpace Video, Facebook, etc
3. How easy it is to get listed as a video podcast in iTunes
4. What the best ways of driving traffic to a vlog are

I’ve only put up one (non-video) post at the moment but aim to get the first video diary up at the end of the week.

The site is not setup as a commercial site so doesn’t have any ads (for the moment at least there are no plans to do so either) and is just a bit of fun so please feel free to have a gander and let me know what you think as I get more videos online - maybe you even want to link to it for me!

Late last night after doing all my Christmas shopping online I found myself wondering how I was going to pay for it all (god bless having children) and started looking at wordpress themes for a product based domain that seemed to be available to buy.

It was then that I came across what is potentially one of the best themes I have yet seem for Wordpress.

See Demo Sites 

Revolution Themes have released a few different styles that really push Wordpress to the next level and provide an entry level solution to getting an online magazine up and running in the space of a few hours.

Ultimately if I was to buy a theme I’d probably want to get the full pack that is priced at $500 and slightly out of my price range (if anyone wants to buy me a Christmas gift you’re more than welcome) but I imagine there is a lot that can be done with these - would love to see a site like Lee’s Pleo Toy in this kind of template.

While we are talking of themes I’ve found a few more themes and plugins recently that are really neat & will be adding them to the Wordpress Theme and Plugin back in the next few days.

A while ago I released a wordpress pack, containing a number of plugins and themes along with the standard wordpress install.

Seeing as I hadn’t updated it for a while I’ve created a new page on the 3wdl site with the latest version that you can download and get going a bit quicker than usual.

Wordpress Pack - containing over 40 themes and plugins 

Enjoy

One of the glories of the web is the number of visitors that come to your website / blog via longtail search terms - it can drive lots of targeted traffic but often visitors come to the site only the once.

A small bit of php can be integrated into wordpress to try and combat this. Take a look at the screenshot below:

Now just follow our few easy steps to integrate this into your wordpress installation:

1) Save cookie.php.txt to cookie.php somwhere locally.
2) Open up cookie.php.txt and change the text and feed URL to match that of your server.
3) Upload the file to the root directory of your server.
4) Open up your wordpress backend (wp-admin) and select “Presentation” then “Theme Editor”.
5) Select style.css on the right and add the following code (you can modify it to change the colors, etc) in the file somewhere:

/* Cookie style document */

.cookiestyle {
width:450px;
text-align:left;
padding:5px;
background-color:#EAF4FF;
border:1px solid black;
font-size:12px;
margin-bottom:15px;
}

6) In the Theme Editor, select “Main Index template” and insert the following line:

<?php include(”cookie.php”); ?>

This should generally go near the top of the file and in my theme is above:

<?php $countervariable=1; if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

Do the same with the Single Post page

7) Re-visit the site and you should now see the message display - Refresh and it will disappear.

It’s another “nice touch” and if your content is high quality it may well encourage your visitors to sign up to the RSS feed and visit more often.

Regular wordpress users will know that there are hundreds (or perhaps thousands) of plugins on the web and recently I think I’ve found my favorite yet, Comment Relish.

Once downloaded and activated you are able to setup text within your wordpress backend and whenever someone comments on an article for the first time, they are emailed thanking them and linking though to the RSS feed. Here is an example mine:

John,

Thanks for your comment on 3wdl blog at www.3wdl.co.uk

I hope that you like the blog and if you want to keep up to date with all the latest posts then you can subscribe to our feed at: http://www.3wdl.co.uk/feed/

Thanks again,
James
www.3wdl.co.uk

John is now happy at the seemingly personal touch and is more likely to convert into a long term subscriber, especially with the link though to the RSS.

This and the Subscribe to comments plugin fit in pretty nicely and are features that anyone serious about their blog should be looking at. Both are available on the wordpress pack that I put together.

As suggested in my previous blog post I have now moved everything across to the 3wdl domain name and installed a new more €œfresh€ theme as the old one was getting a bit stale - I have also taken off the advertising space for the time being and fixed the annoying image border on the photo in the sidebar.

Always interested to hear feedback and hopefully the change will inspire some more posts.

Will be interesting to see if the site gets picked up a bit better in search after the domain change.

Since this plugin is a bit of an arse to get hold of, I’ve put a copy of it on my server for download.

A bit of history about the plugin.

It was created by Robert Deaton  and hosting on Something Unpredictable, which crashed due to a hardware failure and has not been back up since.

It works in Wordpress 2.0 - I have not tried it for 2.1.

Download No Ping Wait Plugin

It’s very useful if you you ping a lot of servers (A list of some good ones can be found on my post about Wordpress and SEO).