About Marty

is a passionate web developer from Sydney, Australia. He owns about 400 websites and makes a healthy living from working the web. As a day job, he works as a pilot for an international airline. You can follow Marty on Twitter or Google+.

WordPress Automatic Install and Upgrade Errors

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Tweet My friend and colleague Karlene Petitt is just about to undertake a short ‘WordPress Introduction’ course. She had a list of requirements from her tutor with essential criteria being that the user should be able to apply themes, plugins and core upgrades using the built in WordPress upgrade functionality. I’ve just installed two default [...]

Country, State & City from Google’s Geocoding API

google-geocoding-api

Tweet This post won’t mean much to you unless you’re specifically looking for it. It’s a problem that troubled me for at least a couple of hours before it was resolved. My problem: I was doing some mapping with Google’s Geocoding API and had to extract the City, State and Country (most notably the state) [...]

Metar to Twitter Application

metar-to-twitter

Tweet Some time back I set up a number of Twitter accounts that would automate the hourly posting of aviation metars for a small number of airports (examples: @YSSYmetar & @KLAXmetar). I was later inundated with requests from people that wanted accounts set up for their own local airports. It was a little time-prohibitive to [...]

Blogger.net.au and the iSnare WordPress Plugin

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Tweet On April 27, 2008, I set up Blogger.net.au and wrote about the purpose of the site on InterNoetics (formerly martinetics.com). The post was oriented around turnkey-style websites and the ‘myth’ that they made money. It’s funny reading back on what I wrote back then because – although my opinion hasn’t changed in any drastic [...]

Happy (belated) New Year!

Royalty-free clipart of a

Tweet I’ve been a little lazy lately… at least in terms of updating this blog. I’ve involved myself in a number of other projects that were all competing for my attention so finding the time for my own passion projects had to take a back seat. I’ve not followed up on comments, emails or support [...]

Google Chart WordPress Shortcode

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Tweet Google charts are awesome. I use them on about a dozen sites to visually represent all kinds of data. If you don’t know what Google Charts are, it’s worth checking out the massive resources available on the Google Chart Tools website. Google describes their service as “… [the] perfect way to visualize data on [...]

Website Snapshots with WordPress Shortcode

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Tweet WordPress.com uses a nifty little tool to take screenshots of Commercial Themes. If you right click on a few of the screenshots on that page you’ll see that they have consistent URL form. The following shortcode makes use of the functionality on WordPress.com by rendering a screenshot of any webpage in your blog post. [...]

Resizing Images using TimThumb.php

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Tweet I recently had a request for some shortcode that would render formatted images and text in a particular way. When I tried to imagine how the average author on one of my blogs would apply the shortcode, I ran into the problem of how image scaling would be handled. Some of the people I [...]

Conversion Rate Optimisation opportunities for people near YOU – Geographic information in WordPress Titles

Geo Data in WordPress titles and posts

Tweet Did my headline get your attention? The title should have rendered the city you’re in (or one you’re near) based on your geographic location. I’ve tested geographic based headlines on three sites for the last month with click-through-rates increasing by much as 600% – although it averaged about 300% on most days. That’s a [...]

Conversion Rate Optimization

conversion-rate

Tweet Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is orientated around optimising or converting the traffic that has landed on your website or blog. It’s easy to throw lots of money into Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and traffic generation but this means nothing if you have no plan to convert or monetise that traffic that you’re successful in [...]

Find and Replace Words in a WordPress Post

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Tweet This PHP function will search for a particular string of text in a WordPress post and replace it with alternative text of any kind. If you’re just getting into the affiliate business, this is a great way of instantly monetising your blog via specific keywords. If you’ve ever written about Thesis, you could, via [...]