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Blogger.net.au and the iSnare WordPress Plugin

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 way [...]

Royalty-free clipart of a

Happy (belated) New Year!

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 requests, [...]

google-charts

Google Chart WordPress Shortcode

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 your [...]

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Website Snapshots with WordPress Shortcode

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. I [...]

php-pics

Resizing Images using TimThumb.php

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 work [...]

Geo Data in WordPress titles and posts

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

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 massive [...]

conversion-rate

Conversion Rate Optimization

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 attracting. [...]

find-replace

Find and Replace Words in a WordPress Post

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 the [...]

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PHP Threaded Comment Class

A few years ago I built a dodgy little site at Usenet.com.au that rendered Australian text Usenet newsgroups. I’ve since disabled posting while I give the website a complete face lift. One of the biggest challenges I faced in the early days was orientated around optimising threaded articles. With several million articles in the database [...]

wp-search

Prevent WordPress Pages from appearing in Search Results

Michael Harvey of New York, USA, asks: “I’ve set up private WordPress pages that I’m only giving to friends and family. However, when people use the WordPress search function, these private pages appear in search results. Do you know a fix?” I use the same functionality on my own site(s). I have countless private pages [...]