(Please bear with my bookmark posts a while longer, it’s part of my atttempt at playing catch-up for my One Page A Day challenge which I plan to complete by the end of Friday (today, yikes!))

I’ve been bloghopping through a huge number of affiliate marketing-related sites last month as I was preparing to launch another niche site based on the WordPress platform. One of the essentials I have to set in the new site is the ability to cloak affiliate links to improve the click-through rates. I found two… er, well… applications, if you may call it that, which I plan on using, though I haven’t really tried them and made a choice of which one I’d utilize.

W-Shadow developed a Link Cloaking Plugin for WordPress and is pretty much well-supported by its developer. I suppose it’s a nice alternative to other “affiliate link manager” (as they like to call themselves, but they’re just fancy words for masking or cloaking links! ) scripts out there, and it seems pretty easy to install, although from reading the comments it also looks like you need to meddle a bit with your htaccess file to make it really work well.

After reading Kidino’s post on losing ClickBank sales, I followed a link through one of the comments which led to Ed Zivkovic’s URL Redirect Generator, a software that creates HTML files to redirect your affiliate links. Once these HTML files are created, you would need to upload them into your site, preferable to a dedicated folder for convenience sake, and then add a link from your proper site to that HTML redirect page. I thought it would be a hassle at first, having to FTP every single URL to the server, but I thought it may be simple as well if your web hosting account has those built-in file manager so that you can just upload through there.

The former looks good if I have too many affiliate links, and the latter is good because of its simplicity. I’ll make up my mind later on which one I’d use.

(Read Part 2 first?)

Okay, so I’m sitting in front of my laptop with a mug of of my good ol’ hot drink, looking at the two-column CSS layout I’ve just selected for my new Blog of The Rugrats site. My next step was to choose a colour scheme for the theme. You can look for sites that list out some colour combinations you can use, such as the choices that can be found at ColorCombos.com, or do it the way I did, which was to use the search engine to look for recommendations on the best colour combinations specifically for children- and kids-related web site. I eventually found a rec that said green and purple seems to be a very attractive combination for children’s web site, so I stuck with it. I also browsed around Template Monster and other blog and template directory sites and look at children’s web site sets to get more inspiration. I found a few sites I liked, especially one Blogger-based design that has some sticky-tape concept added to it, which I liked. I kept those ideas in mind or just made a quick jot in my handy dandy notebook.

Next, I went looking for some simple yet still unique graphics to use, and my favourite place to find free graphics is at Microsoft Office’s Clip Art Library. Armed with a collection of potential clip arts now stored in my clip art library, I opened my Adobe Photoshop program, created a 800×600 sized canvas and did my layout testing there first, before splicing the necessary graphics for use in Microsoft FrontPage.

TBC.

(Read Part 1 first?)

Once I’ve successfully customized the default WP Kubrick theme and learned how the WordPress template tagging basically works, I was now bold enough to create a theme from the ground up, so to speak, and my Blog of Rugrats project gave me a reason to work on one.

I really wanted to build a theme from scratch and finish it in the shortest time possible. One thing determined how fast I can develop one, and that is my little know-how on CSS. Thus, I decided to cheat. I played around with WordPress Theme Generator, hoping that I can generate the layout that I wanted and just edit the resulting CSS file after that. But you know what? I found that editing the file was a lot more confusing than I expected. At the end, I decided to forget the theme generator. Instead, I did a keyword search on CSS two-column layouts, and saw a very good collection of two- and three-column CSS templates at Dynamic Drive CSS Library. I went with the fluid left, fixed right column layout, then started to edit it using my favourite HTML editor, Microsoft FrontPage (Do I hear a few people laughing out there? I make money training people to use FrontPage, and I earned my Microsoft Certified Professional thanks to FrontPage, OK?).

(Read Part 3 for the continuation)

(Tacky headline, don’t you think?)

If you’re subscribed to my feeds, you probably don’t realize that I have made three changes to my blog this month. Although very small, they’ve been very significant in terms of increased traffic, and — yes — increased moolah! Yeehah!

1. The Top Commentators list at WebGrrrl.net has been increased
   Many people who have used this plugin/widget have posted about how Top Commentators can increase a blog’s visitor participation and bring in more traffic. And they’re true. Of course, comments also depends on the quality of your posts, PageR***, and removing the nofollow tag off your comments. I recently thought that it would be cool to just list as many commentors as possible every month, so that every one gets the chance to show off their URLs in my home page. It’s currently set to 30 names, but I’ll keep increasing them as the commentors grow every month. From the increased comments I received, everyone seems to like this change.
2. EntreCard has been added
   I am loving the EntreCard concept; users get EC credits for visiting or being visited, then use the points to advertise or buy some stuff. I have noticed a 20% increase in visits since I installed EC on my sidebar, and discovered many other great blogs out there that I ended up subscribing to.
3. Ads have been added
   Because of the increased traffic, I thought that I should just take advantage of it by targeting and monetizing my popular posts. You should only see those big ads showing up in certain posts that are popular with the search engines. And, oh boy, it is definitely showing some very good results! I like to do the hard work, but it doesn’t hurt to get some passive income once in a while.

At least try the first two if you’re looking to build some easy traffic into your site or increase your blog’s popularity. Feel free to share your own traffic-building tips, too.

Despite my need to keep this blog lean and mean, I couldn’t help but add more of those wonderful WP plugins into my site. Here are the new additions to my blog plugin family:

1. Ad Rotator — I don’t really sell ads in my site, but it doesn’t hurt to recommend certain products to my blog visitors once in a while, especially those cheap domain deals. I’m not going to say that this plugin is really great, but it’s just enough for what my blog needs. Adman wasn’t for me because it is limited to one type of ad, and relies on that ad’s capability to randomly display different advertisers. AdSense Deluxe plugin wasn’t my choice either because it’s a little too fancy for me. So I ended up with the simple Ad Rotator which randomly selects and displays an ad from a list I have in the text file.
2. Leprakhauns Word Count – This plugin helps you to count the words while you’re typing in your post. Very convenient for my, er, money-making activities let’s just say.
3. Robots Meta — I needed this very useful plugin to hide certain posts from the G-bot by using nofollow and noindex, which would hopefully help me maintain my PageR. If you earn money from posting, you know what I mean.
4. WP Super Cache — I use this to lower the load off my web hosting server. WebGrrrl.net now loads one third faster than normal because of this, or at least that’s what my stats say.
5. Flexi Pages Widget — This widget is used to hide a certain Page from displaying automatically under my 411.

One plugin that went RIP is Dean’s Permalinks Migration, since WordPress version 2.3 and above now has the ability to redirect between those ugly and pretty permalinks within WP.

Those are what’s new in the WordPress Plugins I Use list. Check out my full list if you’re interested.

I think I finally got the knack for creating WordPress themes and templates, so I felt like sharing my experience as well as listing the resources that I use to learn how to create my very own WordPress themes (actually, it’s also a part of my effort to fulfill the One Page A Day challenge I took recently, so I’m also breaking this post into three parts). Who knows, maybe it would inspire those of us interested in doing your very own WordPress theme but don’t know where to start.

I started dabbling with WordPress theme when I wanted to modify the default Kubrick theme and insert my own WebGrrrl.net header graphic. At the same time, I was learning the basics of using WordPress Template Tags, which is to this day a site I always refer to when building my theme. At this time, a little bit of CSS knowledge is also useful to have, because of the Kubrick theme’s heavy reliance on it.

I realized, once I was done with changing the header graphic, that at the end I don’t really have to know programming to modify a WordPress theme, but only the motivation and the guts to do those changes (I know some of us are very hesitant to edit a WordPress theme for fear of breaking the design, but as Nike said — just do it). I also realized that sandboxing is a very, very, very good thing

(Read Part 2 for the continuation)

Bloghopping through my MyBlogLog visitors led me to a cute little plugin called ClickComments by PostReach. Instead of typing out their comments, your blog visitors can instead click on an icon representing how good your particular post is.

This plugin can be supported in many types of blogging platform such as Blogger, MovableType and of course WordPress. Even the setup looks fairly easy to use. You just need to fill in the form on the right-side of ClickComments’ web site with your blog URL (which is the only compulsory field to fill), and select the style you preferred when your plugin appears in your site. The icons representing the comments can be as simple as two icons representing I Like It / Don’t Like It, to as many as six icons representing Cool / Fun / Insightful / Fell Asleep / I’m Confused / I Disagree.

I suppose this may be a good alternative to using ratings on your posts, but this may not totally replace the traditional comment form that we’re used to. For one thing, the inability for the plugin to record your commentors’ URL would put off some people from commenting for the sake of backlinking (thus avoiding spams, yeay! ). Also, ClickComments may not fit your need if you are looking at your comments section as a community-building platform.

On top of that, the plugin design and icons are still very limited to those options you see in the form. Maybe one of these days ClickComments will have the ability for its users to customize not just the plugin look, but also the types of icons that can be used so that the plugin can be customized to fit a particular blog’s persona or theme.

I was this close to putting this widget into my blog, if not for that fact that my recent web hosting predicament caused me to be aware of my blog’s loading time and avoid anymore plugin and widget add-ins (although the plugins did not cause my problem). I may use something like this in the future or for my other sites.

I am in the midst of updating the Top Commentators Widget, and have a few changes in mind for this:

1. Modifying commentator queries based on e-mail addresses instead of URLs. I have read a few posts currently in the Web about how Top Commentators plugin can be hijacked by spammers, by way of typing in legitimate site URLs of honest commentators in a particular blog, then possibly inserting the spamming URL in the content of a comment. The suggested fix to this issue is to do queries of top commentators based on e-mail addresses, which are hidden from comments (as is most often practiced). I have suggested a fix that does just that in one of the comments of the Top Commentators Widget, but I have not tested it extensively. I’ll be doing so before releasing the next version of this widget.
2. Fixing the unclickable form fields in the Control Form. There’s only one, really, that I have identified as problematic, and that is the “Specify number of days” field under the reset period. The problem is apparently caused by the label tag wrapping around both the reset period and reset day fields. I have redone that part in my current test.
3. Option to list only commentators with URLs.
4. Fix the exclude URLs field, which seems to not work the way it suppose to.
5. (Added 4/Mar/08) Option to display or not display comment count.
6. (Added 11/Mar/08) Option to set NoFollow on all links in the list.

There were a few more issues I would like to fix but which may be out of my control. For example, a few commented that changes were not reflected even when saved (this could be permissions issues or browser not refreshed after changes were applied), and the control form not showing at all (certain browsers can’t display the JavaScript-and-CSS-based form properly; you may want to try using a different browser just to make sure).

If you’re currently using the widget and have anything else to add before the update is released (probably end of March), please use the comment form in this post, instead of the widget home post, and I’ll see what I can do with the request.

Once I read Andy Beard’s feed update on the latest MyBlogLog widget and seeing how cool-looking it was, I immediately rushed to my MBL dashboard and generated the widget code to add into my blog. Unfortunately, the MBL widget that I used, even after updating it according to the instructions in the MBL page, didn’t work; the new code snippet refused to save itself into the widget form. So now I am still stuck with what MLB calls its crusty old Recent Visitors widget.

If you had the same problem as I have but managed to fix the problem, please let me know how you did it.

UPDATE: The problem has been fixed, thanks to Ian and the MBL team. After Ian mentioned about the fix, I only needed to regenerate the code snippet and paste it in the MBL widget for it to work.

As part of my support for the NoNoFollow movement, I initially decided to use the easiest DoFollow WordPress plugin there is by Semiologic. However, after just learning about bad neighborhood links, I decided on using a different plugin called NoFollow Case by Case so that I have a greater control over the outgoing links in the comments.

So far I only used it on less than 5 of the mere 1000+ comments I get in this blog due to suspicious back linking. Sooner, though, I feel I should have some sort of comment policy to tell people not to take the comment section in my blog too lightly. I know some of you, particularly one or two who are in the Top Commentators section, are taking advantage of the nofollow option to promote your affiliate/product sites. Don’t overdo it, ’cause if you do, don’t come complaining and spamming me. I wouldn’t care, ’cause this is my blog and I do as I very well please.