This week, I was planning to continue with my WordPress plugin development for a GEDCOM viewer, after making myself busy with OS upgrading and testing, as well as niche blog building since last year.

Alas, when I checked the WP.org Extend directory to request a repository for my GEDCOM project, I’ve found that a GEDCOM viewer plugin has already been developed. So I thought that since mine is still a beta, I might as well not reinvent the wheel and let someone else do the hard work (and believe me, there’s a lot of hard work and reading going on with my GEDCOM plugin development).

l’ve decided to stop development of my GEDCOM plugin, and instead recommend you to check out WP Family Tree. There is also one simple but pretty-looking GEDCOM viewer called Family Tree PHP, which you can install if your web hosting provider supports PHP and MySQL. Last but not least, PhpGedView is one other option if you’re interested in a more extensive genealogy application on the Web, and was the basis of my WordPress plugin.

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The development of this plugin has been largely delayed by the robbery that happened to me earlier this year, so I had to start from scratch.

However, I’ve made my plan a bit more simpler, as I now plan on just adapting from a GPL-based genealogy software of my choice that’s running on PHP and MySQL. The same development concept was used when I developed the Top Commentators Widget, since I figured I shouldn’t be reinventing the wheel when there are better and more developed genealogy software.

I’m looking into adapting either phpmyfamily or GeneoTree, albeit in a smaller scale than what is offered by either one application. I’m hoping to achieve the following by the time a beta release is ready for public testing:

• Include a simple administration page to upload GEDCOM (.ged) file
• Provide the ability to display ancestry in a list order
• Provide the ability to display a person’s details

And that’s it, really. I’m putting off the rest of the options because, honestly speaking, this can grow into a pretty huge application that would match its original counterparts. If I’m bogged down with too many features, I’m worried that I might not be able to complete this by the end of this year. So, better something than nothing, I say

I still need your help finalizing the official name of this plugin. FamilyPress and WP-Genealogy are currently in equal footing as of the moment of this posting. Please use the poll below and vote for the official name. I’ll be announcing its official name the moment a beta is ready for deployment.

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(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.

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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.

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I finally managed to finish updating the WordPress Plugins I Use page after months having this task in my to-do list. I was too busy tinkering around and testing new plugins that I don’t think the list is extensive enough to include all those plugins I have historically used but did not work in my site when installed, which happened a few times.

Interestingly, my WordPress plugins list is among the most visited posts/pages in this blog, so I’m more than happy to keep this updated from time to time.

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Instant Upgrade: Upgrade your WordPress-Installation with one simple click.

This is one of the plugins in my blog I could never live without. I installed it just before I went into a blog hiatus about 3 months ago. I used to do my WordPress upgrades manually, by FTPing to and fro my server. Instant Upgrade helps me to do that in about 0.001 seconds. The interesting part about this plugin is its ability to downgrade to a lower version of WordPress should you choose to do so, although I haven’t personally tested it myself for fear of a database screw-up.

Alex Günsche did a good work on this simple plugin. I’m sure there’s a few more WP upgrade plugins out there that works as well or better than Instant Upgrade, and I have tried two others, both didn’t work at all.

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I have been working on two main things for the past two months — frantically doing sponsored posts, and fiddling with more WordPress plugins.

Installing the Math Comment Spam Protection has definitely been one of the smartest moves I’ve made with my blog. Not only was it easy to install, but the spam comments Akismet captured made a staggering drop from 50ish a day to only one every other day! Another good thing that comes with installing this plugin is that I don’t have to moderate my comments anymore, and my commenters can get the instant gratification of immediately seeing their comments posted. Now I have more time to bloghop and make more dough.

I didn’t pay much attention with the new features that were to be in WordPress 2.3, so I couldn’t help but curse myself when I found out — after upgrading to WP 2.3 — that the new version comes with a built-in tagging support. Sheesh, if I had known, I wouldn’t even bother installing Ultimate Tag Warrior two weeks prior. For the sake of supposedly improving my blog SEO, I had to endure some temporary brain cramps as I tried to understand why in the world I would need to activate three UTW plugins in my dashboard, and looked through the unending options I had to go through. I just find UTW to be a hassle, and ultimately my bad experience with UTW prompted me to remove it, and to stick to the simple tagging option.

I’ve only slowed down in my WordPress plugin tinkering this week (due to my next big plan on making money) — I should update the WordPress Plugin I Use page after this.

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