I’ve released version 1.12 of Comment Warning overnight. It only contains a small, non critical, change – it now counts how many comments have been made from each IP address in the Log.

What Does Version 1.12 Include?

As mentioned above, version 1.12 only includes one small, non critical, change: counting how many comments have been made from each IP address in the Log.

The number of comments counted will include all comments from an IP address, even those before the comment author was warned. It will NOT include comments that have been marked as spam (or deleted obviously).

If there are some comments for an IP address, the number will link to the Edit Comments page for that IP address, so you can check the comments left by that visitor to see if they are appropriate to remain on the site.

Note: Because of the way the Log is created, there may multiple entries for each IP address. In this case, the comment count will be duplicated for each entry from the same IP address.

How To Upgrade

To upgrade to the new version, go to the Comment Warning plugin page, download the new version, unzip it and upload it over the top of the existing files on your server.

Basically you just need to follow the installation instructions on the plugin page, without the need to activate it. Although not strictly necessary, it’s always recommended to backup your database and files before doing anything on your server.

Alternatively, if you’re already running Comment Warning and are on WordPress 2.7+, you’ll see an upgrade notification in the Plugin page of the Admin area. Click the upgrade link and it will do it all for you in about 15 seconds.

Late last week, I quietly released my new WordPress plugin, Comment Warning. Over the weekend, I added some extra functionality and it’s now reached the point where I’m ready to announce it to the world. So here goes.

Who Is Comment Warning For?

Comment Warning is aimed at DoFollow and ex-DoFollow blogs that have become a target for comment spammers, including those running the CommentLuv and KeywordLuv plugins.

Background

Although DoFollow and related plugins can reward your commentators (and help increase traffic), it also attracts comment spammers. These spammers often hunt for blogs through DoFollow lists or Google searches for terms related to the CommentLuv and KeywordLuv plugins.

The level of comment spam I get on this blog has become untolerable. I turned off DoFollow, but the spammers keep coming.

Comment Warning helps deal with this problem. In the 7 days that I’ve been running the plugin on this blog, 113 visitors have triggered the warning. The number of borderline spam comments have dropped.

Of course this means that the total number of comments I’m getting has dropped as well, but I’ve decided I only want genuine comments at this stage.

Compatibility

The plugin has been tested on WordPress 2.7 and 2.8.

I suspect that this plugin will NOT be compatible with the WP Super Cache plugin. I will be doing some testing in the near future and, if necessary, changing the plugin so it does work with WP Super Cache.

How Does It Work?

Comment Warning checks where visitors come from. If there are certain terms in the referring URL that may indicate that the visitor is a potential comment spammer, they will be presented with a warning message, outlining your comment policy. The message is displayed via a JavaScript modal ‘popup’ (not a real popup).

Both the list of triggers and the message are customisable, allowing you to control who is shown the message and what they are shown. If you come across another site or term that should be added, please let me know.

It is possible to redirect potential spammers to a URL of your choice, either immediately (bypassing the warning) or after a certain number of visits from the same IP address. However, my own personal view is that redirecting visitors is harsh.

A log of visits that trigger the warning is kept. This allows you quickly jump to any comments left by these visitors. It also adds a message, letting you know that the commentator has been warned in the past, to all new comment email notifications and to comments appearing in the Admin area.

What It Doesn’t Do

Comment Warning won’t help if a comment spammer comes directly to your site, rather than from a search or a page with a URL that contains one of the trigger words.

However, if they have been warned previously, this will have been recorded in the log and a message indicating this will appear next to their comments in the Admin panel and in comment notification emails.

How Do I Get It?

You can read more about Comment Warning and download it on the plugin page. Alternatively, you can get it from the Official WordPress Plugin Directory (or search for Comment Warning in the install plugin page in the WordPress Admin area).

The Official WordPress Plugin Directory

This is the first time I’ve added a plugin to the official WordPress Plugin Directory (when did it change from Repository to Directory?). The process wasn’t too hard, but it would have been much harder without the excellent Listing Your Plugin at the WordPress.org Plugin Directory post by Ronald Huereca on WebLogToolsCollection.

Other WordPress Plugin Development News

It was with some surprise that I noticed that this is my first release for almost 18 months! Time flies…

I’m working on some other WordPress plugins in the background and I’m still holding to my statement that I’ll update my old plugins and move them into the official plugin directory. I’ve also started thinking that I should tidy up and release some of the custom plugins that I use on my sites.

Time will be an issue, but I’m hoping I can get most of this done.

This is perhaps my most overdue post ever – a review of Vladimir Prelovac’s book, WordPress Plugin Development (Beginner’s Guide) [note: that's an affiliate link].

I’ve had other posts that I’ve promised to write that I’ve had trouble finding time to deliver. In this case however, I actually accepted a review copy of the book, so I really should have written about it before now.

In my defence, we had a new addition to the family and we’ve been undergoing major changes at work, so I’ve been spread pretty thin.

Also, because I live in Australia, Packt Publishing could only send me the eBook version. In many ways, I prefer ebooks – no more leaving books behind when you change country! In this case however, having a physical book in front of me would have meant I’d have been more likely to pick it up.

Anyway, enough with the excuses and on to the review!

Book Details

• Title: WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner’s Guide
• Author: Vladimir Prelovac
• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Paperback: 278 pages [191mm x 235mm]
• Release date: February 2009
• ISBN: 1847193595
• ISBN(13): 978-1-847193-59-9

Who The Book Is For

I’ll just quote the book on this one:

This book is for programmers working with WordPress, who want to develop custom plugins and to hack the code base. You need to be familiar with the basics of WordPress and PHP programming and believe that code is poetry; this book will handle the rest.

That seems to be WordPress Plugin developers, WordPress Theme developers, those providing web development services based on WordPress and maybe some power users wanting to push the boundaries a little.

If you don’t have any experience with PHP (or jQuery for that matter), you might just get by, but I’d advise you to at least read up on the basics before you jump into this book.

What The Book Covers

The book covers most of what you’ll need to get started writing WordPress plugins – the right way. The topics covered include (in no particular order):

• The basics of the WordPress plugin architecture and the API used to hook into the WordPress functionality and manipulate it.
• Interacting with the WordPress database
• The use of custom fields to store data.
• Creating widgets (though not using the new WordPress 2.8 widget api)
• How to use both jQuery and AJAX within a WordPress plugin
• Working with third party APIs such as Flickr
• WordPress Plugin security
• User roles and permissions
• Localising WordPress plugins (ie to support other languages)
• Managing the plugin options.
• Maintaining WordPress plugins (including adding them to the WordPress Plugin repository)

In short it covers a LOT. As I said, everything you need to know to write WordPress plugins.

The Positive

I’ll be honest – I haven’t read the book from cover to cover. I have read the first 3 chapters in their entirety and have skimmed the rest of the book, digging into some areas a little more. However, I’ve seen enough to get a good feel for the book and to know that I like what’s in it.

The book’s tagline is "Learn by doing: less theory, more results". It teaches by example, rather than pushing a whole lot of theory at you.

The book walks step by step through the development of 6 real life WordPress plugins, covering the various issues that arise for each plugin and how to resolve them. Using real life examples makes it much easier to understand the concepts that Vladimir is teaching.

In my opinion, Vladimir has done a great job of choosing plugins which allow him to demonstrate all the things he needs to, without having to contrive situations just to demonstrate something. He weaves all the complex information together, giving you a little bit at time but building on it and reinforcing it later.

The source code is available for download, allowing you to try it out yourself without typing it – although if you’re a beginner I’d recommend that you do the hard way and type it. You’re much more likely to remember things that way. The source code is also a great starting point for you to start experimenting on your own.

I learnt quite a few things from the book – mostly things I’d heard of before, but hadn’t gotten around to learning about – but the book laid them out in a simple straight forward way making it easy for me to quickly understand.

Perhaps the best feature of the book is that Vladimir follows ‘best practice’ methods for creating WordPress plugins. Are you not quite sure about any of the following:

• using nonces to make plugins more secure (and other security issues)
• using wp_enqueue_script to load scripts rather than just calling them directly
• localizing your WordPress plugin so that it can easily be translated into other languages
• using shortcodes to call plugin functionality directly from the post body

This book will make it clear just how to use these features and so much more. Whatever Vladimir does in the book, he uses best practice methods.

This is great both for new plugin authors (who’ll learn to do things the right way) and for existing plugin authors (such as myself) who need a refresher on the best way to do things in WordPress. There are plenty of us out there who have written plugins that work, but which could be written better.

I’ve been planning to go back and update my plugins to take this into account. When I get around to doing so, I’ll be consulting this book again for a good overview of what I need to do (and why).

The Negative

There are very few negatives with the book. The content, by and large, is excellent.

I did notice a few spelling errors. That’s always possible with large books, but ideally the editor should have picked them up.

The only other thing I noticed is that the order (within each section) takes a little getting used to. Vladimir pushes through the example, then explains what happened afterwards. For me this approach is a little counter-intuitive. However, you get used to it and isn’t a big problem. In fact some even think that this is a strong point:

Each mini-tutorial (”Time for action”) section is followed by a “What just happened?” section that let’s you take a breather to understand what you just did and why you did it. I believe that this pause for explanation is the key reason why it is so easy to learn from this book.

Other reviews have mentioned that the book is a little fast paced. Perhaps, but it didn’t worry me and of course you can work through the examples at your own pace.

Question Marks

I do have some concerns about this book – not to do with the content, which is excellent, but to do with the very concept of a book on WordPress plugin development.

Out Of Date Content

I didn’t put this in the Negatives section, but I easily could have. WordPress is being updated all the time at an astonishing rate. Can the book keep up with this? The widget api was been overhauled as part of WordPress 2.8, meaning that section of the book is out of date already.

Vladimir will be on top of such changes and I’m sure there will be revised editions of the book, but the nature of a book on WordPress is that it will be behind from almost the minute it’s published.

Free Alternative Information

All of the information contained in this book is available free of charge elsewhere online.

Sure it may not be available in one place and ordered in such a useful way, but there are volumes written on WordPress plugin development. I’ve always found that a combination of the WordPress Codex, Google and the source code have been enough to tell me everything I need to know. I probably wouldn’t have gone out and spent money on this book because I’m comfortable with finding information through these alternative sources.

That’s not to say that such a book doesn’t have a place: It would be very useful for someone starting out on WordPress development who wants all the information up front without having to go out and search for it. The way I see it, this book is not a necessity, but is a luxury that will save you time.

Size Of Target Audience

Lets face it – when you round up all the WordPress plugin authors, there’s not too many of us and many won’t buy such a book.

There are more WordPress theme developers out there and I suspect that they will be a big target audience for this book – many of them are looking to extend their WordPress skills and to build more plugin-like functionality into their themes. However, there are other books coming that may appeal to theme developers more, as they are less plugin specific.

Perhaps the key to the success of this book is the rapid growth in the use of WordPress by web development agencies to provide solutions to clients. Is it enough to sustain several books on the topic (particularly in light of the other concerns above)? Only time will tell.

Conclusion

WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner’s Guide is a very good book. It covers everything you need know about writing WordPress plugins and it teaches by example rather than by lecturing.

That said there are question marks about the book – most notably how quickly it will go out of date due to the pace of development of the WordPress core.

For me, it won’t replace the WordPress Codex and Google as my prime source of information, but it would be very handy to have on a shelf to turn to from time to time. It would also be an excellent starting point for those just getting started with WordPress related development.

I’ve been using WordPress 2.7 for a while now and have comprehensively tested my WordPress plugins on it. In this post, I release the results of my testing: Four plugins work fine (albeit with a non version specific bug found in one of them). One plugin seems to have problems with WordPress 2.7.

Plugins That Work With WordPress 2.7

The following WordPress plugins appear to work fine with WordPress 2.7:

• DualFeeds
• FeedEntryHeader
• LocalCurrency
• KeywordLuv

However, during testing I discovered a bug with LocalCurrency, which I’ll explain in more detail below. This bug is not specific to WordPress 2.7 and has always existed in the plugin. If you haven’t noticed it yet, you’re unlikely to.

Plugin Which Has Problems With WordPress 2.7

Unfortunately, the IFrameWidgets plugin has a problem, which appears to be related to WordPress 2.7. In fact, I suspect that this problem has existed since WordPress 2.5, but only occurs on certain browsers.

The problem is that widgets running in the IFrame widget do not appear. This seems to be related to the JavaScript no longer being able to find the height of the IFrame (the plugin hides the IFrame until it’s fully loaded, then automatically resizes it based on it’s contents).

I’m not certain of all scenarios when it will occur, but I’ve managed to make it happen with the BlogCatalog widget using Firefox 2.0.0.20. For me, there’s no problem in Firefox 3, Google Chrome and IE6.

Kirk M from Just Thinkin’, who reported the problem, seems to be having a more serious problem with the Google Friend Connect Members widget: he gets the problem with Firefox 3.0.5, Shiretoko builds, Chrome and IE 7.0.

It may be that there are two problems: a general problem which only occurs with FireFox 2 and a more specific problem with the Google Friend Connect Members widget.

I suspect the general problem occurs because the way widgets work changed back in WordPress 2.5: IFrameWidgets uses the number of the widget in the plugin logic. Prior to WordPress 2.5, you were only allow a maximum of 9 widgets, so the plugin was using the numbers 1 to 9. In versions after 2.5, there is no maximum number of widgets and the plugin is using numbers such as 320138091. It may be that FireFox 2 can’t handle numbers this large?

I am continuing investigations and hope to identify a fix soon. You can follow this issue in the comments on the IFrameWidgets page and I’ll announce the fix in a post – so subscribe to my feed if you want to know when it’s released.

LocalCurrency Bug

As mentioned above, LocalCurrency has a bug which has always existed within the plugin. The plugin works fine within a single post or page, but doesn’t always work on pages with multiple posts (ie the home page or category pages).

The plugin has been designed to work on pages with multiple posts, but it doesn’t always load the JavaScript that allows it to make the call to Yahoo! Finance. To optimise performance, the JavaScript is only loaded when the plugin finds the <–LCSTART–> tag in the post.

This is fine for single posts / pages. It’s also fine for pages with multiple posts IF the tag is in the first post on the page. However, if the fist post doesn’t have any currency to be converted (ie no <–LCSTART–> tag), then the JavaScript isn’t loaded.

I’ll be fixing this problem sometime in the near future. I’ll probably add an option to allow the blog owner to decide whether they want to convert currency on multiple post pages. If chosen, the plugin will load the JavaScript without checking the posts for the tag, circumventing the problem.

Final Thoughts

Anytime there is a WordPress upgrade, there is a chance that one of my plugins will break. This means I have to do extensive testing with each WordPress release. This takes a lot of time, but fortunately, there are normally no problems to fix.

For the WordPress 2.7 release, I did find a couple of problems – but I’ll get them fixed as soon as I can.

Happy New Year to all! A new year, a new start, but before I start churning out new posts, I want to have a quick look at 2008 on More Than Scratch The Surface. I’m not normally given to writing review posts, but I was looking at my Google Analytics stats for 2008 and felt moved to write a review of 2008.

The Top Ten Visited Posts In 2008

According to Google Analytics, the top ten visited pages on my blog included the home page and four of my plugin pages, which was pretty predictable. Stripping these out, leaves the following as the top ten visited posts in 2008:

1. WordPress – Rounded Text Boxes in Posts (2007)
2. Creating A JavaScript Array Dynamically Via PHP
3. Don’t Let Your CommentLuv Be Stolen Away!
4. WordPress – Simple CSS Text Boxes In Posts (2007)
5. WordPress – Most Viewed – Sidebar Widget (2007)
6. NetBeans IDE 6.5 Beta for PHP Developers
7. How To Avoid Adsense Smart Pricing On Blogs
8. WordPress – Taming The Advanced Editor (2007)
9. Shylock Adsense Plugin – Hack To Avoid Smart Pricing
10. The Adsense Dilemma (Or How To Make Money)

Interestingly, four of these posts are actually from 2007! Apart from the WordPress Most Viewed Sidebar Widget post, which was out of date as soon as I posted it, the other three are some of my better work (although I now use a different rounded corners technique and wouldn’t recommend it anymore)

If we were to just look at 2008 posts, the following four would be added to the bottom of the list:

• WordPress Plugin IFrameWidgets 1.0 Released
• How To Display Ads Only To Search Visitors
• Centered Fixed Width Layout And Scrollbar Problem
• Embedded Search Box In Google Search Results

Although some of my best posts are in the top 10 2008 posts, there are also some that I definitely wouldn’t have included.

My Top Ten Posts In 2008

Now, if you asked me what my top posts in 2008 were, in terms of importance to me, I would have ranked them this way:

1. Password Protecting The Wp-admin Folder
2. Don’t Let Your CommentLuv Be Stolen Away!
3. The Adsense Dilemma (Or How To Make Money)
4. How To Avoid Adsense Smart Pricing On Blogs
5. How To Display Ads Only To Search Visitors
6. Creating A JavaScript Array Dynamically Via PHP
7. SearchWiki Breaks Numbered Google Results – Easy Fix
8. The Curse Of The Blogger
9. Setting Cookies In WordPress – Trap For Beginners
10. Spammed By A Master (Of Making Money Online)

Other Interesting Stats From Google Analytics

Google Analytics also provided some interesting statistics for 2008 on this site.

Traffic

The site recorded 46,488 Visits and 74,916 Pageviews in 2008. Not bad, but I’m hoping to improve on that in 2009.

By far my largest source of traffic was Google, accounting for a little over 50% of all my traffic. This is normally 70 – 80% on a day to day basis, but a couple of posts went hot on StumbleUpon and DZone, sending a surge of traffic and driving down the percentage from Google over the whole year.

Browser Breakdown

The vast majority of visitors were using Firefox, with IE a distant second. This isn’t surprising given the nature of this blog, as it appeals to web developers and bloggers, groups given to using FireFox. The full breakdown is as follows:

1. Firefox – 69.74%
2. Internet Explorer – 21.63%
3. Safari – 3.95%
4. Opera – 2.02%
5. Chrome – 1.47%

Operating systems

I thought it would be interesting to look at the major operating systems used by visitors and it was dominated by Windows. The full breakdown is as follows:

1. Windows – 83.48%
2. Macintosh – 11.57%
3. Linux – 4.56%

Top 10 Screen Resolutions

The screen resolution of visitors is always important to web developers. I’ve included the top 10 resolutions below. Some are pretty damn big, but the important one to note is that 800×600 has almost dropped off the list at last!

1. 1024×768 – 24.77%
2. 1280×1024 – 19.34%
3. 1280×800 – 17.89%
4. 1680×1050 – 10.68%
5. 1440×900 – 10.09%
6. 1920×1200 – 4.56%
7. 1152×864 – 2.68%
8. 1600×120 – 1.83%
9. 800×600 – 1.60%
10. 1280×768 – 1.53%

Top 10 Countries

1. US (by far)
2. UK (London was the top city)
3. India
4. Canada
5. Australia
6. Germany
7. Philippines (Hi RT)
8. Netherlands
9. China
10. Indonesia

Goals For 2009

Here are some of my goals for the upcoming year.

Post More Often

I only managed 41 posts in 2008, slowing towards the end of the year, with only two in November and two in December. By contrast, I managed 52 posts in a little over 7 months in 2007. I’d really like to get more posts out.

It’s not for lack of ideas – I have lots of half written posts that I just need some time to finish off. I tend to spend more time working on my projects than writing about what I’m learning.

Post On Topic

It’s noticeable in my top 10 posts above that many are my Make Money Online posts. I’d like to keep posting on that topic as I learn more about it, but I want to post more often on my Web Development efforts (and WordPress of course).

Update My Current Wordpress Plugins

I want to overhaul my existing WordPress plugins, make them more efficient, add some new features and move them into the official WordPress plugin repository.

Release Some New WordPress Plugins

I started off by writing that I’d like to release another 4 WordPress plugins this year (I already have 4 half finished plugins that I want to finish off). However, thinking of my workload, I changed it first to 3 plugins, then to 2 plugins! So we’ll have to see how many I can actually get out.

Release A WordPress Theme

I’ve extensively customised themes on several of my WordPress blogs, including this one. It’s always been my intention to build a theme from scratch, which I’d then use as a basis to create WordPress Themes for release. Hopefully, I finally get around to it in 2009.

Release Some Greasemonkey Scripts

I have a couple of half written Greasemonkey scripts that I plan to finish off in the near future and I’m sure that I’ll develop more as the year progresses. I’m really loving how easy it is to tweak the behaviour of the websites I visit.

Final Thoughts

Well that’s a quick look at the year that was and the year that will be here at More Than Scratch The Surface. I hope all your endeavours for 2009 are successful as well!

If you have any big plans for your blog, feel free to share in the comments.

First let me wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! I hope you all accept my best wishes, even if you don’t celebrate Christmas.

December has been a very busy month for me and I haven’t had much time for posting. I may not get another post out this year, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to update you on some of the projects I’m working on.

Brand New Acer Aspire One Netbook

I suffer from having too many ideas for the amount of time I have to implement them! In an effort to get a little more time in on my various projects, I recently bought an Acer Aspire One netbook to use on the train to work. I have two 35 minute train rides, so that gives me about an extra hour a day.

Hopefully, this should allow me to get more posts out – in fact I’m typing this very post on the train. I’m also planning to do some web development work on the Acer Aspire One as well.

There’s no wireless network on the train, so the term ‘netbook’ is a little misleading, but I’m happy to work offline and to sync it later. I’m using XAMPPLite (Apache, PHP, MySQL bundled together), so I can do all the web development work I need to do.

WordPress 2.7

WordPress 2.7 was recently released, meaning it’s time to upgrade: I’ve upgraded one of my blogs and I’m working on the others. I know the upgrade is supposed to be quick, but it’s not so simple for me. I don’t just suck it and see, I carefully consider the impact of the upgrade on each blog.

For the first blog, the whole process took about 4 hours. The upgrade itself only took 15 minutes, but I had to go through all the plugins I’m using and update them. The main problem I have is that I’ve hacked quite a few plugins, so when I upgrade them I need to port my hacks across to the updated plugins.

I’ve also hacked the WordPress core in a couple of places and one of these had moved, so I had to track it down. Hacking the core and plugins gives you a more flexible site, but the cost is the additional time and effort at upgrade time. Fortunately, this isn’t a problem for most users.

As for my verdict on WordPress 2.7: so far, its great!

WordPress 2.7 And My Plugins: News Coming Shortly

Now that I’m running WordPress 2.7, I’m testing all of my WordPress plugins with it. I haven’t been through everything, but so far its looking good. I’ll write another post in the near future outlining the results of my testing.

Updating My WordPress Plugins

I plan to go through and rewrite all of my WordPress plugins, to add some new features, tidy up the code, etc. This will incorporate any changes necessary for WordPress 2.7, if testing reveals any problems.

I’ve been planning to do this for a long time as RT from the Untwisted Vortex Living In The Philippines blog will be able to attest. Sorry RT, I will get to it early next year!

Once I’ve rewritten the plugins, I plan to add them to the official WordPress Plugin Directory (also something I’ve been planning to do for a long time!).

New WordPress Plugins

I’ve also been working on some new WordPress plugins. I’ve got at least 3 or 4 on the go at the moment. I won’t mention what they do yet, but one is a DoFollow plugin that I’ve mentioned before. We’ll see how they work out, because they are one of the first casualties of my busy schedule.

Greasemonkey

I’ve really been getting into Greasemonkey scripts recently. As well as creating hacks to fix the Google Reader Print Button and Numbered Google Results scripts (written by other people), I’ve written two of my own scripts.

They are both highly specialised and still need some tweaking, so I’m not sure if I’ll bother releasing them or not. One is for the OurBrisbane.com TV schedule (to only display the common Free to Air channels) and the other is to tweak the output of the Google Reader Print Button script to print the article’s URL.

In both cases, I embedded JQuery in the script, because it’s just so much easier. I’ve also really been getting into JQuery lately – it rocks!

Jobs in China

There’s lots happening over at my Jobs in China site.

First, l’m creating a job listing service for the Teach English in China market. I’m investigating several ways to do this. At the moment, I’m playing with the TDO Mini Forms WordPress plugin to allow people to post jobs.

I’ve checked out Jobberbase but discounted it because although it’s nice, it doesn’t do enough of what I need. I may look at the BlueFur.com job script, although I’d probably need to extend it.

On top of this, I’m also planning a new theme for the site.

Client Work

I’ve been working on a client site and I’m just putting the finishing touches on it. Hopefully I’ll have it finished in the next week.

Posts

I have quite a few monster posts almost completed. I hope to get some of them out the door soon, but then again, I thought I’d get a couple of them out over the last couple of weeks. These posts take a lot of research and I want to make sure they’re right before I publish them. It’ll probably be January now before they start to appear.

One of the post I’m getting close on is the one I promised K from the ShanKriLa technology blog, long ago, on the effects of the KeywordLuv plugin on SEO.

Final Thoughts

These are just some of the things I’m working on. I have a few other projects that I won’t mention here. I also have a busy full time job and a family and Christmas just around the corner, so I’m having to learn to just do what I can!

It’s been a while since I last posted, because I’ve been tied up with some other projects. My focus is now returning to this blog, but before I get into anything of substance, there’s some housekeeping I need to take care of.

If you subscribe to the feed of one of my WordPress plugin categories, please be warned that these feeds will be removed in 7 days time. The feeds in question are the following:

If you want news about my WordPress plugins, please subscribe to the following feed:

http://www.scratch99.com/category/my-wordpress-plugins/feed

This feed will contain news and tips relating to ALL my WordPress plugins.

Alternatively, you can subscribe to the feed relating to the tag (rather than category) for each plugin. These will probably have all the news relating to each plugin, but may also contain other posts that mention the plugin in passing. These feeds are as follows:

• DualFeeds Tag Feed
• IFrameWidgets Tag Feed
• FeedEntryHeader Tag Feed
• LocalCurrency Tag Feed
• KeywordLuv Tag Feed

I’ve taken this move for two reasons:

1. I’m consolidating my categories, because I have too many of them. This will merge 5 categories into one general category for my WordPress plugins.
2. I normally stick to one category per post, but I often have news relating to more than one plugin. This will allow such news to reach everyone who needs it.

I regret any inconvenience this may cause, but hopefully it will result in a better site.

In the past, I’ve written about only showing Google Adsense to search engine visitors, so as to decrease the chance of being smart priced. In this post, you’ll see how to improve the technique outlined previously, so that you can make more money.

Background On Smart Pricing

By now, most people know that Smart Pricing is a penalty Google applies to Adsense accounts that don’t convert well for the advertiser, resulting in you earning only about 10% of what you’d normally earn per click.

I’m not going to go into more detail than is absolutely necessary in this post, so if you want more information on Smart Pricing, see my post on how smart pricing may cost you money or for the ultimate description, see Grizzly’s Optimization Tips for Adsense.

For now, you just need to know that only certain visitors are going to click Adsense ads and buy something from the advertiser. Who? It’s not your regular readers. It’s not the stream of visitors from StumbleUpon, Digg or Sphinn. It’s the search engine visitors.

Search engine visitors provide targeted traffic for the advertiser, which converts well. The other sources don’t. If the majority of your traffic comes from the social news sites, then you’re in danger of being smart priced. That’s why I chose to show Adsense only to search engine visitors.

The Original “From Search” Function

In my original Shylock Adsense Plugin – Hack To Avoid Smart Pricing post, I provided two approaches: one based on hacking just the Shylock Adsense plugin; another on a more generic solution that can be called from wherever you want (within the Shylock Adsense plugin, the sidebar, single.php, etc).

In this post, I’m using the second approach as it has a wider application. This was originally explained in the Hacking Shylock Adsense AND Sidebars section of the previous post. This worked by adding the following function to functions.php in your theme’s folder (wp-content/themes/yourtheme folder, where yourtheme is the name of your theme):

function scratch99_fromasearchengine(){
  $ref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
  $SE = array('/search?', 'images.google.', 'web.info.com', 'search.', 'del.icio.us/search', 'soso.com', '/search/', '.yahoo.');
  foreach ($SE as $source) {
    if (strpos($ref,$source)!==false) return true;
  }
  return false;
}


This function was then called from the Shylock Adsense plugin, a sidebar widget, or anywhere else you may want to, via the following code:

if (function_exists('scratch99_fromasearchengine')) {
  if (scratch99_fromasearchengine()) {
    INSERT YOUR CODE HERE
  }
}

Obviously, INSERT YOUR CODE HERE needs to be replaced with whatever code you want to show the search engine visitors: your Adsense code if it’s in the sidebar (using the ExecPHP widget) or the Shylock Adsense code (see my original post for more details).

Problem With The Original Function

As Zath pointed out in the comments, the original function only works on the first page the visitor lands on. If the visitor subsequently navigates to another page on your site, the ads disappear. This is because the http_referer is no longer the search engine, it’s now the page where they landed on your site.

Of course, that means they no longer have the option to click an ad before leaving the site. I wasn’t worried about this, because I figured not many search engine visitors would go to another page on my site. I was wrong!

Leaving Money On The Table

According to Google Analytics, over the last month, visitors arriving at this site from a search engine read 1.54 pages per visit. That means that every second visitor is clicking another page.

Every second visitor! That means I could be serving up 50% more ads to the sort of visitor who is likely to click ads!

I decided I better change the way I was doing things, so that search engine visitors see ads on every page they visit at my site. Fortunately, this is fairly easy to do, by setting a cookie that identifies search engine visitors.

New “From Search” Function Using Cookie

Here is the solution I’m now using on this blog.

First, the you need to add some code to functions.php in your theme’s folder (wp-content/themes/yourtheme folder, where yourtheme is the name of your theme). The following should be added immediately before the ?> at the bottom of the file:

$ref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
$SE = array('/search?', 'images.google.', 'web.info.com', 'search.', 'del.icio.us/search', 'soso.com', '/search/', '.yahoo.');
foreach ($SE as $source) {
  if (strpos($ref,$source)!==false) {
    setcookie("sevisitor", 1, time()+3600, "/", ".scratch99.com");
    $sevisitor=true;
  }
}
 
function fromasearchengine(){
  global $sevisitor;
  if ($sevisitor==true || $_COOKIE["sevisitor"]==1) {
    return true;
  }
  return false;
}


Note: In the setcookie line, you must change “.scratch99.com” to your own domain!

The fromasearchengine function can then be called from wherever you want to use it (to check if a visitor is from a search engine or not). This is explained further below.

Notes About The New “From Search” Function

The code that detects whether the user is from a search engine has been moved out of the fromasearchengine function, into the body of functions.php. This means it will only run this code once per page load, rather than every time the function is called, which may be several times per page load (I call it from Shylock Adsense and from the sidebar).

Also, the $sevisitor variable was introduced because the cookie can’t be detected on the first page view. The cookie is set on the first page view, but the $_COOKIE function won’t see it until the next page view. The above code checks whether the $sevisitor variable is set (ie it’s the first page view) or whether the cookie is set (ie it’s a subsequent page view).

I had one problem with setting the cookie via WordPress, but it doesn’t affect the final solution above, so I leave that for a future post.

Calling The New “From Search” Function

To call the new fromasearchengine function from Shylock Adsense, edit the shylock_adsense.php file which comes with the plugin. Look for the following code (on line 325 in version 1.2):

function shylock_adsense_filter($content){
  global $id,$user_level;
  $output = $content;

and replace it with:

function shylock_adsense_filter($content){
  global $id,$user_level;
  $output = $content;
 
if (function_exists('fromasearchengine')) {
  if (fromasearchengine()) {


Then go down to about line 364 and look for:

  return $output;

and replace it with:

} } return $output;

Alternatively, to call it from a PHP sidebar widget or somewhere else (such as single.php), you would add the following code in the appropriate place:

<?php if (function_exists('fromasearchengine')) {
  if (fromasearchengine()) { ?>
    INSERT YOUR CODE HERE
<?php } } ?>

replacing INSERT YOUR CODE HERE with your Adsense code or whatever else you wanted to show the search engine visitor.

Final Thoughts

Using this technique, to set a cookie to identify search engine visitors, then only serving Adsense to such visitors, should help you make more money, while avoiding being smart priced. However, as always, it pays to experiment with Adsense and monitor the affects on your income.

Of course this technique will have other applications as well, allowing you to serve whatever content you like to search engine visitors. I hope some of you find it of use.

This is a brief update on what I’ve been doing, my plans for the site and my WordPress Plugins.

Busy, Busy, Busy!

Work has been pretty busy. For those that don’t know, I head up the web team for a large organization based in Brisbane. The role is mostly management / internal consulting, but with
a little hands on development.

The website uses the RedDot CMS, which is an interesting challenge for me, because it’s a proprietory Windows based solution, and I come from an open source background. I haven’t learnt much about RedDot itself yet, but I’m going to focus on that soon.

We’re looking getting a project off the ground to revamp the intranet site, which I’m very interested in. You’ll probably see some intranet related posts in future as I’ve been reading a lot about this topic.

I’ve also undergone some training in the Prince2 project management and ITIL service delivery frameworks, both of which were fairly intensive.

Because work’s busy, I have less time for my online ventures. It’s a little frustrating, as I have so many things I want to do. At least I enjoy work!

WordPress Plugins

As yet, I haven’t performed any testing of my plugins in WordPress 2.6, but I know I need to do it soon. I’ve had reports that DualFeeds works fine in WordPress 2.6, but don’t know about the others.

There is one very small issue with most of my plugins. WordPress 2.6 may break the Check Version function in the Options page. This does not affect the core functionality of the plugin and is only likely to occur if you have moved the wp-content folder from its default location.

The only plugin that’s likely to have it’s core functionality affected by this issue is LocalCurrency, which uses an AJAX call similar to the one used by the Check Version function. If you use LocalCurrency, don’t move the wp-content folder from its default location.

This means I’ll need to re-release all my plugins with this fixed. I’ll take the opportunity to add a few new features that I’ve been promising for a while.

Also, as mentioned in my last post, I’m working on a new DoFollow plugin for WordPress, which will only reward the people who leave good comments with a DoFollow link. Progress is slow because of a lack of time.

I also have several plugins that I’ve written and use, but haven’t released because they need some polishing (ie an option page added, the code tidied up, etc). There are also several half written plugins, that I’ve never got back to. When I have time, I’ll plan to finish these off, but don’t hold your breath.

The problem is, the more plugins I release, the more work’s involved with maintaining and supporting them.

New WordPress Theme Coming

I’m also in the middle of creating a new theme that looks a lot better than the current one. I am a good web developer and I do have design skills, but this doesn’t come across looking at my blog. I plan to rectify this soon.

Here’s my current header (click to see full resolution):

Here’s a sneak preview of the new header (click to see full resolution):

Let me know what you think! That’s just the header. The whold theme will be revamped – in fact, I’m rewriting it from scratch.

Direct Advertising

With the new theme, I’ll probably start offering some direct advertising. Many other bloggers do this, but I haven’t taken the step yet.

I’ll nofollow the links, so as to stay in Google’s good books. I haven’t determined the pricing yet, but I’ll provide details in future.

Services

I’ve been turning down requests for custom WordPress plugins because I’ve been so busy. I’ll have to drop free model as there just isn’t time: I’m not going to stop working on my projects, unless I’m being paid for the work.

I’ll still be offering a Custom WordPress Plugin service, but I’ll have to be adequately compensated.

I’ll also offer a Custom WordPress Theme service in future, now that I have the taste for WordPress Theme development. This was always on the cards: it’s a natural extension for plugin developers with web design skills.

Final Thoughts

There’ll be a number of exciting things happening here in the coming months. I’m busy and I’m only going to get busier – but it’s all good!

I’m finally releasing version 1.01 of the IFrameWidgets WordPress plugin. The only change is that is has been re-written so that it will work with WordPress 2.5, which changed the way widgets worked.

If you are on WordPress 2.5 and above, use Version 1.01 of IFrameWidgets. If you are on an older version of WordPress, use version 1.0 of IFrameWidgets.

IFrameWidgets can stop slow loading JavaScript widgets from breaking your page. Widgets remain hidden until completely loaded, then appear in whole. If they don’t load, they won’t take up any space on your sidebar. If they load slowly, or hang, they won’t stop the rest of your page from loading.

Thanks To EagleHawk

A BIG Thanks to Eaglehawk from Flight of The Eaglehawk for alerting me to the problem and for beta testing the new version.

Where Do I Get It?

IFrameWidgets v1.01 can be downloaded from the IFrameWidgets plugin home page. Further information about the plugin and it’s features, including installation / upgrade instructions, is also available on the plugin home page.