Paginate Links in WordPress Link Manager

Posted on March 16, 2011

Links are not a first-class citizens in WordPress

In developing the a website for professional genealogists, I was tasked with creating link directory functionality in WordPress. I didn’t want to install some big plugins; I wanted to use the Links Manager that’s built in to every WP install out of the box. There were two problems, however:

  1. Link categories are not hierarchical, and;
  2. There is no pagination in the Links Manager: all links are displayed on one page by default.

My client’s website will have over 20,000 links; having them all on one page was simply not an option.

I didn’t want to create a new Post Type or Taxonomy; Links are already the right tool for the job. I moved forward creating the custom solution, and am sharing the results of that development here. The result of the project was a successful deployment of a crazy amount of links (see an example on their Iowa genealogy resources page). Continue reading →

Posted in Code, WordPress | Tagged , , , , | 10 Comments

Export Bit.ly Link Data as CSV

Posted on March 11, 2011

Finally, a way to download Bit.ly link data as a CSV.

Bitly Download CSV

Would you care to download a CSV of your Bit.ly links? WINNING!

Download the plugin from WordPress.org

Bit.ly is one of the most popular link shortening services, and rightly so: it is stable, easy to use, and has pretty looking statistics. One thing Bit.ly does not do is export data. There is simple no other Bit.ly exporter out there.

The Bit.ly Exporter plugin allows you to export up to three years of daily click data for your links. This allows you to analyse click data like you always wanted to! All you need is WordPress. Continue reading →

Posted in Plugins | Tagged , , , , , | 12 Comments

Google Instant Scraper – The Best Tool for Google Instant SEO

Posted on February 8, 2011

Optimize your site, find niche keywords

Introducing: Google Instant Scraper, a powerful free tool for niche marketing and keyword research. Find high-traffic, relevant long-tail keywords in seconds.

How the Google Instant Scraper works:

  1. Enter a “seed” keyword (or multiple keywords separated by commas) and choose how many levels deep you would like to scrape;
  2. The Scraper gets results from Google Instant for that keyword. These are level 1 keywords.
  3. For each level 1 keyword, the Scraper gathers results from step #1 and adds them to the list. These are level 2 keywords.
  4. Repeat #2 and #3 for levels 3 and 4 keywords
  5. The list is sorted by the # of queries, and the excluded keywords are removed from the list

In this way, the Instant Scraper builds powerful, targeted keyword lists in seconds…for free.

Continue reading →

Posted in Affiliate Marketing, SEO | Tagged , , , , , , | 14 Comments

Hierarchical Link Categories for WordPress

Posted on January 25, 2011

Download the plugin on WordPress.org

If you’ve ever tried to use WordPress’ built-in bookmarks / links manager, you know that its limits can be frustrating. One of the biggest issues I’ve encountered is that the link categories are not hierarchical.

Let’s say you have a tech blog and you link to a lot of pages about TV’s. You may want to categorize the links under TV > Plasma or TV > LCD. With the existing system, you cannot.

Enter the Hierarchical Link Categories plugin

Continue reading →

Posted in Plugins, Uncategorized, WordPress | Tagged , , , , | 21 Comments

Gravity Forms Shortcode – A Detailed Explanation

Posted on January 18, 2011

This post is about Gravity Forms, a WordPress contact form plugin.

I know about Gravity Forms…but what are shortcodes?

Think of shortcodes as a placeholder for where other content will be displayed: instead of “Insert a Gravity Forms form here,” we use the gravityform shortcode. Learn more about shortcodes on WordPress.org.

The Gravity Forms shortcode has five pieces:

[gravityform id=# name=TEXT title=boolean description=boolean ajax=boolean]

  1. id (required) – The ID of the form, as displayed on the Gravity Forms Edit Forms page in the Id column
  2. name (required) - The name of the form.
  3. title – Show the title to users? Default is true; set to “false” to disable
  4. description – Show the form’s description to users? Default is true; set to “false” to disable.
  5. ajax – Submit the form without refreshing? Default is false; set to “true” to enable.

Gravity Forms Shortcode Examples:

[gravityform id=1 name=Example Form title=false description=false ajax=true]
Will result in Form #1 being displayed without a title or description, with no-refresh entry submission. Continue reading →

Posted in Tutorial, WordPress | Tagged , , , , | 12 Comments

Google Rewrites Your Search Result Titles for Relevance

Posted on January 7, 2011

Google is changing your titles for you…whether they’re “optimized” or not!

Google is overruling your title tags when they determine that your content headlines are more relevant.

Previously, I had only seen this behavior when there were not well-structured title tags, keyword-stuffed title tags or no title tags at all. This has been well documented and discussed. This is the first time that I have noticed Google taking a more aggressive stance in rewriting title tags that have been well crafted. Continue reading →

Posted in Google, SEO | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Enable PDF Uploads in CubeCart 4

Posted on January 6, 2011

No swimming, no file uploads in CubeCart either!The CubeCart file and image uploader in the product editor only allows for a small set of file types: jpg, gif, jpeg, png, swf, fla, jpg, gif, jpeg, png, avi, mpg, and mpeg. If you want to upload a PDF in CubeCart, you will have to manually FTP it into the uploads folder, and even then the file browser won’t show you PDFs. If you try to upload PDFs, you’ll get the following alert: “Invalid file type.”  Well here’s how to fix that. Continue reading →

Posted in Tutorial, Web Development | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Want some valuable .gov links? Get a FDA warning letter!

Posted on December 27, 2010

I recently discovered that FDA Warnings have been unwittingly adding value to the very websites and products they are trying to warn about. What does this mean in the context of Google’s new negative review algorithm?

Google has been working on de-valuing bad reviews…

There has been lots of press over the NY Times article exposing an ability to get ranked through negative press online. Google has since updated their search algorithm to take into account the reputation of the company being reviewed. Now, in theory, Google will no longer add value reviews if the reviews are extremely negative:

…in the last few days we developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience. The algorithm we incorporated into our search rankings represents an initial solution to this issue, and Google users are now getting a better experience as a result.
Official Google Blog

The key here is that Google’s focus is on user experience; they want to provide the best search results so that users are satisfied with Google’s search result ranking system.

Continue reading →

Posted in SEO | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Shopify Importer – Import Shopify Products into WordPress

Posted on December 2, 2010

Download the plugin from WordPress.org

Shopify is a great hosted eCommerce provider. WordPress is the best blogging platform.

I first learned about Shopify in 2007, and was very interested in their service: they take care of every aspect of an eCommerce shop, and you pay them monthly plus a little cut of your sales.

  • Themes: Shopify has a great theme generator package that uses Ruby on Rails and it also has a theme store with tons of beautiful, standards-compliant themes.
  • Apps: The Shopify App Store features free and paid applications that integrate using the Shopify API.
  • Hosting: Shopify uses Rackspace and Akamai for hosting and as a CDN, respectively. Security, hosting, etc.
  • …and tons of other features

Shopify Blog FunctionalityI am still impressed with Shopify, but when I logged in recently to my Shopify account, I saw that Shopify’s “blogging” functionality is weak. Very weak. When I saw that there was an app to import a WordPress blog into Shopify, I laughed, and went ahead creating a Shopify importer for WordPress. Continue reading →

Posted in Plugins, WordPress | Tagged , , , | 18 Comments