Month: September 2012

Sep

2012

Content Replacement 48 Hour Sale

Offer Closed

***

Today at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST) I’m running an unplanned 48 hour sale for a plugin that I use ALL the time for just about everything called the Content Replacement plugin.

Yes it’s one of those you-must-have-this plugins.

There’s a (hopefully interesting) story behind this sale.

A few days ago I made a small mistake (I wasn’t even in a hurry) which caused me to change my plans for what I was doing then.

What happened was I ran a sale for Big Ed and my intention was to sell a limited number of copies as people had been asking how they could do what Big Ed did but they didn’t know about Big Ed at the time.

I like to run these sales as it’s a win-win for us both.

Anyway… My intention was to kick the sale off at my usual 6.00pm GMT, monitor the number of sales and then close it off. I figured the sale wouldn’t last even a couple of hours.

But. I had to go out.

No problem because my Content Replacement plugin would kick the sale off for me by adding in the buy button.

That’s what the Content Replacement button does. You add an HTML / PHP or javascript snippet, set a date and time for it to appear and disappear and that’s it.

The nice thing is you can stack lots of HTML snippets that come in and out to the schedule you set. It’s also a convenient way of adding PHP code to a page, or iframes to contain YouTube videos or whatever.

That’s how I run all my semi-automated sales including the one I messed up the other day for Big Ed and the one I’m running today for this plugin.

It’s easy and convenient.

So what was my mistake that caused me to change my plans?

I set the wrong date for the sale start. D’oh!

When I checked my stats, a load of people turned up after 6.00 to get Big Ed at the sale price and some left a message saying “Where’s the buy button?”

It was turned 7.30 before I sat down at my desk and spotted the button wasn’t live. It took me a few moments to fix the date but that left me with a dilemma.

What about all the people who turned up to buy, couldn’t get their copy, and planned to come back later to take a look? What if by the time they came back the sale was over?

I don’t know about you, but that would *really* tick me off if it happened to me.

I had no choice but to let the sale run for the full 48 hours, well a little longer actually. So I sold a lot more copies than I’d intended but nobody missed out.

I hope.

So if you want to have similar problems… 🙄 today’s your chance to get the Content Replacement plugin at just $10.

The sale will go live at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST) today, Saturday 22nd. I’ll drop you an email when it starts.

-Frank Haywood

Sep

2012

Spam Cracker – Re-use Your Spam

Offer Closed

***

One of the things that we all have to face every day is spam. This is my solution for removing it from all your blogs.

I’ve used various tools over the years to deal with spam and one of the good ones was Akismet and I’ll continue to use it even though it’s now a paid service. But I’ve always thought there had to be a better way of dealing with blog spam.

Logging into a site for the first time in a couple of months only to find 800 comments waiting to be reviewed isn’t my ideal way of spending my time, and what I’d usually do is just delete the lot. Page after page of them – it can take ages.

TIP: Did you know that if you’re on the comments page and click the “Screen Options” tab next to the “Help” at the top right, you see an option to control how many comments are displayed on that admin page? By default it’s set to a stupidly low 20, but you can change it to 999 and that saves a heck of a lot of time. You get the same option on the posts and pages admin too. No more time wasting clicking through loads of pages.

Anyway. One day I got to wondering if there was a way to take advantage of all that automated effort that someone was making and turn it instead to my own advantage.

Turn the tables so to speak.

I wanted a way of (for some blogs) being able to leave comment moderation OFF so that comments always got auto approved – it makes the blog look busier and people who see a busy blog leave real comments. But I didn’t want any of the potentially spammy backlinks in those comments to be displayed. Or to have spammy keywords showing either. I’m sure you know the ones I mean. 😉

And that’s when Spam Cracker was born.

What it does is when ANY comment comes into your blog, it temporarily replaces any links with your own taken from a list at random. It also replaces any spammy words with your own, again taken from a list at random.

That means that all the spam comments start pointing to links that you decide, and all the keywords are converted to words that are relevant to your blog. Yes it will mean that sentences sometimes won’t make any sense, but it’s far better than the alternative.

But the most important thing is it will seem that visitors are commenting and leaving behind on-topic keywords and links that point to your own sites.

(You could even use your OWN affiliate links for some of them and occasionally earn a commission from it.)

The search engines would then see plenty of commenting activity which they see as a positive social indicator for the amount of activity on your blog.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, social indicators of this nature seem to be the direction Google is going in its pursuit of giving people the best search results. The way I see it, lots of commenters using similar keywords on your posts is a good social indicator for the keywords being used.

You with me? 😉

We’ve also added an option to remove URLs in comments on posts older than n days. Typically my own spam comes in on older posts, so setting this value to say 14 days will stop any URLs from being added to those older posts. (Really that’s an option that should have been in core WP, so I thought it made sense to fix that.)

If a genuine person makes a comment (you can usually tell), then you can choose to manually approve the URLs in that one comment and they’ll revert back to the original links left by the commenter.

And finally, we added in a nice little idea we got from Akismet.

Each user URL (the one the commenter types in when leaving a comment) in your admin panel has a little x next to it so you can quickly just remove the URL if you want to.

Tomorrow at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST) I’m running an introductory 48 hour sale starting at just $10 for the first 50 copies.

The Spam Cracker plugin is one you should definitely consider having in your arsenal for use on all your sites.

I’ll drop you an email when the sale starts.

-Frank Haywood

Sep

2012

Sale LIVE – Multiple Streams Themes FOUR

Today and for the next 48 hours I’m running a sale for Multiple Streams Themes FOUR and the price is just $17 and includes the Ads Manager plugin for controlling placement of your ads.

It’s extremely nice and I like it so much I use it on the ShhCool.com site (without the header enabled for the moment).

Here’s a screenshot of the theme with everything included enabled, plus a link to a working demo.

Apart from the beautiful and well thought out design, the theme admin includes the following features.

o Custom headers
o 2 or 3 column selection
o Three top widgetised areas
o Custom backgrounds including colour picker
o Custom menus
o Four built in page templates
– Default template
– One column page, no sidebar
– One column page, no sidebar, no three top widgets
– No top widgets
o Theme options
o Box for analytics code
o Box for footer text
o Turn on and off featured/ad areas

The ad banners in the above screenshot are supplied with the theme as both blank no-text JPEGs and also as Photoshop PSDs.

You can get it now and for the next 48 hours for just $17 and then you won’t be able to get it again until the Multiple Streams Themes site goes officially live and then only at full price.

-Frank Haywood