Posts filed under 'Blogging'
Maybe you have noticed, after you’ve made the upgrade to Wordpress 2.3.2, that you don’t receive comments notifications anymore. At least, I’ve observed that on our younger blog, EzMoneyOn.Net, though I’ve set the option to receive notifications when someone leaves a comment. Funny thing is that on 134u.com I’ve received comment notifications, although I’ve upgraded to the same Wordpress version. The settings on both blogs were the same. Hmmm 
I’ve search on Goole for this issue and I’ve found an article explaining that this seems to be a Wordpress bug.
The solution is very simple and consist in a little modification to the file pluggable.php, located in wp-includes folder.
You’ll have to comment the line 228:
$phpmailer->Sender = apply_filters( ‘wp_mail_from’, $from_email );
So it should look like this:
//$phpmailer->Sender = apply_filters( ‘wp_mail_from’, $from_email );
After I’ve made the change, I’ve uploaded the file and it works. Just that the “from” from the notification looks strange. It didn’t show the person who left the comments, but an email address from BlueHost (EzMoneyOn.Net is hosted on BlueHost).
So I’ve commented the line 227 either:
$phpmailer->From = apply_filters( ‘wp_mail_from’, $from_email );
Which finally look like this:
//$phpmailer->From = apply_filters( ‘wp_mail_from’, $from_email );
Now, my comment notifications on EzMoneyOn.Net work fine. Just to notice that on 134u.com I haven’t made any changes on this file, but the comment notifications works fine either.
Note: Even if WordPress has released 2.3.3 version, it seems that this issue wasn’t fix.
February 13th, 2008
I was a little lazy/busy this week, so for the today’s “13 Great Articles” I’ve choosed the carnival’s format. I hope you don’t mind.
1. 11 Ways to Gain Exposure as a Web Designer – by Steven Snell, saying, “As a web designer you may be faced with the challenge of getting your work and your abilities in front of others. If this is the case, here is a list of 11 different things you can do to get noticed.”
2. Think Unoriginal, Think Blogging – by Mohsin, saying, “Since bloggers are the individuals who take the role of authority and leadership, you’d think they are highly unique people, influencing the minds of their readers in their own inimitable ways. But the reality is very different. Bloggers have turned into a noisy crowd, where no voice can be distinguished from the other one.”
3. Alternative Search Engines to Google – by Sueblimely, saying, “Will there be any alternative search engine to really challenge Google’s stranglehold in the near future? Will spam sites and parked domains continue to rate highly? Will we be able to search and actually easily find exactly what we are looking for? Will we be able to access a good range of valuable information on a topic without finding only those sites who have been successful in keyword and search engine optimization techniques?”
4. Automatic keyword inserting affiliate plugin for Wordpress – by Patrick Altoft, saying, “A new plugin for Wordpress that allows you to monetize your long tail traffic better than ever before. The plugin works by taking the keyword that a visitor used to find your site in any major search engine and turns it into an affiliate link.”
5. Spammers use Top Commentators vulnerability to hijack top list – by Andy Bailey, saying, “It seems that the Top Commentators plugin remembers the last URL used for a commentator and displays that as an anchor for their name,(it used to use the most used url, don’t know why they changed it) even after deleting and spaminating the spammers url and ip into the blacklist they still showed on the displayed list so I have decided to remove the Top Commentators plugin for now.”
6. 7 Effective Ways to Start Blogging – by nimrodjo, saying, “People have different thoughts that want to express. Mostly, they cannot show it because of many reasons. Most people just keep their thoughts inside them and never speak it out. One way of expressing these thoughts out of them is through writing. Writing is the usual outlet of those people that are afraid to show or express their thoughts through their mouth or through their gestures.”
7. Niche Blogging: Limit Visitor Choices? – by Frank Carr, saying, “Here’s a little experiment that I’ve been trying on some niche blogs I recently created. The idea is to narrow visitor choice on the page down to the point that an Adsense block or an affiliate offer are the most logical exit points aside from the back button. In this article I’ll go over how I’m setting this up and some of the reasoning behind it.”
8. What to Post? When to Post it? – by Jay, saying, “Do you always have ideas running through your head, day in and day out and constantly writing like there’s no tomorrow? Now you have so many articles, how should you organize them? When should you post them?”
9. Affiliate Marketing Guide: What Are Conversions And How Can I Get Some – by Simonne, saying, “If following our “online money makers” article you joined some affiliate networks, most probably you have encountered terms like “conversions” and “impressions”. Are they clear to you, or you got a bit confused?”
10. The Human Side of Photography – 4 Tips for Natural Looking Portraits – by Natalie Norton, saying, “Here’s 4 tips on how I work toward those beautiful, natural, genuine portraits that make our hearts sing, end up framed on our walls, and/or sell like crazy post production.”
11. How to Determine the Effectiveness of Your Internal Link Structure – by Aaron Wall, saying, “How do I determine how I am best utilizing my PageRank? How do I know if my navigation is successful?”
12. Are You Excluding Beginners From Your Blog? – by TheWild1, saying, “There are very simple and perhaps even beneficial methods to make your blog accessible to all levels of readers. To clarify the methods, I will use my finance site as an example.”
13. 5 Reasons to Push Through Fear – by Andrew, saying, “Lack of fear does not equal stupidity. There are of course good reasons why we feel fear. Fear is a protection mechanism to help us survive. For example it’s great that you might feel a bit of fear crossing a busy intersection. This fear keeps your senses alert. What I’m recommending is taking calculated risks.”
February 10th, 2008
WordPress 2.3.3 is an urgent security release. There was founded a flaw in the XML-RPC implementation (a specially crafted request would allow any valid user to edit posts of any other user on that blog). In addition, Wordpress 2.3.3 fixes a few minor bugs as well. Now, you can download the entire new version, or you can download the fixed version of xmlrpc.php and copy it over your existing xmlrpc.php.
You should know that there is also a vulnerability in the WP-Forum plugin that is being actively exploited right now. If you are using this plugin, the recommendation is to remove it until an update is available.
February 5th, 2008
Maybe you have seen the Entrecard widget on many blogs and you may have wondered what this is? Well, Entrecard is the new method to get free traffic to your blog by advertising your 125×125 ad for free on other blogs.
I have joined Entrecard about 2 weeks ago, and I must give some credits for that to Antibarbie, because I’ve joined after her comment on my article Free traffic requires hard work.
How Entrecard works?
1. In order to join Entrecard, your blog must be in English and it should be of reasonable quality, i.e. not spam, pornography or highly offensive.
2. When you join Entrecard you can upload your own personalized 125×125 ad, or you can choose from a few Entrecard ads, which are quiet pretty:
3. Once you have create your account you can start to earn credits. What are these credits and how you can earn them?
Credits are the currency of the Entrecard network. You pay with Entrecard credits instead of real money to advertise your Entrecard on other people’s widgets. Earning credits is very easy. You will earn 1 credit every time you drop your card for someone else (you can find blogs with Entrecard widget by going to Campaign tab where you can find them ordered by categories, by most popular, most recent, most recommended – see the image below). You will earn 1 credit every time someone else drops their card for you. You will earn credits every time someone advertises on your widget.
4. The image below is how your Entrecard dashboard will looks like. You can see what blog is advertising on your widget, what blog has left it’s entrecard, who wants to advertise on your widget. There are also advanced 3D statistics of traffic from ad campaigns and from Entrecard site, as well as stats for cards given and received.
5. When you choose to advertise on someone’s blog, your ad will be displayed for 24 hours, without any ad in rotation. You are able to see on your Dashboard on what blog is your ad running so if you receive more visits from a blog, you can advertise on that blog again.
For more help on how to use Entrecard you can read the Help section or Entrecard’s forums.
My traffic from Entrecard
My stats on Google Analytics displays to kind of referring site: entrecard.com (displays the visits you receive from entrecard.com – people who drops card on your blog) and entrecard.s3.amazonaws.com (visits from blogs where your ad is displaying). I can see these numbers in my Entrecard Dashboard, too.
In two weeks, I received 417 visits from people who drop their cards to my blog and 400 visits from ads I placed on other blog. That means about 800 visits in two weeks, for about 15 minutes/day of work. Isn’t that something?
2 tips for placing your ad
1. When you choose blogs where you want to advertise on, try to choose those that have the Entrecard widget displayed on the first visible screen, for their visitors to see you better. If the widget is displayed on the bottom of the page, your chance to be seen is lower.
2. Try to place your ad on those blogs who have a good Alexa Rank (a good traffic). I have Alexa Toolbar installed and I follow pretty easy the blog’s Alexa Rank. I choose to advertise on blogs with an Alexa Rank up to 5-600,000.
I have to admit that I have advertised also on blogs with a low Alexa Rank, but with Entrecard widget placed on the first visible screen.
My advice
If your blog is new, just launched or you have low traffic, Entrecard is a good way to drive traffic to your blog and to get known. You don’t have to work too hard for this and you can advertise on high traffic blogs without spending any money. How cool is that?
Entrecard on the blogosphere
You can find out more about Entrecard, by reading some interesting articles on blogosphere:
1. Interview with Entrecard’s Graham Langdon founder by Darren Rowse on Problogger.net.
2. 8 steps to becoming an Entrecard powerhouse on MastersOfSEO.com
3. Entrecard Economy Weaknesses on BruceHopkins.net
4. Entrecard Is Winning Over Blogrush on BloggingMix.com
5. Reasons you Could be Failing in Entrecard on Wiflba.com
January 14th, 2008
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