Today I finished the last of my site switchovers to the new eBay affiliate system - what fun! If you’ve been using Commission Junction for your eBay affiliate links, then you already know that in March eBay announced they were moving it in house. Now, here in May, it’s either convert or see commissions go away - while links will continue to work for awhile longer, there will be no commissions paid out. The good...

The word ‘ping’ has a long history both off and on the Internet. In 1983, Mike Muus wrote a tool to check if other sites were up and accessible. Somewhat like a sonar ping in the submarine movies, a single packet was used to see if there was anything out there, so it’s very appropriate that he named it after the sonar ping. This small information packet is used to see if a site is...

If you’re new to PHP or programming languages in general, working with WordPress templates may seem quite a change from the usual HTML coding. Whereas HTML is quite flexible and free-form, PHP is less so - and it’s also less forgiving, so mistakes that HTML would ignore can stop a PHP-enabled page cold, with a (usually) cryptic error message. Although the subject of PHP is a large one, editing PHP can be much easier -...

What is .htaccess? It’s a modifier for Apache servers that provides many useful features - most notably for us, WordPress’ permalinks. Looking at a typical .htaccess file, you may see items like this: # BEGIN WordPress RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d RewriteRule ^.*$ - [S=40] # ...many, many more entries follow... # END WordPress This is part of the .htaccess file that WordPress uses to create permalinks, by using what are called URL...

I was reading a post on Andy Beard’s blog today, and was reminded of the ‘dofollow’ movement. What this involves is removing the default WordPress ‘nofollow’ tag from comments. A few years ago, search engines were getting inundated: spammers would leave comments on blogs, and these links would be counted like any other link towards a site’s rankings. However, unlike a link that everyone evaluates and approves (such as the decision you might make to...