Only Network

Keep an eye on WP Auctions

2009-07-11T22:44:57Z

: Image by Zacky Ma via Flickr

@hyder and I have been putting a ton of work into our flagship WordPress auction: WP Auctions. If you’ve never come across it, it’s a plugin that lets you auction items right off your blog. Anyway, one of the big issues we had was that I had used Prototype as the Javascript library for the popup and for the AJAX routines. Now Prototype is all great and that, but we had a major issue whenever someone tried using it with a plugin that used jQuery (or Mootools, one of its derivatives).

Well, I’m pleased to report that I’ve rewritten the popup to work in jQuery now. Not only that, jQuery has a method to interoperate with other libraries, so I’ve made sure that the plugin will now work regardless of what’s living around it. So if one of the moving companies New York wanted to use the plugin to auction off their services and they used Prototype or Dojo or some other library? Well, it would work without any problems. Cool huh?

HTTP Header Checker

2009-07-04T23:23:10Z

Are you sure that browsers and search engines are seeing your site they way you expect them to? Well, there are things under the covers that aren’t visible to the naked eye and HTTP headers are one of these. Conveniently, there’s a Header Checker online that lets you see what’s going on. So, let’s say we have a website that sells diet pills. Here’s the result:

Fetching www.slimmingpillsreview.com …
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 04 Jul 2009 23:21:06 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.10
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.9
X-Pingback: http://www.slimmingpillsreview.com/xmlrpc.php
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

This tells me there are no redirects on the page (which can throw search engines off); the sute runs on Apache with PHP 5 available and there’s a Pingback port available for the site. Cool huh?

Check out the header checker.

What’s the Page Rank?

2009-07-04T23:13:56Z

Here’s an interesting tool. It lets you type in a keyword and examine the Google resultset for that particular keyword. The interesting this is that it displays the results together with the Page Rank of each of those pages. So, for example, if you search for acne treatments, you get a result like this:

It can be quite useful to see what Google is going with your keywords and how Page Rank is (or isn’t) affecting the SERP for your site.

Link Popularity Check

2009-07-04T21:34:59Z

So, how popular really is your website? Well, you can’t really find out in real terms, but you can find out how popular it is on search engines. This is where the Link Popularity Tool down at Marketleap comes into play. You can specify your website and which category it falls under. So, if your website is about insurance rates for example, you can benchmark it against other “Money sites”. It will then produce a report showing how your website ranks against others in the same category. Also, if there’s a particular site (or two) you want to check how your rank against, you can specify them in the initial form and it will rank those sites alongside yours.

Nifty I thought. Check it out

Are you a stats hound?

2009-07-03T22:15:38Z

Are you the sort of person who like looking at stats? You pop back to your website every few minutes to see how many new people have hit your website. Well, there are quite a few stats packages out there that will help you do this; but there are more places you can get statistics from. One such place is the Domain Stats Tool which gives you some salient details about your site.

For example, let’s say you’re running a website that sells bathroom safety products. Just put your domain name in that website and it will come back with the number of backlinks you have, how old your domain is and how pages are indexed by which search engine. Cool huh?

Find more keywords: Ontology Finder

2009-07-03T20:29:22Z

Are you looking for more keywords for your website? Well all know that search engines love keywords and use them to figure our what the context of your website is about. Well, instead of repeating the same keywords over and over again, you can also use words that have the same meaning; synonyms and you can do this using the Ontology Finder.

So, let’s say for example, you want to optimise the keywords: sleep number bed. If you feed them into the engine, it comes back with the following suggestions:

sleep (10 related words found)
sleep
sleeping
comfort
insomnia
sleepy
sleeper
sleeps
sleeper’s
sleep’s
sleepy’s

number (0 related words found)

bed (4 related words found)
bed
beds
bedding
bedding’s

I thought that was pretty interesting. So go ahead and check it out

Analyze your search engine results visually

2009-07-03T18:57:55Z

Here’s an interesting site I came across. It’s called Thumbshots Ranking and allows you to compare results from different search engines against one another. So, for example if you’re focusing on the keyword mesothelioma, just enter it in Thumbshots Ranking and you’ll be able to see what the results of the different search engines look like. It picks out pages that appear in one search engine and matches them to show you how the same page appears in a different engine.

You can also designate your website so that the result from that site is highlighted. This helps you match what’s happening in one search engine against the other. Pretty cool I thought. Check it out.

The Ballet Shop – the first few days

2009-06-13T23:18:29Z

It’s been great to watch The Ballet Shop start to blossom using Magento as it’s new software. I’m more and more impressed by this e-commerce package every day I use it. Not only is the feature set outstanding, but there’s a vibrant community pushing it forward, developing add ons for it and participating in the forums. It’s not tied to a particular range, you can use it to sell services as well as products like loose diamonds and other physical goods. It’s more geared towards the physical goods side though, and includes modules for shipping, invoicing and all the other bits that you would expect from the back-end of an online store.

Well, one thing is for sure. If I ever have to build an e-commerce site again in the future, Magento will be my product of choice!

WordPress 2.8

2009-06-13T22:12:45Z

I’ve just upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.8 with all it’s juicy goodness. It’s been relatively painless rolling it out across my different blogs, but there have been a handful of plugins that made the upgrade less than painless. I managed to fix any issues I had quite quickly, but I have heard of people having the occasional show stopper that needed plugins adjusted or even disabled to get their blogs up and running again.

All in all, I have found WordPress a pretty good platform to be running things on, and I particularly like the versatility it offers. I’ve used it for various websites and see it used on many more, whether blogs related to dancing or dedicated to diet supplements or even saving the world! The versatility, availability of different themes and different plugins lends itself pretty well to allowing you to create whatever type of site you like. But if you want to use WordPress as a CMS, check out this post first: Using WordPress as a CMS

One Step closer to WP Auctions v3.0

2009-06-09T20:36:07Z

I took some time tonight to put some effort into the next iteration of WP Auctions, a plugin for WordPress that lets people auction anything they like right off their blog. Anyway, we’ve been working on some updates to it and today I finished a new version of the upload routines that lets you upload images into your blog’s file system. The previous version used ImageShack to host the images, but like this you have full control. I think I might make it an option whether to use ImageShack or not.

It’s been interesting working on this plugin, because we’ve had lots of feedback from people using it. We’ve seen people use it to auction paintings, jewellery and pretty much everything. From personal blogs to people down in Westgate, we seem to have quite a bit of traction, which is great news. Hopefully we’ll have the new version out soon .. watch this space!