David Risley dot com » Webmaster Crap

How To Have Random, Rotating Images In Your Blog Header

David — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 22:43:02 +0000

As part of my new header design for this blog, I am using a series of 12 header images which rotate randomly.

I’ve had a few people comment on that and wonder how I did it. It is actually VERY easy to do.

First, you create the images you want in your header. Make them all the same dimensions that way they can change without making your layout different.

When you name the images, give each of them a numeric file name. For example:

topphoto_1.jpg
topphoto_2.jpg
topphoto_3.jpg
and so on.

Make sure not to skip any numbers. It has to be a constant series of numbers.

Now, you modify your blog theme. In the section of your header.php file where you want this image to appear, use this instead:

.jpg” width=”123” height=”123” />

Now, the most important part of that is the PHP code inside of the filename. What you’re doing is telling PHP to give you a random number between 1 and X. Replace X with the number of images you have available. In my case, I have 12 header images, so I would use rand(1,12). Also, make sure you use the actual height and width of your images in the HTML.

That’s all there is to it, guys. No javascript necessary. No plug-ins, either.

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The Search For A Good Shopping Cart System

David — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 15:45:38 +0000

I have been spending some time looking into different hosted shopping carts. This is something every internet entrepreneur will need to do eventually.

I wouldn’t say that my evaluations are over, however I will discuss where I am now for the benefit of you guys. Plus, perhaps by writing this post, I’ll have some others with good experience with any of these carts chime in.

Why Hosted?

Certainly, there are a lot of decent cart solutions out there which I could host locally. In fact, I already own a license to X-Cart.

I’m at a point in my business, however, where I would rather pay somebody to deal with stuff for me than have to worry about it myself. For this reason, hosted solutions work best for me.

Plus, most shopping cart solutions which are self-hosted seem to be your classic catalog-style carts. This isn’t what I need. I tend to sell via sales pages, not catalogs.

Scoping Out Options

There are a lot of different solutions out there. There are equally as many opinions. It makes evaluating all the options pretty frustrating.

All of this is a move away from Clickbank, too. The last 2 products I’ve launched, I ran them through Clickbank. The problem is that Clickbank exerts too much control over me (price caps for one). Plus, they take an average of 8% of every order. I have had a merchant account for years. I use it already for my other website. For my 2010 plans, I need something far more robust than Clickbank – something I have control over.

The features I need most are:

Ability to integrate with Aweber
Ability to integrate with the software I wish to use. (Amember, Wishlist Member, etc.)
Ability to do upsells, downsells, 1-click
Built in affiliate program

The ones I looked closest at were:

Let me discuss my view on each of these…

1ShoppingCart

1ShoppingCart (often abbreviated 1SC) looks to be a good all-around system. The Pro account integrates email, affiliates, ecommerce all into a single package.

The ecommerce system seems pretty robust. The affiliate system, too, seems to be good. I read about some issues in the past with regard to the affiliate system, but all indications are that it seems to be pretty solid now. Their email system is pretty basic when compared to Aweber. Plus, their delivery rates are not up to Aweber. So, I’m really not all that interested in their email, however I can integrate it with Aweber (sorta).

One of the things I like about 1SC is the tremendous amount of social proof around it. A LOT of people use 1SC, which means I have a large pool of experience to draw from when I need it. This was a problem with some of the other carts.

Some of the biggest limitations I’ve found so far:

I can only specify one set of out-going emails for the entire cart. This means that notification emails of new orders are sent to certain email addresses. The problem is that it is this feature which is used to integrate with Aweber. The drawback is that all of my customers would need to be added to a single list in Aweber. That’s a problem seeing as I have different products to different markets.
No support for recurring payments via Paypal. I find this an oddity. Seems to me a simple Paypal IPN would get the job done here, but perhaps there’s something I don’t know.
There doesn’t appear to be any way to stack continuity programs as upsell offers.

On the plus side, it integrates with almost everything (seeing as 1SC is pretty popular).

InfusionSoft

I have not set up an account with Infusion. I have seen some fairly big players use Infusion. Plus, their company understands marketing pretty well.

Infusion is expensive. The account I would need runs $299/month. Now, I’m willing to pay that if the software rocks my world, but in reading reviews of Infusion, I find as many people complaining about it as I see who like it. In fact, it almost seems as if more people complain about it. A few have even recommended using 1SC integrated with something like Office Auto Pilot as an alternative to Infusion.

This could be due to it’s complexity. Either way, it wasn’t enough of a convincer to sign up. Perhaps some day I will change my mind.

Ultracart

Ultracart looks to be fantastic. It does pretty much everything 1ShoppingCart does and then some. It is also cheaper.

The problem with Ultracart (At least for me) was the lack of social proof and community around it. Not as many systems out there integrate with Ultracart out of the box. It isn’t bad, but 1SC has more social proof around it.

Also, when I asked some of my contacts who’ve used it about it, their reaction is best summed up as “powerful, but complicated”.

I also know that Ultracart does not integrate with Wishlist Member, something I do plan to use soon.

Nanacast

Nanacast, for me, is a bit of an enigma. It looks powerful as hell, but there is almost zero social proof surrounding it. On top of that, their website and sales page is simply atrocious. It has the appearance of being a small, 2-man show and that isn’t exactly a confidence booster.

On top of that, the lack of social proof means that Nanacast doesn’t really integrate with ANYTHING (in terms of membership sites). They do have their own Wordpress plug-in to integrate with Wordpress, but it doesn’t seem to integrate with anything else. Nanacast works best as an island where you host your content with them. This makes me nervous as I don’t want to be that dependent on any one company, much less one with such a seemingly small footprint.

If Amember integrated with Nanacast, I’d be sold. At least then, I could keep my content on my own server in my own control. Nanacast does have APIs, but then I’d have to hire my own programmer to integrate. Seriously, an Amember/Nanacast out-of-box integration would ROCK.

Aside from those issues, though, Nanacast looks VERY powerful. The different pricing strategies it supports are awesome and a definite leg up over the likes of 1SC. The only problem I have, again, is that it looks as if I’d be overly dependent on Nanacast for content delivery for a membership site (which happens to be what most of my products are now).

So, What Am I Doing?

For now, I have signed up with 1SC. Their system isn’t perfect, but it seems to be the best all-around option out there right now.

I’m not married to 1SC, though, and would be open to looking at other solutions if they look like they’d fill my needs.

If you have experience with any of these systems, I’d really love to hear from you.

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Fighting The Wordpress Dragons

David — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 20:15:10 +0000

What follows is a quick tale into the technical details of Wordpress that I’d rather not think about, but was forced to…

Over on PCMech, I have been having a cyclical and perplexing issue with server load. The end result was that PCMech disappeared from the Internet for a few minutes at a time, several times per day.

Extremely frustrating to say the least. Especially when you pay your web host about $700 per month to keep these sites online.

A few weeks ago, I started host shopping. I am with Pair Networks now, but I started talking with the guys at Rackspace. Both great companies. Rackspace is certainly more proficient with their marketing, but they also back it up. I’m not even a customer and I can tell that their “fanatical support” is indeed what it says. That said, Pair is no slouch either. Pair is always spot on with their email replies and they get the job done.

At the end of the day, I’ve got a business to run, however. As good as Pair is, if they can’t get it done for me, I switch. The prospect of moving all of my sites to Rackspace wasn’t exactly one I wanted to confront. At the last minute, fortunately Pair came through for me and offered to throw a lot more hardware in my direction. Essentially, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

As I had left it, Wordpress was still proving to be a beast, but we threw so much hardware at it that it was acceptable. Still, PCMech was slower than other sites.

Fast forward to this morning. PCMech is gone. Buh bye. Wordpress is delivering nothing but blank pages.

When I check out the cache, it looks like the problems started shortly after 4AM.

I was clueless. And, again, my host was pissing me off. I pay these guys so much money, and essentially I was getting fast responses and some hints about the problem, but no solutions. They told me, essentially, that they weren’t that familiar with Wordpress. This was surprising considering Wordpress is pretty much the most common blog platform on the net.

After wasting several hours on it, all while PCMech was offline, I was beginning to feel pretty damn helpless. I started thinking about my personal network of contacts.

Mark Jaquith came to mind. He seemed ideal. He lives local to me, we know each other, and he also happens to be one of the lead developers for Wordpress. So, I decide to invade his space, look him up on Skype and I interrupt his day.

In short, Mark saved my ass. He’s a good guy to know.

Come to find out, there are two problems at play here…

Wordpress Options Table

The Wordpress database has a wp_options table. By design, the Wordpress code queries pretty much every row from this table on each page view (specifically, the ones marked “autoload”).

Well, my options table had over 600 entries and was over 23MB in size!

Mark cleared out some bogus entries, shaving the table down considerably. I went in afterward and removed a bunch of crap from old plug-ins.

Seriously, plug-ins add a bunch of CRAP to your options table. When you deactivate the plug-in, that crap remains in there and is queried out of the database each page view. It is excess baggage. I had to go in and remove entries by hand.

This alone brought PCMech back from the dead. The consistent queries which were returning a result set of over 20+ MB was just killing the server, eating up all the memory, and causing Apache to restart cyclically.

Apache Process Size

This issue remains unsolved as of now, but I’m working on it.

Each Apache process is using up about 50MB of memory. That is insanely high. Wordpress itself, we have ascertained, is only using around 5.5 MB. I’m not loading excessive images from the server, and all videos are hosted offsite.

Still to look into is whether we’ve enabled a bunch of Apache modules that are being called up that I’m not even using. I’m also going to look through the code and see about thinning down the number of images.

Every image and every video (essentially, every single file) has to be served by Apache. Lesser is better.

Wordpress Is a Beast

Wordpress is very query-intensive and uses a lot of memory, especially when you have it loaded up with plug-ins. Of course, I am also using vBulletin on this server, and it uses a lot of database queries, too.

When you start subjecting it to high traffic, it can really take your server to its knees. Some other things I have done include:

Getting rid of all unessential plug-ins.
Installing an opcode cache (like APC or Eaccelerator)
Installing WP Super Cache.
Host databases on a separate server. This is the reason I actually have TWO servers with Pair Networks.

I’m going to continue to watch the server and watch that uptime.

I guess this is the kind of stuff you deal with as part of being a pro blogger.

Oh, and thanks again to Mark. You da man!

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Making Videos: What Happens After Filming?

David — Mon, 11 May 2009 15:00:20 +0000

I did a post about how to maximize your video quality. I also did a video showing the exact equipment I use to make videos. But, what happens after that? What happens once I get the footage over to my computer?

A reader, Chris Langston, submitted the following:

What I would like to know is after you have captured your video’s, how are you going about editing and then rendering the final product? I’m capturing with a Sanyo HD camera, then pop-the SD card into my computer, editing with Sony Vegas Movie Studio, rendering an .avi file and then re-rendering to *.flv format. This all takes a lot of time after the video has been shot. I was looking to streamline my process and wanted to see what you recommend and how you are doing things.

What happens after filming is very important. Once you get that footage over to the computer, then what?

Personally, I use a Mac. My process is this:

Import video directly into iMovie 09.
Drag footage into a new iMovie project and do a rough arrangement of the scenes.
Drag and drop the video intro to the beginning of the movie.
Put transitions in between the different scenes.
Put a title slate onto the beginning, right after the intro reel.
Export.

When putting the video onto public video sites, I’ll usually export using iMovie’s built-in settings which output an M4V file. I then upload the M4V directly via TubeMogul and all of the different video sites take care of converting to FLV automatically. For Youtube and Vimeo, I like to have HD quality so sometimes I will upload to those sites separately using a movie of 1280×720 dimensions.

When I host the video myself, I have to do my own FLV encoding. What I usually do is export to MOV. Then I use the FLV Encoder that comes with Adobe CS3 suite to re-encode the movie into FLV format. Imovie does have an option to export directly to FLV format as well, but I believe you need to have the Adobe Suite installed to have that option.

There’s really no super-fast way to do this, however. Imovie makes for some slick and fast video editing as long as you’re happy with the templates it provides. However, the process of exporting is pretty much the same regardless of which software you use.

What software do YOU use? Got any shortcuts you’d like to share? Please comment.

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Maximizing Your Online Video Quality [How To]

David — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:49:13 +0000

I routinely talk about how important doing videos is to your blog’s traffic and making sales. However, a common confusion is exactly how to make the video look as professional as possible.

Doug asked the following of me:

I have a question about adding videos to a blog. What have you found is the best for quality? I started with YouTube, but their quality is terrible. I joined Blip.tv and I just got Vimeo Plus, but I am wondering if there is still a better choice. I was thinking about trying ezs3.com with Amazon S3, which I see you said you recently signed up for. Have you tried it yet? I would love to know what you think.

I have done quite a bit of experimenting and trial and error with this very thing.

Why I Like Vimeo

As Doug correctly pointed out, the quality on Youtube isn’t that great at all. Now, you can make the quality better if you use HD video (more on that below), however it is precisely for this reason why I use Vimeo when I embed videos on this blog.

Like Doug, I have a Vimeo Plus account and one of the top perks to me is an increased weekly upload limit. What that means is that you can upload HD videos all week. The quality will be about as good as you can get from a streaming video.

Realize, however, that you should ALWAYS post your videos to Youtube. Youtube is the king of online video and where you’re going to get the most traction (in terms of views). So, even if you post to all the other video sites (recommended) and embed from a site like Vimeo, always make sure that you put your stuff on Youtube.

Using High-Def Video Online

Many of the video sites are now using HD. But, how do you use it?

Make sure you use a high-definition video camera.
Upload the video with 1280×720 dimensions (for widescreen).

If you upload your final movie with those dimensions, then the sites will encode the video as high definition. Realize that the movies will not necessarily show on screen at that size. They’ll actually be smaller, however when you take a larger film and shrink it the quality will be good.

I use the Flip Mino HD for quick and easy movies. It records in 720P high-def. When I do higher-end videos where I don’t need to be walking all over the place, I’ll use my Canon Vixia HF100, a true 1080P camcorder. 1080P is overkill for the web, however the lens quality is superior to the Flip. Plus, the HF100 has an external microphone jack – an absolute must if you don’t want your audio to sound noisy or distant. I use a lavaliere microphone which connects to my collar and plugs into the camera. I also have a shotgun microphone which connects to the camera.

Audio is very important for professional looking videos, so always make sure the camera you get has an external microphone jack and use it.

Using Amazon S3

I do use and recommend Amazon S3. Realize, however, that you will need to FLV encode your videos on your own when you host with S3.

As for quality, your videos will probably not be any better with Amazon S3 as it would be if you upload to Vimeo in HD. However, it does put you in more control. If you want to embed a full 1280×720 video from S3, you can. Do I recommend you embed something that large on a website? No. But, you could do it.

As for EZS3, they are a good service. I have not been using them for long, however it does make a few things easier. Namely, it has pre-built FLV players to embed your videos with and you can track the view stats of your videos. However, there are a few things I would like to note about using EZS3:

Their interface is a little clunky.
I recommend only using EZS3 for sales videos and things where you absolutely need to track the stats and don’t have long-term plans for the videos. I am currently setting up a new site with lots of video and I initially began using EZS3 players. Then, I realized that that would tie me to EZS3 for life and that I’d have to continue to pay them unless I go through this entire site and replace the tags. So, I elected to embed the videos internally using Viper Video Tags. I will continue to use EZS3 for landing pages.
You really don’t need EZS3 unless you want view stats. Otherwise, you can use the S3Fox plug-in for Firefox for free. You could also use a service like S3Stat for simple stats and it is only $2.00 per month with the “cheap bastard” plan (gotta love that).

Hope that helps, Doug (and anybody else).

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Creating a Custom Blog Homepage [Wordpress]

David — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 13:49:08 +0000

Wordpress is extremely customizable and that’s one of the beauties of it. When you are able to master customizing blog themes for Wordpress, you can turn the platform into almost anything.

The problem is that most people don’t know how to do it. They look at a blog theme and see nothing but cryptic HTML and PHP code. Sound familiar?

Last week, I was told about the confusions a person was having on creating a custom blog homepage (like what I have here on DavidRisley.com). They couldn’t find anything on the net to show them how to do it. He was trying to use a Wordpress page to do it. He tried using plug-ins. Nothing worked to create a dynamic homepage.

It is actually much easier than any of that. I’ll show you how.

Create a Custom Homepage File in Your WP Theme

If you view the template hierarchy for Wordpress, you’ll see the order for which it checks for files in your theme. In the image on that page, you’ll see home.php. It will check for this file and, if it doesn’t find it, it will default to your index.php file.

So, go into the folder where your theme is located. It will be in /wp-content/themes/[name of theme]/. You will see an index.php file there. Now, you might find a home.php file in there. THAT is your homepage template. If your theme doesn’t have a home.php file, just create one. Create a copy of your index.php file and simply save it as home.php. From there, the file will need to be modified.

I hope I haven’t lost you.

Essentially, any theme changes you make to the home.php file will only affect your blog’s homepage. So, within this file, we will make any changes to make your blog homepage look like you want it to look.

Showing a Feature Post

On the homepage of this blog, I show a single feature post for the day at the top. How did I do that?

I created a category called “Feature”. Whenever a post is assigned to this category, it is made into a feature. I also assign the post to whatever other categories are relevant.

Here is the code to output the feature:

have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); $do_not_duplicate = $post->ID; ?>

Today’s Feature Post

Read the rest of this entry »’); ?>

Now, the HTML in this and the layout of the theme tags you will need to edit to suit your own design. But, what it is doing is running a query to fetch a single post (the latest one) from the “feature” category. It then just runs the loop to display it. Also note that I am using the_content() to show the text of the post, and it stops wherever I use the “read more” break (which is part of the Wordpress editor). If I forgot to include that, it would show the entire post on the homepage and look like crap. If you don’t want to mess with this, you can just use the excerpt.

Showing the Latest Posts

Beneath the feature post, I show the latest posts down the left side of the homepage. I will leave it up to you to format this stuff and put it into a column layout, but this is how you show the latest posts:

    query_posts("cat=-259");
    while (have_posts()) : the_post();
    if( $post->ID == $do_not_duplicate ) continue; update_post_caches($posts); ?>

Read the rest of this entry »’); ?>

So, what’s going on here? First I’m running a query for all posts that are NOT in the category with the ID of 259. In my particular case, this is the Flip Tip videos category. Since I want to exclude those posts from that listing, I do so here. Then, I just run the loop again.

Now, you will also see that I have an IF statement in there which will exempt the post from displaying if the ID is $do_not_duplicate. This variable was defined with the feature post (see above) and the purpose of this is so that my daily feature post is not listed twice.

Showing The Videos

On my custom homepage, I am also listing the latest videos. Above, I exempted category #259. In this case, I want to exclusively list category 259. So, the query to start off the loop would be:

The only addition here is that I am limiting the list to only the latest 5 videos.

Feel Free To Cheat

I’m not going to be able to turn you into an expert Wordpress theme hacker in this post, however hopefully I’ve given you a good start.

Remember, often you can swipe code from other files in your theme. You will see “the loop” used in multiple Wordpress files. In my custom version, I’m simply duplicating the loop and starting it off with my own criteria and customizing the appearance.

You can also download free WP themes for the only purpose of looking at the code to see how they did things. Then, just copy it to your own theme. This is how we learn.

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Where Should You Host Your Blog’s Videos?

David — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 11:24:13 +0000

I have talked many times about how it can be a great idea for you to produce your own videos. It is really easy to do. However, once you have a nice, shiny video, how do you go about actually putting it on your blog?

Let’s look at your options.

Essentially, you have three viable options here:

Host your video on one of the many video sites (i.e. Youtube) and simply embed into your blog.
Host your video on your own server and embed onto your blog locally.
Host your video elsewhere, but a place where you have total control.

Third-Party Video Sites

Using sites like Youtube or Vimeo to host your online videos is the most popular way to go. It is easy to do plus it saves you the headache of the potential bandwidth demands of online video.

The drawback, however, is that video quality can be diminished. For example, if you upload a video to Youtube, very often you’re going to see the video quality drop significantly and that’s because they are trying to save space and bandwidth. When you upload a video to any of these sites, typically THEY do the encoding for you. It is convenient, but they pick the settings and your video can come out looking a little bit grainy.

That said, I generally recommend going this route for most bloggers simply because it is free and easy. If you don’t mind the quality loss, Youtube is a great option because that also means you expose your video to the substantial audience who surfs Youtube directly. If you choose to go with another site like Blip or Vimeo, I still suggest you also upload to Youtube.

Use a site like TubeMogul to upload to multiple video sites simultaneously.

Hosting Locally

So, what about encoding the video yourself and uploading it to your own server? You can do that, however it is a lot more work. You will have to do the encoding to Flash format on your own. Usually the quality will come out a lot better this way, though.

Bear in mind, though, that hosting large media files off your own server can be a significant load on your site. Chances are it is going to noticeably slow down your blog. This is why I don’t really recommend this. A much better alternative is…

Remote Video Hosting

You can pay for hosting which is separate from your web hosting, and the only purpose of this account is to host your large media files. One of the most popular ways to go here is Amazon S3. Amazon S3 is “cloud hosting” for file storage. Essentially, you are using the same server clusters as Amazon uses for their own site. The great thing is that it scales to your demands and you only pay for what you need. Storage and bandwidth is incredibly cheap as well.

Amazon S3 isn’t the most straight-forward thing in the world to use. You can’t tap into it with your typical FTP program. Instead, you need a secret key and an access key, both which you will get when you sign up. Then, you can use a Firefox plug-in called S3Fox to interface with your account. Alternatively, you can use a service like EZS3 (who I just signed up with).

Embedding Your Videos

If you use one of the third-party sites out there, you will be using their video player. They provide the embed codes and you just paste that into your Wordpress post and you’re good to go.

If you go the more do-it-yourself route, you need to find another way. Wordpress now has an FLV player built right into it. When doing your post, just hit the button for uploading a movie file. Alternatively, you could go with a plug-in like FLV Embed or Viper’s Video Quicktags. That Viper plug-in is particularly good and has a lot of configuration options.

You can use these embed options for videos hosted on Amazon S3 as well. If you go with a service like EZS3, however, you can use their players and you will even get video view stats (something you won’t have otherwise).

So, What Does Dave Recommend?

For quick videos where you just want maximum viewership and you don’t care to keep the video exclusive to your own site, I recommend Youtube or Vimeo. I see many sites use Blip and they’re good, too.

If quality is very important to you, or you want to keep the video exclusive to your own site, I recommend Amazon S3. Just keep in mind that you’ll need your own FLV encoder if you want to encode to Flash.

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Using Gravatars On Your Blog – Why And How

David — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 13:30:48 +0000

Blogs are simply awesome for building a community. There is innate two-way communication to you posting something and others offering their two cents by way of comments. That sense of community, though, is enhanced when you can SEE them.

Gravatars are “globally recognized avatars”. It is a little photo which represents the user which can be used across the Internet to represent that person. Gravatars are very common on blogs.

How To Get a Gravatar

If you do not have your own gravatar, go get one. You can do that at the official Gravatar website. It works based on your email address. So, essentially, you upload a photo and it is associated with your email. Wherever you have a profile that uses the same email address, that photo can be used to represent you.

Why Should You Use a Gravatar?

My recommendation is that you now only have gravatars display on your blog, but that you ensure you have your own.

From a branding perspective, having an avatar which is consistent across the web as representing you enhances your brand. Wherever people see that, they will associated it with you and your brand. I like to use a photo of myself. A picture says a thousand words, as they say, and I think people being able to see what you look like makes for a stronger connection than just an anonymous name.

If you are trying to build up a business brand, I recommend you use a logo of some sort for your gravatar. If you are trying to build your personal brand, you might want to use a photo.

From the blogger perspective, using gravatars enhances the sense of community. It turns comments into statement by real people. It enhances the sense of real community at the blog.

Integrating Gravatars on Your Blog

Gravatars haven’t always been trouble-free for bloggers. For a time, it was unreliable and bloggers would tend to remove them because the images wouldn’t even load properly. Then Automattic bought it (the same folks behind Wordpress) and they provided the necessary hardware support to make it dependable.

The fact that Automattic now owns it, though, means that Wordpress has gravatar support built-in. You simply need to enable it.

If you enable it and they do not appear, then it is likely because you are using a customized comment template for your theme that simply doesn’t include gravatar support. However, it is simple to add it. In your comments.php them file, just add the following template tag whereever you want the gravatar to appear:

echo get_avatar( $id_or_email, $size = ‘96′, $default = ‘’ );
?>

How do you use this in practice if you’re not a PHP nerd? Well, if you look at your comments.php file, you will probably see what is called a FOREACH loop. It will probably look like this:

Everything under that and up to the endforeach comment gets repeated. This is what shows all the comments on your blog post. So, inside that loop, add the following command:

This will feed the $comment variable into the get_avatar() function and you’re telling it to output 32×32 avatar images. You can change that number if you want large images. In your Wordpress control panel, you can dictate what the default image will be if the user doesn’t have a gravatar.

You will need to place HTML around this little line of code to make the gravatar merge with your site’s design.

So, that’s how you do it.

Do you use gravatars on your site?

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How To Configure OIO Publisher

David — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 12:02:24 +0000

I have highly recommended OIO Publisher to my readers in the past. It is a powerful ad management platform for Wordpress. It is so powerful, in fact, that some of my readers have expressed confusion on how to use it. Well, I’m here to help!

First of all, once you have downloaded OIO Publisher, you need to install it just as you would any other Wordpress plug-in. Upload it to the plug-ins folder, activate it and you’re good to go. But, then what?

OIO Publisher Settings

Click on the Settings option and you’re going to have several sub-sections to OIO. Enter the name of your site and your email address. Set your currency to whatever is appropriate. For the payment system, I used Paypal in which case you will enable the option and enter your Paypal email address.

For Advanced Settings, you will select whatever is appropriate. See, the idea behind OIO is that advertisers can actually upload their own ad and pay you automatically from your site. So, you’re specifying here the capabilities they have, such as whether they can upload images, purchase ads on specific posts, set up a subscription (in which case your sponsors will be auto-billed until they cancel), etc.

The Rewrite rules is important because this is the page which will act as your advertising catalog for your blog. I recommend you use your blog’s root URL and then something like “advertise”. So, enter “[blog url]/advertise”.

Save your settings. Then, you will need to copy the .htaccess rewrite code that OIO gives you and include it in your .htaccess file. Chances are you already have re-write code in your .htaccess file for the Wordpress permalinks. If so, just take the last line from the code OIO gives you (the “RewriteRule” command” and include it in your .htaccess file somewhere directly beneath the “RewriteEngine On” command.

Setting Up Ad Zones

OIO supports several different ad types, including text ads, banner ads, inline ads, ads specific to posts, and custom ads (which allow you to use OIO to charge for pretty much anything you want). The system has settings sub-sections for each ad type.

So, to set this up, you have to first look at your blog and decide where you want ads to show up. From there, you plan out your ad zones. For example, you might have an ad zone for your sidebar, another for the top header area, and another for your footer. If this is how you’re doing it, then you would have a total of 3 different banner ad zones.

Under “Banner Ads”, you tell OIO that you have 3 zones. Once you’ve done that, you’ll have links to configure settings for each zone. You specify the name of the zone, the price tag you want, the banner sizes, how many ads you want in each zone, etc.

The “Default Ad” is simply an ad to display if no paying customer is using the ad slot. You can specify any code you want in here, whether it be an affiliate banner, Adsense, or anything else.

Repeat the same setup process for each ad zone. You will see, too, that OIO gives you both PHP and Javascript code to include the banner zone into your blog theme. You can choose either version you want, but you will need to manually include the ad code into your blog theme so that the banners managed by OIO Publisher are actually displayed.

Text ads will be just that – text ads (with no images). You can set up as many text ad zones as you want. Inline ads will allow your customers to buy ads which are automatically inserted into your posts. The “Posts” ad type allows you to sell your own paid reviews via OIO (rather than go through a middle-man like ReviewMe).

The “Custom” ad type allows OIO to act as a payment system for anything you wish to sell on your blog. For example, you could use OIO to process payments for an information product that you sell.

Setting Up Your Templates

With your ad zones set up and the various zone ad codes included in your blog’s theme, you should now be seeing OIO-managed ads in your blog. The final step is to customize the template files that come with OIO so that the actual purchase pages managed by OIO look like they are part of your blog.

The OIO Publisher file structure has a sub-directory called “templates”. Within that folder, you will see sub-folders, each corresponding to a theme. See, OIO allows you to have several different themes to choose from.

Now, you can edit your theme files directly from OIO Publisher if you have granted write access to those files. In this case, you can edit your OIO theme from your control panel. Otherwise, you will need to modify the templates locally and upload via FTP.

The most important files to them theme are styles.css, header.tpl and footer.tpl. Most likely, you’ll want to modify these files so that they more or less match the theme of your main blog. You can use the default files as a basis for comparison, but overall you should be copying code from your main blog theme into the OIO theme that way the advertising section of your site looks appropriate to your blog.

The “Core Templates” are output templates for the core functions of OIO Publisher, including the ad types, the purchase pages, etc. You do not need to modify these templates for OIO to function properly. You should only modify them if you must to ensure the aesthetic appeal of your pages.

Linking To Your Purchase Page

Back in your OIO Settings, you configured the URL path to your OIO pages. In this post, I specified to make it use an “advertise” path off your main URL. In this case, just add “purchase.php” to the path to get your purchase page.

To illustrate, you can see the OIO-powered purchase page over at PCMech at this URL:

http://www.pcmech.com/advertise/purchase.php

So, just change your URL to suit your blog and you should see your OIO powered purchase page.

At this point, just set up a Wordpress page which acts as your sales page for advertising on your blog. Then, direct the “Buy” link into your purchase page where the advertiser can then purchase ads on your blog easily.

Hope That Helps

OIO Publisher is a powerful plug-in that can really help you generate good revenue from your blog. But, it is so powerful that it might be a bit hard to figure out. Hopefully this post helps you.

If you are not already an OIO user, there is a discount code available where you can save $10, but only if you order before February comes to an end! That discount code is” “Feb-10”.

Now, go make some money.

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Developing a Blog Backup Strategy – How?

David — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 13:04:18 +0000

Most bloggers put a lot of time and effort into their blogs. Now, wouldn’t it suck if something happened to it and you couldn’t recover? Oh yes, it would. The answer to this blogger’s doomsday scenario is a solid backup strategy.

Unfortunately, it seems as if most bloggers don’t really pay as much attention to this as they should. It is common for bloggers not to even think about it and they thus rely on their web host to do it for them. This is NOT dependable. Many web hosts don’t back up every day. Plus, the horrific data loss over at Magnolia shows that there is no guarantee even with that.

Another option is to manually back up your Wordpress database using PHPMyAdmin. Many web hosts have this already installed and you can access it using your account control panel with your web host. Even if your host doesn’t provide it, however, you can install it to your own server yourself. Using the Export function of PHPMyAdmin, you can create backups of your database and save it as a file.

Another common option is to use the WP-DB-Backup plug-in for Wordpress. This is certainly a LOT better than depending on your web host. You can also set it up to run on automatic using Wordpress’s own internal CRON.

Here’s How I Do It

I do not want to depend on my web host for backups. They do do it for me, but I’m not willing to trust my business to them blindly. And I don’t want to depend on a plug-in to back up Wordpress. What if something happens and Wordpress isn’t functioning properly? What if PHP stops executing on the server? In other words, a backup system that depends on Wordpress itself to back up Wordpress is just not a fail-safe solution.

So, I do a few things:

I keep a copy of all my blog files locally on my computer. I have a directory on my hard drive for each site I have.
I run a series of independent PHP scripts to back up each of my databases. These scripts were written by me and are run each night in the early morning hours via CRON. The scripts are designed to create an SQL backup of the database, timestamp it, and archive it in a server directory which is not accessible to the public. I keep 7 days of SQL backups on file for each database at all times, and then I archive weekly backups into another folder on the server so that I always have 2 weeks of backups there. Each SQL file is G-zipped to conserve space.
Using CRON on my Mac, and an Automator script which works with my FTP client (Transmit), my Mac logs into the server each and every night while I’m in bed. It will then download all backups to my Mac such that I always have ALL database backups on the server mirrored locally to my hard drive.
And, of course, being that I am running a Mac, everything is backed up to an external hard drive by Time Machine.

So, as you can see, I’m not dependent on Wordpress at all. And I have multiple levels of redundancy. The database backups are stored on my web server (which is backed up by most host as well), as well as on my Mac on TWO separate disk drives.

For me, geographic redundancy is important, too. If, God forbid, anything huge ever happened in the city where my web server is located and it took out my server, I’d still be able to put my sites back together with another hosting company because I have most everything stored locally.

How Can You Do It?

This is already a more technical post than I would usually write for this particular site, but I want to leave you with something actionable so that you can set up your own blog data backup plan.

Below is a link to a text file. This is the PHP script which I use to backup my databases. Save the text file and reset the file extension to .php. Edit the variables at the top of the script with your database access information, backup locations, and the prefix. Upload this script, then, to your server and set up a CRON job to execute it automatically every night.

Click here for the database backup script.

I will leave it to you and your web host to set up a CRON job. Most hosts have some web-based way to do this.

To get the local backups on your computer, you will need to look into the scripting capabilities of your FTP client. Most good FTP clients have some way of executing FTP commands via the command line.

Under Windows, you would probably need to use some VB Script and execute it via scheduled tasks. However, I’ll be blunt: Windows sucks when it comes to dependably executing anything on a schedule. I know – I used to try.

My automated scripts perform flawlessly on the Mac, however. I recommend Transmit as an FTP client because it has hooks which are built into Automator and it makes it very easy to set up a script to execute FTP commands. I then use Cronnix to set up a CRON job on my Mac to execute the Automator script.

However you ultimately go about it, be sure to take the time to put a blog backup strategy into place. Some day in the life of your blog, you will be glad that you did it.

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