Devblog

After finally getting all the logins fixed as mentioned in the previous post, it turned out that now two of my four blogs would not allow us to post to them (ironically this one that I posted to saying I’d fixed everything did!). Whenever we clicked on Save or Publish all that would happen is that we’d get dumped to the homepage. It would however save a copy in the Drafts folder. Sensing that this was a PHP issue and not a MySQL issue, and that there may be weeks of tinkering and fixing in my future, I decided that a Wordpress upgrade might be the best way to fix it.

I went and got the latest Wordpress 2.8 and uploaded the files to my server in the folder for the first blog. I ran the upgrade script and everything seemed fine. I was greated with the new styled login page and then got to the dashboard without a hickup. I then found my post in the Drafts folder, hit publish and it informed me that it had been published – nice!

However, when I went to the site to view the post, all I got was the Blank Screen of Death as it’s known. I bit of tinkering showed me that the PHP files were working fine – it just didn’t want to output anything. After a bit of playing around in the admin bit I finally clicked on the Themes and was presented with a message saying my theme was broken.

I loaded up the default theme and now everything works fine! Now I can just tinker with the new version and then find a theme that isn’t so boring…

[Note: I've since changed the theme so no offence to the person who designed this one]

We tried to logon to some of our Wordpress blogs yesterday and even though we hadn’t changed anything at all, whenever we logged in it just sent us back to the login page with no error messages at all. After some checking I was pretty sure that none of the passwords or anything had been changed.

Much Googling later seemed to suggest that people were having the same problem after an upgrade to 2.6 but we were still on 2.1. There were suggestions that the problem could be caused by a plugin incompatability so I thought I’d try disabling them to see if it helped. Since I couldn’t login all I did was FTP to my server, browse to the plugin directory and rename the entire thing to plugins2.

This let me login without a problem so I recreated the plugins folder and copied them back one at a time to see which ones weren’t working. I repeated this for them all and now everything is fine

There’s a number of reasons for having a blog:

• Something to pass the time
• Generate extra pages and hopefully PageRank for business and revenue generating websites
• Generating direct revenue from Google AdSense or similar
• Feeding the ego by getting onto page 1 of the SERPs for your name etc

Generally I use my blogs for all these reasons and as for the last one I’m doing OK, being top for “Devblog” and my nickname “Wellsy”. As for my actual name, “Andy Wells”, I’ve got a bit of competition out there as there’s a rock band and a mayor in the US both with the same name. I’m starting to make progress though and have made it up to number 4 on Google (even above Wikipedia).

Yay me!

Although I like my job, the problem with being salaried staff is that no matter how hard you work or how ever much overtime you do, the only way to get more cash in your pocket is by getting a pay rise (hint, hint boss).

Because I like money I’ve been setting up a few sites and blogs with ads on to try and get some extra cash. So far I’m really happy with the way Google AdSense is performing on the various blogs and other sites they are on.

I did want to create some articles on a particular site called Opportunity Club and then put some specific ads with the content. I headed over to Tradedoubler and found the various programmes I needed and applied for them.

Every single one of them came back “Denied”. Now I can see why various companies might not want to approve this site, even though it is trying to make them more money directly. The problem I’ve got with Tradedoubler and the way they do things is that it’s not just that domain I’ve had problems with.

I’ve also been refused for numerous programmes for the Medicology site which is surprising since it’s a well designed, corporate site with high PR and traffic.

I’ve also been refused for various computing and technology programmes for this site. What the hell do they want? “XYZ Computers are great!” in a H1 tag on your homepage with the banner underneath? It’s stupid.

Now I realise that some of this isn’t Tradedoublers fault, but there’s other things that annoy them about me:

• The half a dozen “newsletters” they seem to send me every day
• The absolute uselessness of their website and reporting tools
• The fact that their ads either don’t work or slow your site down so that you loose visitors
• Some of the bizarre rules and restrictions they have

Well, I’ve decided to give Commission Junction a try for a while since they seem to be approving my requests to join programmes and I’ll obviously be sticking with AdSense.

I’ll probably update this in 3 or 4 months when I get a feel of what CJ are like.

Here’s a quick guide to Google AdSense to your Wordpress blog. I’ve tried to keep it as simple as possible for the novice user but I’ve made a few assumptions:

• You have a Wordpress blog and know how to upload files to your webspace
• You’ve already signed up for a Google AdSense account (if not, click on the banner on the right)
• You won’t moan at me if you accidentally break something!

Ok, First go to your AdSense account and log in. Click on “AdSense Setup” and then “AdSense for Content”. Follow the guide to create your AdSense code (if you need help at any point, look at Google’s support pages). I’m going to show you how to add the adverts in the “Sidebar” (the strip on the right) so I recommend choosing either a Skyscraper or Vertical Banner.

Once you have you code leave it open in your browser and go to where you’re keeping your wordpress files on you PC. You’ll need to browse through the folders to:

wp-content\themes\default\

Open the file you’ll find in there called sidebar.php in a text editor (such as Notepad). All you have to do is paste your code in there. I recommend putting it at the bottom (just before the </div>) to put the ads below your other links.

Now just save the file and upload it to your webspace. Go have a look at your site and you should now have your ads on there!

If you can’t get it working, leave a comment and I’ll try and help when I get the chance.

In the past I’ve usually taken projects and sat down with the MD to spec them up and finally sat down to write the code. This was the approach for pretty much every website or program I’ve done (including the software this blog used to be run on) as it gives us much greater control over the visual characteristics and the features of the stuff we produce. Another reason is that some of the sites we’ve done have been suites of sites, such as Find Locally which just aren’t compatible with existing bits of software and need to be custom from stage 1.

Recently though, we’ve been working on projects that lend themselves quite well to being run on open source solutions. I therefore decided to give it a go and set up one of our retail sites, Erogenicity, to run off OScommerce and then see how difficult it would be to modify it to our unique requirements. As it turned out, it was a lot easier than I thought it would be so I decided to take the plunge and reduce maintenance time on some of our existing projects (such as running all our blogs on Wordpress), as well as reducing development time on new stuff.

So far there haven’t been any problems so from now on I’ll be checking for any open source solutions I can utilise before sitting down to weeks of coding. I’ll also be looking for any missing features so I could possibly write an extension/contribution and give something back to the community!

I currently look after several thousand websites but there´s about half a dozen (like this blog) that I´m really intersted in. One of these is a site that I´ve had for years which I don´t really use for much but is always around since it´s my home page (fast to load and has links to stuff I use regularly). Cos it´s my home I tend to do a redesign on it every now and again when I get bored of the current one. I was doing a bit of random browsing and looking at the Wayback Machine, it´s been almost a year since the last time I changed it. No wonder I was bored of it.

 
While I was there I decided to check out the Premier Computers domain. The reason being  I occasionally get emails which are intended for someone else but all on the premier computers domain. I decided to try and track down who used to have the domain by having a gander at past versions before we had it. Turns out it was owned by a company in Peterborough in 1999 and 2000. Time to update your address books people!

I was a bit bored this morning so I was thinking of ways to get more traffic around the site. One of the shortcomings of the current way I do things is the Archive part. I was basically a series of pages (i.e. 1 | 2 | 3….) with links to all the posts on them and a line or so from the start of the post. It worked but wasn’t exactly search engine friendly. Plus the link to the archive was just a single link from the sidebar. Again not the most search engine friendly way of doing it.

I decided to redo it in the way some other blogs do with links to an archive page for each month and then displaying the posts for that month in abreviated form with a couple of paragraphs from the post and a link to it. It’s more search engine friendly (content is king!) and should help the spiders get around a bit easier.

I didn’t really need to post about this but I didn’t have anything for “November, 2005″ yet!

I´ve got thousands of sites to look after but I do have a few personal ones as well. Two of them are "blogs" (one actually is – this one, the other one is more for fun: Welly´s World), but the third one is just a basic site promoting PHP development services.

 
I use this one as my home page since it has links to the stuff I use regularly and is fast to load. Only problem is that it´s had the same design for over three years now and apart from the fact that all the code is pretty naff, I´ve got bored of looking at it a couple of hundred times a day. A redesign was in order! I like it anyway.

We decided to do a quick redesign of all of our training sites. Andrew came up with the designs in Fireworks and mailed them across to me to do the coding. I had wanted to recode one of the training sites anyway including some re-writing of URLs and re-ordering the code to try and boost the SERPs.
 
I started this and after about half a day I was only about a quarter the way through. Then we decided to apply the new design to this site as well and since it is very similar code to the other ones it only took me about two hours to apply the new design and effectively optimise the entire site. Saved a load of time anyway!