Surgery Update
Ros’ surgery went well and she is on the mend.
Popularity: 9% [?]
How to Exclude a Blog Category from Displaying
For example, because there is already a separate list of videos on the homepage at RosalindGardner.com, I didn’t want the videos to show up again in the “Most recent entry posted” featured at the top of the page.
So, to eliminate the Videos category from that section, I first look go to Manage > Categories in my Wordpress Administration panel and look for the category ID, which turns out to be #10.
I open the home.php template (you might be using index.php) and add cat=-10 to the code for the most recent post as follows:
< ?php $recent = new WP_Query("showposts=1&cat=-10"); while($recent->have_posts()) : $recent->the_post();?>
Note the minus sign in front of the category number.
If you want to eliminate more than one category from the display, simply separate each category ID number with a comma, such as: &cat=-10,-22 .
Popularity: 3% [?]
Polling Plugin for Wordpress Blogs
Back in January, I added Polls to this site and have since tried a few different platforms.
For the first poll, “What is Your Biggest Internet Marketing Challenge?“, I used a third-party service called Vizu. Because I chose the free poll option, the polls shows a ‘Powered by Vizu‘ link at the bottom of the poll. As the poll is hosted on their server, that’s a fair deal. However, because I don’t like sending traffic off-site if I don’t have to and have a mountain of bandwidth with which to play on my server, I kept looking for a self-hosted polling plugin for Wordpress.
I came across the Democracy plugin, which was really easy to set up and deploy for my “How Many Web Sites Do You Operate?” poll. IP addresses can be logged to stop multiple voting and you can store an archive of polls. What you cannot do with the Democracy plugin however is run more than one poll at a time, so I kept on looking for a self-hosted polling option that allows multiple polls.
By the time I wrote the 3rd poll - How Often Do You Post to Your Blog? - I had found Lester Chan’s WP-Polls plugin, which along with his WP-Polls Widget, adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog that lets you run multiple polls.
WP-Polls lets you customize the look and feel of your polls using templates and there are number of other options from which to choose. The software allows users to select more than one answer and you can assign a maximum number of answers. You may also assign a start and end date for your poll, so if you get really ambitious, you can write a number of different polls to be queued up and published later to your blog.
The only additional feature that I would like to see in this plugin is a fill-in-the-blank option for those instances where the answer hasn’t been provided and readers would like to add more information. Other than that, WP-Polls is pretty much the perfect poll option.
Are you using WP-Polls or other polling software on your blog that you especially like (or dislike) and would like to mention? Please leave a comment and let others know!
Popularity: 6% [?]
PubCon Las Vegas Dates Announced
In a press release yesterday, PubCon announced that its Las Vegas event to be held in the North Halls, Las Vegas Convention Center will be held November 11-14, 2008.
Brett Tabke, PubCon’s organizer and WebmasterWorld’s CEO, said, “It’s great to be back to our November dates in Las Vegas, this time with a switch to the North Halls at the Convention Center. Our 2007 Las Vegas PubCon once again broke records for attendees and sessions, attracting the industry’s top speakers from the Internet’s leading businesses around the globe.
Once again, our aim, for Las Vegas PubCon 2008, is to deliver an extensive program of educational, highly topical and cutting-edge Internet marketing know-how, and to bring extensive networking opportunities to every attendee. It’s a great place to meet and learn!” Tabke continued, “Anyone wishing to speak at the conference should apply with their proposal as soon as possible.”
PubCon is hosted by SearchEngineWorld & WebmasterWorld and registration for attendees will open later in the year at http://www.pubcon.com.
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Video Newsletter: March 11th, 2008
This week’s newsletter is a video blog post - shot from the top of Giant’s Head Mountain in Summerland, B.C. The video includes a big THANK YOU to everyone for your good wishes and tips for my upcoming surgery as well as information on posts that I’ve lined up over the next week during my ‘outage’. Please forgive the sound difficulties - the wind was blowin’ dead bears atop that mountain! 
Posts I made in the last week include:
- March 10: How to Find Your Feedburner ID
- March 11: Matthew Mullenweg to Speak at Elite Retreat (my apologies to Matt for having pronounced his name incorrectly in the video)
Here is a list of upcoming posts. Please note that links to the posts will only work after midnight Pacific on the appropriate day.
- March 13: Polling Plugin for Wordpress Blogs
- March 14: How to Exclude a Blog Category from Displaying
- March 15: Happy Birthday Flickr!
- March 16: Amazon’s Video Widget for Affiliates
- March 17: PPC Advertising Doesn’t Work
Thanks again to everyone and I’ll be back & bloggin’ again in no time!
Cheers,
Ros
Popularity: 12% [?]
Matthew Mullenweg to Speak at Elite Retreat
According to the following press release, the co-creator of Wordpress software, Matt Mullenweg, is to speak at the Elite Retreat..
Lincoln, NE (PRWEB) March 10, 2008 — Matthew Mullenweg will be speaking at the Elite Retreat Internet marketing conference (http://www.EliteRetreat.info) this coming April 3 and 4 in San Francisco. Matthew Mullenweg is co-creator of WordPress, blogging software which is used by millions of users worldwide. WordPress takes on more significance at this time as iFOCOS released its study that more people in the U.S. are now getting their news from the Internet than from traditional media. The Elite Retreat was created and will be hosted by Internet marketing expert Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker.
Other speakers at EliteRetreat include:
- Jeremy Schoemaker
- Neil Patel
- Brian Clark
- Aaron Wall
- Andy Liu
- Guy Kawasaki (keynote)
A warning!! Elite Retreat attendance is capped at 35, regardless of how many apply to join and there is only ONE retreat each year. Cost to participate in Elite Retreat is $4,950 per person — the price you pay for personal attention.
Popularity: 12% [?]
How to Find Your Feedburner ID
Your Wordpress theme or a plugin may ask you for your Feedburner ID which is NOT the name that is appended to your Feedburner URL, i.e. http://feeds.feedburner.com/affiliateblogs.
The ID is a numeric sequence such as 298492. To find your ID:
- Login to your Feedburner account
- Click on My Feeds
- Click on the name of the appropriate feed (if you have more than one)
- Click on Publicize.
- Scroll down to Email Subscriptions in the left navigation.
- Select the Feedburner radio button and then click on Activate.
Activation will generate an HTML email subscription link for you to place on your blog and which contains your Feedburner ID, such as:
http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailverifySubmit?feedId=875817&loc=en_US which renders as Subscribe to The Affiliate Blog by Email.
Note that the feed ID in this particular case is 875817.
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A Busy Blogging Week
Hmm… there’s nothing quite like being scheduled for surgery to remove a mass of unknown origin to propel one into action. In other words, I blogged a LOT this week.
After reviewing notes and listening Affiliate Summit recordings via the web, I blogged about how Jason Calacanis offended affiliates during his keynote speech. I personally thought his point was excellent - when you got past the arrogance.
I reported on Chitika’s new Related Product Unit (RPU) and that Yahoo Search Marketing changed it’s minimum bid policy on Sponsored Search keywords.
At that point, I noticed that Brian Gardner was having an contest for affiliates who promote his Revolution Wordpress themes — which then got me thinking about working on RosalindGardner.com where I ended up installing a new Premium Wordpress Themes (which I blogged about at NPT).
I stopped just long enough to read success stories about sites that sell fitness, tea & gas station equipment and then started blogging again.
I blogged about how much I enjoyed using my Flip Video Ultra Camcorder and embedded some new videos along with my 3-month old godson’s first YouTube video taken at Sun Peaks Resort where we cross country skied last week.
I took a little poke at some U.S. based online merchants who really need to start thinking beyond their borders, and at the discourteous jerk in seat 12F. Of course, I won’t have to worry about rude passengers as my March and April conference plans and appearances have been cancelled.
From now until I go under the knife, I’ll be drafting a series of helpful posts to be regularly delivered during the first part of my recovery.
But I really hope that that there will be an Internet connection in the room so that I can just keep on bloggin’…
Popularity: 8% [?]
More Premium Wordpress Themes
Yesterday I picked up a Premium News Theme designed by Adii. You may already have spotted variations of this news style theme on a number of other blogs. I was actually waiting for Adii to release his ‘Kineda-inspired’ theme, but since putting the mock-up out on November 23rd of last year, the design isn’t yet available for sale… so I went with the Original.
Along with crediting Brian Gardner for inspiration, advice and guidance; Adii notes that “the aim of this theme is to offer the mainstream public the opportunity to implement such a website at a very low cost” and also notes that this “theme is not for the average Joe blogger however - it is a high-end theme and CMS solution that has just been made affordable and accessible to everyone. This theme is perfectly suited for ambitious bloggers looking to earn an income from their blogs / websites”.
These themes are definitely not plug and play and do require some tweaking to get them running right. For example, I installed the theme to RosalindGardner.com yesterday, worked on it for an hour and haven’t yet filled all my ad spots, figured out how to designate a featured post (that big gap at the top of the page) and haven’t written a page for the ‘Advertise Here’ link. All that said, it shouldn’t take me long to sort out.
If you like Adii’s theme but are worried that it may be too advanced for your coding abilities, Adii does provide thorough installation instructions, a Support Forum and a contact form. You may have to wait awhile for a response through the forum, as I notice that a question posted one month ago about issues with the video loading on the homepage still hasn’t been answered.
If you really like the theme, don’t let that dissuade you! There are always designers around at Scriptlance, Elance, etc. who can de-bug and fix those issues. I think it’s worth the cost and a little tweaking to have a theme that looks and acts higher end than the Joe Average themes on the Codex.
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Fitness, tea & gas station equipment
This month’s issue of “Secrets To Their Success” features…
- Chris S., who took his brick-and-mortar store onto the Web to reach a larger market and now he does 90% of his business online to earn a powerful $10 million a year!
- Michael C., who has the Web’s top source for tea and tea-making equipment and uses the “story” of his product to engage than 150,000 customers a year!
- A company providing automation equipment for gas stations is taught how to fuel up their site for better performance!
Each and every month “Secrets To Their Success” features 2 inspirational web business success stories and one website makeover from which you can learn EXACTLY how these unlikely Internet entrepreneurs do it as well as “steal” their strategies and duplicate their success!”
An STTS subscription also gives you a chance to win $5,000+ in FREE consulting — just by entering your name and email address! Once each month, they draw the name of one lucky member who gets their web site or business plan critiqued by the Internet Marketing Center team.
Sign up for “Secrets To Their Success” today to learn and be inspired by the success of others.
Popularity: 6% [?]
