Money-Code » wordpress

Issues with CJNiche WordPress Plugin

admin — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 02:36:27 +0000

So I’ve been working with the cjniche plugin. Overall, it’s a pretty good plugin, but I definitely have some issues with it. I noticed that a few of my requests were getting the dreaded PHP warning:

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in
/var/www/wouldnt/you/like/to/know/wp-content/
plugins/cjniche/cjniche.php on line 79

Want to see if it’s a wide spread problem on the interwebby? Check out this Google search on the topic.

The line number may vary with yours, I added some extra special customizations to the plugin. Googling around on this, I see constant references to this error relating to this plugin. I also see crazy recommendations like deactivating and reactivating the plugin. Reminds me of the ‘did you reboot your computer’ and if the answer it ‘yes’, you follow up with ‘how many times’. Odd how some things just go away. Well, I wasn’t buying it.

It is true if you add a space to the advertiserIds or dork up your CJ Key you’ll get the same error, but I was experiencing intermittent errors. It would work a few of the times, then not work the other times. That would have NOTHING to do with variable values stored in the database. I did some digging (which is hard with this particular plugin since they encode everything.. really?). I was able to get to the root of the problem.

If you’re getting this error every time, the plugin is not receiving a proper XML response CJ and that is why the foreach is blowing up. Unfortunately, the plugin is not checking for a good product set return from CJ and just explodes. Now, if you’re getting this error some of the times, the problem is very similar. I was able to echo the XML returning during a failure and this is what I saw:

[error-message] =>; The server is currently at
capacity or down for maintenance. Please try again later.

Wow, now that helps shed some light on the problem for sure. Looks like CJ is having problems. This is my biggest irritation dealing with CJ’s datafeed. I’ve mentioned that in the past that it’s just not reliable. This plugin is nice for something quick and if you’re working with small data sets or small merchants, this probably works really well. If you’re dealing with larger product catalogs, the keyword filtering is obviously going to take longer and probably cause issues with many requests. Now this is an assumption. I’m not sure if yesterday and today are the only two days having problems.. who knows. What I wanted to do with this post was shed some light with the PHP error and this plugin. I definitely see mention of it in many places.

I’ve written some error handling in the plugin to catch vs. explode when this occurs, but I might need to work on a caching solution to fall back on a stored data set if it has trouble.

Simple modification to FD Feedburner Plugin

admin — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 18:38:45 +0000

Today for one of my sites, I needed to populate a Facebook page with a feed, but I didn’t want the entire post as the ‘note’. I found a great plugin called Feed Facebook, Leave Facebook that leaves a partial feed with a link to ‘leave Facebook’ to your site. This is EXACTLY what I needed, but I was having problem with my FD Feedburner Plugin which auto-magically converts my RSS feeds to feedburner feeds. In this particular case, I needed to exclude a single feed from this. Unfortunately, this is not a configuration option.

So I’m posting this mainly for myself in case there is a plugin update and I need to know how I did this the first time, but I can see that few might find this useful.

Basically in the feedburner_redirect() function, we need to add a conditional:

if ($feed_url != null) {
// Redirect the feed
header("Location: ".$feed_url);
die;
}

Needs to be changed to this:

if ($feed_url != null) {
// Redirect the feed
if(!eregi(‘facebook’,$_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’])){
header("Location: ".$feed_url);
die;
}
}

The feed url that Facebook will be using looks similar to this : http://www.yourdomain.com/feed?feedfacebook, if we detect this in the REQUEST_URI, we do nothing with the redirect. Now Facebook will be happy with our new feed, while any other requests to our site’s feed will be directed to Feedburner.

Update WordPress!

admin — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:37:14 +0000

Okay, looks like WordPress released a ‘hardened’ release for 2.8 which will jack your release version to 2.8.5. It’s very important to stay upgraded to ensure that your sites will run properly, but more importantly to maintain security. You don’t want your money-making sites to go down, or to have your account suspended due to your site being compromised. As they say, “A ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”.

Details of the release can be found here: http://wordpress.org/development/2009/10/wordpress-2-8-5-hardening-release/

The headline changes in this release are:

A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins.
Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.

Review of ReviewAZON

admin — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 20:19:36 +0000

If you’ve been following this blog for some time, you would know I sort of have a love-hate relationship with Amazon’s affiliate program (Amazon Associates).

First of all, I love their site. I buy many things from Amazon, and it’s hard to beat the name trust you get with Amazon. I love that you can buy SO much stuff from there. Basically if you can think of it, it’s on Amazon. I love their affiliate management interface (except it updates every 24 hours), but getting reports, and tools is a snap. I love their API for pulling products (even though I was having trouble after their recent change for signed authentication). So that’s a lot of love….

The bad? Well, their cookie life is brutal. They only offer a one day cookie for earnings. That potential customer can’t “sleep on it”, and if they do, you get nadda. So it’s strictly related to impulse purchases only or you’re relying on them doing the research and are ready to buy when they go to your blog or store front. Tough. Their commission percentage is pretty low as well, and especially compared to other networks. You’ll hear arguments that you’ll make it up on the name trust, and that will convert to more sales, etc.

Bottom line is that I’ve tried promoting Amazon multiple times and have not had good luck. Is this Amazon’s fault? Is their network that bad? No. I’m definitely the weak link on this one. For whatever reason, I have not tapped into the proper targeted crowd for Amazon. I feel like I have a good feeling about EPN, but Amazon, I’m still reaching out in the dark.

Clearly, there are many individuals making excellent earnings with Amazon, so where did I gone wrong? I believe it was my approach. First of all, I’ve always intermixed Amazon with EPN sites, heavily promoting EPN, while loosely promoting Amazon. Also, I was working in niches that worked good with EPN. These niches may be producing naturally poorly with Amazon. I’ve also pursued store front style sites using Amazon’s API pulling ‘related’ products. Talking with few people that do well with Amazon (People, it’s important to talk to others and learn), and they seem to be having excellent results with blog / review type sites. Working the SEO organic long tail, etc. This was never my strategy with Amazon or EPN for that matter.

Today, I created two new WordPress blogs focusing on product review/blog angle related to products. This time, my focus in on Amazon with a small focus on EPN (only showing 2-3 auctions), etc.

To do this, I discovered a fantastic WordPress plugin called ReviewAZON. I cannot believe how cool this plugin is. First off, it’s already up-to-date with new Amazon authentication structure, so it’s good to go there. Below is a listing of product features advertised on their site.

Get Lifetime updates – Pay once and get lifetime updates and product enhancements for the life of the product.
Use ReviewAZON on UNLIMITED Domains! Buy it and use it on some or all of your domains.
Access to the ReviewAZON Support Forum: Join our community of ReviewAZON users and get the latest product updates, support information as well as user tips and tricks to make your blog a success!
ReviewAZON allows you to display over 25 different pieces of product content such as average customer rating, product description, customer reviews, pricing, brand, manufacturer, product details and more!
Detailed product user guide helps you every step of the way when it comes to installing, configuring and using the ReviewAZON Wordpress plug-in. Also learn how to make your own custom templates quickly and easily.
Build complete blogs in a matter of hours instead of days or weeks allowing you to focus on other things such as promotion and creating additional blogs.
Easy to use and intuitive administrative tools make configuring ReviewAZON a snap!
Ajax driven product search dialog screen allows you to search by product category, custom sort parameter and product keywords to find just the products you are looking for quickly to add quality content to your blog in just minutes.
Support for all the Amazon Affiliate programs including Canada, United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany and Japan.
Flexible HTML templates let you control the output of Amazon data to your users with virtually unlimited ways to display pertinent and meaningful content to your blog readers.
Custom YouTube video search screen allows you to search for YouTube product reviews and add them to your blog to enhance the reader experience.
Display Product Accessories and Similar Product listings along side your product post pages by showing them in-line or by using the custom sidebar widgets that come out of the box with ReviewAZON.
Use the built in Custom Template Manager interface to make custom template changes on the fly and update all your blog posts with a single save!
Custom Template Token Reference tool allows you to see exactly what tokens are available for use with that particular template without having to reference the manual each time you make a change.
eBay integration with PhpBayLite or PhpBayPro enables you to display eBay listings along side the products you are promoting to help increase your ROI and affiliate commissions.
Built in custom Sidebar Widgets helps you to display information such as product Brands, Price Ranges and Featured Products to your customers to better help them find the information they need on your blog.
Use the built in Tabbed product listing interface to display product information to your users in a tab layout instead of the normal vertical layout.
SEO friendly image and product URLs can be configured to display human readable links that not only help your readers but also boost on page SEO for your blog.
Output Caching allows you to speed up the rendering of product content to your blog readers by reducing the load time and the number of calls to the Amazon web service.
Make your blog product content stand out by providing your readers with timely and informative customer reviews on the products you are promoting.
Continuously add product posts to your blog by “Drip Feeding” them over a defined set of time by using the Bulk Product Post feature of ReviewAZON. You can have products automatically post to your blog over the course of days, weeks and even months allowing you to focus on promotion rather than content creation.

What I particularily like is the buld search and post of Amazon products. Here you can create many blog entries (inserted in random times) to your blog (this is what they refer to as “Drip Feeding”). They also provide a YouTube review feature where you can search YouTube for related videos and include them with your post. Very cool. Also the ability to include actual Amazon reviews fills content quite nicely. You can edit content surrounding your Amazon fed posts as well to create a more personal review.

The eBay integration is great. I went with PHPBay Lite version for now, which provides more than enough control for what I”m trying to. Remember, I’m trying to focus on Amazon vs. EPN on these particular blogs.

If you’re looking for some quality Amazon integration for your WordPress blog, this could be the plugin for you! How effective has it been for me? Too soon to tell, but I’m very optimistic. I’ve changed my niches to more ‘commercial’ products and plan on working the long tail. The content definitely supplies a lot of keywords. My big concern is duplicate content penalties. My goal is to break up the content and insert as much as I can to help avoid this.

Including your WordPress blogs to a external website

admin — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 22:47:18 +0000

I’ve been working on various CJ and EPN store fronts lately. Not creating new ones but working SEO and fattening them up with more reasons to visit. One of my popular ones I thought it would be cool to introduce a blog where I can promote more CJ items and promote other sites (treating it like a hub blog of sorts). I did not want to include the WordPress blog in a subdirectory, but wanted it as a sub domain (http://blog.test.com). This is located on another server (complicated circumstances), but I wanted to include recent posts within the home page of the store front.

I thought this over. I was originally just going to suck in the RSS feed from the blog, but I didn’t want the blog to impact performance in anyway. Performance can be impacted with slow delivery of the RSS (I’m already sucking in a eBay RSS feed there as well), or worse the RSS times out or has issues. I didn’t want that impression left to the potential customer.

I thought it might be cool to create a cron job to suck in the recent posts every hour via direct connection to the database on the remote server and populate a local database (the storefront). This way the ‘fetch’ process is outside the performance of the site, and the presentation of the feed would be handled by the local mysql database (very quick). Plus.. it sounded like a nerdy thing to do this morning.

To do this, I created a local wp_posts table in the local database (this is not the WordPress database). I’m only needing a few things: date, title, comments, etc.

Here is the schema:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `wp_posts` (
`ID` bigint(20) UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`post_date` datetime NOT NULL DEFAULT ‘0000-00-00 00:00:00′,
`post_title` text NOT NULL,
`post_name` varchar(200) NOT NULL DEFAULT ”,
`post_type` varchar(20) NOT NULL DEFAULT ‘post’,
`comment_count` bigint(20) NOT NULL DEFAULT ‘0′,
PRIMARY KEY (`ID`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 AUTO_INCREMENT=1

Next, I made the ‘worker’ PHP CLI script that will run on the linux server in the background. This is not executed via a browser but using the PHP executable to parse it. It basically connects to the remote (WordPress) database and queries the latest 10 records. It then truncates my local database and repopulates it with new info.

#!/usr/bin/php

define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘test’);
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘test’);
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘test’);
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘mysql.test.com’);
define(‘LOCAL_DB_NAME’, ‘test’);
define(‘LOCAL_DB_USER’, ‘test’);
define(‘LOCAL_DB_PASSWORD’, ‘test’);
define(‘LOCAL_DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’);
mysql_connect(DB_HOST, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD);
@mysql_select_db(DB_NAME) or die("Unable to select database");
$sql = "SELECT post_date, post_type, comment_count, post_title, post_name
FROM wp_8kzhbt_posts
WHERE post_type = ‘post’
ORDER BY post_date DESC
LIMIT 10";
if(!$rs = mysql_query($sql)){
echo "Database Error\n";
echo mysql_error()."\n";
echo $sql."\n";
exit();
}
$postArr = array();
if(mysql_num_rows($rs)){
$num = 0;
while($row = mysql_fetch_object($rs)){
$postArr[$num][‘post_date’] = $row->post_date;
$postArr[$num][‘post_type’] = $row->post_type;
$postArr[$num][‘comment_count’] = $row->comment_count;
$postArr[$num][‘post_title’] = $row->post_title;
$postArr[$num][‘post_name’] = $row->post_name;
$num++;
}
}
mysql_free_result($rs);

if(sizeof($postArr) > 0){
// connect to local db
// clean the table
// re-populate
$localCon = mysql_connect(LOCAL_DB_HOST, LOCAL_DB_USER, LOCAL_DB_PASSWORD);
@mysql_select_db(LOCAL_DB_NAME) or die("Unable to select database");
$sql = "TRUNCATE TABLE `wp_posts`";
if(!mysql_query($sql,$localCon)){
echo "Database Error – Local Connection\n";
exit();
}
for($num = 0; $num < sizeof($postArr); $num++){
$sql = "INSERT INTO wp_posts(post_date,post_type,comment_count,post_title,post_name)
VALUES(‘".$postArr[$num][‘post_date’]."’,
‘".$postArr[$num][‘post_type’]."’,
‘".$postArr[$num][‘comment_count’]."’,
‘".$postArr[$num][‘post_title’]."’,
‘".$postArr[$num][‘post_name’]."’)";
if(!mysql_query($sql,$localCon)){
echo "Database Error – Insert Local Connection\n";
exit();
}
}
}
unset($postArr);
?>

This script is added to the cron.hourly of the server is executed on a hourly basis. You could add this to crontab as well.

The next piece is on the storefront site itself. I query the local database and ask for the entries and reassembly my ‘permalink’. I could have used the guid field in the database, but it seems to convert a few of the URLs to permalinks. Not sure why, so I figured I would just create it. You may need to adjust it to fit your format.

$sql = "SELECT *
FROM wp_posts
ORDER BY post_date DESC";
if(!$rs = mysql_query($sql,$connect)){
trigger_error(sprintf("SQL Error: %d: %s\n" , mysql_errno(), mysql_error()), E_USER_ERROR);
}
if(mysql_num_rows($rs)){?>

class="header">
Recent Blog Posts

while($row = mysql_fetch_object($rs)){
$post_date = $row->post_date;
$post_title    = $row->post_title;
$post_name = $row->post_name;
$comments    = $row->comment_count;
// assemble the permalink
// http://blog.test.com/year/mo/day/post-name/
$dateArr = explode(‘ ‘,$post_date);
$dateSeg = explode(‘-’,$dateArr[0]);
$year    = $dateSeg[0];
$month = $dateSeg[1];
$day = $dateSeg[2];
$formatDate    = showDate($post_date);
$url = ‘http://blog.test.com/’.$year.‘/’.$month.‘/’.$day.‘/’.$post_name;?>

"margin-bottom: 8px">
"" target="_blank" rel="dofollow" style="font-weight: bold;">$post_title?> =$formatDate?> (=$comments?> comments)

}
}
mysql_free_result($rs);?>

Have fun with this.. hope it helps. There is literally a million ways you can do this. I would probably suck the RSS feed in directly via the worker script, then parse and insert that into the database if I was to do it again.

Staying on top of your blog posts

admin — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:13:08 +0000

One of the great features for Word Press blogs is the ability to Schedule your posts. I recently converted this blog from Drupal to WordPress, and I’m very impressed with this feature. In Drupal, I was unable to schedule posts, I could date them ‘ahead’, but I wanted posts to just appear on a daily basis. This could have been a Drupal plugin that I needed to install, but it was never pressing enough for me to spend some time to look for it. Now having this feature automatically in WordPress, I’m realizing what I’ve been missing.

The schedule piece is a great way to get your blog posting on a daily or semi daily basis. Now, when I have a few free moments, I look in my ‘idea’ list for potential blog topics or tips and crank out a article or two and get myself ahead of the game. Again, this is another great opportunity to actual work while watching TV, etc.

If you haven’t switched to WordPress, you might want to give it a look. If you do, please remember to keep it up to date, since security vulnerabilities is a growing problem with this widely popular blogging platform.

Good adjustments made to my new WordPress blog

admin — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:16:57 +0000

As I stated earlier today, I migrated Money-Code.com from a Drupal platform to the WordPress platform. The first steps were to move the data from their old tables to their new tables. Next was to configure tags, categories and add functional plugins. The other areas I wanted to make sure was working was getting my popular posts to be redirected to their new locations here. I went with SEO friendly URLs so had to do some redirects using my .htaccess file.

Along with rewrites, I made some security adjustment to them and thought it would be good talk about those as well.

First to do redirects you can use mod_rewrite or something simple like Redirect. Here is what I did for my redirects of my popular posts:

Redirect 301 /node/46 http://www.money-code.com/2007/11/using-ffmpeg-to-create-youtube-clone-script/
Redirect 301 /node/93 http://www.money-code.com/2008/09/epn-bannings-and-epc/
Redirect 301 /node/32 http://www.money-code.com/2007/10/url-masking-cloaking/
Redirect 301 /node/23 http://www.money-code.com/2007/09/simple-script-for-connecting-to-commission-junctions-product-web-service-and-populating-a-local-database/
Redirect 301 /node/15 http://www.money-code.com/2007/09/using-ebays-api-to-search-auctions-and-return-results/
Redirect 301 /node/61 http://www.money-code.com/2008/01/cj-apiwebservice-version-2/
Redirect 301 /node/20 http://www.money-code.com/2007/09/build-a-niche-store-bans-unsatisfied-programmer/
Redirect 301 /node/64 http://www.money-code.com/2008/01/how-to-search-amazons-catalog-with-amazons-associate-web-service/
Redirect 301 /node/37 http://www.money-code.com/2007/10/ebay-rss-querystringvariable-definitions/
Redirect 301 /node/56 http://www.money-code.com/2007/12/how-to-use-ppc-with-your-ebay-affiliate-store-fronts/
Redirect 301 /node/77 http://www.money-code.com/2008/03/prepare-for-ebay-partner-network-cutover/
Redirect 301 /node/14 http://www.money-code.com/2007/09/capture-search-data-on-your-site/
Redirect 301 /node/98 http://www.money-code.com/2008/10/dynamic-xmlrss-feed-using-popshops/
Redirect 301 /node/44 http://www.money-code.com/2007/11/shoemoneys-google-adsense-check/
Redirect 301 /node/71 http://www.money-code.com/2008/02/popshops/

Here we’re using Redirect 301 which is “Moved Permanently”. It’s looking for the node variable with was Drupal’s page handling and redirecting to the new SEO friendly WordPress URLs.

The next item I always like to include is adding proper 403 and 404 handlers in .htaccess. Basically when a 403 (Client Denied) or 404 (File not found), I like to redirect the user back to the home page instead of giving them a crappy Apache message. You can get fancier by creating custom error pages, but redirect works find for me. Here is what you would add for this:

ErrorDocument 403 http://www.money-code.com
ErrorDocument 404 http://www.money-code.com

The other piece that is really important, and often not used is turning OFF indexes. Basically if you go to a directory without a index page (ie: index.php), it will list out the contents of that directory. This is a potential security risk, it can show what items you have installed, or provide files for download that you did not want downloaded. By simply adding this, it will throw a 403 to the user that hits a page without a index file.

Options -Indexes

I primarily did this since I don’t want people seeing my wp-content/plugins directory, but I see as of 2.8, they’ve added a index.php with nothing in it, causing a white page. This is good, but I think it’s still good practice to prevent directory browsing like this.

The other piece I like to do is restrict administrative access to my IPs. I’m a freak this way. I have static IPs at my office, and I also have VPN access, so I like to restrict access to certain IPs on my network. Basically, I have to be at my office OR VPN’d to my office to edit my pages. This is a pain to many people, and I can understand people not into this, and that’s fine, but it really reduces the risk of brute force attacks to your admin area. If you’re interested in this measure here is the code you would include in the .htaccess file residing wp-admin/:

order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

Obvisouly, xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx would be your static IP or subnet xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx./16 for example.

I’ve always been uneasy with WordPress due to it’s history and potential damage it can cause on the server it lives on. The bottom line is to keep your install up to date, and that includes your plugins. I’ll also be setting a subdomain for testing purposes (only available to my IP) to handle large WP updates.

Migrating Money-Code from Drupal to WordPress

admin — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:24:20 +0000

So I was really getting annoyed with Drupal and thought I would make the push to WordPress. Surprisingly, the migration went pretty easy for the most part (relating to posts and comments). This site was a great resource for the SQL updates:

http://www.darcynorman.net/2007/05/15/how-to-migrate-from-drupal-5-to-wordpress-2/

After I migrated to WordPress, I needed to update my posts that had code blocks (example code). I went with “Dean’s Code Highlighter“, which appears to work fine. For now, I’m working with a temporary theme while I develop better theme. The other issue that I needed to address was updating my feed at Feedburner with the new WordPress feed address. After I did this, I thought about doing a mod_rewrite which would have eliminated that need. Oh well. I’m psyched that I can now post my latest post in my Digital Point profile. I was unable to do that with the Drupal RSS format.

I should be completely done adding tags and assigning categories later today. After that I’ll start posting a few new posts.

Thanks everyone!
hanji