Posts Tagged ‘wordpress’

The CommentPiG launch is going extremely well this week, I’ve had some repeated pre-sales questions come through so I’ve posted the answers here for everyone to see:

I’m interested in buying commentpig but I’d like to try it for a few days. Is it possible?

We can’t issue a trial license at the moment. We do of course offer a full no questions asked money back gaurantee for 30 days after purchase which is much better than trialling it for a couple of days.

Where do the comments come from?

The comments come from a variety of sources. When running in full auto-pilot uses your selected matching criteria (probably a tag from your post) to find comments from:

• YouTube – videos that are tagged with the keyword
• Twitter – using your keyword to search for tweets
• FriendFeed – using your keyword to search for comments
• Yahoo Answers – using your keyword to search for questions and using answers as comment
• Own Comments – you can harvest comments from any source and clean them yourself before uploading as DB to CommentPiG, this is the most powerful way to use CommentPiG

Do you happen to have a demo blog to see this working?

Not currently only live sites that I’m not keen to expose, I’ll put up a demo site asap and post the link.

Can I install the plugin on several my blogs?

Yes you can install CommentPiG on as many sites as you own.

Do you guys do installations?

Not officially, i.e. we don’t have installs on the price list but we’re more than happy to help out if you have any problems. Installing CommentPiG really should be as quick as uploading and activating and WordPress plugin. The only that occasionaly requires a little extra work is the ioncube loaders as about 1/10 hosts don’t run them by default. Most will add them if requested.

You can read all about CommentPiG here

Just click the support tab at the top of the page if you have any more questions.

I’ve seen a few plugins out there for displaying your tweets in widgets but you don’t really need them unless you’re trying to do something special.

You can use WordPress in built feed widgets to do exactly what your after.

Watch this 1 minute video

Go to Appearance->Widgets in WP admin.

Drag an RSS Widget over to your sidebar and rename it “Recent Tweets” or whatever you want.

Open your twitter feed in another browser tab and look for the “RSS feed of BlogPiG’s tweets” in the bottom right of the twitter sidbar.

Copy the link of the feed and then paste it into the RSS widget you still have open in WP admin. Mine was http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/21875500.rss

Choose “How many items would you like to display?” I chose 10.

“Display item content?” has no effect.

“Display item author if available?” has no effect.

I chose not to “Display item date?” it’s your call.

Save the settings and visit the frontpage of your blog to view your twitter sidebar feed in all its glory.

If you’re like me and don’t like the RSS badge next to the title of the widget then simply add the following code to the bottom of your style.css in your template directory and it will instantly dissapear.

.widget_rss img {display:none;}

And there you have it, Twitter updates in your Wordpress sidebar in less than 5 minutes with no plugins!

This is little off the beaten track from my normal posts so gloss over this one if it’s not really relevant to you.

I’m posting this because I’ve made a new commitment to give a bit more back to the ‘web’ in general, basically if I find some information or a technique I use in my business or here on BlogPiG.com I’ll post about it for others to find.

As it happens this is a technique I actually put together myself

The Problem

Most WordPress templates use a quote background image to enclose the blockquote content. The problem is that you CSS only allows one background image per element so you can only have an open quote image. I always thought this looked a little odd as you should really close the quotes too.

I found a couple of proposed solutions out on the web, the most interesting involved enclosing the the contents of the blockquote inside an additional DIV and styling that with another background image containing a close quote positioned to the bottom right.

This would indeed work but having to remember to add the additional DIV inside WordPress blockquotes would be a pain and it means you’d have to leave the WYSIWYG editor and switch to the HTML editor, an issue for some people perhaps.

In short it wasn’t elegant enough…

The Solution

I finally realised that WP already enclosed the contents of the blockquote inside another element, namely a paragraph ‘p’ tag. With this knowledge I could simply style the ‘blockquote p’ CSS to contain the close quote mark image and position it using margin and padding. Et voila!

WordPress blockquotes with a neat close tag automatically added each time I use them.

I centre my block and the text inside the paragraph but you should be able to style it exactly as you need with a bit of tweaking.

The CSS

/* Start blockquote */
blockquote p
{
width:100%;
color:#E6751F;
font-family:"Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, Sans-Serif;
font-size: 16px;
font-style: normal;
font-weight: bold;
background-image:url('images/ClosePostQuote.png');
background-position:right bottom;
background-repeat:no-repeat;
text-align:center;
margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;
padding:0px 30px 15px 0px;
}

blockquote
{
width:75%;
margin-left:auto;
margin-right:auto;
padding:20px 0px 0px 35px;
background-image:url('images/PostQuote.png');
background-position:left top;
background-repeat:no-repeat;
position:relative;
left:-15px;
}
/* Finish blockquote */

Some Notes

I had to include the 0px margin in the p style or it doesn’t work, I have no idea why this is.

Add a contrasting background colour to both your ‘blockquote’ and ‘blockquote p’ styles temporarily whilst you adjust your padding. It makes it much easier to see what is going on.

If you’re centering the blockquote using margin left/right auto then don’t forget to offset it’s postion by the same amount as you right pad the paragraph. In my case the paragraph was right padded 15px so I positioned the block with a relative left -15px. This seems to maintain the centering nicely

I’ve checked this using Firefox, Chrome & IE browsers and all seems well. I’ve also tried it with lengthy multi-line quotes as well as single line and that appears to work without problems too (i.e this quote)

Please leave feedback in the comments if you use it successfully or improve it or maybe find it just doesn’t work for you.

We’ve just released a new update of CSVPiG to the WordPress Plugin Repository. This is Version 2.0.0.796

The key changes are listed below:

• Removed the ‘Disable Post Publishing’ check box
• Added a ‘Post Status’ drop-down box with the following options: Published, Pending Review, Draft and None
• Adjusted the initial settings file and some log messages

So now you can choose whether to import you posts as live posts or keep them as drafts for publishing later.

Due to popular demand I have decided to start releasing a selection of the BlogPiG plugins under GPL license. The first to be launched is TagPiG our WordPress AutoTagger.

TagPiG is an auto-tagging plugin for WordPress. TagPiG has been designed to overcome the manual bottle-neck by completely automating your tagging process. Here are some of the key features of TagPiG:

• Automatic post categorisation
• Automatic tag publishing
• Automatic tag filtering
• Automatic internal linking of common tags
• Automatic tag rotation

TagPig is simple to install and setup on your WordPress blogs. Once the plugin is activated it will run in the background, silently categorising, tagging and linking your blog posts automatically. With TagPiG installed you get all the great benefits of tagging without any of the additional manual overheads.

You can get an immense amount of benefit from correctly tagging all of your blog posts. Tags not only help you organize large quantities of content, but they also help define your site as a whole. If you post good content and you consistently tag every post you make with maybe 5-10 relevant keywords then, over time, your blog will become a very valuable resource to people interested in those keywords. They can actually come to your blog and get better, more reliable, less spammy, more focused search results than by doing a Google search! While this all sounds very desirable in theory the extremely manual nature of categorising and tagging blog posts has been a major bottle-neck for webmasters who build a lot of blogs and/or post to them frequently.

By Using TagPiG to automate your tagging will:

• Deliver additional keyword density into your blog posts
• Expand the keyword reach of new blog posts
• Get traffic boosts from Technorati and other tag aggregators
• Thematically organise your blog posts
• Provide an intelligent internal linking structure for your blog

TagPig has a comprehensive pdf user manual detailing every aspect of it’s setup, configuration and installation.

You can download TagPiG immediately here…

As promised here is the first free plugin from BlogPiG. It’s called NukePiG and even though it’s incredibly simply it has proved an invaluable tool to me over the year whilst building my BlogPIG farms.

We all make mistakes, especially when using mass automation apps like the BlogPiG suite of passive income generation tools. Imagine importing over 3000 schedule posts only to find out that you’ve a typo in every affiliate URL. Even with WordPress 2.5’s new bulk deletion feature you could only delete 10 posts at a time, that’s a lot of clicks!

NukePiG allows you one-click deletion of all your blog posts, pages, tags, categories or links, no messing around in the database, just select what you want to reset and hit NUKE! Within seconds you can reset an entire blog or simply just certain content elements, it’s your call.

You can download NukePiG from here: NukePiG

I’m pretty confident I’ve tested most of the major content platforms over the years – Joomla, Drupal, MoveableType, Blogger etc. etc. The list goes on.

One of the more annoyings things I’ve heard is people claiming that just by using one particular CMS your SEO and traffic needs will be sorted, this is complete rubbish. It’s not the CMS itself that makes or breaks your site building campaign it’s how you leverage that CMS features that really counts. At the end of the day 99% of any CMS is all back-end anyway. It’s totally invisible to the end-user and search spiders, and of course that’s the way it should be. Here are my criteria for choosing the perfect backend for my sites:

• Thousands of other users
• Unrivalled expandability
• Fast customisation of front-end (appearance and layouts)
• Good support
• Cutting edge web 2.0 technology

Maybe you shouldn’t use any off-the-shelf system? Perhaps the best path would be to develop your own back-end DON’T DO THIS! At least not until you’ve proven that there is absolutely no third-party solution that can meet all your needs, and I seriously doubt that’ll be the case.

Trust me on this, I learned this the hard way, right at the start of my site building career I convinced myself that there was nothing on the market that would be good enough for my site building exploits so I hired a coder to build me the ultimate back-end from the ground-up. It took over 9 months and thousands of dollars in development to get anywhere, not to mention hundreds of hours of testing and fixing and testing again. The product’s potential was amazing and it had some really awesome features but tying them all together and getting everything integrated was a total nightmare.

Fortunately whilst the development was underway I was running a lot of parallel tests on off-the-shelf-systems and one in particular stood head-and-shoulders above the rest. It met all my criteria and best of all it provided the perfect framework for tying together all of the functions and features I’d been trying to have developed. What was it? WordPress of course! It was a simple, easy to use platform with infinite customsation options available through the addition of plugins. Most importantly it was in use by millions of websites already. I immediately shelved the custom development project and had the all key features re-coded as WordPress plugins.

This was the birth of BlogPiG…

Within the next few days I’ll be releasing the very first module from the BlogPig suite of products and the best part is it’s going to be completely FREE!

NukePiG has proved to be an invaluable tool for me whilst creating my BlogPiG farms. In a nutshell it allows you to selectively nuke(delete) all of your posts, pages, tags, categories, links from your blog, leaving you with a nice fresh, clean, empty blog.

It’s not uncommon to make the odd mistake when your’e creating thousands of scheduled content items for your blog, especially in the early days whilst you’re getting the hang of things. One wrong column header in the CSV you import with ImportPiG or a small typo in your seed keyword used by ContentPiG and suddenly your blog has thousands of incorrect posts and maybe even tens of thousands of tags if your’e using TagPiG. Deleting these with the native WordPress interface is a real bind as it only allows you to display 20 items per page, even with the new bulk delete feature of 2.5 you can only delete what you can see listed so it still requires thousands of clicks to empty your pre-populated blog.

The only way to achieve a bulk delete until now was to go into the database itself and manually truncate the tables directly using SQL, not exactly a slick workaround. 

Enter Nuke PiG. Simply check the boxes for the content items you want deleted from:

• Posts
• Pages
• Tags
• Categories
• Links

Then hit the NUKE button and within a couple of seconds your blog is ready to go again with a fresh batch of content items. Here’s a preview of the simple UI:

NukePiG is ready to go, but I’m just finishing testing it with the lastest WordPress version and then it will be available for download from here & the WordPress.com plugin directory.