BlogMunch

Tinker here and there…and some RSS troubleshooting

The first thing I do when I came back to BlogMunch is, of course, tinker with the theme. First I upgrade to WP 2.3.3 (Fantastico is still behind times and too lazy to switch to Simple Script). Then I switch to a simpler theme that you are seeing now, Codename “Statement”. Redoable is really a high maintenance theme and also quite a slow theme.

Disable some of the plugins that I am not interested anymore, like Adsense-Deluxe+, Extended Live Archives and Gregarious.

Write out yesterday’s post and publish it.

Here’s the thing about changing to a new theme. There are snippets of code you need to remember to add in. Like FeedFlare code, Goggle Analytics code and Similar/Related Post php callup. Not only do you need to remember to put all these code back, also you have to remember where to put them. I wonder how some blogs can change theme every month or so.

Troubleshooting begins…

That’s when I went back to my Google reader to see if my new post came up so that I can check everything is working properly. Nope, no new post. I then subscribe to the blog original feed at http://blogmunch.com/feed to see if it work. No luck there too. So both the feedburner and blog feed doesn’t work.

Log into feedburner to check feed status. Apparently, I have an error within the feed.

Source: http://blogmunch.com/rss2

   1. 
   2. <br />
   3. <b>Warning</b>:  Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/blogmunc/public_html/wp-content/plugins/illacrimo/functions.php:24) in <b>/home/blogmunc/public_html/wp-includes/feed-rss2.php</b> on line <b>2</b><br />

There are three extra lines on the feed xml file. Send my feed through the Feed Validator and confirm this error.

The first thing I do is to delete the illacrimo theme that might be causing the error. No luck there.

Then I download all my WP files through ftp to find the feed file so that I can delete these three lines. Not right either.

Search about this error on Google. Someone reported that to solve this error, you need to delete all extraous spaces before <?php and after?>.All my php files seems fine.

The answer is actually staring in my face. If you read carefully, the problems lies in the plugin section. I only though illacrimo as a theme and didn’t know it adds some plugin too.

Well, after that it si quite simple. I delete everything about illacrimo in the plugin and all my feeds works fine now.

This teaches me not to overthink things sometimes. Keep.It.Simple.Stupid. KISS

Do you hide your affiliated links?

Imagine you walk into a apparel store. There is a friendly sales person that comes over to promote the new T-shirts that arrived recently. He talk about the unique design of the print, the 100% combed cotton material and the new designers cutting of the shirt. You were so impressed that you start to tell the sales person to wrap it up. Being the nice person he is, he told you about the 20% commission that he will earn when you buy the t-shirt from him. That’s when you say, “No, I am not buying this t-shirt if you are earning a commission from it”.

Do you find the above story familiar?

You search for reviews for the best and cheapest webhosting service around. You found a article that tells you the features of a good webhost. You like it and decided to buy the plan. Suddenly, you look in the status bar of your browser and saw that it is a affiliated link. You start to get disgusted and copy the link (without the affiliated referral) so that you can buy directly from the store. Imagine if the link is just a straight link to the site, you would have click through to sign up.

Both stories above shows that irrationality of a normal person. All commissions are paid by the source and no matter who you buy from, the price you pay are the same. So why do you penalize the marketer/promoter? Doing so just unhinge all the hard work promoting to you/ researching for the review you read. You might say the promoter is biased towards their product, but if the product is really bad, you think you can’t see through the sugar coated lies?

So if you are a affiliated marketer and wanted to “camouflage” your affiliated links, here are 4 ways to do it.

1. This is from Ben Cook of BloggingExperiment. He uses a affilated jump page to redirect the buyer to the source. So a url like this “http://www.text-link-ads.com/starter_kit.php?ref=94747” would become this http://blogmunch.com/recommend/text-link-ads.php. Here’s the code for your php template.
   <html>
   <head>
   <insert tracking scripts here>
   <meta http-equiv=”Content-Language” content=”en-us”>
   <title>Sign Up with Text Link Ads</title>
   <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”>
   <script>window.location=”affiliate url“;</script>
   <meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”1; url=”affiliate url“>
   </head>
   <body>
   <p align=”center”>You will be taken to the correct page shortly.
   <br>If this page does not load after 5 seconds, please
   <a href=”affiliate url“>click here</a>.</p>
   </body>
   </html>
2. If you are using cPanel with your webhost, you can also use the redirect function at the domain tab to redirect any affiliated links to your custom url.
3. You can also use a tool like http://get-shorty.com/ to install on your server to generate short and sweet url that will hide your affiliated links.
4. Lastly, like all things WordPress, your solution is only a plugin away. Use the Hidden Affiliate Links plugin.

Choose any one of the solutions above and enjoy more click-through to your affiliated programs.

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Tip of the day - linkout from your wordpress pages

I have been searching how to linkout from my page menu. I have googled it but did not have a satisfactory answer. Not sure if it is too common sense for someone to post about it. The reason is I wanted to linkout to my Amazon aStore from the page menu.

Here is the method I used.

For example, you want to linkout to your aStore with the title “My aStore”. This is what you type into the Page Title:

<a href=”http://astore.amazon.com/endlidyl-20? title=”My aStore”>My aStore</a>

or basic structure

<a href=”url of the site you want to link out”>Page Title Name</a>

(note: change “endlidy-20″ to your own affilate id)

Save the page and add My aStore page to your page menu.

You will now be able to linkout to your aStore. I use this method to create a subscription page too.

Try it.

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