As a treat to ourselves and to help us be more mobile with affiliate marketing we have both bought iphones. We have had them about 2 months now and they have been a great asset, checking things like google reader, accounts, email and all this from the comfort of the local pub We both wanted iphones anyway and this project was a useful excuse to get them.

As a result of checking our site on the iphones we have now installed onto our theme the iphone plugin making this site easy to read and much more accessible on the iphone.  Here is a screen grab (very sexy feature on the iphone) of our site on an iphone.

iphone capture

The plugin we have used is the WPtouch plugin. So all you iphone users, have a look and let us know what you think.

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Recently we designed a new site, Maternity Underwear and this was ready really quickly, probably our quickest site design to date. So it was rather frustrating when Google just wasn’t indexing it. Initially we thought it might be the fact that the robots.txt file had incorrectly disallowed access to everything but this was changed and still almost 1 month later the site was being indexed despite it being complete, good content and starting to be linked. Then Gary found that in the new Wordpress and option had changed. Under the Privacy settings the default now appears to be to block search engines and allow normal visitors only. We changed this and about a week later it is starting to be indexed. Hopefully given a bit more time the site will be fully indexed and start to climb and the hard work will pay off. Has anyone else noticed this  option change?

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Affiliate Project recently received a comment on this post – Niche site launched using data feeds and decided to create this post to help any other affiliates with displaying product data feeds.

We initially struggled to get product data feeds working. We found it hard to find how to get this to work, so thought we would document this on our blog and this could also help other affiliates.

There was 3 basic steps to get the data feeds to be displayed on the page.

Before you do this, you will need to download your data feeds and then create a new database using phpmyadmin (often from cpanel tools). Create the field names as per your datafeed or merchants datafeed.

1st step:

Create a php page template. So in the php file you will specify template name, pull in the header and title, then when you login to wordpress and add a new page, you can specify this new page template (your_template_name).

EXAMPLE:
<?php
/*
Template Name: your_template_name
*/
?>

<?php

2nd step:

Put the php code that has the mysql statements that query the database which holds the datafeed

EXAMPLE:
// Connect to Database
$con = mysql_connect("localhost","database_name","database_password");
if (!$con)
{
die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());
}

// Select the data from table_name
$result = mysql_query("SELECT field_a, field_b, field_c, field_d, field_e FROM table_name WHERE field_f='category_name'");


3rd Step:

Display the data from the database in table format, then loop the products. After that close the connection and display the sidebar and the footer

EXAMPLE:
// Display the table
echo "<table border='0' cellspacing='16'>";

// Disconnect from Database
mysql_close($con);
?>
</div>
<?php get_sidebar() ?>
<?php get_footer() ?>


You can style the output how you wish with css styling.

w3schools.com is a great resource for website coding such as html / php / mysql.

Hope this helps other affiliates.

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We noticed that we were getting a lot of spam comments, hundreds a day which uses up time removing them and also bandwidth to our site. So we looked for a plugin to combat this. The simple way we thought was to add a question to the comments section so that spam robots cannot automatically post comments. We came up with the following plugion and so far this seems to be working well for us. If you are having trouble with spam robots hitting your comments, try this plugin.

Math Comment Spam Protection
Asks the visitor making the comment to answer a simple math question. This is intended to prove that the visitor is a human being and not a spam robot.

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We are utilising more Wordpress plugins as we get better at webdesign and want to add more functionality to our websites. We thought we’d write a review of the ones we’ve used so far.

Akismet
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. We have seen an influx of spam comments to our site and this plugin has helped get rid of them to the spam folder where we can review them to make sure they are spam.

All in One SEO Pack
This has been a great tool to help get this site to number 1 on google search. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is very important for websites to improve the amount of hits they get.

Similar Posts
Displays a highly configurable list of related posts. Similarity can be based on any combination of word usage in the content, title, or tags. This is very useful to direct readers of your blog to other related content they may be interested in on your site. Requires the latest version of the Post-Plugin Library to be installed.

Social Bookmarks
Adds a list of XHTML compliant graphic links at the end of your posts that allow your visitors to easily submit them to a number of social bookmarking sites.  You can pick from a large number of social sites which makes this plugin great.

WordPress.com Stats
Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. This is useful for determining how much traffic you are getting and what they are doing once they get there.

Wordpress Popular Posts
Retrieves the most active entries of your blog and displays them on a list. As you can see we use this plugin on our sidebar. It means readers can immediately see which are the most popular articles on a site.

WP125
We use this in our sidebar as well to easily manage 125×125 ads within your WordPress Dashboard. It allows you to run ad campaigns for either a specific amount of time or indefinitely.

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We researched about how to create our blog and the best package to use. We came up with Wordpress. I had been following other people’s personal blogs which were written using Wordpress and I liked the feel of them. Looking into Wordpress further it seemed that its ease of use suited web design beginners like us to create a blog fairly easily using a good standard of tools.

So we then looked at using and installing Wordpress. The installation was straight forward with a good step by step guide on the Wordpress website which can be found here

Wordpress comes with a nice dashboard which really makes designing and managing the website straight forward.

We had a look at some themes and decided on the layout we wanted. We wanted a 3 column layout. We had a look at lots of themes that we could customize to suit our blog. We came across the Revolution website which has lots of great themes to use at a great price.

As well as the main blog theme two components of Wordpress have increased the speed at which were able to get our blog up and running and to have the look we wanted. Firstly plugins have been very useful to add functionality to our website with ease. They can be used to do almost anything you can imagine with Wordpress. Many people have designed and written plugins for Wordpress. Some plugins we have used are the Popular Posts plugin and the SEO plugin both of which aid the website development to do what we want it to easier and to make is better content wise. To have a look at some plugins available to Wordpress click here

Secondly we have used widgets. Widgets are standard sets of code to create items you can put in your WordPress blog’s sidebar without needing the knowledge on how to edit a web page. Initially we were trying to modify php code to do things like add Categories and other sections to the sidebar but with widgets they give you the code to do this and through the widgets dashboard option you can modify them to appear how you want without having to modify code. Again for a beginner this is a very useful tool.

In time we hope to create some “How to …” guides such as “How to install”, “How to use plugins” so please keep coming back for updates.

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This book is a must read if you are new to Wordpress and blogging.
It will help ease the process of setting up your Wordpress blog site.

Wordpress for Dummies is a comprehensive and easy to follow book, which covers everything from Getting started with Wordpress, to Designing your blog site, using Templates and Plugins and also some examples of good templates and plugins.

We created this website using Wordpress and as well as this book we came across Revolution which has some great themes that are easy to use and customize.

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