As I told before I am extremly bussy with several things. The first and one that is taken the most time is WP Octopus. It is a management system for wordpress.

Next are the sites I already installed and have to install using my own system.

And to make things even more bussier I decided to use my knowledge about building sites using wordpress as an cms and make them look like normal sites and benefit from all wordpress has to offer into a template system.

It will be part of WPOctopus where I will offer it to the members but I will start by having it offered seperatly as I have no idea how long it will take me to finish up WP Octopus.

The templates will be found at http://www.wpnichetemplates.com and I will post here when it’s ready to go

Posted on July 18th, 2007 by edwin
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I have so many things going on but today I spend my day on building a site purely to sell.

I build 2 Golf sites upon my theme I have used for many deblogging sites. I set it upon PR3 domains and used some great graphics from stockexpert.com
The first is ready at http://www.letsgolfvirginia.com/ and is at auction at Digital point.

My other project at WP Octopus is taking more and more shape but I totaly miscalculated how much time I would have available and how much it would take. It’s fun tho and I like to make something that in the end I am proud of.

Posted on July 16th, 2007 by edwin
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In the past 2 weeks I have made 50+ sites like www.fitnesapparatuurwinkel.info and the first results are great
I only had time to promote about 10 of them but most are already indexed and Google sends organic search visitors to the sites.

Coming week my wife will promote the rest of them and I have great expectations of what will happen.

All of the sites are promoting affiliateproducts which I pulled from a datafeed of a merchant. That datafeed I stick in a mysql database. Next a simple program I made pulls the products in certan categories from the database and makes it into a xml-file which a plugin in wordpress transforms into posts. I know there is a product that sells kinda the same idea but that only works for predifined affiliateprograms and I am not in the US so I made my own solution …and it saved me $197. I need to work on that part a bit still as I do not have a automatic update from the datafeed (i do have it automaticly pull the xml file but that is useless at the moment as the xml file is the same) and maybe I could use a better interface to it.

Right now my deblogging theme is how it looks like at the site above. It has a custom homepage that has the following features

• navigation
• categories
• news
• sitemap
• xml sitemap
• tags
• popular products

Navigation….the menu at the top left is pulled from the categories but only if it’s a child of the category products.

The categories in the main body work the same…Automaticly the categories are displayed there with their classes if it’s a child of category products. I have Also an other category tips and advice which I give a standard id of 4 (I already have it in the install inserted) and thus I know the number of that category and know which titles to pull from the database

The news in the left sidebar is pulled using the same technique. I know that the news category is 3 and by using the following code query_posts(’cat=3&showposts=3′); I fetch the last 3 posts in that category

Sitemap and xml sitemaps are a great plugin that I got from http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final and I like it and so does Google as they come by often

The popular tags are also a plugin and it’s from http://www.neato.co.nz/ultimate-tag-warrior/ If you don’t use ultimate tag warrior you really should as it works great for SEO purposes

Popular products…I have a star system with all the products and at the home page I display the most voted for by category and at the footer the overall most voted and most popular. It’s a plugin from http://www.lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming.php

The rest is not realy spectacular but I am proud of what I have made till now.

Some other sites In the same deblogging theme I made

• http://tuingereedschapwinkel.info/
• http://www.doehetzelfwinkel.info/
• http://www.fietsen-winkel.info/
• http://babykleren.info/
• http://laptopaccessoires.info/

Posted on May 17th, 2007 by edwin
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I keep repeating it but one of the main reasons why I use wordpress as a cms is the simple fact that when I launch a site it gets spidered and indexed within a few days. I get long tail organic search results often within the first two weeks after the launch of a new site.

By no means do I have large sites but in the end a lot of small niche sites add up and that is why I try to be very specific with the topics the sites are dealing about.

My list of SEO I apply to my standard install of wordpress is this

1. Ultimate Tag Warrior http://www.neato.co.nz/ultimate-tag-warrior/ 
2. SEO Title plugin from http://www.marketingop.us/2006/06/06/seo-plugin/
3. robot.txt
4. permalinks -> custom ->/%postname%/
5. Title post in H1
   

The first and second are related to each other as the SEO Title plugin needs the UTW plugin. I also often use UTW as a navigation in the sidebar but not always.

The robot.txt I have filled with the following

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-config.php
Disallow: /wp-login.php
Disallow: /wp-register.php
Disallow: /wp-content/
Disallow: /wp-rss2.php
Disallow: /wp-trackback.php
Disallow: /?
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /feed/atom/
Disallow: /feed/rss/
Disallow: /trackback/$
Disallow: /comments/feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/atom/$
Disallow: /*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/trackback/$
Disallow: /*/comments/feed/$
Disallow: /shop/

The reason why is duplicate content This robot.txt will help me to keep the site clean for the spiders and crawlers as they do not see the archive etc where the same posts are available again.

The permalinks is something I had before at /%category%/%postname%/ but lately changed to /%postname%/ and I get the feeling it is working better but have no hard data for it. The main thing is to change your permalink from dynamic to static (so no index.php?p=4)

The last I do is in the template I use if I haven’t build it myself I make sure the title of the article is in H1 tags and sometimes add to the comment part things like …have some opion about -Title article- leave a comment. This will add some keyword density. Make sure it doesn’t look spammy.

I am sure that using these seo tips for wordpress will help you as it did work for me and keeps on working till today.

Posted on April 29th, 2007 by edwin
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Like I said earlier I love the wordpress cms but I needed some flexable way to make sites that look like sites and not as blogs. One of the thing I needed was a way to place every category on the homepage with images and a url but only the categories that I wanted.

So what I came up was a piece of code and a standard setup of my categories. I changed the setup pages so at install I would have a category with id 1 with name products. The category news and links were inserted also automatic. Next I inserted the other categories by hand as a child of category 1.

In the code of the homepage (home.php) I have this snippet

$cat = $table_prefix . “categories”; $opdracht = mysql_query(”select * from $cat where (category_parent=1)”); $num_rows = mysql_num_rows($opdracht); $i = 1; while ($B = mysql_fetch_array($opdracht))

Next I have the display of each and every category.

A first start of sites that I made is fi www.fitnessapparatuurwinkel.info there are some things not set yet and this was the first where I didn’t work with all the code I have included in my template right now.

I will make some new sites and will have a link here to it when they are ready.

Posted on April 29th, 2007 by edwin
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I just finished installing 50 wordpress sites and altho it is not ready I wanted to share something that you might find usefull if you ever want to install multipal wordpress sites.

One of the first things I used to do after installing is deleting the helo post, the blogroll, change the category name from uncategoriezed to general or news and  add a page for sitemap and contact.

I found a way to do this in the default install….

As wordpress is a great tool but in the end a php script that calls values from a Mysql database I knew it should be possible to change the default installetion.

What I do is this….First collect all my plugins and themes I want to use. Make a folder on my computer where I have the basic structure of wordpress and I already add the plugins fo the folder ->wp-content->plugins

Next go to the file upgrade-functions which is located in wp-admin. At about line 54 you will find a function called wp_install_defaults

Here you find the inserts off the links for the blogroll, category and posts. You can change them but make sure that if you add posts to categories that you also change the post2cat and the linkcount in the add category.

I found a second thing that is very usefll if you are going to play with the install of wordpress. Webserver on a stick…you can install a local version of wordpress on your computer and test everything without fear to brake your server or essing up your hosting account. You can download WOS for free at http://www.chsoftware.net/en/useware/wos/wos.htm

Posted on April 15th, 2007 by edwin
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I realy had to dig deep to find this so I thought I would put it up here so I wouldn’t forget as well for you to have it.

What I wanted was to divide the homepage in several sections and it should diplay only the newest posts and if possible only at the place I wanted it.

The posts are called in the loop and normally ou have one loop on your page that goes thru all your posts and displays it like that. But you can limit the posts and also you can specify how many posts and from which category.

The code to do that is like this ( i have removed the opening php part as I have a plugin called exec php which will try to execute the php and in this case I do not want that)

–open php– query_posts(’cat=x&showposts=y‘); while (have_posts()) : the_post(); –end php–
here you can call the title, content, date authur etc etc
–open php– endwhile; –end php—

at cat=X you look at the number of the category in Manage -> Categories and fill in the id number of your category at x. At showpost=y you change the y into the number of posts you want to show from the category. So if you want to show 3 posts from category products which has an idnumber of fi 6 it would be query_posts(’cat=6&showposts=3′);

Posted on April 15th, 2007 by edwin
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Sometimes I forget that Wordpress is php and mysql. So when I look at it I tend to forget that to do somethings al it takes is clean code and if there is no function that does what you want you will have to write it yourself.

Same with the count categories. What I plan to do with it is display it in a way like at the demo layout but of course I need to know how many categories there are.

Code for it came from a plugin at http://jonas.rabbe.com/ and I stipped the part that displays it to use futher in a variable

$request = “SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT cat_ID) FROM $wpdb->categories, $wpdb->post2cat, $wpdb->posts WHERE post_status = ‘publish’ AND ID = post_id AND category_id = cat_ID;”;
//    if (!$all_posts) $request .= ” AND comment_post_ID=$id”;
$num = $wpdb->get_var($request);

It selects only the categories with posts n it so that is good as I do not want categories displayed that are empty.

Next is a piece of code I wrote years ago on a site that pulled info from a db and putted it in a table. That table had 3 rows and the code kept counting if it hit 3 to start a new line. I wil have to look it up where I have it and modify it a bit

Posted on March 25th, 2007 by edwin
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I am still playing with it but here is a start of a layout I am making for a template for my deblogging quest.

I want it to have this kind of look and on the inside when you click a category or a article title only the header, sidebar and the article with maybe an image. Every category should have an other header image or color to make it different.  The way I will do that is either using a different css style or having a seperate page per category. Not sure yet which path to take as both have their ups and downs.

But I think it is a nice template and when it´s ready with all the fancy php going on it will be a great succes

Posted on March 23rd, 2007 by edwin
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One of the things you see on magazine style websites is a category and links to articles within that category. To do the same thing with a wordpress site is not that hard and can be done with a few lines of code. First you need to find out how many categories there are, next we need to find out how many post there are in the category. Making sure that when you call a post it doesn´t hit an error because you asked for post 4 in category 5 while there are only 4 categories.
I will post the code here when I write it  (will use the function count)

(count(get_the_category())

Posted on March 23rd, 2007 by edwin
Filed under: Code | No Comments »