Today it is really back to work.  I have been able to have a day here and there since the Christmas break but many interruptions, mostly nice ones of the family kind.

I have had my step-grandaughter for a few days but yeaterday, i put my daughter, son-in-law and step-grandaughter on the plane for Snowmass, in Colorado for their annual ski holiday.  Going from lovely high summer temperatures in SE Queensland, Australia to snow and the other end of the temperature scale they said is such fun!  To each his own!

So now I am getting myself organised.  I’m loving my Corkboard.

My sites are mainly WordPress based and I need to update several of them to the latest version 2.7, btw they are working on 2.8 right now.

WordPress 2.7 has so many great new features and are making what I need to do right now, that’s the updating and not just the WP but so many of the plugins need updating too, so simple.

This is just so easy and the 2.7 version has made it virtually a couple of clicks and no ftp-ing.

I love it when things work too.

Cron jobs and I have never gotten on very well.  As I set up a site to sell and to make it easy for the purchaser, I have installed WP-O-Matic to automatically update the blog on the site with feeds.

This needs a cron job to be set up in the Cpanel. It is not hard to do.  Usually, unless I really know what I’m doing, I don’t use the ‘Advanced’ option on anything.  But….with the Cron, the advanced is so much easier as normally you wil get the link to add and it will have the time and when to get the feed at the beginning of the link.  This is set out like

15 20 * * *  the/link/will be here.php

The first part means that the feed will be posted at

15–means the minute of cron job
20–means the hour of the day
The * means that will be posted every day, every weekday and every month.

So the feeds will be posted at 10.15pm everyday, every weekday and each month, the 24 hour clock is used.

So when you get to the Advanced option in the Cron tab, you only need to add link and then fill in the times etc.  The Standard option you have to select from the various box scrolling options, not hard, but the advanced seems much easier to me.

Take a look in your Cpanel and you will see the difference.

Now all that is fine but make sure you get the RSS feed that is active, posts, news etc being added every day or on a much regular basis.  I know that many people go get lots of feeds and have them added several times a day, I don’t.

I get several RSS feeds and set them up to post in the relevant categories but only post say 3 posts each time.  The site will be updated on a regular basis and look more natural.

You need to monitor these feeds too, sometime ago, I had a lovely knitting site and being updated with a knitting news feed.  That’s fine but went in to check and low and behold, the top post was about these people being beheaded in a road accident somewhere, very descriptive, the keyword knitting appeared somewhere in the news text and so was picked up.  All the lovely knitting readers popping in to see the latest must have gotten a shock.  I was able to delete the post, thank goodness.  So now I’m very careful with the feeds I set up.

I don’t add the WP-O-Matic until I have added articles and my own individual posts and the site is indexed in Google and has other information relating to the topic, maybe products, videos, books etc.

Now for the products, like Clickbank ebooks etc, the affiliate links can be included via another plugin called Gocodes and this one is easy to set up too.

Firstly you need to add a couple of lines of code to the .htaccess file, if you don’t know how to do this then your webhost should be able to help you out.

—————————————————————-
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^go/([a-zA-Z0-9._-]*)/?$/index.php?gocode=$1 [L,R]
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

——————————————————————-

The code is given to you by Gocodes in the READ ME File and then all you have to do is upload the new .htaccess.php via your FTP client.  It is important that the code goes before the #BEGIN WordPress

In Gocodes you only need to add a keyword and your Clickbank hoplink and then include the link from the Gocodes plugin to WO-O-Matic and that keyword wherever it appears in the posts from the feeds will link to your affiliate page for the Clickbank product.

WP-O-Matic does check to make sure the RSS feed link is valid and an RSS feed.

So there you are, if you want to automate your blog, have affiliate links automatically via keywords added to the posts, then this is a simple way to do it and best of all, it is free.

I have heard of some people having problems with WP-O-Matic and it has been because of the WP theme they are using, so if you have problems, check out another theme and hopefully it will be fine, as updaitng is so easy this way.

Till next time,

Take care

Cheers
Carmel

PS Gocodes has other uses than the one above.

Links for both plugins

WP-O-Matic plugin

Gocodes