The problem, as with candy, is that not everything you put in your site works together, and often a blog belly ache can result. If your blog breaks, it is often a plugin that is the culprit.

Today I had a client call me and all of their blog posts and pages had disappeared. The first thing I do when that happens is check the database and run a repair on the database tables. That usually fixes the problem. Not in this case. I could see the posts in the database, but nothing was showing up on the website.

I then upgraded their WordPress to the latest version and ran a database upgrade. Still no content.

I changed their theme from the custom one they had, to the WordPress classic theme, to make sure that it wasn’t a theme bug. Still no content.

Finally, it occurred to me to rename their plugin folder on the server, to quickly de-activate all of their plugins. Voila! All of the content came back again.

I judiciously added back the minimum of plugins, testing after the addition of each one to make sure the site worked.

The take away on this article is to only add plugins to your wordpress site that are integral to its functionality. Quality over quantity.

Whenever you run a WordPress upgrade or a plugin upgrade, test your site. If something breaks, it most likely is a plugin conflict. Try de-activating plugins and testing after each to see if the problem goes away. If you can’t get into  your admin after the upgrade, change the name of the plugin folder on the server to see if things start working again.

No related posts.

Blogs are all about content. We use a blog platform to deliver good content to our audience, and thus promote our businesses or our brand.

How your content is presented, however, can either improve your message, or hinder your message.

Your audience, before they even read your content, is looking at how it is designed, how it looks visually on the page. If the presentation isn’t appealing, they might not read it, or they might read it, but discount it.

If I own a store, I know that in order to get my audience to walk through the door, the store front needs to be clean, the windows organized and the walkway swept. Once people enter my store, my merchandise needs to be polished and presented in such a way that highlights it and that makes it easy for customers to find what they are looking for.

If I own a salvage yard and sell bits and pieces of salvaged items and my customers expect to dig through piles of dusty stuff to find hidden treasure at a bargain price, then I might not worry about how organized or clean my warehouse is. However, if I DO sell treasures and I expect to sell them for what they are worth, I am going to be very aware of how I design my store’s interior and exterior and how my content is presented.

A blog should follow the same principles. If you want people to be able to read your content easily and to value your content, there should be some design consistency in how it is structured.

Step one is KEEP IT CONSISTENT.

The key to good design is consistency. Less is more on well designed websites. The designer chooses a select few fonts, colors and font sizes and these are used in moderation for emphasis. The more you have a variety of shapes, fonts, font sizes and colors on your site, the more cluttered and hard to read it will be.

On your blog, make sure you use consistent capitalization. This is the easiest change you can make to have your site look more professional.

Look at the image below that shows all different treatments of capitalization. It looks like a mess.

Compare it with the image below:

It is much easier to read what the words are saying, if they follow a consistent system of capitalization.

Fortunately, you can fix your blog capitalization with just a few lines of code in your blog theme style sheet. You don’t have to go back in and retype every single blog post title, tag and category name. Using CSS you can transform text to be capitalized, uppercase or lower case.

With these few lines of code in my style sheet, I was able to make all of my blog titles, category names and tags capitalized.

.sidebar_list a {text-transform:capitalize; }
.entry-title { text-transform:capitalize; }
.headline_area { text-transform:capitalize; }

Decide what capitalization you are going to use and contact your blog programmer to make the changes for you, or if you are comfortable doing so, go in and edit your themes style sheet yourself.

On websites that are designed well, things line up.

Keep the WIDTHS OF YOUR IMAGES consistent within a blog post, and even from one post to another.

In good design, things line up visually. Often, a blog will show multiple posts on one page. The width of all the images on all these posts are going to visually relate to one another. If you are using varied sizes  and proportions of images, then it it will start to look disorganized.

The easiest way to avoid this pit fall is to  choose a consistent width for ALL of your blog images.

Under your settings, in the Media section, you can set the widths of how large you want your large, medium and thumbnail images to be on the site.

(These dimensions will depend upon the blog theme that you are using and how wide your post area is.)

I recommend  filling in these settings and then sticking to them when you upload images to your blog posts.

When you click to upload an image, once you’ve selected it, at the bottom of the window you can indicate what size it is and how to align it. If you’ve filled in these values in your media setting, it is a simple step to ensure that all your images are given consistent widths.

If all of the images have a consistent width, then your blog will start to look organized, and the content will be easier to read.

If you want to re-size your images before you upload them to your blog to make sure they are all the same widths, a great free online tool for re-sizing and editing images is http://resize.it.

Step two is KEEP IT SIMPLE.

The blog text editor is not conducive to complicated design layouts. Unless you have a custom theme created with custom fields for displaying specific data, it is best if you stick to the most simple formatting. Put your content in short paragraphs. Use ordered and unordered lists. Upload images and video. But avoid any fancy formatting.

The most successful blogs visually follow a simple pattern for their blog posts. They might start with an image at the top of the page. Then put in a paragraph or two. Then another image or video, and then more text as needed.

They find a pattern that works for the type of content they are going to be blogging about, and they consistently use that pattern on all of their blog posts.

Think about how long your blog posts are typically going to be, figure out a simple  structure that would work for the majority of your blog posts, and stick with that.

This is particularly important if you have side bars in your blog. Side bar content can often be busy and varied. If your blog post content is simple and restful to the eye, the audiences’ attention will settle on it naturally. If the blog content is displayed in a disorganized and cluttered manner, it will blend with the clutter in the side bar, and the content will be harder to read.

THINK TWICE ABOUT ALIGNING IMAGES LEFT AND RIGHT

Be very careful when having the text wrap to the right and left of images. It is tricky to get images that are aligned left and/or right with text wrapping around them to look like balanced design elements in your blog post.

Your blog post is going to be viewed on all different computers, platforms and browsers and what looks great on your computer, might not look the same on another.

The illustration below shows how left and right aligned images can be problematic.

In example 1, the images have different widths, and it looks sloppy.

In example 2, 3 and 4, the images have the same width and are inserted above the paragraph, so they look much better than example 1.

However they illustrate how the same text and images can appear on different browsers depending upon browser settings. You think your blog post is aligned beautifully, but someone else might see the images in an entirely different configuration depending upon how their browser treats font sizes and line height.

Also, beware of inserting an image in the middle of a word or sentence by accident. It might look fine when you preview your blog post. Because the text is wrapping to the right or left of the image, where it is placed in the word or sentence is not noticeable. But the appearance of your blog post when translated into other platforms, like rss feeds and emails, will degrade.

The code that your blog editor adds to the image to tell the image to go right or left on your blog’s website page is not recognized by email clients (gmail, mac mail, outlook etc..), so if your blog posts are being sent to subscribers via email, for them, any image that is aligned left or right on your blog will be stuck right in the middle of the text where you inserted it.

This image below illustrates an email that I received from a blog subscription. The blog post, although it looked fine on the blog, did not look good as an email.

For this reason, I recommend inserting images in between paragraphs and not aligning them left or right..

Think about how long your blog posts are going to be generally, figure out a simple  structure that would work for the majority of your blog posts, and follow that structure on all of your posts.

In Summary

• Keep the formatting simple.
• Follow a consistent pattern for the formatting of blog posts throughout the blog.
• Stick to the same capitalization rules throughout the blog.
• Choose three image widths for large, medium and thumbnail images and make sure all of your images throughout your blog, stick to these widths.

If your content is well designed, it will be easier to read, and the audience will value it more.

Photo credit 1 -  Photo credit 2

No related posts.

My colleague, Sheryl Dagostino from thispresentlife.com, told me a neat trick for composing content for your text widgets which I am going to share below. It makes it so easy to add images, links and custom coding to text widgets. You now will have one less reason to call your web designer, and more control of your blog’s appearance.

No related posts.

A great way to keep up to date with a blog that you love to follow is to subscribe to an email subscription of their posts. That way, when a new post is made, it lands right in your email inbox. If you want to offer this to people who visit your blog, it is easy to do.

The first step is to create a feedburner account for your blog. Feedburner is now one of the tools that google offers, so if you have a google account, you can log in, click the feedburner icon under your account settings

and fill in the address of your blog’s feed.

(If your blog is hosted on my server, the address would be [blog-address]/index.php/feed/rss/
So my blog feed URL or address, for example, is http://goffgrafix.com/blog/index.php/feed/rss/ )

Once you’ve burned your feed with feedburner, you click on the name of the feed, and then click on the publicize tab.

And then click on the email subscriptions link in the left hand menu

You then need to activate that service by clicking on the activate button.

Once you’ve activated the email subscriptions, feedburner gives you the embed code for the opt in form that will let visitors subscribe to your blog and have it arrive in their email inbox.

Highlight and copy all of the code, and then you can paste it into a blog post or a text widget on your blog website.

No related posts.

I receive literally hundreds of emails a day, and sometimes I am emailing back and forth to a client repeatedly while also trying to get done the programming on my plate. Now this in itself is probably not a great practice – I should have a time set aside just for email where I can give it 100% of my attention, but life comes at you from all directions in my field, and a client who has a burning question, or who has forgotten the log in to their content management system sometimes needs immediate assistance.

Looking at my emails several years back, I realized that when I made quick replies to client questions, I often forgot the basic courtesies that should be part of a professional correspondence: “Hello” and “Sincerely”. My rushed emails, bereft of the greeting and signature, appeared abrupt and rude in some cases.

I don’t want to be rude or abrupt to my clients. I may feel like I’m racing the clock in that moment and feel rush rush rushed.. but that doesn’t excuse sending a communication off without courtesy. My clients sometimes only know me through the emails that we exchange, so those emails inform their opinion of me and their experience doing business with me.

To stop this unintentional rudeness, I created a signature file for my emails that automatically appears on the email no matter what: when I create a new email, or when I hit reply. That signature actually contains the “Hi” at the beginning of it, as well as the “sincerely” and all my contact information at the end. That way I am forced to stop and look at it and write the name of my client after the “Hi”. On every email, I greet them by name, and on every email, they have my full name and all of my contact information.

Just the act of writing their name at the top often slows me down enough to make a more thoughtful reply than I might have if I was just typing a quick response and hitting the send button.

The last thing that I want to do is be  rude or abrupt. Communication is the groundwork for creating successful websites.

Below I have links to tutorials on how to set up custom signatures in different mail programs:

Outlook: http://www.ehow.com/how_4500972_set-up-outlook-signature.html

Thunderbird: http://www.ehow.com/how_4442853_create-signature-thunderbird-email.html

Mac Mail: http://oit.pdx.edu/how-to-mac-mail-signature

Gmail: http://www.ehow.com/how_4665440_add-signature-gmail.html

If you know any tips for setting up signatures in your email programs, please share them in the comments.

No related posts.

A number of my clients use it to collect payments on their websites because it is free to join, the fees are comparable to other merchant services and your customers no longer need a PayPal account to make a purchase or pay an invoice with PayPal. It is a great option for letting people pay you online.

Several weeks ago, a client of mine called because one of her customers kept having their credit card declined by PayPal and she wanted to know what could be the matter. We did some sleuthing. I called the PayPal customer service number (888-215-5506), but since the difficulty didn’t happen with a transaction on my PayPal account they couldn’t check the logs. When my client called, they were able to look at the error logs and we found out why the credit card would not go through.

AND it wasn’t for all your normal reasons like the billing address doesn’t match the credit card address or the card is maxed out. It was for a reason that never would have occurred to me.

When you go to check out with PayPal, there is an option to not check out with a PayPal account (see image below).

The reason why the customer’s credit card was being rejected was because the customer had a PayPal account with that credit card number recorded in it. However, the customer didn’t realize that they could pay by credit card logging into their PayPal account, or for some reason wanted not to log into their PayPal account, so they had clicked on “Don’t have a Paypal account” option and were trying to pay outside of their PayPal account.

PayPal assumes that if a credit card number is in someone’s PayPal account, and then a charge is run through on the same number but not through the PayPal account, there may be fraud involved. The card might have been lost or stolen.

If you have a PayPal account, the option “Don’t have a PayPal account” will not work unless you use a credit card number that is not associated with your PayPal account.

PayPal defaults, I believe, to extract payments from the bank account that you have on file. If times are lean and your bank account is feeling anemic, then you may hesitate to use PayPal for purchases. It is very very easy, however, to change the payment method for a purchase once you’ve logged into your PayPal account.

When you log into your PayPal account to make a purchase, there is a link to change your payment method.

When you click the change link, you can then select to pay with your credit card on file.

In conclusion, if you have a credit card on file with PayPal, and want to make purchases with that credit card, you need to do it by logging into your PayPal account and selecting it as a payment method. If you try to use it without logging into your PayPal account, chances are it will be declined.

No related posts.

There are any number of reasons why emails might bounce back. What is certain, is that when they bounce back, the server that bounced them will give you a reason why they bounced, right at the top of the bounced message. Usually they bounce for benign reasons that have nothing to do with who hosts your email.

For example:

You may be sending the recipient an attachment that is too large for their mailbox capacity. If that happen, there will be some text that states that the message size exceeded the fixed maximum message size. (see image below).

It could be that the email address is no longer valid, or has a typo in it. If this is the case, you will get a message saying that the address was rejected or that the recipient is not their customer or doesn’t exist.

See the two examples below:

It could be that the mailbox of the recipient has reached its quota or is full.

Often, the receiving person’s mail server is down or has a very large queue. When that is the case you will receive a message at the top saying that the email hasn’t been delivered yet, but your server will try again.

If your mail server has been blacklisted for spamming, then your email might bounce back as well. In that case there will be a clear message stating so.

If I am hosting your email, and you get a message about RBL lists and black lists, then please DO contact me immediately, forward me the bounced email and I will put the wheels in motion to fix the situation.

Can you think of other reasons why emails bounce? and what the clues are in the returned mail heading?

No related posts.

This tutorial is directed at videos that are hosted elsewhere and give you an embed code for adding them to your website. I took these screen shots when I was emailing directions to Barbara at Island Alpaca on how to add video to her website. Please check out her wonderful alpacas and alpaca products.

The first thing you need to do is find the video’s embed code. Often, when a movie that you are watching is over, it will give you the embed code at the end. For example, here is a screen shot of a video hosted by youtube.com. In this case, you would highlight all of the code in the embed field and copy it.

This screen shot below if from a video hosted by plumtv.com. Many of my local Martha’s Vineyard clients have videos produced by Plum TV that they want to put on their websites. On the screen shot below, the movie ends with the share tab open by default, but if you click to the right of it on the embed tab…

… it will open with the embed code that you can copy by clicking on the copy code button in the bottom right.

The screen shot below is showing the text editor that is used in the Island Alpaca content management system. What I suggested that Barbara do first, is to put a line of asterisks where she wants to place the embed code for the video – because once you switch to the code or source view, it is sometimes hard to tell where to put it if you don’t know HTML (and sometimes even if you do).

Next you need to switch to the code or source view of the editor.

In Barbara’s editor, you would click on the Source button in the top left.

If you were adding it to a blog post, you would click on the HTML tab in the top right.

And if you have the wysiwyg editor that many of my other content management systems use, you would click on the code icon < > on the bottom right.

All wysiwyg editors have some way of switching to view the source or code view. If you mouse over their icons, they will often tell you which one is for which.

Once you switch to the code view – look for those asterisks, and highlight them and replace them by pasting the embed code.

You may need to change the width and height of the video embed code so that it will fit in your website design. You can see in the pasted code where the width=”" and height=”" values are. Those numbers represent the number of pixels each attribute is allotted. Web pages show 72 pixels to the inch, and some websites layouts are pretty narrow, so you may need to adjust the width and height. For Barbara’s site I had her adjust the video from 640 pixels wide to 480 pixesl tall, to 420 pixels wide by 315 pixels tall. Embed code may have the width and height attributes in more than one place, so look at all of the code that you pasted.

Once you add the embed code and adjust it, save your changes and the video will display on your web page.

Not all wysiwyg or text editors will show that the video code is in place when not looking at it with the html or code view, and some of them will remove the code if you make subsequent changes to the page so make sure you keep a copy of the embed code for the video someplace handy, in case you need to replace it.

No related posts.

The first step is to brainstorm and jot down a list of what you think the phrases are that people are using who might want what your website offers. What are the phrases that people are typing into the search engine search boxes?  Keywords are a form of advertising. Make sure you only use keywords that match what your site offers. The search engines want to match people’s searches with websites that truly match those searches, so if you are selling affordable housing, don’t use the keyword phrase “ocean front villas”.  It is important to be honest.

If your website offers multiple things – homes for sale and vacation rentals, for example, put together a list for each facet of what you offer, so you would come up with one list for your home sales, and one list for your vacation rentals.

Keep in mind, also, that people might not be aware of your product name to search for it – so if you have a product with an obscure name that cures headaches – make sure your keywords include “headache cure”, “getting rid of headaches”, as opposed to the product name. Sometimes you need to optimize for the symptoms rather than the solution.

Then, go to the google keyword tool website: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

When you arrive there – click on the “Previous Interface” link in the top right of the page. (see image below)

Then, paste your list of keyword phrases into the field “Enter one keyword or phrase per line:” make sure that “Use synonyms” is checked, and then click on the button, “Get Keyword Ideas”. (see image below)

This will give you  your list of keyword phrases with how many times people use them to search.

To make the data easier to read, go to the show/hide columns drop down menu and HIDE the local search volume AND the advertiser competition. (see image below)

Make sure to select “Exact” from “match type” (see image below)

Then export your list to csv (for excel). Export a copy of the “Additional keywords to consider” as well that google lists under your list. (see image below)

Consolidate both excel files into one and then go through the keyphrases and eliminate any phrase that is not relevant to your website. Make sure that you only keep the keywords that are truly what your website is about.

The next step is to find out how competitive those keywords are. We do this by doing a google search for the keyword specifying that you want to see only websites that have that keyword in their title tag. If a website has the keyword in their title tag, then they are most likely your competition. You do this by typing

allintitle: “keyword”

make sure to put the keyword in quotes.

When you hit the Google Search button, the number of results will appear underneath the search bar. (see image below)

Add that result number next to your global monthly search volume in your excel sheet. In the image below I’ve named the allintitle results “competitors”. (see image below)

The keywords that are going to bring your site the most targeted traffic are the ones that have a low competitor number compared to the search volume number. You can certainly include some of the keywords that are not in the least competitive, if they are truly what your website is about, but also make sure to include the competitive search phrases. Also, make sure to include your business name in your keywords.

Where to put the keywords?

• Put them in the content of your pages – the text
• Put them in the content headings
  
• Put them in the meta tags
• Put them in alt tags of images and title tags of links

The more often the keyword is found on your site – or within links to your site – the better you will place in the search results for that keyword.

It is important to have the keyword not just in the metatags and not just in the page text, but in both places.

Include your keywords in  your page headings and in bold font – and also in internal text links that bring people from one page of your website to another.

META TAGS

Many of my content management systems give my clients an interface for adding and updating the meta tags on their website pages. The most important meta tag is the title tag. Make sure to include your best keyword phrases at the beginning of your title tag. Include your company name in the title tag as well – for your home page, about your company page and contact page.

Google will only show 60 – 70 characters of your title tag, but you can certainly make it longer.

The title tag of a page should include only keyword phrases that have to do with that specific page.

You should try to include 3 keyword phrases in your title tag:

Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword 1, Secondary Keyword 2

Put your keywords in your keywords meta tag. List the keyword phrases that have to do with the specific page, the most important first, and separate them by commas. The keywords meta tag is the least important meta tag. According to google webmaster central, google at this time disregards it completely for its search results. However, other search engines do look at it, and since you have the keywords handy in your excel sheet, go ahead and copy and paste them into this meta tag – it can’t hurt.

Put the keywords in your description meta tag. The description tag is often what search engines will show under your page listing in their results, so make sure it describes what the page is about and is phrased in a way that will make people want to click to the page. Read what google webmaster central has to say about the meta description tag.

This is a start to researching and adding keywords to your website.

Make sure to optimize each page of your site specifically for the content on that page. Make sure your keywords are a good match to what you really offer.

If you have separate areas of your site, create separate lists of competitive keywords for each section.

No related posts.

For security reasons (to prevent “PHP include” hacker attacks),  some servers set the allow_url_fopen and allow_url_include PHP directives to off. If you see errors similar to the following on your website, then your website (or software you have installed on your website) uses insecure PHP calls.

Common Errors

Warning: fopen() [function.fopen]: URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration in /……../ on line (..)

Warning: file_get_contents() [function.file-get-contents]: URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration in in /……../ on line (..)

Warning: include() [function.include]: URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration in /……../ on line (..)

Warning: getimagesize() [function.getimagesize]: URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration in in /……../ on line (..)

Warning: readfile() [function.readfile]: URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration in in /……../ on line (..)

Solution

WordPress / Joomla / Drupal Software: These applications do not use functions that require allow_url_fopen or allow_url_include to be turned on. However, certain third party plugins may require changes. If you see any of the errors above, try to isolate which plugin is causing the issue and replace it with an alternative plugin. You should also consider reporting the issue to the plugin developer so that they may fix it in an upcoming release. Alternatively, you can check out some of the examples below and attempt to fix the errors yourself.

Note: Do not attempt to fix issues yourself if you do not have prior software development experience. If the below does not make sense, you should consult with your web professional.

The errors above manifest themselves when your website is attempting to retrieve outside web URLs. The solution is to use the PHP Curl library to do so instead, which is more secure. How you use PHP ‘s Curl library to circumvent this issue depends on which warning you’ve received.

Example 1: Warning: fopen() [function.fopen]:

$file = “http://news.google.com/news?ned=us&topic=h&output=rss”;

$xml_parser = xml_parser_create();
xml_set_element_handler($xml_parser, “startElement”, “endElement”);
xml_set_character_data_handler($xml_parser, “characterData”);

if (!($fp = fopen($file, “r”))) {
die(“could not open XML input”);
}

while ($data = fread($fp, 4096)) {
if (!xml_parse($xml_parser, $data, feof($fp))) {
die(sprintf(“XML error: %s at line %d”,
xml_error_string(xml_get_error_code($xml_parser)),
xml_get_current_line_number($xml_parser)));
}
}

In the above example, an attempt to open a Google RSS feed is being made. The fopen() call will fail because $file is an outside web site, and the rest of the code will not be executed. To properly load the RSS feed and parse, this snipit of code would need to be rewritten as follows:

$xml_parser = xml_parser_create();
xml_set_element_handler($xml_parser, “startElement”, “endElement”);
xml_set_character_data_handler($xml_parser, “characterData”);

$file = “http://news.google.com/news?ned=us&topic=h&output=rss”;

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $file);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$xmldata = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

$xmldata = split(“\n”,$xmldata);

foreach ($xmldata as $data) {
if (!xml_parse($xml_parser, $data)) {
die(sprintf(“XML error: %s at line %d”,
xml_error_string(xml_get_error_code($xml_parser)),
xml_get_current_line_number($xml_parser)));
}
}

Example 2: Warning: file_get_contents() [function.file-get-contents]:

<?php

$contents = file_get_contents(‘http://www.cnn.com/’);

echo $contents;

?>

In the above example, the file_get_contents function is used to retrieve the content of the CNN website. You can accomplish the same thing safely using CURL as follows:

<?php

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, ‘http://www.cnn.com’);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$contents = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

// display file
echo $contents;
?>

Example 3: Warning: include() [function.include]:

Including files from web hosts is not allowed.

<? php include(“http://www.example.com/new.php”); ?>

If the file that you are trying to include is local, use relative paths instead , not the web URL. Otherwise, use the following:

<?php

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, ‘http://www.example.com/mew.php’);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$contents = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

// display file
echo $file_contents;
?>

Example 4: Warning: getimagesize() [function.getimagesize]:

getimagesize() allows you to get the height, width and size of an image file. To use getimagesize() safely, CURL can be used to get the remote file, the data can be saved to a local temporary image file and getimagesize() can be used on the local version.

<php

$filename = “http://www.example.com/example.jpg”;

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $filename);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

$contents = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

$new_image = ImageCreateFromString($contents);
imagejpeg($new_image, “temp.jpg”,100);

$size = getimagesize(“temp.jpg”);

// width and height

$width = $size[0];
$height = $size[1];

Example 5: Warning: readfile() [function.readfile]:

<?php

$contents = readfile(‘http://www.example.com/some.txt’);

echo $contents;

?>

In the above example, the readfile function is used to retrieve the content of a remote text file. You can accomplish the same thing safely using CURL as follows:

<?php

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, ‘http://www.example.com/some.txt’);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$contents = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

// display file
echo $contents;
?>

The above examples are not guaranteed to run without changes, they are strictly guidance to illustrate how to safely retrieve off-site content.

No related posts.

LINKING TO A PDF FROM WITHIN A BLOG POST

To Link to a PDF from within a blog post, click on the add image icon.

Select the PDF file and upload.

Once it is uploaded, click on the “Insert into post” button to insert a link to it directly into your post.

LINKING TO A PDF FILE FROM A LINK OR FROM AN IMAGE IN A POST

If you want to create a link to it from an image, or from within your LINKS, then, instead of clicking on the “insert into post” button,  copy the LINK URL and then hit the “Save all changes” button.

You can then paste that URL into the web address of a link that you’ve created (see image below)..

Or, if you want to link to the PDF file from an image in a post, click on the image that you want to link the PDF to, and click on the insert link icon..

and add the LINK URL in the LINK URL field, clicking “Update” when you’re done.

ADDING A PDF FILE TO YOUR MEDIA LIBRARY

You can also add the PDF file directly to your media library by clicking on the “Add New” link under Media in your left hand navigation.

Select the PDF file from your computer.

Then click on the save changes.

Once a PDF file is in your library, to find out its URL so that you can link to it, click on the Library link under media.

Then click on the “View” link under the file that you want to get the URL of.

That will pull up the name of the PDF file, linked to the PDF file. Right click (if you don’t have a right click on your mouse, hold down the control key when you click) on the link and choose “Copy Link Location” from the contextual menu.

There are probably a slew of other ways to add PDF files to your blog posts. If you have your own version, please share by commenting on this post. Thanks!

No related posts.

Generating passive income is a must for the self employed and creative people in this world. There are only so many billable hours in the day, and it is hard to make a living if you are just billing billable hours.

I decided to experiment with a digital product and adding it to my blog to see how easy the process would be.

Creating A Digital Product

E-books: If you are going to be selling any form of e-book, it is generally delivered as a pdf file. The best software to use to generate the pdf files, in my opinion, is adobe acrobat professional. However, there are free pdf writers available for creative people on a budget. Cute Pdf is an example of a free pdf writing software.

Audio Files: If you are going to be selling mp3 or audio files there are a number of great software options available for recording and generating mp3 files. One free software that I recommend to clients who want to generate vocal audio and not professional music quality is Audacity.

My Journey – bundling audio and pdf: I happened to purchase finale print music software several weeks back and spent a euphoric couple of days experimenting with writing beginner/intermediate piano scores. I was able to save these scores as pdf files by using adobe acrobat professional. Now I have a handful of piano scores suitable for the beginner/intermediate player and so thought to myself, why not bundle a score with mp3 file to sell digitally for this blog example?

First of all, I want people to be able to hear what it sounds like when played. Finale Print Music can generate a digitally produced  audio mp3 file of the music score. I needed to insert the mp3 file in this blog post so that people can hear a sample of the song.  Supplying a sample listen is a great idea for musicians selling mp3 files, or for experts selling audio files. If you are thinking of selling an audio file, I recommend installing the plugin below so that visitors to your site can easily listen to a sample.

WORDPRESS PLUGIN TIP: I installed the following plugin into my wordpress blog so that my audio links would be playable with an audio player.

http://wpaudioplayer.com/download

It generates an audio player just like the one here. Click on it to listen to my Simple Song 1 for the piano.
Simple Song 1

If you want to play audio on your blog, I highly recommend wpaudioplayer.

3 Examples of Digital Delivery/E-commerce Options

1. Option 1: free and the least passive:
   The first option for selling digital products would be to use paypal and then manually email people the product. Setting up a business paypal account is free, and then you can sell products and services online and paypal takes a small percentage of sales. This is the least passive option as you have to manually email people the digital product, but it is free. You can use the steps that I illustrate in this tutorial on adding e-commerce to your blog: http://goffgrafix.com/blog/index.php/2009/04/adding-e-commerce-to-your-blog/ to generate the code for your buy now button and copy and paste it into your blog post. You would then have to manually email the digital product to the customer once you receive notice of the purchase.
2. Option 2: e-junkie.com
   With e-junkie.com you can sell up to 10 products for only $5/month, and it ties into paypal. Click here to view the complete list of features that e-junkie offers. With e-junkie the process is automated. When a customer clicks the buy now code that e-junkie supplies you, e-junkie will automatically send your customer to a page to download the product when the payment goes through. They will also email the customer a time sensitive link to the product download page.
3. Option 3: 1shoppingcart.com/marketerschoice.com
   1shoppingcart.com/marketerschoice.com is a robust and comprehensive shopping cart service that offers digital products options, autoresponder capabilities, recurring billing and much more. I use them for my hosting/web design business, so they were the obvious choice, for me, for selling digital products. After I upload my product, the cart generates a buy now link that I can just paste into this blog post below. Voila!

Purchase Simple Song 1 Piano Score for the beginner /intermediate piano player.
$2.75
Score comes bundled with mp3 file.

Listen to the score below:

Simple Song 1

Your Experience with selling digital products

Please share your experience with selling digital products. What e-commerce system do you use? Do you sell pdf files? audio files? Is there a software that you have found useful in generating digital products? Please comment below. I look forward to your input.

No related posts.

I want to share them with you.

FREE SERVICES (with upgrades)

1. yousendit.com
   Need to send a file that is too large to e-mail? With yousendit.com you can send unlimited 2GB files and folders.
2. altertra.com
   Alertra is a website monitoring service. I use its spot check to see if a website is being connected to globally. It will show you the connectivity of your website from locations around the world and how long it took them to connect to your site.
3. ipchicken.com
   Go to ipchicken.com and it will show you your current IP address.
4. domaintools.com
   I use domaintools.com to look up where a website is registered and hosted. Often my clients don’t remember where they registered their domain names, and domaintools.com is an easy way to look up the information.
5. tweetlater.com
   I have set up tweetlater to email me replies to my tweets and also tweets with keywords that interest me. On days where I don’t have time to log into twitter, I can still stay somewhat connected.

SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES

1. browsercam.com
   I use browsercam’s remote access to test websites that I am developing on different platforms and browsers.
2. lynda.com
   lynda.com offers tutorials on every software that you can imagine. This is the best source for software tutorials that I have found.

Is there an online service that you use? that helps your productivity and that you swear by? Please share in the comments area.

No related posts.