As part of the relaunch I’ve finally upgraded WordPress to a more respectable (and secure) version, found a new theme and added some cool stuff, including OpenID support for comment posting.

All the posts and comments should be intact and everything should be working properly, but random behaviour for the next few days shouldn’t be unexpected…

Although the theory is essentially the same as PayPerPost, the implementation is different. In PPP advertisers list opportunities which bloggers can the accept. The price paid ranges from about $2.50 to $10 (with the most common being $4 or $5). ReviewMe works the other way round. Bloggers list their blogs with a price (determined by ReviewMe) and advertisers choose which ones they want to review their product or service. The price paid is dependent on the blog (how exactly they determine I’m not sure but it seems to be some sort of PageRank, Alexa, back-links type combination) and seems to be significantly higher. Of course you’re likely to get fewer offers though.

One offer they seem to be giving to everyone is to review ReviewMe itself (eerily like this) so every blogger accepted should earn something from them. And although I didn’t look at their payout details specifically, I would guess it’s the same as TextLinkAds – at the end of the month by PayPal with no minimum (and possibly other options with a minimum or a fee).

Some articles are essentially timeless however. If you’re lucky and lots of people link to them you should be able to get some steady search engine traffic but people looking for something that specific aren’t likely to hang around after reading them. So FeedCycle.com have come up with a reasonably clever way of letting you push your old content but still keeping a blogesque feel to it.

The idea is to create a custom feed of a subsection of your content. The example they push a lot is a podcast “series” about the same topic, but it can be any thematically linked (and generally ordered) series of posts from your blog. When someone subscribes they get the first post in the series. The next day, they get the next post and so on until the end of the series.

There is a plug-in somewhere for WordPress that lets you mark posts as part of a series and to create navigation links to quickly get between them. Used in conjunction with this would let your users read through the whole series or just sit back and have it delivered. Now if only I ever posted such a series…

Now I’ve decided to muddy the waters a little with regards to PayPerPost in a sort of confusing double bluff sort of way. Most of the opportunities on PayPerPost are almost impossible to post in a subtle way. Some on the other hand are fairly sensible, except for the fact that they want “buzz” (over the top praise for their service) meaning they aren’t suitable for most people either. So I’ve decided to be honest. That doesn’t mean I’m necessarily going to be open about what is or isn’t PayPerPost motivated. But bear in mind that I doubt really negative (or at least sarcastic) reviews will get paid.

And that brings us back to Christian debt consolidation. That site I have emblazoned with a link has some, er, “resources” regarding christian debt help. Those resources are Google Ads. Five keyword heavy pages about the advantages of Christian debt consolidation and why Christian debt consolidation is better than secular debt consolidation (atheist debt consolidation?) and three ads units per page. The irony for me at least is the obvious American slant – none of the adverts I see mention Christian at all. We don’t really have a strong religious right wing over here so marketing things as specifically Christian doesn’t help.

And if you get there by mistake they have some handy links about timeshares, cord blood and student loans. We’re talking A-grade top quality content here folks.

It has however pissed quite a few people off. Jason, CEO of Weblogs seems to be one of the loudest. I’m going to take the wimpy way out and simply say it’s a tool with potential, that can be abused.

But in the long that’s not a problem for the blogosphere. If you destroy your own integrity by blatantly posting ads instead of actual content you will lose out as surely as if you filled the page with conventional advertising. If you don’t annoy your readers however, you will be fine. In this case it means choosing “opportunities” (that’s what PPP call them) that are actually relevant. That’s how Google AdSense came to be accepted, remember?

The funniest part of course is the number of comments from people who read the title of the post but not the content and just threw a normal anti-anti Linux rant.

Unfortunately these things only work if you have a fair amount of traffic in the first place and I probably don’t quite qualify

Linux, traffic, Linux sucks

Anyway, it should now never be down for more than a few minutes…

bash, Linux, servers]]>

Just mentioning loans once isn’t going to do it so I should mention loans a few times. A stray mention of debt management might also help.

Of course my demographic isn’t really geared towards finance topics like loans or money lending. So just think of this as an experiment.

loans, mortgages, finance, credit, money, AdSense]]>

If you want to do it yourself, you need to do two things. First you need to redirect error pages to a custom PHP page so add the following line to the top of your .htaccess file:

ErrorDocument: 404error.php

Now you need to create 404error.php and make it redirect to the search page by adding the following to it:

header('Location: http://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . '/search.php?s=' . $_SERVER['REDIRECT_SCRIPT_URL']);

After doing this it had me thinking about status codes. By default that will generate a 302 Found HTTP status code. A bit of reading led me to decide that 303 See Other was a better response since the request might correspond to a page in the future (and presumably a relevent page) but for now should be redirected. 3XX are somewhat confusing…

Anyway if you want that behavious, add this line too:

header('Status: 303 See Other');

Finally, you should think a little before implementing this since any random page accessed could now be cached by proxy serversand search engines etc. since the server is no longer sending a 404 Not Found code.

HTTP, status codes, WordPress]]>