Some adverts for loans appeared recently, probably because I mentioned an interesting deal from Lloyd’s TSB.
So I wondered if I could make more appear by mentioning things likes loans, finance and mortgages. 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.
When I came up with the idea for mini themes it occurred to me that it could be a reasonable possibility for advertising. Reasonable in theory only since my limited traffic would be a problem. But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t affiliate stuff up :P
So here’s the first one: a fairly unobtrusive advert for a website of mine offering cheap international calls. I say unobtrusive simply because the layout of the content of the page is identical to before. And if you browse at a low resolution you don’t see the advert at all.
One quick note, you have to view the post specifically to see the theme. I intentionally stopped them from showing on the homepage.
Not having a computer also means that I don’t have internet access outside of work.
I say this just to make it look like I’m still updating the blog.
I decided to take my idea for nicer searching in Wordpress one step further. Now if you try to get to a page that doesn’t exist it automatically redirects to the search page. So http://www.oliverbrown.me.uk/galaxia will return search results for “galaxia”.
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 relevant page) but for now should be redirected. 3XX are somewhat confusing.
Anyway if you want that behaviour, 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 servers and search engines etc. since the server is no longer sending a 404 Not Found code.
The Wordpress wp_options table manage to get corrupted. I tried MySQL’s repair but the table was still not well so I had to copy the table from another installation and reset everything.
For one scary moment nothing was displayed on the site but then I realised that was because it was trying to load a theme that didn’t exist. Everything is happy again now.
TextLinkAds are offering $100 of free text link ads. The catch? You have to buy $125 of advertising. The catch isn’t as big as you’d think. I assumed it meant you spend $125 and get another $100 free, but it doesn’t. You order $125 worth of advertising and only pay for $25. You still need to be careful though. You’re actually ordering a subscription and if you don’t cancel within a month you will be charged again.
TextLinkAds sell hard coded text links (oddly enough) on publishers websites. Hard coded means detectable by search engines. And you can get them at one fifth the “normal” price. To qualify just enter “New client” as the coupon code.
First of all I should point out that I think I now have 4 posts called “Comment spam”. I just got 200 spammy comments in 12 hours. Luckily most of them are coming from the same IP address so they were easy to deal with.
Ooooh, the blog has been up for a whole year :D
Oooh, Feedburner have put my new Item Age feed flare unit thingy on their 101 Flare Ideas for a Better Tomorrow page (#10).
It lets you display the age of an item in a Feedburner feed in a nice human format (17 minutes old, 4 days old) etc. It’s really dead simple but I figured Feed Flare might be useful and it was good idea to practice before writing something really cool.
You can see it in action in my feed.
I did a bit of comment moderation for Oliver today, since he had a few obvious spam ones. Firstly I didn’t know I could actually moderate comments, but there you go… Secondly, why do people try to submit such obvious spam, I mean it didn’t even try to get around the spam filter! Plus its not even remotely tempting to click on them, so what the author aimed to get out of it I just don’t know! Anyway, three cheers for the WordPress spam detector! :D