Archive for Wordpress

Inspect your Elements

Editing a website,  especially a CMS based site thay had a theme and CSS in for example WordPress it can be hard to do, getting the look and feel you really want is diffucult and you may feel restricted to what the theme has to offer.  Powerful tools either are included in modern browsers or can be added to them to allow you to inspect elements of a website and play with the look and feel without changing the website code directly.

Firefox has a nice extention you can install called Firebug, by inspecting an element it gives you control of what drives the look/feel of a website such as the  CSS.  If, for example a logo or image is not where you want it, you can right click it and usually there is a menu item to inspect Element, you can then change parameters of that element such as positioning until you have something you like,  you can locate where in the CSS this is them controlled and go and make changes to the code of the site making the change permanent,  its almost like vitual exploratory surgery if a website.

I use these tools when working on WordPress sites to disect a theme and customise it to be more to what the customer wants when they come to us for a web design project.  Islandnet.com can be hired to make changes to your site.

 

New Year SU Blues

I am finding that StumbleUpon is not having such a huge impact on my traffic in 2012,  now they have revamped and face lifted the site but the mechanics still seem to be the same.  I’m thinking it may be that the holidays are over and everyone’s knuckling down at work,  my big fear is that StumbleUpon’s new design has ended up culling its following.

I am actively looking for the next big thing for driving traffic my way.

Blogging about products can earn $

I’m using a http://www.bo.lt account to share some of my website earning successes,  one below leading up to Christmas was a geeky gifts posting.

http://robtinbc.bo.lt/2hedj#.TxznvZCYSSo

I have spoke about viglink before,  its my understanding that you dont have to use cloudflare (traffic washing and site optimization service that is free) to use viglink,  I do believe they have code widgets you can embed.

I regret not discovering viglink earlier as this posting was viral in November and December as well as a little into January and I would of seriously cashed in if I got it setup before Christmas but I am going to try and be more aware of product blogging in conjunction with holidays and whats trending in the world on things like Android Market, Google Trends and Twitter.

Looking at my Geeky gifts postings I could of improved allot on it, the link to the buy is the price but I could of made this more obvious and captured more click through traffic and improved some of the layout.

I’m enjoying my efforts,  its like playing the slots and Vegas,  its a little hit and miss but can be lucrative if your in the right place at the right time and its fun, or I think so.

CloudFlare – Love it!

I’m loving the service provided by cloudflare.com, I have been using it for only a few days but it has saved me GB’s of bandwidth,  made my site load faster with its caching and using the add-on from https://www.viglink.com I have made $24 in 2 days from people clicking on products and buying them.

Because my website traffic goes through cloudflare.com to my hosting company islandnet.com cloudflare is able to manipulate the data with my permission (see Cloudflare terms of use as they ad tracking information etc) and by enabling viglink.com’s service any product manufacturer or re-seller that is on viglink’s database automatically becomes a link through to the website of the re-seller/manufacturer and if someone purchases an item then I get a little kick back.

I have a posting for Geeky Gifts on my crazyasabagofhammers.com website and each gift links to a page where you can but it,  that posting went viral after being hit up on reddit.com and thanks to that person who posted it I got $24 in revenue.

Now if I was to do a website that specifically was product related like a review site then I could cash in I think.

How do I stop some someone loading images from my wp-content?

Does anyone know a way to stop people linking to images for my post diirectly,  I see in my web stats all the time direct links to images such as:

/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/wpid-facebook_302985649.jpg

What I would like to do is capture these and redirect them to the page or post that the image is on as I probably am loosing ad revenue from people stumbling the image and then others directly loading it and I want to minimize that.

I suppose I could use htaccess and redirect any image request coming from stumbleupon.com to a page in my site but I want something that could cleanly redirect any request from any domain that is requesting an image linked in a post to open the post and not the image.

 Anyone?!