Google’s Page Rank Update
Looks like Page Rank (PR) has been updated in the Google Toolbar, and I’m pretty happy with the results this time around. Personally I didn’t see too much jump in any of my sites. I had a couple of sites bounce from 3 to 4, and one from 4 to 5. I’m most happy that a couple of friends who just started blogging have seen some real success. Both started at PR 0s, and now are at 3 and 4 in less than a year. Pretty cool!
Removing Author Names from FeedBurner Feeds
Ever wanted to force the author name in your rss2 feed supplied to FeedBurner? The group blog I’m building gives authors anonymity, and that’s pretty easy to do on the site itself. But after a few test posts I noticed that the author name stilled showed up on the FeedBurner feed, which is actually read from the rss2 feed I’m creating on the site.
How to change this?
Open up the feed-rss2.php file located in the wp-includes directory of your WordPress installation and look for the line
<dc:creator><?php the_author() ?></dc:creator>
Remove the php code and insert whatever you’d like to use for the author tag. WARNING: When you upgrade WordPress this file will be overwritten, so you’ll have to go back in and change it again. I got caught on that one upgrading from WordPress 2.5 to 2.51
Google AdSense Revenue Sharing
I’m working on a group blog project and I wanted to share AdSense revenue with my contributers. I quickly found Harley’s WordPress plugin for AdSense sharing and got it activated–it’s very easy to use and works nicely. The only problem is that the new style of AdSense ads cannot be assigned to another publisher just by changing the publisher ID. In order to make this work you have to assign a field with Harley’s plugin and the users have to go set up their own ads that are just like yours with their Publisher ID and the GoogleAdSlot value.
This is a little dangerous because it lets users who don’t know what they are doing screw up or leaves you open to displaying horrendous ads on your site. So I looked around the web and found some examples of the older ads. Here are the ones I’m using if you’d like to copy and paste them if you’re using Harley’s plugin–may save you a little time.
Old code for the 468×15 text link units
<script type=”text/javascript”><!–
google_ad_client = “xxxxxxxxxx”;
google_alternate_ad_url = “”;
google_alternate_color = “FFFFFF”;
google_ad_width = 468;
google_ad_height = 15;
google_ad_format = “468×15_0ads_al_s”;
google_ad_type = “text_image”;
google_ad_channel =”xxxxxxxxxx”;
google_color_border = “FFFFFF”;
google_color_bg = “FFFFFF”;
google_color_link = “000000″;
google_color_url = “000000″;
google_color_text = “cccccc”;
//–></script>
<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”>
</script>
Old code for the 300×250 text and image ads
script type=”text/javascript”><!–
google_ad_client = “xxxxxxxx”;
google_alternate_ad_url = “”;
google_alternate_color = “FFFFFF”;
google_ad_width = 300;
google_ad_height = 250;
google_ad_format = “300×250_as”;
google_ad_type = “text_image”;
google_ad_channel =”xxxxxxxxxx”;
google_color_border = “FFFFFF”;
google_color_bg = “FFFFFF”;
google_color_link = “000000″;
google_color_url = “000000″;
google_color_text = “000000″;
//–></script>
<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”>
</script>
Old code for a 468×60 text ad
<script type=”text/javascript”><!–
google_ad_client = “xxxxxxxx”;
google_ad_channel = “xxxxxxx”;
google_alternate_ad_url = “”;
google_ad_width = 468;
google_ad_height = 60;
google_ad_format = “468×60_as”;
google_color_border = “FFFFFF”;
google_color_bg = “FFFFFF”;
google_color_link = “000000″;
google_color_url = “000000″;
google_color_text = “000000″;
//–></script>
<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”>
</script>
If these are the ad types you were looking for, I’ve tested them and they work. Thanks again to Harley for writing such a great and useful plugin!
Free vs. Membership
But that’s ok. We’re going to trim the site down and launch it as a free resource supported by ads. I think in the long run we can do better using this method. As Seth Godin has pointed out repeatedly, attention is the best thing you can get from your market. If you have their attention the rest is easy. It seemed as though we’d have a tough time getting anyone’s attention based on our research, but by being a free resource we should be able to pull it off.
This also makes everything a little easier on the technical end. We don’t have to deal with managing memberships, and if we ever decide to grow to a membership site we still have the option by offering premium features like video examples which were going to slow down our time to market in the first place.
Launch date just got moved up!
Test Driving bbPress
I’m going to wait until I’ve had some time to test it out until I spend a lot of time with it. However, I like the idea of a message board that integrates with WordPress, and I think it will be a great platform long term, so I’m willing to be an early adopter and at least give it a shot. Let me know what you think, and be on the lookout for random and sporatic changes to the bbPress installation here.
Back to The Forums
I think I jumped the gun a little bit selecting a forum. After a lot of research I’m now leaning towards vBulletin. I got caught up in the “freeness” of other boards and didn’t consider the fact that vBulletin is relatively cheap–a couple of hundred bucks is nothing compared to the time I’d have to spend integrating another board with Wordpress and PayPal to handle membership. All I have to do with vBulletin is deal with the theme integration and I should be done.
A Good CSS Plugin For Firefox
Over the weekend I spent a lot of time messing with WordPress themes. I’m definitely not an artist, and I’m barely literate at CSS, but I would have been lost without this nice little Firefox plugin that lets you see the CSS tags on a page live.
I used it mostly to check which tag different parts of the site were using, and get all the properties–makes it much easier to figure out why what you have doesn’t work what you need to rip from one that does work.
Testing Some Changes Here
Obviously, I’m testing out a new theme here. I’m basing it off of BwDec2007, changing up the colors, adding the use of widgets, moving a few things around, and adding some logos and other things. I think the best way for those of us who aren’t artistic to come up with a new theme is to use one that someone else did and change it up.
Seminars and Survey Software
To kick off the actual content end of our membership site, we’re going to conduct a seminar for some local people who are in our target market. We’re doing this for free, by the way. The way we look at it, it’s the least we can do for the valuable service they’re providing us.
The attendants of this seminar are filling out an online survey so that we can tailor the seminar for exactly what they need. We’ll video this presentation and post it on our website, making everyone who attended the initial seminar Charter Members–free for life. It should also help us tremendously to have them out spreading the word for us. Again, the least we could do is give them the seminar for free.
If you’re just getting started with a membership site and want to do some surveys for your initial users, I feel really comfortable recommending SurveyMonkey to do a quick, easy, and free survey. I was able to set up an 8 question survey this morning while holding a squirming baby.
We’re only looking at 20 or so respondents for our first survey, so it made sense to do it with them instead of host our own.
Narrowed Down Forum Choices?
The two options I’ve been looking at today are phpBB3 and bbPress, which is supposed to integrate well with WordPress, but still seems a little shaky. My other big issue with bbPress is that I’m going to need to be able to handle several different account levels.
Here’s what we were thinking as far as memberships…
Admins–obviously, the master users
Publishers–there wouldn’t be many publishers, but we don’t want to be the only ones charged with posting content.
Charter Members–these are members that are with us from the beginning. They’re helping us get started by filling out online surveys (more on that in a different post) and contributing resources. We want the site to be free forever for these members.
Premium Members–pay a monthly membership and have access to everything on the site so long as their payments are current.
Regular Members–free membership, but limited in what they can see. Basically, we’ll be showing them just enough to make them want to be Premium Members.
Guests–can see only a couple of articles and evidence that there is plenty more there. For instance, there will be several podcasts and videos available or Regular Members.
We’re also considering a Pay Per View model for many of our videos and possibly for podcasts for people who just want specific information. They’d have to be regular members, of course, and hopefully they’d become Premium Members.
So our message board software needs to be able to distinguish between these users as well. I’m big on free software, but it’s looking like it would be a good investment to buy aMemberPro. It integrates well with WordPress and phpBB3, plus handles all the PayPal stuff.
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