Dew Point on SEO

Trouble Shooting WordPress Shopping Cart WP-Ecommerce

david — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 02:49:51 +0000

Using PayPal with WP-Ecommerce you’ll often find that on your first test trial (you should always test) you’ll get an error saying: “Return to Merchant. Unable to process payment. Please contact the merchant as the shipping address provided by the merchant is invalid, and the merchant has requested that your order must be shipped to that address.”

To fix this go to merchants/paypal_multiple.php

Find this line:
$data['address_override'] = ‘1′;
(should be line #46)
and delete it or comment it out.

Anyone know how to clear up this warning? Please leave a comment answer.

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/shopgree/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-shopping-cart/merchants/paypal_multiple.php on line 82

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/shopgree/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-shopping-cart/merchants/paypal_multiple.php:82) in /home/shopgree/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-shopping-cart/merchants/paypal_multiple.php on line 237

Advertising on YouTube

david — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 05:02:05 +0000

It’s here. Advertising on YouTube. Ever since Google bought YouTube they’ve struggled to figure out how to monitize. It appears they’ve hit on their strategy and you can take advantage of it.

How does it work?

Being called pay per click by some it is really pay per view. Just like in Adwords, you set up a campaign, choose your keywords, choose how much you want to pay and set a daily budget.

Launch your video and when people search YouTube, and by the way more people search YouTube than Yahoo!, your video may show up for their search.

Is it a good idea? Well it can be, but it would be worth your while to spend some time looking at the types of videos that people watch on YouTube. Your not going to get many viewers if you launch a boring commercial.

Keep LEGS in mind.

Laughs, educational, grungy, sexy. Those are the kinds of videos people watch

For full details go to https://ads.youtube.com/

Design for Internet Explorer not Firefox

david — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 22:30:28 +0000

I am shocked by the completely unacceptable behavior of so many designers today that design sites to show up well in Firefox while altogether ignoring Internet Explorer.

If you’re hiring a designer one of the criteria you should insist upon is that the site design displays well in Internet Explorer 6, IE7 and depending on when you get around to reading this IE8. I personally hate IE, it’s limited, unfriendly, crashes and on and on, but that doesn’t matter. The fact is that 75% of all people use IE as their primary or only browser. Do you want to turn off 75% of your visitors? I didn’t think so.

If you’re a designer it’s fine to design with Firefox, but your job isn’t done until you’ve made sure that the site renders appropriately in at least the latest 3 versions of IE. I know, you hate IE you wish they would get their crap together and your shocked that they can’t even make IE so that sites display the same in their own browsers. I am with you, but when it comes to a client’s site you’re being completely negligent and doing your client a disservice if the site doesn’t display well in IE.

The bottom line is that visitors stay on sites that are professional looking, appealing and work well, so design for IE.

Dealing with Comment Spam

david — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 18:08:02 +0000

Just spammed another comment. Here’s what I sent to the spammer.

Your ip and email address have now been added to Akismet database of spammers. This comment was not relevant to this post that makes it spam.

Now there’s a good chance that the user didn’t use their real email and I am fully aware of that, but it takes me two seconds to send the email and if they get the message that a legitimage comment must be germain to the post, or at least to another commenter’s comment, it was worth it.

Getting Links in WordPress Comments to Open in a New Window

david — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 05:42:14 +0000

WordPress has gotten better over the years about seo and helping bloggers and site owners to build traffic, but it still has a couple of weaknesses. One of the features that I am not fond of is how it opens links in comments in the same window. If this bothers you too, here’s the solution…

First a hat tip to Adham who worked this out on a project we’re doing.

What you want to do is find the file wp-includes/formatting.php

and replace this line

return $matches[1] . “$url” . $ret;

with

return $matches[1] . “$url” . $ret;

That’s it. People can still click a link in the comment and go to that page, but now getting back to your fabulous content isn’t so difficult for them.