RL Digital

Javascripts to hide email addresses from spammers have been around for a while but perhaps you missed this one. I have been using it more and more for my client’s HTML-based websites.

If the email address is: joe@mydomain.com, most websites use:

<a href="mailto:joe@mydomain.com">joe@mydomain.com</a>

That line of basic HTML is easily harvested by spambots. Within a few weeks, the spam will start trickling in. After a few months, there will be a flood of annoying spam emails.

What can you do? Start with a fresh email address and use this small JavaScript:

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eBay’s new affiliate program, eBay Partner Network, is an excellent source of income for product-related blogs and websites. It takes some skill, however, to integrate eBay links and images into content and templates. The program offers several creatives that can be pasted into sidebar widgets. However, I found them to be slow-loading as well as poorly converting (to sales).

I decided to make my own eBay Sidebar Widget. You can see an example of the widget running in the sidebar just to the right. I have outlined the steps below. The WordPress PHP widget and TWP auction code are free.

Steps to make your own eBay widget

1. Download and install the WordPress PHP Code Widget.
2. Download TWP Auctions.
3. Upload the files twpauctions.php and twpfunctions.php to your root directory.
4. Go to your Widgets Page and add one PHP Code Widget.
5. Paste in the TWP code into the PHP Widget.

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The introduction of sidebar widgets in WordPress have resulted in a huge time savings. Gone are the days of pasting code into sidebar.php just see your layout go wacky. The capabilities of widgets in the basic WordPress installation are, however, very limited. By default, all widgets appear wherever the sidebar is loaded within your theme. If you are using widgets to display ads, you cannot choose on which pages the widgets appear.

Slayer’s Custom Widget Plugin solves this problem. This plugin enables you to select which widgets appear on specific posts, pages, categories, author’s posts and tag pages. You can even configure where widgets are displayed per WordPress template using conditional tags.

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What’s up with Askimet these days? This well-known WordPress plugin has been letting foul comment spam through on two of my blogs including RL-Digital. To solve the problem, I ditched Askimet and replaced it with the Defensio plugin.

Unlike Askimet, Defensio at least has some adjustments. And, it is an adaptive filter, which will improve with time. You may need to give it a few days to learn, but quite quickly you should see spam eliminated that is sneaking by Askimet.

To help Defensio learn, restore good comments that were incorrectly marked as spam, and mark errant spams as spam. Also, if you do not agree with a comment but it is not spam, make sure to delete it instead of marking it as spam.

You will need an API Key to activate the plugin. You can get one for free by registering on the Defensio site. To see your stats, login to the Defensio site and go to ‘Statistics’. To use the plugin on multiple sites, make sure to generate a unique API key for each site.

Genkisan, the webmaster at Ericulous.com, has just released a free lightweight WordPress theme based on Google’s popular Chrome browser. There have been several Chrome themes released by other developers. However, this is the best one that I have seen so far. The combination of a full width header and fixed width body looks great without allowing page elements to re-arrange in smaller browser windows.

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Amazon has added it’s new movie & TV streaming service to it’s Associates Program. Associates will earn a 10% referral fee on all movies, TV seasons, and TV episodes such as The Office, House and Law & Order. The widget shown below allows Associates to add movie trailers to their websites.

The first two minutes of videos automatically play at no charge to customers inside the widget. At any time during or after the 2-minute viewing period, customers can choose to purchase or rent the title to watch it in its entirety. The preview serves to drive higher conversions and increased referral fees for Associates.

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