For some unknown reason this product came back into my vision over the past weekend and the pieces fell into place to resolve the problems.

So I have modified the original and fixed the problem with the mandatory signed request.

A working copy can be seen at CyberCoder Amazon Store

It can be downloaded from Amazon Simple Store in PHP with Mandatory Signed Requests , I do charge a $9.95 fee to download from my site. And yes, I know, everything should be free, but some of us have to make an income from our work.

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Although the standard RSS feed file in WordPress contains the author if you view the RSS feed you will not be able to see the Author name through standard readers as it is not converted.

A good example is to look at a WordPress feed that uses Google Reader and you will not see the Author listed.

One solution of course is to change the WordPress Feed files, however, if you do this every time you update WordPress your change will get written over. The easier and better solution is to add the small snippet of code below to your WordPress Themes function file.

function wp_titlerss($content) {
global $wp_query;
$content = $content." by ".get_the_author();
return $content;
}

add_filter('the_title_rss', 'wp_titlerss');


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Using the term mechanic invariably brings to mind a car mechanic, and a website mechanic is very similar. If you want your car to look better you take it to a body shop, but if you want it to run better, tune it up, or fix something you take it to a mechanic. And that is the same situation here. If you want graphics or a slick looking website, I should not be your first choice to help you. However, if something is not working right, or you want to tune it up, I can usually help you.

In just the last week I have converted a couple of static sites to WordPress, repaired a slow loading blog, fixed a site that was not loading properly and several other small “mechanic” tasks for others. I also do a lot of custom stuff. Here is a good post from WayneJohn explaining some Twitter API work we were both involved in.

Remember, there is nothing wrong with needing help. A lot of the people who call on me are excellent bloggers and designers, but we each have our skill set and we need to know our limitations. Trust me, if I want some hot graphics I am going to call on someone else to help me out.

A key to success is being able to know when you need help and utilize other peoples skills to advance your work.

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Since Twitter changed to 100% OAuth support you are now required to have a Twitter Application to post to Twitter. This can be seen with how a lot of the WordPress plugins work, which now require you to setup an application and save your OAuth keys so that they can post to Twitter.

You can do the same thing in a stand alone application and add functionality specific to your needs.

There are several benefits including but not limited to, having your link and name appear at the bottom of each Tweet as seen below.

You can also write custom routines to help you issue better Tweets.

I did this on my own Twitter App page with my Follow Friday Tweets.

I always hated the FollowFriday Tweets that are just several links to other people with no explanation of why I would want to follow them. So I built a routine where I can input the persons Twitter name, a reason to follow them and the result will always be the same formatted Tweet.

Each Tweet has the #FollowFriday hashtag followed by the referenced account and an explanation as to why I recommend them, and finally the #ff hastag to end the Tweet.

I also included several other features to make Twitter easier. I have a regular post box where I can write a Tweet and I created a Javascript bookmark for auto posting.

When I am on any web page I click Auto Post, and a Tweet is created and sent that has the Title of the page as the body of the Tweet, and a shortened link is included to the page. And of course they are branded with my link for each Tweet.

If you have a little time and programming help, I would highly recommend using a custom branded Twitter strategy.

Think outside the box!

Every little bit of exposure and linking helps !

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With over 80 sites generating traffic there is no way I could do this on all my sites, but it is interesting and helpful to run on sites where I am trying to get a better feel for the incoming search traffic on a real time basis. I also dump the results to a file to review later, which would be easy to adapt for other things utilizing a database.

Doing a quick search I found this article with a complete tutorial that outlines doing the same. Search Terms Extractor : Statistics and Demographics

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After almost 2 years of answering questions on that post I thought it was time to discuss the issue again.

I have done a dozen or so conversions since that post and I have found that some sites really need to take a fresh start approach to get the best result. The main reason for this is that a lot of older HTML sites are built with outdated techniques and WordPress has made some great advancements.

On these sites I create a sub folder for the WordPress install, such as /wordpress. This gives us designated area to work and learn WordPress without interferring with the original design. The hardest task may be getting a theme to match your original design, but I would suggest taking this time to update your original design. There are so many good WordPress Themes this should not be a problem. Once your theme is in place you can copy and paste your orginal content to the new install matching the page names. Depending on your original file extensions you may need to set the permalinks in WordPress.

Once this development is complete it is easy to change the Site address (URL) in WordPress to show the new site in the root. (Make sure to backup the original first!) Here is the link from the WordPress Admin panel that explains this.

If you need to learn WordPress and want to take a little time without being pressured to get the new site in place this is the best option I have found.

Yes, I do conversions for others. If you would like a quote, simply send me a link to your site and contact information using my Contact Form.

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Another helpful function you can utilize is having multiple Admins assigned to a Fan Page so you can have someone else help you with your page design, programming and updating.

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I finally have the used car database complete. The result is a database that should help any programmer needing the same information for their used car project.

The Used Car Database currently has over 5,200 cars listed by Year, Make and Model, from 1989-2009.

The data matches what is listed in the Kelley Blue Book which has been the nation’s number-one-selling automotive book, I did this to have a good reference point for data validity.

The file download includes 2 file formats of the database. A CSV file and a MySQL export file. Between these 2 formats, most programmers should be able to incorporate this data into a project easily.

Here is a random sampling of the data.

2002 Saturn SC2
2009 Chevrolet Colorado
1992 Mercury Sable
1994 Dodge Viper
2007 Chevrolet Equinox
1994 Suzuki Samurai
1999 Lexus LS 400
1999 Dodge Durango
2001 Ford Mustang
1992 Buick Riviera

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The one thing you need before you start is a copy of WordPress 2.7+ so you can copy some code. Just a little side tip here. Even though most of my sites and clients have one button install of WordPress, I keep a copy of each version that is released on a thumb drive with my other web stuff so I always have it handy. I also sync that thumb drive up to a hard drive in my office for backup!

Here are the steps to take to convert your comments to threaded comments as they appear here on my site.

• Copy \wp-content\themes\default\comments.php from WordPress 2.7+
• Copy \wp-content\themes\default\comments-popup.php from WordPress 2.7+
• Copy code from \wp-content\themes\default\header.php, and place in your header file.  <?php if ( is_singular() ) wp_enqueue_script( ‘comment-reply’ ); ?>
• Copy the Updated styling code from this great article by Chris Harrison

Turn off  ”says” :

That’s it, about a 5 minute process to convert to WP Threaded Comments on a WordPress blog. Pretty painless too. Big thanks to Chris Harrison for his excellent post on styling Threaded comments!

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PHP Freaks

W3Schools PHP Tutorials

PHP Net

PHP Classes

The thing I liked about getting into PHP Programming was the amount of help and sample code out there is unbelievable, and if you work in WordPress you have a great place to test PHP stuff.

I would recommend setting up a dummy WordPress site, just to try things out, it is an excellent way to learn from the ground up.

If you ever need to just ask a simple question, give Twitter a try, there is always someone willing to help.

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