mincus code

Manage Your Posts Only in Wordpress

mincus — Sun, 04 May 2008 12:58:41 +0000

What does this Wordpress Plugin Do?

One of the frustrating things of running a multi-user Wordpress blog is wading through the enormous amount of posts that end up there. Also, by default Wordpress allows all editors to see the titles of other users posts and unpublished drafts even though they cannot edit them.

Previously other users have tried to do the same thing (see: Multiple users - only allow them to see their own posts when logged in?) by editing “edit.php” or “edit-post-rows.php” directly. This gets the same outcome, but is more likely to get forgotten or messed up when you install a Wordpress Upgrade.

I’ve created a tiny little Wordpress plugin that makes it so that users and editors can only see posts from the manage tab that they have written themselves. By using this plugin, the only users that can see all posts from the manage tab are Admins.

Wordpress Plugin Install

Download the Manage Your Posts Only Wordpress Plugin

Unzip and upload ‘manage_your_posts_only.php’ to the ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory

Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress

Comments or Questions?

Let me know what you think about the plugin! Maybe I missed something, or there is some extra functionality that you would like it to have. Just leave a comment here or send me an email.

Thanks!

Adsense Notifier

mincus — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:30:14 +0000

What is Adsense Notifier?

Adsense Notifier displays your Adsense earnings on your Firefox status bar. It allows you to easily see your earnings at a glance instead of logging into the Adsense website multiple times a day.

Install Adsense Notifier

Install Adsense Notifier 0.9.8 now.

Adsense Notifier simply shows your adsense stats on the status bar and updates the stats automatically. This is wonderful for anyone with OCD ( or GAD as some have called it ) who needs to check their stats every three seconds to see if they have gotten any more clicks :-p

Version Notes

- Updated for Firefox 3.0 (new password manager)
- Removed a while loop that was causing lockups/delays for some users
- Fixed an issue where users weren’t notified that the AdSense Terms and
Conditions were updated

Thank you to all the users of Adsense Notifier for the praise and feedback that you have given me. Please consider linking to http://code.mincus.com if you do use this extension. Also, I am also looking for users to help translate Adsense Notifier to the languages supported by Google for Adsense. Please contact me if you are interested in providing a translation of Adsense Notifier.

Adsense Notifier is highly configurable and should be useful for everyone that uses adsense.

Other Adsense-related Firefox Extensions:

Adsense Preview - The Adsense Preview Tool lets you preview the Google ads that may show on any web page. By Yellow Pipe.

How to Stand Out in a Sea of Fives

mincus — Sat, 12 May 2007 02:23:04 +0000

Darren Rowse of problogger.net just finished up another of his whiz-bang Group Writing projects.

The topic of the project was “Top 5″

I got the feeling that many of the entrants were students from the school of Brian

It was really interesting to see the different techniques that people used to stand out - after the jump I’ve listed all of the posts without using 5 or five in the title. Out of the almost 900 entries, only 77 people didn’t use “5″ in their titles.

Also for those that missed it, Darren let in on his amazing Chitika earnings - almost $250K!

The Secret to the Search Engine Long Tail

mincus — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 10:07:23 +0000

What is your single biggest source of traffic?

Whomever said “Content is King” forgot to tell you that your king content amounts to about three people a month per post.

On my sites, almost half of my traffic comes from search engines, but the top 10 referring key phrases account for less than 15% of the search engine traffic.

The majority of the keywords that drive traffic to my sites number in the thousands, but only get 1 or 2 searches each. To top it all off, most of these keywords are for things that are said in passing in an article, or that were never intended the article to be about. You say “Pink Donut Safety Measures” and 3 weirdos out there search for it every month and you are the top site.

Just like this search engine traffic is the long tail, the articles they are hitting are all part of the long tail of the content on my sites. They are the everyday posts that most people look over once and then without any additional opportunities would probably leave only to never come back again.

So what can you do knowing all of this?

1. Create Anchor Content

First, your sites all need that special something that sets you apart - You need that killer

- what ever is the most popular thing on your site that you can use to convert that long tail traffic to someone who’s going to come back to read you again.

2. Add Lots of Additional Content

This is the daily grind. You add content everyday to your sites, you get a few comments here and there and a little link love. Most of what’s written gets archived away almost never to be seen again except from those one off, odd search engine referals. All of that said, it still needs to be focused quality content. Don’t think for a second that your hard earned readers won’t dump you if you start filling their RSS feed readers with rubbish.

3. Convert!

Now you take those long tail referrals and make sure they know about the #1 most important thing on your site. You throw the giant RSS feed icon at them and tell them that you’re not just a flash in the pan. But, this is the curse of running ads on your sites - By converting well with ads, you are potentially losing a lifetime visitor.

If you haven’t already looked at Aaron Wall’s Book on SEO(Aff), I highly recommend you take a look at it. If you’re making any money from your sites, the book is filled with 300+ pages of solid tips for increasing your profit.

How to Remove the Posts per page limit in Wordpress

mincus — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 10:00:34 +0000

I love Wordpress, it’s made web publishing and blogging incredibly easy and available for so many people.

But, Depending on your theme or setup, it’s also easy to make hundreds of pages of duplicate content within your own domain. For instance under the categories pages, by default your content is duplicated and paginated based on your posts_per_page setting. So some of your older posts can be incredibly difficult for users and search engines to get to.

My goal was to fix this using these two changes:

Make the category pages into lists of links so that it doesn’t show up as duplicate content.
Have each category page show every article in that category, overriding the “Show at most” setting, so that from any page on the site, you are never more than 2 clicks away from any other page.

Read on for how I did it…

Removing the posts per page limit

WordPress uses the first Template file it finds in your current Theme’s directory from the following list (assuming this is for category 6).

category-6.php
category.php
archive.php
index.php

So, the easiest way to change the amount of posts per page shown for categories, is to do the following:

Either edit your category.php file, or if it doesn’t exist, copy your index.php file to category.php.
look for this line:
< ?php get_header(); ?>
and change it to the following:
< ?php get_header(); query_posts( 'posts_per_page=-1&cat=' . $cat ) ?>
That’s all, your finished. The -1 in posts_per_page lets Wordpress know you want all posts to be shown and it overrides the setting in your options.

Changing the duplicate content into lists of links

This was also a simple quick change - I again edited my category.php file and looked for the following line:
< ?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
Deleted everything between that if statement and its endif and put in the following:

`< ?php single_cat_title() ?>`



    

    < ?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

        

            < ?php the_title(); ?>


        


    < ?php endwhile; ?>

With these two easy changes, I now show all posts within my categories regardless of my options settings, and have removed the duplicate content from the category pages by making every category article a link.

If you aren’t already using it, I also recommend the Permalink Redirect Wordpress Plugin to help keep your URL schema straight and to ensure that there is only one URL associated with each blog entry.

Let me know how this works out for you, hopefully you find these changes useful.

Mortgage Companies are Crazy

mincus — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 05:32:19 +0000

Seems like lots of people get odd overwhelming requests for information when applying for a mortgage.

When I sold my first house to purchase my second, I decided to buck the “buy way more than you can afford and be insanely in debt forever and if the market drops your house is worth less than your mortgage” trend. So, my wife and I settled on a nice house that actually cost less then the house we were selling. Sure it was a much further drive, but it was away from the over developed jerk fest we were living in.

This concept of not over extending one’s self was so foreign to the mortgage company, they forced me to write a letter and sign it explaining why oh why I wanted to buy a house for less than I was selling. FSM forbid that I don’t want a 3-month ARM Interest only with an extra 500k loan attached 75 year mortgage.

I just can’t for the life of me figure out what they were protecting by doing this. Any ideas?

Why your successful site is leaving money on the table

mincus — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 12:26:09 +0000

Right now, your sites are making less money than they should be. What should you be doing about it?

Never give up. Never surrender.

Below I list some simple things that you can change on your site right now to increase your income and traffic. Changes that I have made in the past have quadrupled the traffic to one of my sites and increased my income almost 10-fold.

3 Simple changes that can drastically improve your ranking

Like Shoemoney and many other people that already make tons of money from their sites - these 3 changes are second nature to them and they don’t even count them as “SEO.” Yet, I come across site after site that doesn’t have even these tips on their site and are basically throwing away better rankings.

Keywords in the page Title

Your page title should have the keywords for that specific page in the title. Thats it.

Keywords in URL

Same as the title, every URL should include the keywords for the page and should “look” static. mod_rewrite is your friend. The only blog software that matters supports this, but doesn’t default to it. Make the change from query looking URLs (ex. ?q=3) to static URLs.

Content at the top of your HTML

This is the one that many people miss and end up in supplemental hell. If you have so many sidebars, headers, javascript, additional CSS, and formating code that your actual content is waaaaay down in the bottom of your HTML file, the search engines seem to get bored at some point and stop looking down in the file for your unique data. So the top part of your HTML looks the same on all of your pages and Google just slaps a dupe content penalty on the majority of your pages. Cut down on the crap in your HTML or use CSS to allow you to move the actual content as one of the first things in your HTML.

Japanese Kaizen and A/B Testing

Always keep trying new things

Your site can always be doing better. Don’t stop trying new ads, new content, new linking ideas. Use A/B Testing to find out what moving an Ad does - if it gets you a better CTR make the change on your site and start a new test.

Accumulate small changes

Kaizen is basically the concept of continuously improving through tiny changes. Adding new content on a consistent basis, and trying the A/B testing above. Looking to places where people talk about new ideas and giving them a spin. Little by little these add up. .5% better click-through, a few hundred more unique readers a day. It all seems like its too little to matter until months later you’ve doubled or quadrupled what your site makes.

Diversify Your Income Sources

Google Adsense has really given so many people the opportunity to make a living, or at least have some extra cash on their passions and hobbies. Its a great start, but eventually you must start diversifying your income, not only to protect yourself from a “single point of failure,” but to really start growing your income levels. Look into things like Text Link Ads(Aff), Azoogle Ads(Aff), Chitika, Amazon, or start filling ad space with house ads.

I once saw a demonstration at a conference where the presenter held up a a ten dollar bill and said he was selling it for one dollar for the next 10 seconds. The whole audience just stared at him for the first 8 seconds, until one person caught on and ran up and bought a $10 bill for only $1. Next, he held up a $20 and again, sold it for a $1 for the next 10 seconds. It still took almost the full 10 seconds before someone took the initiative to get out of their seat and take the free money. The rest of the audience just sat there. For some reason, most people are OK being the ones who sit around and watch everyone else actually do things. Who are you going to be today? The masses that sit in their seats, or the guy who simply walks up and takes whats waiting for you?

Updated (2007/3/30): Added Azoogle Link + fixed a formatting error with the amazon link.

Firefox Addon Developer T-Shirt

mincus — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 04:27:28 +0000

Now I’m no hero and people like Ben Goodger and all the others that contribute code to Firefox are a whole different level of coders - but it’s pretty awesome to be able to contribute, even in the tiny way that I have to the success of this great browser.

Thank you Mozilla.org and to all those that thought to give us little Add-On developers a nifty little T-Shirt.

Windows Wireless API

mincus — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 11:00:58 +0000

How to programmatically access the WiFi API

(Updated 2007/01/29 with new download paths - API is now out of beta, thank you Aichi!)
After searching for hours and hours I finally found a solution for accessing and changing the windows wireless settings through a programming interface. Using the Wireless Zero Configuration service and the WiFi Native API I was able to change anything that I wanted to. This will allow me to programmatically roll out changes to clients WiFi interfaces through logon scripts or on a client to client basis.

Below I documented the steps that are needed to use the program, and I also have shown the steps needed to use the source code which I have released under the GNU GPL for your own projects. This is my first release of this software, so I encourage you to provide feedback, suggestions, and code!

Download the wifi config executable - 636KB for Windows XP SP2 Only.

To use wifi_config.exe perform the following steps in this order:

Install the Microsoft Core XML Services (MSXML) 6.0
Install KB893357
Install the WLAN API for Windows XP SP2

Executable Options:
-Enable Enable the wireless interfaces specified by limit. If no limit specified, enable all wireless interfaces. This option effectively checks the “Use Windows to configure my wireless network settings” checkbox under the Wireless Network Connection Properties.
-Add Path(s) to an XML file containing the information about the Wireless Access point that you wish to setup.
-Delete Access Point name(s) that you wish to remove from the profile list.
-Nics List wireless interfaces by their description and GUID.
-Aps List access points by AP name.
-Limit GUID of the interface(s) to limit the additions, deletions, and access point listings to. The default is to use all interfaces.
-Help Displays the command line arguments and sample usage (this screen.)

Sample Usage:
Delete access point from all interfaces:
wifi_config.exe -delete SAMPLE-AP

Delete multiple access points from a specific interface:
wifi_config.exe -delete SAMPLE-AP1 SAMPLE-AP2 -limit {GUID}

Add multiple profiles:
wifi_config.exe -add “C:\profile1.xml” “C:\profile2.xml”

List access points:
wifi_config.exe -aps

Microsoft has also provided some sample XML files detailing many common access point configurations.

For those that wish to compile their own Wifi Config

Download the Wifi Config Source - 3.53MB

I had much difficulty in actually getting this (or any) Wifi API to function the way I needed it to.

Here are the steps that I took to get this code to work for me:

Using Visual Studio 2005

Install the Microsoft Core XML Services (MSXML) 6.0
Install KB893357

Install Wireless SDK + API

WLAN API for Windows XP SP2 Beta
WLAN SDK for Windows XP SP2
Place wlanapi.h, wlanapi.lib, and wlanapi.dll in your build directory
Add wlanapi.lib to the library includes
Install Install Vista RC1 SDK

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=C2B1E300-F358-4523-B479-F53D234CDCCF&displaylang=en

Add the Vista SDK path to your include paths

Includes should contain at least the following:
#define WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN #include #include #include #include "wlanapi.h"

Ensure that the following DLLs exist on the target machines or in the run directory of your program -
For Release:
- All from:
"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\redist\x86\Microsoft.VC80.CRT"

What Tools Do You Use for Windows Automation?

mincus — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 11:30:47 +0000

If you do any work in an IT support role, knowing how to use at least of one of the following tools is a requirement. The amount of repetitive work done in tasks like imaging or testing begs for automation and these tools can get the job done easily.

Perl has been a must have tool for systems administrators for almost two decades now. Perl’s way of making the easy things easy and the difficult possible, its use for systems administration, network programming, and the vast library of code available from CPAN make it a top choice for prototyping, interfacing with other applications, data munging, and automating.
Kixtart is free tool that was designed internally at Microsoft Netherlands as a skunkworks project mainly intended for login scripts, but has been greatly expanded. Interacting with AD, WMI, and the registry is extremely easy with kix. Additionally, it has a great user base that has created hundreds of “functions” that can do almost anything that you need to do.
AutoIT shares many of the same benefits of kix, but makes automating simulated keystrokes, mouse movement, and window/control manipulation very easy. Using AutoIT in a testing environment, for imaging, or for creating distributable executables makes this a very valuable tool.

What tools do you use for Automation?