The good ol’ admin account.

Every website has one, and WordPress installs it by default. Therefore everyone who wants to hack your site knows exactly what account to try for.

But, what if you didn’t use that name?

Seriously, if everyone changed the location of their car’s ignition switch, wouldn’t it suck to be a car thief? Imagine how long it would take if every time someone tried to steal a car, they had to strip search the whole car to find out where to start it.

Default means just that. You don’t have to use it, the system just needs something to use if you don’t select what you want. Hosting companies often use Fantastico to install WordPress and just above the “install WordPress” button, you have the option of changing the account name to whatever you want. You don’t have to take the default. WordPress doesn’t care what account name you use. As long as you have a name to use, WordPress is fine and happy.

Maybe you want the administrative account to reflect your philosophy on computers in general such as “HatezThisDamnThing” or go with a more Native American naming structure such as “SlapsMeInTheHeadALot”, “DancesWithSlackers” and even “PaidALotaLoot”.

It’s your business and your system. Have fun with your security protocols. You don’t have to be the military or government to be paranoid. Paranoia is totally non-discriminatory.

Of course, if you REALLY want to have fun with this, you can hide the login screen altogether. After all, why hide the lock, when you can hide the entire door?

Stealth-Login is a WordPress plugin that accomplishes this. You can make your login page use whatever link you want. No need to give out the location, just make up the URL anything you want and that will be the new login page.

Your website is your party.

When someone tries to use their car keys to open the back door of your house and take it around the block for a spin, move the handle on that door and make them wonder where you put it.

Toff ward
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Accelerate your business online using LinkedIn.

Wouldn’t it be cool to own your own link shortening service like bit.ly or tinyURL or a myriad of others nowadays?

Think a moment about how the URL shorteners work.

Every time you use their service, you’re giving away an opportunity to advertise your own site. You are literally expanding their traffic in favor of your own site.

Advertising is normally a paid thing. When you advertise for someone, you get a small token payment as a thank you for the service.

Are you getting paid to advertise these sites?

Then why do it?

There are alternatives that you can use that will help your site rather than giving all of that link juice to someone else. I’ve never been partial to letting someone else have my stuff and then borrowing it from them. It’s about as silly as heating water inside your house, in Summer, in Texas.

The WordPress plugin I use to create short links is Pretty Link Pro.

Pretty Link Pro allows you to create short links on your own website that can be used on social media sites, like Twitter and Facebook and it includes options to automatically Tweet short url’s to blog posts, which makes promoting your content even easier.

Using this plugin on your website allows you to advertise your own site and keep all of your business communications branded to you.

So, get your own shoes and skip the lease.

Toff Ward
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Learn how to build and market your business online using a blog.

Oliver Wellington from nRelate recently contacted us about a new WordPress plugin that nRelate is developing to help bloggers add value to their existing content and potentially make some money in the process.

Oliver also wanted to know if we would help spread the word about their beta testing program. So we decided to set up and record a conference call with him so he could tell us all about the new related content plugin and give more detail about their beta testing program.

The video and transcript of the call are provided below for you. If you have any questions about the program, be sure to visit the nRelate website for more details.

Can’t see the video? Watch it here.

Charles:
Alright, well welcome back to another Open Source Marketer interview. Open Source Marketer, of course, is your source for information about how to build and market your business online using open source tools.

I’m Charles McKeever and here to help me grill our guest is Toff, aka Christopher Ward. So, today we’re going to be talking with Oliver Wellington from NRelate.com about their beta test program for a new WordPress plugin that suppose to increase the value of your content and potentially help you make some money.

But, before we get in to that I need to give you a little bit of background information about nRelate and Oliver. Basically nRelate is a related content company and their software enables web publishers, including both bloggers and large media sites, to enrich their site content and to increase their relevance to their audience.

Basically they build tools and plugins that let publishers integrate content from their content archives, content of their partners, and even the entire blogosphere which provides better context to their online content. So, overall nRelate’s goal is to help publishers and bloggers get the most out of the articles they are already publishing, which comes back to increasing their content, page views, and the length of visits on the site.

Oliver Wellington, who’s waiting in the wings here to share a good bit of information with us, he started his online career in music. He used social networking sites to promote his band in the early days of MySpace and Pure Volume.

Then, like most struggling artists, he worked for a music management company and produced music videos for a New York film startup. He has his MBA from Babson College. His program focused primarily on entrepreneurship. He joined nRelate last September and he’s been working with the founder to help grow the company.

These days his time is focused on building the blogger community for nRelate along with business development for the company. Today, Oliver’s going to tell us about a new WordPress plugin that nRelate’s developing to help blogger’s provide more value to their readers and hopefully make some money along the way.

So, Oliver I want to thank you for taking out some time to spend with us today.

Oliver:
Yeah, thanks for having me guys.

Charles:
No problem. Now as another piece of background information, Oliver contacted me through our Meetup group and he was looking for a way to get the word our about these plugins that they have and what they’re trying to do with their beta test program. So rather than trying to put together some kind of announcement, I said why don’t we just put you on a call and let you explain it.

So you said nRelate is a “related content” company. So, what exactly does nRelate do?

Oliver:
Basically what we do is index a large portion of the relevant new web, or about 6 million sites. Once we get them in to our index, we basically created a bunch of different products that will allow content to related to other pieces of content on the web. The main thing we are working on right now is a related content widget. So, say a large New York publisher wants to display links to older content, or even if they are publishing a lot next to related articles, it will show up 5 to 10 links to other pieces of content that they’re written from their own site on a given article. If they have partner sites they want to link out to, we can also provide related articles from that. So, the basic thing we do is display related links that allows readers to stay on their site longer, maybe kind of browse through content around a particular topic or story a little more freely than having to search through Google or using the internal site search and that kind of stuff.

Charles:
So when you say related content, does it actually put links in the content, or is just links that are below the article maybe.

Oliver:
Well, actually what we are talking about now is there will be a small box at the bottom of the article or sometimes in the middle of the content. It will say something like “related articles” or “you may also like” or “similar articles”. Then we’ll populate that box with a list of closely related articles. And then we do do some internal linking stuff with customers, which we’ll link relevant keywords to a site search or related articles, or topics pages and that sort of thing. But, generally speaking, for what we are talking about now, it’s located in a separate box and now inside the content itself.

Toff:
So, let’s break it down to a concrete example. For instance, if I’m running a blog for smart energy ideas where I talk about energy efficiency, ways to save, or conserve energy and let’s say I’m talking about solar panels and I write an article on a brand new solar panel. How would nRelate add to, change, or augment something I did on that blog.

Oliver:
So basically, if you want to link to articles that you have written previously. So say you write about alternative energy in general and you write about solar panel and say you also write about wind energy. We need to ingest your entire post, all your content basically, into our engine and then we show you links. Say you are writing, as you said, about solar energy. We show you links that are from another articles you choose. People usually choose between 5 and 10 at the most. So say you had five other articles that you’ve written in your archive, then we could surface those up and you would see links to those alongside in a small box beneath your post.

Toff:
Would you be linking to anybody else’s content, or just my own?

Oliver:
It depends. We started out telling publishers you can link to anyone you want and you can link to the entire blogosphere. But, we’ve found that most people want their visitors to stay on their own site and they are hesitant to link out as much. But, we can set up whitelist lists for people. If they have five or six partners who are also writing about solar energy, we can display content from there. We also go for the full range of available new sources and just link out to any number of sites.

Charles:
Okay.

Toff:
Very nice.

Charles:
Yeah. Okay, there is a revenue element to this, so how exactly does that work?

Oliver:
With the plugin?

Charles:
Yeah.

Oliver:
The one aspect is basically what I’ve been mentioning. Basically, just having the related links gets the reader reading about a particular topic and if they want to learn more, they will probably go straight to Google, but if you show them another related article that you’ve written then you will increase your pageviews and that will help to increase your rates that you get from your own advertising, if you have impression ads on your site.

And then another way is, we are also working with some ad partners who are allowing people to display advertising in the plugin underneath the related links. That’s something we are working on to improve and help bloggers to make some extra money from the space on their site by showing related content. Only if they choose to, of course.

Charles:
Was there an option for the plugin to allow you to add your own advertising. Was that something that I saw?

Oliver:
That is something we are working on. We just released this last week and that’s actually a question a blogger asked. What if I have my own ad code, can I put it in. Our attitude is, yeah it’s your blog, so we are going to work to release that in one of the next releases in the next couple of weeks. Because, we want people to try our plugin and use it. We also want them to be able to use the advertising we are providing, but if they want to use their own, we want them to be able to do that as well.

Charles:
Okay, so basically, to recap we have the related article plugin. Obviously there are some of those out there, but what yours does in addition to that is not only pull related articles from your own site, but it can also pull articles from partner site and it can pull from the blogosphere at large. You can pull from news source, you can pull from other blogs, you can pull from what ever, but you’re basically linking out to related content on these other sites. And, if you wanted to, you will be able to put in your own ads or you can choose to participate in your ad network that you guys are running at nRelate.

Oliver:
Yeah, right now I’d have to say on the bare bones version we have right now, specifying a network of sites to link out to, we don’t have in yet. But that should be in the next week or two. But, yeah you nailed all the features that we’ll be adding in the next couple of weeks. That pretty much sums it up.

Charles:
Okay, so tell me, what type of publishers use your existing products right now.

Oliver:
Right now we basically work with a financial blog that does pretty decent traffic in New York. We are working with them to deliver related content and we are working on a few new products that should be coming out in the next couple of weeks. We’re also being demo’d live on a pretty large newspaper in New York, The New York Daily News. So, in terms of scale you can see a financial blog with a solid following up to a large media site. And then we also we also do some other products for some other sites. We do data aggregation products as well for a couple of other sites that have profile on companies. Basically they have between 20 to 30K profiles for companies, so for each company we provide a news feed.

Charles:
Okay, so would you characterize these as larger media outfits?

Oliver:
Yeah. Well, technically the financial site is a blog. It’s only a handful of people working on it, but it’s not like an individual blogger going out. They are doing it as their full time job. We have been trying to work with bloggers and being that we are a start up, we’ve taken the last couple of months to get to the point where we are ready to start releasing some of our software to bloggers in an easily digestible form.

Charles:
So, is that kind of why now you are approaching the blogger space, is that it?

Oliver:
Yeah basically.

Charles:
I know you have had mentioned specifically building your blogger community.

Oliver:
Yeah, we got in to this space in general because we think the relevancy of the content results we produce is better than the other offerings and we see what other companies are offering to bloggers for related post plugins and we noticed a lot them will put ads on them, but they don’t necessarily share money back with bloggers. So that’s a space we want to get in and give bloggers the best related post software they can and also help us to get our name out a bit more as well.

Charles:
So you mentioned the revenue sharing piece of that, so is that something that is collected by nRelate and then paid back to the bloggers. Is it like an ad network. How does that work?

Oliver:
Basically, right now we are working with a few different ad networks and some affiliate programs, so we are setting that up so it will be through us. We will give each blogger who is of legal age and all that a code allowing them to join the ad community we are building and then we share back revenues to them based on what they choose to put on their site and what the payments are.

Charles:
So someone could join the beta program, install the WordPress plugin, and then not have to do anything else part from their regular operations as far as producing content and things like that.

Oliver:
Yes.

Charles:
Great. They wouldn’t have to fuss with any kind of going out and sourcing ads or starting up affiliate accounts, or managing creatives or stuff like that?

Oliver:
Yeah, basically the way it’s set up it’s just checking a few boxes and then an ad shows up and then if you don’t like it you can just uncheck the boxes and then the ads don’t show up.

Charles:
Okay, as far as set up and things like that, what kind of setup are we talking? Most plugins are just uploaded and activated. Are there settings that have to go into it, you talked about having to have a code?

Oliver:
It’s pretty simple to upload. I’m not actually one of the coders on the team. I pretty good with technical stuff. I’m not by any means at the level that you guys are or most of the other team are, but I can set up this plugin in less than three minutes. It’s as simple as downloading the plugin file and then using the WordPress plugin upload process. It’s pretty quick, and then it’s also quick to delete it if you don’t like it. Just in terms of trying it out, it’s a pretty simple thing.

Charles:
We’re all about open source around here, so is it open source, or closed source, or how does that work?

Oliver:
Basically, the way it works now, the code we have for the widget itself, we are fine with it being open source. The code that actually is going to figure our the results to put in the box is still proprietary. But, as things change, I talked with the founders in charge of tech and he’s going to start releasing some of that as well. But, I don’t know exactly when.

Charles:
Okay, but from the blogger’s perspective, they can get in and tweak the widget if they want and style it to look like their site and things like that?

Oliver:
Oh yeah, definitely. All that stuff is acceptable and encouraged.

Charles:
For most bloggers, it’s less of a property rights issue. It’s more of, my site is blue and that’s orange, I don’t like it. Ha ha.

Toff:
It’s a, “I want to do what I want to do”.

Charles:
Yeah, so I don’t think anybody’s looking to take over somebody else’s stuff. It’s just a matter of if I’m going to integrate it, how does it work and how can I get to it.

Toff:
Along those same lines, can you tell us a little bit about your beta test program?

Oliver:
Right now, basically we’ve got the first iteration of our widget ready. So what we are doing for the first group of people who are going to be beta testing, what they need to do is email me, or go to the website and fill out a form. Basically, I’ll send them back a code and then they install the widget and test it. For the first group of people, we are going to let them keep 100% of revenue that the widget generates for as long as they use it.

Toff:
Very nice.

Oliver:
You know beta testing involves a little bit, we want feedback. People don’t have to give feedback, but we would like to thank the people who do and even the people don’t by just sharing everything.

Charles:
Okay, so you’re truly beta testing. Your not Google beta testing for like 10 years. Your really going to be making improvements and taking feedback.

Oliver:
Yeah, for example, the version we have right now is pretty bare bones, but I’d say in the next week or week and a half. Being in software development, maybe I should just go ahead and say two full weeks. We’ll be including, people will be able to have thumbnails in their results. They’ll be able to specify, as I said before, other sites they want to display related content from. So, I mean we are going to be adding things. So the goal on this is to…we want to beta test as long as we have to until we get to the point where we are comfortable listing the plugin in the WordPress plugin directory. That will signify us being out of the beta testing period.

Toff:
Now, along those same lines again. For the beta program, is this for WordPress users only, or any blogger, or what do you have going?

Oliver:
Well, right now basically we’re focusing on WordPress and we’ve been working with a guy who organizes the New York WordPress Meetup and also has a development company called SlipFire, a great guy named Steve Bruner. He’s been working on this with us and he’s all about WordPress. I personally like WordPress and the more hard coding guys our team likes WordPress. So, we are kind of focusing on WordPress so we don’t do everything at once. But, if there is interest in other platforms then it doesn’t take us to long to customize for those as well.

Toff:
I’m definitely a WordPress person, so that’s not an issue for me.

Oliver:
Yeah, I love WordPress.

Charles:
That’s a great choice really. There are so many of them out there.

Oliver:
Yeah, I mean for me when I first went through setting up a website, I went through cPanel and stuff like that, but it was the only thing out there that was that simple and you could still customize pretty descent amount by just reading some forums. So, I think it’s a great platform.

Charles:
So basically what I hear is that you have a beta test program that people can use to put related listings on their site and you have a revenue model right now that shares back 100% of whatever comes in the door, as far as advertising revenue, and you’re actually actively asking for people’s feedback. So if some were to actually give a suggestion, there’s a pretty good chance that it would be implemented.

Oliver:
Yeah, as long as you all agree that it’s something reasonable. The suggestion for bloggers to include their own ad code, we presented at a meetup and someone got up and said they would want to include their own ad code. That’s a good idea. It’s not like we are trying to shut out everything, we just didn’t think of it.

Charles:
Yeah, obviously not every suggestion can be implemented. But, I’ve seen some beta programs where you feel like you’re on the outside where you feel like you don’t get a voice, but I’ve seen others where the program is very responsive and you can see the progress unfold. It sounds like that’s what you guys are after, being able to have an active conversation with the blogging community.

Oliver:
Yeah definitely. People who write in and email will get a response in a timely fashion and I think a lot of people will actually see their suggestions come to fuition.

Charles:
According to the nRelate website, you said you’re “developing an entire suite of blogger widgets”, I’m quoting here. “That will help you increase your revenues on your blog as well a unique visit and allowing you to define your own content sharing communities.” Tell me about that. What’s up with that?

Oliver:
Okay, in terms of having the revenue it’s basically around the different types of advertising that can be placed in the plugin. Sharing back is one way to help people to increase their revenue. Also, in terms of the content sharing communities, if you can imagine for example, that right now people have their blogrolls. That’s pretty cool I guess, but what we can do with out software is wouldn’t it be cool if you could display content from authors on your blogroll. Instead of just sharing links you’re actually sharing links to timely articles that are related to things your also writing about. So we help people band together in that way. So that’s what we mean about the content sharing stuff. So in terms of the next thing that we will be tackling after we get this thing down, we will be doing a very good internal site search. But that’s probably for a different discussion.

Charles:
Well you know, now the content sharing communities begins to make sense, because there are lots of bloggers who keep in touch with each other behind the scenes. They kinda keep in touch with each other and when they tweet something and say hey I just posted this article, will you retweet it and things like that. It makes sense that these are informal partnerships, where there’s an unwritten rule when you build up credibility so that people will tweet something about you later. So why not tie your content together loosely in a way that allows you to share those visitors. We can’t be all things to all people but we can join together to provide as much value as possible and keep people in our network as much as possible.

Oliver:
Yeah, that’s the thinking behind that aspect.

Charles:
That being said, will the plugins help with getting unique visitors? You had mentioned something about bringing in unique visitors, so can you talk a little about that.

Oliver:
Yeah, for this first version, I can say right now if it’s only internal, it’s not going to help you with your unique visits. It’s only going to help you with your pageviews. But once you allow people to link out and share content across blogs, I think of it as an evolution of link sharing. That just done in many ways to help drive traffic between sites and creates uniques across a network of sites.

Charles:
Gottcha. Again, it’s a traffic sharing mechanism.

I know this isn’t necessarily the plugin your releasing under the beta program, but I noticed under your other products that you had on the nRelate site, you had a popup search box, popup related content, and things like that. Are you going to roll out those plugins as well?

Oliver:
If there is enough demand for those types of things we would be happy to make a WordPress version of them. It’s not that much work. It’s just being a small company, we only have so much bandwidth. That’s basically a place where we could draw ideas from for future things.

I really want to try and creatively figure out with bloggers if there is anything based on the things you just mentioned, if there are things we can put together for them.

Charles:
Okay, that’s definitely interesting. Toff, did you have any questions that you wanted to ask.

Toff:
No, I’m ready to go sign up.

Charles:
Yeah, I’m very interested in the community aspect of things. Being able to hook related sites together. You could just as easily pull in links from other news sources and things like that but what if you had three related sites and you wanted to share traffic across those three sites. Maybe one of your sites is killing it with the keywords, but the other two are just feeder sites. As long as the content is unique across each site, there’s not reason to loose that traffic to something else.

Is there anything Oliver that you want to leave us with.

Oliver:
Basically, I just want to say thanks for having me. If people want to sign up the can email me at blogger @ nrelate.com or visit the website, nRelate.com/blog.php and also I set up a small forum at nRelate.com/forum. So those basically the three ways to get in touch and I want to say thanks again for having me.

Charles:
Well hey thanks for taking the time out to share the program with us. I appreciate you reaching out and contacting us.

That’s it for the interview. Now, go check out the nRelate plugin and then tell us what you think about the plugin and the experience of beta testing a new product.

Beta testing everything,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Accelerate your business online using social media.

During last night’s Open Source Marketer Wednesday Member’s Webinar we talked about how you can use the Odiogo Listen Button to create a Text Content Factory that adds text-to-speech audio player to your blog. Odiogo provides a free services that turns your text blog posts into spoken audio. Website visitors can either click the play button on the built in audio player or they can download an MP3 version of your article.

We talked about a lot of other useful tools on the webinar, but here’s a quick video to show you how the Odiogo Listen Button works.

You can watch the full webinar recording inside the member’s area, along with all the other previously recorded weekly webinars.

Enjoy,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Accelerate your business online using social media.

By default, Atahualpa allows you to upload multiple images and rotate through them. I was asked recently whether or not it could rotate in a specific order.

Much to my delight, the answer was easy to code. Atahualpa makes finding things you want to change easy and accessible. All I really did was add 1 short line to the the javascript code (don’t get dizzy, there’s no heavy programming at all. Just copy/paste).

In WordPress you click on the “editor” link in the “Appearances” section. This gives you a listing on the right of all of the files in the Atahualpa theme. The specific file we want to change is “js.php”.

Go ahead and click on that link and open the page within WordPress (or download and change it if you like). Find the code that looks like:

We want to add code right after the variables are created that sorts the pages alpha-numerically:

HeaderImages.sort()

Adding this into full code will look like:

By adding the sort() function, we now allow the ability to make the header rotate according to how we want the images to display. A good example is having images with text leading up to the tag line.
- image 1 – Wouldn’t you like,
- image 2 – To have a Theme
- image 3 – That makes life Wonderful?

- image 4 – Atahualpa is better than unicycling bears!

I like things that allow for creativity, flexibility and improvement. Atahualpa allows that. If I could become an affiliate for Atahualpa, I would, but their theme is free, so there’s not much money involved, just happiness.

Toff Ward
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Accelerate your business online using social media.

Recently an Open Source Marketer member contacted us for help with their WordPress MU installation. They had everything installed on Hostgator, but for some reason they weren’t able to automatically create subdomains.

Since they had set up their MU installation to use subdomains instead of subdirectories, this was driving them crazy. Each time they would create a new blog, they would get a site not found message.

At first it didn’t make sense. We had set up a full WordPress MU environment complete with BuddyPress and a ton of plugins as part of EpicChange’s TweetsGiving project last year and everything had worked fine.

I eventually put them on speaker phone so that Toff could hear the issue and lend a hand. Since we virtual office via Skype he was able to follow along. So, I recapped the issue and he reminded me that before we put the TweetsGiving website on another host, we had set up a test environment on Hostgator and there had been some issues then as well.

It had taken me three hours to find the solution then and here it was again poking me in the eye. The issue is that in order for WordPress Mu to be able to use multiple subdomains you need to enable wildcard support so your WordPress MU install will work properly. In this case they had to create a wild card dns entry using the Hostgator CPanel. The MU settings were already in place, but the dns wild card had not been created on Hostgator. So, they could create a new blog all day long, they just couldn’t get to any of them.

The steps to enable support on your hosting may be different, so if you run into a similar problem, you may want to check with your hosting company to see what they recommend. And of course you can always Google “WordPress MU YOUR HOST COMPANY HERE wildcards” for support docs. Hopefully that will save you 3 hours and a lot of grief.

If you’re setting up a WordPress MU site, send us a link. We love to see what other people are up to and if you have a time saving WordPress MU tip or trick, be sure to post it in the comments below.

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Accelerate your business online using social media.

Color Theory for the Color-Blind

“Sweetheart, does this match?”

“No it doesn’t. You’re not really going to wear that are you?”

Color is not my thing. My wife, on the other hand, is a graphic designer. When we were getting carpet for our house, she brought out 3 samples and asked me which one I liked more.

“The beige one.”

“You lost me at beige…”

I have never pretended to understand when colors complement or clash. Matching to me means you are wearing the same socks (more or less). RGB versus CMYK was never in my Depeartment of Defense Acronym booklet so I simply respond with “Gesundheit” and move along quietly.

My simple point here is that if you don’t understand color, most likely, someone took pity on you and mentioned this before. That same understanding carries through to your website. If you already know that color is not your bag, then for the love of Pringles, DON’T pick the colors for your website.

I build websites.

I do not design them. I merely express sincere gratitude to the person who hands me the design and asks me to build it. I have some clients who look at the the designs and say something along the lines of,” yeah, its nice, but I think the titles should be pink”. Yes, I know, the customer is always right. They just need a little help with form and color. That’s why they hired a Designer in the first place.

Folks, when you try something out for yourself, it ends up looking horrible and you hire an expert to fix it……….TRUST THEIR JUDGEMENT. It works with both plumbing and websites (how’s THAT for an analogy?).

You are paying for their expertise, so don’t mess it up by altering what they do or recommend. By changing it, you are no longer getting the results you paid for and you might suffer negative consequences due to your own meddling (my kitchen sink is proof of that).

When I don’t know something, I find people who can help me and then let them do their thing.

After all, as far as I’m concerned, I still have beige carpet.

Toff Ward
Open Source Marketer

Accelerate your business online using social media.

A good example of how this might work limiting ads to relevant pages. Let’s say you have a banner ad that you’d like to display to promote a product, but you only want that ad to show on one post. By default, WordPress widgets don’t provide a way for you to limit where they are shown. After a widget is placed in the sidebar, it’s just there. You can move it up or down, but it’s still going to be displayed across the entire site.

Using a few simple plug-ins, you can not only control where widgets appear, but you can also rotate ads in those spots. below is a video that walks you through the process of adding two widgets to your WordPress blog. Those two widgets are data feed or random ads and widget logic. Watch how these two plug-ins help you to control where you’re ads display and how much ad space you can get from a single ad spot.

How to make WordPress widgets show only on selected pages and posts

Is you know of another way to do the same thing, leave a comment and let me know.

Charles McKeever
Open Source Marketer

Accelerate your business online using social media.

CForms provided a few features that made it a perfect fit for my client and due to the plugin’s flexibility, it’s able to fit every one of my clients. It’s very powerful, very capable, and gives me the ability to fit multiple needs. Did I mention it’s free?

With great power, comes great complexity. This is not what I would label a “beginner” level plugin. There are other plugins for forms that are easier and more intuitive to use. So, I label the CForms plugin as “developer friendly”, but not “user friendly”. However, if you are willing to spend a bit of effort on the learning curve, it’s well worth the time.

Here’s a rundown of the features that got my attention:

• Required Field Notification – the biggest problem with the original form plugin was the form submittal process. Users were skipping a required field or two and when they tried to submit the form, their information went to the server, identified that they had missed a required field and then came back with the required field error message….and a blank form. This means the user had to retype all of their data again. Most users were filling out the form again and then sending a complaint, but inevitably, some users probably just left the site and never bothered retyping. Cforms gives immediate feedback on a required field before sending info to the server, this means no retyping for users.
• Form Cloning – Recreating new forms can eat up a lot of time. Now, all I have to do is copy an existing form and tweak it. This feature alone is worth its weight in gold.
• Mail Server Settings – The ability to enable an external SMTP server for email notifications solved an issue that I had with my client’s DNS.
• Database Storage – Saving submitted form information seems like a logical thing to do since we are already using WordPress, but there are some plugins who don’t do this. CForms does and it’s good to have a backup of user submitted information, in case an email gets lost.
• Data Exports – Form data stored in the database can be exported in multiple formats. This is a must-do thing.
• CSS Styling – The form’s look and feel is completely customizable using custom style sheets. This is important when coding for a client who has paid for a custom design to the website and doesn’t want a generic form that doesn’t match.

These are just a few of the features that I was needing at the time. The Cforms plugin has a lot more functionality than I need or want today, but it’s a wonderful thing that the additional features are there when I need them. Those extra features come into play when my client says something along the lines of, “you know what would be really cool…”.  I highly recommend this plugin and throwing a few donation dollars to the plugin author wouldn’t be a bad thing either.

Christopher “Toff” Ward
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Well, if you use the H2 Zoom Recorder you can do just that and more. The H2 Zoom runs on double AA batteries, has VCR style controls, and takes standard SD cards for additional storage space. Here is a close up look at the device and all it’s features.

The H2 Zoom fits in your pocket, has settings for custom environments, and also works as a working microphone solution via usb. For a small investment between $160 to $180 you can get an extremely versatile device that is portable, impressive, and doubles as a studio microphone for day to day recording. I use the Zoom for all my on the go recording and as my in studio microphone and it’s fantastic.

In this detailed look of the H2 Zoom I’ve included a video review of the device and an audio sample so you can get a feel for just how well the recorder works.

Watch the H2 Video Review

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The H2 has two stereo mics facing front and rear. This is great for capturing stereo sound. The two sets of mics – one pair facing the front and one pair facing the rear – allow you to record at 90° from the front or 120° from the rear. This is great for recording interviews or capturing audio from a single source. You can also use both two pairs to produce a four-channel recording with 360° coverage to get a full surround sound recording.

The H2 even has a built-in 3D panning function that gives you full control over the front/rear/left/right balance. Or if you prefer, you can use authoring software like Garageband or Audacity to create 5.1 surround recordings.

You can record audio in several formats. You can choose 24bit/96kHz linear PCM (WAV files) format for better than CD audio quality, or you can record directly to MP3 format in an almost any bit rate for longer recording times and smaller file sizes.

Recordings are stored on Secure Digital (SD) card.  A 512MB SD card is usually included with the device, but I recommend you buy at least a 2 to 8 GB SD Card for normal usage. The H2 can accommodate up to a 16GB SDHC card, but keep in mind that a single recording file is limited to a 2GB file size. I carry several cards with me when I want to make sure I have enough storage space for major events. According to the manufacturer, you can record up to 24 hours of total recording time using the 16bit/44.1kHz WAV format or up to 280 hours of sterio recording using a 128kbps MP3. I’ve never had to test this out.

The H2 has a USB port so you can move your recordings to your computer and use recording software to edit the audio, create mixes, burn CDs or distribute your recordings by email or on your website. You can also move MP3 files to your H2 for storage or later playback. The Zoom can be used as an MP3 player and you can choose between single-file playback, single-file repeat, all-file playback, or all-file repeat. TA-B repeat lets you “zoom in” on a specified section of a file.

Using the BWF (Broadcast Wave Format) your files can be set with timestamp information and markers (cue points) during recording. This makes playback and editing much more efficient. I haven’t used this format since I am usually wanting MP3 format for podcasts, but it sounds like a handy feature you might explore for yourself.

You can also set the H2 to automatically start recording when audio is detected and stop when audio ceases. This allows you to capture all the important audio you want during a conference or lecture while minimizing the total recording time.

The H2 has an Auto Gain Control (AGC) function and Low-Cut Filter that allows the H2 to automatically record at the right level while eliminating unwanted low frequency noise. You can also manually control the gain levels with the Low/Mid/High selector and then fine-tune the levels with gain control buttons on the front panel. This allows you to get clear recordings with very low noise and no distortion. I’ve found this most helpful when setting up the device for recording in very quiet or very noise environments.

The H2 can also function as a USB microphone, letting you record directly to your computer. Using almost any recording software, you can create a podcast. This is a great option if you need a good quality microphone, but don’t have the budget to buy both a high end microphone and a portable recorder.

Editing files on the device is extremely simple. Even without editing software, you can divide a recorded file at any desired point, right on the H2. The built-in normalizing feature lets you optimize the volume level, and can even convert WAV files into MP3s. The normalizing function is not applied to MP3 files. You can also record your audio in higher quality formats like WAV and then encode them down to the compressed MP3 format using the H2.

The H2 has an input jack for external stereo mics and it supports plug-in power for equipment that requires additional power to operate. There is also a stereo line input for external audio sources, in case you want to bring in audio from another device.

The low-power circuitry in the H2 makes it possible to run the unit continuously for about 4 hours on two AA alkaline batteries. For longer sessions you can plug in the supplied AC adapter. When using the unit as an SD card reader or USB mic, it operates on USB bus power. I always recommend carrying extra AA batteries to make sure you have enough power for important events. Since the H2 runs on standard AA batteries, you can quickly swap them out and be  back up and recording in under a minute.

The H2 usually comes with a desktop stand as well as a mic clip adapter for attaching the unit to a mic stand. It also comes with a 512MB SD card, earbuds, a windscreen, AC adapter, a USB cable, and a 1/8-inch to RCA stereo cable, so you can begin recording from the moment you open the package.

The best selection and cheapest price I’ve found is to purchase the Zoom on Amazon. You can also check eBay for current pricing, but this can be hit or miss, and I definitely advise that you check the sellers feedback and inventory listings before making a purchase.

As you can see, there are a lot of available options. If you need additional coaching, let us know and we’ll help you set up a solution.

See you in the forums,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com