TechyShell.com » Wordpress

WordPress Launching Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising Platform

kami — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 18:37:00 +0000

WordPress is launching a new pay per click (PPC) advertising platform that will allow bloggers to earn money from ad revenues.

The WordAds PPC service comes in response to requests from the company’s community of writers producing content on 24 million blogging sites.

Launching the service, WordPress ads lead Jon Burke explained that the firm had always resisted advertising because it “wasn’t terribly tasteful, and it seemed like Google’s AdSense was the state-of-the-art, which was sad”.

He continued: “Blogs are unique and they shouldn’t be treated like every other page on the internet,” adding that if there is to be advertising, “it darn well better be good”.

The new PPC platform is the result of an agreement with Federated Media, which said the partnership will allow brands to “execute cohesive, content-driven campaigns using a variety of marketing solutions”.

Examples cited by the firm include content curation and sponsored content posts, which it says will integrate marketing messages “respectfully and appropriate to the conversation”.

Additionally, it says the PPC service will allow brands to target conversations instead of just key words.

Not every blogger on WordPress will be able to benefit from ad revenue, however. Writers will need to have publicly visible blogs with a custom domain, with selection based on level of traffic and engagement and type of content, as well as the language used on a blog.

With blogs catering to niche markets, it is probable that brands will be able to target their advertising at specific audiences.

Although WordPress did not reveal exactly how the advertising revenues would be split or the level of interest from brands, it is clear there is huge scope to make the scheme profitable, with Mr Burke noting that more than 50,000 WordPress-powered blogs come online every day.

Econsultancy recently pointed out that PPC has two main advantages over other forms of digital marketing – transparency and control. “You can see exactly where you are advertising, and control the amount that you pay per conversion with great precision,” Shane Quigley explained on a blog post.

Top 10 WordPress Plugins of 2009

NeeT — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 07:22:48 +0000

WordPress is one blogging platform that can be easily upgraded with latest plugins. Although there are an array of wordpress plugins available, only a few have made it to the top. Here are the Top 10 WordPress Plugins in 2009.

1. Branded Admin

Bloggers using WordPress based websites will find this plugin very useful. It allows you to brand the WordPress admin section using unique header and footer. It also removes WordPress links to better distinguish the site as a custom work and reinforce the sites branding.

Download Here

2. Insights

You can search your blog, Wikipedia, images, videos, and Google while writing a post with this plugin. You can then link the search results to your post’s keywords. You can also edit them if they are from your own blog increasing productivity and at the same time the appeal of your posts.

Download Here

3. GD Star Rating

This plugin allows you to have your own rating system for your posts. You can display stats on the sidebar and also customize the stars in your rating.

Download Here

4. Old Post Promoter

This plugin allows you to promote older posts by classifying them under latest posts. The plugin chooses a particular older post at random and revises the timestamp. As a result, the post appears as a latest post on your blog.

Download Here

5. WordPress Backup

This compact plugin allows you to back up the current theme, uploaded images and plugin directories. You can schedule the backup to occur at a particular time and set it to be sent to your email address.

Download Here

6. WP GreetBox

This plugin inserts a special greeting box on top of blog posts based on the source of the readers like Google, RSS, Technorati etc. It also informs the visitor about how simple it is to subscribe to the RSS feed.

Download Here

7. Google XML Sitemaps

This is an essential plugin to help your blog do well in search engines. It helps by automatically informing Google on updates in your website.

Download Here

8. Broken Link Checker

Broken links can severely affect your page rank. This plugin investigates your webpages and shows all the broken links, allowing you to repair them with ease.

Download Here

9. In the Loop

With this handy plugin you can easily add stuff to the end of your blog posts. You don’t have to mess up with the template to add codes to your webpages anymore.

Download Here

10. RSS Includes Pages

When you use wordpress as CMS, you would have found that the WebPages are not shown in the RSS feed. To solve this issue, all you have to do is install this plugin and your web pages will start showing in the RSS feed.

Download Here

How to Remove IFrame Trojan?

NeeT — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 20:56:45 +0000

Open source means choice and freedom for those users who have the skills to download and install softwares but is also prone to attacks because of its unsecure nature. PHP and WordPress are also open source and no doubt a great resource for web developers, but they are attractive to attackers as well.

Being a blogger I myself have been using WordPress as a platform for my different blogs and so far I was not facing any problem. But a few days back some of my blogs got infected by a malware called IFrame. And the funny part was that I was not even aware of the infection and I still don’t know how did somebody got this peice of code injected into my blog. One of my IM friend informed me that his antivirus just stopped him to view a page on my blog. He send me the screenshot.

I was shocked to realize that my antivirus was updated as well with the latest virus definition files, but it didn’t caution me any time. I had BitDefender installed which of course I have changed with AVAST now, and I must say that its been a great tool as its High performance antivirus engine, Anti-spyware & anti-rootkit tool, Resident shield and self-protection, Enhanced user interface and Daily automatic updates let me know of the malicious scripts on different websites I browse earlier with no knowledge.

This IFrame malware can infect any PHP file in theory because it is just a piece of code that has to be injected in the file, but provided that you are using WordPress on your blog, most likely the files infected by it are

index.php in root folder
wp-config.php in root folder
index.php in wp-admin folder
index.php in wp-contents\yourtheme\ folder
default-filters.php in wp-includes folder

What it does that it inserts a piece of code at the end of each of the above mentioned file right after the ending ?> PHP tag as shown below in the picture.

Sometimes it is also found within the php code injected using echo command.

Here are some issues that you are most likely to face if your site is infected by Iframe malware.

1. You will not be able to login to your wp-admin, rather it will show you that there is some error in default-filters.php file.
2. If you browse your site and you do not have any good anti malware or script blocking software then you will probably see that the layout of your site has become like a jigsaw. Page elements could have been moved to different random locations.
3. The height of some elements on sidebar might have been modified.
4. Your site just do not open, instead it will show a php error message.

Removal of IFrame Malware

Removing that IFrame malware was not easy by any means. I searched over internet and many things were tried. I found another good article regarding IFrame removal written by Fields Marshall. But everything went in vain, everytime I remove that IFrame tag and upload the modified file, it gets inserted after a while. Now I will list the steps which I did and finally got rid of that malware, incase your site is infected by IFrame malware, you follow the same steps and I hope that eventually you will get rid of it as well.

1. Make sure that you have AVAST installed on your system with the latest virus database files.
2. Scan your PC for infections.
3. Change your ftp account password and also the cpanel password.
4. Upload and overwrite a fresh copy of all wordpress files after making necessary changes in wp-config.php file.
5. Download and install TextCrawler, a free utility to find required text in files on your hard drive. Its a freeware and very easy to use. Text Crawler is a fantastic tool for anyone who works with text files. It enables you to instantly find and replace words and phrases across multiple files and folders. It utilises a powerful Regular Expression engine to enable you to create sophisticated searches, perform batch operations, extract text from files and more. It is fast and easy to use, moreover TextCrawler is Freeware!.
6. You might have all files of your theme on your hard drive, if not, then download all files of the theme and search within those files for an iframe tag using Text Crawler. If you find any file containg the iframe tag then remove those lines which resembles like the ones discussed above.
7. Similarly download all plugin files that you are using at the moment and scan them for an iframe tag, if found then just remove those lines.
8. Remove all unwanted themes and plugins that you are not using. Do not use poor themes or less popular plugins. People are spreading free themes and plugins for purpose.
9. After making sure that all your theme files and plugin files are clean upload them.
10. Browse to your site and wait for any AVAST warning to appear, if done exactly as described, chances are that you will not face any trouble again.
11. Enjoy and if you found this article helpful, please consider linking to it or sharing it with someone else.
12. All comments and suggestions are appreciated.