I know, kind of a weird way to start off by saying something doesn’t work.

Yourls works great for shortening your urls and tracking your clicks and providing details about those clicks.

For some servers, there seems to be a problem when you try to add a url – Yours can’t add urls

You seem to get the “spinning wheel” that never stops and tells you that the url has been added.

The installation is straightforward (if you understand installing scripts, setting up MySQL datatbases, chmod directories … you know, that kind of stuff).

There Is A Problem

On some servers, certainly not all, Yourls doesn’t seem to work.  It won’t allow you to add a url – sure, it looks like it is working, but it never completes and tells you that the url has been added.

So what’s a person to do?

If you don’t mind hacking around a little bit, then open up your favorite file editor or login to your websites control panel and find the insert.js file that was installed in your Yourl’s js/insert.js file and add a couple of lines of code.

One line 39 add the following code:  newurl = newurl.replace(“http://”, “”);

It should look like this:

You need to do the same thing later in the js (javascript) file, on line 111 add the exact same line of code.

Your Yourls url shortener should now be able to add and delete urls.

I don’t know if you noticed or not …

These “hacks” unfortunately don’t allow you to do one thing that Yourls was designed to do.

And that is, track secure urls, https.

That’s the price you will have to pay with this hack if you are having problems adding urls to yourls.  If you are not using secure urls, then no big deal.

If you are interested in an easier solution, let me know

I was considered knocking out a script that autoinstalls Yourls, however I would like to know if there is even a hint of interest before I go down the rabbit hole.

Use the comment section below to let me know if you are interested.

Working on another simple PHP script. One that helps you write articles quickly.

It is called Articletator.

I’m planning on having a working version ready very soon.

Here is a ten minute video demonstrating what it does so far – and the code that generates the results.

Articletator Video

The idea is you search for a keyword phrase of interest, tell the script how many results to get and where the results come from.

Articletator goes off and does its thing – grabbing urls of sites that provide the information of interest, parsing out bits of information relevant to your query and reporting back the results in an easy to use format.

Or “The Poor Man’s Split Testing Method”.

There’s no right or wrong way to do this. Darren Rowse made a post about split testing Google Adsense and showed how to do so using channels and a little javascript.

Like a lot of things, there are other ways of accomplishing the same thing.

Enter PHP, that fancy web scripting language that gives you the ability to do some pretty neat tricks.

The code snippet below allows you to split test your Adsense by day. Instead of having to setup separate channels to split test, just login to your Google Adsense account, create two versions of the Google Adsense code you want to test, paste those two versions into the PHP code shown below, put that PHP code in an include file on your site, and call that include file in your web page. Then, if you want to see how you are doing, go back to your Google Adsense account and look at your results by day.

O.K. maybe that was a lot of stuff to do.

If you have a PHP enabled web site and you are not using PHP includes, tsk, tsk.

All of the even numbered days (even numbered according to PHP) will display one version of your Adsense code while all of the odd numbered days will show another version of your Adsense code.


<?php

?>


The most important part is the “if” statement, the code that checks whether today is an even or an odd numbered day.

In this PHP example the “z” represents the day of the year.

The date(“z”)%2 < 1 checks if today's number modulus 2 is less than one (which asks if today is an even numbered day), then do whatever is between the set of squirly braces - the "{" and "}" - else do whatever is between the next set of squirly braces.

The whatever I am referring to is display your Adsense code.

By the way, there is nothing to prevent your from putting anything between the squirly braces.

There are some limitations to be aware of for sure. Namely, you still need to generate two versions of the Adsense javascript code to include on your web site. Also, if you want to get a better understanding of your results, you will need to download the results and group the data by even or odd day. I don’t even know if Google allows for an easy way to get your Adsense results – I’m not even going to login to find out.

But, for a quick and dirty way of split testing your Adsense results, this PHP code will do the trick.

Extra: You don’t have to just use the day of the year (“w”), you could just as easily use day of the week (“w”), hour of the day (“G”), day of the month (“j”) – or some combination. Whatever your mind can conceive and believe it can … oops, that’s for a different topic

“And in the beginning” … what a great opening line.

Time to start building a brand for myself. Get out and press the flesh with the people. Shake some hands, get pictures taken with the babies, break ground on the new skyscraper. Oh, sorry, wrong conversation.

Where was I? Oh, yes, talking with you. Letting you know what’s going on around here. Telling you my great plans for this little old weblog out on the internut.

I guess I should start with what I have planned for this site. After I spruce up the interior a little – a new paint job, refinish the floors, new kitchen cabinets … no, no, no, no – there I go again, getting off track.

Actually, I do mean I need to spruce up the interior of this weblog a bit. Give it a solid foundation to build on. Stuff like tricking out the title – get rid of that damn raquo thing, you know that ‘greater than symbol’ that services no worthwhile purpose. I have the latest and greatest version of WordPress running this site. Not sure what all of its capabilities are, noticed a bunch of widgets running around when I went to muck around with the presentation. I’ll have to wrap my head around widgets and I see if I like what I have here. Or maybe just do it the old fashion way and edit using vi on the command line. Something like this.

Dont’ worry, I won’t make you touch it, it doesn’t hurt.

Once I have the look and feel stuff done, will move on to adding analytics – maybe Statcounter or Google Analytics for tracking.

Of course, I’ll make the effort to build a list of subscribers – plan on making it worthwhile by giving stuff away. When I say stuff, I mean useful PHP scripts – kind of like what Robert Plank does at his site.

Then I’m going on a bender and getting setup with a bunch of Web 2.0 stuff for promoting this bad boy blog. De.licio.us, onlywire, propeller, youtube, slideshare – whatever else I can think of to toot my own horn.

I have thought about linkbaiting. Already have in mind who I’m targeting – going for the big fish on this one. Title will read something like “_____ ____, I have your wife hostage.” The ironic thing is I have something to back it up with – something I bought November 2007 when I first found out about this little factoid. Cloak and dagger stuff – ohhh, ahhhh, exiting!

And to finish up, I’m going to click on those links I just dropped and see if I can attract any attention over here.

There you go, the first blog post.

Check To Verify Your Site Exists

I’m getting ready to open up the offer I made a couple months ago – to build you a gardening database driven website.

Before I do that, I want to make sure you are ready. One thing I will ask you is if you have a website ready to go … and I have a script that will verify.

The reason I am doing this is so that when you place your order, we can get your site setup and ready to go in a short amount of time.

Here’s part of the script I will have when the order page goes live next week:

Thanks.

Dave

P.S. – If you have any questions, please use the comment section below to ask, thanks.

This was inspired by Robert Plank’s Black Hat PHP ebook.

So you know, I am working on increasing my online exposure. Part of the way I am doing that is giving away some of my stuff – show you what I can do. If you have been a regular reader of this site, you know that I am creating a database driven affiliate web site that I am going to give away (how to you get a free site, you ask? Use the signup form and get on my mailing list).

Additionally, I have recently added a feature that gives you the possibility of making money from this site.

If you refer people to this site and they either signup or purchase one of my products that I sell on Clickbank – you can get credit using a special link to direct visitors here.

Send people to this site using the following link: http://www.davewooding.com/visit/cb_aff

Replace the cb_aff with your ClickBank affiliate id (IMPORTANT: do NOT put a trailing slash (/) at the end or it won’t work)

Your affiliate link will show up in the autoresponder:

Any emails I sent out for a product of mine will have your affiliate id embedded.

Also any product that I sell off of this page via Clickbank (yes, there is a product for sale):

If you are familiar with looking at the html code, go look at it now – see if the html code looks similar to what I just showed you. If not, type in this link in your brower’s address bar, http://www.davewooding.com/visit/cb_aff (replace the cb_aff with your affiliate id).

So there, I have come clean with my intentions – I’m looking to increase my online exposure and am willing to pay for it!