Every once in a while I want to populate a new blog with articles from InfoGoRound. The usual method of cut and paste can be horribly tedious and time consuming, so I turned to some free software I created several years ago to convert InfoGoRound articles into neatly formatted HTML files.

InfoGoGetter allows you to name files with any extension, and use any template you want, so I created a template.xml file that looked like this:

<item>
<pubDate>Mon, 26 October 2009 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<category>Wordpress</category>
<category>Blogging</category>
<title><!--TITLE--></title>
<content:encoded><p><!--ARTICLEBODY--></p></content:encoded>
</item>


Of course, you’d want to change the date and category names to ones that fit your blog, but that’s all there is to it.

Then, I went through and converted all the articles I thought were useful with this template and saved them with a .xml extension.

Once I was done, I used a search and replace tool to remove spaces between the paragraph tags, since the Wordpress import documentation said that linebreaks would convert as extra br tags, which would make way too much space between paragraphs.

Then, I opened a Command Prompt window, navigated to the directory where all the articles were stored, and typed:

type *.xml > file.rss


This command works like cat in linux/unix to concatenate all the xml files into one big file.

Then all that was left was to import the new file.rss into Wordpress.

The Import menu is under Tools in the Wordpress admin sidebar.

Simply choose the RSS import option, find the file on your hard drive, and voila, they’re all done!

Of course, the more articles you want to import, the more useful this is. Still, even with just 11 articles, it saves a fair chunk of time.

If you’ve read my previous post, you’ll know I’m working on a local business networking site in Wordpress.

To handle event registration, I checked out a few different plugins, and finally decided on Events Manager 2.0. It’s a very slick plugin that not only allows people to RSVP for events, but also ensures only the right number of seats are available, it sends confirmation emails, and produces a nice printable report of who has bought tickets.

It isn’t exactly what I need, but it’s a solid place to start hacking.

My first job was to turn the single field “seats” into “member tickets” and “non-member” tickets, make sure that the new fields show up in all the right places, and recode a few things to make sure they get added up in the calculations to determine how many tickets are left to be sold.

I also added two new admin and database fields for the prices of member and non-member tickets for each event.

Today I’m working on a Paypal integration for the registration process. Once the user has decided how many member/non member tickets to buy, I want to send them to a page where they can either print off the invoice and pay by cheque, or click a link to connect to Paypal.

Once I’m done hacking this plugin, it’s on to user registrations on the site, which looks like it could be a beast!

[evening edit]

And by golly I’ve done it. It ain’t pretty so far, and I need to make the paypal and addresses and such customizable, but the hack was successful….

A friend and client of mine asked me about SNEmpire today. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but a quick Google I discovered it’s a $500 social networking script. The sales page actually looks pretty good, but I went to one of the sites running the software (imsocialize.com) and was less than impressed by the user interface presented there.

Instead of recommending a buy, I pointed my friend to several open source social networking scripts that might server her needs:

Dolphin
The demo site and the showcase of sites running this script are very impressive.

Elgg
This looks like another contender. It’s got a pretty basic interface, but from a user standpoint, the simplicity is great.

Mahara
Mahara is a little less like Facebook, and a little more like LinkedIn. If your users are all about business and achievements, this might be the best solution for you.

Insoshi
A bit basic, but like Elgg, it’s got lots of potential.

PHPizabi
A great looking site right out of the box.

While each of these will require some customization, and they don’t come with tutorials, and maybe that makes all the difference to my friend. But making sure the foundation of my business — the software — is rock solid would be more important to me than spending time on the customization and learning curve were I planning a social networking site.

So far in this series we’ve created a way to redirect prospects sent by affiliates to oodles of different product sales pages from one clickbank account, and created custom affiliate URLs to ensure that affiliates are linking to your site, not Clickbank’s, for their affiliate links.

Today I want to solve on other problem I have with Clickbank.

When you run an affiliate program through Clickbank, you do not know who your affiliates are. All you know is their Clickbank ID.

I don’t really need to know their mailing address or the name of their pet canary, but it would be nice to have their name, email address and Clickbank ID.

It would be nice to be able to email affiliates about any special offers they could promote to their list.

It would be awesome to be able to send out an email to all my affiliates when I’ve got a new product.

Having a ready made list of people who might promote a new product is much more advantageous than starting from 0 affiliates with each product and hoping that a few folks will find it in the Clickbank marketplace.

And should I ever want to abandon Clickbank and move to a different affiliate management service, I would definitely want to tell all my affiliates about the new setup.

So, I need, at least in some minor way, to have my own affiliate list.

I decided that the most effective way to do this is with a combination of a bit of custom PHP and Aweber.
Read more…

Yesterday I created a simple (very, very simple) script to allow Clickbank merchants to redirect their hoplink to different products.

This is beneficial because it allows you to run affiliate programs for up to 50 products from one account, without creating a distracting intermediary page listing all your products. Running all your programs from one account also will increase the gravity of your account, making it look more appealing to affiliates in the Clickbank marketplace.

Today I’m going to create a script to go along with yesterdays redirection code to fix another problem I have with Clickbank. It’s nice to have a lot of affiliates linking to your products, but they’re not really linking to you. They’re linking to hop.clickbank.net.

Since we’re already giving affiliates custom codes to link to our products, why not add a second redirection script so that those custom affiliate codes give us the link love instead of Clickbank?

Yesterday we created a file called hop.php, and once we were done, our affiliate hoplink codes looked a little like this:

http://AFFILIATE.PUBLISHER.hop.clickbank.net/?prod=1

Today, we’re going to create a file called go.php which will bounce visitors to the correct hoplink from our site. The hoplink directs those visitors to hop.php back on our domain, and hop.php directs them to the correct sales page, wherever that may be. If the average visitor even had a clue how much jumping around they were doing in the background, they’d feel a little bit like Tigger. Fortunately it will generally be instantaneous and invisible to most users.
Read more…