According to Mint, most of my blog visitors are American. To reflect this I decided to change my default Amazon Associates links from the UK to the US. In the process I got confused over the link syntax I should be using, but now have this sorted. For managing links to specific items on my site (automatically tagged with my Associates ID) I use Amazon Media Manager. AMM is a WordPress plugin that will randomly show a specified number of product links, categories of which can be matched to categories on your blog. AMM development is not active, however, it is easy to hack the plugin to use the more recent link syntax.
Continue reading 'Unravelling Amazon link formats'
Tag archive for 'php'
As previously noted, the currently available RSS module (1.0.6) is incompatible with the Siriux theme for Gallery (2.1.2). I wanted to be able to offer a feed (photocast) for an album in my own gallery, but finding a hack for the code was only half of the problem. For some reason defining a feed in Gallery is very non-intuitive. Here's how it's done, step-by-step.
Continue reading 'Fixing feeds for the Siriux Gallery theme'
Having settled on SimplePie as a solution for embedding iStockPhoto feeds, I decided to see if I could use it to parse the latest posts from multiple sites in my OPML file (blogroll if you prefer). Would it really be as simple to cook as it sounded? There were qualifiers, however. I wanted to show only a selection of headlines at any one time. I wanted to vary the order in which the sites were listed. And I wanted to automatically fetch and display the favicon for each site. Armed only with copy-and-paste level PHP know-how, I was going to need help in the kitchen—that much was clear at the outset.
Continue reading 'Baking SimplePie with favicon topping'
In an earlier post I described a JavaScript-based method to include recently-approved iStockPhoto images in a page on your website. When I migrated from a static blogging system (iBlog) to WordPress I found a useful plugin that worked very well in MAMP. Unfortunately it broke when I moved my developmental site to a live DreamHost server. Here is a bit more background to the problem and an eventual solution that uses SimplePie. Although the focus here is on displaying photographs, it's a solution that should work with practically any feed you might wish to embed.
Continue reading 'Embedding iStockPhoto feeds revisited'
Alternatives to LAMP: The LAMP configuration (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) is familiar to the open source universe. But just because this combination of products is comfortable, that doesn't mean that it provides the best solution for your systems. David Chisnall suggests some alternatives that might make a better match for your needs.
