And it was a mother. This was why I wait so long to update.

First, I made sure that all my plugins were current, but it turns out that this new version of WordPress is a big change and it really didn’t matter if they were current because a lot were not going to work.

Alinks

This is a plugin I had on every installation of WordPress. And I am tired of messing with it to make it work with WordPress 2.6.1 or the theme at Digital Products Review. I am not really sure which it is, but I am done for a while. But when I turn it on, my homepage looks like the picture on the right. It did nothing to the other pages on the site.

Not sure why. Looked at the source code of each and did a compare. They came out exactly the same. Done messing. Just done.

I want to use the same autolink plugin across all my WordPress installations, so if it doesn’t work with one, it is not going on any.

So I went looking and came back with KB Linker, a very simple way to autolink keywords, which I may edit so that it can import true CSV files. The Alinks import and export function was very proprietary. I just want a simple “keyword,url,title,target” type CSV file.

But I found a lot of autolink plugins, enough for another post sometime.

Simple Tags

This S.O.B. stopped working too and it did a lot. It gave you tag suggestions and gave you related posts for both posts and feeds. The replacement is supposed to be Simple Tagging which doesn’t even do half as much.

So now, no suggestions. I have found that Similar Posts works pretty well and I will be using Sniplets to put the code under each post. Sniplets is a pretty sweet plugin. It’s almost like having widgets you can put anywhere, not just in the sidebar.

Sezwho

They have two plugins you can download. Don’t make the mistake of installing the wrong one if you have WordPress 2.6 or higher. On this site, it messed up the javascript in the admin to the point I had no HTML editor and I had to build the sidebars in the correct order the first time, because drag and drop was gone.

The Turbo Link

I use Flock. Nuff said. Can’t use Google Gears on Flock. So I have no idea how well this works. I guess I could fire up Firefox just for blogging, but why. I have Live Writer and ScribeFire.

WordPress MU

I do have one of these installations now and I can build subdomain blogs on the fly. It’s pretty damn cool. I can also clone any one of these installations to create a new one.

Ch-Ch-Changes

These times start out shitty, but in the end they are much better. I took a normal work day off to get all of this done. I will not go broke making my boss rich. I make more on my own than my day job. Therefore, it gets second place.

I realized my priorities were out of wack. If anything needs to have the focus of my work, it is my sites, not my job.

And I will be using Atomkeep to send out my resume, like Tim Ferris suggests in The Four Hour WorkWeek. I need to see what’s out there.

And I changed the theme. It was time and it was free. And I think I like it a lot better.

Most people don’t give a second thought to how the search engines work. When I explain that part of my job, I have to say something along the lines of, "You know, when you are searching for Athlete’s Foot Cream online. That first link you click on. Well, someone worked hard to get their site there out of the thousands available."

"But what if I’m not searching for Athlete’s Foot Cream?"

"Okay, Donkey Shows then."

"I don’t have much interest in Donkeys."

"Nobody does. I’m just lying. Really, I just screw around on the computer all day. I was just making that part up. God picks the top search results and we humans just accept the choices as his will. I just pray a lot."

I have to play to the locals, who are a mix of Baptists, Mormons, and Pentecostals. Yet another group who believes I print money out of air or maybe think I’m a drug dealer because I don’t "work" that much.

In the old days, before blogs and content management systems, we would hop on one foot through the snow to get our pages ranked in the SERP’s. What’s an SERP? I don’t know, half of a snake maybe? (Search Engine Results P…, too lazy to look up P).

But then the software came. The software made our job much easier. We could work our magic more quickly. But it became harder at the same time. Footprint.

Take one standard installation of a WordPress blog and from the outside, disregarding the content, it looks just like another. This makes it great for cookie cutter sites and MFA article quilts. Post after Post underneath Category after Category. Flat earth technology. A post received a week of fame before it was swallowed by Blog.

Yes, you could link to other Posts, but you would have to remember that. Blog was no help with that.

Along came Plugin to breath life into the flatness in the land of Blog. Plugin and his minion Widget gave us the option to single out certain Pages and Posts for greatness. Greatness now, a week from now or a year from now.

This greatness was achieved on the back of lesser Posts. They bowed to the mighty Great Posts with Popular Posts, Recent Comments, Recommended Posts and other Widgets that emphasized certain Posts over others by spreading their word across all Pages of Blog. The royalty of the Great Posts was further highlighted with Plugins like Alinks which became one with the content of Blog.

These spells and sacrifices are necessary for Posts to be ready for the SERPs. Only some Posts make it. That is the way of Blog. The SERPs are brutal. Sending your whole army of Posts out will result in slaughter.

Therefore, we continue, as Priests and Priestesses of Blog to nurture those posts with sidebar spells and interlink concoctions, because we know that there is more than one Blog, constantly searching for new Widgets to bring light of the SERPs to the denizens of the one true Blog, our own.

Just to let you know, I’m agnostic. And that sure beat writing a normal old post about using Widgets and Plugins to emphasize posts. Plus it fits with the name "Blog".

I actually started with a "Sacrificing Pawns" analogy. All of your posts won’t be great and all of them won’t face the competition. So pick ones that will and give them a shot. And use a Top Posts and/or Recent Comments plugin to allow some "visitors to Blog" cast their own lots, although Top Posts can sometimes become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This weekend was another research weekend, hence my last links post. I have been looking a lot at the alinks plugin.

This plugin allows you to assign urls to phrases within your posts. The plugin does it dynamically. It even has modules for such affiliate programs as Clickbank and Commission Junction.

By using this plugin, you can monetize your blog and link deeper to older posts at the same time. But I didn’t want to go about this manually, more like semi-manually.

So this is going to be one of my thought process posts where it go off on tangents trying to find an answer for what I am trying to accomplish.

I also have the landing sites plugin and an old stats plugins that still works with the current WordPress called Chaitgear cgref.

The landing sites plugin recognizes a query from search engines and when a visitor comes from one of the search engines, it lists related posts at the top of the page. Click on my link in these search results and you will see what I mean.

The cgref plugin is a very raw stats program, but being raw, it allows me to sort and access the keywords visitors have used to access my site.

Now, the alinks plugin allows you to import keyphrases. I was thinking I could update the cgref plugin with the more up to date query data from the landing sites plugin. I could then catch more of the keywords used to access my site. Then export the keywords and urls and import them directly into alinks, filtering them manually as I do.

In theory, I think this would increase traffic by boosting the rank that I already have for certain keywords and phrases. But I never stop with simple.

Or maybe just integrate these plugins into one plugin and have a site that automatically adjusts its own links. But that was not quite enough either.

Or maybe create a central tracking/ad server. One server for all of my blogs that uses the alinks modules to interlink related blogs based on the data from search engine hits collected at the central server. The advertising side of the server will use the search engine queries and the tags on blog posts to match affiliate products to the posts. Then I will use just simple feeds to deliver the related products with an ad block inside the post or serve them via alinks.

This will work will any affiliate program that provides data feeds that can be imported into the server like Clickbank, ShareASale or Regnow.

To build the matches I may have to use the Yahoo API or simply do a full text search on the affiliate database.

But then, how would I rank the products. What if 100 matching products come back for one post and I only want five? I could use the programs own ranking data to start. Clickbank gives you this info. And then I could collect clickthrough data and actual sales data to tweak this ranking.

And this is why I disappear for a couple of days at a time. I get myself into these projects I created myself and spend months finishing them. I’ll let you know if I have bitten off more than I can chew. But I see the prize. I think it’s a nice one. And if any of you know of something that works like this, save me.