A thousand apologies to anyone who happened to download my initial 1.21 version and got their CSS file chewed - I somehow managed to delete a vital line of code, arrrghhh! Should be fixed now. Sorry, sorry, sorry! If it’s any consolation I did the same to two of my sites before realising…
After a flurry of error reports and lots of really helpful comments from users, I have revised the WordBay code and eliminated some small (for some people not so small) bugs and added a couple of little features I hope you will appreciate. Man, I haven’t spent this much time on WordBay development for a long time..! Many of the bugs are a result of some scrappy coding on my part from way back in the early versions of WB, so I am surprised they haven’t surfaced sooner!
Download the new version from the link on the left, or update from your WP panel.
Changes are as follows:
Bugs eliminated (we hope):
- the problem some users were having with path to the countries.txt file not working. Now believed fixed, see end of this post for explanation.
- some changes to ensure the WordBay plugin path is got properly in other places too, like when saving the CSS file. Might be the cause of some errors people have been having with 404 errors when saving the CSS, but need to continue to monitor that, please let me know.
- removed a spurious part of the url obfuscation routine that I realised COULD cause a potential bug (in a very small minority of cases). Now WB no longer tacks “buy” and “cheap” on the end of the URL. I never liked that anyway. At some point I would like to add a better encryption routine, but no time now…
- fixed the SILLY bug where every time you update your setting some more forward slashes get added to the single quotes in the css file, and those only in my comments! I finally discovered stripslashes(), sigh…
Features added:
- FINALLY added the product title to the URL, so now the URL looks like:
http://www.mysite.com/wp-content/plugins/wordbay/buy.php?buyurl=Alpine-IDA-X303-iPod-Sat-HD-Ready-AM-FM-CD-Car-Deck___aHR0cDovL3JvdmVyLm…
People asked me to do this aaages ago as it could have a positive effect on SEO (though I doubt it - a Google-slap is a Google-slap) and it also has the added benefit of pushing the ugly bit of the URL a way off the end of the browser address box. Maybe I should add another long line of “______” and push it right off!
- also added the product title to the “title” tooltip for links, so now when you hover over any of the product links, you get the little tooltip. Helpful and could have SEO benefits too (again, call me sceptical…) I could have added “Buy ” before this, or “…for sale” on the end or something, but that would be a matter of taste…
Hope this does indeed fix your bugs and I hope you like the new features too. Plenty more feature requests and ideas out there, but they will have to be done as and when my regular job, hobbies, not to mention 4-month old son allow me!
Oh, and if you want an explanation of the countries.txt path bug, well I was specifying a full http:// path to the file. However, when using the PHP file() function, not all servers allow you to specify a full URL for security reasons, because it could be used to access an external file. Specifically, fopen wrappers is disabled on some hosts in the php.ini file, so I had to use a native PHP method of finding the “internal” path. This also applies to put_file_contents, which is also subject to this limitation. This function is used by the CSS retention routine, so COULD be the reason for some bugs that have been happening there.
This SHOULD have eliminated some of those major bugs! But I am sure you will let me know if it hasn’t, though 
Posted on February 24th, 2010 by markowe
Filed under: Uncategorized
“though I doubt it - a Google-slap is a Google-slap”
Agreed, Wordbay’s got a footprint, Google knows which sites use it. (remember folks: all the images come from eBay unless you use an image cache plugin like image-shadow..ohh yea, what about WordBay.css that is used in every install) If anything this adds another variable to confirm the footprint. IMHO Google will not care about Wordbay if your have original, useful content on your site. But if folks want it they got it
About the phantom 404s: Just bumped one of my sites up to v1.21 from v1.16 and this appeared when I viewed a listing:
xx.xx.xx.xx- - [24/Feb/2010:15:40:22 +0000] “GET /wp-content/plugins/wordbay/WordBay.css HTTP/1.1″ 404 5119 “http://www.sitename.com/xxxxx” “Mozilla/5.0 (xxxxxx) xxxxx”
WB Admin options says “No existing WordBay.css was found in your plugin directory…….” I can see the file listed but I can’t get into the site from this location to check the creation date of it. Either way this is not a critical issue (just annoying when I review my 404 logs)
Now go spend some time with Mark Jnr, well that is unless this is your ‘escape’ …Dirty nappies vs. PHP code…tough call
(Oh yea and stick your paypal email address/button somewhere on your site)
Yeah, and eBay RSS has a footprint a mile wide anyway, I can’t be bothered with trying to get rid of all the telltales (like “Bid now/Buy now”). Jez, who did the geotargetting routine, also wrote a little image url cloaking routine, but I never included it in the production version, was trying to keep it for myself
But I might put that in the next version.
Hmm, those 404s are worrying, but I check the logs on my updated sites and don’t get those. They are just in the logs, right? Not actually on-screen?! I’m still not sure there might not be something dodgy going on there…
You figured out that “No existing WordBay.css was found in your plugin directory…” appears when you reinstall, since installation via Wordpress admin update feature overwrites the css file so it has to get it from memory again. But you know that, that’s why I really need to add that “on activation” feature asap…
Yes, Mark jr (Luka) will soon be clamouring for my attention, does make a nice break from PHP!
I did have a donation button - I may well put it back up, I took it down as I didn’t really want to fish for donations, but it is nice when people do “remember” the author of programs that are making them loads of money
I generally need to sort out the template of this site, it’s an absolute eyesore!
Thanks for all of the hard work you put into this plugin. I hate to say this, but as soon as I updated to version 1.22, my posts look fine, but when I click on any of the listings they go to my 404 error page.
Any clues as to what might be causing this.
Sigh, thanks Pat
You should update to 1.22 in any case, but I don’t think it will fix this bug - there seem to a few of you with this problem. Is it like an “internal” 404 error caught by your blog? So when you click it comes up within your blog template and a “Not found” message? Or is it going to some other page? What page is in the browser address bar at the top?
This is probably some clash with some setting on your server, but it’s one of those mysterious things where I can’t think of anything that I changed this time that would give you that error…
Oh, P.S. Pat, do make sure you updated all the files, especially “buy.php”, not just WordBay.php (unless you did the update automatically, in which case it should be fine), otherwise you will certainly get an error like the one you describe. Maybe it would be worth reuploading buy.php from the zip file just in case that file didn’t update for some reason.
Hey Mark. It goes to my sites 404 page with a “Nothing found” message. I have updraged to v1.22 but it is doing the same thing.
I updated the file automatically from withing Wordpress. My buy.php is actually called shop.php. I wonder if that could be a problem.
Here is an example page of where this is happening if it helps:
http://makeavideo.net/samsung-digital-camcorders/