As promised I have put some work into WordBay today (more than I have in a loooong time) and come up with version 1.20 (download from the link on the left). Changes:
- corrected the bug where the “Click for details” icon was taking visitors to an eBay sign-in page instead of to the item clicked on. Many thanks and well done to ChuckMcB, a faitfhul WordBay user and frequent contributor, who spotted this problem and its cause. We might all see a slight increase in sales after this, who knows!
- found some legacy Wordpress functions I was using that needed changing. You won’t notice the difference!
- corrected a small potential security problem - not sanitising $_GET data. Big “no-no” usually, but it’s unlikely this could have been exploited here since WordBay merely passes this data on to eBay. Still, better safe…
It’s got a widget, a lovely widget
You might remember that ad if you are from the UK. Anyway, I also added something people have asked about intermittently ever since the early versions of WordBay: - I added rudimentary “widget” functionality, i.e. the possibility to add posts to your template rather than to content. Now this is DEFINITELY BETA! I just want to run it past you guys to see if you can get any results from this.
It works like this:
Put this code:
<?php echo wbwidget(array ('searchterms' => 'ipod') )?>
…wherever you want in your template, say the sidebar.php (careful not to add the PHP start and end tags if you are placing this within existing PHP code!).
Replace ‘ipod’ with your search terms, using the same search criteria as you would if you were inserting between the ‘[wordbay]’ tags.
Now please note!! It is hard to get good results with this because eBay preformats the feed (using some horrible tables etc.) and there is not much we can do to change that. Hence you need a good minimum width to display the feed, and you probably want to turn off the “Click for details” icon. Maybe you can get better results than me with some judicious css. I certainly didn’t manage to get it looking decent! Let me know how you get on.
Oh and by the way, at the moment you have to rely on the existing settings in your admin panel, which doesn’t help of course. It’s unlikely you’ll manage to get your settings so they look right in both the “widget” and the post&page content, so it’s probably one or t’other. In particular you will want to set the display to a single column, I’d imagine! I have not yet added the possibility of adding per-post settings, that’s another thing people have been on at me for ages, but I am reluctant to take that on right now. It’s the next big job, though, for sure.
Well, as ever, all the best, and keep earning with Wordpress, WordBay and EPN! (and let the rest of us in on the secret if you know it!)
Oh, P.S. WordBay is now tested up to the latest version of Wordpress, 2.9.2 - finally!
Posted on February 20th, 2010 by markowe
Filed under: Uncategorized
Hello,
First of all, I love this plugin. It works great on my sites.
I am having problems with one site and it’s a little confusing, because it doesn’t do it on any of my other sites.
I’ll login to WP and when I go to the Wordbay options, it just kind of locks up and slows down everything. It only does it on one site though.
Not sure what that would be, but I’d love your input if you have the time.
Thanks and thanks for a great plugin!
(the site is listed as my name above)
Mark, I thought the main reason for doing this update was the adjustment to Ebay’s new RSS feeds? While its great that you fixed the “click for details” error I’m a bit flabbergasted that you deduct that this error accounts for the drop in reported clicks and earnings for the past week . Because how could it if that error has always existed before? You know what I mean?
So please look into the RSS issue again, there definitely is something wrong with this as WordBay clicks dont appear to be properly reporting to Ebay. Again, looking at my transactions report the period from Feb 10 to 20 records about 2/3 less WordBay clicks. The WordBay clicks that are showing for this period only show up as BINs/BIDs and nothing ever with revenue! This is totally abnormal and I think I remember someone mentioning on the EPN board that that is the most common error pattern associated with the RSS update, especially for UK links. If you haven’t checked your own transactions reports for February please do so. If you like I could also email you mine though I doubt that it could help you track down the actual issue.
@Kenny: I used to have similar problems with plugin settings when I switched to a VPS server. The problem was the server memory size. Once I had hostgator set it to 64MB everything worked fine again. So try to look into this.
For reference:
http://www.ebaypartnernetworkblog.com/en/news/rss-feed-is-being-updated/ http://forums.ebay.com/db2/topic/Ebay-Partner-Network/Steady-Visitor-Count/510191390
http://forums.ebay.com/db2/topic/Ebay-Partner-Network/Rss-Changes/510191369
Hey Dennis. Thanks for your reply.
What’s confusing to me though, is that the domain I’m using is an add-on domain in my Hostgator account. I’m using the plugin on 2 other sites and it works perfectly.
Also, I get this error when I try to update it:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 41943040 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 4196252 bytes) in /home/kennyk3/public_html/bathroompedestalsink/wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 566
Dennis, sorry, maybe I didn’t take your report seriously enough that you thought campaigns using WordBay had taken a hit in comparison with campaigns using other scripts. That would definitely be worrying, so I have taken another look in detail and written up my findings: http://www.itsgottabered.com/wordbay/2010/faulty-rss-link-generation/
Unfortunately, my conclusion after that exercise remains the same, that there is nothing in the links that WordBay produces that differs in any way from those produced by the RSS Generator. However, closer inspection of my own stats does show some sort of nosedive after around the 11th Feb. Then again, this is nothing new since QCP (though does not explain your discrepancy with other scripts). The only thing I can conclude right now is either we all got whacked by Google around the same time (that is not unheard of, as Google introduces criteria discriminating certain types of site “footprint”) or we are getting whacked by EPN (also not unheard of) and they haven’t fessed up yet, and your discrepancy is unfortunate coincidence.
I am willing to hear any other suggestions or reports which might fill in the picture so let’s keep the line open.
Kenny, that is a huge amount of memory for WordPress to be using! 42Mb?! I wonder if that is related to the problem I described elsewhere (seems I never wrote a post about this, I will have to). It may be caused by the Magpie RSS module used by WordBay that is native to Wordpress. I wrote:
@ Kenny: Yep, thats exactly the type of error that points to an insufficient server memory size. Since you have an add-on with your actual domain its very possible that its set too low. Just submit a ticket to hostgator and ask them to increase your servers memory size. 64MB is the least you should have/get. They did it for me this way too, though Im not sure if a shared server has a set limit compared to a VPS (which I’m on now).
@Mark: I seriously doubt that these are just coincidences. See my comment on your new post.