February 17th, 2009 Add Your Comments Bookmark and Share

DEVELOPING A WORDPRESS PLUGIN
Anyone stopping by yesterday may have noticed something strange going on with THE MAKE MONEY ONLINE DOT NET. I took it upon myself to delve into the world of WordPress plugin development, it didn’t exactly go as smooth as I’d like. The wrong comments showing under the wrong post, some posts not showing at all, random text appearing (at random). You name it and I screwed it up. Why would I do this to my blog? Simple really, I was too lazy to setup a development environment and this blog makes me less money than any of my others. It became my test bed for the day. The good news is that I eventually got “something” working and it “should” be very good.

First of all let me explain that I’m not a PHP developer in any way shape or form. I’m strictly from the Microsoft side of the fence. Secondly I don’t really do much work with web applications, more desktop and nasty system applications. All this is adding up to a PHP disaster without doubt! BUT I wanted to write a plug-in for WordPress. There is something that is very important in terms of ranking your pages that is missing from WordPress. I did a quick search and couldn’t find anything obvious to fill the gap either. That left me with 2 choices. Either forget about it or write it myself. After 30 seconds reading about the basics of the WordPress API I took the second option. An hour later my blog was trashed and I was swearing a lot. 2 hours later it was still trashed, the language was beginning to get toned down. 3 hours later it was still trashed but less trashed than an hour ago. 4 hours later I had a working plugin and was dancing the dance of success. 5 hours later I had my dinner.

So What Have You Written Paul?

Ahh, that would be telling! It’s a plugin to help boost a blogs natural search traffic. Now rather than make a load of nonsense claims I’m going to do this differently. I’ll use it for 1 month (possibly 2) on this blog and then post up the natural search traffic results. If my traffic improves, great, if not then back to the drawing board. I’m very confident it will make at worst some positive impact. Once I know that it’s having the right affect I’ll think about what to do with it.

I’m not going to be selling it, there is a little work involved to get the most out of it and I really can’t be bothered with the support e-mails for what will be a few dollars. That leaves me with either giving it away to all and sundry as link bait or more likely sticking it behind a password protected post for my subscribers…hmm… decisions, decisions. Of course if it doesn’t work I’ll just disable it, pretend it never existed and we can never talk about this again!

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Paul B