http://www.example.com/images/
http://www.example.com/wp-content/uploads/

(note: In WordPress, change your media settings by un-checking this box “Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders”. This will keep all your uploads in a single folder.)

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^images/(.*)$ http://www.example.com/wp-content/uploads/$1 [L]

Download, install, and activate the featured content gallery plugin. Add 2 featured items by following the plugin instructions.

Open the file header.php located inside the TwentyTen theme.

Look around line 77 to remove the default header image code for TwentyTen.

77

<img src="<?php header_image(); ?>" width="<?php echo HEADER_IMAGE_WIDTH; ?>" height="<?php echo HEADER_IMAGE_HEIGHT; ?>" alt="" />

Then go down a few lines and look for:

80

<div id="access" role="navigation">

Then place the featured content gallery code right below that:

81

<?php include (ABSPATH . '/wp-content/plugins/featured-content-gallery/gallery.php'); ?>

It really works nice, with the navigation just below the featured content gallery.

See example: lakeshorestorage.com

Remember: The featured content gallery needs at least 2 featured items to work. So if you are seeing a blank spot, add 2 featured items.

This works with both TwentyTen 1.0 and 1.1 theme versions.

I am sure many of you follow the same process I would follow when starting a new website.

1. Have an idea for a new site.
2. Install and configure WordPress and install plug-ins.
3. Search for the perfect theme.

Now number 3 would always take lots of web searching, downloading, installing, activating, removing, over and over, no theme ever seemed to be just right.

Then I found the Frugal Theme. I found I can really make this theme into any look and feel I want all from within WordPress. Just about every single detail can be changed with a few clicks. It also has SEO built right in (which eliminates the need for SEO).

I have discovered that the more I use and dig into the frugal theme the more powerful it becomes. You will find out that Frugal is actually much much more than just a WordPress theme.

Are you tired of searching for the right theme? Get the Frugal Theme, you will not regret it!

Free Frugal Skins

The orders table is using a standard MySQL timestamp field to store the date of the order. I made timestamp indexed since we will be doing this query against this field.

I figured the easiest way was to only query those 90 days, that way I didn’t have to worry about looking at each row and comparing a date during output. All I had to worry about was creating the right query.

The first line simply is the number of days to go back in the query, in this case the number of days is 90.
The next 2 lines are used to create and format our new date 90 days in the past.
In the query we simply select all records that are newer than our 90 day old date.

$daysback = 90;
$accessdate = strtotime(“-$daysback days”,time());
$mysqldate = date( ‘Y-m-d H:i:s’, $accessdate );

$myquery = “select id,ordernumber,timestamp from tblorders where (timestamp > ‘$mysqldate’);”;

In the end of quite of bit of research I ended up with CubeCart version 4. Version 3 of the software had been around and was widely used. Version 4 was recently released and the software seemed to be the right mix between features and price.

After almost 2 years on CubeCart 4 my assessment is still the same. It is very solid and has really great features, but there is always room for improvement. A few items were missing, and yes, many of them could be added with “mods”, but I prefer to keep the software as close to original as possible. The reason is for security, upgrades, and support. You start adding and changing code and you could be opening up unknown security issues, and upgrades become a major headache as well.

CubeCart 5 beta has just been announced. I checked out the demo and read about the new features. I am very excitied about this new release. I really re-affirms my original choice to go with CubeCart. The company is not sitting back and watching, they are continuing to improve and innovate. This is exactly what you want your software vendor to be doing. Now I won’t be one of the first to upgrade, I will let the bugs get settled and squashed for a bit, but I am very excited to take the next step with our e-commerce store, and I think CubeCart 5 is going to be a big part of the process again.

• beta.cubecart.com
• CubeCart Developer Blog

Other reports are saying it is ignoring the robots.txt file, so might not be good enough to deny it there.

It was coming from 218.28.29.236

Here are more details about that IP, and what ranges you might want to block.

http://whois.domaintools.com/218.28.29.236

I placed the following in my .htaccess file


order allow,deny
deny from 218.28.
deny from 218.29.
allow from all


Please post a comment if you this bot has hit your site.

If you look at the graph above you will see the nice steady growth of a website. Then suddenly a drop! The site in question dropped from an average of over 100 unique visitors per day down to less than 5 per day. Quite a significant drop! Once I was sure the drop was going to stick, I made a few minor changes and then just left the site alone for a long time. Yes, I was disappointed, but it was not something I had time or ambition to address at the time.

Note: you will see on the chart short regain of traffic, but this seems to be a normal “blip” that can happen as rankings are sorted out across Google data centers.

Fast forward a month or so, and I am looking in through the webmaster tools, and happen to notice the HTML suggestions section under Diagnostics. There I see a line that says: “Short meta descriptions x,xxx”, which is just about every single page of the site. Immediately I fix the problem with the meta descriptions.

The Google Word on Meta Descriptions

Within two days, the traffic is already starting to climb backup again after staying flat for over a month.

My theory is that when the site was new Google eagerly indexed the site and it rose in the rankings, as time went on it got a deeper “analysis” by Google, and thus the problems caused the site to drop way down in the rankings. I am keeping my fingers crossed that the site will continue to climb and eventually gain back the traffic it once had.

30 Day Update

My corrections have made a very big difference. On Dec 22 when I wrote this post, Google’s webmaster tools showed 1,873 short meta descriptions. That number has slowly been dropping over the last 30 days. Now today Jan 24 that number stands at 473. Yesterday I got a big surprise when checking stats, traffic was right back where it was before the drop. Now I will have to see this sustained for at least a week or so to really feel that it is back for good. But it all looks very encouraging.

Keep a sharp eye on the webmaster tools, it is your best peek at how Google is analyzing and viewing your website.

Find out if users are reading and responding to your email newsletters. This simple method will determine a direct correlation between newsletter clicks and sales.

Here is a very simple way to track the clicks the result directly from your email marketing newsletter.

Inside your newsletter you are likely going to include links directly to the products you are promoting in your online store. In order to track the links coming directly from the newsletter, we will create a special tracking page on your website to intercept, track, and then direct the link to the product.

The links inside your newsletter will look like:

http://examplestore.com/track.php?id=1

At the end of this link you will notice the id=1, the number 1 in this case will stand for a product page.

Now we will use this URL to track the click and then redirect to the product page.
In the code block below we look for the “id” variable and then set it inside the script as “id”.


$id = 0;
if (isset($_GET['id'])){
$id = $_GET['id'];
}


Next we write the hit to a simple text file, this will become our log file. In this example we use a file names “marketinglog.txt.” Upload a blank file with the file name “marketinglog.txt”, and set the permission to be writable on your web server.

We will write the id number, the IP address, and the date to the log file.


//file stuff
$ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$the_date = date("Ymd" ,time());
$myFile = "marketinglog.txt";
$fh = fopen($myFile, 'a') or die("can't open file");
fwrite($fh, $id . "," . $ip . "," . $the_date . "\n");
fclose($fh);


The next section is where you place your real links. In the example below you can see the ID to URL relationship we are using.

1 = http://examplestore.com/widget-blue.htm
2= http://examplestore.com/widget-red.htm
3= http://examplestore.com/superwidget-deluxe.htm

Note: you can use any identifier you wish here. Maybe instead of an “id”, you can use a part number or some other internal numbering system which will make it easier to interpret the data later on.

[If the id is 1]
Case 1:
[then redirect to the real product page for blue widgets]
header(‘Location:http://examplestore.com/widget-blue.htm’);
[since we have a match in the id field, we will "break" which will stop processing]
break;

The last line with “default”, means if no id is matched, then redirect to the main page of the website.


switch ($id) {
case 1:
header('Location:http://examplestore.com/widget-blue.htm');
break;
case 2:
header('Location:http://examplestore.com/widget-red.htm');
break;
case 3:
header('Location:http://examplestore.com/superwidget-deluxe.htm');
break;
default:
header('Location: http://examplestore.com');
}
?>


The Full Tracking File


$id = 0;

if (isset($_GET['id'])){
$id = $_GET['id'];
}

//file stuff
$ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$the_date = date("Ymd" ,time());
$myFile = "marketinglog.txt";
$fh = fopen($myFile, 'a') or die("can't open file");
fwrite($fh, $id . "," . $ip . "," . $the_date . "\n");
fclose($fh);

switch ($id) {
case 1:
header('Location:http://examplestore.com/widget-blue.htm');
break;
case 2:
header('Location:http://examplestore.com/widget-red.htm');
break;
case 3:
header('Location:http://examplestore.com/superwidget-deluxe.htm');
break;

default:
header('Location: http://examplestore.com');
}
?>


Download the php script to view your log file online. (change the extension from txt to php)

Follow this very simple procedure to schedule your website backups. You will be glad you did.

Download and install the free software: NCFTP

Restart your PC (NCFTP writes a line to the windows path, so this works best upon restart)

Open notepad, and create a brand new document, paste in the following text and save it as backupwebsite.cmd

ncftpget -R -E -u your_ftp_username -p your_ftp_password your_web_ftp_address C:\website backup\ /


replace your_ftp_username with your FTP login name
replace your_ftp_password with your FTP password
replace your_web_ftp_address with the FTP address used for your website

You can change the C:\website backup\ to where ever you want to store your backups, just make sure the folder does exist.

The last “/” is where the backups will start from, if you FTP right into your web files, then you can leave just the forward slash, but some hosts you have to go into another folder to find your web files, like maybe /public_html or something similar.

Once you have this tested and running, then use the windows task scheduler to make it run when and how often you need.

Be sure and check on the backups every now and then to make sure everything keeps working…