Prosper202 is a PHP application that you can host on your own server that gives you a tool to track your PPC campaigns. You can track multiple PPC accounts such as your Google Adwords, Yahoo, and MSN adcenter campaigns. What specifically do you track you ask? Well you can track multiple things, but the most important being the tracking of your Top Performing Keywords! The Tracking202 application tells you which keywords are actually making you money and which ones are losing you money. This way you can weed out all the under performing keywords. In other words, with your PPC campaigns you are used to being able to track the following:

1. Ad Impressions
2. Clicks on those impressions

Then you are basically blind from there until the visitor actually hits your website/landing page. Then you are able through analytics and your own calls to action what the visitor does on your site. But what about in between? Of the visitors who actually did what you wanted them to do on your website/landing page, you have no way of telling what keyword they came from. Understand? That’s where this application comes into play!

This is not the only feature Prosper202 has however. There are a few others and I would like to mention those as well. As mentioned on prosper202.com here are a few other features:

Track every PPC network

Most of the current tracking programs out there don’t have nearly as many features as T202. Plus they can only track a few of the bigger PPC networks such as Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter. With T202, you can track any network, big or small. And unlike PPC networks, T202 tracks clicks in real-time-you see every click as it happens.

EPC Calculator

Changes you make to your templates or entries are reflected immediately on your site, with no need for regenerating static pages.

Prosper202 Pages

T202 maximizes EPC (Earnings Per Click) calculations. How would you feel if you knew exactly what you needed to bid for a keyword for it to be profitable? Then you could adjust your bids accordingly and turn a profit within seconds. It will tell you your EPC per keyword, per Text Ad, per Referer, per PPC account and much more.

Spy View

Probably everyones’ favorite feature. Spy view is a feature you will only find on T202. With Spy View, you can see real-time actions your visitors make with your ads.

Keyword Cloaking

T202 gives users the ability to cloak their keywords from advertisers and affiliate networks-so all of your top-performing keywords are a secret. Why risk your Affiliate Manager or the Advertiser finding out your best keywords, copying them for their own campaigns, and putting you out of business?bTo be successful at Affiliate Marketing you must track your keywords and they must be cloaked.

Direct Linking or Landing Pages

T202 works with direct linking through PPC campaigns or with your own landing pages. Now you can track whether your campaigns profit more with direct linking or landing pages.

So download this application and give it a shot. You will want to make sure you follow the installation instructions very carefully as this app can be a little tricky to install. I was able to install it on a Dreamhost account without any problems so that is the only host I can currently recommend. Good luck and any feedback on the app would be greatly appreciated. Let me know how it works for you! I will be working with this app for the next several weeks and will have some more information for you guys in the coming weeks!

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There are many Elgg plugins to help you add additional functionality to your Elgg core. The idea of this post was not to put together “the best” list of Elgg plugins, only it’s a list of 10 Elgg Plugins that I have found to be extremely useful. I have used and tested each of these plugins with the most recent version of Elgg which at this time is Elgg 1.1. All have installed and worked perfectly and have been a great advantage to the Social Networks I have used them with. I hope they will do the same for you!

1. Default Widgets

This plugin gives you the ability through a web interface to control the default widgets for new users profile and dashboard. This is an extremely helpful plugin because you can’t always assume that your users will know how to customize their profile & dashboard pages. (even though it’s quite easy).  Default Widgets

2. Custom Index

Most likely you are going to want to customize the homepage of your social network. This Elgg plugin gives you an easy way to do that wihtout totally hacking your Elgg platform. The author includes some demo code to help you in creating your custom homepage as well. Custom Index

3. Invite Friends

Kind of surprised this is not a in the Elgg core by now. Anyhow you will definitely want this plugin. Gives your users a new option where they can send out mass invites along with a message for the email to invite more to the social network. Invite Friends

4. Friend Requests

By default with Elgg (as of the date of this post) the friends functionality does not quite work the same as your typical social network. You can add users as your friends without their approval. Many people don’t like this part of the Elgg framework. This Elgg plugin gives users the ability to moderate who their friends are. Friend Requests

5. User Validation

This Elgg plugin gives site administrators the ability to moderate users as they come in/register. In some cases you may want to limit or control what the users that come into your social network. Kind of like a private social network of some kind. That’s where this plugin would come in helpful for you. UserValidation

6. Form & Related Plugins/ Flexprofile

The Flexprofile plugin gives you a web interface to control the Profile Fields for your users. This is another bit of functionality that should be in the Elgg core. I use this often to actually add additional fields to users Profile so they can give more information about themselves. Flexprofile

7. Embed Video

A widget for users profile pages so that they can embed a YouTube (and other types) video of their choice. If you are going to have a social network you have to give your users video capabilities. And what better than pulling YouTube video over.  Embed Video

8. TidyPics Photo Gallery

There’s a file functionality built in already with Elgg where you can upload files. But this particular plugin is more specific to uploading & sharing photos and creating photo albums and galleries. TidyPics Photo Gallery

9.  Higher Walls

This plugin for Elgg hides your entire social network to the public. So by combining this plugin along with the UserValidation plugin you can create a private social network. Higher Walls

10. Twitter Widget

Need I explain the reason to have Twitter integrated within your social network? Well with that aside let me expalain this simple Elgg plugin. It basically takes a users Twitter Feed and displays X ammount of hte most recent “Twits” on the users Profile page. Twitter Widget

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One of the many unique advantages that Wordpress has over other content management systems is the vast pluign community it has. It continues to grow nearly every single year and it has gotten to the point where there seems to be a plugin for just about everything you can imagine! Plugins are such an advatage obviously because you can add so many various types of functionality to your blog/site with relative ease. But should we depend on 3rd party plugins as much as some of us do? And also, can too many plugins on one Wordpress blog be a bad thing?

Should We Depend on 3rd Party Plugins As Much As We Do?

The answer is of course no. A classic example of why is when a plugin comes out, and then stops being supported by it’s original developer for some reason. The right Open Source thing to do would be to pick it back up yourself and “re-support” it and contribute code wherever you can. But this doesn’t always happen! And if you are a end-user, not a programmer, you could end up finding yourself in a tough situation because your plugin no longer works with the most current version of Wordpress. There are many plugins that you will feel that you just need, but have some moderation on the plugins that you depend on so that if a plugin goes “unsupported” you won’t be left in a bind.

Can Too Many Plugins On One Wordpress Blog Be A Bad Thing?

Yes. Consider the answer to the previous question as one of the reasons why. And the other reason being the number of MySQL queries that are required the more and more you add new plugins. I have worked with many peoples Wordpress blogs that are just way too “heavy” and slow to load because of poor plugin management. Deactivate and get rid of the plugins you are not uisng or are going to use! Clean up your Wordpress CMS of any wasteful and uneeded materials. That goes for your code as well!

Use Code Over Plugins Whenever Possible!

Obviously if you are a PHP guru you are going to have no problem writing all your own code inside your theme. But many of you are savvy enough to find code hacks or snippets that can get the job done without using a plugin. Let me give you an example. Instead of installing a Link Directory plugin of some kind, learn how to use the wp_blogroll functions with PHP in your theme to build your own Link Directory using Wordpress code itself. Many times theres no need to depend on a 3rd Party Plugin for something the Wordpress Code can cover on it’s own. Make sense?

A perfect site for beginners is a blog called WPHacks.com which daily displays code on achieving certain functionality through code rather than through plugins. And once you are a little more familiar with Wordpress, get yourself introuced to the Wordpress Codex. There’s almost nothing you can’t do with all the code documented there.

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I ran into a situation recently where I needed to import over 600 blog articles that had been written into a Wordpress blog. The other complexity was that these articles were all in individual Microsoft Word Docs and not in some other blog platform like Blogger or MoveableType. So I needed a way to be able to quickly combine all the Word Docs into one spreadsheet and import them all at one time! Even that would be time consuming considering I had to do 600 Articles but it will still save me days from inputing each blog article one by one. After alot of research and much trail and error and finally found something that worked for me. Note that I was using Wordpress 2.7 at the time of importing.

Plugin I Tried To Use But Failed

A CSV Import script posted by Zack Preble is probably what most of you will come across. It was the first script I tried using without any luck. It imported a bunch of mashed up junk, confusing the titles for the categories and vice versa. If you are using the most recent version at the time of this post which is 2.7, I don’t recommend using Zack’s script until he updates it to work with this most recent version.

Plugin That Worked For CSV Importing of Content to Wordpress

After trying various random ideas, I finally came across a plugin posted by JayBlogger. It’s apparently a script that he payed a developer to put together and it worked like a charm for Wordpress 2.7. The only issue I ran into was importing the categories. But with this plugin I was successfully able to import the following fields from the CSV file:

1. Post Title
2. Post Content
3. Tags
4. Timestamp

Here’s Exactly What I Did Step By Step

• Go to JayBlogger and download his plugin
• Unzip and upload the folder to your plugins directory
• Activate the plugin
• Look for the Import CSV page in your Admin Panel
• Put together your CSV file by opening up the Test CSV file inside the plugin directory
• Be sure to use the same format they use
• Make sure your Timestamp date is in this format – “Feb 19, 2009 18:22:11 PM”
• Import Your CSV File and enjoy!

The only bug I ran into with this plugin with Wordpress 2.7 is that the Categories would not import. But in my case I didn’t need it to, I just needed the tags. This is something however that will most likely be important too many of you. I will keep you informed on when/if there is a fix for this.

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If you are using the WP-O-Matic plugin for Wordpress for importing content via RSS feeds, and you are wanting to use Yahoo Pipes to create a customized RSS feed or RSS mashup with WP-O-Matic you are going to run into a bug that will prevent you from getting anywhere. But don’t worry there is a fix! The problem that people are running into is that when they setup their campaign inside WP-O-Matic, the plugin is not actually retrieving any articles when you “fetch” for them. The Yahoo Pipes RSS feed just keeps coming up as “0 Posts Fetched”. But we know our RSS feed works correctly so what is the deal?

Here’s The Fix!

After your campaign is all setup and you have entered in your Yahoo Pipes RSS feed through the WP-O-Matic management interface, go check out your campaign_feed table in your MySQL database. In my case I just use PHPmyAdmin to browse to the table. Browse through the table and find your campaign that you just setup for Yahoo Pipes. You will notice that there are some unneccesary characters that have been added to your RSS url. And this is precisely what is causing the issue. In my case this is what my Yahoo Pipes URL looks like…

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=umvxn4H23RGR1FUcZcag4A&_render=rss

And this is what it looked like in the database when I checked it out…

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=umvxn4H23RGR1FUcZcag4A&_render=rss

Notice the extra characters “amp;” after the “&” in the url. All you need to do is go in and change that in your database inside your campaign_feed table and you are good to go!!! Go back and “fetch”  your campaign with WP-O-Matic and the plugin will start fetching in all the articles from your Yahoo Pipes feed! It’s a small fix for now which most likely will be fixed sometime soon by the plugin developer. But in the meantime for all you who are impatient like me this is how you get the job done!

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Many of you are probably familiar with the popular Wordpress plugin NextGEN Photo Gallery. It’s one of the most highly downloaded and highly used plugins for Wordpress. With it you can create Albums and Galleries and place those Albums and Galleries inside your blog posts or blog pages. A widget also comes with the plugin that allows you to easily add a sidebar widget that displays your most recent photos/images from your galleries. But what if you need more control over where and how your photos are displayed within your Wordpress theme? I found 3 very useful customizations that I have used consistently on many blogs I have  worked on and the PHP code to make it happen.

I Want To Display The 6 or So Most Recent Images On a Page

Let’s say you want to display a certain amount of your most recent images on a page, and not in your sidebar using the widget that comes with the plugin. Here’s some PHP that you can place in your template, and then just use some CSS skills to style it how you please!

As you can see with the code, the first number parameter in this case “3″ specifies the exact amount of recent images you want to display. While the following two numbers represent the height and the width of the images. Play around with it and get the desired look you are after!

I Want To Show Images From a Specific Gallery Or Album On a Page

This code will be a little bit different, since you are wanting to pull images from a specific Gallery or Album form NextGEN. Here is really the most simplest way of accomplishing this. Inside the template file where you wish to place your code use this…

As you can see in the code, “Gallery” specifies that you want to pull images from a Gallery. You can swith this to “Album” and it will put an entire album rather than just a Gallery. The number “1″ is the ID for the Gallery or Album. You can find this by hovering over your Gallery or Album links in the backend of Wordpress.

One important thing to note with this PHP call. I have not found anything that allows you to specify how many images you want to pull from a gallery. So what I have done is specify the number of images shown before pagination in the NextGEN plugin options in the backend. A workaround in this area would be helpful and i’ll be sure to post it when I find it.

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