WordBay

Are your eBay sites sandboxed?

I have been reading with concern around the net of the possibility that Google is cracking down on eBay listings sites such as those produced with my plugin, WordBay, as well as BANS, phpBay etc.

The main reason is that I have seen my best performing site drop right out of the Google SERPS a couple of weeks ago, despite previously having good organic Google search traffic. It’s on an established domain, there is plenty of original content, it’s a .com, so I have a horrible suspicion it’s Google having a problem with eBay. Anybody else seen their eBay sites slapped? Or is this just some temporary glitch?

Posted on July 11th, 2008 by admin
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NEW VERSION: WordBay 0.96 - now display in columns!

The latest version of Wordbay, 0.96 (was 0.95, but I found another bug just after publishing, d’oh) includes an exciting new feature I’ve had under my hat for a while - multi-column display. Makes perfect sense, there is plenty of room, those RSS listings are quite concise and there is usually a whole lot of space over to the right. So download the new version of WordBay and install as usual, but please be warned - have the old 0.92 version to hand just in case, so you can reinstall quickly if anything should go wrong. Doing clever stuff with CSS like I have (well, not that clever) always has the outside chance of breaking your template, but reverting to an old version will quickly resolve that. So what’s the deal?

WordBay columns

You can now choose the number of columns from the admin back-end to get an effect like I have at my Used Musical Instruments test site. Now you can get more items in and they are easier to browse. I would suggest using a column count that is divisible by the maximum number of items you are displaying, to give a neat grid.

Nothing can go wrong… can go wrong… can go wrong…

You do need to be a LITTLE bit careful because each template is different in width, your font sizes may be different from mine and you may already have some personalised settings in the wordbay.css file. If you don’t want to replace your existing css file, then what you do need to do is add a “height: ??px;” setting to your .firstlocaleitem class. This height setting should determine the maximum height for each item (probably at LEAST 200px) and ensure you get a neat grid, and no text overflowing. You may also find you need to reduce the numbers you have in padding: in the same class from 8px to perhaps 4px. You should also make sure the column count you have chosen works for 1024 x 768 or even smaller resolutions. Realistically, even on my 1440 width display and a fluid-width template I can’t get many more than 3-4 columns in.

I am aware this new feature seems fraught with risk, especially if you feel you do not know much about CSS - but I hope the above instructions will be enough and let me know in the comments here if anything goes horribly wrong. Remember, all you have to do is reinstall an older version of the plugin.

Enjoy!

P.S. There were also a couple of minor changes, see the changelog at the bottom of the readme file. In particular I changed the text at the bottom that says “not found…” to “didn’t find/haven’t found” for the sake of better style - thanks Dave for pointing that out!

Posted on June 16th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: Uncategorized | 10 Comments »

NEW VERSION: WordBay is official!

I am very happy to say that WordBay got approved for listing on the WordPress plugin directory, so it’s kind of officially launched now!

Save the congratulations though, because this did cause a couple of issues:

1) I realised that I had left the new, fancy graphical icon out of the release package - doh! And I wondered why people were asking me about that!

2) The WordBay plugin directory name now has to be changed to lower case - “wordbay”, because that is how the files get packed in the WordPress plugin repository. Which means that if you already have WordBay installed, you need to deactivate it, update the files with version 0.92 (just WordBay.php actually) and change the name of the directory to lower case - “wordbay”, and then reactivate the plugin (having refreshed the Plugins screen). Let me know if there are any issues with this - sorry for the hassle, it took me by surprise. And just getting a plugin uploaded to the repository is darned confusing if you’ve never used it before, let me tell you…

Hidden sales?

By the way, has anyone noticed a strange phenomenon in their EPN earnings? Firstly, they seem to be improving, secondly the daily and other reports are not showing all the transactions, or else they are posting them very late! I downloaded the transaction report and found about 3 times more sales than were shown on the web interface. I’m not complaining, but there is something strange there!

Posted on June 10th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: Uncategorized | 8 Comments »

New version of WordBay: now set min and max price and more

Just to let you know about the new, 0.9 version of WordBay, the eBay/Wordpress plugin which you can download, free, as ever from the downloads page.

On request by users, I have added an option in the backend to filter for minimum and maximum price - this is handy if you want to filter out, say Cray supercomputer parts, which are cheaper, and just list Cray Supercomputers which are usually more than, say $1000 (probably, never bought one).

I also added a little CLICK for details icon in a kind of neutral grey, which you can switch off from the backend if you don’t want it. The graphic file is included with the latest plugin release and should be placed in the WordBay directory together with the plugin. If you want, you can replace this with your own, of course. You question my design skills!? Clicking on this icon takes you to the same page as clicking the picture and may improve clickthrough - I noticed some days with disastrous CTR and got to thinking, maybe people need a little prompting Also, the link caption displays the name of the item, so all good for keyword density!

NOTE: (should have mentioned this with previous releases) don’t overwrite your css file with the new one if you have made changes to yours! However, I have added a new class, #clickicon, which refers to the little icon and if you know about CSS you can fiddle with this a bit - I added some padding to line it up with the picture.

Posted on June 6th, 2008 by admin
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WordBay implementation in single posts

If you’re using WordBay, I just wanted to give you a tip. If you look at this page you will see where I’ve inserted a single product, above the line What’s clipless? like so:

This is done using WordBay, simply by choosing number of items as 1 in the admin panel, and turning off the sign-up link and all that. Of course, you can’t do this if you are running a niche site in the same Wordpress installation, because the setting are global. I haven’t yet implemented a way of changing WordBay settings on a per-post basis, though I plan to. The other limitation is that you can only insert one per page - I haven’t tried inserting multiple [wordbay] tags, but am pretty sure it won’t work!

Also you can see where I have slightly tweaked the CSS so it looks just a little bit better. I will be adding some tips on this soon.

Hopefully you can see how this implementation of WordBay would be really useful if you have an existing blog and want to insert products here and there in your posts, especially where it’s product-related. Hopefully a viable alternative to AuctionAds, which never seemed to display relevant products - I am pretty sure WordBay works fine

Posted on May 30th, 2008 by admin
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NEW VERSION: WordBay 0.86 release version!

We may just have a release version on our hands! WordBay seems to have come of age, the bug reports have dried up, so this is an official launch of WordBay - the Wordpress plugin that helps you earn from eBay!

Just check out the Downloads page and install the new version over the top of the old. There are now half-decent instructions for Installing and configuring WordBay, so check those out. It’s all meant to be pretty straightforward, and is intended to get you going with a eBay niche site as quickly as possible, and FREE!

Let me know how you get on - I will let this version circulate for a while and see how we get on. If everything is OK, then I can start working on some new features. There have certainly been plenty of suggestions from users, so thanks guys (more work for me!)

Posted on May 28th, 2008 by admin
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NEW VERSION: WordBay 0.85BETA

You can now download the latest version of WordBay from the downloads page. In case you’re wondering, WordBay is the new FREE* WordPress plugin that allows you to quickly and easily create an eBay niche site and start making money as an affiliate!

This new version fixes a couple of minor bugs, one where the “Sorry, no items to list” message was showing at the wrong time (i.e. even when there WERE items listed) and another where the “Still not found it…” link wasn’t actually working. This is critical-ish come to think of it, so you ought to update your version!

Other than this, I see the number of bug reports is drying up, which is a good sign. I know there are some more features people would like implemented (e.g. category-based search) but I want to try to get a release candidate out for the next version, before I start adding any new features. So get any bug reports in quick if have them! Thanks!

* It’s free to download and use, but you are warmly encouraged to donate via PayPal, or to use the Generosity option in the admin menu to share a tiny morsel of that huge revenue with the author

Posted on May 14th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

NEW VERSION: WordBay 0.8BETA

I have skipped v0.7 (the old template-based extension was number 0.7, so to avoid confusion…) and you can now download the new version from the download page and simply replace over the old files in your plugin directory (actually, only the main WordBay.php file is changed).

The new version of WordBay is in response to more of your invaluable feedback and among other things now implements an eBay Category option in the admin section! So now you can narrow things down even further, and you can also home in on eBay Motors which, as a user pointed out, you can’t do just by selecting the eBay Motors site ID. This may not suit everybody, some may find it too restrictive to specify one category site-wide, but you can always choose All categories, and anyway… think niche!

Also, the time zone now matches the time zone for the eBay site in question, instead of being locked into PDT like it was before.

A couple of other bugs fixed too, and so things are gradually coming together. Please keep testing and letting me know if there are any other issues you have found, as well as feature requests you might have. I am looking forward to hopefully publishing a “production” version soon,

Posted on May 12th, 2008 by admin
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NEW VERSION: WordBay 0.6BETA

I am pleased to say I have ironed out some pretty major issues and expanded an important functionality, so this definitely deserves to be v0.6.

So go and download the latest version from the downloads page.

Thanks for the feedback from users - it’s so useful as you guys pick up stuff I just wouldn’t notice. You will be pleased to know the following:

New functionality

The eBay Site ID option in the admin panel is now properly implemented and is no longer the mystery I earlier proclaimed it to be :). My deepest apologies to non-UK/US users, I had no intention of excluding you - I am very aware there is a whole planet out there, but I had used US eBay as my basis for some of the parameters and ended up with the limited selection we had before (that’s why Worldwide gave you Canadian results - ha ha ha! Think about that for a second!) So welcome to Sweden, Australia (nod to John), US eBay Motors (yay! Sell cars!) and others!

Bugs fixed

There was a bug where a h2 tag wasn’t closed, as mentioned before, and it was messing up the rest of the page in IE, though not Firefox, strangely. I believe this to be fixed now, but as I have said elsewhere, design aspects have not been at the foremost so far with WordBay, so there may be more HTML and CSS fixing to be done.

I have also fixed another significant bug whereby some prices weren’t displaying properly (and even getting substituted by the search keywords in some places!) In case you are interested in the reason, it was the dollar sign causing problems! PHP marks variables with dollar signs, so you can imagine what kind of trouble that was causing. And that’s why this only affected US and Australian listings - can’t believe I never noticed this before!

So, let’s see how you get along with this version - please keep trying to break it, your feedback really is a great help!

I must also add that with the number of bugs that we have now eliminated it is becoming increasingly unlikely that I will “retro-fit” the old template-based WordBay 0.7BETA extension with the two-pane listing (though I do intend to implement this feature in a later version of the new plugin version), so I hope nobody got too carried away with that version. I now STRONGLY suggest you move over to the new plugin version if you have not done so already and apologise for any inconvenience this may cause people (I will have to move some sites over myself, so I’m in the same boat).

Posted on May 7th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Small bug-fix for WordBay 0.5BETA

Another silly bug in WordBay 0.5BETA - there is a <h2> tag not closed properly, resulting in a mess in the rest of the template in some browsers.

This will be fixed in the next version, but to mend it yourself in the meantime you can find edit the plugin code at line 255 where it says:

$newcontent .= ‘<h2>’ .
$stilltext .
‘<h2>‘;

and (you guessed it), change the <h2> that I have underlined to </h2>.

Posted on May 7th, 2008 by admin
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