Another Wordpress Blog

Regular readers may remember I’m working on a plugin to create a little text box containing text links ads. The ads could be affiliate links, my own resources or anything I like. I’m

Right now, the plugin:

1. Fishes out ‘Amazon.com’, ‘Clickbank’ and ‘general’ links from the ‘aLinks’ database at random, and turns them into a little text link box similar to the one you see to the right.
2. Redirects the “Clickbank” and “general” links. This turns them into “nofollow” links so you can sell without transferring your page rank to the product page. (Maurice of They Cayman Host suggested this.
3. I can insert the box outside post content; outside the content. When I place the box outside content, I can adjust the color and size of the box. You can see one of these in the sidebar.
4. Permits the user to insert ads inside a post by placing &lt!-injectad-> anywhere they like. I placed that code in the DIV box to right justify the box. However, inside content, I don’t yet permit customization of the ads. The box is outlined in grey, five ads appear, and you can’t adjust the width.
5. Piggy-backs off “aLinks” a WordPress plugin that will auto-link words in a blog content. This lets me defer writing certain parts of the user interface until I identify the full functionality I want from my plugin.

For my purposes, the functionality is already pretty nice. Hoever, I find I discover what I want to change as I actually use it. So, for now, I plan to slap one of these ad in the sidebar and then hunt down some decent affiliate programs that permit me to just run text. Over the next week or two, I’ll also be adding whichever features I feel I need most and which I can figure out how to do easily.

In the short term, I’ll be adding functionality to let people customize the box width and colors when this is used inside posts, and to change the ‘Ad’ message in the lower corner.

This plugin isn’t available yet, and it doesn’t have a name, but you’ll be seeing the ads in various locations from time to time.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 29th, 2007 at 1:34 pm and is filed under Monetize, My Plugins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.