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Rae Hoffman

Never Mess With a Woman Who Can Pull Rank

Thesis Tutorial - Creating Custom CategoriesMarch 28

I get asked at least once per week how I got the custom content on my category pages (you can check out the affiliate marketing category here on Sugarrae or the SEO conference category on Outspoken Media to see examples). The answer are custom category hooks and the instructions for creating them are below.

Now first, I’d like to say that having custom categories is possible in any Wordpress theme. So, if you’re not using Thesis, all you need to do is duplicate the basic category.php template of your theme and and then customize it for each category, name it category-#.php (with # being the actual number of the category you have customized that template for) and upload it to your theme file. Wordpress by default will first check for a category-#.php file before it renders the plain category.php if a custom one does not exist.

That said, if you plan to customize every category on your blog, I’d highly suggest switching to the Thesis platform. Why? Well, if you go to change blog layouts or designs in the future, you will have to re-create every single custom category template in the new theme. With Thesis, if you change the design, the hooks still remain. You do it once and don’t have to worry

James Cook of Kawink Wants to Know What You ThinkMarch 10

So, this morning I received an angry email from some guy pissed off that I wasn’t responding to his emails requesting support on the Customize Your Community plugin that I paid to have developed and had given away for free (that says it accepts donations, but of course, he didn’t donate) right after I had it developed. His email said:

“Rae Hoffman-

I am confused your website comes off as really credible and you seem to be connected some what to the blogging/internet arena but you have ignored 2 different emails sent telling you that we are having a problem with your plugin…I wonder what your community would think of that?

James Cook
www.kawink.com”

Well, my thought is that folks might think that people running a real business should hire a programmer and not send a blogger emails threatening to expose them for not providing free support. So, my response was:

“I think my community would be kind of surprised at the audacity that you demand I help you troubleshoot a plug-in I paid xxx dollars to have developed that I no longer support because I no longer need it that you didn’t bother to donate anything to but feel entitled to receiving support for.

In short, don’t threaten me asshole.

Rae”

So what say you community? What do you think?

UPDATE:

He responded to my email with

PRWeb ReviewJanuary 21

I’m often asked when I mention doing press releases for website promotion, branding and visibility what online press release distribution services I recommend, if any. The truth is that I’m a longtime user of PRWeb, have spent thousands of dollars running press releases with them and am pretty pleased with their services.

When I first started doing serious press releases several years back, I signed up with PRWeb - partially because they were very visible at industry conferences like PubCon and partially because they offered (and still do offer) a series of free webinars that explained how to use the service.

I was making the leap from being a small site affiliate to creating true affiliate brands and knew press releases had to be a part of my marketing strategy. With the roles of traffic and branding playing a larger and larger part in top search engine rankings, utilizing every opportunity you have to get publicity, including press releases, is

Thesis Tutorial - Customizing the 404 PageJanuary 14

A few weeks ago, I published a Thesis theme tutorial that showed you how to do advanced ad targeting. The tutorial showed you how to assign ads to be different based on the category the posts were filed in, as well as change them on a post by post basis.

While “You 404′d it. Gnarly, dude.” is a semi-custom page since it does keep with your theme and design, you may want to give it a little bit of your own personality and wording to make it truly “custom”. Below, I’ll show you how to do it.

Step 1: Open your custom_functions.php file (thesis > custom > custom_functions.php) in your favorite editor

Step 2: Underneath the example code already in the file, place the following code (this code assumes your blog is in the root):

/* Custom 404 Hooks */
function custom_thesis_404_title() {
?>
YOUR 404 PAGE HEADING HERE
<?
}

remove_action(’thesis_hook_404_title’, ’thesis_404_title’);
add_action(’thesis_hook_404_title’, ’custom_thesis_404_title’);

function custom_thesis_404_content() {
?>
<p>WHATEVER YOU WANT YOUR 404 PAGE TO SAY HERE</p>
<?
}

Affiliate Summit West - Day 3 Mini-RecapJanuary 13

Hey, affiliate kids. I’m about to head to the airport to start my trek back to the East Coast, but first, let’s recap Day 3 of Affiliate Summit, shall we?

Sadly, due to my flight and this silly little thing called “lunch” that the speakers seemed to be really interested in, I was only able to make it to one session today: Amazon Widgets for Fun and Profit.

I was more interested in the “how to use widgets” angle of this session than I was the Amazon part, so that’s what I’m going to focus on.

What’s a Widget?

They’re rich Web gadgets or mini applications that improve the richness and functionality of your Web site. In a nutshell, they allow visitors to interact with the data that interests them from wherever they are on the Web. Widgets allow others to share your data on other Web sites and they allow you to take advantage of other people’s data.

For example, in the session speaker Zahid Khan told the audience how they could take advantage of the many widgets provided by Amazon to help increase the functionality and usefulness of their Web site. Basically, you get to bring Amazon to your site and to your users, which can help increase both clicks th