the blog of
Shawn Plep

Use CSS to Show the Current Nav Point

Here’s a quick but useful CSS technique. Learn it, and love it – this technique will let you do with CSS what other people have to do with a scripting language.  (Remember: the less scripts you run on a page, the faster your site will load. Make the computer do less.)

First, let’s start with some example nav code:

<ul>
<li><a class="home" href="/">Home</a></li>
<li><a class="about" href="/about/">About us</a></li>
<li><a class="contact" href="/contact/">Contact us</a></li>
</ul>

The important thing to note is that each nav item has it’s own distinct class. After you’ve given each nav item a class, move on to your body tag.

For the body tag on each page, give it an id that matches the class name you gave that page in the nav. (So, the body tag for “About Us” would have an id of “about” and so on.)

Last, make a CSS rule to make the magic happen…

<code>#home .home, #about .about, #about .about, #contact .contact
 {
 text-decoration: underline;
 }

Obviously, you would make the CSS rule do whatever it is you actually need to happen – but hopefully you get the idea. When the nav class and the body id coincide for any item, that rule takes effect.

My 9 Best Coding Tips

Over the last few years, I’ve learned a lot about programming and coding sites. Some of this knowledge came from books, but the majority of the really good things I’ve learned came from simply “doing it” – trying things, experimenting, and just learning what works best and what doesn’t work. In other words, experience really is the best teacher.

So here are nine “tips” – short but helpful things that can make your life easier when you develop a web app, website, or script. I will list these in no particular order – hopefully at least on thing in this list will be of use.

Create a wireframe, sitemap, or content matrix before you ever start coding. Unless you’re hacking something out really quick – plan your programs. Seriously. I see many people just sit down and start coding, but in my opinion they waste far more time doing things that way. It’s far better to plan out your program first, work out the flow of events and logic, and then start coding. And you don’t need to use Omnigraffle or any tools to do this: I map out database structures, navigations, and wireframes on yellow legal pads. So plan your projects in the way that works for you best – but do it.

Use a good text editor or IDE. I personally prefer Crimson Editor. If you’re on a Mac, Textmate is supposed to be good. But I would not recommend trying to code in Dreamweaver as I’ve seen some people attempt. You really need to get into the code – and I recommend this for HTML, CSS, as well as scripting.

Group all “like” files. Have a directory for images, one for CSS, etc. Don’t throw it all in your main directory and expect to keep things in order. Grouping files that belong together will make maintenance much simpler.

Name all include files with a leading underscore. Someone wrote this on their blog (I don’t remember who) and it’s helped me keep things organized for some time. I often have a file such as “__header.php”, “__footer.php”, or “__nav.php” and I can always tell which files are includes for other “main” files or template files by merely glancing at them. Also, by using the underscore character to name them, they will appear at the top of my directory listing by default.

Indent your code with tabs, instead of spaces. It keeps the structure of your code consistent, and it takes less characters to make one tab than to make four spaces. I know it might seem insignificant, but I like to make my files as small as possible.

Use comments, “stubs” and pseudocode when developing – liberally. There’s no reason that you can’t delete/replace this stuff later if you don’t need it. But initially, I find it useful to “jump right in” and actually create the file(s) for my program and make myself notes where things are missing or where I haven’t yet implemented something.

Don’t use inline styles. This is a general rule that I’ve found should rarely be broken. Learn how to control all your pages with a stylesheet. You’ll see the beauty and simplicity of it if you’ve ever had to hunt through multiple pages for stray inline styles when you needed to make a change.

When you begin to get unproductive, go for a walk. I find that there are three activities where I can really think creatively and productively: mowing the lawn, taking a shower, and going for a walk. Seriously, many of my best ideas come to me in the shower! But taking a walk usually clears my head, as well. The essential ingredient here is the “zoning out” factor paired with no interruptions.

If you can’t think of a way to solve a problem, present the situation to a non-programmer. This might sound like it’s the wrong way to approach a coding problem, but it works very well. (Of course, you have to strip the problem down to its essentials and present it in non-technical terms.) But if you have someone you can bounce problems off of and they have no pre-conceived ideas about how you’re “supposed to do it”, you might be surprised at the insights you’ll get from them.

There you have it: nine very specific ideas to help programmers. Whether you code in Perl, Ruby, or PHP or if you’re making small web sites or huge web applications one of these ideas is sure to crop up in the near future. I hope you find at least one of these tips helpful when that time comes!

SEO Tool Under Development: SaturationChecker

I constantly have ideas, but I rarely have time. (Not an issue – if you don’t need to sleep. But I need my beauty rest each night.) Sometimes, I get a bit of bonus time when I can actually work on one of my ideas.

That recently happened with my idea for SaturationChecker. It’s a simple script, but what it accomplishes can save the SEO-minded site owner a great deal of trouble and help them improve their site.

Here’s how it works:

1. User submits the URL for the site they wish to check
2. SaturationChecker (SC) then attempts to find either  an XML sitemap, or an HTML sitemap file, or an RSS feed. (In that order.)
3. If a source for URLs is located, SC then checks each URL successively and writes it to the database. Each URL is recorded along with its status, and whether or not the URL was found in Google’s index.
4. The unindexed URLs are then available to the user, so they can be targeted for promotion or perhaps simply rotated to the top of the XML sitemap file.

It’s up to the user to find a way to get the unindexed URLs “found” by Google; what SC does is simply shows where the deficiencies lie in a site’s index saturation. (So, if a site had 100 pages, yet only 50 of them were in Google, that site would have only a 50% index saturation.)

This tool was developed for my own use, and as such it’s a bit rough around the edges. (It works for me.) I do wish to polish it and then make it available for others’ use at some point in the future.

Some additions I will be adding will be:

• The capability to track if a URL is added to the index, then dropped again. (This may indicate the URL was found, and added, but then dropped due to an on-page problem or simply a better page coming along from a competing site.)
• A percentage report, as given in the example above. Very simple to code, but I haven’t added it as of yet.
• Prettiness. The thing has no style, and if I release this for public consumption I want it to look nice!

Since I haven’t released this yet, consider this post as “pseudo-code” for you coders out there to make your own. It’s a fairly simple script – I began it one night in my hotel during this year’s SEOmoz seminar and had the basic functions, and finished the rest of it today. (And I happen to be a coding perfectionist.)

Additionally, I’m open to new ideas – so feel free to contact me if you have any suggestions and I’ll see what I can do.

Things I’ve Come to Believe

I have a few philosophies that I’ve either adopted (by learning from others) or that I came to believe due to things I’ve experienced in life. Here are a few.

- I don’t debate with people. If someone wishes to know something, they’ll ask me and I’ll tell them. It doesn’t offend me if they then choose to not accept what I tell them, or if they wish to research it further. However, if someone asks me something because they only wish to argue, they’re small-minded and foolish – and are merely wasting my time. When someone wastes my time in this manner, it does offend me.

- I must enjoy my work. A person’s life is actually quite a short event. That being the case, I intend to live as much of it as possible. Since I must make a living by working, it makes the most sense for me to do something I find challenging as well as enjoyable.

- When I say I will do something, I must follow through on my word. I’ve broken this a few times, and I can’t think of a time when I didn’t regret it. It’s always best to keep one’s word – and I aim to live this way.

- The things I do should help others, not hurt others. I believe our lives are meant to be lived this way. This is not a religious belief, but it should be a part of any good belief (religious or otherwise).

- I should do my best. When I have to work at any task, I simply should put forth my best effort. There are many reasons to do this, and no reason not to do this. Anything less is either lazy, irresponsible, or inconsiderate.

- My happiness is not more important than the happiness of others. While I do wish to be happy, and will make efforts to be as happy as I can be, I am not “more important” than other people and have no right to deny them happiness if my wishes conflict with the state of their lives.

- Humility is better than a proud attitude.

- Be kind to others. People are never won over by negative actions (anger, debate, war, etc), but often are won over with kindness.

- Learning is the most valuable use of spare time and should be done on a normal basis. I like to do mindless things from time to time (watch a movie, or play a video game for instance) but I try to always have an interesting book on hand as well, so I can keep growing mentally.

- I can be the best in my field (and should be). No matter what “the other guy’s” supposed ability, level of intelligence, personality type, or level of education is – it doesn’t stop me from being just as good if not better.

- Nothing is impossible. I mean this for good things as well as bad things. It’s simply a way to remember that anything can happen in life, sometimes when we never imagined it was coming our way.

How to Conceal Your WordPress Version

There may be reasons you don’t wish to disclose that you’re using WordPress, or you may simply wish to disguise which version you’re using. I hope your reasoning isn’t for “security”, because this isn’t truly effective as a security measure. But whatever your reason, here’s how to do it.

First, go to your /wp-content/themes folder, and open the folder for your current theme. There should be a file named “functions.php”. (If this file doesn’t exist, simply create the file.) Open this file, and add the following line to it:
remove_action(‘wp_head’, ‘wp_generator’);

That directive tells WordPress to remove the action of displaying the generator (which shows your WordPress version). It’s that simple!

You can do a lot of neat things within the functions.php file, as well – including adding new functions and removing other actions. For instance, you can remove some of the other (possibly useless) header info that WordPress outputs by default:
remove_action(‘wp_head’, ‘rsd_link’);
remove_action(‘wp_head’, ‘wlwmanifest_link’);

Think of the functions.php file as a way to implement a certain amount of plugin-like functionality, without having to actually install a plugin. If you know how to code in PHP the possibilities are vast.

Automating Shareasale Affiliate Reporting w/ PHP & cURL

When you begin to get deep into the world of affiliate marketing, a few things happen:

1. You begin to miss your family, because you’re always doing “computer stuff” they don’t understand
2. You have a lot of accounts at different merchants/affiliate networks and you log into those accounts all the time to check your income
3. You should be making some money

The number 3 part is what keeps people like you and I going. Otherwise we’d have better things to do with our time, right? Right. In fact – even while making money, we have better things to do with our time.

Hmmm…so what can we do about that? How can we maximize our time? I know: let’s do what I’m constantly harping about, and make a computer do the job we don’t need to do. In this case, let’s make a computer log into our affiliate accounts and check stats. Sound good? Good.

For this example, I’m going to show you how to use PHP and cURL to check your Shareasale stats. I thought, “Why not prepare everyone with a nice way to automatically gather their stats?”. But the following lesson can be applied to just about any affiliate site…or any website for that matter.

I assume you are familiar with running PHP scripts, at least. If you aren’t, there are some great books with animals on the cover to show you that. (And, perfectly good free websites to help you learn PHP, as well.)

So let’s just jump into it. Here’s a script that logs into Shareasale, grabs the current amount of income, and shows it to you.

<?php
$username="superoptimist";
$password="ibelieveinmyself";
function return_between($string, $start, $stop, $type)
{
$temp = split_string($string, $start, AFTER, $type);
return split_string($temp, $stop, BEFORE, $type);
}
$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_REFERER, "http://www.shareasale.com/a-login.cfm");
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1");
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, '/public_html/cookies/cookie.txt');
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, '/public_html/cookies/cookie.txt');
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "step2=True&username=$username&password=$password&submit.x=40&submit.y=19");
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.shareasale.com/a-login.cfm");
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$page = curl_exec($curl);
echo "logged in";
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_GET, 1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.shareasale.com/a-main.cfm");
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_REFERER, "http://shareasale.com/a-login.cfm");
$page = curl_exec($curl);
$total=return_between($page, '<font color=gold> $', '', EXCL);
echo 'got income amount';
echo 'Total Amount $'.$total;
curl_close($curl);
?>


And that’s it. Put your real SAS login info up in there, run it, and you will see a number appear on your screen – like $0.00, if you just opened your Shareasale account. But hopefully, eventually you’ll see some real income.

So why not just log in, manually? Well the point of me sharing this script is not to give you a marginally-useful script that you can use to get your current income. You can do so much more with this script once you think about the possibilities. Here are some:

* Make an affiliate dashboard, and include all your affiliate reports in a nice, single menu with that day’s sales, that day’s hits, current income, etc.
* Grab all your affiliates’ daily sales (running daily via cron) and throw that into a database. Use that to generate reports to show you things like: overall most profitable day of the week, most profitable merchant, product, etc. If you run a few scripts like this – say, one for SAS, one for CJ, one for CCBill, etc. and put it all together you can view reports like this across all your merchants and affiliate networks.
* Grab datafeeds daily or weekly from your merchants, and then update your databases (the ones that run your sites) with the latest products.

Get the idea? This is just an example of basic principles – but cURL is a powerful tool that can almost precisely behave like a web browser – just faster and automatically.

Hopefully you can follow the gist of what this script does, but here are a couple of pointers in case you need some cURL help.

Send what is expected. You must always send GET when the server expects a GET request, and a POST when POST is what’s expected. How to find that stuff out? LiveHTTPHeaders. Possibly the best FireFox plugin out there. At least to me. But there’s probably some weirdo out there with an Fellow Furry Finder plugin or something who thinks that’s the best. (Sorry, that’s not an actual plugin.)

Use LiveHTTPHeaders by selecting it, and then logging into the site you wish to write a cURL script for, and then examining the confusing stuff in the little window. All the stuff you will see is the conversation between your browser and the server. Your goal (in writing an automation script) is to replicate that conversation, or the format of that conversation.

Send in the order that is expected. This means that you must always have the proper referrer with each target URL. If every time a user who goes to accountadmin.php must have come from mainmenu.php, you better put mainmenu.php as your referrer when telling cURL to go to accountadmin.php. Follow the path that you would normally take (as a human, navigating a site).

Respect server resources. Do not do things like hammer a server every five seconds, or visit every hour and downloading a bunch of pics, or anything else like that. Remember Eli’s QUIT tool? Yeah, me too. I miss it. (*Sniff*). See, he shut down the thing just because of someone out there abusing the tool. If you do things like that to other people, they too will probably shut it down (at least, to your IP).

So did we learn something, kids? I hope so. I ain’t here to give ya’ll step-by-step instruction or nuthin’ – but I wanted to at least whet your appetite for some of the things you can do with cURL and maybe give you some ideas. Any questions? I’ll do my best to answer.