Almost Free Senseo®

Posted by Lizzie under sinful pleasures, work from home 

I was reading The Domestic Diva last week and she posted about this amazing deal from Senseo® Gourmet Coffee. You go to their website and take a short survey and at the end give them your email address. There’s a message at the end of the survey letting you know that if you qualify they’ll send you a special offer on a Senseo® Machine. I was all over that one. I love good deals and I love good coffee.

I completed the survey and a couple of days later I got the email that I qualified for their special offer. I could get a Senseo® Base Coffee Pod System, complete with a sample bag of coffee pods, for just $15 (the cost of shipping and handling). I’d just got paid and thought “Why not?” I paid the $15. The confirmation says to expect the system in 4-6 weeks. Ok, well, I got mine today! I am thrilled to say the least.

It didn’t take me long at all to unpack that beautiful piece of coffee machine goodness and get it started. If you would have seen me… The coffee is delicious, the system looks great on my counter and I’m really anxious to try other flavors. My system came with Dark Roast, which is tasty, but I’m adventurous and want to try them all.

Besides the sample pods it comes with a little silver canister in which to store your pods and a little thing that, I think, helps you get the pods out of the canister. That’s what I’m using it for anyway. You also get 5 $20 coupons to give to your friends and family so they can have one too. Of course, you theoretically could put the system back and give it as a Holiday or birthday gift. Someone would think you put a lot of thought and money into a gift (it’s worth $70 according to the literature). That was originally my plan. Oops. I’ll have to come up with something else.

So a big round of applause to The Domestic Diva for turning me onto this deal. It really is a nice deal. And why don’t you pop on over to the ShareSenseo website and snatch one up for yourself (or your mom, I mean, if you really love her. :)).

_{This is not a sponsored post.}

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Answers.com Gets Sweet Deal

Posted by Lizzie under work from home 

WordPress.com, together with Alex King, have rolled out a new plugin that allows for content to be linked directly to Answers.com. The name? AnswerLinks, of course. It’s available to WordPress.com users and as a plugin to self-hosted WordPress blogs. According to the official WordPress.com blog:

AnswerLinks will find words in your post that might benefit from a definition and ask you if you’d like to turn them into links like Artie Shaw and Turmeric. Easy as that!Answers.com gets their definition data from places like Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica, and the American Heritage Dictionary.

Quite simply, if you have a word in your post that AnswerLinks thinks should be defined, it offers to create a link to an Answers.com definition. Your reader then clicks on the link and is taken to to the definition. Pretty straight forward and innocent. Right? Not according to at least one blogger.

Andy Beard suggests that there may be some money flowing behind the scenes. He wonders why other plugins that offer to take readers away (via links) to other sites, such as Wiki and shopping sites, haven’t been included in available plugins for WordPress.com users. With so many blogs using the AnswerLinks, the link “juice” for Answers.com would be phenomenal. Andy mentions that users may want the ability to add “rel=nofollow” to the links going to Answers.com. However, many WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress bloggers just don’t understand the importance of the “rel=nofollow” tag and most likely wouldn’t bother applying it to the outgoing links. Thus, Answers.com gets a huge benefit from the AnswerLinks plugin.

If Auttomatic did receive a financial incentive for installing AnswerLinks, should they then let the WordPress community know this? WordPress.com and Blog-daddy Matt Mullenweg have be very adamant about keeping the Themes codex sponsor free and refusing to allow WordPress.com users to monetize their blogs. Because of this some bloggers feel that the deal (or lack thereof) should be made public and are questioning the ethics of Auttomatic as a whole.

Regardless of the specifics of the deal, Answers.com stands to gain a windfall in “link love” from unsuspecting bloggers. And bloggers who have been much against placing ads on their blogs may be unintentionally doing just that by adding the AnswerLinks plugin to their blogs. Could that knowledge drive WordPress.com bloggers to other platforms? It certainly could be a reason that Auttomatic doesn’t have much to say about it.

I personally don’t see anything wrong with Auttomatic taking money for anything. It’s a company and they can’t stay a company without some kind of incoming moolah. And I don’t see anything wrong with them employing a plugin to give another site some serious link love. I will continue to use my WordPress because, quite honestly, it’s the best there is. My opinion about WordPress.com, though… Well, that’s why I don’t use WordPress.com, isn’t it?

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Why You should Have a Links Page

Posted by Lizzie under coding, tutorial 

Links lists- or blogrolls- can get quite long and laborious for some bloggers. An exceptionally long links list can make your page take longer to load and distract from other important aspects of your sidebar- if you’ve got ads, for instance.

WordPress makes it incredibly easy to to clean up your sidebar and organize your links in a more efficient way. Instead of devoting one sidebar to an entire array of links, you can devote a partial section to it, and rotate through your list.

Many themes now come complete with a links template. So here all you need to do is create a page with “Links List” (or blogroll or whatever you want), select “links” for the template and publish. No need to do anything else. But what if your theme doesn’t come with a links page template?

It’s simple to create a links template. Simply download your theme’s page template- many times it’s simply called “page.php”. At the top of the page add:
<?php
/*
Template Name: Links page
*/
?>

Then look below this snippet

<php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

There you’ll see a php call for the content. This is where you want to put your links list. Highlight
<?php the_content(”<p>__(’Read the rest of this page »’)</p>”); ?>
(it may be something else, but similar). Replace that portion with
<?php get_links(); ?>
Save the page as “links.php” and upload it to your theme directory.

What if you have different lists for different content types?

It’s simple to organize your links into different catagories on the page. For instance, you may have a links list called “Personal Favorites” and another called “Valuable Resources” and you don’t want to mix the two. What do you do?

First look on your Blogroll page in your admin area. From there go to the tab that says “Categories”. Note the number to the left of your links lists, under “ID”. You may have
“2, Personal Favorites” and “3, Valuable Resources”.

On your links page template, use two distinct tags to call your links. Also, you’ll need to clearly mark which list is which. As an example I’ll do this:

<h2>Personal Favorites</h2>
<?php get_links(2); ?>

Notice that I put a two in the parenthesis. That’s to let the tag know that I want only those links that are in Category 2. Below that I’ll do the same, except I want Category 3 of my links.

<h2>Valuable Resources</h2>
<?php get_links(3); ?>

Of course, you can style the page anyway you want. The important part is the number which is called.

How to incorporate those in your sidebar

Now you want your links to appear in the sidebar, but not all of them at once. To make sure only a certain number of links appear at any given time, you’ll rotate them out in your sidebar. You could use a plugin to do this or you could code it yourself. I’ll show you how to code it yourself.

<h3>Links Rotation</h3>
<ul><?php get_links(’2,3′, ‘<li>’, ‘</li>’, ”, FALSE, ‘rand’, False, False, 15, True); ?>
</ul>

This tells WordPress that I want

* Categories 2 and 3 (’2,3′)
*listed with “<li>” before and “</li>” after
*I don’t want anything between the links (”)
*that I don’t want images (False)
*I want my links to appear randomly (not in any specific order (rand)
*I don’t want to show a description (False)
*I don’t want to show a rating (False)
*that I want the list rotated with a maximum of 15 links showing at one time (15)
*that I do want to show updated (True)
Please note the parameters that require apostrophes and which don’t.

If you want to show your links in order the you can leave that parameter empty (”) and it will default to “id”, which is alphabetical.

To keep your links lists separate, but still in rotation, simply apply this code twice, once with “2″ and once with “3″, then make the maximum number shown reflect a smaller number, such as 7 or 9.

Keeping your sidebar clean and organized keeps attention focused where it should be- on your content. You spend a lot of time picking out the right theme and writing the best content. Utilizing a links page keeps your blog tight and clutter-free.

For more get_links parameters, please visit The WordPress Codex

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