W-Shadow.com

Ever since the release of the Plugin Update Checker library, one of the most common questions asked has been this: “How can I secure my download links so that only users who have purchased my plugin can download an update?” In this post I’ll try to answer that question in the context of using WP […]

Most of my income comes from developing and selling commercial WordPress plugins. Up until recently, I sold many of those plugins through the WPPlugins.com plugin marketplace. Now, however, I’m planning to remove my wpplugins.com listings and build a separate site for each plugin. If you want to know why, read on. It all started several […]

Update 2017-06-20: This library has been deprecated. Please use PUC instead. It’s more current and it supports both themes and plugins. This is a PHP library that lets you add automatic update notifications and single-click updates to any WordPress theme. It’s purpose is to be easy to integrate for developers and to provide a familiar […]

It is hardly news that the average load time is one of the many factors that Google uses to determine how well your site will rank. But how much does it matter, really? If my recent experience is anything to go by, the answer is “very little”. Over the last two months, I optimized this […]

The “Pro” version of Broken Link Checker has been discontinued. All features that were previously paid-only have been merged into the free version. This includes (among others): Internationalized domain name support. The ability to check embedded videos from popular video hosting sites (e.g. YouTube). The ability to check links to popular file hosting sites (e.g. […]

Search engine optimization gets a lot of flack from the uninformed. While most web developers know (presumably) that applying basic SEO techniques to a one’s site is just common sense, the average web-dweller needn’t be so lenient. For many, “SEO” is a word to be spoken in disgust, a synonym for spam, viruses and other […]

In the short time that I’ve been playing the ISV game, I’ve had many an opportunity – and necessity! – to think about pricing. As it turns out, finding the right price for your software is tricky business. Many articles have been written, much virtual ink has been spent on discussing various strategies. There’s even […]

Last updated on June 26, 2015. Since time immemorial, only plugins hosted in the official WordPress.org plugin directory have supported automatic updates. Now, I’ve written a PHP library that you can use to add automatic update capabilities to any plugin. Public, private and commercial plugins alike – all can now enjoy the benefits of automatic […]

As you may remember, I’ve been running a little AdSense experiment on this site. Here’s a brief summary for new readers: The core motivation for the experiment was to test the prevalent assumption that people coming from search engines are the ones most likely to click on ads. To this end, I used a little […]

Way back in March, I conducted a little AdSense experiment to see which type of visitors (direct, coming from internal or external pages, or arriving from search engines) were most likely to click on ads. It turned out that internal visitors – that is, people coming from another page on the same site – were […]

Last week, I announced I would be conducting a little AdSense experiment to gain insight into how often different kinds of visitors click on ads. Today, I will present the results. The core motivation for the experiment was to test the prevalent assumption that people coming from search engines are the ones most likely to […]

As you might have noticed, the query suggestion feature of Google Search usually only comes up when someone wants to expose and make fun of all the silly things that people search for. Today, I’m going to show you how you that it can also be put to a more practical use – keyword discovery! […]

If you frequent technology news sites, it’s easy to get the impression that AdBlock Plus – the popular Firefox extension that can block most forms of online advertising – is a big deal. Any news article, blog post or forum thread that happens to mention advertising will inevitably get several comments expounding the benefits of […]

Behold, I bring you even more WordPress-related statistics! Today : the most popular words in plugin names. Use them to come up with new plugin ideas, figure out which services/features are over- or under-represented in the WP plugin ecosystem, and more. Here’s a tag cloud of the names of all plugins listed in the WordPress.org […]

In this post I will explain what the “Viralogy.com script” thing mentioned in the Broken Link Checker survey was all about, discuss the user response and attempt to verbalize my rather unclear thoughts on the issue. Viralogy Script About two weeks ago, I received an offer to bundle a social media tracking script from Viralogy […]

During the last few months I have been working on an improved premium version of my popular link cloaking plugin. And now, on this unquestionably glorious day, I finally deem it sufficiently polished and bug-free to be ready for public release. So if you do affiliate marketing and want to protect your commissions, go check […]

I’m planning to release my first commercial WordPress plugin later this month. The plugin will be an improved version of the Link Cloaking plugin and will include a bunch of new and exciting features, like cloaking links anywhere on the site (as opposed to only detecting links inside post/page content) and the ability to display […]

Social proof is an easy way to bump your traffic figures a little bit and make yourself look more authoritative. Today I’ll show you five simple ways to apply it to your WordPress blog. Preface The essence of “social proof” is simple : when people don’t have a lot of information about something, they will […]

Behold, today I present you my glorious plan to save the world! Well, this post is actually my attempt to answer a burning question : “How can we download stuff for free and ensure that musicians, actors, programmers and other people who create stuff still get paid?”. It’s a longish, wistful rant on intellectual property […]

As a plugin developer, I sometimes wonder what makes a plugin popular. How come some plugins garner hundreds of comments and thousands of downloads, while others pass quietly into the archives? What kind of plugin do the users want? Obviously the plugin’s niche (what kind of stuff it does) would be a huge factor. For […]

Most people make a common and incorrect assumption when thinking about targeted advertising. They whine about how the tracking and data mining that would enable it hurts their privacy – and that’s a fair concern, really. But sometimes they go on to remark that “well, it’s not all bad, because targeted ads would definitely be […]

There’s been some controversy about the ethics of using Adblock. Webmasters want advertising income, users want a better browsing experience. Yadda yadda yadda. I can certainly sympathize with both sides of the debate – on the one hand, I hate intrusive ads as much as anyone. On the other hand, this site is mainly ad-supported. […]

Noticed a piece of anticopyright propaganda on Digg. Another simplistic visual aide saying that (online) piracy is not the same as theft. So I decided to make my own, a bit more accurate version.

What will search engine optimization be like 30 years from now? How will the SE algorithms have evolved in this huge – from the technological perspective – time period? Will every SEO have a solar powered flying car, or will they be reduced to working at algae farms?

A review of a free Opera plugin that can highlight nofollow links, display Alexa rank and PageRank, show the number of backlinks that a page or a domain has, and more. Basically it is a full-featured SEO toolbar for the Opera web browser.

It is no secret that the introduction of the rel=nofollow completely failed to stop, or at least decrease link spam on blogs, forums and similar sites. The possible reasons, and the negative effects of Nofollow on legitimate users, have been discussed to death, but still I feel there is one aspect of the problem that has been overlooked.

Over the last few days I’ve been tweaking my AdSense ads and trying to improve their relevance, with good results – last Sunday was the highest-earning day for this site since… well, since ever. There was no large increase in traffic, so it’s really because of the changes I made. Here are some tips that I figured out from my experimentation…

About two weeks ago I was browsing SEO-related sites and came upon a promising technique for getting one’s pages out of the supplemental index. It’s called “third level push” and looks particularily useful for blogs. This is an advanced technique and you should work on the basic stuff first before trying something like this.

Instead of a detailed tutorial I will offer some thoughts about the “third level push” method and some tips on implementing it (yes, this is going to be a long post).

I spent a while today wondering what to post about. I have an aptly named file on my desktop – “arggr.txt” (apparently I had misspelled “arrgh”). That’s where I store most of my ideas. Since I’m pretty sure that I don’t have a “feeling” for the audience/people in general, I looked through some of the […]

When I use my GTrends SE tool to find good niches, I sometimes stumble upon valuable niche keywords that I can’t use myself. I simply don’t know enough about the topic and/or don’t think it’s interesting enough to start researching it, so I move on to other ideas. Since the unused kewords aren’t doing anyone […]