Ever wanted to submit your wordpress blog to a reader or blog service or even subscribe to someone elses blog, but felt that too much of it was off topic?

Well with wordpress it is possible to just submit or subscribe to the rss of individual categories.

All you do is navigate to the category you are interested in and add feed after the url.

For example;

Say on this site you are only interested in the Affiliate Marketing category

1. navigate to the appropriate category http://www.keithbond.co.uk/category/affiliate-marketing/
2. Add feed to the end of the url http://www.keithbond.co.uk/category/affiliate-marketing/feed and subscribe in your favourite reader.

Incidentally if anyone has a UK affiliate blog or a blog which is pretty general but does contain one category with an internet marketing / affiliate marketing slant let me know and I will add it to Internet Marketing Blogs which also has of yesterday has a twitter account @AffiliateBlogs which tweets new articles as they are published, this is set to a maximum of 5 per hour so you shouldn’t get over run although at busy times the odd one may slip through the net.

Another service to add the affiliate category of your blog to is the blogs section ofaffiliates4u.com simply click on the My Profile link at the top of the page and navigate to the blogs section and add your blog (or category) feed url.

** Plugin updated to 0.2a 6th Feb 2009 ** (see below)

Flush with the success of writing Easy Content Units Wordpress Plugin I decided to have a go at the Sunshine WordPress plugin competition which is being run over on Joost de Valk’s Blog. For some time I have been using an RSS plugin called Feedlist to embed Sunshine rss feeds in to wordpress, and it does the trick but can be a little messy, so after  having had a good look round on google for something better and drawing a blank my project for the competition was a wordpress plugin that would easily pull in and parse the Sunshine rss feeds.

Where to start? well the ECU plugin I made couldn’t be simpler to use so that was first stop, then I needed to workout how to parse the rss feed and output the results, luckily during my research I discovered Function Reference/fetch rss « WordPress Codex so all I needed to do was put them together, sounds simple and it probably is if you know what you are dong, unfortunately I didn’t and spent a frustrating ten hours or more struggling with it on Saturday before giving up and going to bed with the problem unsolved. Sunday morning bingo, everything suddenly clicked in to place and I have a working plugin, very possibly I also know a bit more about php too so thats a bonus.

What the plugin does is outputs a rss feed as a list of titles and descriptions into a wordpress post or page, here is a screen shot of the output.

You are able to add a variable to change the number of results that are returned. I’ve called the plugin Keith’s Easy Rss Wordpress Plugin rather than Sunshine Rss because  it works with other Rss feeds too. I’ve tested it with Amazon RSS Feeds and a couple of Feedburner ones as well on both WP 2.6.x and 2.7. Some feeds with too many parameters do fail to parse though, any thoughts

0.2a 6th February 2009 – Mod by Brian Edwards (Scifind) so that affiliate tracking in the form of  prefixes and postfixes  can be added (if just using Sunshine Rss you wont need to add any)

Download here. Still in Alpha so absolutely any feedback is appreciated.

Have fun playing.

Examples:

Sunshine Rss >> Latest Magaluf Offers from Sunshine

Purely Diamonds using Affiliate Window Prefix Tracking >> Purely Diamonds top 10 products

Mio Destino (Indy) using Postfix affiliate tracking >> Latest Lingerie from Mio Destino

I seem to be turning into an old cynic lately always having a moan about something, my previous posts  Merchant 404 Pages and Why I dislike graphical emails are a just couple of recent examples.

Anyway I don’t like being an old whinge bag and I usually leave the complaining to others so in order to start looking at the bright side of things again I need to get a couple of things off my chest.

Merchants changing the URL structure of their websites… why oh why (like the points of view style?) can’t they put in place some form of mod rewrite / .htaccess to redirect old urls to new ones, not only will this save affiliates having a load of broken links it will also help the merchants own seo as the search engines will not be finding a million 404’s.

Reversals of sales – any merchant that has had an internet presence for any length of time knows what percentage of reversals they are likely to have, why not reduce the commission by this factor and pay out on everything, result happy affiliates and less admin to do.

Deeplinking – there really is no excuse in this day and age for an affiliate network not to have simple deeplinking in place, I wrote about Affiliate deep linking tools some time back, and these are excellent however, deeplinking should be as simple as adding the target url to the end of the affiliate code, its not rocket science.

Finally more a niggle than a moan, when you sign up to RSS by Email please don’t use an email address that sends an out of office reply because usually these go out between midnight and 2am and I really do hope you are out of the office at that time.

Right rant over now I hopefully can get get back to the business of trying to scratch a living.

If you have an opinion on any of my whinges or if you have a  moan of your own please leave a comment below.