Peter Coughlin

I've just posted my latest free WordPress plugin — a virtual robots.txt file generator.

I was getting a bit fed up with the palaver of creating and editing physical robots.txt files for my blogs. All that creating the file, cranking up my FTP program, uploading the file, making sure permissions were right, closing down my FTP program, browsing to the website, checking the robots.txt file ..etc. Driving me bananas.

So, I created a WordPress plugin that intercepts any request for a robots.txt file, and creates a virtual one on the fly. It's got a bunch of entries pre-populated, so I don't have to do anything unless there's something unusual needed. But then the plugin admin page makes that easy anyway, so no big deal. Read more about Free Robots.txt WordPress Plugin →

Up until now I've been using the Static Home Page plugin by Denis de Bernardy, which is really easy to set up and works very well, but I wanted to see how the latest version of WordPress dealt with a static front page. Here's the results of my experimentation…

When you choose a static page for your Front Page, from the Options, Reading menu, you can choose any of the pages in your Blog. If you apply a custom template to the page you choose, it gets applied as you would expect. That's great for building a specialized home page with the latest articles from various categories, or featured articles ..etc. Read more about Using a Static Front Page with Wordpress 2.3 →

You've probably heard about this already, but just in case you haven't, you can now sign up for free PLR content from one of the best PLR providers out there, PLR Pro.

Marc and Daniel have decided to release a limited version of the full offering, so what you get each and every month, is 2 niches, both with 20 articles each. The articles coming through in the full version are superb, so I don't expect these will be any different. Read more about Free PLR from the Experts →

Three times in the past few days I've seen posts about this latest stratgey for generating backlinks. Well, not so much generation as promotion of backlinks, but the promotion will automatically generate more backlinks, and these aren't reciprocal either — they're at least 3-way if not 4-way or more. The principle is simple and ingenious, but I can't quite decide if it's, well, ethical. Read more about An Automated Linking Strategy? →

I don't mean no more links, like, ever. I mean no more of those "more" links that appear when you add the more tag to your posts. Well, actually I mean no more of the bit on the end of the more links, the bit that says "#more-xx". Yes, this is about avoiding duplicate content again, although I ought to say I started looking at this because it's a pet hate of mine when I click the read more links to get transferred half-way down the page.

Anyway… I'm not entirely sure how much difference this makes, but I have it on good authority that the "#more-xx" bit on the end of the "read more" link is a bad thing.

So, as I've been playing with WordPress plugins, I've created one that's very small and lightweight, which automatically strips the "#more-xx" bit off any of your "read more" links. You don't have to do anything, just activate the plugin and watch them disappear! Read more about No More Links →

The last few days I've been wrapping my head around the intricacies of mod_rewrite, especially as it relates to WordPress. I've gotta say, it took me a long time to find the information that I needed. So what I thought I'd do is put together the info that I would have liked, to maybe save you some trouble. Read more about WordPress, htaccess and mod_rewrite →

I know article marketing is still a big thing, so I wanted to share my experience with a couple of the people that I personally use. It's a sort of review, I guess.

I use them, they're one of the best article providers.

The first one is PLR Pro. I use their stuff and I can honestly say they are definitely one of the best (maybe even the best?) article providers out there.

High quality exclusive articles

If you're looking for high quality articles, that are only released to a relatively small number of people (200 in this case) then PLR Pro may be just what you're looking for.

Basically you get a collection of 40 articles written on 11 different topics each and every month. That's 440 in total. The topics - or niches, if you like - are always well researched by the guys at PLR Pro (Marc Lindsay and Daniel Turner) using WordTracker. They do give you the keyword research as part of the topic package, so you get quick and easy access to those long-tail keywords! Read more about PLR Pro Articles Review →