Articles, updates and sales for Arnan’s plugins

AdRotate Pro 3.12.4 – General improvements.

Some further improvements for Geo Targeting and general improvements. Based on some user feedback I have re-done some of the database indexes aimed at making stats faster.

Changes

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[fix] Query error when cleaning database manually
[fix] Stats exports not working on certain versions of PHP
[fix] Adblock nag countdown not saving
[fix] ‘Strict standards’ error when uploading a file on some systems
[fix] Geo Targeting better filtering for locations with capitals
[fix] Self-repairing database function now actually works
[tweak] Geo Lookups no longer leading in Geo Service availability
[tweak] Geo Targeting warning emails removed
[tweak] Load max. 20 ads for a dynamic group
[tweak] Impression counting excluded from popular caching plugins
[tweak] Click counting excluded from popular caching plugins
[change] GeoBytes no longer supported for Geo Targeting
[change] Upgrade script cleaned up
[change] Removed unnecessary indexes from database
[change] Removed obsolete ‘block’ columns from database
[change] Improved INT() unsigned datatypes in MySQL

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Updating

If you have version 3.12 or newer already you’ll get the update via your dashboard.
If you have an older version you may have to update manually because your version looks at an older API which is no longer online. More information here.

Switching your WordPress site to SSL

Https for your domain makes sense these days for a bunch of reasons; You offer an encrypted link connection to your visitors which provides security. It’s not very expensive either. You can get affordable certificates via NameCheap (A popular hosting provider).

I got mine via MediaTemple because I’m rather lazy and their dashboard has this fancy thing to install a certificate with just one click. But you can get them cheap via NameCheap from ~$10 per year or so.

Product changes – AdRotate Geo updated

Over the weekend I have made some changes to the website, related to products and availability of products. Also I’m working on something new and exciting.

AdRotate Geo

AdRotate Geo has been online for a little while now. Nobody appeared interested to buy extra lookups. Some found the 14400 lookups per day not enough. So I fixed both.

I have updated the API to accept 50000 lookups per day for free now. And next to that, the paid options have been removed. There really was no point in keeping them around if nobody was using it.

So the gist; More lookups, effective since yesterday. No action is required on your part. Less premium options. But nobody bought it anyway.

WooCommerce Plugins

As you may know I maintain a bunch of WooCommerce modules. I’ve gone over what they actually do and how useful they are. Some were not useful, reflected by the number of sales. Specific little plugins have little demand obviously. So zero sales in a year means to me I don’t need to sell it either. Therefor I have removed the fluff and kept the useful ones.

Also I have updated the page a bit to show a download counter on each plugin and WooCommerce Price Equality got updated a few days ago. Good stuff 🙂

AdRotate Pro & AdRotate Free

AdRotate Pro are due for an update, too. I am finalising a bunch of things for that. Based on some feedback I have revised the indexes of the stats database which should see a bit of a speed bump on larger setups. For GeoTargeting in AdRotate Pro a bunch of things have been tweaked and improved. Also GeoBytes kinda broke their stuff so I decided to remove support for their “API”.
Updates are likely ready for release later this week.

Coming soon-ish^™

Currently I’m working on a simple to use SEO solution which focuses on what you look like in search results. SEO is always important to drive traffic to your site and a lot of plugins simply aren’t up to snuff. Others are complicated or are otherwise unwieldy. I think I can make a difference. SEO generally is made out to be much more complicated than it actually is. I’m going to change that. That’s exciting right? I think it is.

The ultimate development environment for Mac OS X

Updated: December 26, 2018

I’ve pieced together what I think is the ultimate development setup. This tutorial is particularly useful if you’re working in different places and have to rely on public wifi or if you don’t have high speed internet available.

As you may have read I’ve moved to the Philippines. This means I no longer have a home address for a while. This also means that high speed internet becomes a luxury. To not being hindered in developing things like AdRotate and other plugins I needed a fast and reliable alternative for my online development server. So that even if internet is wonky, I can still do some work.

Improve your email overall, fix issues with receiving or sending email. Or generally make things work if you simply don’t know how OS X Mail works or is supposed to work. This post will outline a number of things to look at which may improve your overall mail usage but also will be helpful if things go bad. This post is particularly useful if you use IMAP/POP email combined with SMTP (for sending). Exchange accounts are a whole different kind of animal and are not covered in this article.