All details are on the dedicated plugin page.

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In it, he provides not only a piece of SQL that you can run to see how your site is affected, but even provided a PHP script that you can upload to your website to graph the results. Mine is to the right. I have my spam cleared out quite regularly, so the results are only recent ones.

As you can see, one of my posts was generating nearly 47% of all the spam. This is usually due to keywords within the article – the fact that it’s about a forum is possible a key. The second place “magnet” is a my review of  a Microsoft keyboard. I have no idea why, maybe because of it being Microsoft related.

I’ve resolved the first post by simply closing off comments (it was an old post and I think everything that needs to be said has been). The review, well, I’m not sure what to do there. I want to keep comments open on reviews. Others are mainly WordPress pages, which I need comments available for feedback and support. However, the fact that the plugins are related to PayPal, Facebook, AdSense, etc, I’m sure is no coincidence, and probably help to attract the spam.

So, not a huge amount I can do (having said that, I’ve reduced my potential spam input by 47% – assuming they don’t just target another one of my posts!), but interesting to know none-the-less.

Having said that, I’ve never really thought about closing comments on posts before and it’s something I will do in future – especially when I announce new or changed plugins, as comments can be placed on the main page itself.

Update: A WordPress plugin has been released of the code to produce the spam charts.

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Two plugins have been modified, and both are relatively small changes. YouTube Embed has had its demonstration video fixed and Simple PayPal Donate now validates with XHTML Strict. In  both cases (and for upcoming plugin changes) I’ve also added some commenting to the resulting XHTML so that it’s easy to find the code in the source.

More changes to come…

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Flu Pandemic Level – updated to version 1.1. Re-tested and code tidied up, but no major changes.

Simple Wakoopa List – updated to version 2. This is a major update which introduces a new caching system, a new method of passing parameters, along with a slew of new switchable options.

Simple PayPal Donate – updated to version 1.2. Re-tested and code tidied up. New parameters to allow a target to be specified, and for the button image ALT text to be modified.

There’s more to come, including a brand new Twitter plugin.

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I heard nothing back until a few weeks later when PayPal informed me that the donater disputed the money and was requesting it back. They seemed to think it was for goods that I hadn’t delivered so I explained it was a donation and that my site name appears prominently during this process. They quickly backed my cause and rejected the dispute. However, their credit card company thought otherwise and withdrew the money.

But, hats off to PayPal, they persevered and disputed this “chargeback”. And won.

It is PayPal’s standard practice to dispute wrongful chargebacks. One of the benefits of using PayPal is that our team of chargeback specialists will gather the necessary information from you and work with the credit card company until the chargeback is resolved.

We appreciate your prompt response to our request for information about this transaction.

The money is now heading back towards me. Not that I longer feel that it was voluntarily donated out of good will, which is a shame.

But why would you donate a sum of money and then do whatever you can do to claw it back? Well, I suspect I know the answer. My Simple PayPal Donate WordPress plugin is quite popular and in all the code examples I use my details. I suspect someone has implemented it with my details by mistake and this person was attempting to donate elsewhere. None-the-less, it would have been my details (including site address) that would have appeared during this process.

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1. Users don’t talk to you much, unless something isn’t working. Not that it’s a bad thing – I’ve been able to tweak instructions and even create new versions of my plugins thanks to this kind of response. However, I’d love to hear about what people would like to see in the way of improvements or even new plugins!
2. Users don’t donate So I’ll just have to keep trying to make my money from advertising!
3. Niche products aren’t so popular. I’ve created plugins for Wakoopa, TheThingsIWant and Readbag, but all have failed to do well. However, those for Twitter, Adsense and PayPal are doing a lot, lot better.

To demonstrate my last point, here is a graphical representation of how many people have downloaded my current plugins…

Pretty conclusive. Having said that, some of those result are scewed because of the length of time the plugins have been made available. So let’s change the results to represent the number of downloads over the days the plugin has been available…

Wow, that makes a huge different to my code embed plugin – the only one of the popular ones that isn’t somehow linked to another product.

In this case it’s popular, well, because it’s not linked to another service and it’s filling a role that doesn’t currently exist. When I wanted to put some code into my posts I couldn’t find a plugin to do it. There was one but the author kept the download to his site¹ and insisted on your email address (for sending you emails at a later time all about his other great stuff) before letting you know how to download it.

And this is it – populariting comes through one of two things.

1. A link to a service – money making or social networking – that’s rather popular
2. Being unique and providing a service that people are looking for

Now all I need to do is think of that one plugin that ticks both boxes. Of course, if you have an idea, I’m happy to hear your views!

1. if it’s not on the WordPress plugins site it won’t automatically inform you when a new version is available

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This update fixes a problem where some PayPal servers are producing different code than that expected for use within the plugin. Now, whichever version of the PayPal code you get, this plugin will accept it. Thanks to John Kalogerakos for highlighting this to me.

Full details can be found on the plugin’s dedicated page.

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“Simple PayPal Donate”¹ makes it easy to place a PayPal donation button in your WordPress theme.

As well as making it easier to control your output, this plugin assists with multiple occurrences across a WordPress installation (maintaining a single point for the code, particularly useful if the code changes in future). It is also XHTML compliant, unlike the original PayPal code.

You can view more details and download it from the official WordPress site, or from it’s official page on this site.

1. can you see where I’m going with these naming conventions!

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Memset
They host the BMTG website for free. All you pay for is your domain name, which you can buy elsewhere and point to their nameservers. Their service is excellent as if the quality of their hosting. Oh, and they’re carbon neutral

PayPal
They provide reduced charges to non-profits. Google Checkout doesn’t. Never-the-less the PayPal non-profit charges aren’t much more generous than the standard Google Checkout rate.

There is also Google for Non-profits, a collection of Google tools and sites. Unfortunately, it’s just that. And the link no longer appears to work, even though it was only launched a couple of months ago.

Google Grants offers 3 months of free advertising to, well, people them deem to be appropriate – submit your details and cross your fingers.

If you’re aware of any useful services for non-profits/charities, please let me know.

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Up until now I’ve handled the handled the ticket availability via a combination of PHP and MySQL. The shopping basket and checkout has then been handled by PayPal. To add some more flexibility, though, I’ve been taking over the shopping basket. The coding was a little complicated but it’s done. I can now track multiple tickets in a basket, with options to change quantities and delete items from the basket. All well and good.

The next bit is to pass the basket entries to PayPal for final payment.

Oh lord.

The main PayPal site has “walk through” screens on how to add the code. But stuff is missing – but can be found in a 100+ downloadable PDF manual. Add to that the code they give you includes a broken link to a PayPal image.

So, now, I need to find a replacement “Checkout” graphic from PayPal. Could I find one. Could I heck. However, there was a news story about PayPal updating their graphics so I followed that and found a list of “before” and “after” images. That told me that PayPal generated images – such as the ones provided in the example code – would update automatically. The other option was to download replacement images and host them yourself. This wasn’t my preferred option, but I went for it anyway. Guess what? Yes, clicking on the link to download the image showed me the code that was required to host it from the PayPal site – exactly what I was after. But in no way obvious.

And that’s what I’ve found about the PayPal site in general – nothing is where you’d expect it to be and everything needs a good deal of searching to find.

Which is why most of the help can be found at the PayPal Developer Community – a group of official PayPal forums that I only came across via a Google search.

These forums mentioned that I could use the PayPal Sandbox for testing purposes. But could I find a link? No. A search on Google naturally lead me to a completely different site – PayPal Developer Central. And don’t even get me started on how complicated the Sandbox is to use…

So right now I’m frustrated to hell. My coding of the PayPal interface has barely started as I’ve spent all my time desperately trying to find answers to what I think are basic questions.

And after that… I’ve going to add Google Checkout as a second payment option. God help me.

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