As you may have guessed, I support my wife and her AkronOhioMoms site by providing technical assistance and keeping her site up to date with the latest and greatest. Because I am always looking for the best in WordPress tech, the mom blog is an excellent testing platform to try out new plugins and custom code.
I thought that those visiting my site might be interested in exactly what I do in support.
[exceptional-citing quoted=”cindy-on-the-beach-2013″ template=”elegant-reversed” date=”” ]Honey, my Amazon Affiliate codes are all of a sudden showing a long description- this looks like duplicate content to Google, can you please fix it, NOW?[/exceptional-citing]On June 23rd, I ‘upgraded’ the Amazon Products in a Post plugin. This is a great tool that allows her to quickly insert affiliate links for products sold by Amazon into her blog posts. All she needs to do is find the ASIN# of the product listed on the Amazon page, and this plugin does the rest!
The Amazon Products in a Post Problem: The new ‘upgraded’ version of the plugin does a ‘great job’ and goes above and beyond the old version- it writes description text taken directly from Amazon pages. This is cool, however if you are adamant about having only original content on your blog like Cindy is, those additional paragraphs are an abomination!
After year’s of blogging and including the special Amazon Product in a Post ‘shortcodes’ in likely over 1000 individual blog posts, we’re committed to it and can’t change horses mid race!
The Customization Solution: I’m certainly not afraid to get my hands dirty in someone else’s code. So, I dug through a half dozen PHP code files until I came to amazon-product-in-a-post-functions.php.
After making a backup copy of the original, I identified the correct part of code that includes the ‘description’ and removed it completely. This gave me the best tool for AkronOhioMoms original content problem.
But sometimes problems snowball. Well not necessarily snowball, but I identified a second issue with the Amazon Affiliate sales- the Amazon “BUY NOW ” button constantly had a a Pinterest “Pin It” tag hovering over it every time a user tried to click buy now! Who wants to PIN a BUY NOW button!?
I had recently included the Pinterest Pin It Button For Images plugin for WordPress- and it creates this feature for ALL images. I guess I didn’t realize it would be over the buy now buttons. SO, what to do? The Pinterest Pin It Button For Images plugin had an option to disable images of certain css styles, so, BACK into the functions.php file and declared all Buy Now buttons as that ‘no-pin’ class. It was a simple solution, but required hand coding.
Anyway, the effort on AkronOhioMoms.com is complete, and I must retire. Thanks for following along with my silly blog post about AOM work:)
