One of the other issues I needed to sort out when I bought My Affiliate Marketing Forum – Affearners was to sort out the wierd 404 the site was serving.

As you will know a 404 is served when the page doesnt exist but for some reason when I took over the forum it was trying to send these requests through to a page called 404.shtml and looping it round and round… Not great really.

So to sort that I decided I would implement a more friendly 404 page. To do this I opened up the .htaccess file in the root of the domain (If you dont already have a .htaccess file there just create a file with that as the name – yes it does start with a . and no file extension!)

In that .htaccess file we add this line: -

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I have been delaying my booking to go to SEO Roadshow in Limerick this year mainly to annoy certain people but so as to annoy them even more I am actually going!

The hotel looks great, not sure they know whats coming!

I also have to say that the booking experience on Ryanair’s site was awful, im glad they are cheap or only an idiot would book with them.

Now that its all booked (arrive 10th sod off back 12th) the following people owe me beer: -

But I am more than happy to accept one from anyone else.:)

See you there!

I have been doing some work over at my Affiliate Marketing Forum, Affearners. Minor tweaks really but I felt that they could be useful to anyone else with an SMF powered forum.

I would really like to spend some time ripping the whole thing to pieces as its all table driven and the code looks like someone threw it up, but instead of that mammoth task I did the lazy thing and tweaked it to get some benefits.

First off Affearners uses the SEO package created by Earl over at Syndk8 and I inherited that when I bought the forum. In my opinion it does a decent job of sorting the URL’s out but has some issues that perhaps newer packages dont (I dont wanna go through a complete URL migration so sod it it will do).

So first thing to sort is that the post pages dont even have a decent H1 title, so that should be easy to sort…

Open up dispaly.template.php (in your current forums theme folder) and change the following line: -
', $txt[118], ': ', $context['subject'], '  (', $txt[641], ' ', $context['num_views'], ' ', $txt[642], ')

And replace it with the following: -

Thats gotten rid of the crap we didn’t need in there and made the page title a nice H1.

Next the formatting may be a bit crappy for your forum so we may have to alter the CSS to sort that out. Heres what I did, open up style.css (Same folder as display.template above) and add this to the end of the stylesheet: -

That just makes the title big but still fits in nice even if people do long stupid titles (Like I tend to )

Thats it really, simple change really but I feel a lot happier about the what each page is saying about itself.

I know you love campers Dave, and this one Mr Naylor is cheap and for sale near me.

Seeing as how the Youtube vid didnt work heres a crappy screencap

Not quite the right thing but I still kinda like it

Earl is having a bad night, someone hacked Syndk8 and heres all we see now: -

DONT PANIC!!!