knofun

Wow so just finishing up what ended up being months of work on the new Zeropaid. We had to move everything from a hacked up custom CMS that was a combination of an old version of pligg, something I wrote in 2002 called ‘newsadmin,’ and 6 years of patch over hack over patch over grossness. The import contained over 500,000 users, 10,000 news stories, countless comments and posts.  We decided on Wordpress for our CMS and vBulletin for our user management.

An aside on that for a moment. I really like vBulletin and we have used it for user management and our forum software for years now. When we decided on redoing ZP, we were really high on wordpress. We had been turning out tons of blogs with it, and its capacity for customization is undeniable. I really like some of the features of WP, like for example its ability to handle comments and filter spam is great. Performance-wise, Wordpress is not the greatest. Yes, we are using WP-SuperCache. It’s really hard to load test to the traffic levels of ZP, and once we flipped the switch I was shocked at the server loads. We are definitely adding more hardware to the rack to make this setup workable. Kinda wish I would have investigated more to see if we could have used vBulletin for the whole job… then again our vbulletin forum has to be filtered hourly for spam – manually.

At any rate, the new site is working amazingly well. Participation and discussion are way up, and that was the total goal. Everyone seems to like the new design, which is a first. Big hat tip to Unique Blog Designs, Nate, Matt and Josh. If you need a design done for a site, call these guys. Seriously.

Jorge is really the guy who made all this happen, grinding out the vbulletin bridge and all the little details that made the big picture look so good. Props to ya my man.

So to kickoff the new site and to reward the people who really matter – the users, we are giving away a brand new Xbox 360. To enter all you have to do is interact with the site, rate a program, leave a comment, post in the forum, or follow us on twitter. We pick the winner end of April, so you have plenty of time to get in where you fit in.

Official Contest Page

file sharing / p2p, geek stuff, ventures, web marketing contest, php, vbulletin, wordpress, zeropaid

Well I have been working on a few wordpress plugins for a few days and finally figured one was ready for public consumption. So basically all this thing does is implement ZinText on your wordpress blog with no coding. If you don’t know already, ZinText is in-text ads for eBay affiliates. Check out a demo here, or its on this blog on posts older than 10 days. 

Oh yeah thats another cool feature you can say only display ads on posts older than X days so you have more control over where the ads appear. There’s also a whitelist if we aren’t linking the words you want, and a blacklist if we are linking things you don’t want linked. You still have to have a campaign ID from ePN, but if you are a good affiliate you have one already.

Check out wpZinText here

Please leave feeback here or on the plugin page.

geek stuff, ventures, web marketing advertising, affiliate, ebay, in-text, plugin, wordpress, zintext