new year – Page 11 – PDRater – Permanent Disability Calculators

Homemade WordPress 2.6+ Plugins

By Jay Shergill Posted on September 2, 2008 Posted in AJAX, Free, Javascript, Open Source, PDRater, PHP, Technobabble No Comments Tagged with Accordion, Credit Card, new year, Paypal Account, Programming Code, Subscriptions, Tweaks, Wordpress

If you’re at all curious, I’ve written about four eight of the plugins for this website. WordPress was specifically written to allow users to create their own plugins. A “plugin” is a little piece of programming code that will modify how a program behaves.

I’ll discuss them later on, but for the ravenously curious my plugins include:

A plugin that creates rounded corners throughout the website
A plugin that creates the “accordion” menu effect on the Links and Calculator pages
A plugin that adds AJAX effects throughout the website
A plugin that creates a “gray-out” screen over certain pages when you’re not logged in or a registered user
A plugin that redirects a user to the calculator page when they log in
A plugin that changes the look and operation of the registration page to be more user friendly
A plugin that makes lots of little tweaks to the site to make it look and act better (I’m constantly adding to this one)
A plugin that allows users to sign up for automatically recurring subscriptions using a credit card or their PayPal account (I’m still working to make this more user friendly)

Free advertising

By Jay Shergill Posted on September 1, 2008 Posted in 1997 PDRS, 2005 PDRS, Business, Free, Links, Marketing, PDRater, Workers Compensation Resources No Comments Tagged with Compensation Law, Disability, Free Advertising, Guest Article, link, new year, Submission Guidelines, Thomas Richard, Totally Free, Wiggins

I’ve just published the this website’s first guest article courtesy of Thomas Richard of Wiggins, Richard & Romano.

If you’re a workers’ compensation professional and have something interesting or informative to say about workers’ compensation law in California, drop me a line. Lots of different people come to this website for information and to use the permanent disability calculators – so why not put your name in front of them?

There are a few submission guidelines, but its totally free advertising.

PDRater.com – climbing search engine results!

By Jay Shergill Posted on August 29, 2008 Posted in Business, Free, PDRater, Search Engine Ranking, SEO, Technobabble No Comments Tagged with Advertisers, Blogger, Bottom Line, disability calculator, Dooley, Few Days, Free People, Gold Standard, Google, Google Ranking, Google Search, Interplay, Many People, new year, Other Search Engines, Permanent Disability, Psychology, Search Engine Rankings, Search Engine Results, Target Keywords

A blogger I respect very much, Roger Dooley, recently posted about “The Power of FREE.” His Neuromarketing blog is mostly about the interplay between marketing and psychology. You should read the article for yourself, but the bottom line is that offering something for free is an incredible incentive – even where someone might get just as as good a deal for “almost free.”

Many people measure their success by their search engine ranking for their “target keywords.” I would wager that most people care about their Google ranking over other search engines. Most search engines alter the search results by placing paid advertisers at the top. Google does not sell search engine rankings. I would say this is one of the biggest reasons it’s considered the gold standard of search engines.

My own target keywords are “permanent disability calculator free.” I discovered a few days ago that this website is the top ranked Google result for these keywords!

Technical Difficulties

By Jay Shergill Posted on August 27, 2008 Posted in PDRater, Technobabble No Comments Tagged with E Mail, Mail Accounts, new year, Technical Difficulties

Panic ensued at 9pm on August 27, 2008. My website was down after it had been operational all day. For some reason, my e-mail accounts were not working either. I hadn’t touched any settings whatsoever. All the files on the server were fine – the server just wasn’t sending information. An hour later the website problem resolved all by itself.

My e-mail is still down, but at least the website is back up.

Update: E-mails back too! Yay!

Website upgraded again!

By Jay Shergill Posted on August 27, 2008 Posted in Calculators, Free, Open Source, PDRater, Technobabble, Website Updates No Comments Tagged with Color Scheme, Confusion, Default Settings, Free Registration, Infinitesimal Changes, kitten it, Launch, Minor Changes, new year, Open Source Software, Security Updates, Security Vulnerabilities, Source Code, Tweaking, Two Edged Sword

In my never ending quest to build the world’s best workers’ compensation website, I’ve made a few upgrades:

Upgraded from WordPress 2.6 to WordPress 2.6.1
Infinitesimal changes to the theme
Adapted a new plugin for WordPress that redirects you directly to the calculator page as soon as you log in

Why keep upgrading WordPress?

Using open source software can be a two-edged sword. On the down side, anyone with the ability to read the source code can figure out the security vulnerabilities. The plus side is that people are constantly working to improve and eliminate those very same security vulnerabilities.

Since people are working on WordPress all the time, it will need to be upgraded all the time. Doing so allows me to take advantage of the latest features and security updates. So far I’ve used WordPress 2.3.2, 2.5, 2.5.1, 2.6, and now 2.6.1.

Why change the theme?

The theme (the “look” of this website) is completely user configurable. Since this website’s launch I’ve been constantly tweaking the look. Minor changes to the color scheme, menu at the top of the website, and how many posts are shown on the blog page.

I work on the theme in order to (hopefully) make the website more aesthetically pleasing and easier to use.

Why the new plugin?

I’d like to make the free registration process as quick and as painless as possible. I’ve had the opportunity to watch a few people go through the free registration process for this website. What I saw was that people were logging in for the first time and were sent to their user page – which looks totally different from the rest of the website. Unfortunately, this caused no end of confusion.

I modified an existing plugin to override website’s default settings to send users directly to the calculator page as soon as they log in.

Tag: new year