Tong Family

OK, I discovered my Amazon Affiliate application Amazonify died silently, and suddenly I am not covering even the modest $20/month hosting charge. That’s not a big deal, but I thought you all liked me 🙂

Turns out I was doing a lot of things wrong, that a quick search revealed:

1. First was that Amazonify had some problems with security and then disappeared from the Internet but the plug-in was still installed which is too bad. Hopefully, I’ve not been hacked.
2. Then there was a sea of really confusing WordPress applications that were way more than what I needed. Most of them cost more than my yearly hosting charge 🙂
3. Finally, it looks like there is a simple application that does what Amazonify does which is just to add my little tag to links called Auto Tagger for Amazon. It just gives you an Amazon link that has your Affiliate Tag in it.
4. And if you are blowing ads and things on your site, you can get your affiliate links stripped by Ad Blockers, I don’t see this affecting the simpler links like on this site, but I could be wrong.
5. Finally, there are disclosure issues, so you have to deal with for Affiliates, so apparently, you need to add an affiliate disclosure on each page (it’s on our footer now) and also have a link to an Affiliate Disclosure page.

Cookie Consent

Man, the legal requirements keep growing, so I put in the Privacy notice previously and then I randomly learned about the need for Cookie consent. You see them all over the Internet, so here goes for us as well. For instance on my site just by plugins, I see trackers from WordPress Stats, JetPack, Cloudinary and deliver.js Content Delivery Networks, and Gravatar for emoticons also from WordPress.

If you pay for MonsterInsights (I use the free version), then you can add a GDPR consent, but I’m looking for freeware

I tried Cookiebot, but frankly couldn’t figure it out in 5 minutes, so trying the easier one called Cookie Notice. It was some magic, but basically, with Cookie Notice you load the plugin, you get a login to their site and then you. verify your email and it automatically fills in the app id and secret, so we should be done.

Newsletter support for each blog page

OK, I’m not going to be disciplined enough to make this happen with Substack or others, so I just want something that turns every blog post into a newsletter. I installed the very mystifying Newsletter plugin and suddenly in each post, I get on the publish side a Post & Email option which sends this to my 17 subscribers. I have no idea how I have that many or how you get to be a subscriber. More love to come.

One of the problems with the WordPress Admin is that there is absolutely no rhyme or reason to where the configurations are. Sometimes, they just appear somewhere in the main menu, sometimes, they appear in Settings and other times, they appear below Settings. Sigh.

But finally figured it out:

1. Go to the newsletter plugin, and start adding configuration settings like privacy policy and so forth. It automatically creates a form at ./newsletter so you can just link there
2. It also has a shortcode for your templates

   Thanks for subscribing to our newsletter, this contains posts and happens at irregular intervals. We will never sell your name or anything nasty like that, so thanks for subscribing :-)

   First name

   Last name

   Email

   I accept the privacy policy
   and there is a quick one that is great for widgets in their Gutenberg widget or you can just use the Shortcode block and add

   Thanks for subscribing to our newsletter, this contains posts and happens at irregular intervals. We will never sell your name or anything nasty like that, so thanks for subscribing :-)

   First name

   Last name

   Email

   I accept the privacy policy
   and it will take care of the rest with a short subscription.
3. You can set it for double confirm so it will check that the email is valid and also add a captcha and Akismet anti-spam support. Overall pretty good. Subscribe to this site now 🙂