I have two blogs that feature content where the readers are likely to want to buy items from eBay. One is a guide to Designer Handbags, and the other gives help for iPod users who have lost their iTunes. I have seen plenty of sites and blogs displaying live eBay auction listings so I decided to do the same: after all, it should be easy, I thought. I then spent hours going round in circles through Commission Junction and the eBay Developers’ site. Every options seemed to require programming knowledge that was way beyond my experience. I decided I had to ask for help. The developers’ forum was pretty good, and several people offered helpful ideas for installing eBay listings simply on my blogs. As a result I have now downloaded and installed the phpBayLite plugin which adds eBay Auction listings to any php enabled site – like a WordPress Blog – with just a few lines of code.

Once the plugin is installed you get a new new button that shows on the button panel as “pBL”, and you need to click on that for each post then insert the relevant keywords. This is simpler than installing convoluted code: it is displaying well, although so far it is only showing one item at a time.

I found a useful plugin for hosted WordPress Blogs today, developed by Lucia over at Big Bucks Blogger. The plugin enables you to hide any or all of your post categories, in-post, in the sidebar list or in the blog archives. This plugin is easy to install – just upload to the wp-content folder, ‘plugins’ on your web host control panel. Then log in to your WordPress blog to activate the plugin in one click of the mouse. Then under ‘options’ you can choose which categories your blog visitors will see. This plugin is also useful to prevent your sidebar becoming clogged up with hundreds of categories that do not help your visitors find the posts they want to read. Read more »