January 2, 2008: Happy New Year to all the LocalCenters.com readers, whom I might add , now span 18 countries and 38 states! Just recently we’ve welcomed Argentina, Sweden, Ghana, Spain, Italy, and France. We’ve broken through the magic number of 100 page views a day now, that makes us actually rank and look legit, and even better is that you are now viewing nearly 3.5 pages per visit which is wonderful.

We’ve made some significant changes over the holidays, although few will be apparent to the non-techies, which I am fast becoming not, an unplanned learning experience. We’ve added site tags for easier navigation between articles. Our related articles section has better contextual relationships, and we now are introducing articles through excerpts rather than the first few lines. The day after we made this last change our page views started to go up, and they keep climbing. We have two guest articles up and more coming.

I added some downloadable coupons for our upcoming Murphy400 Blood Drive , this Sunday. It’s my hope that I can get my merchants to realize there’s no distribution costs (for them) and that we will be publishing many more coupons for our local communities. I have to say it’s frustrating; I think we could be offering better discounts for no marketing costs but this is the first run and I wimped out rather than pushing. Once we get the system down, I expect some terrific daily bargains to be found here!

Our Elk Grove, CA Tip Night Podcast downloads have now exceeded 250 which is great for any non-mainstream podcast, but if we got the Pay It Forward message to a couple of hundred people in the process, that’s worth more than any statistic.

Yesterday I started adding some affiliate advertising. Affiliate advertising, wherein the publisher (that’d be me, LC) gets a percentage of the sales (Amazon), or gets paid per click (Google). Initially I had too much on the home page, and pulled it back. Then I pulled back more and it doesn’t look crowded. Amazon is very low paying, but the books I’m featuring are my selections and so good that I want everyone to consider buying some of them. This is what is known as a “long-tail” site, meaning the strip mall business is not ranked real high in search word popularity, so we’re in an extremely focused niche market. As such, most of the advertising offered to us isn’t contextually relevant. We’re searching for relevant products, but content will always be what drives the viewers here, and advertising will be secondary for months to come. I am working on some proprietary products to offer which are extremely relevant, but rather than throwing something out that’s not of supreme value, I am taking the time necessary to produce some killer items for our industry.

Thanks again for your support. Our returning visitor percentage has almost doubled since we started tracking November 14, but new visitors still account for the majority of visits which is good too; I’m now ahead of projections. Please make some comments or email if there’s something we can publish that would help you make some money in 2008. Thanks,~LC.

December 27, 2007: Today I changed “Ask LC” to “Ask The Strip Mall Insider.” I also went to a posting format from a static page format to enable easier questioning and posting. The name change was partially because many of the responses will be from our associate experts, and also because I learned by a quick Googling that “LC” is not exactly a unique name! I think we’ll have better indexing with the new structure. So, ask away!

December 26, 2007: Our Christmas podcast was a recording of a spectacular benefit in Elk Grove, CA, and we had nearly 200 listeners over the first 5 days of publication. Two social networking sites picked it up and it is getting more viral every day. We have visitors now from 37 states and 11 countries, and localcenters.com moved up 1.2 millions spots on Alexa today! I hope to be in the six figures soon and that would be great for a site that’s been indexed by the search engines for only 32 days.

Our first guest article is up, and today we added a “related posts” feature where articles with similar topics are hyperlinked to the bottom of the post.

I read something today about Web 2.0 that made quite an impression-”a site should not only be easy to use, it should be a joy to use.” We’re trying to make localcenters.com just that, and thanks for your continued support.

December 19, 2007:, Our first Podcast will be broadcast on localcenters.com on Saturday, December 22! We will start out with a short interview with Jacqui McManigal who brought the Pay It Forward concept to Elk Grove, CA with her “Tip Night” which she started in 2006. Then, we’ll have some event guests shout out some holiday greetings, and finally Read More→

This article is specifically for site developers and newbies like me who have been frustrated with the Tags showing in the excerpts or on the main page when using Excerpts or “More.” Here are the code changes I made, all in the Main Index Template only. You don’t need to touch any other template file.

1. Activating the “Excerpts” function:

Your code looks something like this, now:

<div class=”entry”>
<?php the_content(’Read the full article’); ?>
<?php if ( function_exists(’the_tags’) ) : ?>
<div class=”tags”><?php the_tags(); ?></div>
<?php endif; ?>
</div>

To add the excerpt function, change it to this:

<div class=”entry”>
<?php
if ($single) {
the_content();
}
else {
the_excerpt();
}
?>

This change gives you the option of writing an excerpt, or by default Wordpress will take your first 120 (?) words and use it as an excerpt. The single page contains your full post and with this code your excerpt will not be repeated there.

2. If you use Wordpress 2.3x tags, they will appear in the excerpt which only adds to visual noise. Here’s how to add Tags” to the above code and still constrain them to your single page post.

<div class=”entry”>
<?php
if ($single) {
the_content();
}
else {
the_excerpt();
}
?>
<?php if (is_single()) if ( function_exists(’the_tags’) ) : ?>
<div class=”tags”><?php the_tags(); ?></div>
<?php endif; ?>
</div>

Now, your tags will appear only at the end of your single page only, just above the comments!

3. Using the “More” Function

I am a good example of so not a geek, and as such I am sure many join me in not intuitively understanding this:

[....] which Wordpress generates is you do not write your own excerpt. If you do write your excerpt, there is no directive to read on after the excerpt ends.

The traditional “More” function is disabled with excerpts. Although the Wordpress Codex gives a way of calling up a “more” directive with php, I like the manual method better. It’s totally custom and very easy.

First, you will have to publish your post to get the correct URL Permalink. At that point Wordpress will generate a [...] at the end of the auto-generated excerpt. If you want to write your own OR hyperlink to the full post, go back to “manage posts” and simply use the

<a href=”your post PermalinkURL”> and-say-anything-you-like-here</a> and drop this in just after your excerpt string. I’ve used “find out how!” “read on” and “more” depending upon the nature of the post.

Good luck, hope this helps some that have shared my frustrations