Here’s a 5 minute overview of a very useful, free, and really easy to use screen sharing tool. I apologise if my voice is a bit gruff as I still have a sore throat.
-Frank Haywood
Magic Pages Plugin
Update: The sale for the dead useful Magic Pages plugin is live at just $12.50 until Saturday 18th May when it rises to $17 for one week before going to $27.
***
Tomorrow Saturday 11th at 6.00pm GMT I’m releasing a new plugin called Magic Pages.It allows you to very quickly create easy-format sales and opt-in pages with a choice of background colours and a few different page border styles.
SIMPLE stuff, but it’s really quite good.
It has a number of very cool little features, and addons:-
- 5 box-outs in pastel colours with 2 border styles
- 2 new list styles – drawn star and drawn arrow
- 8 different coloured clickable buttons
- Buttons expand to accomodate the text
- Page border shadow options
- Page widths as a percentage (fluid!)
- Colour pickers all over the place
- Numerous text boxes
- Auto-parsing of opt-in form code
- And some other stuff
Here’s a screen shot of the box selector:-
And the button selector:-
***
A quick side note…
A few weeks ago I released a plugin called Magic Styles which was exactly as popular as I thought it would be.
That plugin gives you a number of useful additions to enhance your pages and posts such as graphical bullets and buttons, fixed size johnson boxes and pastel shaded notices.
You can still pick up a copy here if you missed it as there are a few remaining at $17.
http://www.frankhaywood.com/magic-styles-plugin/
***
But now it’s the turn of the Magic Pages plugin.
I had this plugin created for 2 reasons.
#1 – I’ve wanted something fairly quick and easy to use like this for my own personal needs for a while now – it HAD to be fast and easy. That was my #1 priority.
(And I also wanted to be able to use it with plugins like Magic Styles and Big Ed so that I could add nicely formatted text and box outs and bullets.)
#2 – I was genuinely surprised when I had some people say that 60SSP (based around the Page Template Plugin) was too complicated and was overkill for what they needed.
They wanted the same simple method of putting up a page that I’d secretly been wanting too. 
And so we have Magic Pages.
It allows you to create sales and opt-in pages without being too technical and lets you do things like choose a nice border style and background colour (picker) and optionally add a graphical headline banner.
The banner graphic was THE most asked about thing with 60SSP.
“How do I remove the headline and add a banner instead?” was a question I answered over and over.
I guess I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was. I felt like I’d been caught on the hop and should have foreseen what people would want even though I wasn’t too bothered about it myself at the time.
With Magic Pages you can just insert your banner via the normal WordPress media library.
SORTED. 
You can see a couple of example pages here and here.
The sale kicks off tomorrow Saturday 10th May at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST) with the first 25 copies going at $10.
More news when it happens.
-Frank Haywood
P.S. I’m hoping that the Amazon S3 Video plugin will be ready very shortly for those that are waiting. I’m sorry about the delay.
Instant WP Videos
I was asked to do an overview video or two to show how Instant WP worked, and that’s what this is all about.
The first video is the overview, and the second is how to run it from a USB stick. Rather than use a “flash memory stick”, I used an external 2.5″ USB drive instead, but the principle is exactly the same.
I’ve actually had a bit of a cold and a sore throat, so I apologise if my voice sounds a bit gruff. And just to complicate things a little more, the video went out of synch with the audio for the second one so I had to remove my mug from it. “No great loss” I can imagine you thinking. 
Instant WP Overview
Instant WP Running From a USB Stick
WP Simulator
If the free Instant WP isn’t enough for you and you’d like to run multiple WordPress installations at the same time, ie you need something with a little more oomph, then this is what you should be looking at instead.
http://www.frankhaywood.com/wordpress-sim-machine/
-Frank Haywood
Instant WP
There’s a new bit of *paid* software been released that allows you to easily set up a localhost WordPress installation.
You’ll likely get an email or two or three from people promoting it over the next few days.
I didn’t buy it because it’s already been done. For free. A few years ago.
(Probably more than once.)
Why would you want to install WP locally and not on a web site?
Simply because you get to test everything at lightning fast speeds BEFORE you deploy it on your web site. That way you can make sure everything works the way you expect it to before anyone else sees it live.
PHP is amazingly quick when run on an up to date PC. I can confidently say you’ve never seen WP run so fast until you run it on your PC – the page change on a menu click is near instant.
However…
The fact of the matter is setting up WP to run locally can be a nightmare, but some clever guy (Seamus Brady) in 2009 came up with the software to do it (for Windows only I’m afraid) and has been updating it every so often when it needs it.
It will even run on a USB stick for total portability (which I like). Just copy it to wherever you want to run it from.
Once you’ve downloaded and run the executable unzipper, you just fire it up to get a really nice dashboard presented to you where you can see your local site, log into the admin panel, use MySQL admin, and view the documentation.
Trust me, it’s a doddle to use.
All the nasty stuff like setting up the Apache web server, PHP and MySQL are done totally transparently in the background for you and it just works, which is how we like things isn’t it?
There’s documentation on the site, but if you’d like me to do a few videos explaining it all and how to run it on a USB stick etc, then just let me know by leaving a comment.
My guess is there are similar freebies out there that I don’t know about, but if *you* do then please let me know and I’ll pass it on to everybody.
Now then, before I sign off, I know that some people will want to consider the paid-for option because there’s a whole lot MORE in the paid-for version rather than just the software – there are a number of bonuses too. No I’m not going to go through them all but it’s a quite a comprehensive list of information, themes, plugins, and how-to’s. (Take a look at the sales page on the link below.)
And one big technical difference between the free and the paid software is that the paid for version comes with 10 WP development installations you can switch between and the free version only comes with one.
So, free or paid? You decide.
http://www.frankhaywood.com/wordpress-sim-machine/
-Frank Haywood
PLR WordPress Plugins
Of all the emails I get from people, questions about my WordPress PLR membership re-opening top the lot.
Well, it’s about to re-open on Sunday 28th April. Hurrah!
I know that there will be plenty of people reading this that will punch the air and shout “Yes!”
My PLR membership has been responsible for a whole swathe of plugins being released. In fact I’ve released over 24 plugins with PLR, and I believe I was the first to be able to offer this kind of service as a membership.
Every so often I see them turning up in resale rights bundles, or being given away in return for people signing up to a mailing list, given away as bonuses, or tucked away in member areas.
People love these plugins. Even some of my own plugins I sell have made it into the PLR membership too.
And some members have even told me they only buy the plugins for their own use.
So what happened?
The membership had to go into a temporary closed state due to problems with PayPal (now resolved) and I hoped I’d have it re-opened by now, but other things have been going on and I didn’t have the time to do it as it does take quite a while to get everything ready.
But at last it’s time to kick it all off again.
And this time round I’ve decided to change the format a little with the re-opening.
For 2 years I supplied a plugin each month (sometimes late, ahem) with documentation and a sales page, and instructions on how to rebrand everything.
What I didn’t do was write any sales copy, and I did this for the very good reason that if you write your own sales pages, then you’re not competing with everyone else all selling the same thing.
All the smart marketers do this, me included.
YES! I love and buy PLR from time to time, spend a few hours working on it and release it all bright and shiny (and UNIQUE) as my own. If anyone has ever spotted that occasionally I’ve released a PLR product, then no-one in nearly 4 years of me doing this has ever said a word to me about it.
I put that down to the work I put into making enough change for it to be unique – there’s that word again. (And often I make the product better by adding value to it that wasn’t there.)
The trick is to move quickly and not overthink things.
Yes we all do that, me included, but I *try* to keep things as simple as I can.
With the old membership I didn’t write any sales copy and that was the one thing that I got criticised about most.
And so I resisted and insisted to everyone that brought it up that it was most important they do their own thing with the sales copy. But in the end I’ve realised that you have to give people what they want and it was dumb of me not to come to that conclusion in the first place.
I thought (and still think) I was doing the right thing, but okay…
Yes I WILL be supplying a sales page with the plugins in the new membership.
I figure that those people who want to write their own sales copy or heavily modify what I supply will do so, and those that don’t will just use what I give them, and that way everybody’s happy.
I’ll also be giving every plugin its own name and creating the documentation using that name. Again if you want to rename it and modify the docs you can do so, and everybody’s still happy.
So here’s the new membership deal.
Tomorrow and for 24 hours ONLY you can join for just $20/month. This will make a lot of people happy.
When that 24 hours is up, the price goes up by another $7 for another 48 hours and then AFTER THAT I’ll be changing the pricing structure of the membership for all new members. (Yes it will cost new members more money.)
Look, just don’t worry about it okay? Do not sweat it.
Join tomorrow when the membership re-opens and it’s all nice and simple (and cheap) for you. You’ll be a special founder member and won’t have to do what everyone else does afterwards.
You can cancel your membership any time, but there won’t be any refunds because this is PLR.
Okay?
So what’s the first plugin at relaunch?
It’s the brand new and very cool “Time Sensitive Widgets” plugin.
This plugin puts a set of time in and out drop-downs on EVERY single widget and allows you to set a date and time for a widget to go active and inactive.
In other words you can set a date and time for ANY widget to show on your blog, and also set a date and time for it to disappear.
The possibilities of this plugin are MASSIVE.
Here are some examples plus that GREAT IDEA I mentioned at the beginning of this email.
You could use the Time Sensitive Widgets plugin to sell ad space, give away coupon codes, run daily video tutorials, do launch announcements and make EVENT NOTIFICATIONS. I know there are some people reading this that would be very interested in the posibilities of that last one.
In essence you could use the plugin to make your blog that extra little bit “stickier” and keep people coming back every day to see what’s happening.
>> For example, the video tutorials idea is a really sweet one. <<
It’s very cheap now to create quality desktop recordings. Where you once had to spend hundreds on expensive software, you can now pay something like $15/year to use a really cool tool to record and edit your desktop and webcam.
(Why don’t I do a video tutorial on that!?)
This is what you could do, and what I’m going to do too.
Create a series of short (less than 10 minutes each) desktop video recordings that show how to do something useful.
Show a new one in the series each day, and then remove it and replace it with the next one. You can set all these up in advance using the “Time Sensitive Widgets” plugin.
Your readers have to turn up every day in order to see the next one.
If they miss one that’s really too bad, but you could make an offer to them of joining your membership where they get new videos every month and get to see all of the other videos you’ve ever released, all tucked away for members eyes only.
You start with a low price each month and as the library grows in size and value you increase your price.
Is that a GOOD idea or what?
ANYONE could do this, why not you?
It all starts with joining my PLR membership when it reopens on Sunday.
-Frank Haywood
