williswired

Apparently it was some sort of spyware in my Chrome. After I removed the YouTube Downloader extension and restarted the browser, links are working for me now.

Still don’t know why my clicks took a major hit, though.

I don’t know if this means anything, but I notice that when I click on my affiliate link on my blog, I see this link for a brief moment …

https://www.heapr.com/#https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/williswire/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=heaprcom05-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creativeASIN=williswire

Weird.

But I just discovered that this only happens in Chrome. Links work in Safari.

I read one source that said the YouTube Downloader extension added heapr.com spyware. I had that extension but have removed it. Links still don’t work. Could that be it?

Okay, this is interesting. I checked my click reports at Amazon Associates and see that links went nearly non-existent in early March — the day I discovered my site had been hacked. I ramped up site security and added some security plugins.

I’m guessing there’s a connection, but not sure what it is.

Any ideas?

FYI, when I paste one of my affiliate links into the Link Checker at Amazon Associates’ site, I get the result …

Success: The link tags to a valid tag or sub-tag for your Associate ID.

Ah, I just fixed it. My webhost changed my server so I was trying to connect to the wrong one. So, I got in, deleted code — now I can start over. ??

Well, I just switched to WP-Slimbox2 plugin and that seems to have taken care of the problem. So it looks like this may have been a problem with the Slimbox plugin.

Edited to add that I’m using latest version, 1.3.3.

I have all my “galleries” posted in one “album” on one page and it seems to be working for me.

The only problem I’m having is that when I upload photos (had to enable Flash uploader to be able to upload more than one photo at a time), I get several duplicates of recent/previous uploads.

It’s not a huge problem for now; I can simply delete the duplicates, but I hope there will be a fix some day.

Anyway, thanks for the great plugin!

Thanks for the help, guys.

While deactivating the plugins didn’t work, after some more tinkering I wondered if it was something else I did. I had created a new page template (home.php) and put it in my child theme (thought I read somewhere I could do that in a child theme, I dunno?).

Anyway, I deleted that page template and that fixed my problem.

Obviously, I’m still wrapping my head around how to use child themes. ??

Thanks for the help. Thematic has a minimal setting section in the admin panel and that’s not one of them.

I have posted a question on the Thematic forum but haven’t gotten a response, for some reason.

I wondered if it might be something like that. Unfortunately, I’m not seeing that, though.

Funny, CyStats reported some of my highest numbers (visits) for 7 days in a row and ever since (several days now), my numbers have plummeted. They’ve never been this low in the 3 months I’ve been using it. Strange.

I have just added StatPress Reloaded and will see how it compares.

Thanks.

Any suggestions on a theme to try or start with?

I mentioned a couple above, so feedback/reviews on premium themes would be helpful, although I may play around with a free one(s) first to try it out.

I may create my own theme(s) someday, but just don’t have the time right now, unfortunately.

Thanks again for the continued discussion. I would be interested in a comparison of different stats plugins as well.

Thanks for the replies. I’m still trying to figure why the numbers are so different. Looking at my numbers from my Lijit search widget (not sure how it compares) and the Feedjit “recent visitors” map, they don’t look so high either.

Are the much higher numbers from Cystats reliable? Why are the others lower?

Thanks, travel-junkie. That sounds simple enough.