How to quickly change all your referral links!

[Larkino]

Hi all.
I recently downloaded Notepad++ which is a nifty little HTML/CSS Editor.
Anyway, there’s a great little thing inside it which effectively allows you to find a word and replace it with another. Well, this is great for us freebie hunters, because (well I don’t know about anybody else) I’m constantly changing my links to different networks/sites depending on how many greens/pendings I have on a certain site, and this little thing means you can change every instance of a link to another in a whole page.
Here’s a quick little tutorial on how to do it:

Step 1
Download Notepad++ using the link above.
Find the page you want to edit, and right click and choose Edit with Notepad++:



You’ll end up with a page looking something like this (I’ve blurred out the code, because I don’t’ want you all copying my site do I? ):



Next, you want to go to the menu and select the find tool (or alternatively, you can press CTRL+F5):



A window looking something like this should come up:



Click the Replace tab, and you’ll have something like this:



As the image above shows, enter the referral link you want changing to in the “Find What” box, and enter the new referral link you want to switch it with in the “Replace With” box.
Click the replace all button:



And a little window will come up saying how many times the link has been changed!



Apologies if you already knew about this tool, but I just noticed it and thought it was brilliant!

Then just repeat with each page you want to change the links for!

[Larkino]

has this thread been approved?

[Schism]

Nice guide matey

[Larkino]

oh it has, lol.

[oli1122]

lol great tutorial but if i wanted to steaL UR ISTE I WOULD ONLY HAVE TO OPE IT WITH A SITE RIPPER AND DONE IT BOUT 5 SECS BUT COOL TUTORAIL THANKX

sorry for caps cant be botherd to re type

[Ilikefree]

^^ right.... :/

Great guide Miloooo

[Larkino]

Originally Posted by oli1122

lol great tutorial but if i wanted to steaL UR ISTE I WOULD ONLY HAVE TO OPE IT WITH A SITE RIPPER AND DONE IT BOUT 5 SECS BUT COOL TUTORAIL THANKX

sorry for caps cant be botherd to re type

its simple to steal someones site, just look at their source code, grab the css sheet and your away.

[arcticfox]

Originally Posted by Larkino

its simple to steal someones site, just look at their source code, grab the css sheet and your away.

though why someone would want to do that and get penalised from google as well as abuse from us.....dunno why anyone would.

SO GLAD HE TOLD US THOUGH

[Emma]

Originally Posted by oli1122

lol great tutorial but if i wanted to steaL UR ISTE I WOULD ONLY HAVE TO OPE IT WITH A SITE RIPPER AND DONE IT BOUT 5 SECS BUT COOL TUTORAIL THANKX

sorry for caps cant be botherd to re type

You need a link back to exceem on the site in your sig before you advertise on here

[messyhead]

Nice guide. I've always used Notepad++ as it's great for coding

[Sibbo]

Think you can use find/replace in Dreamweaver to.

[JimBeam251]

You get replace in normal notepad too but it's a great guide, nice Larkino

[-null-]

Originally Posted by Sibbo

Think you can use find/replace in Dreamweaver to.

You can and Dreamweaver allows you to replace all occurrences in all files in a folder or your site (if you've set one up).

[HollyJ]

whatever happened to coding in wordpad lol

[Blazer]

Originally Posted by HollyJ

whatever happened to coding in wordpad lol

Ah, the good old days

[bigalreturn]

If you really really want to save some time then there's an even easier way - it will take maybe 15 minutes to set up, but after that changing all your URLs will take seconds. It does rely on you having PHP on your server though, but most paid hosts will do.

1) Create a file called urlinformation.php This will contain the following:

<?php
$url="http://www.yourreferrallink.com/whatever";
?>

2) Place urlinformation.php in the root of your server.
3) At the top of each of the pages on your site, before anything else, add the following code:

<?php
require("urlinformation.php");
?>

4) Now, wherever your referral link appears in your code, replace the URL with the following:

<?php echo($url);?>

This means the actual code will look something like:

<a href="<?php echo($url);?> title="Freebies">Your Link Anchor</a>

5) If all your pages are .php extension, this will now work perfectly, and you can change all your URLs simply by changing the one in "urlinformation.php". If your pages are .html extension, then read on.
6) We need to make your web server process .html files as if they were PHP files, so that the code is replaced with your URL when it serves up the pages. We can do this through cPanel...
7) Go to the advanced tab, then click on "MIME types". We need to add a new mime type, so in the Mime Type Box put "application/x-httpd-php", and in the Extension(s) box put "html" , "htm" , or whatever extension(s) your site uses.
8) Click Add.

You can now automatically update all the referral links on your site, by changing the URL in just one single file!

[Larkino]

That's also a good way, but lots of freebie hunters use different referral links for different gifts, so they would have to set up multiple PHP links.

Nice guide though

[aquascene]

Nice guide, thanks, i must get notepad ++

[Xigmapro]

Nice guide. I never knew Notepad++ has that feature. I will dowload it now.

[Nero]

Nice guide I should download this software.