The other week I got an interesting voicemail from Peter Dickenson (Affiliate Future employee) and I’ve finally found a way to get it off my voicemail and online.
Enjoy the recording; I have suggested going to audition at X-Factor this year and I’m sure you will agree that he would certainly add something “special” to the show.
Rather than editing the sidebar code via Wordpress I like to use the Widgets function that is built into my skin; it’s quick, easy to move things about and quite effective. I also like to use the BUMPZee recent visitors / entries Widget rather than MyBlogLog as it’s a lot more relevant to my site.
Ultimately the two of these did not want to work together. Whilst Scott is working on a solution for it I did find a workaround to get the BUMPZee widget to work via the standard sidebar Widgets system for Wordpress.
You need to get the PHP Widget Plugin and activate it. Once this is done if you go to the Sidebar Widgets section under Presentation in your Wordpress backend you will see a new option called €œPHP Code Widgets€. Select 1 and click Save and under Avaliable Widgets you will now see €œPHP Code 1€; drag this to where you want the BUMPZee widget to appear in the sidebar.
Now click on the options link for the PHP Code 1 (the little graphic on the right) and input the code that is given in the BUMPZee section under options.
Click Save, go to your website, and you should now have the full functionality of the new plugin by Scott.
After changing my hosting provider a few months back I finally got around to putting my image gallery back online. I installed F-Spot on Gnome and organised a bunch of my photos (not all of them yet) into Tags. I then put a fresh install of Gallery2 up and uploaded them all though F-Spot. Simple enough.
Next however, I wanted to display a random image in the sidebar of this blog which is hosted on the same server but on a different domain. I picked up the line of php from the Image Block section of gallery and tried to put this in one of the text widgets.
Text Widgets don’t support PHP however.
I looked all over the Web and couldn’t find a solution; I tried a few different widgets but none of which seemed to work. I even tried a widget which lets you run PHP Execs but it gave a security error generated by Gallery2.
In the end I came up with a solution.
I inserted the PHP External Image Block code generated by Gallery2 and put this line into a .php file (I called it photos.php and located it in the wp-content directory). Then I created a new text widget and setup an iFrame with the following aspects:
src=”/wp-content/photo.php” FRAMEBORDER=”0″ MARGINWIDTH=”0″ MARGINHEIGHT=”0″
The result is the Random image that you should be able to see to the left. It’s hardly ideal but seems to work.
It’s only been about a week since I got fed up of windows crashing and decided to switch over to Ubuntu.
I must say, It’s been a good week. It feels like I’ve inherited a brand new PC. It’s fast, it’s stable and nearly everything is free for it.
There are a few things I was worried about; how would I get by without Photoshop for example? I’ve never been a GIMP lover (an opensource graphics package) but help was to hand with a programme called Crossover Pro which allows you to install support windows applications such as Photoshop, Microsoft Office and Dreamweaver.
The desktop search add-on is great and I’ve even rediscovered my love for Monopoly with an opensource linux based multiplayer (online) version of it!
As a normal desktop user my wife is also happy - she’s able to do everything she could do previously in windows without much hassle and hasn’t really noticed a big difference (apart from the fact it’s faster).
So what’s the catch? Should everyone run and switch over? I’d say that the answer is that it’s not ready for everyone yet. I think that you still need to have an understanding of linux (or at least a general technical understanding and be able to operate google) as some of the extra packages are activated via command line in the terminal). It’s also not too simple to mount your windows drive.
I’ve been tempted to sign up to World of Warcraft again too since I cancelled the payments (as I wasn’t playing it enough) and apparently you can get this working though Wine/Crossover and the graphic capabilities seem to be better than in Windows.
Overall I’d encourage people to give it a go - you can out it on duel boot and you may even decide to ditch windows completely and go opensource if you find it as reliable as I have.
You should also checkout Lifehackers Article on the top 10 Essential Applications
As regular readers to the site will know, I work for a white label gaming operator (for the next two weeks at least) running affiliate programs for 8 different sites. Three of the affiliate programs are run on an Affiliate Network which has a number of incentive sites that are (or have been) signed up to our programs.
In gaming you have to be very cautious of this recruitment method as sites like Quidco may be able to deliver a high volume of players but many can be of a poor quality, bonus hunters signing up to abuse the cashback offers who don’t stay and play after meeting the initial criteria.
Some feel that the best solution would be to stop working with these sites altogether but i’ll give you a good example of why this may not be the case. We had a player sign up in December from one of my least favorite incentive sites so has so far deposited around £15,000 (and lost most of it).
That said I still tend to find myself asking time and time again how to best work with these incentive sites - whilst one or two players can make a huge difference to the profitability of the program if they don’t come though then the potential is there to lose a lot of money.
So what to do? Unfortunately I don’t have all the answers but I would say that regular analysis is extremely important. Make sure that you can track the lifetime of customers recruited via this channel PER AFFILIATE. Reward sites that are providing quality players and make sure that you nip in the bud poor performance and potential abuse before it’s too late.
There are some great sites out there and great people behind them. Darren from GreasyPalm, for example, is extremely honest about this sector of the industry and the kind of customers that are likely to sign up - he understands the profitability risk and helps make sure that this is taken into account before starting a campaign for you.
So if you are launching a program and wondering what to do about incentive sites do make sure that you structure the program correctly against possible abuse and regular monitor the performance.
I just got an email saying that the new Tom Mcrae album, King of cards, will be streamed on his website in advanced of the launch at 12pm on Friday.
The album doesn’t come out for another month or so and Tom is by far my favourite artist so if anyone has any ideas how I can go about recording the Stream please let me know
I’m not sure what to do with my theme. I’m never happy with the look of my sites and in it’s years of existence (when I actually bothered to post) this site must have had about 20 different re-styles.
I’m debating the idea of changing it again to another widget supported theme, but am sure I’ll still be unhappy with whatever I chose!
On another note - thank you to Fraser for showing me how to setup the feedburner stuff. I switched over my RSS links a couple of days ago and it’s showing as having 40 subscribers so it’s nice to see I have a few people reading my posts who would not be showing up in Firestats or Google Analytics.
If you do have any feedback on the design please feel free to comment.
I recently decided to give Affilistore v1.0 Pro a trial after seeing some good reviews about it over the web. The creator is a regular contributor to the A4UForum and his technical skills are second to none.
As a mini-case study I’ll be documenting the process, describing how I get on with the install and hopefully suggesting a few potential features. My initial fears are that it will be difficult to get organic traffic with most of the text coming direct from the product feeds so this may be one of the more challenging aspects of the project.
For this I am going to use the domain name treatdad.co.uk which I purchased a few years ago and never did anything with (much like most of my domain names in fact).
7.15pm: The wife is out for the evening and it’s time to boot up my FTP client ready for action.
7.18pm: All uploaded. Time to view the Readme documentation.
7.21pm: Skimmed though, created a new MySql Database for it and assigned user privledges.
7.27pm: My progress is halted by an error when I try and run the install.php script - apparently I have what is known in the industry as an €œInvalid default value for ‘priceLimit’€. I’ve emailed Steve and asked for a solution. Decide to tidy the house a little whilst I await a reply.
7.53pm: Just got a reply with a replacement install.php file which seems to work. Need to pick up a datafeed now so going to sign up to Paid on Results and give Prezzybox a try first.
8.09pm: I’ve managed to sign up for an account, full of the datafeed and complete the installation. I made an error with the IMGUrl and tried to change this, but couldn’t find an easy way of changing the fields and regenerating the site, so had to delete the feed and try again.
8.10pm: The site seems to work, though I’m not sure where the €œSimilar Products€ part comes in. Apparently a Waters Friend Corkscrew is similar to a Silverstone Ferrari experience!
8.18pm: I’ve noticed a couple of bugs that need to be ironed out. The navigation is a little broken for example. I am going to try and add a second feed next.
8.32pm: Second feed added. Figures out the problem with the navigation which was due to a slightly broken feed - remove the extra fields that were not required (lots of image locations) and managed to fix it. Spoke to Steve who also said that there is the option to hide categories which could have done the same job.
8.41pm: I’ve added a news entry and will try and get one added every few days in the lead up to Fathers day - this is the best way I can think of to get some content driving though visitors
A quick point to make
In just over an hour I’ve managed to get up a fully functional site with two different feeds feating thousands of products - bear in mind the fact that I had a small problem with the install script and that’s pretty good going! The features are very good and I’m already sold.
My next main port of calls will be do try and change the skin a bit (I need a logo). I’ve managed to stick some tracking tags up so will look forward to my first visitor. I also want to add some more feeds from some different networks and see what happens!
So where do I see this product going?
My initial thoughts were to focus on some community aspects of the site - as most of the content is going to be duplicate (as it’s from feeds) there should be features to allow product reviews (with a simple CAPCHA form - no need for registration) and build some kind of community on top of it (simple blogs, forums, etc) - basically as much UGC as possible.
I’ll continue to add more details as the project goes on but for now I should go and do some more tidying before the wife gets back and wonders what I’ve been doing with myself for the past couple of hours.
I’ve been getting annoyed with my windows powered machine for a while now and was finally tipped over the edge this evening when I got in and found that my Thunderbird mail client had crashed and data disapeared.
So I spent the remainder of the evening backing up as much data as possible before booting up onto the Ubuntu CD, removing windows and starting afresh going open source.
So far so good. The install was painless but having to edit some files in terminal to get access to my other windows drive could have been easier.
The inlaws are round this weekend (!), but my aim for when I have some spare time is to try and get my mail back and get Photoshop running (which should work via Wine) as i’ve never been a big fan of Gimp (the open source alternative).
I just upgraded the site to Wordpress 2.1 today so hopefully everything is appearing as it should be. Please let me know if you spot any issues.
On other notes, I purchased BusinessBlog.org.uk today but am not sure exactly what to do with it. Please do comment if you have any suggestions!