I’ve wanted to go to a conference for a little while now, although the nearest one (a4u expo) seemed a bit too much. When I signed up for thinkvisibility, I knew I was getting a bargain – I mean, £30 for a day of talks and networking is a no brainer.
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March 9, 2009
Quick Think Visibility Recap
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October 19, 2008
Joomla affiliate link cloaker
So here it is. Version 3 of the affiliate link cloaker for Joomla 1.5.x
This new version works in a completely different way from the last version which will stop the problems caused by the WYSIWYG editors. However, there are other issues which I will explain about later. For now though, here is how to use it:
July 24, 2008
Welcome to the darkside
Recently, I’ve been looking for a way to increase the chances of achieving my new years resolution to be able to start paying my mortgage each month from profits made by various web sites. At the moment it’s all pretty lame – I’m getting about $100 a month on a good month, not nearly enough for one mortgage payment.
But there’s hope on the horizon – For the last couple of months I’ve been a member of the forums over at the awesome www.seoblackhat.com which has a private forum for discussing ways of making a ton of cash using various questionable and devious methods. I’ve been reading and learning, and I’ve also been doing the most important thing, and that is doing stuff. None of this is worth anything if you dont take any action.
In the last few days Quadzilla has announced the blackhat conference of the year: SEOktoberfest. This is going to be the mother of search engine conferences…. Unfortunately for me, the price tag of €5000 is a little high at the moment, but, hey, there is a chance of getting picked in the draw for the one free ‘golden’ ticket.
DISCLAIMER: If I do win, my girlfriend has made me promise not to pay too much attention to the 6 German playboy playmates that will be sprinkled throughout the conference.
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June 3, 2008
BrewsterAds
Coming soon…. a way to integrate phpbay pro into any site (including drupal, joomla and other content management sites) with AuctionAds/ShoppingAds formatting, but with more flexible search options for the ads.
May 12, 2008
Optimising your ebay affiliate profits
A few months ago I came across phpBay – a WordPress plugin and API that integrates ebay listings easily into your website. When a user clicks on a product and places a winning bid, you receive a commission from Ebay.
One feature that I found that was missing was being able to show users local auction listings, for example show people from America US listings or people from the England UK listings. However this is now possible to do with my country class, and once installed will enable you to maximise your affiliate profits. To acomplish this you will need to purchase the web lookup service from MaxMind. The class can be downloaded here.
To make this work with wordpress, simply unpack country.php and geo.php, edit the geo.php so that it contains the key that you receive from MaxMind and upload the files to wp-content/plugins/phpBay/ and the phpBay plugin will take care of the rest. This will work on version 3.0 of phpBay
If you need to get this working on a non wordpress site using the API, then you will just need the country.php which contains the country class. To see it working, see my site DVD For A Dollar. Here is how I accomplished the country detection on that site.
At the top of each file I start a session using session_start() so that if a user browses more than one page of a site then it will be able to retreive the country from MaxMind once and then use it on all subsequent pages. Then I use the following code to initiate the class and retreive the country.
PHP:
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include( ‘country.php’ );
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$ebayCountry = new country();
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{
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// replace the ‘x’s on the next line with your MaxMind key
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$ebayCountry->licenseKey = "xxxxxxxx";
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$ebayCountry->getCountryFromWeb();
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$_SESSION[‘country’] = $ebayCountry->ISO;
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} else
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{
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$ebayCountry->ISO = $_SESSION[‘country’];
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$ebayCountry->setReturnArray();
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}
Now you can initiate the phpBay class and set the country parameters like this:
PHP:
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$ebay = new ebay();
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$ebay->eb_siteId = $ebayCountry->ReturnArray[ "siteId" ];
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$ebay->eb_language = $ebayCountry->ReturnArray[ "language" ];
If you want a combo box that displays a list of countries that defaults to the local ebay like the one on DVD For A Dollar, place the following code above the code that checks if the country session variable has been set:
PHP:
Here is the code that draws the combo box itself:
PHP:
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function DrawCountryCombo() {
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"AU" => "Australian Auctions",
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"AT" => "Austrian Auctions",
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"BE" => "Belgian Auctions",
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"CA" => "Canadian Auctions",
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"FR" => "French Auctions",
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"DE" => "German Auctions",
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"HK" => "Hong Kong Auctions",
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"IN" => "Indian Auctions",
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"IE" => "Irish Auctions",
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"IT" => "Italian Auctions",
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"NL" => "Dutch Auctions",
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"PL" => "Polish Auctions",
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"SG" => "Singapore Auctions",
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"ES" => "Spanish Auctions",
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"CH" => "Swiss Auctions",
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"GB" => "UK Auctions"
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);
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$form = ‘<form method="POST" action="">’ . "\r\n";
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$form .= ‘<select onchange="javascript:submit();" id="countrycombo" name="country">’ .
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"\r\n";
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foreach( $Countries AS $Key => $Value )
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{
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$form .= ‘<option’;
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$form .= ($_SESSION[‘country’] == $Key) ? ‘ selected’ : ”;
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$form .= ‘ value="’ . $Key . ‘">’ . $Value . ‘</option>’ . "\r\n";
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}
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$form .= ‘</select>’ . "\r\n" . ‘</form>’ . "\r\n";
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return $form;
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}
To draw the combo box, simply use the following code:
PHP:
And that’s all there is to adding country detection to your ebay affiliate sites. Huge thanks to Wade who wrote the phpbay class for his support with this project.
If you find this code useful, feel free to buy me a beer.