Month: November 2009

Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Affiliate Marketing

Black Friday, Cyber Monday and a whole lot of Affiliate Marketing, Let’s get it on! Shout out to the coolest boxing referee ever. Judge Mill Lane. I’m sure all of the boxing fans know who and what I’m talking about and for the ones that don’t, Mills Lane was the referee from the all famous Holyfield and Tyson boxing match.(Yea I’m a big boxing fan)

Well anyway with Black Friday and Cyber Monday right around the corner I hope everyone who participates in affiliate marketing is ready to rumble. This is like super bowl season for all of the online marketing geeks. I’m sure most of the big boy affiliate marketers have had their sites ready to go for months now. But for the sorta noobs like me it’s been pretty exciting. I’ve sold far more Push-N-Pop Bottle Openers this month then any other month this year. My parked domains are accumulating a nice amount of day by day traffic; everything is peaches and cream right now. The holiday season is truly an awesome time but at the same time additive. I’ve been dabbling in affiliate marketing for a little of a year I think, perhaps two years. But I have never have had my stuff setup as well as I do now. This is going to be an interesting toss up. With Yahoo not sure what the hell they are doing, Bing is still suspect, that leave us with Google and sometime they can be a big bully. These are the 3 I’m relying on. I’m not doing anything with Facebook nor twitter this go around. So my big worry now is what will happen after the holidays. I’m bouncing off the walls with joy right now and I would hate for the good times to stop. Good luck to you all.

Yahoo Search Monkey, Google Rich Snippets: No Love

Yahoo Search Monkey and Google Rich Snippets is giving me no love. I have been working really hard to get some type of visibility from Yahoo Search Monkey and Google rich Snippets. I’ve tried RDFa tags and the Yahoo’s adjunct tags and nothing. It’s probably going on the 3rd or 4th week now, and nada. With Yahoo Search Monkey I’ve tried thier several options, DataRSS, submitting via Site Explorer but I still come up empty. But today surprisingly I did catch a little luck, not from the search engines that I was expecting and targeting, but from Bing, Yea Bing. It’s nothing to go shouting from the roof tops about but it was kind of interesting. Within the description you get when you mouse over the search results Title Tag, Bing is now including by Street Address. This can only be pulling from the RDF tags that I included. It’s little but it give me hope that things are possible and with some tweaks perhaps I can better control what’s being displayed in that area. Again not really a big deal but I’m really happy to see some movement. Thanks Bing for the love!

Programmableweb, The Best Site Ever

Programmableweb

Programmableweb the shopping mall of API’s and probably one of the best websites in the whole wide world. Programmableweb.com is basically the shopping mall of API’s, they have the low down on about every API on the web, well maybe just the really cool ones. APIs are properly organized in categories so you’re able to flip through and find what you’re looking for quickly. They offer API related news and a RSS subscription feed so your can keep up on what’s new.
When I’m project free I sometimes come back here to see what’s new searching for a reason to start another project. I’m a project junkie, that’s my thing. Sitting at the computer hour after hour doesn’t bother me. I love coding and working with API’s, not sure why, I just do. (sorry got off topic)
But let’s say for example you’re thinking about starting a financial website and you’re not sure which way to go. Well there’s a financial category listed that will allow you to pump some really interesting data into your site. You can get instant access to AmeriTrade data, stock quotes or to recent filing data, which is pretty awesome.
If you’re really looking to get your project (or mashup) off the ground start here, I’m sure there’s something that could help spark a idea.

Reverse IP Lookup, FREE PHP Tool

Reverse IP Lookup, Search for domains hosted on a single IP address

As some of you have probably already noticed I’ve added a new link/script/tool to the site. I have a bunch of these one offs scripts scattered around the internet. I’m currently trying to rope them all into one location.

But basically this tool will look ups and reports what other domains are hosted on a particular server. It’s actually fairly simple and works off of an operator that most are not aware of.

How it works. Simply just add a domain with the dubb and the tool will do the rest. I capped it off at 30 results. So even if there are thousands the tool will only report back 30 other domains.

RSS Auto Discovery, Do it now

Added a dynamic RSS Auto discovery feature to my site today. Yea nothing earth shattering but I thought it was still pretty cool. Then for shsss and giggles I started surfing the web to see who didn’t have one. I was shocked to see that there’s a lot of big named website not taking advantage of this small addition.

For example

  • Mint.com, http://www.mint.com/blog/ – Mint offers a RSS Feed but not a Auto Discovery feature hosted off of the home page. This option is only available to you when you visit the Feedburner hosted page.
  • My.barackobama.com, http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/hqblog –  Basically the same thing as Mint.com. You only see this option on the Feedburner hosted page. And not off the home page. (I’m not even going to get into why they are not using the branded feedburner solution.)
  • Whitehouse.gov, http://www.whitehouse.gov/ – They DO offer a RSS Feed and a RSS Auto Discovery option on the home page. Good deal!

This is actually pretty interesting because it’s so simply to implement and in doing so will make things easier for your readers. Part of the game plan is to get people involved, why not make it easier from then to keep up.

So anyway here some code and some links to reference if you want to add this feature to your site.

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<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://www.josephtinsley.com/feed/rss.xml">

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="ADD SITE TITLE HERE" href="ADD RSS FEED URL HERE"/>

Google Favicon API, PHP Code

I ran into something very, very interesting today. Google Favicon API
(A Favorite Icon API)
. It’s an API that allows you to pull websites Favicons, plus the API dynamically converts the image into a PNG format. This actually comes at a great time because I was just thinking the other day that since I have the option to add offsite URL’s to my site now. Would’nt it would be supa cool if I could also included their Favicon? To beak it down if you look into my site’s right side navigation you will see the “Links” category. Well I thought it would be nice, I mean supa cool if I had a script that could automatically include the corresponding sites Favicons.  And BAM! Thanks Google Favicon API. I wrapped this APIs up with some cURL and a little PHP and now I have a working PHP function. I don’t know much about the Google Favicon API but it looks like it’s been around for about a year. So it’s a good chance that this API could suddenly up and move or disappear all togehter. Basically what I’m saying is I don’t know how long the good times will last. So in my opinion I suggest you consider the use of this script temporary until you can get the time to build a much reliable one yourself.

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<?PHP
function getFavicon($var){
$filName=substr($var,0,-4);
$fp = fopen ('folder/'.$filName.'.png', 'w+');
$ch = curl_init('http://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain='.$var);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 5);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FILE, $fp);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
fclose($fp);

}

$var='techcrunch.com';
getFavicon($var);
?>

FamFamFam, Great Icon Resource

FamFamFamfamfamfam

If you recognize these 3 words then you have probably used their product at sometime. FamFamFam has been around for some time now, but I’m not certain how long. I’ve been using them myself for at least 3 years now. For a short spell I did try Icon Buffett but ended up moving back to FamFamFam. I mostly user their Icons for the PHP applications I create, but I must say I’ve seen their work all across the web. FamFamFam is one of those sites that many people know of and use but don’t talk about much. There’s not much information on the web about them besides what’s provided by the thier website, which appears to be pretty much dead. It’s looks like a post was made back in 2006. But that’s cool FamFamFam, is a great resource that I bet still drives lots of traffic.

So from the bottom of my heart, thank you FamFamFam from making my apps much more Beautifuller.

Note to Robbers, The Atlanta Chapter

Dear Robbers (Atlanta Chapter),
Christmas is right around the corner, that’s right a time sharing and giving. Well I was just sitting here thinking that maybe you all would perhaps skip me this year since I gave so much last year. The whole experience last year is still kind of shocking. I mean first off who knew you guys worked during the day, I always thought robbing was a third shift job, go figure. And thanks for pointing out how weak my front door was, I hope no one was hurt during the invasion. Kicking in a door can be a dangerous job. But if so please by all means send me the hospital bill , I would hate to have another reason not to get sleep at night. Oh and by the way I hope your family enjoyed the PS3, Nintendo Wii, Laptop, and 42 inch LCD TV. And did you know that the PS3 also dubs as a great Blu-ray player? Wait, what am I talking about of course you knew, that’s probably why you guys took the few Blu-ray DVD’s I owned, sorry my mistake, I forgot. But speaking of last year, the economy is much better this year so do you guys really need to go door to door this year. I think not. Have a heart. Well thanks for your consideration robbers have Merry Christmas and a Happy New year.

Signed Victim

P.S. I so Love Atlanta

JosephTinsley.com, The Big Move

Please bear with me; I’m currently moving this site from an
older template. All of the PHP Tools and Scripts that I’ve created and was offering for use will eventually make its way over to the new layout sooner or later.

I decided to make this move to that new layout for better control. I actually built this system. It’s a project that I have been working
on for the past 2 weeks and continue working on because I seem to always find new bell and whistles to add on. I know from the outside the layout and design appears to be very simply but what’s under the hood is the main reason for the move. A lot of thought went into the programming; it has a lot of dynamic solutions that make my life a lot easy in the long run.

So again please check back with us later if your here for
some code.
Thanks,
Joseph

Display duplicate Keywords from your Title Tag, PHP Code

Display duplicate Keywords from your Title Tag, PHP Code. I whipped this up really quick so please don’t criticize. It’s probably going to be the basis to something much bigger. But I was recently in the need of a script that could flag and report what keywords I had repeated in a list of given title tags.

You all in the SEO business understand that repeating keywords a bunch of times (A.K.A keyword stuffing) is not a tactic that should be practiced.

Feel free to use it and twist it up, but please let me know what you come up with. This would probably be even more valuable if there was some kind of white list feature to take advantage of. I’ll add it if I end up growing this out.

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<?
function whosUnique($str){
   $parsStr=explode(' ', strtolower($str) );
   $wordArray=array_unique($parsStr);
   $result = array_diff_assoc($parsStr, $wordArray);

return array($str,$parsStr,$wordArray,$result);
}

$str="Briefcases &amp; Totes - Business Tote, Men's Briefcases, Women's Briefcases";

$result = whosUnique($str);

print '<pre>';
print_r($result);
print '</pre>';
?>

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