Take More Risks

I spent much of the afternoon scouring Google for the answer to this damn problem and still found nothing! So I decided that it was best to solve it myself and that I did! It was quite simple in the end, I signed up for a new tracking ID in the Allposters Affiliate control panel. I then organised my existing code that accessed the Allposters Web Service into a class to allow for greater flexibility.

I set my Ad group’s URL to http://www.rockontshirts.com?adw=true and included a condition in the code which checked to see if adw was set. If it was, then the new tracking ID was incorporate into my links via the class. If it wasn’t the default one was used. Simple!

There was an issue with this though. Whenever the user clicks away onto a new page the $_GET[adw] obviously wasn’t passed on so the system defaulted to the original ID. So to get around this I stored the value in the $_SESSION global variable and checked it instead of $_GET!

if($_SESSION[adw])
$ap->set(”WebSiteID”, 2022331255);

It may not be ideal, but it works in the meantime.

I’ve just noticed that some of the music t-shirt related keywords are priced at over £1! It should be fun trying to break even here. The maximum I’m prepared to pay per click is about £0.15. Even then its going to be very tight.

I’m an idiot. I’ve realised that the reason why my reported Adwords conversion ratio was so high for my last campaign was that I pasted the tracking code that you are meant to place on your order confirmation page, on every page! I’ve been watching some of the tutorial videos over on the main Adwords site and I still can’t grasp how you can track sales on affiliate sites. God this is so damn frustrating! I feel like I’m getting nowhere.

I’ll lay out exactly what I want to do!

Right I have a site at rockontshirts.com which offers T-shirts from Allposters. My adwords will be linking to rockontshirts rather than straight to Allposters. I obviously can’t paste the tracking code on the Allposters sales confirmation page so how can I work around this? I’m sure there is an easy solution here. I just can’t think of one at the moment.

Just to let you know, I’ve finally received my first clickthroughs from the Namedrive.com domain parking network! It seems as though all of the domains I put up on parking are in Google now which is cool. I’m not sure if it’s to do with me linking to them from here or whether Namedrive provides a link somehow but either way it’s good to hear.

In other news I was going to start another adwords campaign last night, this time choosing more focused keywords. However, Adwords was down for maintainence when I tried to access the site though so it’s something I’m going to do later on. I need to create a seperate tracking ID for the campaign this time around so that I can measure how effective it’s been.

I wonder if there’s any software which would allow you to store daily tallys on your return on investment. There must be something somewhere! Adwords conversion tracking is bound to have a similar feature built into it. Might just use Excel in the meantime.

I was meant to make a post about this earlier on in the week but didn’t get around to it for one reason or another.

Anywhooo recently in work I’ve been using Xajax a lot. One of the recurring problems I’ve had with the library is that I would constantly receive this error message when I set the debug mode to on.

“You have whitespace in your response”

This became infuriating after about 3 hours of changing and deleting code. The error message itself was vague at best and I didn’t know where to turn for help with it. When I enclosed the search phrase in quotes in a Google Search only 10 results were returned! Finally I did the sensible thing and visited the XAJAX Forums and quickly found the problem with a skim through the posts.

Turns out you cannot have any whitespace before the opening PHP tag otherwise XAJAX will throw up this error!

The forum post that saved my ass.

http://community.xajaxproject.org/viewtopic.php?id=1269

I finally started playing around with the Zend Framework last night, following this tutorial.

My first impressions are positive, particularly with the inbuilt validation class. I am however a little disappointed with the amount of code you have to write to generate a CRUD based web form. Granted, you don’t have to write nearly as much as you would if you weren’t using a framework, it’s just I was expecting a little more. Note to self : it’s a preview release!

One feature that would be cool would be if it automatically generated form items by default if you did not specify one explicitly. For example if you have a MYSQL table with two DATETIME attributes in it, a class could detect this and automatically print out the list of selectboxes for you.

Right I’ll get back to working with this. I bet that features already in it and I’ve just overlooked it!

Arggghhhh, decisions decisions! Around this time last year I went through a phase of registering as many domains as I could with Dynadot as they were the only reputable registrar that I knew of that accepted Paypal as payment at the time.

Two of them are set to expire in the next fortnight or so, namely psycherelic.com and obscure80smusic.com . Out of the two obscure80smusic was the only one that proved to be reasonably successful. From the start I didn’t really know what to do with psycherelic so I just turned it into a legal highs affiliate site. Only I didn’t have enough imagination to do a writeup about hallucinogens!

I think I’ll let psycherelic go. It’s a poor domain to start with. I might develop obscure80smusic soon using API mashups as an experiment. The only problem is, is that it’s currently hosted on Hostgator and I’ll have to change the DNS settings over to Dreamhost to use PHP5. God I am too lazy.

I realised that the problem must have been trivial this morning when Windows Messenger connected on its own accord. I simply went into Window Messenger > Options > Connections and saw that no proxy details were set. I then opened up IE and checked the same information via Tools > Internet Options > Connections > Lan Settings and eureka! The “use a proxy server” check box was ticked! I unticked it and everything worked again.

Now for some reason something called WhenU is trying to connect to the web via IE. It looks like it might be adware. According to Google at least anyway. I’ve given my computer the once over with Adaware and it comes up with absolutely nothing. Bizarre. I should really install a decent virus app.

Next on the agenda, I need to start placing all of these entries into a hierachy of categories! I am wonderfully disorganised.

I’ve managed to break away from my addiction to that infernal game and I’m back for good. Today was relatively unproductive as I was exhausted. Staying up until 3am when you have to be up at 7 in the morning is never a good idea. I subscribed to .Net magazine this afternoon for a year. I’ve no idea why I didn’t do it earlier. Should hopefully inspire me with some fresh design ideas.

I need to make a decision quickly over which PHP framework to use. I’m refusing to develop anything at the moment until I’m fairly competent with one as I don’t want any unnecessary extra work. Goddamnit Amazon doesn’t have any books on frameworks! Might subscribe to PHP architect. It says it takes around 4 weeks to arrive through the post though so I might just order the PDF version.

It’s between Zend and CakePHP at the moment. CakePHP seems to be more stable than the former at the moment but Zend will probably have more support once it gets properly on its feet. I should really try to use InstantRails. I’m too tired to learn much new tonight though. I’m a wreck.

My god! My addiction to Football Manager 2006 has taken over my life which is why I haven’t updated the blog in the last few days! It’ll end soon though, do not fear!

A quick update on Namedrive. Still no clickthroughs after about 30 views. My domains are finally in Google too now so hopefully they will start performing. Msn still isn’t connecting to the Internet. Doesn’t really matter at the moment either because I’m spending so much time playing that damn game. Trying to take the night off from it tonight though. They should ban it!

Damn it, it still won’t connect. I really can’t be bothered searching for a solution to this tonight. It’s far too hot over here. I guess I’ll have to stick with Ebuddy in the meantime when I’m working on my laptop. Which isn’t that bad considering how much of an improvement Ebuddy is over the old Emessenger client. Extremely impressive and it makes me believe that the future of instant messaging services lies within browser based web applications.

I’m getting ready for Adwords Round 2! This time hopefully I won’t be knocked out in the first round. I must concentrate though on the task at hand which is finishing off the sites I’ve already started!