Rory Hansen

Happy Cyber Monday everyone!

If you haven’t heard yet, you can use coupon code 99DOMAIN over at GoDaddy.com to purchase .com/.net/.org domain names for 99 cents!

This is a smoking deal for anyone looking to start the New Year fresh with a new blog/website. Even if all you do is buy a domain for $0.99 and flip it for a few dollars on SitePoint or DigitalPoint, that few dollars is nearly pure profit!

To make the deal even more smoking, as always, if you purchase 5 or more domains from GoDaddy, they’ll throw in free Privacy Registration (a $11 savings on each domain!).

Keep in mind, this is just for 1-year domain name registrations. I’ve got a handful I’ll be registering tonight. Lemme know which domains you end up picking up!

In Google’s recently released Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (PDF ALERT!), they describe the best practices to follow to ensure that Google can properly crawl and index your site data.

Shaun at Hobo has created a list of tips on what to AVOID doing, by summarizing many of the suggestions from the Starter Guide. Here are some interesting ones I saw:

Avoid:

• having deep nesting of subdirectories like “…/dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/dir5/dir6/
  page.html”
• creating an HTML sitemap that simply lists pages without organizing them
• allowing your 404 pages to be indexed in search engines (make sure that your
  webserver is configured to give a 404 HTTP status code when non-existent
  pages are requested)
• having a navigation based entirely on drop-down menus, images, or animations

There are a total of 30 tips listed on Shaun’s post. Read them all here.

Earnings
AdSense: $166.53
Clickbank: $437.58
Text-Link-Ads: $89.56
Sedo, Amazon Associates: ~$2
Paid Reviews: $22.54
Total earnings: $718.21

Costs
No AdWords costs this month.
Signed up for Findology, but have yet to start any campaigns.
Total costs: $0.00

October Earnings: $718.21

September Earnings: $335.79
This represents a 214% improvement month-over-month.

Mortgage Goal
As you may recall, my goal is to earn enough each month through AdSense and affiliate marketing to cover the cost of my monthly mortgage payment. For the sake of the experiment, we’re saying it’s $1500/month.

This month I earned $718.21 profit, which is 48% of the way there. I have until June 2009 to hit my goal, so that leaves me with 8 more months to make up the remaining 52%.

Concerns going forward
As I had mentioned in a previous post, my main contributing site has seen it’s traffic dive in recent days. By dive, I mean traffic has reduced by about 75% (natural, search engine traffic). This concerns me because unless things pick up again, November earnings could potentially be 75% lower than October earnings.

I first mentioned CodeIgniter back in February 2007 as something that really excited me, but it took over a year and a half for me to actually use it!

Well, after a 2-day programming blitz, I launched my first CodeIgniter website yesterday. It’s hosted on the keyword domain www.PremierLeagueShirts.com and is an affiliate site targetting those looking for English Premier League jerseys. While still under heavy construction, the primary features are now available for use. The remaining changes will mostly be cosmetic and UI-related.

Here are some of the features that I programmed into www.PremierLeagueShirts.com:

• SEO-Friendly URLS - Each and every URL is search engine friendly. Take for example some of these URLS:
  • http://www.premierleagueshirts.com/store/subcategory/Shop_By_Player/Beckham_David
  • http://www.premierleagueshirts.com/store/subcategory/Teamwear/Womens
• Product Search – While still quite simplistic, will return a list of products which matches the user’s query.
• Completely Database-Driven: All content is stored in the Premier League Shirts database. No real-time webservice calls to the main affiliate site which may slow down page loads.

And what’s left to come?

• Improved GUI – Yes, the UI is plain. But my goal was to get the site out there and crawled by the major search engines. Now that that’s done, I’ll see what can be done about the look-and-feel of the site.
• Improved Search – The site search currently only looks at the Product Name, and not the Brand, Category, or Description. This will be looked into.
• Stats – Record what products are being looked at, what’s being searched for, and store that all in the database. Spit that out onto new pages on the site for further crawling by Google.
• Additional Content – What is on the site right now is strictly affiliate products and their descriptions. Obviously Google may not like that so much, so will have to look at additional sources of related content.

So, what do you think so far? Since this is my first forray into the world of CodeIgniter, I’m please with what I’ve accomplished over the last 2 days.

Today, I created my first website using the Code Igniter PHP framework and, oh boy, do I like it a lot more than Ruby on Rails. But I’ll dig into that further in a future post.

The purpose of this post is to shed some light on a problem that I wracked my brain over for a few hours last night.

The problem: After installing Apache, PHP, and MySQL and configuring the Code Igniter framework, you get a blank web page when testing your first controller, model, and view.

What I discovered were two issues that, when combined, create the perfect storm of an installation problem:

1. First, MySQL is no longer enabled by default with PHP 5. Says the PHP website of MySQL in PHP 5:
   

   MySQL is no longer enabled by default, so the php_mysql.dll DLL must be enabled inside of php.ini. Also, PHP needs access to the MySQL client library. A file named libmysql.dll is included in the Windows PHP distribution and in order for PHP to talk to MySQL this file needs to be available to the Windows systems PATH.

   It’s been a LONG time since I’ve programmed in PHP let alone installed PHP, so this was news to me. Anyway, if check out the MySQL installation notes on the PHP website if you need help enabling MySQL.  

2. Unfortunately, that was the easy part. Once I had an error message to work with, Google lead me to the PHP website, and I was in the clear. But, for the longest time, I wasn’t even getting an error page. Remember, all I was getting was a blank HTML page. So what was the cause? Code Igniter…
3. Using some creatively placed die() calls, I found out that the application was dying when trying to connect to the database. (Previous to this, I had already double- and triple-checked my MySQL username and password in the Code Igniter configuration file, and had even tried out alternate accounts, like my MySQL root account.)What I found out was that the MySQL drivers in Code Igniter were suppressing errors when attempting database connections.

This is what the code looks like in the Code Igniter mysql_driver.php file:

function db_connect()
{
   if ($this->port != '')
   {
      $this->hostname .= ':'.$this->port;
   }
   return @mysql_connect($this->hostname, $this->username, $this->password, TRUE);
}
The “@” symbol before the mysql_connect() function call supresses any errors that may be returned. It is that symbol that wasted a good 2 hours of my life.Anyway, after I removed the “@” symbol from the code and re-tested my web application, PHP spit out the error message that I should have been presented with hours ago, and I was well on my way to fixing the problem.
 If you’re experiencing the same problem that I was, I hope this helps you correct it faster than I did! Best of luck.

Oh, and did I mention how much I prefer Code Igniter over Ruby on Rails? It’s messier, but with my C and Java background, it makes more sense than Ruby and Ruby on Rails does!

I’ve spent the last couple hours debugging an authentication issue with LinkShare’s Link Locator Direct web service. My console app was throwing the following exception:

System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException: org.apache.axis.AxisFault:Pass in username/password

The error message seems straight-forward enough– “Pass in username/password.” But what do you do if you know you are passing in the username and password?

This was the code I was using:

LinkShareTextPromotion.EJBTextPromotionServiceService tp =
     new LinkShareTextPromotion.EJBTextPromotionServiceService();
tp.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(username, password);
tp.PreAuthenticate = true;
LinkShareTextPromotion.Text[] results  = tp.GetAllLinks(sid);

Anyway, I finally lucked out and stumbled onto this link on the LinkShare forums, which lead me to Gordon Weakliem’s blog that had a working solution. Apparently this problem occurs due to how .NET authenticates.

If you’re experiencing the same error and got here via Google, then I hope this helps you get on your way.

It’s been a long, long time since I’ve done any web development in my free time– at least, any non-work related web development. Well, after batting around a few business ideas with buddies these past couple weeks, I’ve enough motivation to actually go ahead and see what happens with one (or two or three) of them.  But first, I need to prepare my development environment.

My aging laptop has been by my side throughout university and the first few years of post-university employment, and, well, has seen me use a myraid of tools for the many different development phases of my life. Lots of these tools have since aged into obsoleteness, so the first phase of my development environment preparation saw me ridding my harddrive of many of these tools and/or turning off services that are no longer used. Gone is Eclipse, as well as Apache 1.3, PHP 4, and that old version of MySQL. Cya later Ruby and Python. IIS? Disabled.

I’ve decided to use Code Igniter as my web application framework for these ideas I’m going to pursue. If you don’t already know, it’s a “powerful PHP framework with a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications”, or so it’s website says at least. As such, after cleansing my laptop, I installed the newest versions of Apache, PHP, and MySQL. (Truth be told, I was surprised at the relative ease at which they were installed. No configuration mess at all, although I’ll probably have to do a httpd.conf refresher in a few days.)

Has anyone ever used one of those pre-configured WAMP installation packages, such as WAMP5 at WAMPServer.com? What are your thoughts? Worth using? At first, I was tempted to use one of these packages, rather than installing each of the tools separately, but decided that I wanted the freedom to upgrade whenver, rather than when the WAMP5 distributable was updated.

Anyway, my laptop is now almost all set to go! All that’s left is to set up some virtual directories, install Code Igniter, and then refamiliarize myself with PHP. Wish me luck!

Now that I’m living on my own, I’m tasked with doing my own grocery shopping each week. While my weekly purchase is fairly small (a few pieces of fruit, some meat, and lots of prepared foods), I find that I rarely get to take advantage of the deals that are available at the supermarkets. So, instead of buying the bulk peanut butter, I buy the mini jar. Or, I buy one or two buns, rather than a dozen. Or I get the pack of 12 rolls of toilet paper rather than the 36-roll pack. In doing so, I don’t get the same cost-per-item deals that most families would take advantage of.

At the same time, I realize that in my apartment building, there are probably many other young, single professionals like myself that are facing the same dilemma. A possible solution: create a website which allows singles living near each other to find each other and share grocery and supply lists.

Don’t need a full bag of sugar or salt or pepper or any other seasoning or spice? Log into the website, find people in your area that are looking for the same ingredients (with hooks into Google Maps for convenience), and see if they’d like to share.

Understandably, we’re often just talking about fractions of dollars here, but to help with that, make the website credit-based. For example, I buy $10 worth of credits and when I need some salt, I pay $0.25 for a few tablespoons worth and that credit is then dropped into the supplier’s (ie. one of my neighbours) account (with the site taking a small margin).

As the site would be completely localized to the various parts of each city, there’s a great opportunity for local grocers to advertise (coupons, ads, etc.) through the site and target residents that live in the surrounding areas.

Thoughts?

Scenario 1: I’m walking down the street and an idea for a new website pops into my head. I even think of a great domain name, but have no idea if it’s already taken. But I’m forgetful and chances are, will have forgotten the whole business idea and associated domain name before I get to a computer.

Scenario 2: I buy domains and sell them for a profit. While in line at Starbucks, I think of a great one, but don’t know if it’s available. In my industry, domains are disappearing quicker and quicker and my window of opportunity may not exist when I get back to the office.

Solution: Create a service which allows people to check the availability of domain names via text messages from their cell phone. If available, also lets them purchase the domain name.

How would it work:
1) User sends a text message to service containing the domain name their interested in.
2) Service responds with “Available” or “Not Available”. If available, service also sends back numeric reference number and message that says “Please reply if you’d like to purchase this domain name now.”
3) If user replies with intention of purchasing the domain name, an automated phone system calls the user back, takes reference number (to avoid re-typing of domain name) and credit card info and processes the purchase.

Target customers:
1) Those that make purchases based on emotion, gut feeling, or instinct.
2) Domain squatters.
3) Brainstorming entrepreneurs hoping for the next YouTube.

What do you think?

Adsense: $236.07
Firefox Referrals: $793.10

Yahoo! Marketing: $167.39
Google Adwords: $271.80
MSN AdCenter: $5.62
Ask! Sponsored Listings: $68.38

Profit: $515.98