Oct
4
2010
eBay By | 4 comments

Review of Free eBay Affiliate Scripts for WordPress

If you want to earn some money from your website or blog, the eBay Partner Network is an interesting option, and I’ve reviewed some free eBay affiliate tools that make it easier to use.

As well as banner ads, as an eBay affiliate you can display auction listings. These add constantly updating, hopefully relevant, content to your pages and provide you the chance of earning commissions. (I say ‘chance‘: your visitors have to click on the eBay links, and also buy something from them!). So it depends at least partly on your powers of persuading strangers to buy things that appear at random :)

If you compare EPN with Adsense, it looks more interesting on your website, there are more steps required for it to earn you money, but the commissions you’d earn could be higher if you’re selling something valuable.

It’s possible to create eBay adverts free within your eBay Partner Network account. There are also free and paid scripts available, some as WordPress plugins, which automate this process and make it easier or better.
Continue reading Review of Free eBay Affiliate Scripts for WordPress →

Apr
26
2010
Adsense, Security By | 10 comments

Are Social Bookmarking Buttons Hijacking AdSense Publisher IDs?

Something has been hijacking the Adsense Publisher ID on some of my pageloads, inserting someone else’s ID in the Google ads instead of mine. I’ve been investigating this with some members of the Google Help forums and an HTTP debugger.
Continue reading Are Social Bookmarking Buttons Hijacking AdSense Publisher IDs? →

Apr
23
2010
Office Technology, Technology By | 10 comments

How to Get a Wireless HP OfficeJet Printer Working with a Linux Laptop

The tale of the printer…

I have an HP OfficeJet J6480 all-in-one printer. This is connected via USB to our Windows XP desktop machine. I also have a Linux (Kubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope”) Laptop which connects to the wireless network setup by our router. The printer also connects wirelessly to that network. Thus, if I’m on the network on my laptop I have access to the printer.

This is the story of how I got the printer to work after having it stop working inexplicably one day. I consider myself a Linux novice; I am comfortable using it, but uncomfortable administering it.

Setting up the printer via USB on the Windows machine was trivially easy. I was unable, though to connect to the printer wirelessly either using Windows or Linux (my laptop is dualboot). Eventually, after spending far too long with HP Technical Support, I realised that the problem was simply that the router was using a channel with too much interference on it. By switching the channel to something else, we could confirm that the laptop (in Windows mode) could connect to the printer wirelessly. They hadn’t heard of Linux, though, and so I was on my own from there.
Continue reading How to Get a Wireless HP OfficeJet Printer Working with a Linux Laptop →

Jan
5
2010
Security, Web Development By | 7 comments

My Joomla Website was Hacked – Here’s What I Did Next

When my Joomla website was hacked with rogue javascript, it was done unobtrusively: no massive deleting of files, or ‘pwned’ claims on the home page.

So it was obviously done for a hidden, longer term purpose, rather than to take the site down, and that worried me too. Could it be rescued?

This is a long post, detailing the steps I took to trace the problem, minimise the damage and rescue the website, so the steps I took are linked in this step-by-step list:
Continue reading My Joomla Website was Hacked – Here’s What I Did Next →

Oct
23
2009
Artificial Intelligence, Funny, Internet Marketing By | No comments yet

Bizarre screenshot of the day: RSS directory?

Ok, firstly don’t get your hopes up – there isn’t a bizarre screenshot every day. But I just got this one when I was looking for RSS directories to add a blog RSS feed to.

I’d just added the RSS feed to Goldenfeed, and saw a link underneath to another RSS directory, ‘readablog’. So I clicked on it and got this error screen:

Sounds like a perfectly normal RSS and blog directory so why has Alexa toolbar come up with this stuff???

Sounds like a perfectly normal RSS and blog directory so why has Alexa toolbar come up with this stuff???

For once I agree with Alexa: ‘Why am I seeing this page?’

Firstly, where did the ‘porn’ search come from? Going back to Goldenfeed, all I can see in the status bar is the URL.

Then, looking at the listings, where did Alexa toolbar get those from? OK Home Cinema could have some relevance. And maybe Royal Caribbean Cruises are trying to spice up their image (unlikely, but you never know). But ‘Christian Child Ministry’?? Is someone having a joke on this site, Google bombing them or something like that? And Cisco Systems – some lonely nerds with a networking fetish?

I can’t help wondering why Readablog has been lumbered with this. It has such a wholesome, non-X-rated name. Looking at its page in wholinkstome.com, none of the incoming links have adult sounding names, and it seems to rank best for keywords about marriage and babies.

Looking at its page on Alexa, it seems to have been related to other RSS directories. The closest to dodgy term I can find in its keywords is ‘swimsuit’. Which isn’t even dodgy.

Meanwhile, quantcast has its visitors as mostly male, in their late 30s, without kids and with college degrees. Ok, I’m starting to get a little creeped out about how much the net seems to know about us…

In any case, I can’t see any reason for these Alexa toolbar results (or Cisco Systems, etc for that matter!) Has ‘porn’ become another word for ‘website’?

Finally, I check up on Goldenfeed, and find it has let’s say more of a mixture of stuff. Oops. And there’s my feed, on the home page! Woo hoo!

Now I’m just wondering what the Adsense will come up with for this page…

Oct
17
2009
Adsense, Social Networking, Web 2.0 By | 3 comments

Sharing Profit from Adsense on a Community Website

Sharing Profit from Adsense on a Community Website

After my first experiments with Adsense and artificial intelligence, I thought it might be interesting to try it out on a website with more traffic. (However great my privacy and ‘under construction’ pages are, they aren’t the most visited pages on the web!) So when I discovered there was a scheme for sharing profit from Adsense on a community website I was using anyway, it seemed like a great opportunity: after all, what was there to lose?
Continue reading Sharing Profit from Adsense on a Community Website →

Oct
6
2009
Business Insurance, Employees By | 10 comments

Back to your Desks, Peasants!

Employers take out Life Insurance Policies on their Employees

Is it right that employers take out life insurance policies on their employees?  Most employees do not even know if their employers have taken out life insurance policies against them, and undertandably so:  how could it feel to work for a company, knowing the company would profit from your death?
Continue reading Back to your Desks, Peasants! →

Oct
4
2009
Adsense, Artificial Intelligence, Internet Marketing By | 3 comments

Google AdSense: What Artificial Intelligence does in the Real World?

When I went to college, I studied Artificial Intelligence before there was any such thing as Google AdSense (or, in fact, Google). I know, it’s hard to believe.

So I spent a couple of years learning about robots, intelligent systems, evolution and natural language processing. Little robots will go to Mars, they told us. They’ll be Fast, Cheap and Out of Control. I thought it was strange at the time that no one seemed concerned with more immediate practical applications.

Shortly before I graduated, I met an ex-boyfriend of my cousin’s, who worked in marketing. “They’re just starting to use neural networks where I work now,” he told me. They used them to target direct mail advertising. So there it was, the first real life example of AI I’d personally encountered, and it was used for spam. I really should have known. By which I mean, I really should have known, and started Google. Then I’d be laughing.
Continue reading Google AdSense: What Artificial Intelligence does in the Real World? →

Sep
23
2009
E-business, Intellectual Property, New Media, Social Networking, Web 2.0 By | 3 comments

Ebusiness Case Study: Last FM and Web 2.0 innovation

How Last.fm Responded to the Opportunities and Challenges of E-Business Technologies

As an e-business from the start, an online presence was essential to Last.fm’s business model. There was no risk of channel conflict or cannibalisation of pre-existing sales channels.

Last.fm’s Relationship with Technology

Using Rogers’ (1962) technology adoption lifecycle model, organisations can be innovators, early adopters, early or late majority, or laggards. However, an organisation like Last.fm can have a different relationship with each technology it uses.

Continue reading Ebusiness Case Study: Last FM and Web 2.0 innovation →

Sep
18
2009
E-business, Internet Businesses, Technology, Web Development, Working from Home By | No comments yet

Ebusiness Technology: a new Web Development and Internet Business blog

Welcome to Ebusiness Technology, my new blog about Web Development and Internet Businesses, and the gold mine that is surely out there somewhere for all of us.

I work from home as a freelance web developer while my kids are at school and preschool, and also when I should probably be asleep :) When I’m not working on customers’ websites, I develop and run my own websites to try out internet business ideas and make my effortless millions.

I’m curious about it too: I want to know how these ideas work, and how the internet is used in society and by businesses.

So this blog will be a mixture of the technical side of web development, interaction design and usability, internet business models and working from home with kids. I know there are many others out there, so I would like to hear from you!