News and Information Blog 12 02 2006

Quick Amazon Direct Link Generator

Tired of schlepping (spelling?) over to Amazon to re-familiarize yourself with how to set up a direct link to a single product? Try this little bookmarklet instead:

Create Amazon Url

It works as is, by clicking on it, or just left-click on it and drag it up to your browser's toolbar and it will be saved there for whenever you need it.

Once it's on the tool bar, right-click on its icon and left-click on the Properties menu selection.

When that comes up, you just have to change where it says "YourAmazonAffiliateIDHere", to be your actual Amazon affiliate id.

^newSponsoredWords

This could be the most important technology to come along for online marketers since the affiliate link itself!

For the first time ever, potential advertisers can bid to sponsor words and phrases in your content, RIGHT ON YOUR SITE, and we've automated the whole process for you from start to finish.

Just paste a few lines of Html into your pages, and instantly your "content store" is open for business.

It comes standard with all our plans.

To see it in action, click on the "Sponsor words or phrases in any post on this blog" link on the right, or place your cursor over green, double underlined words.

Join free or subscribe now, to try it out yourself.

Shareasale launches PPC Management Tool

While LinkShare asked their merchants to send a "Terms Addition" to help manage the issue of PPC bidding on brand names and trademarks, it's Shareasale that have jumped ahead with a PPC Management Tool. Not only does this allow merchants to define what exact words and phrases they do or don't want their affiliates to bid on, it even allows them to set a maximum bid for those words. This means that affiliates and merchants can work side by side without driving up the cost and at the same time work to "block" bid on the top positions. All that's missing is a "Which PPC Engine" option as merchants don't cover all PPC systems in their bidding usually and it can be ideal to have affiliates tackle those that fall outside the merchants own coverage.

Win $200 every week from AMWSO.com

We're going to be launching a little quiz competition here with weekly prizes of $200 from AMWSO. The quiz will be simple :
10 questions. First one to send in the 10 correct answers wins the $200.
You mail in your answers to an email address and post "Answers sent" on the ABW thread at the same time, no post, no win.
Questions will cover a wide variety of topics that will require, searching the net, searching web sites, asking people questions and, dare I say, checking offline for some answers.
You can be anyone from anywhere to win , Affiliates, Affiliate Managers, who ever, from any country, ABW newbie or Veteran and if you have a pay pal account that will be very helpful, but if not we'll find a way around that too.
First quiz will kick off this coming week
If you have any thoughts and ideas on ways to make this more fun etc please do post on the this discussion thread.

Amazon "Adsense" Advertising Network

Seems that even Amazon want a slice of the success that Google and Overture have driven through their CPC campaigns, I still remember when Overture initially luanched as Goto.com and people scoffed at the idea of people "paying" to be listed and ranked on a cost per click basis. Amazon now want a part of that business. It'll be very interesting to see whether they can make it profitable at all considering their margins, and also how it will interact with the affiliate program. Will the CPC system overwrite tracking? I can already see the future, with sites built of nothing but Amazon CPC Ads that could cost a small fortune for Amazon in terms of "look see" clicks.

More Advancements in Perl Programming

What's advanced Perl programming? The definition has changed over the years. For a while it was XS and GUIs and typeglobs and OO. Now a lot of it is using CPAN effectively. Since completing Advanced Perl Programming, Second Edition, Simon Cozens has discovered even more ways to work more smartly and effectively. Here's what he's learned.

Read the entire article here

Debugging and Profiling mod_perl Applications

How do you use the debugger on a mod_perl application? How do you profile an application embedded in a web server, with multiple child processes? Don't worry. Where there's Perl, there's a way. Frank Wiles demonstrates how to debug and profile mod_perl applications.

Read the entire article here

Test-Driving X11 GUIs

Is GUI testing as difficult as it seems? Maybe not, with the right testing libraries. George Nistorica shows what X11::GUITest can and can't do to make your Unix and Unix-like applications more robust.

Read the entire article here

Analyzing HTML with Perl

Kendrew Lau taught HTML development to business students. Grading web pages by hand was tedious--but Perl came to the rescue. Here's how Perl and HTML parsing modules helped make teaching fun again.

Read the entire article here

Stop the Clock!

Test your reflexes. The object is to stop the counter as close to 500 as possible. The lower your score, the better. Can you get a score of 0?

Read the entire article here

Disable Text Selection

Use this script to disable the selection of text on a page. It's very simple using two of the built-in JavaScript events to cancel the selection before it starts. You can even attach the events to a specific element.

Read the entire article here

Universal Form Validator

Validate form elements of all kinds: select boxes, text fields (including spaces), radio buttons, force numbers in textfields, etc. Very easy to use. Can be used on all forms.

Read the entire article here

Sizable Popup Links

This script will call popups from a link. Each popup is sized individually. Can be used more than once on a page.

Read the entire article here