Old but good humor

I have always liked this http://www.illwillpress.com/sml.html

Why I read the Blogs listed

Rich wrote in his blog recently "I just noticed today that this blog is mentioned under the "blogs I am reading" section of a couple of other guys blogs that I checkout so I now feel under pressure to come up with some worthy reading material..." so I thought I would mention what I like about the blogs that I read.

Burt - His blog is always a good read, and there is something there "new" all the time, if it is a new post or just checking out the comments. His blog is worth the $3951 just for what you can learn from it. Burt has a lot of ideas and is always trying to make more $$$$. I really like Burt's philosophy of generating automatic income without having to do any extra work. His blog has made me examine a lot of different areas of my business and look at ways to do it better.

Richandzhaoyan - I stumbled across Rich's blog (never seen a post by Zhaoyan). He is a member of osC but don't really come across him to much there, we must run in different circles or something. I liked his blog because it came across as just the thoughts of a guy trying to make it in life and ecommerce sharing the ups and downs. He just seemed like a nice guy trying to support his family and I found it to be down to earth and from the heart. When I first read his blog I thought he is the type of person I would like to go out for a beer with.

Chemo - The coding GOD!!! Need I say more, probably not but I will. I met Bobby in the osC forum and his help has been so valuable, he is the kind, patient and generous with his time and knowledge. Character does matter and that is why Bobby is at the top of his game. Whatever he does in life I know he will be successful.

WizardsandWar - Well it is not for the spam that I read his blog. I wished he kept it more updated but that is up to him. I find that when he does post it is very informative though sometimes over my head.

I thought it was over

In the past 2 weeks people created about 50 bogus accounts on my site. I just deleted them all which is a time consuming thing to do. Then there are all the tests of our payment system so I go to check on things on my account screen and it is all taken up with rejected payments. The message to everyone who "plays" in my store is ....GET YOUR OWN STORE AND STOP F%&KING WITH MINE!!!!

News feed automation

For a while we have had free news feeds on our site that people can view in their RSS readers or other web site owners can use on their web sites. They have generated a lot of traffic but it is not targeted traffic.

I had the feeds set up as individual pages on the site and this was a pain in the &$@. For each feed it had to be created in the News Feed Admin, then the page that displays the feed on our site had to be created along with the language file, the XML page had to be created, the filenames.php file had to be updated, and it had to be added to the list of feeds. This process took about 30 minutes per feed.

Rob123 did the work the first time and he did a great job so I went back to him again to automate the process. The work he did is nothing short of amazing. Now when a feed it added to the News Feed Admin, it is automatically added to the list of available feeds in the appropriate category, the page that displays the feed on the site is automatically created, and the XML feed is automatically created. This is still using the same URL's as they have always had. The entire thing runs off 3 php files located on the site. With this process automated it takes about 15 seconds to add a new feed (instead of the 30 minutes).

There is another new feature he added. Before when looking at the XML pages in a reader it always had the same boring ad for Java Roasters at the bottom (Courtesy of Java Roasters). With this new version it has (or will have when I finish making up all the pages) a different "catch phrase" for every day of the month linked to a different page of the site. So on the 1st of every month it might say "What is our best selling coffee" followed by the description "Urban fix has alway been our best selling coffee. Find out what everyone is talking about" with a link to a page on the site that is built specifically to promote Urban Fix. On the 2nd of the month it will have a different message about our company. This was a very important feature for me to have because I think people tend to ignore the "Courtesy of Java Roasters" part after awhile because it is always there and never changes. Also only "new" articles are downloaded onto news readers so by having it change every day they will always have a unique message about our company in their RSS reader.

I was also looking at the Microsoft site the other day and IE7.0 is in beta testing now and it has a built in RSS reader. I really think RSS feeds are going to take off as soon as IE7.0 becomes available to the general public as they will be known by the general population.
Currently we have about 100 feeds generating traffic of about 16,000 views per month. The goal is to have 3,000 feeds by the end of this year. That should give us about 480,000 views per month. When IE7.0 comes out I don't see a reason why that should not increase by 10 times the number giving us 4,800,000 views per month. Now if 1 in 10,000 of those views generates a sale that will give us 480 sales per month. Once all the work has been completed and set up, tested, refined I think these goals are reachable and this does not include any work that we do to increase traffic to our site from feeds that are displayed on other sites.

If we reach our goal then this whole process might pay for itself.

Biting off more than you can chew

I have taken on the massive task of getting a working version of CCGV up and running. It was so buggy and almost impossible to install. I think most of the bugs have been worked out now, just a few more things to check. I am checking and changing a lot of the text in it also, there were punctuation, spelling, and gramatical errors all over the place. Also redesigning the emails that it sends out so they are more informative to the customer. I am just doing the english part and making sure the code works, others have offered to do the other languages which is amazing. Still it is a huge job and without the others help I would never be able to finish it.

Hey, did people know that the spanish language files do NOT contain any spanish text. I can't figure that one out.

I think I have come along way

I was thinking back to when I first went to osC and downloaded the package. It took me days to figure out how to install PHP, apache, and Mysql. Then I tried to edit something and messed up my site. About 300 installs later I think I managed to change something on a page without getting a parse error (I had to look up what a parse error was in PHP for morons). I had absolutely no clue as to what I was doing or should be doing.

Then Emmett to the rescue and he taught me a lot about what I should be doing. Since then with a lot of help from Emmett and others I have managed to fumble my way through PHP but I am still just a hack.