Leaving The Day Job

Archive for the ‘programming’ Category

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Yahoo today announced that they will be supporting the OpenID authentication protocol. This could be really big news to anyone trying to build a community based site such as a forum as users can jump straight in and get involved much more easily.

I’ll explain that logic in a minute but first : what the heck is OpenID anyway? OpenID is a open, decentralised authentication system. What that means is that you get a username and password from one website and you can use it to log in to any other website which supports OpenID. Think of it as being like Microsoft Passport was supposed to be a few years back only open, free and adopted by many more websites.

Users can choose which ID provider they want to use. When they want to log in to an OpenID-supporting website they simple provide their username (which often looks like a web addresss eg fred.myopenid.com) and the website redirects them to their ID provider to log in. The ID provider then passes back a message to the website telling them whether or not the log in was successful.

OpenID has been around for a while and it’s not really taken off outside the geek community because it’s all been a bit complicated for the average user. Why create yet another login for something you don’t really understand anyway?

What Yahoo have announced is that they will become an OpenID provider meaning that users will be able to log in to an OpenID-supporting website using their Yahoo user name and password. This more than trebles the number of OpenID accounts to about 370 million.

So back to my original point: how this can help your community website. People are swamped by user names and passwords. Getting them to create a login for your site to add to the hundreds they already have is a barrier to them using your site. Instead they’ll see a button labelled ‘Sign in with your Yahoo! ID’ and be taken straight to a familiar Yahoo login page before being bounced back to your site.

By allowing them to use their existing Yahoo credentials on your site you’re making it easier and quicker for them join your forums, comment on your blog or upload their user-generated content to your site. No form filling, no validating their email address and no illegible captchas to decipher. They’ll have a smoother path into your site and as a consequence be more likely to contribute.

There are more details at the OpenID website

Merchant product feeds are a great way to add a load of products to your affiliate website quickly. If you’re using something like Affilistore you can knock up a money-earning website in no time at all. The trouble with feeds is that they tend to be all or nothing and as we all know our affiliate sites need to be niche-focused. Getting the products you need out of a feed can be helped a great deal by the command line tools which come built in to Macs and Linux.

Geek alert! This is one way of achieving the task which makes sense to a geek like me. It’s not for everyone. If you are scared of typing commands and want a point and click approach this one isn’t for you.

First thing, you need to get to the command line. On Macs this is done by running the Terminal app which you will find in the Applications / Utilities. Different versions of Linux work in different ways but you’re looking for something called terminal or shell which will probably be in a ’system’ or ‘utilities’ menu.

Next you need to find your way to an easy to use directory. You should be able to do this by typing :

cd Desktop

if you type :

ls

at this point you should see a listing of the files you have on your desktop.

Download your product feed from the affiliate network website onto your desktop. We’ll assume that it’s called feed.csv. We need to extract the first line of the file, which has all the column names in it and place it into our output file. This we do by typing:

head -n 1 feed.csv > output.csv

Then we want to search through the feed file and extract every product which matches our search text. Say we want to find all the Bob the Builder products, we type:

grep -i "bob the builder" feed.csv >> output.csv

Notice the -i option which means we are doing a case-insensitive search and the double > means we are adding to the existing file not overwriting it.

And that’s about it. If you searched for a more generic term you might need to open the CSV file in a spreadsheet programme and edit the results a bit.

This may all seem geeky but it’s very effective and very fast. I just cut a 330 meg feed file down to just 14k in less than a minute using this technique. A 14k file I can finetune by hand; a 330 meg file is a non-starter.

Well, it’s going to be a long time until I can go fulltime as an affiliate but I took the day off from my “proper” job today to try to get a good chunk of affiliate work done. I started out the way I always imagined working from home would be like by sleeping through the alarm and getting up an hour and a half later than intended.

I moved on to reviewing stats, reading blogs and answering emails over a cup of freshly brewed coffee then settled down to have a long, bitter and swearword-infested fight with PHP and XML. I was trying to convert the XML from Amazon’s web service into a nice CSV file to use with Affilistore. I quickly learned that Amazon provide you with easily enough XML rope to hang yourself with. There’s far more data in their feed than I could ever need and so I spent ages trying just to figure out which bits of it were which. Then my rustiness with PHP paid me a visit and I spent a similar number of ages referring to the manual trying to work out how to manipulate said XML.

In the end I got something not entirely dissimilar to what I was trying to create but was not at all pleased that I’d wasted half the day trying to get it. It’s my intention to create a more general Amazon to CSV tool to put on this website but it’ll have to go sit on the backburner where so many of my other bright ideas are waiting. As much as I love Linux my years spent coding .NET at the day job mean development would be a heck of a lot quicker if I just bit the bullet and switched to hosting my sites on Windows.

By this point it was lunchtime already. In the day job, lunch usually marks the point at which my productivity takes a serious downturn but working at home I’ve actually got more done in the afternoon than the morning. This is a good sign as it kind of suggests that working for myself suits me.

I’ve discovered that one of my old, neglected sites is still seeing a fair bit of traffic and that most of it comes from the US. So I’ve installed openAds to rotate the banners on the site and geo-target them to the visitors. I’m thinking of revitalising and relaunching the whole site since people seem to still like visiting it.

I’ve also set up a PC at home with Fedora Linux so I can do development work, launched some PPC campaigns and done some tweaks to another one of my sites. All in all I feel I’ve been quite productive and I’ve certainly got more done in one day than I would have done in a week of just doing affiliate work in the evenings. Unfortunately you don’t get quick results in affiliate marketing (at least I don’t) so it’ll be a while before I see if my hard work pays off. In the meantime it’s back to the day job tomorrow - only four days until the weekend