I’ve just updated my amazon associates plugin to take into account the recent signiture changes which amazon have introduced for their webservices api.
This now also means you’ll have to enter your amazon secret access key in the plugin configuration page.
You can download the updated version over here.
It also means my wishlist has finally been brought back to life. Just in time for Christmas…
Jan 13
It seems that all I do these days is talk about what’s going on over at Fair & Bare and if you’re here because you prefer the more geeky side to me I apologise I’ve not been indulging you recently. However, that said, these posts do represent a significant part of me right now and what’s going on in my life so I think it fair I shout about it.
We’re holding our second design challenge right now and calling for designs based around the concept of a unique twist on a fairy tale. The prize is our biggest ever, at £200 + a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS3 (which was kindly donated by one of F&B’s community!). You have until 15th February to both submit a design and get it voted on by the F&B peeps!
It looks like I’ve also failed to mention over here the winner of our Snowdodgers competition as the amazing Mister Shrew. The shirts we printed look amazing and you should pick one up now if you haven’t already.
One of the things that’s bugged me for a while whilst having a website is that at certain times of the year when people might actually like to buy me a gift they’re unable to find my wishlist. This is mainly because they’re simple folk who might not think to check amazon for my name. I’m also signed up with amazon associates, so I decided it could do me well to post my wishlist items along with my referral tag in the links in order to earn a bob or two on my own homepage. All this data is available on the web already its just a case of putting it together.
Some keen readers might of noticed the wishlist page I stuck up recently and want something similar on their own site and (like myself) either can’t be bothered or didn’t have the time to create a plugin to pull this data together. I’m putting up here my own quick and dirty plugin I built a few weeks ago to achieve this.
It uses amazon web services to look up a wishlist, stick in a specified associates id in each of my item links and replace where I put the text (without spaces) in a post with my wishlist items. The plugin regularly updates this (hourly) as a scheduled event in wordpress in case someone decides to actually buy me something. Of course you’ll need a services key to use it, which you can easily get by signing up with amazon at aws.amazon.com. Fill out your services id, your wishlist id (found by logging into amazon and heading to your wishlist page) and your locale (the bit after amazon. so mine is .co.uk) and press the fetch items to pull all the items in. If you don’t have an associates id, feel free to leave as my own : )
I used curl to get the remote data from amazon as the file_get_content methods generally aren’t enabled on normal web hosts. If you’d like the items to be fetched less regularly, then install the plugin with and updated wp_schedule_event method in the main wishlist.php to a value of your choice.
You can download it over here.
Double alliteration in a post title? Not sure I’ve attempted that before.
[Edit: You'll need to be running on PHP5 to make use of this plugin]
[Edit: I released an updated version based on Amazon's move to use of signitures, see the details here]
Mashable is reporting that a Microsoft-Yahoo merger may be on the cards, which is a fairly bizarre prospect.The price? $50 Billion, is Yahoo only worth 30 odd YouTubes? I for one think not.
I heard about fakeyourspace via mashable today, which offers the ability to purchase your own social networking friends to leave messages and comments on communities such as myspace and facebook (the only two web pages I ever see to be open when supervising university labs). In their own words:“If you are tired of seeing everyone else with the hottest friends and want some hotties of your own, then this is the place for you.”For the princely sum of $1.99 – or $0.99 as an introductory offer, you can purchase a friend to leave you two comments on your profile per week. The photo’s seem to all rather fake, as their name would suggest.I would give you some more stats, but it seems that fakeyourspace is either suffering from the mashable effect (being mashed?), or indeed that its been pulled for being completely and utterly ridiculous. I wouldn’t be surprised if myspace or facebook had been on their backs in order to cut the kind of fake networking that such a system would introduce. They could easily kill each of the profiles which had been created on any of their networks if not.
Nov 19
I don’t really understand microsoft, over the last few days, their live network has been experiencing problems every time I’ve tried to logon to access my email. Who knows what my 8 emails contain which are hidden within live mail, I certainly don’t. You would think that more people would be in uproar about this – I mean what if these were payment requests, final demands or quick response business proposals? I could be loosing out on some serious money here.Apparently, even they are unsure of the problem – it could be that “This site may be experiencing a problem” or “The site may not be a member of the Windows Live Network”. These seem quite vague, I mean obviously the sites experiencing a problem as everything would be fine and dandy if not and I’m pretty sure that Live mail is a member of their Live network too. Why don’t you try telling me something that I don’t already know?
Registration is open for the Future of Web Apps conference in London 07. I’d love to go, loads of great companies/people talking (good to see Last.fm making an appearance), loads of schmoozing (if thats the appropriate word), but unfortunately absolutely jack to do with my PhD, so no funding.
I was thinking about this earlier and was trying to make an educated answer. What I would note is that it is primarily content which drives users to use sites, we can see that through all manner of feeds and low bandwidth sites across the net. Without content, theres no point in sticking up a website. You can see demonstrations of that assertion here from time to time. It’s also fairly visible through all manner of seedy content on the web as users will be quite happy to sit through the many pop-ups and poorly formatted text to get to that bunch of images which they’re after.Design ends up just being the icing on the cake for users, but for other (perhaps) more hardcore users such as any number of programmers, it can be an ultimate turn off to see the horrendous environment which content which we thought we might be interested in is displayed.I think the reason I’ve been pondering this is the huge amount of extremely popular social networking sites which I’ve accessed which just don’t seem to abide by the rules which those of us who have been programming on the web have become accustomed to adhering to. I am of course referring to web standards and their apparent lack of appearance at myspace. They’ve recently risen to light (as if they ever went away) as myspace have been in talks with O2 about the possibilities of accessing pages via mobile. How can they get away by flouting design rules? Have we been lied to? Should we never have bothered? It’s kind of a joke that an application so recently on the scene is so buggy.I for one feel accomplished at the end of the day knowing that whatever I’ve produced is beautiful code (or at least my best attempt at it). It’s going to work well, and hopefully for a long time if standards are adhered to by browsers in the future too. It doesn’t need other applications to make it navigable either. Despite all its buggy pages though, myspace must be good at something, right? It’s not just all for the kids? It’s allowed people and artists to listen to full tracks by one another and browse for similar music via those peoples friends. Oh what? – That’s it?A recent perusal through a free music mag “salvo” from my local fopp shows that out of the 10 up-and-coming artists listed, none are without a myspace page, and none offer any other point of contact. It’s kinda nice when communication is provided like this to those who want/need it, but for my part I’d much prefer if they had a wordpress blog sat on their own domain, or at least used wordpress.com.
Carson Systems is showing the details of how dropsend stacks up in terms of monthly profit. Ryan states that at a conservative estimate by December ‘07, it’ll be making $21k/mo. He also seems to be beating off a bit of bad feedback on the advertising which has/hasn’t been done.
I love it when I get useful error messages such as those often uttered by hotmail.