There's quite a few perks to this job. Get up whatever time you like. Work from home and avoid the morning commute to work. Find as much or as little work as you want to do on any given day. And, of course, the money's not too bad either when a project works out how you intended.

One unexpected perk occured last week, however, when I was invited up - because of the London related sites that I run - by ITV Local to the studios of ITN to see how they they put together their news programmes and and to learn more about their own website at ITVLocal.com. A group of five bloggers got the full guided tour, which included wandering around the set of their news programmes, sitting in the gallery whilst London Tonight went out live, and then, the highpoint, meeting the legendary Alastair Stewart.



Thanks ITV!

Google Referrals was recently "retired", to use the corporate BS for it, which means an end to the Firefox with Google Toolbar referrals and Google Pack referrals which had been earning me a pretty solid £50/day for as long as I can remember. That's a pretty nasty kick in the shins, but what ho, there's a credit crunch on don't you know and at least now I can empathise a little better with those feeling the pinch.

So, with no decent alternatives, I switched over to the Spread Firefox Affiliate Program. I got going mid week, and based on past seven day figures, I'm ranked in the top 15 and I think I could make it into the top referees over a full week's data. Now, you don't get any payment back from Spread Firefox for your efforts. I understand that - Firefox is free after all, and has always had a good community vibe about it, so to many it might seem a bit vulgar to be sloshing cash about in exchange for a recommendation. I understand that many people in fact chose not to use the Google Adsense Referral links and opted to just refer free of charge because they love the product. You do get points though, which put you on a leaderboard and on that leaderboard your username can be a link back to your site.

That's fair enough I guess: you give them loads of referrals, they give you a link back. This is community spirit in action, I thought, and in the absence of any money, a very nice PR back link would suffice. Except those folks over at sFX decided to add the NoFollow attribute to the links. Ah, what happened to the community spirit, guys! Someone actually took a conscious decision to deny affiliates the default benefit of a hyperlink, by adding this parameter which actively makes the link no good at all. That's a bit of a slap in the face for the "affiliates" I'd say, and is all the more strange when you notice that the links they provide for banners etc back to them don't include this NoFollow attribute which is a little inconsistent.

It's a bit like a friend giving you a donut/doughnut after they've just taken the jam out of it. You might still eat the thing, but you'd be entitled to wonder why a friend would think to take the jam out to make it less enjoyable than it was designed to be!?

Now I think this is a pretty rum deal but even after all that, I have no problems accepting its their browser and their program and they can do whatever they like. But I'm just left wondering... what's the actual point of the "affiliate program". Why even term it an affiliate program when you're not only not rewarding affiliates, but you're almost offending them by adding something specifically to render their backlink less useful than its default form would make it. So why not just scrap the "affiliate" program and just have links and banners for those want to use them, and I probably still would, but without the pretence that there's an affiliate scheme to speak of.

Labels: firefox

I've got a couple of product feed based sites which run from the feed files which most UK affiliate networks provide. I've had sites like this for ages, and they frequently become out of date because I'd forget to update the product feed. I knew that the smart thing to do would be to automate the whole process, but I was too lazy to find out how to do it, although the truth is once you work it out, it allows you to be even lazier because you don't need to worry at all about keeping your sites up to date - it just happens and your sites are always lovely and fresh.

Now, I daresay every other affiliate has all this sorted already, but it took me a long time to get round to it and I didn't see any clear guide online so if it's something you want to set up and haven't done it yet, here's how I did it.

First you need to have an affiliate site that runs off a product feed download, such as a csv or XML file. When you normally download the product feed, it's usually possible to get hold of the URL required to download the feed directly without logging in - Affiliate Window, Buy.at and Affiliate Future certainly provide this. Make a note of this URL because you will need it later.

Now, I suggest you go and get hold of this command line downloader - scroll down the page to find File Downloader. Once you have downloaded and extracted it, you will have a few files including one called download.exe. This is the really useful bit and to make this file easily accessible to the batch file we're about to make, I just copied and pasted that into the /%windows%/system32 folder.

Now we have the downloader bit sorted, we can begin creating the script which will use it to download the product feed file and automatically upload it to your webspace.

Open up Notepad and enter this text, replacing the text in red with the right text for you.

download "http://URLOFPRODFUCTFEED" /notime /overwrite /output:"c:\program files\downloader\NAMEOFPRODUCTFEEDFILE.csv"
@echo off
echo open FTPSERVERNAME 21 > z
echo USERNAME>> z
echo PASSWORD>> z
echo BINARY >> z
echo cd data >> z
echo put "c:\program files\downloader\NAMEOFPRODUCTFEEDFILE.csv" >> z
echo quit >> z
ftp -i -s:z
cls
exit

You will notice that I have the line "echo cd data >> z". That is basically navigating into a directory called data in my webspace , which is where I want to upload the file to. If you put your file in the root of the webspace, you don't need that line. If you put it in a directory of another name, you would need to change it. Sometimes it's useful to fo through the steps manually from the command line using FTP just to make sure you have it all down right.

Using the File->Save As menu in notepad, save this file with the filename of something like "uploadfeed.bat" and change the "save as file type drop down from text files to "All Files" - that's quite an important bit, otherwise it will just save your script as a text file that doesn't execute when you double click it.

With that all done, you should be able to double click the saved file and watch it execute the successful download and upload of your product feed.

To automate this process, you need to look at creating a scheduled task, which you setup using the wizard in Control Panel, which has been renamed Task Scheduler in Vista. Here's a Microsoft guide to creating a scheduled task.

Usual disclaimers apply with all this: use at your own risk, and remember to test the site after to make sure the feed has successfully gone up. Sometimes people make unnannounced changes to feed formats so you can't completely forget it and still need to check your sites occasionally.

Since I started using this method, it's been a great relief to know my sites are now being updated regularly with no input from me and I wish I had bothered to learn this years ago. There might well be better ways to do all this though, so if you know one, please share in the comments..

When I used to work in IT support at large organisations, I had the occasional thought about how brilliant it would be if I could sneak an affiliate link on to the thousands of desktop computers used through out the company.

Toshiba, it seems, has had the same bright idea. I was helping a friend set up a new Toshiba laptop which I noticed two rather pretty preinstalled shortcuts on the desktop. One to Amazon.co.uk and one to eBay.co.uk. When I took a closer look, it was apparent that both these links were commission earning affiliate links. As well as these shortcuts, there was two sidebar gadgets for searching Amazon and eBay.

From Toshiba's point of view, I guess it's a smart move and reasonably logical. But from the point of view of independent publishers, it could be quite a blow if manufacturers make sure their affiliate links to the top online shopping destinations are prominently displayed as desktop icons and sidebar gadgets from the moment the PC is first switched on.

Does anyone else know if other manufacturers are doing the same? Do you think it's anything affiliates should be concerned about?

The official website of Number 10 Downing Street has been redesigned and relaunched as a Wordpress blog. The PM was once accused of being an "analog politician in a digital age" and he seems determined to combat that by embracing anything web 2.0. Number 10 already has channels on Youtube, Flickr and Twitter and its own website follows a familiar blog format, complete with social bookmarking buttons.

How long before Gordo tries to control spiralling Goverment borrowing by installing the Mighty Adsense plugin?