SURBER*US » internet

Affiliate programs

josh — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 14:25:32 +0000

In an effort to monetize my blog, I was recently looking at affiliate programs. In an affiliate program, I link to products, sites, or services that I like or think others would, and for every person who signs up or buys something at my recommendation, I get a cut of the profit.

Unfortunately, the two I was looking at don’t seem to want me.

I first looked into ThinkGeek’s. I love TG and have spent nearly half a grand with them over the past couple of years. However, I was formerly a member of their affiliate program (which is provided through Commission Junction) and had my account canceled because I went too long without a referral, losing the money I already had earned. Needless to say, I think this is bullshit enough, but I am also now barred from registering again using my same email address. So that one is out.

(Quick note: this is in no way the fault of ThinkGeek, and I continue to shop with them and will continue to recommend them for free. It would just be nice to be paid for it.)

I also tried to sign up as an Amazon affiliate. I first created an Amazon ID, as I have never shopped at Amazon. Then I tried to get my affiliate code, and found that I had to re-register. I tried to and could not use the same password as my normal Amazon ID. Since I use a password generator based on domain, I am not eager to remember a second password, or create a one-off sub-domain rule just for this site. Amazon lost an affiliate with this “security” decision, not to mention whatever I would have spent on my own.

If you are going to try to get your users to sign up other users, don’t make it a chore. You just might alienate your current user base, rather than expanding it.

Spam

josh — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 21:20:52 +0000

Every time I mention spam to Jennifer (my wife) in relation to her inbox, she says she doesn’t care about it, that it doesn’t bother her. She doesn’t even delete spam. What gets past GMail’s (excellent) spam filter just sits in her inbox, and some of it, I am sure, has been there since she opened her account.

The other day, I was reading about 419 scams. You know, those Nigerian
“I have some money I need to get out of the country so if you give me your bank account number I will put it in your account and you can keep some” emails. I read that the basic premise behind the scam existed in the sixteenth century, and went to tell my wife this. I was halfway through explaining what a Nigerian 419 scam was when she interrupted me and told me, “Those are real, you know”.

Since Jennifer is by no means stupid or entirely new to the internet, I will assume that there are other people out there who believe that these are real too. So, as a public service announcement, here is a list of things to keep in mind when you check your email.

No one wants you to help them smuggle money out of their country. They want to smuggle money out of your bank account.
You didn’t win a lottery. Especially if you didn’t enter.
Your bank/eBay/PayPal is not about to update it’s records and delete your account.
If you can’t get it up, see a doctor. Get real Viagra rather than /|4grA. It is safer and LEGAL. (Is that hard-on worth prison time?)
Never enter a password or credit card number in an email, or a page an email takes you to. If you really believe that email is from Paypal, go to http://www.paypal.com (type it in, don’t follow a link) and see what is up.
And NEVER click the “unsubscribe” link in a spam you didn’t request. This just shows your address works and makes them send you more spam.

Spammers are bastards, but the people who keep them in business aren’t much better.

Google Homepage with Tabs!

josh — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 19:16:00 +0000

A while back there was a “rumor” circulated via digg that Google Personalized Homepage was going to be offering tabs soon. I just refreshed my page and saw this!

There was a tab (in Google blue, naturally) marked “Home” with a link marked “Add a tab”. Unfortunately, I didn’t grab a screenshot before I tried to add one, which just reloaded my page and the whole thing went away. I have been wanting this for a while now, and am glad that it is coming soon.

Edit

Just came back. Here are screenshots.

If you don’t have this and I am a lucky beta tester, just so everyone knows, the modules can be drag ‘n’ dropped onto tabs. Much nicer than existing hacks.

Home Depot, Camino

josh — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 06:39:00 +0000

Well, it turns out that the Amish store doesn’t need me more than once a week or so, so I got me a full time job at Home Depot. I make the same, but also get some bad-ass benefits. The one I am the most excited about is the 401k, where for every dollar I invest in company stock, they put in $1.50 for me. It will be kind of nice having stock.

In addition the insurance will cover my new wife, and I like being able to take care of my family. Jennifer goes to the hospital fairly frequently, and that will help. She actually went the day before Thanksgiving for a headache she had for a month or so. They did a CAT scan and everything, and she didn’t have a tumor or anything. They think it was just tension or a migraine.

I am now using Camino. I know I said I would use it a while back, but I took a while to find a set of add-ons that make Camino compare to Safari with Saft and PithHelmet. But after I found some of the tools listed over at Pimp My Camino, I found I liked it better, especially when combined with Privoxy, which I would recommend everyone use no matter what browser they run.

IM Smarter

josh — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 05:16:00 +0000

IM Smarter is a program that does several tiny jobs so seamlessly that it should be in everyone’s software arsenal.

Edit: the service has now shut down. Bummer

One application that I rarely use, but still couldn’t live without, is IM Smarter. IM Smarter is not an actual application that you download, but a combination of a AOL Instant Messenger”>AIM proxy and a web app. After a simple (free) signup, you point whatever IM application you use (I use iChat) to connect through the IM Smarter proxy (they have simple instructions) and then go on about your normal business.

However, when you are trying to remember some conversation that you had with someone and can’t turn to your logs (maybe you don’t keep them, or they are on a different computer, or you just reinstalled everything and forgot to back them up… whatever) just to to http://www.imsmarter.com and login. There is the full text of all your logs, with a search engine to help find whatever you were looking for!

Need to jot down a quick note or reminder that seems like too small a job for a full word-processor or calendar program? Just send a message to the IM Smarter bot. Your notes are available from the website or your AIM application; reminders will pop up a IM from the bot when the time is right.

Blog? You can post to LiveJournal and Xanga through your IM window. If you don’t have a blog yet, IM Smarter provides you one.

I am sure that there are even more features than I know about, but just off these couple your IM app will become the most versatile piece of software you own shy of your browser, and since it’s free, why not give it a try?

Going offline

josh — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 06:01:00 +0000

Landon and Christina have decided that having cable internet isn’t worth $50 a month, and are having it shut off. They think that there “must be a cheaper way” to get online, but since we don’t have a phone dialup would come out to about the same per month anyway. Long story short, my internet is about to be turned off. This makes me sad.

Jennifer has a job interview tomorrow morning—if she gets it that will make life much easier. I had a prelimenary interview last night, so hopefully we will both have jobs soon.

gMail Invites

josh — Sun, 31 Oct 2004 06:41:00 +0000

I have 6 5 gMail invites to give out. Reply to this post (make sure that you leave a valid email address) and I will give you one. First come, first served.

The Joy of Tech

josh — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 15:55:00 +0000

I got my internet turned on a couple of days ago. Finally. It’s so fast, it’s beautiful. :::sniffle:::

Also got a wireless router. Of course I have a desktop and it is wired into the router, but hey, when I get a laptop it’ll be nice. And I’m sure if Christina ever manages to be at home and awake at the same time it’ll please her.

A customer gave me a 1871 indian head penny at work the other day. I can prolly sell it to a coin collector for a few hundred dollars.

Went to the dentist a week or two ago. One of my wisdom teeth is growing in crooked, and running into the molar next to it, causing the molar to decay. The dentist said that if I don’t get the wisdom tooth pulled within six months at the outside, I will prolly lose the molar. So, I’m just getting all four of the bloody things pulled sometime next month. And after that, I have a root canal to look forward too. Yay.

Ordered Panther off eBay the other day, so even though I can’t get my computer to run Linux, I will still be able to run it with a soft, nugouty POSIX-compliant core. Will be nice.

Man I’m a geek.

Testing Meme Propagation

josh — Mon, 02 Aug 2004 09:45:00 +0000

This posting is a community experiment started by Minding the Planet to see how a meme represented by a blog posting spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs are most influential in the propagation of memes. The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet; results and commentary will appear there in the future.

Please join the test by adding your blog (see instructions, below) and inviting your friends to participate – the more the better. The data from this test will be public and open; others may use it to visualize and study the connectedness of blogspace and the propagation of memes across blogs.

The GUID for this experiment is: as098398298250swg9e98929872525389t9987898tq98wteqtgaq62010920352598gawstw98qwrt189849813907azq4 (this GUID enables anyone to easily search Google for all results of this experiment). Anyone is free to analyze the data of this experiment. Please publicize your analysis of the data, and/or any comments by adding comments onto the original post at Minding the Planet ; Note: it would be interesting to see a geographic map or a temporal animation, as well as a social network map of the propagation of this meme.

Instructions

To add your blog to this experiment, copy this entire posting to your blog, and fill out the info below, substituting your own information in your posting, where appropriate.

Required Fields

(Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers)

I found this experiment at URL: http://kalsey.com/blog/
I found it via “Newsreader Software” or “Browsing or Searching the Web” or “An E-Mail Message”: Newsreader Software
I posted this experiment at URL: http://joshie.surber.us/
I posted this on date (day, month, year): 02 August 2004
I posted this at time (24 hour time): 06:45:00
My posting location is (city, state, country): Haltom City, Texas, USA

Optional Survey Fields

(Replace the answers below with your own answers):

My blog is hosted by: Myself
My age is: 22
My gender is: Male
My occupation is: Gas station clerk
I use the following RSS/Atom reader software: Bloglines
I use the following software to post to my blog: TextPattern
I have been blogging since (day, month, year): 31 March 2001
My web browser is: iCab

Fun with "referer"

josh — Wed, 16 Jun 2004 09:40:00 +0000

In checking my site logs, I have found that most of the non-spider trafic lately has come from search engines, mostly looking for three things:

GeekHosting reviews

I don’t have any up, but if you are looking for my opinion: they rock. For what they charge I was almost expecting ads, but I actually get a cPanel interface, more email accounts than I know what to do with, PHP, Perl, and database usage, and assloads more. Fully recommended.

T-Mobile Pictures info

Don’t know much about it other than that I use it. Send your picture to phone number 222, and it appears at t-mobilepictures.com/yourusername (joshie in my case). The site uses CSS for presentation, which is good, but it is badly coded and had made the pix not show up in at least one browser I have used, which is bad. Still, it’s free with the phone service; what more do you want?

Amputee porn

My previous writting about amputee porn has apparently placed me prominently in search results. No amputee porn here. Go away, you fucking pervert.