The Google AdWords Keyword Tool is a great tool to help you identify popular keywords that can help with search engine optimization. However, it really only supplies insight into one component of the equation when it comes to driving traffic to your site: keyword demand. It lacks any information about what sort of supply there is fulfilling that demand. To help fill that void, I’ve developed the Keyword Tool Supercharger.

Supply and Demand

Fundamentally speaking, organic traffic from search engines comes as a result of two components: demand for certain keywords (people searching for things) and supply of information (webpage providing content that matches those keywords). Of course, it’s not entirely that simple, but at a very high-level that’s how it works. The AdWords Keyword Tool does help to inform you keywords people are looking for, but it says nothing of how many webpages there are providing information on those keywords. That’s where my Keyword Tool Supercharger can help.
Image Credit: SilverStar

How the Keyword Tool Supercharger Works

To find the competition data, my tool takes advantage of the Bing API to bring in preliminary numbers for the competition data. It performs exact searches (by default) on each keyword. It will output the number of search results for each keyword according to Bing. It also breaks down monthly searches by average daily search, and then builds a supply/demand ratio based on the daily searches divided by the total number of results for the keyword.

The Bing data is far from perfect, but it at least provides a good first guess. To provide a better estimate, you will notice that the competition data is hyperlinked. Clicking on the hyperlink will then bring in the estimated number of search results for that keyword on Google. This should give a much better figure for the competition data and supply/demand ratio. The lower the ratio, the better the odds you’ll receive some organic traffic if you use those keywords on your page. The additional keyword analysis data is provided in three new columns in the display.
Image Credit: eugrafia

The Options

In addition to the new columns in the display, there are also new fields and buttons on the submission form. Here is a description of each of the new options:

• Desired Daily Volume: The number of daily searches for the keywords. Higher is better.
• Desired Competition: The number of websites containing the keywords. Lower is better.
• Desired Supply/Demand Ratio: The # of competing sites/# of daily searches. Lower is better, a ratio less than 1 is ideal.
• Required words (comma or space separated): Words/phrases you wish to see appear within the results. These need to be separated by commas. You can also prefix a word/phrase with a minus (-) to specify words you do not want to appear in the results.
• Exact search: Whether or not you want the competition data to be based on searches of the exact phrase (the keyword phrases are seached with quotes). By default, this is enabled.
• Filter on SEO Criteria: When you click this, only rows that match the criteria above will be displayed.
• Show All/Update Display: This will display all results (including those that do not match the criteria above).
• Reload Competition Data: This will reset and reload all of the competition data. This may be necessary if you’ve selected a new choice for the Exact search option.
• Get keyword ideas: Loads in the keyword data

Image Credit: Xander

How to Use It

To take advantage of the information provided by the tool, you should seek out keywords that are high in demand and low in supply (those with a low Supply/Demand ratio). You also want to be sure there is sufficient demand to drive traffic to your site. Once you’ve identified keywords that meet this criteria, sprinkle them throughout your site and use them in page titles and headings as well. There are two ways you can use my free keyword tool supercharger.
Image Credit: STyx

Chrome Extension

The easier way, is to install the Google Chrome extension. Simply click the link below to install it, and then visit the AdWords Keyword Tool page.

Keyword Tool Supercharger Chrome Extension

Bookmarklet

If you don’t have Google Chrome, I still have a solution for you. Drag the bookmarklet below to your browser’s bookmarks bar.

KWT Supercharger

When you visit the AdWords Keyword Tool page, click the bookmarklet. This will load in the JavaScript file that performs the manipulations on the page to display the additional keyword analysis. It should work in Internet Explorer and Firefox. Your mileage may vary with other browsers.

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Last month we saw a new Google URL shortening service that will be used for Feedburner and the Google Toolbar. It wasn’t long before the URL shortening code in the toolbar was dissected, and subsequent APIs developed. I managed to put together my own by using YQL.

YQL is a truly amazing web API.  With its server-side JavaScript and the ability to quickly scour the web for information, there is very little it cannot do.  I decided it was the perfect platform for putting together a simple API for goo.gl.

Because the Google Toolbar was already written in JavaScript, implementing it in YQL was quite easy with the server-side JavaScript. It wasn’t long, before I put together my own open data table for goo.gl.

I submitted my open table to the git repository for open data tables, and shortly after my goo.gl open data table was included. It’s really pretty simple. The YQL you would use to get the short URL for my blog would be:

SELECT * FROM google.goo.gl WHERE url="http://geeklad.com"

The great thing about YQL is that you can obtain the data as XML or JSON, and specify a JSON callback function. So that means it’s very easy to use in JavaScript and develop cross-domain JavaScript. I put together a simple bookmarklet that uses my public YQL table and provides a goo.gl URL for the current page. To try it out, just drag and drop the link below to your browser’s shortcut bar:

goo.gl page

Here’s the JavaScript code from the bookmarklet:

var YQL_url='https://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?format=json&env=store://datatables.org/alltableswithkeys&q=';
var YQL_statement='SELECT * FROM google.goo.gl WHERE url=\''+document.location.href+'\'';
var YQL_script_url=YQL_url+encodeURIComponent(YQL_statement)+'&callback=yql_cb';
function yql_cb(response){
	short_url=response.query.results.result;
	prompt('Here is your short URL (be sure to copy to your clipboard): ', short_url);
}
var yql_script=document.createElement('script');
yql_script.src=YQL_script_url;
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(yql_script);

Pretty simple. Basically it works by putting together the YQL statement w/ the URL of the current page, builds the proper YQL API URL for it, and finally inserts a JavaScript script with the call to the callback function that displays the URL of the current page in a prompt. You’ll have to manually copy it to your clipboard. Enjoy!

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I found this excerpt from Yahoo! Finance particularly amusing. Apparently, Obama wants local lenders to help businesses seize.

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Google has been very busy lately with many new products recently. Many of them, such as Google Public DNS, Google Chrome OS, and real-time search have received the lion’s share of publicity. I’d like to talk about a little jewel sitting in Google Labs you may not heard of. It’s a shiny little jewel that could become a real game changer and not many people are talking about it yet: Google Fusion Tables.

Google Fusion Tables is a web application that allows you to import, manipulate, and generate reports from large data sets. It is designed to handle much more data than you can put into Google Spreadsheets or versions of Excel earlier than Excel 2007. Some time ago, I started fooling around with it and I managed to import a relatively large data set with nearly 150,000 records without any issues whatsoever. The interface also provides some nice ways to visualize the data.

In addition to providing some nifty visualizations, there are also many data tables that have been published for public use. For example, the 2010 Quality of Life Index:

So why do I think this could be a game changer? Yesterday, the Google Code Blog announced the Fusion Tables API. With the API it is no longer necessary to use the Fusion Tables web interface to upload, manipulate, and visualize data. Now it can be done programatically, and Fusion Tables can be used to store large data sets in the cloud. The data can be extracted using SQL, which is the gold standard for handling the data stored within databases.

Not long ago, Jesse Stay wrote about the building block web. The Fusion Tables API is a perfect example of a new set of blocks that will integrate very well (and easily) with the building block web. Persistent data storage is an essential component for the building block web, and that is just what Fusion Tables provides.

Of course, it doesn’t come without its limitations. According to the Google Fusion Tables API developer’s guide, the API can send a maximum of 5 requests per second to the Fusion Tables server. Hopefully Google will lift that constraint or increase it at some point. 5 requests per second won’t be enough for the enterprise applications that could potentially be built on top of Fusion Tables.

If you’re a PHP programmer, here’s some PHP code I’ve put together to help get you started:

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If you’re a geek like me, you may on occasion have run into a situation where you had a file that you needed to convert to exe. I had read a few forum posts and tutorials on how to do this with self-extracting installers, and I even managed to do it with a 7-zip tool called 7zSD. It then dawned on me that I could use 7zSD and some VBScript to create a tool to automate it. Thus, my Convert to EXE tool was born.

Initially, I wanted just to convert a VBScript into an executable file. The reason I wanted to do this was to add a Java application to geek.menu (a fork of the PortableApps.com Suite). I then realized that it might be useful to expand the tool to convert batch files to exe, or any other kind of file for that matter. So I did just that.

Download Convert to EXE

Usage

It’s pretty stupid-simple to use. Just launch the exe, navigate to the file you want to convert to an EXE and select it.

The tool will create an exe file in the same directory where the file you are converting to exe is located.

If you are converting a batch file to exe (or some other console program), you’ll be pleased to know that the exe file the tool generates never displays the command line window. There is one command line parameter you can use when launching converttoexe.exe: /launch

/launch allows you to just specify a command you want to place into an exe. First, run converttoexe.exe /launch (you can do this from the Run… command in your Windows Start menu). It will first prompt you for the command you want to run. Be sure to place quotes if the filename and/or path contains spaces, so that it will launch properly.

After you provide the command, you’ll be prompted for the name and location of the exe file it will create. Navigate to where you want to save the new exe and click Open. The new exe will be saved there with the name you selected.

The /launch feature is good to use if you have a program that needs to be launched with specific command line parameters. A good example is if you have a java application or something, where it needs to be launched with javaw.exe and then a bunch of parameters after it.

The PortableApps.com suite and geek.menu only recognize exe files for the launch menu. This makes Convert to EXE ideal for placing Java applications into them. Even better is the fact that they are launched without ever displaying the command window. It is one of the easier and elegant solutions you’ll find for adding a Java application to the PortableApps.com suite.

Changing the Icon of the EXE File

If you want to change the icon of the output exe file, you can use a nice little tool called Resource Hacker. Just open the exe in resource hacker, and navigate to Icon Group > 101 > 0.

Then Action > Replace Icon ….

Click Open file with new icon…, navigate to the location with the icon and click Open. Click the Replace button. Finally, click File > Save. This is exactly what I did to change the icon for converttoexe.exe.

Technical Details and Source Code

I built the application in very much the same way in which it builds other exe files. There is a main VBScript (converttoexe.vbs) and a partial script used as a wrapper (wrapper.vbs) to execute the desired file. Essentially what the tool does is create a self-extracting 7-zip archive, and uses some VBScript as a wrapper to launch the file. It does nothing more than create a self-extracting archive that launches the file that is compressed into it.

If you’re interested in looking at the code and modifying it, I’ve made it available as well (under the GPL):

Download the Convert to EXE Source Code

To “compile” it, just run build.bat. It doesn’t really compile anything, it just builds a self-extracting archive containing several files:

• converttoexe.vbs: This is the file containing most of the VBScript code to generate the exe files
• wrapper.vbs: This is a partial VBScript file that is used to launch the file being “converted” to an exe
• wrapper.txt: This is the self-extracting archive configuration file for the exes that will be converted
• 7z.exe: The 7-zip archiving program
• 7zsd.sfx: The 7-zip self-extracting builder

The build.bat file is pretty straight forward and easy to follow. It creates a 7-zip archive file called converttoexe.7z that contains all the files that are necessary to build other exe files. The only line that looks a little weird is the line that actually builds the exe:

copy /y /b 7zsd.sfx + build.txt + converttoexe.7z converttoexe.exe

It combines the 7zsd.sfx file, build.txt file (the configuration file for the self-extracting archive), and the converttoexe.7z archive that contains all the magic necessary to build other exe files. Feel free to let me know if you make any modifications/enhancements to the scripts. I can update the downloads here.

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Last week, Techcrunch reported rumors of the release of the Google Chrome OS. They stated that the info came from a reliable source, and indeed that source was reliable. Google had an event at their headquarters, and indeed provided new details and a demo of the Chrome OS. The Chromium Blog has some great videos that provide some additional information about Chrome OS as well.

The Chromium OS source code is available for download (Chromium OS is the open-source version of Google Chrome OS), and you can compile and build it. It took some time, but I did manage to do this on my 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) machine. I also managed to put together a VirtualBox virtual appliance that is all ready to go. I built a torrent for it, so feel free to download it here:

Download the Chromium OS VirtualBox Appliance Torrent

Please continue to seed, as I’m sure there will be many people out there wanting to try it out.

To use it, just start up VirtualBox, click File and then Import. Navigate to the chromiumos.ovf file and select it. The virtual appliance will be imported into VirtualBox and you should be good to go.

I also included a txt file that more or less has the commands I used to build it. You may be able to run it as a script, although I haven’t confirmed that it will work. I guess you could say I more or less took “script-like notes” as I was building Chromium OS.

If you hit Ctrl+Alt+T when you first log in, you’ll get a shell prompt. You can run “sudo su” (no quotes) to log in as root, and I’ve set the password to “password” (no quotes). If you use this machine for anything serious (although I doubt you would), be sure to change the password.

You should be running VirtualBox 3.0.12, and when you import the virtual appliance everything should be configured properly. If you get an error that says “network not connected and offline login fail” when you try to log in, be sure that the virtual network adapter is set to Intel Pro/1000 MT Desktop (82540EM).

If the network adapter is already properly configured but you are still seeing the error, try logging in with the user “chronos” with the password “password” (no quotes). This should log you in and bring up the chrome browser window. If you don’t see a Google Accounts login screen, try hitting the refresh button. That should bring up the Google Accounts login screen.

It is absolutely astounding how fast it boots. It really is nearly instant-on and takes a mere few seconds to bring up the login screen.

Once you log in with your Gmail account, it launches and you’ll see the Chromium interface open up to your Gmail. There is also a Google Calendar tab and a New Tab tab. The little chrome sphere appears in the upper left corner, but when you click on it you don’t get a menu as you see in some of the Chrome OS videos. Instead, you get a Google.com account login page.

As you can see, it looks very much like the Chrome OS screenshots that had surfaced last month. Of course, being that this is running on a virtual machine without any decent video drivers on the operating system, the resolution is quite low (800×600). Your dear old granddad may be the only one that actually finds it visually appealing at this resolution.

Right now the most impressive thing is how fast this operating system loads. Of course, it should load fast because there really is hardly anything there. In any case, it is rather neat to see an early release in action. The fact that it actually works on a virtual machine is quite promising. Eventually as drivers for more hardware are incorporated into it, it should be possible to run it your own real hardware.

I also found a VMWare virtual disk image on a Google Wave about the Chrome OS. You can download it here:

As of now, the link to the VMWare disk image is valid and the download works.

Update: I just went into the Chrome OS Wave I found with the link to the VMWare disk image, and apparently the poor guy that posted that file to Amazon Web Services ran up a $380 bill so he took the file down. Here’s the torrent of the same file posted up on Pirate Bay:

Download the Chromium OS VMWare Virtual Disk Image Torrent

However, I haven’t tried using it, so I can’t confirm that it will run on VMWare without issue. Enjoy your Google Chrome OS virtual machines!

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Earlier this year, I had posted a hack for making free phone calls with Google Voice, Gizmo, and Asterisk. Since then, Google closed the door on inbound SIP calls and thus the hack no longer works. Fortunately a new possibility has emerged that makes it possible once again.

Nerd Vittles has put together another great hack for making free calls with Google Voice and Asterisk: Orgasmatron V, Google Voice Edition. It makes use of an Asterisk Linux distribution called PBX in a Flash. After installing PBX in a Flash, you download and run the Orgasmatron V script, and you have a fully-functional Asterisk system ready to make free calls with Google Voice.

In his instructions, NerdUno recommends using IPkall or SIPgate for a ringback number that is necessary for Orgasmatron V to work. It is actually possible and relatively easy to also use Gizmo as the ringback number, which I will explain in this post. His directions for setting up Orgasmatron V are very detailed and relatively easy to follow, so I won’t repost them here. Just follow his directions up until the part for configuring Google Voice.

Setting Up Gizmo

First, you will want to create a Gizmo account. Once you create your Gizmo account, go to https://my.gizmo5.com and log in. Bring up the Call Forwarding tab in your account settings. Click on the Forwarding All Calls radio button under Status and click on the SIP radio button under Forward to. Set it up to forward to gv-incoming@x.x.x.x where x.x.x.x is the IP address of your Asterisk server.

Setting Up Google Voice

The next step, is to log into your Google Voice account. Log in and go to the Settings screen and click on Add another phone. Call it whatever you want, and enter in the 10 digit number. Be sure to select Gizmo as the phone type.

When You click Save, you will be prompted to verify the phone.  Download and install the Gizmo client and log into your account with the Gizmo client.  Click the Connect button on Google Voice to verify the Gizmo phone. When the Gizmo phone rings, answer and dial the two digit code.

Setting Up Asterisk

Once you’ve installed PBX in a Flash, installed Orgasmatron V, set up Gizmo, set up Google Voice, you’re ready to download and run the Google Voice configuration script for Orgasmatron.  Just log into your Asterisk box as root, and run the following commands at the command line:

	cd /root
	wget http://pbxinaflash.net/orgasmatron/configure-gv
	chmod +x configure-gv
	./configure-gv

Just follow the prompts and enter your Google Voice number (without the 1), your Google Account login credentials, and use your Gizmo number as the ringback number (be sure to include the 1 at the beginning).

Making Free Phone Calls

Once everything is all set up with Google Voice, Gizmo, and Asterisk, you’re ready to log into an extension with a soft phone and make free calls. I highly recommend downloading X-Lite, it is probably one of the best free softphones out there. Ekiga is another pretty decent soft phone you can use, if you don’t like X-Lite.

To make and receive calls, log into extension 701 with your softphone. Use 701 as the account username and the proper password (this would be the secret for extension 701 you selected when securing Orgasmatron as suggested on Nerd Vittles). The SIP server is of course the Asterisk box. Try making an outbound phone call. You should hear a lady say she is connecting your call, then some catchy music, and eventually a ringtone.

Some Additional Setup Tips

If you are unable to make or receive calls after you’ve set everything up, it may be that your server is sitting behind a router/firewall. For it to work properly, you will need to forward port 5060 to your Asterisk box. You may have to refer to the instructions for your particular router on how to do this.

You may also run into issues if your Asterisk box does not have a static IP address. If your IP address ever changes, you will need to update the new forwarding address within Gizmo. To avoid such problems, you may want to set up an account on DynDNS.

You can download a DynDNS update client that will automatically update your IP address with DynDNS. You could download inadyn for Linux and install it on your Asterisk box. Be sure to check out the inadyn instructions to set up. If you have a Windows or Mac box on the same network as your Asterisk machine, you could always download and install your client for that computer instead of the Asterisk box. Alternatively, you could just manually update your IP address on the DynDNS website.

Once you have DynDNS set up, go back to the Call Forwarding tab in your Gizmo settings and change the SIP call foward to gv-ringback@your_dyndns_account.dyndns.org (replacing your_dyndns_account.dyndns.org with the proper domain for your machine).

How Does it All Work?

Behind the scenes, the calls are made with a Python script for making Google Voice calls. Orgasmatron V does the magic of receiving the inbound call from Google voice into a call group and automatically connecting that call to your extension. This makes it all quite seamless to the end-user making the calls.

Stay Tuned

In an effort to further reduce the complexity of this solution, I’ve put together a VirtualBox appliance for Orgasmatron V. Although Orgasmatron V is by far the easiest solution for hooking up Google Voice to Asterisk, packaging it all together as a virtual appliance makes it a little bit easier and a lot quicker. I’ll be posting about that soon, so stay tuned!

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I was fortunate enough to receive an invitation into Google Wave shortly after the initial 100,000 invititations went out last month. Initially, I was a bit overwhelmed and did not really know where to begin or what to do. Bwana was kind enough to engage in a real-time wave with me, and show me around a bit. Afterwards, I began to see the potential. However, I think there are many reasons why Google Wave still is not ready for prime-time.

Lack of Access Control

Google Wave does not have any sort of access control for managing waves and wave participants:

• Anyone can be added to a wave by a participant in the wave.
• Any wave participant can add a bot to the wave (because bots are simply treated as participants).
• It is not possible to remove participants (except for bots) from a wave.
• Anyone can modify any part of the wave.

Here is what I think Google Wave needs to implement to resolve the access control issues:

• Allow the wave creator do add/remove any participant from a wave.
• Allow the wave creator to assign/modify the following permissions that can be set at the wave and participant level:
  • Permission to add bots to the wave.
  • Permission to invite other participants to the wave.
  • Permission to remove participants from the wave.
  • Read-only or read/write access to the wave.
  • Permission to grant/modify each (or all) permissions for other participants and/or the entire wave.

Without access control, things can quickly get out of hand if you are trying to work on a collaborative project that is only intended for certain people. Even if you do manage to maintain control as to who has access to a wave, you may only want to allow certain people permission to perform certain functions.

Image Credit: Brandon Lowery

Poor Contact Management

When you click on the Manage contacts link in Google Wave, you are taken to Google Contacts. Unfortunately there is hardly any correlation between what you see in your Google Contacts and what you see in your Google Wave contact list. Although everyone in your Google Wave contacts list has a @googlewave.com “address” (it is not an email address although it looks like one), within Google Contacts you’ll see no addresses with googlewave.com.

If you want to remove someone from your Google Wave contacts, you have to remove them from your Google Contacts. This may not be something you want to do, as you may wish to keep them in your Google Contacts and remove them from your Google Wave contacts or vice versa. Either Google Wave needs its own contact management, or Google Contacts needs to incorporate functionality for managing Google Wave contacts.

Image Credit: Hannes Grobe

Lack of Groups

If you deal with multiple groups of people when you communicate via email, mailing lists are absolutely essential. Google Wave has no way to group your contacts together to build the equivalent of mailing lists. Without such a function, you have to manually add each and every participant you want on a wave. Not only is this a major inconvenience, but you may omit someone that needs to be a wave participant or add someone that should not be a participant.

Google Wave needs to implement groups. Perhaps it can be incorporated as part of the improved contact management I’ve suggested, or implemented as a separate feature. Regardless, it should also become a part of access control. That way access control can be set and modified at a wave, group, and participant level.

Image Credit: lumaxart

Lack of “Legacy Support”

You cannot expect someone to abandon a very well-established legacy technology (email) without providing reverse compatibility and legacy support. The world cannot and will not just drop email in favor of Google Wave without an interim solution that supports both technologies. The fact that Google Wave addresses do have the same appearance as email addresses does seem to indicate there may be plans to allow Google Wave accounts to receive email.

It is very inconvenient having to check communications from multiple sources rather than having it all in one place. This is the reason why I have all my email forwarded to one single Gmail account. I also take advantage of the Gmail feature that allows you to send email from other accounts.

Google Wave needs to incorporate features to allow users to send and receive email if it is to receive the kind of wide-scale adoption Google seems to believe it is capable of achieving. If I could just forward all of my email to my Google Wave account, receive all my communication in one place, and send emails from Google Wave as well, I would seriously consider using solely Google Wave.

Image Credit: ePublicist

Lack of Revision Control

Revision control is absolutely essential for working in a collaborative environment. The need eventually arises where it is necessary to revert to a previous version of a document. Wikis provide this capability as do a variety of software development source control solutions. Google Wave needs revision control.

Google Wave does have something resembling revision control with the Playback functionality. However, you can only see the progression of a wave from start to finish, and you cannot revert to any of the frames in between. It would appear that some of the plumbing is already there for revision control, it just needs to be implemented.

I’ve seen many situations in public waves where revision control was needed. Sometimes someone unwittingly adds a bot that overwrites the initial blip, wiping away hours of hard work in the blink of an eye. Someone may also intentionally sabotage a wave, removing a lot of valid and important information that must subsequently be manually recovered or rewritten.

It would be best to have revision control in Google Wave at a blip level, rather than at a wave level. One may wish to revert to a previous version of a blip within a wave, without losing the changes that have taken place within other blips and the rest of the wave.

Image Credit: VisualPharm

Final Thoughts

Google Wave is a good tool for communication and collaboration. It has many impressive features and capabilities. However, as you can see by the headings in this article, the problem is that it is lacking many key features for wide-scale adoption. Given that the current Google Wave is just a preview, it is likely that these missing features and others will eventually make it into the final product.

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xdRequest is an open-source JavaScript library that I’ve developed for making cross-domain AJAX requests. In this day and age, with web browsers becoming very fast and powerful, it has become quite possible to build web applications with much of the work performed by the client. xdRequest makes it possible to easily pull data from other sources and manipulate it all on the client-side. With xdRequest, you will no longer need to perform data extractions/manipulations from other sources on a server. It can all happen right in the browser.

I had recently been fooling around quite a bit with YQL, which does provide some built-in features to make cross-domain http requests. It can be done with the html open data table. You can try it out from the YQL Console.  Just go to the data tables section on the right side and select Data > html. Unfortunately, the built-in html table is somewhat limited.  You can only make requests using the GET method, and it does not provide any mechanism for sending/receiving HTTP headers.

Someone in the YQL forums posted a YQL feature request to add POST and other HTTP request methods to the html table. Someone responded with the suggestion of building an open data table to do just that. I then started reading the open data table documentation, and came to realize that what you can do with YQL and open data tables is nothing short of astounding. You can use server-side JavaScript to request data from multiple sources and manipulate it in any way you see fit.

I started developing my own custom open data table for the particular project I was working on at the time, and eventually the project morphed into xdRequest. Because I needed to track cookies and redirects in my little project, I realized that it would be great to develop a generic library that could handle such requests. Eventually, I more or less abandoned the previous project to develop xdRequest. Here are some of the features, as highlighted on the project page:

• Make cross-domain requests using the GET and POST methods
• Add request headers along with the requests
• Automatically collect cookies sent by the remote web server
• Automatically follow redirects and collect cookies along the way
• Properly store/transmit cookies, much like the popular server-side library, cURL
• Automatically submits hidden fields detected within forms on webpages

I also put together a relatively simple xdRequest demo. It brings in data from espn.go.com. When the page loads, it makes an xdRequest to ESPN for the University of Florida Football schedule. I’m a die-hard Gator and UF alumnus, so that’s why I decided to start the demo with the UF football schedule. When you can click the hyperlinks in the demo, xdRequests are made to ESPN to load schedules for other teams, as well as the box scores for games. It’s a simple example, but the sky is the limit as to what you can do with xdRequest.

If you’re interested in learning more about the project, be sure to check out the xdRequest project page. If you’re a JavaScript geek and would like to join, just drop me a line and I’ll gladly add you to the project. I’m kind of a n00b when it comes to object-oriented programming with JavaScript, so I could definitely use some help to clean up the code, make enhancements, find bugs, and fix bugs. This is the first “official” Open Source project I’ve ever worked on, so I’m a n00b when it comes to working on OSS as well.

If you like xdRequest and build any cool web applications with it, let me know and I’ll link to it from the project page. If you have any feature suggestions or encounter any bugs, please report them in the xdRequest issue tracker.

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My good friend Bwana was kind enough to nominate me for Google Wave, and I finally received the invitation yesterday. With all the hype surrounding Google Wave, you may be surprised to learn that it still lacks one very simple piece of functionality that one might take for granted until it’s gone: Undo. There is no undo in Google Wave! Can you believe it?!?

I’m not sure how Google could forget to include undo. I suppose it happened the same way that Apple forgot to include copy/paste on the iPhone. So what does the lack of undo functionality say about the product? It must really suck if there’s not even an undo button or keyboard shortcut, right?

Google Wave is More than Just Advanced Email

I’ve seen some reviews and previews of Google Wave that describe it as the next logical step for email, and some even call it Email 2.0. However, advanced email is not what came to mind when I first started playing with Google Wave. Certainly you can use it as an advanced email replacement, but I think it is much more than that. If had to choose two words to describe it, I’d say it is more like a real-time wiki. Okay, so if you exclude the hyphen it’s actually three words, but who’s counting?

Bwana added me to a few public waves with tips and FAQs on using Google Wave. I made a few contributions to some of them, most notably my realization that there is no undo. Rather than explain how to undo something without undo functionality, here is a screenshot of the section I added to the Wave FAQ wave (sounds kinda funny when you say it that way):

Google Wave and Wiki Comparison

Here are the similarities between Google Wave and wikis:

• The content is editable by all members
• Discussions about the content take place
• The history of the wave can be reviewed
• Anyone can modify the wave
• Anyone can view the wave (if it is public)

Some of the differences:

• Wave discussions take place on the same page as the content. Wikis have a separate page for the discussion.
• You can see updates being made in real-time.
• You can see who is making those updates in real-time.
• When you close a wave or log out of wave, upon your return, you can see what updates have been made to the wave.
• You can add others to a wave. (I suppose you could email someone a wiki page, then they could view/modify it, but it much more seamless w/ Google Wave.)
• Discussions (i.e. blips) can appear anywhere within the wave.
• With Google Wave extensions, the sky is the limit as to what you can put in a wave. For example, there is a Google Wave gadget that allows you to embed HTML, which means you can embed streaming videos, entire webpages, web-applications, etc…

How Google Wave Works

Heres a quick and simple rundown on how it works:

• When a wave is created, the first “blip” is also created. The entire wave is nothing more than a collection of blips.
• Typically this first blip becomes the main part of the wave. It can and will become quite long and full of information.
• The discussion proceeds down below the first blip as more blips are added. You might consider this to be the discussion page behind a wiki page. It takes on the form of a threaded discussion, much like any other message board.
• You can also embed blips within other blips. So you can have discussions taking place at any point within the first blip, or any other blip for that matter.

What I’ve described here is what I’ve seen happen on a typical, well-organized public wave. I’m sure there are plenty of other waves out there that don’t fit this mold, and have all sorts of craziness happening. There’s nothing that says a wave must have a main blip at the top with discussion blips below it. Fundamentally speaking, a wave is just simply a collection of blips.

The ability to embed blips within blips and modify anything and everything is where the magic happens. Functionally speaking, theres no distinction between content and discussion, but somehow it does all manage to remain organized. It is organized chaos at its finest. It’s all pretty cool, and when you see it in action you really get a good feel for how it works and what it’s all about.

Why Didn’t Google Call it LiveWiki?

The irony I see with Google Wave is they did not put the word “wiki” in the name of the product. Google already has two products with the word wiki in them, SearchWiki and SideWiki. Neither of them is hardly like a wiki if you ask me (you can’t modify public content, only add it and modify your own), especially when you compare them to Google Wave. If any Google product ever deserved the word wiki attached to it, it is Google Wave. Perhaps they should have dubbed it LiveWiki.

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The web is abuzz about the 100,000 Google Wave invitations going out today. Be sure that the social networks are no exception. There are thousands of people on Twitter begging for Google Wave invitations, some of which are quite amusing. I’ve put together a list of my top 10 favorites Tweets.  Some are requests to perform amusing acts to obtain an invite.  Others are just witty commentary.  Enjoy!

toiletscribble: Someone…anyone…invite me to google wave and I will have your baby



paulgodfrey: I’ve got an extra kidney sitting around and one of you has an extra Google Wave invite, you can see where this is going… DM me.



trickjarrett: Dear Google Wave invite fairy, please come by and drop one off for me. I’ve been a very good boy this year.



Spinchange: I call bullshit on the google wave ‘rollout.’ If I request an invite in the spring and still don’t have one by the fall, that’s a crawl out



wawoodworth: If anyone has a Google Wave invite, I will bake you cookies and mail them to you. Wherever you are in the world. =D



Nycteris: Now it’s 2009 and I still don’t have a flying car… nor do I have a Google Wave invite!



DStuart: I already hate Google Wave and I haven’t even got an invite yet



SPoftheFakulty: Really needs a Google Wave invite! Kind people and A**holes alike, please bless me w/ one lol.



karlhodge: @danoliver If it helped me get a Google Wave invite, I’d buy @aho a wheelbarrow full of cookies. And when I say “buy” I mean “steal”.



rmtiwari: And just in case, if you got *my* google wave invite in *your* inbox, please re-direct.

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I had to screenshot this, because I’m sure Best Buy will fix it soon.  They have a 52″ Samsung for a mere $9.99!

Some of the reviews are rather amusing:

“overall sweet deal, it only costed me 9.99 per tv, that’s pretty dope, so I just bought 10 of em, only bad thing is that recycling fees are lame.”

What’s great about it: Costs only $9.99 apparently (no lie.. thats what it says at the time of this writing)

What’s not so great: $60.00 shipping ftl.

“When I first clicked the link going to this tv, I was doubtful that such a great deal existed. However, to my surprise, it was real. I proceeded to order 50 of these !

Great picture quality, great sound…

Then again, I’d be happy with an old CRT at that price!

Buy. It. Now.”

Then again, I’d be happy with an old CRT at that price!

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Dofollow vs. Nofollow

The majority of blogs implore the nofollow tag in their comments. That means that when you specify your website URL when leaving a comment, the link created does not help to elevate your website’s status in the algorithms search engines use. Although not really an “official” term, people often use dofollow to describe blogs that do not use the nofollow tag. In other words, comments left on these blogs do help to elevate your website’s status in search engines.

Automatic Dofollow Detection

I had made a few attempts in the past to try to automatically detect whether or not a blog was a dofollow blog or not, but had little success. I’m pleased to announce that my latest attempt has proven successful, and I’ve managed to put together some code that will automatically detect dofollow blogs. It works relatively well and I’ve used it to identify more than 2,000 dofollow blogs.

Unlike other custom dofollow blog search engines, mine uses an automated algorithm to identify dofollow blogs. Many of the other dofollow blog directories and dofollow search engines I’ve seen are manually created, and are often out-of-date and littered with nofollow blogs. I will update my search engine periodically, to ensure that it remains up-to-date.

For lack of a better name, I’ve dubbed it The Ultimate DoFollow Search Engine. The search is powered by a Google Custom Search Engine, but the back-end that builds the list of dofollow blogs uses code I put together myself. If you do use my search engine to post comments on dofollow blogs, please do so responsibly.

Commenting on DoFollow Blogs

Do not post comments along the lines of, “Nice site. I’ve subscribed to your feed.” Such comments are likely to be moderated and tossed away into a pile of useless nonsense posted by others seeking quick and easy backlinks. Such comments are pointless and do not contribute to enhancing the information provided within the article and subsequent discussion. Most dofollow blogs moderate their comments, so you will get nowhere fast posting comments like this.

I would recommend submitting a question to the author about the article. It will appeal to the author’s ego of being an expert on the topic discussed in the article, and it will not come across as a feeble attempt at creating a backlink to your site. Asking a thought-provoking question is a great way to solicit an engaging conversation from the author.

If you do happen to come across a nofollow blog when using the search engine, please let me know. I’m still fine-tuning the crawler and working on ways to improve it. Enjoy!

The Ultimate DoFollow Search Engine

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This post is probably as much for me as it is everyone else. I got sick of having to look up 3 or 4 different SSH keygen tutorials every time I needed to generate a private/public SSH key pair, so I thought I’d write up my own. Here’s how to make your own SSH keys at a shell prompt (i.e. Linux):

That’s all there is to it! Please be sure to keep the id_rsa file safe, and don’t ever share it with anyone unless you want them to log into the account. You should protect the private keyfile in the same manner you would protect any password.

You may get an error on the client machine that says Could not open a connection to your authentication agent. If you see this message, run the following command:

exec ssh-agent bash


That will start the ssh agent and allow you to connect to it so that you can add the new key.

Alternate Step 2 for Windows Clients

If your client is a Windows machine, you’re probably using PuTTY to connect to the host. If that is the case, step 2 will be different for you and you’ll want to use PuTTYgen to import the key.

Just launch PuTTYgen, click Conversions and then Import key.

Then click Save private key and you’re done!

Connecting to an SSH Host with PuTTY

You should be able to use the key to connect to the host from PuTTY. Just start up PuTTY, load your saved session or enter the host info, go to Connection > SSH > Auth and browse to the private key (.ppk file) you just saved.

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There have long been rumors of a Google Operating system. Last night those rumors were finally laid to rest with the announcement that a new Google operating system is in the works.

If you ask me, the Google Chrome OS will really be nothing more than a Linux distribution. It will use the Linux kernel along with a “new windowing system” Google has developed. I suspect it is really just a new window manager that sits on top of the X.org server or XFree86 (X.org would be my guess).

The Chrome browser will play a large part of the windowing system (the OS is actually called the Google Chrome OS). It seems that Google wants to further close the gap between the desktop and the web, and the applications for the operating system will be based on web technologies. I’m fairly certain that Google Gears will also play a significant role in the OS, in order to make applications available offline as well as online.

So what does this mean for Microsoft? Well, Microsoft has already announced what seems to me to be a similar product, that Ballmer refered to as Windows Cloud. Google’s announcement may help to push Microsoft to release Windows Cloud a bit sooner than expected, depending on how well the Google Chrome OS is received.

I doubt that there will really be widespread adoption of the Google OS when it is released. It probably will not be capable of running Windows applications right out of the box, unless Google includes Wine along with it. It is difficult for people to completely abandon a platform they have been using for over 10 years, without having backward compatability to it. Backward compatability has been both a blessing and a curse for Microsoft, as they have released new versions of Windows.

Windows vs. OS X is a good case in point, when it comes to adopting a new operating system. OS X is a great product, but still has a long way to go before it takes considerable market share from Windows. Plus, OS X has the advantage of products that DO provide backward compatability with Windows, yet it probably has not achieved the market penetration Apple desires.

There is one major thing in Google’s favor that Apple does not have. The Google OS will be free. I think one obstacle for Apple to further increase their market share is that the OS is bound to very expensive (and pretty) hardware. Google will have no such obstacle since their OS will be free and open source.

I for one am looking forward to the release of Google Chrome OS. I enjoy tinkering with Linux and other free operating systems. I will be most interested to see if I actually would be able to use it as a replacement to my desktop OS.

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I almost bought an XBox 360 at Walmart this weekend, but a friend convinced me not to. The reason being is that Dell sells them and they often have coupons. I scoured the ‘Net yesterday for the best XBox 360 deal and finally found it. Indeed it was with Dell.

With the Dell coupon code: 65G7RQ11J?M2LH you get 15% off of electronics and accessories, and of course that also includes XBox 360 consoles. The coupon code expires on 7/31/09, so you have until the end of the month to use it.

Plus, Dell also currently has free shipping on orders over $129, and all of the console orders above apply. The only additional charge applied will be tax. If you’re concerned about the XBox 360 price drop rumors, taking advantage of this deal will help insulate you a bit from any impending price drop.

I placed my order yesterday and the free shipping was supposed to be a 3-5 day delivery. Much to my delight, my wife informed me that the package arrived today! You gotta love UPS!

Yes, I know what you’re thinking and you’re right. I was indeed the only geek on the planet without an XBox 360. But no more!

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Do you want to download a flash video? Are you having trouble finding a good program or plugin to rip flash videos? Do you want to know how to download flash video from any website? You’ve come to the right place.

There are lots of programs and browser plugins that help you to download flash videos from websites. The problem is that they all seem to only allow you to do it from select sites. I found a relatively simple way to do it with Firefox and Firebug.

Firebug is a great Firefox plugin for website development and debugging. I don’t know how I would ever get along without it. Don’t bother looking for the “flash video download” feature in Firebug, because it does not exist. You’ll have to do a little bit of manual work to do it, but using Firebug to download flash video from any website is relatively easy.

If you don’t have Firefox, download it. Then download Firebug. Next, open up Firefox and browse to the page with the flash video you want to download. Click on the little Firebug icon in the browser status bar at the bottom of the Firefox window.

Click on the Net tab in Firebug and then select Enabled.

If the video fully loaded into the page when you last opened it, it is likely the entire movie is in your browser’s cache.  That means that when we monitor the net connection, we won’t see it load the video.  You will need to go and clear you’re browser’s cache.  If you’re using Firefox 3.5 on Windows, click Tools > Clear Recent History.  Click the Details button and make sure the Cache checkbox is selected.  Then press Clear Now.

Now you’re ready to find the location of the flash file.  Click the refresh button in Firefox and allow the page to reload.  The Firebug Net panel will display all of the HTTP requests being made along with statistics for each request as the page loads.  There are a few things you can look for to identify the video file:

• .FLV file extension on the file being loaded
• Very large file size
• Very long gray bar on the load time

Here is an example of what the Net panel looks like for a video page on The Onion:

Once you’ve identified which one of the requests is for the video file, right-click on it and then left click on Open in New Tab.

There’s another nifty trick you can you can use if the video has not fully loaded in the player. First, click the clear button in the Firebug panel to remove all the requests. Then click on the player video navigation bar (if there is one) to fast forward to somewhere else within the video.

This will generate a new request for the video file, which in turn adds just a single line for the video file in the Firebug panel. This makes it very easy to find the video file. You’ll then want to click back at the start of the video file, to make sure you get the link to download the entire file. Select the last file request, otherwise, you will end up downloading it from the point to which you fast forwarded.

When the new tab opens, Firefox will ask you what to do with it. Just save the file somewhere where you will remember you put it.  That’s all there is to downloading flash video with Firefox and Firebug!

Of course this begs the question, “What do I do with the movie now that I’ve downloaded it?” Well, if you want to watch it, you’ll need a player that can read it. I suggest you download the VLC player. VLC is a great open-source multi-platform video player (available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux).

I really like it because it includes all the codecs you will probably ever need for playing videos, so there’s no having to constantly add codecs to it all the time. You can even use it to convert videos for your iPod, although I tried this some time ago with limited success (it may work better with the latest version).

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Given that I recently had some success with my free eBay Store, I decided it would be a good idea to put together a similar WordPress plugin for Amazon.com. I’m pleased to present the Amazon Niche Store plugin. So why should you consider building a niche store with Amazon instead of eBay?

I believe that my Amazon Niche Store plugin has the potential to make more money than my free eBay Store (or BANS, phpbay, and the like) for a few reasons:

• If you sell eBay products, those that bid through your blog need to have the winning bid for you to get paid.  With the Amazon Niche Store, you are awarded the commissions as soon as they buy the product.  You don’t have to worry about them winning a bid for you to get paid.
• If the items you sell are more than $75 or so in value, you will receive higher commissions selling them on Amazon than you would on eBay.  Amazon pays a flat minimum of 4% on the sale price, whereas eBay pays on a minimum of 50% on the fees collected for the listing.
  

  Example
  	Sale Price	Commissions
  eBay	$150	50% of $8.57 ($2.00 listing fee + $6.57 sale fee)	=	$4.28
  Amazon	$150	4% of $150 sale price	=	$6.00

• You can sell digital products on Amazon (downloadable music, video games, videos, books, etc.) and receive 10% commission on those sales.

You can display an Amazon Niche Store within posts, pages, as a widget, or any combination of the three.  For example, if you have a video game blog, you may want to display a post or page with Wii products.  You could use the following short code:

[amazon trackingid="yourtrackingid" keywords="wii" rows="3" columns="2"]

And here is what the store would look like:

Wii by Nintendo $199.99 › View Details	Wii Nunchuk Controller - White by Nintendo $19.99 $17.99 › View Details
Wii Sports Resort by Nintendo $49.99 $46.99 › View Details	Wii Fit Plus with Balance Board by Nintendo $99.99 › View Details
Wii Play with Wii Remote by Nintendo $49.99 $44.99 › View Details	Wii MotionPlus by Nintendo $19.99 $17.96 › View Details

Powered By the Amazon Niche Store and Tarzan
Amazon and the Amazon logo are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates

There are two conditions you should be aware of when using the plugin:

• The store displays a link back to this page.  This helps to spread the word about this great plugin so that others can take advantage of it.
• Your tracking ID is used 90% of the time, and the other 10% my tracking ID is used.  This will allow me to be compensated for my efforts, and help me spend more time making even more great plugins.

These conditions are subject to change at any time. By downloading, installing, and activating the plugin you agree to these terms. If you do not agree to these conditions then do not use this plugin.

To get started, you will first need to sign up as an Amazon affiliate (this absolutely free).  Once you’ve signed up or if you’re already signed up, create a new tracking ID to use with your Amazon Niche Store.  Then download, install, and activate the plugin.

Download the Plugin

Once installed and activated, write up a post or page where you wish to display an Amazon Niche Store.  Use the following shortcode (put it all on one line):

[amazon trackingid="YourTrackingID" keywords="Product Keywords" rows="RowCount" columns="ColumnCount" pagination="yes" logo="white" customcss="someuniqueidentifier"]

trackingid and keywords are required parameters. Use spaces between the keywords. columns and rows are optional, and the store plugin will default to 2 columns x 5 rows (10 items in total). The product display on a single page is limited to 30 products (and 50 products in total, if pagination is used).

The pagination, logo, and customcss parameters are also optional. The pagination parameter will allow the display of multiple pages of products when set to yes. You can see this demonstrated on my Amazon Niche Store demo page. You can set the logo parameter to white, black, or none to customize the display of the Amazon logo.

The customcss parameter allows you to customize the look and feel of your store.  By default, the product display mimics that of Amazon.com.  The product display uses custom css classes, and the customcss parameter you specify will be added to the custom class names.  For example, if you set customcss=”mycustomcss”, you can specify the CSS for the following classes:

• amazon-store-mycustomcss : This is the style for div that encloses the entire store
• amazon-store-mycustomcss-title : This is the style for the title
• amazon-store-mycustomcss-manufacturer : This is the style for the manufacturer
• amazon-store-mycustomcss-price : This is the style for the price
• amazon-store-mycustomcss-view-details : This is the style for the view details link
• amazon-store-mycustomcss-footer : This is the style for the footer displayed at the bottom of the store

The display of a store as a widget makes use of this feature, and the customcss parameter is set to sidebar.  So you will need to specify the CSS for amazon-store-sidebar, amazon-store-sidebar-title, amazon-store-sidebar-manufacturer, amazon-store-sidebar-price, amazon-store-sidebar-view-details, and amazon-store-sidebar-footer to customize the look and feel of the widget. The default css customizations for the widget are very similar to those for a regular store, but they have been tweaked a bit so that they will probably look a bit better for sidebar displays.

You can also set customcss=”none”.  This will prevent the customized CSS from being displayed inline on the web page.  If you’re displaying multiple stores on the same page, I would recommend you set customcss=”none” on all but one of the stores, to prevent repetitive CSS declarations.

If you set customcss=”none” you can specify the css for amazon-store, amazon-store-title, amazon-store-manufacturer, amazon-store-price, amazon-store-view-details, amazon-store-footer yourself.  You can also not specify them at all, in which case the store will take on the style of your blog.

Much of the plugin code for this plugin is based on the code I used for my Free eBay Store. The server-side code was a bit different since Amazon has their own API for retrieving product information. However, I did manage to find a great PHP library for Amazon called Tarzan.

Tarzan definitely helped to reduce the amount of time it took to develop the plugin. My favorite feature of Tarzan is the ability to make parallel requests to Amazon. If you are interested in developing your own Amazon applications in PHP, I highly recommend taking a look at the Tarzan library.

Good luck with your own Amazon Niche Store and happy affiliating! If you have any suggestions for the plugin or encounter any bugs, please feel free to comment on this post.

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I recently learned about Market Leverage from a friend, who has done reasonably well with their affiliate program. I decided to join, and upon joining decided to put together a WordPress plugin to help manage and rotate campaign banners. And thus the Affiliate Manager plugin was born.

Market Leverage offers many different products, for which you can display advertisements on your blog. When people click on the links and order the products, you receive a commission. These transactions are referred to as CPA (Cost per Action). If the products are relevant to the information on your blog, such programs can be even more profitable than CPC (Cost per Click) advertising, such as AdWords.

To install the Affiliate Manager plugin:

• Join Market Leverage if you are not already a member.
• Download the Affiliate Manager Plugin, install, and activate it.
• Go to the Affiliate Manager options page under Tools, in the WordPress adminstration.
• Enter your Market Leverage email and password.



• Add new keywords to import ads that are relevant to your blog.



• You can either display ads by placing PHP code within your template, using widgets, or both.

There are three functions you can use for displaying ads in your template.

affiliate_manager_random_banner(size)

This function will display a banner for any keyword of the appropriate size. Just replace size with the size you wish to display in quotes. Example:
<?php affiliate_manager_random_banner("120x600"); ?>

affiliate_manager_by_keyword(keyword, size)

This function will display a banner for a specified keyword of the appropriate size. Replace keyword with the keyword for the banner, and replace size with the size you wish to display. Both parameters should be in quotes. Example:
<?php affiliate_manager_by_keyword("mortgage", "120x600"); ?>

affiliate_manager_displayAd(id)

This function will display a specific banner, according to the ad ID. Replace id with the id of the banner. This parameter should not be in quotes. Example:
<?php affiliate_manager_displayAd(15); ?>

To display banners within widgets:

1. Go to Appearance > Widgets in WordPress.
2. Select the section where you want the widget to appear and click Show.
3. Click the Add button next to the Affiliate Manager Widget widget.
4. Select the keyword for the banners displayed in the widget.
5. Select the size of the banners to be displayed in the widget.
6. Click Done in the widget options.
7. Click Save Changes to add the widget to your pages.

I used a somewhat generic name for the plugin with the intention of eventually adding other affiliates. I’ve also done my best to write the code so that I can later incorporate others. If you have any affiliates you would like me to add, just suggest them in a comment here. Please also free to make any suggestions that you think may help to make the Affiliate Manager plugin even better.

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I’ve been fooling around with the WordPress Plugin API, and I decided to take a stab at putting together a free eBay Store plugin. An eBay store is a great way to make some extra income with your blog or website, and you don’t even have to directly sell anything. You will make commissions on any eBay fees you generate.

For instance, let’s say you have a photography blog and you are writing a review for the Canon Rebel XSi. You can use my free eBay store WordPress plugin to display relevant products right in the post! Here is the code you would place into your post (put it all on one line):

[ebay campaignid="5336304844" keywords="canon rebel xsi" rows="3" columns="1"]

And here is what your store would look like:

Canon EOS Rebel XSi 12.2 Megapixel, BRAND NEW IN BOX!!! Current Price: $425.00 End Time: 2 hours, 45 minutes Free Shipping!

CANON EOS Rebel XSi 450D Digital Camera Body +2 IS lens Current Price: No bids yet. Bid now! End Time: 1 minute Free Shipping!

Canon EOS Rebel XSi with Customized Lens Kit 12.2 Me... Current Price: $500.00 End Time: 2 hours, 13 minutes Shipping: $10.00

Powered By the Free eBay Store

If you have many posts on your blog that discuss many products, you may wish to set up entire pages dedicated to relevant products. You can even place multiple stores on the same page for different keywords.

I’ve seen some products out there similar to my plugin (such as BANS), but they are not free. If they are free, then they want you to sign up for mailing lists and bombard you with solicitations via email. Why am I willing to give this away for free, when there are others charging for similar eBay stores?

Well, for one thing, people love free. It makes it easy to try something out when there is little or no risk involved. I’m confident that because my plugin is free, I’ll have many more takers than I would if I were to charge for it. I want my free eBay store plugin to become the plugin everyone uses for their blog’s eBay store. Making it free is essential for that to happen.

So what’s the catch? Two simple things I think you can probably live with:

• As you may have already noticed, the store displays a link back to this page. This will help to spread the word about this great plugin so that many others can also take advantage of it.
• Your campaign ID will used 90% of the time, and 10% of the time it will be my campaign ID. This will allow me to be compensated for my efforts, and help me spend more time making even more great plugins.

So how do you get started? First you need to sign up as an eBay affiliate for free. Once you’re signed up or if you’re already signed up, create a new campaign to use with your free eBay store. Then download, install, and activate the WordPress plugin.

Download the Plugin

Once you’ve activated the plugin, write up a post or page where you wish to display an eBay store. Then, enter the proper code to display a store (put it all on one line):

[ebay campaignid="YOUR-CAMPAIGN-ID" keywords="YOUR-STORE-KEYWORDS" rows="NUMBER-OF-ROWS-YOU-WANT-TO-DISPLAY" columns="NUMBER-OF-COLUMNS-YOU-WANT-TO-DISPLAY" pagination="yes" vertical="yes"]

campaignid and keywords are required parameters. Use spaces between the keywords, and if you want to exclude a word, prefix it with a minus (-). columns and rows are optional, and the store plugin will default to 2 columns x 5 rows (10 items in total). The maximum total product display is limited to 25 products.

The pagination and vertical parameters are also optional. The pagination parameter will allow the display of multiple pages of products when set to yes. You can see this demonstrated on my free eBay Store demo page. Setting the vertical parameter to yes will display the item info below the image, rather than to the right of it.

The plugin also comes with a widget, if you would like to display ebay Products within a widget. This would allow you to display advertisements for eBay items on every page on your blog. To use it, just log into your WordPress blog, go to Appearance > Widgets and add the Free eBay Store widget. The sidebar widget uses the vertical parameter to display the item information below the image.

Don’t forget to supply your eBay campaign ID and the keywords you want for the products displayed in your widget. If you want, you can display different types of products at random. To do this, use multiple sets of keywords and separate them with a pipe character (|). For example, to display teddy bears and inflatable pools, you enter teddy bear|inflatable pool as the keywords. The widget will select the pipe-separated keywords at random.

If you don’t have a blog, but you have access to a scripting language (such as PHP) on your host provider, feel free to use the following URL to access the store as a pseudo-service:

http://geeklad.com/tools/ebay.php?campaignid=YOUR-CAMPAIGN-ID&rows=NUMBER-OF-ROWS-YOU-WANT-TO-DISPLAY&columns=NUMBER-OF-COLUMNS-YOU-WANT-TO-DISPLAY&keyword=YOUR-STORE-KEYWORDS&pagination=yes

And of course, you need to replace the campaignid, rows, columns, and keyword parameters accordingly. The output is just regular HTML. For instance, to display a 3 x 4 store for products to make money online in PHP, you would use the following line of PHP code:

echo file_get_contents("http://geeklad.com/tools/ebay.php?campaignid=YOUR-CAMPAIGN-ID&rows=4&columns=3&pagination=yes&keyword=make+money+online"); And your store will be displayed right on the line within the webpage where you supply the code. If you want to reformat the display of the store on either your blog or a webpage, just enclose the store within a <div> HTML tag, and set the formatting for that div however you like.

Let me know if you encounter any bugs, have any questions, or have any suggestions on how I might be able to improve the free eBay Store. Enjoy!

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