Working on another simple PHP script. One that helps you write articles quickly.

It is called Articletator.

I’m planning on having a working version ready very soon.

Here is a ten minute video demonstrating what it does so far – and the code that generates the results.

Articletator Video

The idea is you search for a keyword phrase of interest, tell the script how many results to get and where the results come from.

Articletator goes off and does its thing – grabbing urls of sites that provide the information of interest, parsing out bits of information relevant to your query and reporting back the results in an easy to use format.

Or “The Poor Man’s Split Testing Method”.

There’s no right or wrong way to do this. Darren Rowse made a post about split testing Google Adsense and showed how to do so using channels and a little javascript.

Like a lot of things, there are other ways of accomplishing the same thing.

Enter PHP, that fancy web scripting language that gives you the ability to do some pretty neat tricks.

The code snippet below allows you to split test your Adsense by day. Instead of having to setup separate channels to split test, just login to your Google Adsense account, create two versions of the Google Adsense code you want to test, paste those two versions into the PHP code shown below, put that PHP code in an include file on your site, and call that include file in your web page. Then, if you want to see how you are doing, go back to your Google Adsense account and look at your results by day.

O.K. maybe that was a lot of stuff to do.

If you have a PHP enabled web site and you are not using PHP includes, tsk, tsk.

All of the even numbered days (even numbered according to PHP) will display one version of your Adsense code while all of the odd numbered days will show another version of your Adsense code.


<?php

?>


The most important part is the “if” statement, the code that checks whether today is an even or an odd numbered day.

In this PHP example the “z” represents the day of the year.

The date(“z”)%2 < 1 checks if today's number modulus 2 is less than one (which asks if today is an even numbered day), then do whatever is between the set of squirly braces - the "{" and "}" - else do whatever is between the next set of squirly braces.

The whatever I am referring to is display your Adsense code.

By the way, there is nothing to prevent your from putting anything between the squirly braces.

There are some limitations to be aware of for sure. Namely, you still need to generate two versions of the Adsense javascript code to include on your web site. Also, if you want to get a better understanding of your results, you will need to download the results and group the data by even or odd day. I don’t even know if Google allows for an easy way to get your Adsense results – I’m not even going to login to find out.

But, for a quick and dirty way of split testing your Adsense results, this PHP code will do the trick.

Extra: You don’t have to just use the day of the year (“w”), you could just as easily use day of the week (“w”), hour of the day (“G”), day of the month (“j”) – or some combination. Whatever your mind can conceive and believe it can … oops, that’s for a different topic

The next step in creating a database driven website is to display the results.

We have the contents loaded up in the MySQL database ready and waiting.

First thing to do is write a simple query that pulls out a few of the entries.

The way I will do that looks like this:

The important part is line #62, the one that starts with $sql.

The way to read it is “Give me everything that has the word ‘Tree’ in the title.

Once we have that information, then lets print it out.

The “while” statement on line #65 goes through the results and prints out the title and description. Nothing fancy … at least not yet.

That’s enough to hold me over. Enjoy the “family video” that shows you how to do this.

There’s a problem with datafeed affiliate sites – at least it is a problem if you want your sites to stand out from all of the competition – duplicate content.

Who do you think will rank higher in the search engines for specific terms that you might find in your datafeed? Probably the merchant. If this happens, then your site is less likely to get the click that gets the affiliate sale.

So what to do, what to do – let me think. Hmm.

Let’s get a little creative with what the merchant gives us, shall we.

Here’s an example entry that we can use from the affiliate’s datafeed.

I was planning on using the second line, the one that says “American Beech” as the title. What is to stop me from also adding the word “Tree” found on the 12th line down to the title. Nothing really. I can make the affiliate script combine portions of the datafeed and mash it up to create a new title. Pretty cool, huh!

Or how about this idea.

Instead of using the “Dahlia – Dinnerplate – Magic Sunrise” as the title, why not (1) get rid of the dash (-) and also rearrange the words to read “Magic Sunrise Dahlia Dinnerplate”? I can already see the PHP code to do that.

Want in on a big secret – on how I am going to make each site affiliate datafeed site that I create unique?

What secret little piece of PHP code that I have planned for making certain that no matter what, each site I build is not identical to any other site.

Ready? Here it is … modulus.

I’ll explain later

“And in the beginning” … what a great opening line.

Time to start building a brand for myself. Get out and press the flesh with the people. Shake some hands, get pictures taken with the babies, break ground on the new skyscraper. Oh, sorry, wrong conversation.

Where was I? Oh, yes, talking with you. Letting you know what’s going on around here. Telling you my great plans for this little old weblog out on the internut.

I guess I should start with what I have planned for this site. After I spruce up the interior a little – a new paint job, refinish the floors, new kitchen cabinets … no, no, no, no – there I go again, getting off track.

Actually, I do mean I need to spruce up the interior of this weblog a bit. Give it a solid foundation to build on. Stuff like tricking out the title – get rid of that damn raquo thing, you know that ‘greater than symbol’ that services no worthwhile purpose. I have the latest and greatest version of Wordpress running this site. Not sure what all of its capabilities are, noticed a bunch of widgets running around when I went to muck around with the presentation. I’ll have to wrap my head around widgets and I see if I like what I have here. Or maybe just do it the old fashion way and edit using vi on the command line. Something like this.

Dont’ worry, I won’t make you touch it, it doesn’t hurt.

Once I have the look and feel stuff done, will move on to adding analytics – maybe Statcounter or Google Analytics for tracking.

Of course, I’ll make the effort to build a list of subscribers – plan on making it worthwhile by giving stuff away. When I say stuff, I mean useful PHP scripts – kind of like what Robert Plank does at his site.

Then I’m going on a bender and getting setup with a bunch of Web 2.0 stuff for promoting this bad boy blog. De.licio.us, onlywire, propeller, youtube, slideshare – whatever else I can think of to toot my own horn.

I have thought about linkbaiting. Already have in mind who I’m targeting – going for the big fish on this one. Title will read something like “_____ ____, I have your wife hostage.” The ironic thing is I have something to back it up with – something I bought November 2007 when I first found out about this little factoid. Cloak and dagger stuff – ohhh, ahhhh, exiting!

And to finish up, I’m going to click on those links I just dropped and see if I can attract any attention over here.

There you go, the first blog post.

Here’s how to setup Robert Plank’s JVPlus for use with ClickBank.

1) First thing you should do is buy it. The second thing is to upload all of the files to your website.

The files include jvplus.css, jvplus-config.php, jvplus-packer.php, jvplus-share.php and jvplus.php.

2) Next, you need to test it out to make sure it works on your PHP enabled web server.

Open a new text file and created a web page that links to some url, for instance, http://www.example.com. At the bottom of the text file, add the following line:


<script type="text/javascript" src="/jvplus/jvplus.php"></script>

Save the file as either index.html. index.htm, or index.php.

3) Upload the newly created index file to a directory on your server, in my case, you can visit my JVPlus subdirectory to see an example.

Here’s what it looks like.

Fancy, huh?

If you were to put your mouse of the link, you should see that it goes to “http://www.example.com”.

4) Now add on a “?hop=yourname” at the end of the url. Something like this:

Click here for an example, http://www.davewooding.com/jvplus/?hop=dwooding

5) Put your mouse over the link now and notice the difference …

Everything should be working now – you should see your name show up in the url that you put your mouse over.

6) Time to do this for real.

Edit the jvplus-config.php file.

Add in links to your clickbank products that look like these:

Save and close the jvplus-config.php file

7) Edit your index file.

Add links to your Clickbank product(s) that look like straight links (and not Clickbank hop links).

Save the index file and close it. Go back to the subdirectory and reload, here’s what my page looks like now.

9) Put your mouse over the newly added links and notice that the link goes through ClickBank’s hop link system.

10) Let people link to your subdirectory with you Clickbank products and have ALL your products use THEIR affiliate link, give them a link that looks like this
CLICK HERE

Check To Verify Your Site Exists

I’m getting ready to open up the offer I made a couple months ago – to build you a gardening database driven website.

Before I do that, I want to make sure you are ready. One thing I will ask you is if you have a website ready to go … and I have a script that will verify.

The reason I am doing this is so that when you place your order, we can get your site setup and ready to go in a short amount of time.

Here’s part of the script I will have when the order page goes live next week:

Thanks.

Dave

P.S. – If you have any questions, please use the comment section below to ask, thanks.

So you can make money – automatically.

You can have a “hands free” database driven affiliate site up and running by following these instructions.

The first datafeed video (the one you watched at the top of this page) gets a datafeed on your site ready for use.

• FTP zip datafeed to your web server
• Unzip the file on your server

Simple.

Now we get ready to dump the datafeed into a MySQL database.

First things first. Need to setup a MySQL database – that means having a database name, a username, and password.

This database setup video shows you exactly what to do.

• Create a MySQL database
• Create a user and password
• Assign the user to the database

Keep Your Site Running Smooth

To make life a little easier, you will want to create a config file that contains the database, username, and password. This file, which we will name config.php, will be used to retrieve and store information.

Config file should look something like this.


<?

?>


Once complete, the config file gets uploaded to your server.