This month I, along with thousands of other eBay affiliates, have been busy little bees converting all of our eBay affiliate links to use the new eBay IDs and format, thanks to eBay’s announcement that they were leaving Commission Junction and taking their affiliate program in-house.

I’ve been seeing great commissions since switching my eBay affiliate links to ePN (eBay Partner Network), but unfortunately eBay’s reporting isn’t much better than Commission Junction’s. If you want to see what item sold on eBay for any particular transaction, you still have to download the report, open it, scroll over to the column with the item numbers, copy the item number, go to ebay.com, paste the item number in the search field, and hit “Go.”

What a PITA! I’m pretty good with php, so I decided to roll my own script. I started out with just the basic info that eBay provides in the downloadable report, and wrote a script that outputs the report contents with the item id as a clickable link so that I could go directly to that item on eBay.

Then I added code to use eBay’s developer API to pull in the item name, thumbnail image, number of bids, buyer name, seller name, and category name.

Now I have a really cool script that shows me exactly what items sold in eBay, their prices, pictures, and extra info.

I’m such a nice person, I decided to give this script away to any eBay affiliate who wants to use it. I’m not forcing you to upload your transaction report to my server; oh no…. I’m offering the script as a free download that you can download, put on your own server, and run from within your own hosting account.

I’m doing this because I’m such a nice person. And because I think it just might get me a few nice backlinks.

You can get the script here:

TWW’s eBay Report Tracker

Check out a screenshot: (click to enlarge)

It’s very satisfying to spend a great deal of time developing a new site from scratch for a client, taking pains to ensure that the site is search-engine friendly, and then to see that site do well in the search engines after launch.

But it’s also surprisingly satisfying to spend a few hours optimizing a small site for a new client, and then to see, almost immediately, improvements in that site’s performance in the search engines.
(Read on: Minor SEO Changes, Major SEO Effect on a Minor Site)

Apparently I’m part of a small minority of web developers who believe that the developer has a level of professional responsibility toward the client, regardless of whether the client knows, understands, or requests same.
(Read on: Ethics and Web Design - The Professional Responsibility of the Web Designer)

Daily newspapers have been fighting decreasing readership and falling subscriptions for at least a couple of decades now. More and more, newspapers are putting their content online. For that I salute them.

But the web is now about 15 years old, and I wonder why so many newspapers still don’t manage to get some of the basic things right.

(Read on: The News Online: Usability is Lacking)

A page that’s about everything isn’t about anything.

Read my explanation here.

Sometimes, one of my clients wants or needs a blog. And the question always arises, should they use one of the free hosted blogging platforms, such as Typepad or Blogger, or should they use WordPress and host it on their own site?
(Read on: WordPress vs. Blogger)

“We had to destroy the village in order to save it, sir!”

That was basically the response of Network Solutions when it was caught with its hand in the cookie jar, registering domains for themselves that people had looked up in their whois registry. NetSol basically defended their contemptible practice by saying, “In order to prevent domain registration abuse, we’re committing domain registration abuse.”
(Read on: Network Solutions Caught Front Running)

I recently had 2 diametrically opposite experiences with phishing. In the world of the Internet, “phishing” is when some entity (a scammer) — typically, a website or e-mail sender — pretends to be some organization that a user has a relationship with, and attempts to entice the user into providing personal and confidential information (such as passwords, bank account numbers, PIN numbers, etc.) to the scammer. eBay, PayPal, banks, and other similar sites are popular phishing targets.
(Read on: Phishing and Phishing Detection)

I recently subscribed to a satellite tv package when I upgraded my DSL account — and I instantly got hooked on that adorable Animal Planet show “Meerkat Manor.” Just in time for the season ending. Then I started watching Orangutan Island, and while watching the 2nd episode I idly checked the whois for orangutanisland.com. That domain was taken, but orangutanisland.org was available, and I thought to myself, I wonder if I should register that and set up a forum for people to talk about these cute critters? So I did. I used the free phpBB forum software for the forum, and also created a small collection of static informational pages so that the site would have some content to rank for.

(Read on: Forums (or Fora, for you Latin geeks))

Poor hosting companies waste time and cost money.

I needed to set up a MySQL database for a client recently. The client hosts their website with a large and well-known hosting company, which advertises MySQL available with all hosting packages. It should have taken just a few minutes to create the database and assign the db username and password, and then I could get on with the backend programming for the site. Several days and several billable hours later, I was just getting started.
(Read on: Bad Hosting Costs $$ and Wastes Time)

The amount of misinformation out there on the web is almost enough to make a person crazy. I ran across a few statements today that were so baldly wrong that I have to correct them here.

(Read on: Correcting Bad Information)

So I got a gentle tweak from Zack Katkin at Unique ID Web Design because I haven’t blogged in a while. I’ve been busy working on projects for clients, but I know that’s no excuse. I’m breaking the Golden Rule of Blogging, which I drill into my clients when they want to start a blog, to wit: You must blog regularly! Thanks, Zack, for the nudge.

Okay, enough of that. Today I’m going to talk about crawlability and web design. I got to browsing the Unique ID blog and read Zack’s post “Straight From Google, The Four Biggest Search Rank Factors,” in which “crawlability” is listed as the very top, highest priority, most important search engine ranking ractor for a web site. This week I’ve also been following a discussion at the High Rankings forums about whether web designers have any SEO responsibility when designing a web site.
(Read on: “Crawlability,” Web Design, and SEO)

The infamous Google spam czar Matt Cutts has fired another round at honest webmasters just trying to go about their daily work. In a recent blog post, He invited readers to report web sites buying or selling links that are not using the ridiculous nofollow tag on those links. Read: Google wants us to snitch on our colleagues. Turn them in. Rat them out. Become WWW stool pigeons for Google.

There is a host of issues surrounding this edict from Google’s pet spam fighter, all of them ugly.

(Read on: No NoFollow, NoSnitching)

1. Multiple Campaigns

First thing: You want to create multiple campaigns, with each campaign focused around a particular product, category or topic. For example, you could create Campaign A for Product A, Campaign B for Product B, and so forth. But you might also benefit by creating a campaign about Hot New Feature in Product A, in which you would target your keywords, ad text, and landing page to that particular feature, and another campaign about Great User Benefit in Product B, in which you would target that user benefit of product B.

(Read on: Eight Tips Every AdWords Advertiser Should Know)

Does your host or website developer do these things?

Developing a new web site — or re-developing an old one, for that matter — typically involves consulting with the client to determine the site’s target audience and primary objective, creating an attractive and functional design, turning the design into properly coded, valid html, building out the pages of content, and writing the server-side programming to perform whatever dynamic features are needed. But there are several steps that are frequently overlooked before a site “goes live.”

(Read on: Pre-Launch Steps for Your Site)

I noticed that my web site development site got a visit by someone who found it in a search for “hank hill quotations.” I haven’t put any effort at all into optimizing the site for that search term, so naturally I got curious and had to check it out. It turns out my site is #66 in Google and #32 in Yahoo for that search.

(Read on: A Search Engine Experiment)

I’ve never liked to use the term “web site designer” in reference to what I do. Yes, I “design” web sites, but the word design seems to suggest, to many people, strictly “visual design.” I tend to prefer developer, because effective web site development must encompass much more than merely designing a “pretty” or “good looking” site.

(Read on: Don’t judge a book by its pretty face)

Many, many computer users use “search” exclusively as their primary means of navigation. What I mean by this is that a user, let’s call her Pam, wants to go to a particular web site that she knows of and is familiar with. Pamela knows the domain of the site. But instead of typing, say, example.com into the address bar of her browser, or even better, bookmarking the site so that she can go to it with a single click, Pamela types the domain into the search field of her Google toolbar, or into the search field of her Yahoo home page.

(Read on: Do you own the #1 SERP for your domain name?)

Microsoft is the master, but many, many programmers and software development companies are guilty. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had the most meaningless error messages pop up on my computer screen.

What set me off this morning? A client sent me a Word file. A simple, one-page Word file. I double-clicked it.

(Read on: Dumb Error Messages)

Many of my clients already have an existing web site when they contact me. Often they’re unhappy with their site’s visual design, or its functionality, or its performance in the search engines. I hate — I really hate — telling a potential client that their site needs to be completely re-developed from the ground up in order achieve the level of performance they’re looking for. Yes, I can charge more for a complete redevelopment, and I like that part, but it always feels sort of “snake oil salesman” to me. I’d rather tell the client, “Yes, we can work with your existing site. We can make these changes, and add this functionality, and we can do this, that and the other thing.”

But sometimes that’s simply not possible. Particularly when the potential client is looking for improved search engine performance or better usability.

(Read on: Can your site be tweaked?)