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)

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)

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))

Timing is everything. I launched this blog on Jan. 11. On about the 15th, some crazy hacker started hitting SEO-related blogs, using a security vulnerability discovered in the WordPress blog software. Just my luck. The story of my life.

(Read on: SEO Hacking for Fun and Profit)

For about the umpteenth time, this morning I responded to a question on a newsgroup by some poor soul who didn’t understand why the images weren’t showing up on his web page. The links were correct. The images were uploaded to the correct directory. But when he viewed his page in his browser, the images were just …. not there. As if they had never existed.

(Read on: Missing images)

I use a fairly wide variety of software programs in my work, on both the Mac and PC platforms (primarily Mac, of course). Some programs stand head and shoulders above the others, because they provide so much value, and/or make my work (and my life) easier.

(Read on: Saves Time! Less bloat!)