The BookmarkMoney Blog

After two days of frustration BookMark Money is live again. I’m not sure what caused Pligg to puke, but I reinstalled the software from scratch, and that seems to have been the trick.

I would have had the site back up yesterday except for the fact that the time wasn’t there. I’m not sure if a cached version of the site was causing the reinstallation to fail, or FileZilla was mangling the files, but a wipe and an upload via SmartFTP on the wife’s computer got everything right as rain.

Whatever caused the backend software to fail didn’t touch the database, so luckily there was no data loss.

It’s been a hell of a few days, so I’m going to take a break from posting. See you on the flip side!

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Some time between this morning, and when I got home this afternoon, the software that powers BookMarkMoney.com, Pligg, puked.

I haven’t had a chance to look at my logs or anything, so I don’t know whether or not this was an attack, or just the software hiccuping, but the result is the same - one site dead in the water.

I’ve spent almost two hours trying to resurrect it, and hitting dead ends every which way I turn. Part of the issue is HostGator, and the fact that the server drops my FTP connection at random intervals. The only issue I’ve ever had with HostGator is the unreliability of their FTP server. FileZilla, SmartFTP, all other FTP programs act the same.

An annoyance at the best of times, when you have 600+ files to upload it’s pure hell.

On the plus side, the database is intact, so I’ll probably have the main site back online tomorrow night, just in time for me to watch Ghost Hunters.

I apologize for the downtime, but I have work tomorrow, and the day job comes before the hobby. Poke around the blog, and you may find some gems you missed originally.

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Sunday night tornadoes ripped through the tiny communities of Parkersburg and New Hartford here in central Iowa. At this moment the death toll stands at 7 between the two communities, with at least 50 injured. There’s a roundup here.

The reason I’m writing this entry is in the hope that some of my visitors might be compelled to donate to the victims of this tragedy. The local chapter of the American Red Cross’s website is here, and they have instructions on how to make donations.

I have donated what money I can, and my wife and I are taking over a load of children’s clothes tonight that our daughter has outgrown.

My brother’s ex-mother in law lives in Parkersburg, and although the tornado missed her house, the entire town is shut down regarding electricity, water, and gas.

My brother’s ex-wife’s cousin is the manager of the Pizza Ranch, which was mentioned in the story above. She was at work when the tornado hit, and was responsible for ushering her customers and employees into the bathroom. A car landed on the roof, and the building collapsed, but nobody inside was injured.

Several of my co-workers are first responders with the local fire departments and paramedics, and the stories I heard at work today would have been more at place in a group of soldiers returning from Iraq than from small town firefighters.

A tornado is devastating under normal conditions, butwhen one strikes such small, tightly-knit communities, the horror is multiplied exponentially. If you can give anything, please do. Every little bit helps.

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Here’s 8 different types of headlines you can create campaigns around. Plenty of examples to help increase your sales.

Via Digg

read more | digg story
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What’s the best way to guarantee that your internet video will go viral? Make a video spoofing other viral videos. That’s the strategy behind the latest offering from indie music darlings Weezer in the video for their latest self-titled album.

Why does this video work so well? Schadenfreude - that basic human emotion where a person experiences guilty/malicious glee as others suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Humans like watching other humans getting hurt. Period. If it wasn’t so, would reality television programming be so prevalent?

Pork and Beans collects the ’stars,’ and I use that term loosely, of the most popular viral videos of the last few years, and puts them all in one place in a surprisingly amusing piece of internet navel gazing. From Tay Zonday of ‘Chocolate Rain‘ infamy to the excreable Chris Crocker, they’re all here, even reaching back to the late 90’s for an ‘all your base’ parody. This video is 3 minutes of condensed idiocy backed by an amazingly catchy song.

Once again we’re treated to a unique fusion of styles that is instantly recognizable as a Weezer track. Starting with a mariachi style acoustic guitar hook melded with a retro-lounge feel, it slips easily into Rivers Cuomo’s signature distorted guitars and massive feeling wall of sound . Maracas and piano accompaniment are sprinkled liberally throughout the track, and the chorus harmonies are what we’ve come to expect from this band over the last 14 years.

My single gripe is that this song is yet another nerd anthem from Weezer. I love this band, truly, but we’ve been over this ground before. My favorite song off of the Blue album is ‘In the Garage’ their first, and in my opinion, best nerd anthem.

Minor griping aside, this song has me looking forward to the eponymous Red album. I have high hopes for this, especially after ‘Make Believe.’ The song ‘Beverly Hills‘ makes me cringe to this day, and when I heard the radio edit of ‘We Are All on Drugs’ a little part of me died. I can hear them sing about having a ‘Hash Pipe‘ and a ‘Dope Nose‘ but merely saying that we’re on drugs is a no-no? Weak.

The best part of any new album is the tour. My wife and I saw Weezer in Ames in 2002 while they were supporting the ‘Maladroit’ album, and it was the single best concert I have ever been to. The 30,000 capacity stadium we were in was completely sold out, and the atmosphere was like nothing I have ever experienced again. Electric doesn’t even begin to describe it.

When Weezer took the stage, everybody in the audience rose to their feet, and remained standing for the 70 minute set. It seemed like about 80% of the crowd knew every song by heart, and was singing along at the top of their lungs - myself included. Short of a ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show‘ viewing, I can’t imagine the crowd getting more involved without resorting to violence.

After the show my wife and I got separated from the group we were with, and decided to head home. Unfortunately we found out later that they ended up meeting with the the band - sans Rivers - with pictures and autographs to prove it.

Valleywag has a deconstruction of all of the references in the video. Brooklyn Vegan weighs in, as well as the usual suspects at Idolator.

Watch ‘Pork and Beans’ and decide for yourself.

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Tags: Music, Social Networking, Viral Marketing // Add Comment »

I was poking around on Ooof.com last night, when I saw a post announcing the return of Diorex.

I was first introduced to Diorex at the Uber Affiliate blog, and his writings blew me away. Diorex is an affiliate marketing Jedi, and the tips that he deigns to share with us unwashed masses are amazing and powerful. Be forewarned though, the man pulls no punches, and is as blunt as can be. If you can work past that, then prepare to get schooled.

Visit Diorex.
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Tags: Affiliate Marketing // 1 Comment »

I know I haven’t been around a lot, and I’m not making excuses for it. A metric ton of bad karma has hit me in the last month, and I’ve spent three weeks digging my way out of it. Although I’m brimming with ideas and motivation, I’ve had to shelve my affiliate marketing plans for the time being.

That doesn’t mean that I’ve given up on affiliate marketing. Far from it. However, I just don’t have the time to devote to affiliate marketing to do it right at this point in time.

I’ve always been a ’set it and forget it’ type of person, and against the advice of all the gurus, I tried to run my first adsense campaigns in that fashion. I was lazy, and pretty much lost my ass, except for one campaign that I literally did about 0% research into, threw up on a whim, set a tiny budget for, and let run. To my amazement, that campaign has brought in money - not a lot, but a lot more than I ever really imagined it would.

This week my hands off attitude came back to bite me in the ass. Google’s billing department is retarded, and always throws up errors at billing time. They kill my account, and after two days or so, I have to reactivate the campaigns, or else they stay off. The last time this happened was when my life basically collapsed on me, and I decided to just leave my AdWords dead. And that’s where I left it.

Until Tuesday, when I noticed a charge from Google on my bank statement. Apparently, going completely against past performance, Google reactivated my campaigns last month. So baiscally I let an entire month go by wtihout realizing it, and had money falling out of my bank account in dribs and drabs. Not sound business sense.

But I digress. The point of this post is to wish Ruck from Cash Tactics a fond farewell. I had noticed a pretty big gap in his posting schedule as of late, and when I fired up SharpReader today, I got an explanation - Ruck had handed over control of Cash Tactics to a friend. I wouldn’t say I was shocked, since in the few months I’ve been reading Cash Tactics, Ruck has:
1) Launched an Affiliate Network
2) Witnessed the Birth of a new daughter
3) Gone back to college
4) And even taken the time to give a shoutout to a complete nobody ranting on a soapbox on the corner of Fuck off and Die

Any one of those would be a plate filler, and to try and juggle all of those at once should be considered grounds for an insanity plea. Throughout it all, Ruck has always been active in the comments on his and others’ blogs, his forum, and probably other circles I haven’t been invited to run in yet.

I’ve said in the past how much I admire Ruck. I’m in the situation he was a couple years ago - crap job with crap benefits, about to lose the wife and kids - in effect, screaming towards rock bottom at Mach 5. He was able to turn his situation around, and by god, so will I. It’s stories like Ruck’s, combined with Paul’s from Uber Affiliate that keep me plugging along. I know it can be done, I just have to find my own path.

I’m looking forward to seeing what Kris, the new Cash Tactics site administrator, has to say. He has some awfully big shoes to fill, but I don’t think Ruck would have tapped Kris if he couldn’t handle it.

The King is Dead! Long live the King!

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Image via Wikipedia

This is a quick post just to say that I’m alive. While I was browsing the Library of Congress’ blog, I came across this awesome post: The Library of Congress acquired 24 pages of original 1962 drawings from “Amazing Fantasy #15.”

Amazing Fantasy #15 was the first appearance of Spider Man, and spawned one of the most prolific comic characters of all time. Although I’ve never really been a big fan of Spider Man, the thought of seeing these pages in person makes my fatty little fanboy heart dance with glee.

If the Library of Congress deemed these pages worthy of inclusion, perhaps that means comic books have finally become a ‘legitimate’ art form.

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Another week goes by, another wealth of website scraping information.

Website Scraping Platforms

Dapper.net is a company that, in their own words: aims to make it easy and possible for anyone to extract and reuse content from any website. By doing so, we hope to allow others to realize their creativity and implement new and exciting services and applications. More information is located at their blog. I’ve played around with it a little bit, and while I can see the potential, I didn’t have much luck in using it to extract anything useful from my target sites. They also have a FireFox extension that will pull up site-specific scrapers created by other Dapper users.

Sprout allows you to build mashups that are accessed by embeddable flash-based widgets. From the description on their website Sprouts can be of any size and any number of pages and can include images, video and audio and components such as slideshows and jukeboxes as well as Web service components such as Twitter, PollDaddy, ChipIn and more. I’m quite interested in trying this service out, but as of yet have not had the time.

Website Scraping Scripts

Unless noted, all of the following scripts and libraries are either PHP or used by PHP scripts. PHP is the only language I know how to hack around in, so I’m pretty biased towards it.

class_http.php. The author describs class_http.php as: a “screen-scraping” utility that makes it easy to scrape content and cache scraped content for any number of seconds desired before hitting the live source again. The class has 2 static methods that make it easy to extract individual tables of data out of web pages. The class even comes with a companion script that makes it easy to use and cache external images directly within img elements.

At SourceRally I found the following scripts by the user regin. PHP Crawl Bot, and Digg Crawler.

Russell Beattie has a good beginner’s tutorial on using PHP to scrape websites as feeds.

scRUBYt is a simple to learn and use, yet powerful web scraping toolkit written in Ruby. Looking at the tutorials in their wiki, I think this might actually come close to matching its hype in the ease of use. Eyeballing the variables, it almost looks like pseudo code, instead of a real, structured program. This really speaks to me, since I’ve mastered pseudo code, but never been able to make the jump to real code

Ruby Inside reported on scrAPI a while back. scrAPi is a Ruby-based HTML scraping toolkit written by Assaf Arkin.

Miscellaneous Scraping Resources

While I was reading through the Dapper Blog, I came across a comment by Harish Kumar, which in turn led me to his blog. Harish Kumar is involved with the Piggy Bank project at MIT, so his words carry some considerable weight. Last year he wrote a post that rounded up a big group of mashup providers. Although some of them seem to have disappeared as Web companies are wont to do, the ones that are still around offer some pretty interesting ways of mashing data together.

TSSCI Security featured an article last fall named Scraping the Web for Fun and Profit that is an amazing resource on RUBY, Python, and Perl website scrapers.

Related News:

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Tags: Datafeeds, Mashups, Tools // 1 Comment »

Jeffro2pt0’s post at WebLog Tools Collection tipped me off to Speckyboy’s list of Top 10 Security Plugins for WordPress. There’s a lot of good plugins listed, and I was happy to see WP-SpamFree made it on the list.

I’ve been using WP-SpamFree since about the second week of this blog, and it’s been amazing. I don’t know anyone blogs without it. I use quite a few security plugins myself, but I won’t say what, since that might decrease my security

From the same post, Jeffro2pt0 also points us to the WordPress Codex article on Hardening your WordPress.

In a separate post, at Weblog Tools Collection, Marc Ghosh linked to a post at Scripty Goddess entitled “Fun Tools That Will Eat Up the Spare Time You Don’t Have.” Her recommendations:

Stripe Generator, which is an AJAX background designer will give your website that oh-so-sexy Web 2.0 look. Looking at their blog, I came across a post announcing two companion generators - Reflection Maker, and Tab Generator. Three awesome tools to take some of the grunt work out of website design.

WordPress Theme Generator, which does exactly what it says, for those who are mystified by the intricacies of building WordPress Themes.

WordPress Pad has an article on turning your WordPress Install into a Directory with the WordPress Directory Plugin from Links Back.

Miscellaneous

I read an article on Live Science about why hot women marry ugly guys, and it’s not just about the money - which came as quite a shock to me.

For a laugh, read this comment on the story Why Linux Won’t Displace Windows. I can’t tell if it’s satire, or the guy is serious, but I laughed until I cried. It’s people like this that remind me why I got out of computer related customer service.

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