May was a month of brick lane curries, a new art exhibition (silent city), mini golf and a bunch of other blurry stuff.

June was a good month (on the whole apart from hackers and google caffeine?!?), did incalculable amounts of coding, new site rollouts, tennis, monopoly, booked new york flights and some other stuff. Wrote a lot, drank a lot of wine, updated a bunch of auction2post sites because eBay updated their api (for the better) – standard summer month.

I started 4 draft posts across these two months but none seemed to stick, it’s not like the months were dry, posts boning csharp just didn’t fit, I was going to post csharp iis and multisql management code, a nice project I wrote to datamine from ebays new api and I was thinking of digging out my seo hub php based hub and rewriting it as a multi threaded windows app, but yeah sometimes stuff just doesn’t seem to hold enough value.

As ever though projects continue to crop up and evolve. I am working on a stupidly simple file system snapshotter after an incident with a second hacker, I will probably post about ripping data from the Nike app on the iPhone, if it isn’t up already somewhere else. Also I will make a quick program to save the top 20 wallpapers from reddit to a folder so windows 7 can automatically show me new epics (theres even an rss!) if know one else saves me the effort. Unless that is, all this stuff gets superseded. Mostly it’s just me biding my time and making broader plans

Look out for possible random posts on business intelligence, the stock market and brain architecture too, as they seem to keep cropping up.

If you are an EPN (Ebay Partner Network) affiliate you will be familiar with their latest scheme which has been in play since Nov 09 or similar – the idea of a quality based click through deal whereby the higher the quality of traffic you send through to them the higher they pay you per click. The hybrid system encapsulating the benefits of PPC while associating to a finer level with quality seems to be working well on the whole but does change the game slightly.

The set-up before the move to EPC was clear – a campaign and its sub id’s (channels, custom id’s) were there to allow the publisher a clearer view on what was working – a means to allow them to refine their sites and provide a better quality through to ebay which returned more sales and which ultimately benefited both parties. This would mean traditionally a campaign per website and sub-id’s (channels) for each sub category, sub page, sub item or whatever would sufficiently track transactions and allow for later refinement, later. However with the adoption of EPC the campaign gained a new association in the relationship.

As it stands EPC is calculated per campaign (as I understand it) which means if we lazily coast on with the bigger sites all pummelling single campaigns our EPC is far from efficient. Say a site is getting 3000 clicks through to ebay a day, its set up as a single campaign with about 20 sections underneath it all using custom id’s so as you can track transactions later. Overall the campaign gets a measly 0.01 – 0.04 EPC per day depending on the moon or whatever. This 0.01-0.04 EPC is paid out for all 3000 clicks. Great. But if a single sub page is responsible for 1000 of those click through’s and is producing a 0.00 or a 0.01p EPC (performing badly) then potentially it pulls down the epc value of the other 2000 clicks.

In efforts to pull one of my larger sites from the low EPC it currently resides at I have now split it from being a single campaign with custom id’s to being nearly 20 campaigns titled “site – subcampaign x” – effectively making campaigns of the major customid’s. This does make the nice epn reports messier to look at but its all for the sake of refinement. If everything is averaged before calculating epc this should not really affect all that much, however based on the first week or so it seems to offer two clear advantages. Firstly its making me more money. The split up site is averaging a higher EPC overall and higher returns. Spreading it across multiple campaigns seems to distinguish the better from the worse allowing a higher overall average epc value per click. Secondly in terms of finding the poor performers from the group it couldn’t be simpler. No more digging around in transaction logs that really were built to allow refinement under the old system – you can see the epc’ of each area of a big site strait from the management reports – it allows you to identify the 1p-epc area’s of your site and axe them or improve them.

I am sure ebay will dilligently continue to improve their toolset for the epn, especially as I am sure they don’t want millions of campaigns created like this (lol), but in the meantime splitting your larger breadwinning campaigns may be a worthy pursuit – I shall repost in a month or so with some progress.

Probably not worth doing on your Auction 2 post sites this one! haha!

I can see applications ranging from replacing my SEO QUAKE’s list parameter check to many many web marketing, analytics, data crawling and recording processes, all of which you could do in ms.excel, yet more accessible here. This isn’t a big deal, but landed on my lap this morning so here’s the share

The question then comes after you have 30 wordpress blogs on the go, various niche market’s blogged too or personal sites about cats or what have you, what then? Updates then. WordPress do update fairly regularly, they aren’t the slow moving behemoths some other companies are because they are open source, and that’s a good thing. Anyway maintaining 30 copies of wordpress is actually a lot easier than it sounds, an update is usually nothing more than 10 minutes uploading the new wordpress files over the old ones via FTP. But say you had a little project where you wanted to create a few more wordpress blogs. For the sake of this post lets say you wanted 90 blogs. 90 WordPress blogs installed on an average web host (I suggest 1and1) is not a big deal. It can be as big a deal as you make of it but in your pursuits and interests online its potentially likely to crop up.

You can run 90 wordpress blogs (or 1000 etc.) from 1 instance of wordpress. That is 1 wordpress folder on your host serving to 90 blogs at blogsite1.co.uk, blogsite2.com etc. thats nothing new – I am sure the quicker off the mark or longer in the tooth of wordpress users have been doing it for a while, but somehow I missed this up until I got past the 30 blog mark and so I thought its about time I looked at the option of hundreds of wordpress-blogs running from 1 folder, a project has come up. The reason this works by the way is the wonderful way (take not web developers) that wordpress splits its config files and its database. The only file in the wordpress files you upload to your blog that contains any site specific data is the config file, which pulls everything from the database.

On the preface there are both good and bad things about doing this with word press, here are the pro’s and con’s as I see them pre-project.

Pros

• Single central wordpress folder  – 1 wordpress folder to update periodically
• File size – rather than using up 4mb per wordpress install, this method uses 4mb per x number of wordpress installs, although space isn’t an issue really in current web hosting
• Plugins and themes only need to be copied once – they can effectively be shared
• Easier to backup – backing up files of wordpress blogs is pretty pointless apart from wp-content (uploaded images, themes, etc) – putting all your blogs in one basket means backing up the whole lot is a breeze, 1 folder not 90!
• WordPress database is seperate – you could potentially run all the blogs from 1 database too – (capacity dependant) – as wordpress allows table prefix’s
• Adding a blog can be automated – replicating the first wp database from an install can mean tons less setup work

Cons

• Permalink structure may have to be the same? *not 100% on this one and havent tested but there may be issues with permalink setups across multiple blogs as htaccess is shared*
• Other .htaccess differences – because you will effectively only have 1 .htaccess file for all domains pointing to this folder, this puts all that custom .htaccess code out of the window
• Flip side of themes being easy to install is that editing one theme will lead to all blogs using that theme to notice the change, fine if your blogs are stable in design but multiple versions of the same theme will be required if you want to tweak these on a blog specific level, which could make for a messy confusing setup if not through through
• If you are running a network of blogs and want to stay under the radar or just want the sites to be as different as possible – by nature of single resource they will leave footprints unless you are aware and make sure you do things like rename folders for themes non-sequentially etc ( or maybe don’t be paranoid :p )
• Centralising the files for all domains/sites/blogs does mean this folder on this box does then become a single point of failure, loose/break this and the whole of your blog network/project is down. Probably not such an issue with stable hosts these days
• As previous point if you do update, change a file or accidentally delete anything it does effect every site – its a risk but not a big one just be careful!

Limitations

• Unsure about .htaccess but presume custom rewriting becomes a pain as all sites share a file
• There will be a limit as to how many blogs you can run off a single install. It’s probably thousands though – if you had 30,000 sites for example – the file which points the install to the right database tables would become bloated

How to run tens, hundreds or thousands of wordpress blogs from 1 instance – install wordpress once for hundreds of blogs – without MU.

1. Install wordpress into a folder on you hosting (download latest from wordpress.org and then upload via FTP/copy across network)
2. Get your database details together, you will need Database Name, Database Username, Database Password and the Database host for each of the databases you are going to host wordpress tables in
3. Install a single blog using the normal method – point a domain at the folder, go to that domain and follow the wordpress wizard, entering your database connection details and this blogs title.
   1. Go through this newly installed blog and commit any changes that you will want duplicated throughout the new installs – delete the “hello world” post/default wp links for example.
   2. Imagine this like creating a ghost image for a network of pc’s – you want to make a bare bones default wordpress setup so you can replicate this onwards without having to redo it.
4. Happy with  your ghost blog setup? go to your phpmyadmin (assuming you have it) and export all the tables for this blog into SQL.
5. Open that SQL into your favourite text editor, in this case I am using Dreamweaver because I like its find+replace.
6. You will need to do several find + replaces here, but by doing this you can literally clone a wordpress installation – (works as at 2.9.1 anyway) – this is great for mass distribution (This is quicker than installing and can be automated)
7. For example if your site was “harrysblog1.co.uk” with a title of  “Harrys Blog 1″ then do a find and replace for “harrysblog1.co.uk”, switching out the new domain to be added, same with title’s, users, post’s etc. This way you could clone a wordpress site and switch out words…you can change the table prefix this way too.
8. Run this newly modified SQL on whatever mysql database you want to run the blog from (could be same one if you mass replaced the table prefix’s)
9. Alter your wp-config.php file very simply:
   1. Open it up and put a bit of logic which basically says “what domain am I loading from, ah this one – use this DB and this table prefix” – This logic can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be – I kept mine short and sweet with literally:

*note this is just how I did it, there are other ways – the code works but was just to test the theory – when upscaled to a network of xxx or x,xxx sites this is automated quite easily

*note2 I am having to cut this post short but if anyone has any questions or wants to know more/help on replicating wordpress or multi blog – 1 wordpress instance installs let me know in the comments

References

Striderweb – this post pretty much explains the theory, a bit like this post – but I actually happened across it after writing the post – well worth reading if your going to do this – Stephen Rider has made a great plugin that will do everything you want it to do as above, I winged it and just modified the wp-config which simply worked in my case so personally I didn’t use it, but no doubt its probably worth a try if  you want a more deep solution.

Ebay Partner Network responded with a blog post about this yesterday. You wouldn’t blame them if they coldly denied to pay all affiliates for earnings that they effectively didn’t make during the tempremental service, however they look to be providing us with a token possitive sum gesture. This helps epn stand out amongst networks and shows that they acknowledge the shared benefits affiliate promotion offers, certainly it cements epn in the uk as being a solid entrance to affiliate marketing.

“We have finalized calculations for a makegood that will use the earnings on the days before and the days after the outage, along with a factor to account for Christmas seasonality, to calculate a makegood to make up for the decrease in affiliate earnings caused by this outage.

This makegood will be added to each account and will be paid out along with the December payment”

(Taken from the Ebay Partner Network Blog post re the November 21st Site outage Makegood – posted 07th Dec 09.)

You might have to scale it up a lot though, if you don’t choose good niche’s and good domains/designs. From the few I have put up the great domains/good sites do best, but then I did most promotion for them so perhaps that is biased. All in all I will keep A2P in my developers arsenal, for $69 or whatever for a lifetime licence – you cant go wrong with it. If you don’t make your money back and a lot more then you shouldn’t be trying to make money online.

The reason this post really sparked was this post on pico projectors and what pico projectors might be like in 2015. I think pico projector’s (tiny projectors that will fit in your hand but produce a projection pretty much the quality of your old tv, anywhere @ 50 inchs) will get huge. I don’t doubt for one minute that MVIS stock will be the first sign of this in the coming months (the microvision showWX is going to be the worlds first mainstream big selling pico – prediction) and this will be only the start for developing display technology. Over the next 5 years visually representative technology will blossom. We will see embedded pico-projector’s slot into city planning, home design, products such as laptops (netbooks), mobile phones, games systems, camera’s. Within lcd little growth will happen but we will likely see some sort of “ultra hd” – probably double current full hd (1080p), while embedded pico’s will feature a whole host of new resolutions, by 2015 we will definitely see full hd pico’s. This development of display technology will usher in a new age of advertisements, coupled with Augmented Reality and revolution amongst the Operating Systems.

Which brings me nicely to Augmented Reality. AR. Currently there is much buzz around Augmented reality, which I believe really is the sudden sci-fi geek realisation that technically the technology to fully provide AR is out, its been out for more than a year. Smart phones with knowledge of where they are and decent digital cameras have been around longer than the iPhone. It seems once this dawned on people everyone made a mad rush to make something AR, regardless of what it is. As a result magazines, advertisers and marketing companies largely came first (presumably they had the quickest fluid funds to pay for AR.) This marrs the technology a bit if you ask me but perhaps as AR becomes more meaning based this will change. My jury is out on AR but I think it won’t be as big a deal as everyone is making out it will be.

Business will change, or rather some business’s will change the way they use technology. You always get early adopters but I believe a good proportion of companies that operate around creative, co-operative ideology will gear up more technologically as the younger generation come into professionalism. We will see different technological assistance of work in the workplace. Board meetings will not only be worldwide (like now via Cisco tele-conferencing) but they will be assisted by interactive technology, touch and display will play large parts in this technology, beyond the Microsoft surface table and towards the science fiction of minority report. Data will be housed, represented and communicated differently. A few years ago usb sticks and solid state drives didn’t offer an easy solution to copying files, network speeds were a 100th of what they largely are today, there was no cloud. As data management and storage develop as too will the way we use it. We will probably have identifiers rather than storage in 2015. e.g. rather than copying a file to a usb stick you will simply instruct your interface to relate that data to a physical object, a soundwave (a word/phrase perhaps?) or a time of day or place, provided you can prove who you are you could then recieve it. You could carry a 200gb file with you in your wallet or on your fingernail, as the likelihood is that 200gb file will be stored centrally in what people now call the “cloud” (but will probably be a server in london or a main city) and you will simply use a relation to prompt whatever interface into providing you with this file.

There will be hurdles in achieving universal centralised data but by 2015 there will be a huge proportion less of personal computing power stored in the home. The google OS is perhaps a sign of a branching of operating systems, but I don’t see google dominating the operating system market. Microsoft have become a lot stronger over the last 18 months but the real truth of it is that neither of these developers seem to be truely embracing all of the technology developments happening. Perhaps this lag in uptake is natural, Microsoft does show some promising signs but is held back by business concerns, google seems to throw itself into the ideas without checking they are in the right direction, linux, well linux is linux. By 2015 I predict there will be at least another major world provider of what we currently refer to as operating systems. The whole concept needs re-exploring from the ground up, even starting again beyond the google os. Touch for example, AR and improved options for display are all completely ignored by all of the aforementioned operating systems, Microsoft is the only developer that even references these things but is yet to truly develop a commercial option.

Search will change too. The last few years has seen a huge uptake worldwide in searching for things which in turn has pushed marketing, sales and online business into a whole new age. It’s also cemented new business models such as affiliate marketing, search based advertising and more grey area web production. The long tail has well and truly become a reality, many successful business people spend their days driving traffic from long tail search into successful sales. This will continue but it wont settle in a single routine for long. Affiliate marketing will take to interactive media more as this becomes more integral in everyday life, search will some how adapt to a new more astute audience that is used to getting good search results fast and who quickly picks up trends and becomes integral members of up and coming online phenomena such as reddit, twitter etc. Beyond real-time, search will need to integrate much more with outside sources, new operating systems and the work out the best way to catalogue and express the ever expanding online data and how it is created and used.

HTML 5 is on its way too, this will be a major improvement but it wont be the last the web sees pre 2015. By 2015 I believe that the “internet” as we know it, a vast linked store of webpages will be a very different beast. Microsoft (XBOX), Apple (iPhone), Sony (Ps3) – these are all well known, global brands and they are all investing / operating in the new world of applications. Pioneered by Apple and the iphone the idea of segmented approved tools that are properly ordered was a (very apple) genius idea. Bringing a (standard) apple simplicity to what was previously a confusing and avoided world of software for a lot of people. Microsoft, Sky, Sony and other huge technology developers did not miss this success. In the coming years slowly these companies will target specific software/hardware at every possible market audience. By 2015 every member of your family will be buying something digital. Expanding on the segmented digitally providable media of the iphone app, television programs, games, music, films and books will all be available at the click of a button, tap of a screen or utterance of a command (and payment systems such as xbox subscriptions and ps3 accounts will remove the actual money part of the transaction further accelerating digital sales.) This new availability of media will be supported by webpages, but the web-pages are much more likely to be totally interactive, 3d integration is already in browsers but we will see more of this as well as individualised experiences. Imagine every web-page you accessed could (based on rules of privacy) know your name, interests etc – the web could be a much more interactive environment. By 2015 though I think the web could be on its way to new pastures, gone with the current ideal of “pages” accessed by address. An OS with search integrally built in could remove the requirement for a browser, content could be constructed on the fly and applications/services/movies/experiences could replace pages as we know them, with the situation that web pages changing from a square, box of a screen to a multi surface vivid world that we live in, there is no doubt in my mind that the OS and the web “page” as we know it will adapt to a new medium.

We are living in a time which is the true beginning of technology adoption, 2015 might bring a few or all of my predictions into reality, it could just as likely bring thousands more. Social adoption will drive these things forward and in return the technology will hopefully create a more co-operative, fair and equal world society.

But irrelevant of the selling gumpf I had heard good things. In the uk it worked out as £68 or so with currency conversion to buy Auction 2 Post and a pack of 20 themes and it is, worth it. Worth it that is if you intend to use it to satisfy a need. I wouldn’t buy it if you are just looking for some new “get rich quick scheme” to burn your money into, get it if you know wordpress, get it if you already have some ebay sites (php bay, bans, bespoke – please say you have bespoke!) or a good use within an established site network/blog context.

There are lots of ways  you can use Auction 2 post, essentially it just posts ebay auctions as posts’ and offers you a host of ways of doing that, within templates, automatically etc. and you can stay within the ebay partner network rules as long as you invest a bit of time in reading them (you should do this when you sign up, by the way!) A word of caution at this point though, EbayPartnerNetwork is apparently getting hotter on the unscrupulous affiliate and if you were not careful you could probably tear their Terms of Service to shreds with this plugin, not that I would know about doing that! EPN (Ebay Partner Network) is lucrative and worth investing time if your a natural SEO developer, auction 2 post is a nice implementation of a wordpress plugin that helps you into this – but its all about how you use it!

I won’t go into how I am using this WordPress plugin, or how you should – there are a lot of great ways this can work for you. I have set up several experimental sites and am using it in xx other blogs, I will perhaps release some results, experiences and stats in the near future, although we don’t want A2p to get too big do we The forum’s and support for Auction 2 Post are great, zizby/radio is quick to respond to your questions about the plugin – the member area is simple but I have found a few dead links – nothing important and I am sure they’ll fix this. In essence if you know what your doing with the web and wordpress you need this plugin in your affiliate arsenal!

Get Auction 2 Post
(Just skip through the blurb and click order now)