Wednesday, April 27, 2005
ISAPI Rewrite Convert for AllPosters.com PostersFeed
For quite some time I had a posters page on hockeyfights.com as an affiliate of allposters.com (affiliate link).
At first, I created a series of manual links from a text file they had. I downloaded preview images and the info needed, dumped some of it into a db and had a couple of pages.
It became a bit much to keep up with, so I stopped. I took a little piece of code from their affiliate website and just had an iframe that displayed a few top sellers that someone could scroll through. Not really ideal, but no work involved.
Eventually allposters.com released a datafeed. You download a series of files (text, csv or xml) and have all their store information. You can then easily dump it into a database (or use the files as they are if you like) and can build a relatively dynamic store from that. Images and such are all stored on their site and locations/names are referenced in the datafeed files. I wanted to do something with it, but never got around to it.
Semi-recently allposters.com released web services. Web services allow you to access all of their store info on their own machines. No more frequent manual updates. While I know I’d still have to update some code now and then, this was ideal and I wanted to take advantage of this to make a nice looking store front for my users.
Instead of building from the ground up I looked for an already built solution. I found a few ok ones and then I came upon PostersFeed XML by One Click Designs (demo store). It was neat and a good base for me to work with. I also liked that they offered Posters Feed Professional, which is the same script, but with a slight modification for mod_rewrite, allowing you to have cleaner urls (so besides looking nicer, they can be copy and pasted easier, and search engines will follow them easier). mod_rewrite is Apache web server-only. However, Helicon has made an alternative for us IIS users: ISAPI Rewrite. I use it a good deal already. I don’t run Wordpress anymore, but when I did I had a good set of rules that allowed me to do the same url rewrite as Apache users.
So with Posters Feed Professional and ISAPI Rewrite, and a few other conversions to the base script I was able to build a nice hockey posters store for hockeyfights.com. I’m not completely finished with it yet. I will probably add a few more “convenience” links on the right, along with replacing the ad up top with a posters ad (or perhaps a Google Adsense ad). I also plan on having posters come up on actual team and player pages when applicable. This is something that will require a bit more work, but should look pretty good when done (along with hopefully producing some nice conversion rates).
I’d love to post the code for the ISAPI Rewrite modification, but One Click Designs charges for the mod_rewrite tweaks (the base script is free, although they ask you sign up for the affiliate program through them so you would be a child affiliate of theirs at no cost to you). Because the ISAPI Rewrite script isn’t that different from it’s mod_rewrite counterpart I’d basically be giving their script away for free, which is something I obviously shouldn’t do. However, if you look at a few conversions (like the Wordpress one, or a few on Helicon’s forums), it shouldn’t be too hard for you to do the conversion yourself.
Here’s an allposters.com webmaster affiliate link, in case you’re looking to sign up as an allposters.com affiliate yourself.
Tech • Sports • Hockey • 0 Comments • Permalink
Tuesday, April 26, 2005
How Do You Like Your Spam?
Tom from The Media Drop finds out that Google’s Gmail spam filter does more than just stop unwanted emails. The spam box plus “Gmail Clips” provide recipes as well.
Savory Spam Crescents. Yum.
Saturday, April 23, 2005
Penguin Security Threat
Looks like there are new efforts to make sure there’s no profiling at the airport as these penguins go through metal detectors.
via Boing Boing via Schneier
Friday, April 22, 2005
Be Like Mike
Not Jordan, you’re never going to be like him. But Michael Vick? Maybe you could swing that.
To help get you started is the Ron Mexico Name Generator. Learn more about Ron Mexico.
Oh, I’m Buster Italy, in case the legend ever gets told to you.
Thursday, April 21, 2005
Need Some Crack?
Tom Biro over at AdJab has declared Mr. Happy Crack as the best mascot ever.
If you have a problem with that, talk to the crack.
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Pushing Paid Content
If you head over to espn.com right now you’ll see lead stories of baseball streaks and slumps at the beginning of the season.
Out of the five stories contained in the main story area on the front page, four are accessible only to ESPN’s “in” members.
I think paid subscriptions is a good business model for many websites. For some sites it means no advertisements, for others it means premium content (a la espn.com). Either way, you’re usually diversifying revenue sources (generally, it means a site is not relying solely on ads). Slow sports news day or not, pushing your paid service by using the main content area such as this has to be as much of a turn-off to most of the audience as it is a turn-on to new members.
So is having however many new signups worth driving others away? For espn.com, I’d say the answer is most likely yes. Sports sites, and certainly ones like espn.com, can be extremely sticky. News sites in general have large return audiences and sports fans can be rabid. Chances are a one-day (or just a few hour) push to attract new paid members won’t do anything to traffic long-term. Sending some users to alternatives like Sportsline, Fox Sports or Sports Illustrated on a day where little is happening shouldn’t have any impact on tomorrow. However, if ESPN were to continue it’s push for a few consecutive days they might start to see a decline in traffic, at least for a brief period of time.
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Hating the Red Sox
Everyone already hates the Yankees, I know that being a Yankees fan. David Schoenfield hates the Yankees too, but he’s starting to hate the Red Sox as well. Schoenfeld lists his 86 reasons for hating the Sox on ESPN.com’s Page 2.
Sunday, April 03, 2005
It Only Took Two
One game, one complaint and it took all of two batters to happen. ESPN2 is airing the opening game of the baseball season, Red Sox at Yankees, which I’m sure you’ve heard about 1000 times by now. Well, Edgar Renteria is the second batter of the game, and he takes a pitch. ESPN whips out their nifty K-Zone to show us the location of a pitch Renteria didn’t swing at (to make him 1-2). The audience then proceeds to miss the strikeout pitch.
ESPN did not make the same mistake when the next batter, Manny Ramirez, struck out as well.
Update: Tino Martinez comes in to play first base for Jason Giambi. In his first inning of action he makes a great play to end the inning. The Tino-loving Bronx crowd goes nuts. Instead of being treated to a replay (and all I’m asking for is one), we get to see Sam Ryan introducing Fat Joe for ESPN’s new “Soundcheck” segment. Yipee. We don’t see a replay when they come back from commercial either. Go
ESPN.