Cube Cart freaking rocks!!!!

Posted by stuart as ecommerce, Cube Cart, adsense

I’ve been working on the site for the business that Mrs. Pimpypagerank and I are starting (A sublimation printing business, printing on mouse mats, coffee mugs etc).

I’e had ecommerce sites before, using OSCommerce, and always found it a little clunky.

This time I thought I’d give Cube Cart a go (You’ll find it in your Fantastico setup, all you CPanel users).

This is one funky piece of software! Very easy to get up and running, easy to modify, and there are plenty of modifications for sale if you need it to do specific things (I need a file upload utility so customers can upload the images they want printed on things).

If you’re thinking of doing something in the ecommerce arena, I strongly suggest you do an install of this software and have a tinker.

Can a blogger survive in isolation?

Posted by stuart as blog traffic, blogging, blog

Just wondering if a blogger can survive if they live in isolation?

As bloggers, we interact with the outside world in two main ways:

1. Leaving comments on other blogs
2. Responding to comments on our own blogs.

Over the last couple of months, along with a significant drop in the number of posts I’m actually making here, I’ve had very little time to leave comments on other blogs.

This has had no appreciable impact on the stats of this blog, which is interesting, because my understanding was that this was where a significant amount of traffic was coming from.

So what do we gain from leaving comments on other blogs? Apart from the pagerank (assuming the blogger’s not using the “nofollow” tag), it would seem very little, other than the warm fuzy feeling you get from being part of a community.

One is not amused

Posted by stuart as domain registration

Interesting thing happened to me today - I registered a domain (through mydomain.com) for a project I am working on, set the name servers, created the account on my web host, and went off to get a coffee, as I usually do, while I waited for the DNS to delegate to my server. (This usually takes up to half an hour)

So I come back and type the domain name into my web browser, and I get what looks like a freaking landing page.

I logged back into my mydomain.com account, to check that I’d set the name servers correctly…….yup!

I get this page covered in AdSense ads, with the following text at the top:

Oops. There may be an issue with the URL Forwarding service for this
domain, in which case our technical staff is currently working the situation. Otherwise,
this domain is currently under construction and will be back online soon.

Hmmm, I wonder how much money a company the size of mydomain could make if they just did this for, say, two hours on every domain registered.

Has anyone else ever come across anything like this?

Money hungry Wiggles

Posted by stuart as bloody Wiggles

I would imagine that “Wiggles inc”, their subsidiaries, promoters, distributors and retailers probably have a couple of grand of my and Mrs. Pimpmypagerank’s hard earned.

A couple of months ago Mrs Pimpmypagerank took PMPR Jr to see a Wiggles concert. She dutifully lined up at the merchandise stands and bought him a (admittedly, pretty cool) tshirt.

On the left sleeve of said tshirt is a web address. I hadn’t really taken too much notice of the address, assuming it pointed to www.thewiggles.com.au, a quite cool interactive website for kids.
But no, I actually forked out my reddies to advertise the wiggles online store - www.wigglesshop.com.

This pisses me off. The wiggles are using my kid to not further their brand by pointing people to their website, but using him to advertise their (purely commercial) online shop.

I’m not sure why this pisses me off so much, but I did do some more investigating. The wiggles website actually consists of three domains:

1. www.thewiggles.com.au - A quite well done Flash site, with lots of games and activities for the little ‘uns.
2. www.wigglesshop.com - the online merchandise store
3. www.thewigglesondemand.com - more paid stuff - basically you can buy music and video for download here.

The problem is, especially for a three year old, it’s not immediately apparent which site you are on, as they all link to each other.

A couple of times PMPR Jr. has ended up on the “on demand” site, and asked me to “make this song work”. When I’ve looked, I’ve worked out that I need to enter credit card details to get the song to play.

I’m buggered if I’m going to enter the details. I can only imagine the shock we’d get if the site cookied an account for me (so nice of them!), then charged any songs mt kid managed to play to my VISA.

….wanders off to kick the cat

Performancing Partners dies in the ass

Posted by stuart as performancing partners, performancing

According to the performancing website, performancing partners is about to close.

This is a shame, and means that I’ll be losing a little income across a couple of sites.

I wonder whether advertisers currently using the performancing platform will move over to competitors such as text link ads?

….shame