When I sold the site and attempted to transfer the license, I ran into trouble. I learned that even though I bought and paid for a full license, in order to transfer the license I had to be “current”. My active status expired 1 year after purchasing the license. I had to shell out more $$ to get the license active again, so that I could transfer the license.

A valuable lesson indeed, rather a costly one as I more or less gave the site away.

One of the problems I am encountering is making the contact form functional. It seems as though no matter the functions I choose, nothing will work. I have to suspect that my host, Dreamhost has something to do with it.

I went to their wiki, and found some good examples. However, I set things up as shown in my image and the mail never get to me. I have tried several different email addresses on different servers, and nothing works. This will prove to be an ongoing dilemma and more than likely will be posting again on it!

I currently use Maxbounty and Azoogle as tools to help the money making machine chug along, and I have recently wondered how long I should let a non-producing CPA campaign go before pulling the plug on it.

For example, I am currently running a campaign from Azoogle that has a payout of $20 on one of my directories and have yet to make a dime on it. I’ve been running this ad for two weeks.

I asked David from CPA Affiliates.com about it, here’s what he had to say:

Flukeit: How long do you give a non-paying CPA Campaign before pulling the plug?
David: Well are you referring to CPA campaign where you are doing PPC to it or on a website you are currently running?
Flukeit: A website I’m running.
David: I usually will give it two days if it is placed in a prime spot on the site.
Flukeit: Wow, not very long huh?
David: The only time I would have it run longer is if it was a VERY low traffic site with like under 200 uniques a day then might let it run longer
David: I try to focus on targeting my audience. If audience is mainly techie teens I will try free iPod, laptop etc. If they are women I may try free magazine offers or free makeup.
Flukeit: Would you recommend using a lower paying CPA campaign and focus on higher volume, or the occasional big payout?
David: I would try both and whichever one makes me more over a set period would get the spot.

My conversation with David is leading me to have less patience with my CPA campaign I choose to use.

I want to maintain a clean directory, so that means that every site submitted must be verified. Earlier this week, I had a backlog of 600 links waiting to be verified. That would take me forever to go through!

Then I began to think. The world is filled with low wage labor, maybe I could outsource it? I went to Digital Point forums and put the bat signal out. I got a bite.

A member agreed to sift through every one of them for the low price of $20. It took him a couple of days to go through, but he got it done. Amazing.

I then started thinking about third world sweatshops, and the possibility that there could be cyber sweatshops out there where young children or slaves are doing this sort of work. I’m sure it’s possible. Why not? After all, who do you think made the shoes you’re wearing?

I own several websites that are link directories. Most of them are run on the phpLD Link Directory script. One of the more challenging parts of maintaining and getting these directories going is dealing with Smarty. Before I knew any better, I would get frustrated when trying to add code, then not seeing the end result on the page displayed.

Smarty does weird things, as I’m still learning and understanding.

A prime example of this is adding Adsense code to template files. I was attempting to add Adsense code to one of my templates, and I simply added my Adsense code.

The result was not what I planned. The ads displayed, but were not correct as shown here.(Image at 75% scale)

The ad just didn’t look right, and it seems as though the “ads by Google” text was missing.

After doing some investigating, I learned that I had to add “literal” tags around the code as such:
{literal}
Adsense code
{/literal}

This was much better, as it produced the desired ad:

I still run across confusion when I attempt to do other things similar, and still cannot figure them out. These are growing pains, I’m sure as I will eventually grow out of them.

I looked to the Digital Point Forums and found my answer. A big thanks to JEET who answered my dilemma with the following:

Try this code:
(Assuming your images are stored in a folder called “images”, 1 directory below where the code is executed.)
$mdarr= "18-25/12,13-20/05";
$miarr= "christmas.jpg,happy_birthday_jeet.jpg";
// Format explained below and why use this.

$jtd= date("d");
$jtd= $jtd-7;// Minus 7 days to match above format.
$jtd= $jtd . '-'. date("d"). '/' . date("m");
$jc=0;
$r= explode(",",$mdarr);
foreach($r as $v)
{
if($jtd==$v)
{
++$jc;
}
}
if($jc>0)
{
--$jc;
$img= explode(",", $miarr);
$img= $img[$jc];
print '

';
}
else
{
print '

';
}
?>

About the date format.

$mdarr= "18-25/12,13-20/05";
Here you can fit an array for all the dates you wish to change your image on.
For example 25/12 (25 December.) Minus 7 days makes it:
18-25/12, so your image starts appearing 7 days before the actual festival.
Add a "," sign and enter another date in same format.
(Minus 7 days)-(Actual date)/(month)
Add as many as you like.

Which Image to use:
$miarr= "christmas.jpg,happy_birthday_jeet.jpg";

Just enter the full image file name for each date at the same "number" position as it appears in date array.
Seperated by "," sign.

18-25/12 was first item, so "christmas.jpg" is first in this array.
and so on.

Then replace the img tag for your logo with this code above.
Fill the array once, and probably will never have to touch it again...

Submitting your website to directories in an attempt to gain pagerank and/or traffic can be hazardous to your mailbox. While many directory owners have good intentions, some take it to the next level by spamming your email address.

I strongly suggest using an email address that you only use for such applications. Good ones to use are Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail adresses because they’re quite disposable.

It might also be worht mentioning that just because a directory “Looks Legit” doesn’t mean they will spam you. I have been spammed by some very reputable directory owners.

I’ve posted some of my own link directories in the sidebar, I assure you that you will not be spammed.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I decided to remake a website that was Drupal based, and make is a Wordpress site.

Now you would think that I would learn, because I preach this to others but never remember myself. Before you get too far along in a site, check it with other browsers and resolution settings.

Once again, I took it for granted.

I got pretty far into my new Wordpress theme. I was near three hours into recoding and rebuilding this site until I had to go to work. At my “Real Job” I was checking on some things using a different computer. My stomach sank when I looked at my new site and it was half gone.

I realized that using the Liquid Summer 1.0 theme, it looks awesome with Firefox but with Internet Explorer, forget it. I decided quickly that I would be better off just scrapping and starting with a different theme than to try to make this one work.

As I went in the back end and was attempting to make changes, I was completely unimpressed with how the system works. It almost feels like they’re trying to do too much and leaves the administrator completely confused. I tinkered around for several hours and am still finding things.

The navigational system in there is bad also. In fact, I am so displeased with it, I am leaning towards scrapping the entire site and starting fresh with a Wordpress based site.