Anyway, I’ve found out that it’s a lot more difficult than it looks to post coupon codes on a regular basis! Damn! I’m already running 3 other blogs (that’s a total of four with CouponCodesVault.com) and it sucks a lot of my time considering that I’m still working full time.

So What have I been up to? Well sometime ago I started developing a tracking script in PHP and I decided to put that back on the work table.

Now I’ve called it “Affiliate Tracker Pro” but it’s just a work name for now, I’ll find something better later. What it does is that it creates a unique tracking ID for each visitor based on:

• the referring URL
• search keywords
• PPC or organic search result
• the clickthrough page
• the offer link on which the user clicked

It also handles affiliate links using redirects so I can track clicks and optimize my anchor tags for SEO. Once a user clicks on a link, it appends a tracker ID to the affiliate.

Here’s what it looks like at this point:

click to zoom

So that’s where I’m at right now. I’ve made a small $10 at this point and I sure know I don’t post as often as I should. I should post like 4 or 5 offers a day to have enough content.

I’m getting used to finding coupons and writing faster so once I get to post on a regular basis, the next step will be to drive more traffic through various methods like SEO and social networking.

I am very happy about this since web development and web hosting are my passion. I’ll be managing Linux and Windows web servers. I’ll also be going through PHP and ASP development.

I guess those 14 years in this business are finally paying off!

The current WordPress theme is the Blog Pixel Blue Edition SEO’ed by CourtneyTuttle. I’ve done a few changes in order to display ads in the right column.

That said, I’m gonna begin the Make Money Online Case Study this monday. I’m really excited to see how this project turns out!

If you wanna get email updates on this case study, click here.

The pumps will be made by Gilbarco Veeder-Root. They will be connected to the Internet and will display Google’s mapping service. The gas station owners will be able to select which attactions (restaurants, hotels, hospitals, etc.) will be displayed on their gas pumps.

“We think the service will create more customer loyalty for retailers,” said Gilbarco Veeder-Root spokeswoman Lucy Sackett.

3,500 gas pumps will be produced while additional ones will me made on retailer demand.

In its quest to world domination, Google has also entered the PC market lately with their launch of the gPC along with its gOS Unbutu-based operating system. The Everex gPC TC2502 has a 1.5 GHz processor, 512 MB of memory and an 80 GB hard drive. The computer will be available in the US at Wal-Mart for only $199. Such an inexpensive computer is made with the vision of moving applications online like what they did with Google Docs.

Promotion code: us-annual-15

Visit Wordtracker.com

Anyway, I knew I had to change my web control panel (VHCS2) for many reasons (1. it sucked, 2. it’s outdated and not maintained, 3. it’s vulnerable) and I always pushed that back to later. Now I’ve got the cPanel Gold VPS from FutureHosting.biz and the additional $5.00 per month for this VPS was totally worth it.

Moving all my PHP scripts and adjusting parameters (database passwords, paths, permissions, etc…) was a f*cking pain…

 I am just getting used to cPanel, I’ve been a DirectAdmin user for a long time. I gotta say that cPanel is a lot more powerful than DirectAdmin but if you’re into web hosting and you’ve got clients using your control panel, they might like DirectAdmin better because it’s more intuitive and there are less options by default. cPanel has a truckload of functionnalities and you might want to make some simpler templates if some of your users are less experienced.

So now I’m gonna have a deeper look into cPanel and see how I can harden this machine…

Fortunately I had been lucky enough because he could have done a lot more damages. Going through my log files, I have been able to track pretty much everything he’s done and as I noticed the intrusion early, I’ve banned his IP on my firewall. I know it’s not that hard to get in using another IP but anyway it may have given me a few minutes to react to the attack.

I had been a bit lazy lately as I knew I had to replace my outdated VHCS2 control panel by something a lot better but I always pushed that back. So now I guess is a good time to do it because even though I tracked what he as done on my server, I can’t be 100% sure he doesn’t have an access anymore. You can get more information on the VHCS exploit here and you can get the VHCS security patch here.

I just got myself a brand new VPS with cPanel and I am moving all my websites to the new server so updates to TheWebmastersCafe.net may be a little slow this week.

Conversion to PHP 5 has been really slow. According to Nexen.net for August 2007, 78% of websites are still using PHP 4. PHP 4.4.7 is still the popular choice while PHP 5.2.3 is good second.

PHP.net has a migration guide for PHP4 to PHP5 as well as guides for PHP 5.0 to 5.1 and PHP 5.1 to 5.2.

If you are using CentOS 4, I’ve written an article about migrating from PHP 4.3.9 to 5.1.6.

Oh well… it’s not like Overture was a great keyword tool as of lately. Maybe I’ll have a look into Yahoo! Search Marketing someday. Let me know if you ever get to use their services.