Affiliate Program Suggestions

[garyamort]

I've been playing around with stupid ad insertions lately, just for my own knowledge.

I figured since I'm playing around with it, I ought to at the very least stick a FutureQuest affiliate image up as well on the off chance someone clicks it(since I'm playing around in a family photo gallery, the chance of this occuring is slim to none - as is getting any revenue as for the most part we just use the photo gallery as a place to hold images to be used in LJ posts).

A few items I've noticed about the affiliate program:
1) The links use mixed quotes, both " and '. This makes it more difficult to embed this in dynamically generated web pages(PHP and Perl) as one of those charectors must either be escaped, or converted in order to use it as a string.

2) It might be easier to establish a set of PHP and Perl friendly links for people to embed in their code properly.

[kitchin]

Easier in Perl than PHP:

print qq(interpreted text, "quotes" 'are' allowed, $item, \$$price);
print q(uninterpreted text, "quotes" 'are' allowed, shoes, $40.00);

It's even smart about embedded ()'s, as long as they balance, or you can use other delimiters, [] for example.

For PHP, use HEREDOC.

PHP Code:

<?php
print <<<END
interpreted text, "quotes" 'are' allowed, $item, \$$price
END;
?>

[garyamort]

Oh, I'm sure they work. It took me all of 5 minutes to change my own code to work with the quotes.

I'm just commenting that most affiliate programs and ad programs I've been mucking with have an option for PHP friendly code so the person inserting it doesn't have to know what their doing.

[Arthur]

We have changed the code so it no longer mixes single and double quotes. You are free to change the HTML code to suit your needs, if you need all single quotes, you can do that.

Frankly, if a person doesn't know how to use the HTML snippet in PHP, they shouldn't be using PHP.

-Arthur

[garyamort]

Originally Posted by Arthur

Frankly, if a person doesn't know how to use the HTML snippet in PHP, they shouldn't be using PHP.

I just can't agree with that. With templates and other items, it's becoming easier and easier for someone with little knowledge to make many changes themselves to PHP based applications.

Just to use my testing as an example, to add advertisements to a Menalto Gallery installation is dead easy following the instructions here http://codex.gallery2.org/index.php/...to_add_adsense

The first set of instructions shows a well designed system easy for users to follow. All the user has to do is create a template file with the sample code, and then add 1 line of code to their other template files where they want to make changes.

Even more brain dead simple is that when you go into those template files, they tell you explicitly in the first few lines that you need to make a sub directory called local and make a copy of the template files to be changed in the local directory not the root template directory.

(Granted, some users did have a little bit of trouble with these instructions, I beleive because the example didn'g indicate that you only replace the line of text between <<<END and END;, not the whole section. Following it in brain dead fashion, I simply swiped the whole section and than stuck quotes around it. So people placing their google ad code in place of the replacement text without quotes before and after had problems. :-))

After going through the process as a proof of concept, I was looking over my gallery and it struck me that I didn't have an "hosted by FQ" icon on my gallery.

Well, the same brain dead simple process lets me create a template, substitute a FQ image link for the google crud, and bingo, one hosted by FQ icon.

But right there on that collection of images is a link to the affiliate program, so since I'm trying to build experience with different ad types, I figure I might as well try that one. I applied for the Affiliate program(a fairly straightforward process) and when I came back to my system later that evening, I had an affiliate icon.

I did a simple selection of all the text for the Affiliate link, went to my template and replaced the all of 1 hour old FQ hosted blurb with an affiliate blurb, saved the thing and went to my Gallery. My footer was missing. So I pulled the text back up, looked at the affiliate text, noticed the mixed quotes and fixed them, than I reloaded and it worked.(note: I've been deliberately adding this stuff in a fairly brain dead manner, since my goal is to learn how and why things go wrong, the easiest way to do that is to follow cookie cutter approaches and discover when things stop working. Since the worst case that happens is the photo gallery web page is blank for a few minutes - and the only impact there is my wife teasing me if she notices, the gallery seems to be a good place to test. Sure, if Woody had gone to the police, this all would have never happened. And if I had stuck to the example and not removed the END tags from the beginning and end of the code snippet, I wouldn't have discovered this. But since Woody's goal is entertainment, and mine is deliberately breaking things to put them back together, doing it right the first time wouldn't have been beneficial)

Personally, I think the above process is non-technical enough that as long as you don't run into mixed quotes, or your examples are PHP friendly(escaping quotes) there should be no need for someone to pay a programmer to place this sort of stuff on their pages.

I was a bit suprised that I was merely replacing one FQ link with another FQ link and it choked.

I've been looking around over the past few days, and more and more things have affiliate programs. Vbulletin, Amazon, FutrueQuest, Google, Rent a Coder(don't ask why I know about that one), etc. And one of the things that affiliate programs seem to go out of their way to do is to make PHP versions of their stuff.

PHP has reached a point where non programmers can do much of their own editing and insertion using templates.

So I really think that affiliate links should have PHP friendly versions.

I considered firing off a note to FQ about it, but then I saw a whole forum sitting unused regarding Affiliate Program Suggestions, and figured this would be the perfect place to comment.

[Arthur]

The background of my remark was that PHP applications accounted for 43% of security issues last year. But, this is not the place to discuss that.

Following your suggestion, we have added an additional text box that will display the link code with all quotes escaped (\").

-Arthur