I Need To Make Some Changes

The site is starting to get regular traffic but I know that if I continue the way I am there are going to be problems in the future.

Some of them are easy to work around, some are just too large for one guy to deal with without the proper organisation and tools.

Ok one of the problems is this, the images on the listings are hosted by and go to Amazon, this means.

• If they change their system, or policies I will lose all of my images on the listings.
• If they remove a product or change their linking system then this will also affect me and all of the listings.
• If they disable my affiliate account all my referral or product links become useless.
• If I want to change where these links go to , at present I have to do it one link at a time. The larger my website becomes the harder that will be.
• If I want to add a generic Item ,link or text to all of the listings then I have to do it one item at a time.

The number of companies is also a problem currently I have 28 listed, I need a way to link them to each product they have produced, maintain a relevant list of links and be able to update them all with generic data.

I need to be able to add images and create links to them on mass on the appropriate pages.

Basically the main problem is maintaining and future proofing the system in a way that one guy can be reasonably expected to handle it.

Many of the things above can be fixed by manipulating the database but some can't.

I am going to delete or modify the product listings, all of them, then replace them with a Jumi script. Each listing is basically the same except for the actual product issues so I will place the issues in a separate part of the page.

The preamble, images and links will be automated by the php code inside a Jumi module.The code takes one variable, the product name, it then writes out the links images and text dynamically based on that variable.

Yesterday I wrote a small program to help me, its a clipboard program. When I see an image for a product I want to add I copy and paste the image to the program window then copy paste the product name. The program does a few useful things, it creates  affiliate text and image links, it also saves the copied image to my uploads folder using the name of the product as the image name. The affiliate links I can use in static short term content. The saved images I am going to use with my php script in the Jumi module to generate the articles.

This way I am getting rid of the problem with dead image links by hosting the images myself, It will also let me modify the link properties once and effect all the items

This is the outline of the future work process for adding  product listings.

• surf the web and find a product.
• copy and paste the image and name into my program repeat till I get bored.
• Upload the new images created by my program to the server.
• Create the new articles in !Joomla by doing the following , paste the product name into the title field then click save...done.

This is the outline of the future work process for modifying  product listings and links.

• open the Jumi php script , modify then save.

For anyone using !Joomla this is the basic script that I am going to use.

By this point I was assessing the layout and function of the site, my assesment was pretty negative. I had started investigating and teaching myself PHP I also looked into CSS techniques.

Here is a good resource to learn CSS . It's from CSS Tricks , the author explains things in an easy to understand manner, very good video tutorials. http://css-tricks.com/
 

The more I learned the more I could see that the site in its present format was going to be limited. I am now using something vastly differrent than what is posted above, but it is a similar idea. Paste in the title and the  product is listed. It can now be dynamic or stored in the database for performance. It can switch between the two when I want to modify something site wide.

The sad thing is that the site was starting to take off, less than 2 months after purchasing the web space I was getting an average of 45 visitors a day. When the new iphone software was reported that number spiked to 150. Not a lot of traffic but enough to make me happy.