Tell Me About That is Back Again, Really!!

I am such a slacker!! A couple of posts back, I explained about the surgery and why I couldn’t sit here long enough to write the posts. I also said that I would do better from here on out. Well it’s actually been 10 days since I last posted.

Now, it’s not entirely my fault. As I started to make some updates to my pages and scripts, for security purposes, I noticed that there was a script error on one of my 94 web pages. With fear in my heart I started looking at other pages and, sure enough, 85 of the 94 pages had the same error.

You’ve probably noticed that I have Google ads as well as eBay and Amazon offers on most of my pages. Well that’s so I can make a few bucks to help with the cost of keeping things going. If you buy something from eBay or Amazon through my site, I make a little extra change. The same happens when you click on a Google ad and spend a few seconds reading it.

Anyway, apparently, Amazon changed something in their system which caused a bad link in the script I was using. That in turn caused an error on all 85 pages using that particular script. I contacted the guy who wrote the original script and he said it wasn’t his problem. I wrote to Amazon to try to figure out what happened and never received a response to either of my emails. I posted the problem to several forums I regularly visit, that deal with these types of problems, and heard from no one. Now I was getting worried and I started looking through the scripts trying to figure it all out.

Well, if you’ve read previous posts then you might remember that I won all my sites in an auction. They were ready made and all I had to do was enter my affiliate codes for Google, Amazon and eBay. The reason I bought them that way was because, I don’t know anything about building a web page, writing script or doing any kind of programing. So here I was thinking about just shutting it all down and forgetting about it, seriously.

Then one day while sitting here playing Half-Life, it suddenly came to me. If Amazon was like eBay then they probably had a system where an affiliate could build an ad using some kind of online wizard. In fact they did, but it was called a widget. Now when you use the widget and build the ad it automatically generates the “HTML” code for the ad. Then you copy it and paste it where you want it in the web page.

In the case of my 85 web pages, the author was thoughtful enough to put the appropriate code in a file called Amazon.php. So I start thinking that if I can replace that code with the widget generated code, everything would work fine. Well I was right and it did. However, I decided to rename the page to something besides Amazon and that meant I had to change the link in the script as well, so I did, 85 times.

Now everything is ready for you to go to each of the 85 pages and make sure they are all working correctly. You can do that by going to the right side of the page and clicking on the links under “Links”. While you are on the page, go ahead and click on some Google ads and buy some stuff from Amazon and eBay, just to make sure they are working too.

I’ll be back soon, really!!