When Esrun told me his macbook had died I assumed he would go out and buy another.

But he decided to do what Steve always does and throw a surprise… He built his own Quad Core Mac!

I noticed Rob tweeting about it today again and it looks as if a few people will be following his lead.

Personally I am not sure ill be able to do it, heres how mine would end up

Li pointed me towards a great new service from Pierre which helps solve what should be (But never is) a simple problem.

Cligs

When you want to drop in an affiliate link somewhere out on the web often you will find that many of the people who are exposed to that link are from a location that the merchant doesnt want traffic from.

You know the kind of thing, you are promoting a UK offer yet if you drop the link in facebook you find a large percentage of the people who click it are US based and so the network tells them they dont qualify for that offer and sends them somewhere pointless instead.

Cligs helps solve that problem by allowing you to still have an innocent shortened URL whilst allowing you to send the traffic to different places depending on where they are located.

So UK people get the UK offer and US people get something equally tasty.

Simple ideas are often the most useful

Lately I have been finding it easier and easier to post regular entries here and I thought I would share the reasons why. I like most people with a blog that gets a few readers find it hard to motivate myself into getting all the bits together to make up a new post.

You know, text, images, open up photoshop, get a brew, log in – thats enough to make me think ‘meh ill do it later’

Well now I have a way of working that cuts through all that crap and I can just get back to writing.

Software: -

For writing the posts I am now using MarsEdit on the mac (This page has some good suggestions for those on windows). MarsEdit is a great offline blog writing tool. Heres a screenshot of me working up this post.

(Note that MarsEdit underlines my crappy spelling)

I then send the finished post up to the blog automatically as a draft and publish when I am ready and have finished the tags, extras and stuff.

To add the images I have moved to using Jing which is a fantastic tool for grabbing, formatting and annotating the image before uploading it straight to Flickr leaving the embed code on my clipboard so I just paste it into MarsEdit.

You can add arrows, text and frames to suit. I will even screenshot straight out of photoshop to save me the effort of saving it as a web image first (Told you I was lazy)

Once the post is uploaded to the blog I will log in at my convenience and add some tags, meta data etc. Zemanta is a great tool for adding links automatically to any post as well as offering up so

me image suggestions to help illustrate the post too.

Image by Zemanta via CrunchBase

Small things I know but they make the creation of posts a job that can fit in around the rest of the jobs you have to sort.

Some things to add to this way of working: -

For post ideas I am thinking of adding Skribit but to be honest I hate what they have done with the latest version.

I am also thinking of writing a simple plugin that allows me to post a new blogpost announcement to Twitter automatically as its published, depends how useful others think that would be?

I have been playing with a few new networks and some new places to promote affiliate offers of late and something has become painfully clear.

To rely on the stats given by the network is the same as dangling your cash in a shredder and flicking the on / off switch.

Typically the logic goes something like, lets have a look at the EPC for this offer and to start default bids on traffic at about a qtr of that until we get enough data to refine that.

This is the result from a new network I am trying (Not naming which one)

Quality I am sure you will agree. In my defense I was on holiday and didnt stop the test when I should have but it was a brief test at low value.

So in future I am going to use the following method for setting my default bids. (New network only)

Work out what a 2% ctr would provide me and set my bids appropriately. So if I know that the offer I want to test is going to give me $10 per conversion on avg then I will need 500 clicks to get that and 500 clicks cant cost me more than 2cents each, run away run away….

I would therefore conclude that its best not to PPC test this offer but to throw some cheap organic seo traffic at the offer to see what their data integrity looks like instead.

Anything else is burning cash until you know the network better or you get data to support theirs.

This morning I have added a new site search to this blog to make life easier for anyone wishing to find some of my older posts now that I have moved across onto the .co.uk version of my domain.

I tried this out with the standard Wordpress search functionality but have never been impressed with the results. So I installed my own, it looks like this: -

But you can see that as its right there on the sidebar, hey its Sunday morning and my head hurts OK?

The advantages of the new search system are: -

It ranks the search results better

It offers suggestions as you type (I love that feature!)

It indexes sub directories of the blog

The last one is the key for me as I have a number of tools off the main blog on their own pages and this well search them too. Cachechecker is an example of this, heres the search page for it

Last job to do is set up a Cron job on the server to re-index the site every day.

So how can this be done? Thought you’d never ask…

I am using Sphider which is a free PHP based spider. Very quick and simple to set up and offers a huge number of features.

Its installed on a subfolder on the site and then I just copied and pasted the search form into the blogs sidebar, bit of css and we are good to go.

Let me know how it works for you!

Incidently loving POPrl at the moment for sharing this link