If you read Steven’s (Tifosi’s) blog over at Anyname, you will see that he has written some more on the AffiliStore Enhanced - Release Candidate and has now started to talk about version numbers.

It is now at RC1 stage, which means that it is undergoing some final testing to get any last wrinkles out of it whilst trying it out under different hosting environments.

As Steven says in his blog, it is now feature complete for this release, but that doesn’t mean that work is complete as we both continue to try it out in independent ways.

I admit that I struggle to use it fully meantime until I get my head around how a particular new feature works … and therefore documentation will be a key deliverable when we release it.

I know that the tease factor must be immense, but I can assure you that it is worth waiting for to get the product right … you only have to look at Watchtime.

Remember, there is no upgrade path from standard Affilistore .. you will need to re-install and rebuild your stores, or to start up new domains. So start buying up all those domains now in readiness for your new Affilistore Enhanced projects … I recommend 123-reg for cheap registration with full DNS control.

Search for your domain name

Do you sometimes wish that you could see how many products you have loaded from within admin.This is a quick drop in hack to do just that.

fd.inc.php updated file

Unzip and upload as a direct replacement for admin/includes/fd.inc.php.

This could be useful as a cross-check if you expect a merchant to have 1,000 items, but the feed only shows a handful actually loaded.

EDIT: I forgot to add, that I also made it more resilient to finding products and displaying the manage feed row for a merchant. If you delete prodID = 1 (maybe it was low priced) for any merchant, then the standard script declines to show the feed refresh row. This version will look for prodIDs < 100 (you can easily change this if you wish)

It adds nothing to the functionality, but with the switch to the Affilistore v2.01 engine it has become a much simpler proposition to add a count to your site of the size of your product catalogue.

This comes about because it is easier to count products in a single product database rather than to add the product counts from many (and a variable number of them).

The following steps will show you how to do it.

I know that many people like to see these added elements, so if you are one of those people, it is but a 2 minute job to make this happen.

Simply add the following to your index.php file :

//get product count
 $getcount = mysql_query(”SELECT count(*) count FROM affiliSt_products1″);
 $productcount = mysql_fetch_assoc($getcount);
 $body->assign(”PRODCOUNT”,’<b><em><font size=”2″>Now serving ‘.number_format($productcount['count']).’ products.</font></em></b>’);

Where you add it isn’t particularly important, but now you can the {PRODCOUNT} tag wherever you see fit in your .tpl skin fies.

If you want to see this in action, then visit my DIY Tools & Accessories store. Incidentally, that site is running via the hosting that I am considering reselling (see here). As you will see, my site is running at a decent speed even although it does not use any PHP caching.

If you would consider a tailored hosting package running in the same environment, please respond via the forum postings.

If you have the oportunity to include remote file includes, then you should jump at the opportunity.

Why?

Well, you get full content indexation of any HTML that you can incorporate on your page, whereas you get none if all you can include is a link to a remote javascript option.

Unfortunately, more and more ISPs are disabling remote file includes and only permitting your own server side includes.

What if you could embed pure HTML in your own site and get full SEO credit, even for javascript?

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It appears that many people struggle to find high quality hosting that supports their Affilistore hosting.

I am looking at reselling some services that I have found to be very acceptable and in fact, very fast.

Before I undertake such a solution and risk subsidising people out of my own pocket, I am inviting feedback as to how much people would be prepared to pay for a highly resilient hosting service (a service that I have used for 2 years).

What would you be prepared to pay?

Please complete the poll on our new forum here.

Any hosting services and fees that we choose to introduce will be based upon your responses to this poll in conjunction with any other market research that we conduct.

As you will see, I am proposing to provide a month trial of the hosting for a nominal £1 fee. After that, we can talk about the right plan for you.

Please respond to the poll here and tick as many boxes as you feel you would be prepared to pay having regard to the proposed hosting plan arrangements.

Whilst not listed, I would of course plan for discounts based upon multi-domain hosting accounts.

Well, I said that a forum was coming and it is now live at the Affiliate Stores Forum.

For now the forum uses phpBB3 and whilst it may be possible to integrate registration between the forum and this WordPress blog, I have opted to keep things simple on my part and have the forum require separate registration.

As the title of this post says, I need to know what you want to talk about. I am therefore inviting suggestions about the path the forum should follow. Read this post which calls for your input to the structure of the forum and hopefully you will sign up and help determine exactly what we all start talking about and help each other become more profitable.

Happy posting!!

Steven and I are still working to get a release out, which will happen as soon as we are happy that it is stable.

Subscribers have been asking for more information, so here are some of Stevens notes around the mods that show a feature rich list of changes. So far, he has incorporated :

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It has been a while, but development and basic testing finished. Steven and I will be conducting further tests in the coming days.

The feature list is final and is as follows:

GroupMod
NavCatCSS
NavCatDropDown
Enhanced ThemeControl
Blocks
customTAGS
PaginationCSS
PageBanner
ThemeBanner
Enhanced RSS MultiFeed
Enhanced Cache
RefineSearch
Lightbox product listing
Analytics

Steven has added google analytics with the same functionality as wordpress mods & enhanced the theme control to allow finetuning of left/right & new footer navs at type level, e.g page/news.

The new functionality is not as intuitive as Affilistore v2.01, and we will therefore work at producing additional guides to the functionality.

Affilistore Enhanced is getting nearer …. watch this space or sign up to the feed to get the latest news.

Maybe I missed something?

Adsense has always marketed itself as a pay per click advertising channel.

I don’t know whether everyone is like me, but I like to give an advertisng channel to every Google ad that I publish … that lets me know what works and more importantly what doesn’t.

I have had a suspicion for a while that I was earning even where I did not have any clicks, but today I actually stopped to take stock.
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Does it seem crazy?

Let’s say it again …. you sell NOTHING, but you rake the money in.

Does that make sense?

At first sight or reading, of course it makes no sense at all …. but many Affiliate Networks will actually thank you for bringing new affiliates on board.

The way that they do this may be in one of two ways; and with some networks they will actually reward you twice.

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