Beckism.com

Ever since my recent redesign (and subsequent drastic increase in activity), I’ve started using Amazon.com Affiliate links when linking to good books, games, and so forth that I am currently experiencing. I hate the idea of advertisements on Beckism.com, and since I was planning on sharing opinions on books/etc. anyway, this seems like a pretty unobtrusive way to create a small possibility of revenue. My pie-in-the-sky dream is that someday Beckism.com will pay for its own hosting costs. That will be a good day.

In any case, I’ve only recently started using Amazon.com affiliate links, and may I just say that Amazon.com has a terrible system. You have to visit their Affiliate Central. Then log in. Then view all their widgets and so forth. Then choose the Product Links option. Then search for your product. Find the product in the search results. Die of boredom.

And the URL’s hideously long. Some monstrosity like this:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0525457585/104-5843009-5065550?ie=UTF8&tag=beckism-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0525457585

It makes me cringe. I’ve been searching for a way to quickly build my own Amazon.com Affiliate links; since I’m just using simple text links, I see no reason to jump through Amazon’s hoops. My goal was something that doesn’t require me to sign into Amazon and that gives me drastically shorter URLs (because long URLs make it difficult for me to read my post’s code):

These do not seem to me impossible demands. I searched for a Mac OS X Dashboard widget that would let me find products on Amazon and automatically generate an affiliate link: no love. Searched for blog posts about how to do this: Dave Taylor had some interesting advice, but it seemed outdated (given that I’ve never seen the types of URLs that he uses as examples before), and Noah Coad’s regex, while definitely good to know for non-affiliate links, doesn’t mention how to append an affiliate ID. Chris Thomson posted Using Amazon Associates Easily in MarsEdit recently, but his solution churns out hideously long URLs (and his MarsEdit macro forces you to input text; I don’t like doing that).

So here’s what I’ve come up with, which is hardly revolutionary. First step is to search for something via Amazon’s normal webpage (forget that convoluted affiliate link generating crap). You’ll get something hideous like this:

http://www.amazon.com/Neverending-Story-Michael-Ende/dp/0525457585/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1203784616&sr=8-3

Yuck. The part that you want is the string of letters and numbers immediately after /dp/. This is the product ID. Copy it out of your address bar.

Now you just need to construct your shortened version. Insert the product ID into a URL that looks like this:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0525457585/?tag=beckism-20

Of course, use your own Amazon.com affiliate ID instead of “beckism-20″, and stick the product ID after /dp/.

This link is the smallest format that I can find that is recommended by multiple people on the Amazon Affiliate discussion boards. I’m curious, however, if Dave Taylor is still correct about just slapping the tracking ID onto the end. If you’d like to help me test this, click here (I don’t expect you to buy Neverending Story, although it’s a classic and well worth reading, but in a day or so the affiliate reports will show that someone clicked a link, and then I’ll know for sure; currently the affiliate ID in the link hasn’t been published anywhere else).

I’m sure this is a common problem, so let me know in the comments if you’ve heard of a better way. Also, be aware that there’s the possibility that shortening your links down like this may disable some of Amazon’s fancy reporting stuff. I have no idea (or any way to test it).

Lastly, if you’re using MarsEdit, you can make the link creation process incredibly easy. Open up a post (or new post) and choose the “Markup” dropdown in the toolbar (or select Post→Text Markup→Edit). Click the + button to add a markup macro, name it whatever you like, and stick this in the opening tag:

<a href=”http://www.amazon.com/dp/#pastetext#/?tag=beckism-20″>

(Again, replace “beckism-20″ with your Amazon Affiliate tag.) The closing tag is obviously just </a>. If you like, assign a keyboard shortcut for easy access. All you need to do to use the macro is to copy the product’s ID (which follows /dp/ in the standard Amazon URL) before selecting the MarsEdit macro. The macro will deal intelligently with selected text (or lack thereof) without your needing to do a thing.

Update April 13, 2008: After a couple of other people have tested the linking in the comments (and having myself tried both the shortest method and the method I recommend in the article above), it turns out that the format http://www.amazon.com/dp/0525457585/beckism-20 does not work. The shortest format you can use is http://www.amazon.com/dp/0525457585/?tag=beckism-20 (a similar format is additionally cited on Amazon’s own blog, so presumably it will be valid for the foreseeable future).

Veerle recently ran a “What is Graphic Design” contest, and got some beautiful entries. She just announced the winners, and they’re a lot of fun. #15 is my favorite, I think. I love the way the message isn’t complete without the words and images both; I’m not sure why it ranked the lowest of the winners.

Makes me wish I was a graphic designer or had any sort of talent in that area.

Keeping Your Elements’ Kids in Line with Offspring by Alex Bischoff and published over at A List Apart is an excellent article introducing a Javascript library for mimicking CSS pseudo classes such as :first-child, :last-child, and so forth.

An excellent resource considering the number of browsers (including Firefox) that have spotty support for some of these selectors.

The time has come to say farewell to what had previously been my favorite FTP program, Transmit. I started using Transmit because I was sick to death of Fetch, Cyberduck kept failing in the middle of transfers, and hey, thousands of fans can’t be wrong, right?

Of course, if I had been aware of Yummy FTP at the time, I could have saved myself $30. Unfortunately, I only discovered Yummy FTP a few days ago, but I am a solid convert now. Transmit was pretty solid; Yummy FTP is fantastic.

Although I was initially not impressed with Yummy (its interface is rather cluttered and nowhere near as streamlined as Transmit, or even Cyberduck), I tried it out because it was on sale at MacZot and because the feature list was a bit out of this world. So while I didn’t have love at first sight, I definitely had love at first use.

Yummy FTP is the fastest, most powerful FTP program I have ever had the pleasure to use. What it lacks in sparkle it more than makes up for in functionality. Yummy has snapped through beastly transfers that Transmit stumbled and choked on as if they were nothing. It isn’t a program for the FTP newbie; the power that it provides definitely would make the software confusing for a first-timer. But for someone like myself who uses FTP every day and needs a reliable and powerful tool, Yummy FTP is damn near perfect.

Not only that, but the developer is possibly the most responsive I’ve ever met. Before I registered the program I emailed the support email to ask about a couple features, and he replied almost immediately. I don’t think I’ve ever had a developer answer me that quickly, and certainly not in the middle of a sale and for someone who doesn’t even own the software. Then a few emails into the conversation he apologized for being so slow to respond because he was asleep. I hadn’t even asked a question; he was responding to an email that was basically all compliment.

Yes, he’s possibly crazy, but in such a wonderful way.

In any case, Transmit and I will be parting ways (perhaps one of these days I’ll write out a real comparison between the two pieces of software beyond my fan-boy ravings). I’ll leave it installed for a while, but Yummy FTP has stolen my heart. Farewell, Transmit. We had some good times.

I saw the most amazing license plate the other day. I suppose you have to be into the web to get the joke, but on the back of a car in front of me this is what I saw:

404-UHH

The best part is that it wasn’t a custom plate, so the person inside probably had no idea that I was behind them laughing because their car was throwing me a vehicle not found error and was to top it all off confused and speechless about the whole thing.

The fact that I found this as funny as I did probably indicates that I should spend more time outside and less on the computer, but such is life.

I created the design that became my new Mac software blog Tagamac by accident. I was in between web design clients, but had just bought a new font (Estilo) and wanted to play around with it. I started messing around in Photoshop and pretty soon I had a mockup image that was quite intriguing. Aside from Estilo, which just oozes personality, I had come up with a border that was a lot different from any of my previous designs: it extended a little over halfway across the from both sides, but didn’t go all the way across. The top and bottom complemented, but didn’t complete each other.

I had to create the HTML just to see if I could. This would not be a difficult design with tables, of course; heck, I could have Photoshop figure out how it wanted to break it up for that. Divs, however, were another matter. After fighting the good fight, I have a method that I think is pretty slick. In fact, the only thing I regret is that I had to use a pixel fixed width; the squishy fixed width that I’m using for the Idol Bat, One Crayon, and this site could play no part (it’s squishy because it’s in ems; if you resize the text, the width of the page will grow to keep the line lengths similar).

I doubt other people will have quite the same fixation with asymmetrical designs, but I figured I’d outline how I achieved the Tagamac design here. If you want to see exactly how it’s done you can of course check out the source.

The problem I ran up against was not getting the middle main area looking good, but making the borders I’d created extend to the edges of the screen. I solved my problem by using two main header divs and two footer divs. Each div is 50% the width of the screen. For the headers, the left header has a background image along the bottom for the border; for the footers, it’s the right footer. Then each of the header divs has a content div. The content divs are each half the width of the whole page (which is 800px), have an ‘auto’ outer margin, and contain images that hide the background in the parent divs.

And voilá: an asymmetrical page! Of course, the header and the footer have to be broken in half (so there can’t be anything that spans them) and the page width is a fixed pixel width, but overall I’m pretty happy with it. Asymmetry is a relatively easy way to make websites that stand out (from my standard designs, if nothing else).

And now, without advance warning, I have launched a new blog! Tagamac focuses on Mac tagging software and generally exploring the phenomenon of tagging. I noticed several months ago that there is a serious dearth of easily digestible information about tagging online, and since I’m into tagging software, I figured I would try to rectify that situation.

Check it out if you enjoy tags, and particularly if you enjoy Mac software! I’m hoping to publish general articles about tagging, track tagging software updates, and review Mac tagging software.

Take a moment and go take a look at Writing.com.

Now take some deep breaths and recover from your initial “What the shit?!” reaction.

As best I can tell, this is one of the most popular writer’s critique websites that you can find. Hundreds of people will be online at any one time, posting their writing, reading other’s writing, and just generally using the website.

This is a crime. Why do writers settle for this kind of crap? It’s nothing but advertisements, and even if you “upgrade” your account to get rid of the ads, its still impossible to get anything done because the site’s interface is designed so poorly. There’s simply no excuse. That site should be allowed to die, preferably in agony.

It’s hard to find good sites for writing critique online. Critique Circle is like a breath of fresh air after Writing.com, but it has far fewer people online at any one time (10-20 in my experience). I just don’t get it. Why do writer’s have no taste?

If there were any justice in this world, ColdFusion would never have been created.

I currently have a client whose webhost uses Windows hosting. Okay, I can handle that. It’s not what I would advise (since I’m far more competent with Linux hosting), but these things happen. And the host offers PHP.

But this particular client’s website was designed in ColdFusion, which means that it’s languishing on one the host’s ColdFusion servers, with no access to PHP. Due to the fact that I cannot test PHP applications under Windows SQL conditions, I get stuck using ColdFusion in order to be able to test anything.

It wasn’t until I was halfway through the project and banging my head against a wall because nothing was working that I figured out that it wasn’t just ColdFusion, it was ColdFusion 5, two full version numbers lower than the current released version. This server is obviously a dinosaur. I have a fairly decent background in ColdFusion thanks to my college’s idiotic policies (they used ColdFusion rather than PHP because they didn’t think PHP, a piece of open-source software, was secure), but having to use ColdFusion 5, which I’m sure is light-years better than 4, is like riding a tricycle when I’m used to PHP’s motorcycle. At least ColdFusion MX was a bicycle with training wheels.

Needless to say, the site’s code is ugly. Ugly, ugly, ugly, and no fun to write, either.

I know the people who need to hear this are not going to read this, but please businesses looking for hosting. Just because Windows “business” hosting often costs more, doesn’t mean it’s better. And if you settle for Windows, at least make sure that you don’t get saddled with ColdFusion.

On the other hand, this project has forced me to think about interface design a lot (mainly because my first design choices weren’t possible given the limitations, but also because the people who will be using this site are not at all savvy when it comes to the web). When I have more time after the project is done, I shall have to ponder interface on the web.

I recently landed a web design client who has a website that needs a little sprucing up, an entirely new admin backend that can be administrated by real people, and a lot of code updating. Its code is hideous; completely non-XHTML compliant with capitalized tags scattered everywhere, some pages are seas of Word-generated HTML (which is the worst nightmare of any decent web designer), and it’s otherwise just pretty hideous.

Fortunately for me, I have a lovely utility called TextSoap Deluxe. TextSoap has any number of ways to clean text, and one of its nicest ones is the ability to create a custom cleaner based off of regex rules, which will then churn through a chunk of text and do things to it. Of course, I knew very little regex at the time, but after a few hours sitting down with the excellent Regular-Expressions.info tutorial and doing a bit of trial and error in TextSoap I was able to create a cleaner that at least simplifies my life by lowercasing the things that need lowercasing (among a few other things). If you use TextSoap and want to see what I’ve done, I’ve posted an early version of the cleaner in the TextSoap forums: XHTML Cleaner for TextSoap.