yes, a viking that helps you shop
Some few years ago, I had a D&D character named spackthar. He ruled. For some reason I thought it a good idea to buy a series of domain names based on the *thar theme.
- blogthar – an awesome blogging site
- songthar – an awesome lyrics site
- botthar – an mmo helper site
- guildthar – an mmo helper site that specifically helps with guilds
- shopthar – arbitrary shopping engine
followed. I have let most of them expire by now, but I just can’t shake loose of the shopping stuff. Lately I have switched my efforts from holaservers back to shopping. A few years ago I went to an amazon affiliate talk at oscon and kind of caught the vision. I implemented the affiliate api in good old perl, and generated a few million static html pages. I uploaded them to a variety of sites (including some of the thars above), and somehow I started selling stuff. I started to get a thousand page views a day, and a like fifty percent traffic boost each month. Then, I think I pushed it too far, or my ip changed, or something and I went (I think literally overnight) to like a hundred page views a day. My sales fell off to nearly nothing, but not to nothing. I still made like a hundred dollars a month, which was pretty cool.
Then I had a vision, and got some help. And maybe I had the vision even when I was doing the static html, but I wanted to build an arbitrary shopping engine. Filter on whatever you wanted and help you find the best products. Eventually I got a little help, dove in and we made the startings of a pretty cool site. We were using the YUI! stuff and life was good. We started to run into some browser compatibility issues and I thought it a great idea to switch to flex. We had made pretty everything available via a web service so I found a guy that knew flex and he just wrote around the extant web service and there we go. Or went. Traffic dropped to nearly nothing, or actually nothing. Sales followed a similar trend. There may have been a few reasons, like trying to do a little google dance, and having lame urls, but wow, talk about effort disincentive.
Lately I have decided to give it a go again. I have implemented some sitemaps and then rewrote them to prettier urls. I even changed the webservice so that the flex points to the pretty urls. I have been keeping an eye on my bot traffic and it looks like something may be happening
| count(*) | date | user_agent |
| 68 | 2009-01-24 | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) |
| 674 | 2009-01-25 | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) |
| 722 | 2009-01-26 | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) |
| 30 | 2009-01-27 | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) |
Those are some hits WHERE request_uri LIKE ‘/cgi/shop/product?asin=%’. Maybe if they can get indexed well, then some real traffic will start to return. I have also tried to have pages appear on only two domains, which is a whole lot less than the dozen or so I used to do. A site like computercomparer has computer stuff, and then shopthar has pretty well everything. Nothing yet, but I am still hopeful.
It is still a little rough, but if you’re looking for a computer, or a harddrive or the like, give it a go. Even if you don’t buy I would love to start getting feedback on the forums or directly (feedback @ holaservers.com)
Enjoy!
Earl