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How to schedule / automatically test a contact form?

I’ve been setting up a scheduled tasks to let me know if I have a large number of transactions to process on Softtester, this is a simple count of the emails in the que, I get an email if its over a certain level.

This test will tell me if I’ve been spammed or if the pad spider program has failed.

I’d like to test my contact form, maybe once a week.

I’d like to do a true test and no just test the mail script but, test the page.

When I did the email count test, I was able to produce a PHP script which is then added as a schedule in my website control panel.

I’d like to do the same thing with the contact form test.

However, the only way I can think of the test the form, is to write a program which will load the page, populate the fields and click the submit button. And I can’t do this in a PHP script.

Any ideas?

by
JM

PS. I have looked for a free service to do this, but I can’t find one.

2008 12 10 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (3) Permalink

Is it worth seasonalising your site?

I’ve noticed in the past few days that I’ve had some orders for a couple of products where I previously had none. One of which has that pack license problem which they haven’t got back to me about. I’m convinced that these sales must be people buying presents for others for xmas.

With my KMF program, after the first year in erm, 2005 (I think) I put up some halloween stuff and tried to make a drive towards that event. But I didn’t get any / many sales from it.

Since then I’ve never been bothered about setting anything different up for the seasons / holidays. Obviously this would have to be setup in advance and be dynamic, then hopefully I’d be able to use it through-out the year with zero effort.

I’m talking about slight changes in graphics, with snow or pupkins maybe to text, happy holiday etc. I guess there could be quite a lot of events I could do.

The question here is, is it worth it?

As I say I’ve not done it in the past as I’ve not thought my program are good enough, but onee day they will be or may just sell without the download. So is it worth the effort?

Thoughts?

by
JM

2008 12 02 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (4) Permalink

Leeching whether we need to worry and what we can do?

Since we discovered that an IP had been leeching from us, Blue discovered that softtester has about lots of IPs doing it.

Blue doesn’t think theres anything we can do about it and he’s not seen any protection for it.

I’d like to discuss and figure out if its causing us problems, I know its costs resources like bandwidth.

Also, if it is a problem you’d think it would have happened to other people in the past and there would be some sort of protection.

Comments?

2008 12 02 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (14) Permalink

Homepage Title Tag: Possible improvements

I’ve been looking at the title tags on the homepages of both SoftTester and SoftwareLode to see if there’s any improvements that can be made to try and get more visitors.

On SoftwareLode, I’m going to shuffle the order of items in the title as the Free Software Downloads phrase isn’t attracting any visitors for me. The middle phrase in the title – Free DVD Software – gets me a few visitors though as does the Free Photo Software phrase. The phrase I’m going to try out is “Antivirus Software”. This phrase has 550,000 searches a month according to Google’s own keyword volume tool. This is much more than either of the other two phrases (DVD/ Photo). I’m also adding an antivirus-software.php page to SoftwareLode to see if that gets visitors.

On SoftTester, two of the phrases in the title might not be doing much to attract traffic – “shareware programs” and “freeware programs”. It might be an idea to change these to something else and see if any more visitors arrive. Softtester already has handy links for certain phrases in one of the columns on the homepage. It might be an idea to include these phrases in the homepage title. Here are the search volumes for some of the phrases on the homepage now:

anti virus software: 60, 500

dvd ripper: 90.500

However, these two phrases have higher search volumes:

antivirus software: 550,000

dvd software: 246,000

Note that changing “anti virus” to “antivirus” makes a big difference according to the Google keyword tool.

How about changing the homepage title to:

Free Software Downloads | Antivirus Software | DVD Software

and seeing if any more people hit the homepage?

by ML

Tagged
2008 12 01 MikeL Search Engine Optimisation Comments (2) Permalink

PageRank N/A: Why do no inner pages have a rank?

Ever since this blog was assigned a Google pagerank, I’ve been looking to see if any of the older posts have a rank. As far as I can tell, none of the post pages do. On my software blog, the homepage doesn’t have an assigned rank but a smattering of the older posts have a pagerank of 1. I don’t  understand this at all – maybe it’s just be down to the mysterious way Google operates.

My blog used to have a PageRank of 3. I think this was mainly because I gave it a link from my main site. The link was in place for two or three weeks and I think this was enough to give the PR 3 value. When I removed the link, the PR dropped but for some reason some of the older posts still have a rank.

Any ideas why none of the posts on this blog have a rank? Or are there some that do and I’ve just missed them?

by ML

Tagged
2008 12 01 MikeL Search Engine Optimisation Comments (3) Permalink

Actual Software Trial Period Lengths

On my last software release on 11th November, I changed the product code/ unlock code format to make things easier for my customers. The change also means I don’t have to issue new unlock codes when someones buys a new PC. My old system was getting to be a bit of a burden and I was getting 3 or 4 new unlock code requests a day. I took a tip from Dipsys and encoded the customer’s postal address and email address into the code. If the code gets handed out to other users, I’ll know exactly where it originated.

Anyway, the interesting thing about changing the format is that when I get a purchase I can now tell whether someone started the trial before or after the change. I’d read advice on the web saying that if someone was going to purchase shareware they more or less did so immediately. In my case though, this isn’t true. Three weeks after the code change, I’d say 90% of purchasers still use the old format code.

I don’t know whether to be worried by this or not. With the credit crunch and all that I could be paranoid that I’m not getting any new customers and I’m just exhausting the supply of people who downloaded a trial a month ago. However Google Analytics shows an increase in traffic lately not a drop-off so I must still be getting a fair number of new trial users. This is a bit complicated to work out though since I sometimes get bursts of visitors spread over a day or two when my free SliQ Submitter program gets posted on a forum or on someone’s SEO blog. Someone wrote up a complimentary report on SliQ Submitter a week or two ago and called it the GrandDaddy of all free directory submitters. I got about 60 visitors referred from that blog post over the next couple of days.

If my recent experience shows that most people take advantage of the trial period then I’m glad. I want people to use the full trial period to make sure they are happy to purchase. Hopefully it reduces the support overhead in the long-term.

by ML

Tagged
2008 11 30 MikeL Tech Talk Comments (9) Permalink

Types of PadFile marketing Programs?

I’d like to discuss, in more detail, the different types of programs which could be used with pad file marketing. Also gather together enough information / ideas to simple be able to write the program, all from this posting / comments.

Of course it would be easy just to develop lots of screen savers, but I think I could get tagged as a spammer and be rejected by shareware sites.

A) Screen Savers
The easiest / quickest type of program to develop, especailly as I have some software to do 90% of the task. We can also say in our pad files that the screen saver is a demo of our main program, in my case I had a CD, which i couldn’t normally use with a pad file. However, I have used a screen saver for my sheep jewellery item.

B) Catalogues
I’ve seen people submitting this type of program to softtester. They have produced a sort of mini site as a program. However, in my case I’m doing several program / pad file for my site, for my sub pages. So a catalogue is a little difficult. Especially as I don’t have a lot of information on each item. And I can only scrape together a couple of unique photos per item. In my screen savers I’ve had a couple of pages with my site logo and a couple of sentences. So I’m not really sure how I can do a catalogue for one item?

C) Toolbars
Mike has seen these ans said he gets loads submitted to SoftwareLode.com and most have little functionality and just sit in IE or FF and direct the browser to the target website and therefore they aren’t useful software. I guess these are going to be more time consuming to develop. Also naming the program, erm, what jewellery toolbar? I guess thats not so bad.

D) Pricing calculators
I’ve just downloaded one and had a look, it was fr your personal budget with some of the costs put towards jewellery. I was 4 screens and seemed quite complicated for a program on this type. I think if I was writing the program it would take me a day or two as I like to test things. Something like this seems a bit over the top to me. But I guess basic totalling would do. Although I can’t think how I’d do that. The good this about this type is that it couldn’t be called spam, it did seem like a genuine program.

E) Online Product Selection Tool or Online Jewellery Selection Tool
This is something mike suggested in another posting. I’m can only think that he meant that it would be some sort of catalogue with a fancy name? If so I guess the same comments that were made about catalogues stand here. Apart from the name, I doubt I’d reject it based on the name.

Any other type ideas? I’m hoping so, can’t say I like anything other than the screen saver unless I can come up with something quick.

Other comments?

by
JM

2008 11 29 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (11) Permalink

Getting started with the eBay API?

Blues mentioned the eBay API a few times, when he showed me the developers page a year or so ago and I took a look at the code it really put me off. Especially as I’m not that familiar with XMP and my definition of soap is slightly different to his 🙂

I thought I’d try and write something for my ordering system which would get the fee information. So ultimately I can work out my business level of profit.

So what do I know so far, had a conversation with Blue earlier and he said “its free now and allows 5,000 calls a day and my developer id is currently talking to my live account”.

Heres some sample XML.

<?xml version=”1.0″
encoding=”utf-8″?>

<GetMyMessagesRequest
xmlns=”urn:ebay:apis:eBLBaseComponents”>

<!– Standard Input Fields –>

<RequesterCredentials>

<eBayAuthToken>xyz</eBayAuthToken>

</RequesterCredentials>

<DetailLevel>ReturnMessages</DetailLevel>

<!– … more DetailLevel nodes here … –>

<ErrorLanguage>en_GB</ErrorLanguage>

<!– … more OutputSelector nodes here ..

And “in my app ive created copies of xml files on the docs, then insert my values in vb and make the call”.

So I think my first task is to try to get hold of some example code which nearly does what I need. Hopefully I won’t have to read through tonnes of documentation to get me going.

by
JM

2008 11 28 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (2) Permalink

How to caluculate whether your in profit with your ebay sellings?

Ideally I’m trying to come up with a quick and easy way to calculate whether my ebay sellings are earning me any profit. However, to do this accurately I’m going to have to include the amount I spend on packaging and stock.

From that I’ll have to take in to count stock / packaging I haven’t sold.

So that starts sounding complicated already.

Then theres ebay fees, where there is a monthly statement. The paypal where these fees as well as payments.

by
JM

2008 11 27 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (4) Permalink

Sitewide links from Unrelated Sites – pros and cons

Over the years, SoftTester has handed out site-wide links to lots of sites – some to Dipsy’s sites, some to others. Sometimes the other sites weren’t well related – although they often had a connection with software.

I was wondering how getting a sitewide link from a site as big as SoftTester affected the target site’s rank and traffic? For example, for a link with text something like “earrings”, did the linked page do a lot better in SERPs even though SoftTester has nothing to do with jewellery?

I’ve got someone who would like a link from softwarelode for an unrelated topic – web design. would it be a waste of a link or would it actually give them benefits?

by ML

2008 11 27 MikeL Link Building Comments (1) Permalink