I'm on a roll baby!

Yesterday, out of pure boredom, I started dropping cards. Entrecards that is. What else? I thought I might find something interesting to read, something to waste time with. And I did. But besides that, I decided to take a spin over at JoeTech.com since I saw his script on most of the blogs and web sites I've visited. Now, normally I'm not a lucky person. It rarely happens for me to win anything and when I do are just prizes that are not worth the trouble to claim. It happened on his website also: I've won 1 ec about a dozen times, but I decided it's not worth all the hustle to claim it. I mean I would have had to copy the winning code, send him a message, then he would have had to check the code and send me the prize. And all that for 1 ec.

But JoeTech.com has another spinning script. One that let's you win links on his site. So I tried that one out. And Guess what: I'VE WON! One small text link. As soon as I entered the link to this blog and hit the submit button, the script says I've won yet another link. This time a better one. I figured out that you can spin the handle until you lose because after I've entered the details for the second link, the script said "come back tomorrow" or something like that. So I was pretty happy I won two links.

Today I gave it another try. My links were not there anymore so I thought that they only have a one day validity term. At first I won 4 ec with the first script. This time I decided to cash out and, to my surprise, the credits were added pretty fast. It's not a fortune, but maybe one day I'll hit the jackpot. After that I've tried the ads script and I won one small link. After that another one. And another one. And yet another one. Until I had about eight text small links listed there. And then it hit me. The links don't even last one day. They disappear when other people win and the whole thing moves like a stack. I think. And you can play the script more then once a day. So I tried to take all the small slot ads and I almost made it. Except for one.

Oh well, at least I had something to do for a few minutes.

FeedBurner doesn't always count right

I planned to write about this early this week, but I honestly forgot about it. It's related to a post I've read on one of Martin's blogs just last week I think. The post in question gives a link to a list of feed directories that you can use to submit your RSS feed to.

So I've done that and the very next day I watched the stats on FeedBurner. I noticed right away that an increase in subscribers took place the day before, but when you look at the agents that grabbed the feed, thing tend to fall into place. You probably already now that if you click the link right under your subscribers count, the one that says, "See more about your subscribers", you get more information about what agents have accessed your feed. For example, in my case, the subscribers count was 21. What can I say, I'm not a very popular guy. If you add up numbers in the "Feed Readers and Aggregators" table you get that total. But that is not the number of real persons that have grabbed your feed, because if you look lower, there is another table that shows the "Web Browsers". In my case the total of the browsers was 8: 7 with Internet Explorer and only one Firefox. In my opinion, even that number is wrong, As certain bots might disguise themselves as browsers. But I could be wrong. And speaking of bots, the last table on the page shows the bots that have accessed your feed. So if you add these with the number of browsers that have been registered, you get the exact number of subscribers that FeedBurner states you have. Witch is wrong from my point of view. It's like saying that Google Bot is my number one reader.

I was at the peek of exaltation thinking that I've found a huge gap in the way FeedBurner shows stats. But before shouting my knowledge to the world, I decided to do another comparison, using another day as example. I numbered the total of web browsers and the number of bots and then added them together and then ... my whole theory collapsed. I got a number larger that the one that FeedBurner showed to me. So what's up with that? Seeing as I can get no real facts out of this I decided to read the official help pages. Maybe I should have done that earlier.

Here's what I got from the first shot: "Subscribers is an approximate measure of the number of individuals currently subscribed to your feed." Ohhh, why didn't you say that it's approximate. That makes a lot more sense. Reading on: "Subscribers is not computed for browsers and bots that access your feed." There goes all my mathematical operations. And the last but not least: "Subscribers counts are calculated by matching IP address and feed reader combinations."

So that's how I managed to waste a whole hour of my day. The lesson to be learned here? There's a reason for those question mark icons: if you don't know something, all you have to do is click them.

Entrecard: let's see what's all the fuss about

I probably would have never heard about this if so many blogs wouldn't have posted about it. I've probably seen it before in the sidebars, but haven't paid too much attention to it. It was just one of the many other plug-ins that help you build a network and "bring in thousands of visitors". So I decided to give it try.

I could tell right away that there's a lot of activity there. One minute after I've signed up and placed the code for the widget on the blog, I already had a few cards dropped in. It's like it's an ants nest over there, everyone just waiting for the next victim :). I also approved a few advertisers that appeared soon after. Not more than 30 seconds later I think. But I never had the chance to learn what it's all about. So I read the informations that were on the website, but I got bored pretty fast. And then I went back over the posts of the bloggers that made me join. I've seen a lot of contests out there that give away EC (Entrecard currency) if you perform certain tasks like linking to their website/blog, write a short post about it, subscribe via email, write comments or other stuff like that. And the prizes are somewhere between 500 and 1000 EC. To buy ad space on one of the higher blogs enrolled in Entrecard costs you around 200-300 and some might reach 400EC or more. The ad (which is actually a picture of your choice) is placed on the website where you where approved for 24 hours. If it's a web site with many visitors per day, then you can get quite a lot of hits if your add sparks interest. Apparently the easiest way to get EC is to drop your card on other peoples widget. You get one EC and they get one in turn. That would explain why people hold that sort of contests. If you have a lot of people that drop their card on your blog daily then that sums up to a lot of EC. Instead of a one day box on another website, why not encourage people to link to you? Those links are of a more permanent nature and they're backed up by a free review. That looks like a good deal to me.

The problem with people earning EC just by dropping their card on your site is you don't get a real visitor out of this. They just come in, drop it, and leave fast so they can drop it somewhere else. In my opinion that translates most always to a 100% bounce rate, thus making this system useless. I'm not saying that it doesn't get the job done, it just doesn't do it the it planned for it. You can still create a network through Entrecard because you find very easily people/blogs from your niche and that way you can discover new things, find out about new programs or who knows what other stuff you would normally find the traditional way. So it's still good for something. As I said, I haven't had the chance to study it more so I don't know everything it's capable of. But so far, thing look pretty nice. If not for anything else, you can use it to waste a few minutes of your day browsing in a different manner.

As I was writing this a thought came to my head on how to prevent the 100% bounce rate. People just come in, drop the card and leave. That's not nice of them. How could we keep them for longer? Well for them to leave as fast as possible, they need to drop their card, so they need to find the widget. What if you placed a display:hidden attribute on it? I mean enclose it in a hidden div or something like that. Would the widget disappear? Just imagine the people in a hurry to drop you their card and wander mindlessly on your site to find the widget :). Of course this way you would lose the EC that you would normally win, but I guess it's worth it for a good laugh. It was just a thought anyway.

Cheating an auto-surf

This is the follow-up of what I was saying in the last post. Since I first saw an auto-surf or paid-to program, I've always tried to cheat them. Shame on me. I actually managed to trick quite a few, but with no real financial income. This is just one of the: LinkCrews.com. It's a nice auto-surf, cute graphical interface and interesting crediting mechanism. You can find more information on their website. So let's get on with it.

First of all, I have a XAMPP package installed on my computer, but you can use any Apache installation and PHP. This one is just easy to use and provides me with everything I need. The cheating script is comprised of 2 files in my case. One is the html file "hack.html" and the other is "hold.php". I don't know why I've named them this way. You can use whatever names you like. Both of them need to be placed in the same folder in your "htdocs" folder and will be accessed like this in your browser "http://localhost/foldername/hack.html". The source was not originally commented, so I did that in a hurry. What you really have to do is replace "your_user_name_here" with, you guessed it, your LinkCrews user name. And it should work. If it doesn't, don't expect any support. Cheating is wrong (damn conscience!). I might tell their support team about this simple method of cheating their system. And one last thought: this works because they don't really have a good anti-cheat system. I don't even know if they have any. So let's get on with it already. The first file is "hack.html" and the source code is:

<html>
<head>
<!-- refresh page every 15 seconds -->
<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" CONTENT="15;URL=http://localhost/hack.html">
<script type="text/javascript">
/*- function that creates a new "special" variable
- if you want more info, do a Google search for AJAX
- I won't comment this one*/
function newXMLHTTP(){
  try{
    request = new XMLHttpRequest();
    // Firefox, Opera 8.0+, Safari
    return request;
    }
  catch (e){
   // Internet Explorer
   try{
     request = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP");
     return request;
     }
   catch (e){
     try{
       request = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
       return request;
       }
     catch (e){
       alert("Your browser does not support AJAX!");
       return false;
       }
     }
   }
 }

// the main function of the script
function fetch_new_link(){
   var XMLHttpRequestObject = newXMLHTTP(); 
   //create that special variable
   if(XMLHttpRequestObject){
      XMLHttpRequestObject.async = false;
      XMLHttpRequestObject.open("GET", "hold.php");
      XMLHttpRequestObject.send(null);
      XMLHttpRequestObject.onreadystatechange = function() {
        // if our variable is ok
        // let's get the job done
        if (XMLHttpRequestObject.readyState == 4){
           var linktxt = XMLHttpRequestObject.responseText; 
           // what our php file gave us
           newlink = "http://linkcrews.com/surf/index.php?username=usr_name&id=" + linktxt + ""; 
           //create the new link; replace your username here
           frames['container'].location.href = newlink; 
           // point the frame to the next link
           }
         }
       }
     }
    // end all the circus
 </script>
</head>
<body onLoad="javascript:fetch_new_link()">
<!-- start the script on the spot -->
<!-- this will hold the new links -->
<iframe name="container" id="container" width="100%"></iframe>
<!-- and that's about it -->
</body></html>

And the second file, "hold.php", is:

<?
// print out errors if any
function print_error(){
global $parser;
die(sprintf("XML Error: %s at line %d",
xml_error_string($xml_get_error_code($parser)),
xml_get_current_line_number($parser)));
}

// use the default xml parsing methods
$parser = xml_parser_create();
xml_parser_set_option($parser,XML_OPTION_SKIP_WHITE,1);
xml_parser_set_option($parser,XML_OPTION_CASE_FOLDING,0);

// I can't really remember what this does
$data = implode("", file("http://linkcrews.com/surf/links2.php?username=usr")); 
// remember put your username here

xml_parse_into_struct($parser,$data,&$d_ar,&$i_ar) or print_error();

// get the availabe links
$values = array();
foreach($d_ar as $key){
if($key['tag'] == 'id'){
$values[] = $key['value'];
}
}

xml_parser_free($parser); // destroy the xml parser

$i = rand(0,2); // pick one of the links
echo $values[$i]; // send it to the html file "special" variable
?>

And that's about it. There might be certain errors in the code due to the transcription of the html special characters. If you can't make it work, oh well, maybe it's better this way. I've stopped using it anyway. It's just not worth it for me.

Boy, I'm tired. And now I'm all out of ideas and beer. So I'll come back when everything stops spinning. See ya.

LE: I just noticed that certain longer lines of the code are not visible because the posting area has overflow:hidden. Sorry about that. But if you select from top to bottom and paste them in a text editor it should be OK