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Mashup Script Setup Guide

This is a quick guide to getting up and running with my modified version of the 45n5 mashup script.

Some of the steps are probably quite obvious but I thought if i’m going to do a guide for this I may as well include all steps, hopefully this helps some people out there who might not be so technically minded.

1. Get your domain name and webhosting
   This is probably quite an obvious step, but before you can use the script you need to have your domain name and web hosting. One thing that you do need on your hosting is PHP. I won’t go into too much detail on how to go about getting hosting, but if you aren’t sure then feel free to contact me and i’ll do my best to help out.If you don’t already have hosting then I would recommend eUKHost. This is who I am hosted with and they have some really good features and decent prices.
2. Download the mashup script
   Get the script from here. Put this somewhere on your PC and unzip it.
3. Edit the script
   Don’t worry if you’re not comfortable with changing code… you just need to change a couple of values in a couple of the files. Easy.
   • Open the stufftochange.php file in your favourite text editor. Here are the variables you can change here:
     • $siteurl - self explanatory really, just put your own domain name in
     • $TrackingID - put your eBay Partner Network campaign ID here. If you’re not yet signed up eith ePN then go to https://www.ebaypartnernetwork.com/ and join them.
       Once you’ve signed up log in and go to the Campaigns tab and you’ll find your default campaign ID there.
     • $TrackingPartnerCode - You don’t need to change this, this should always be set to 9 so we use the ePN.
     • $CustomID - You can set this to whatever you like, this will be useful for tracking if you use this script on multiple sites.
     • $AppID - This is your eBay developer ID and is needed to access the eBay API. You first need to join the eBay developer network here http://developer.ebay.com/. Once you’re signed up, log in then go to My Account, then under Application keys click on the Generate Production Keys link. Once you’ve done that, click on Key Set 1 and you’ll see your App ID.
     • $CurrencySymbol - This is the currency sign used for eBay prices. By default it’s set to the £ sign (although I had to set it as £ because it wasn’t working). Just set to $ if you want to use eBay US.
     • $amazonid - This is your Amazon Developer Access Key ID, and this is required to use the Amazon API. To get your Access Key ID go to http://aws.amazon.com/ and sign up. Once you’ve logged in, go to your web services account then AWS access identifiers. Here you’ll find your Access Key ID.
     • $amazontag - Your Amazon affiliate ID. Sign up here https://affiliate-program.amazon.co.uk/ (or https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/ for US). Your tracking ID is what you need here.
     • $searchindex - This is the area of Amazon to show results from. By default this is set to Blended which will display from the main areas of the Amazon site. Take a look at http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSECommerceService/2007-04-04/DG/SearchIndices.html for all options.
   • Open inc\ebaysearch.php, then scroll down to the ebay section. The only variables you need to worry about here really are:
     • $SiteID - This tells the eBay API which site to get results from. Set this to 3 for eBay UK, or 0 for eBay US. You can get the full list of site IDs here http://developer.ebay.com/DevZone/XML/docs/Reference/eBay/types/SiteCodeType.html. This variable also determines which Amazon site is used. If it’s set to 3 then the script will use Amazon UK, any other setting will use Amazon US.
     • $EntriesPerPage - Pretty straightforward, just change this to however many results you want returned. Maximum is 50.
   • Open products.txt. This is where you’ll enter all your products/keywords. Simply type out your list and this is what the script will use to build the menu and search eBay, Amazon and YouTube.
4. Upload the script to your site
   Grab your favroutie FTP program and upload the whole script directory. The only real requirement here is that you upload to the root of your site, ie. www.yourdomain.com, or the root of a subdomain, subdomain.yourdomain.com.

After setting this up I would highly recommend uploading my sitemap script to the root of your site, then submitting that to Google.

Hopefully that covers everything. As always if anyone needs any help setting this up, or if you come across any errors then feel free to contact me.

Get a .info Domain Name for only 50p

This might be old news, but I only just stumbled across it. GoDaddy have a sale on .info domains at the moment, just 50p for a year registration (+ 10p ICANN fee)!

Sounds like a perfect opportunity to get in a load of domains. I’m going to have a think about some niches i’d like to set up a site in then try and get a decent keyword rich domain. I’ve registered 3 already, but to be honest those are in an extremely saturated market (video games), but I thought i’d give them a go anyway, not much to lose! My plan is to get an affiliate mashup site on those and see if I can drive some traffic to them. If i’m not getting any return after 6-9 months then maybe i’ll try and sell the domains/sites. The way I see it, they only have to make 60p each to break even, so anything after that is profit, however little that may be.

Sitemap Generator for the mashup script

Just a quick post to say that i’ve written a script that will generate a valid XML sitemap that can be used, for example, with Google Sitemaps. The script runs through all the keywords in the products.txt file, builds the URL in the same way that they are created when someone browses to the site, and outputs it in XML. Change frequency is set to daily for every URL, and the priority is set to 1.0. You should be able to find and change that easily enough if you want to.

All you have to do with this is download the script (zipped) below and extract sitemap.php to the root of your script directory. Then, assuming you are submitting to Sitemaps in Google Webmaster Tools, submit http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.php. That’s it! Google will download your sitemap, hopefully daily, and it will automatically contain all your URLs, even if you add new keywords to products.txt.

Download the sitemap script here.