Caroline left a comment suggesting a site called Maatiam for shopping on line. The catch is Maatiam donates a portion of the purchases to charity and you get to pick the charity. As I’ve been doing this Internet thing a long time now I wanted to make sure this wasn’t a scam before I passed it along and did some digging. I couldn’t find anything negative about the project and people only had good things to say. It looks like Maatiam has been around at least 2 years and the best part of the idea is:

• You don’t pay any extra. You get to shop a top stores that you know and love like Amazon, Buy.com, Target, etc. and you get the same prices you normally would.
• You get to pick the charity! Maatiam has over 800,000 charities to choose from so you should be able to find one that works for you.

The way this works is pretty slick. The reason you don’t have to pay extra is that Maatiam has signed up to the affiliate programs for all these retailers and gets paid a commission on everything people buy. Maatiam donates approximately 7% of the sales to the charity of your choice keeping only about 3% for costs and overhead.

While this is slightly off topic here I think it’s a great cause and a great example of how to use the Internet and the affiliate marketing concept to do something that can have an impact on real peoples lives. I’m about to start doing the online portion of my Christmas shopping and I plan on using Maatiam.

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As I think about what project to do next my mind is always drawn back to doing an affiliate site. I know I won’t be ready in time for Cyber Monday this year but I’ve seen a lot of people getting ready for it. For those who don’t know, Cyber Monday is one of the biggest online shopping days of the Christmas shopping season. It’s the Monday following Black Friday, the big sale day after Thanksgiving.

I know what I’d be doing if I had my site up already.

• Make sure all my sites were up, responding and all affiliate links were working!
• Make sure popular items this season were featured promenantly
• List special deals such as coupons, free shipping, bonus items etc.
• Email my “list” to make sure they know about the sales and link to specific hot deals
• Offer shopping tips for getting the items you want for both Black Friday and Cyber Monday
• Update frequently to keep them coming back.

And I’m sure there are tons of other great tips. Do you have an affiliate site of any kind? What are you doing to get ready?

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If I haven’t mentioned it before I really like the new design I did for Chrispian.com. It’s not fancy, it’s not going to win any design awards but it I like it. It’s wider, cleaner and has more room for me to do the kinds of things I want to do. It’s not Bulletproof yet and I still need to streamline the CSS / Wordpress theme but it’s a big step in the right direction. I designed it with the idea that I could use it for my other sites as well and it lends itself to different colors and other bits that’ll make it look different despite being pretty much the same. So I decided to give Twitter Hacks a shot using the new design and overall I’m pretty pleased with it. Now to figure out what to do next!

Technorati Tags: Twitter Hacks, Wordpress, Redesign

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  Reporting scrapers for using your content.

I’m trying to decide if I can go to SXSW in March. I had a blast last year but this time I’m paying for it out of pocket which makes it a little bit tougher of a decision. I’m also torn because I’d really like my wife Aeryn to go as well (she’s a blogger, it makes sense!) but it’ll cost more, naturally. While the panels are decent, the real magic at these events is meeting people, hanging out and just soaking in the energy of the thing. Sure, by the last day your ready to get the hell out of dodge but I had a boat load of fun laster time and seeing all the hype about Blog World Expo is making me want to go even more. I hate having missed BWE! I’m going to be there next year for sure.

There’s no doubt it’ll be a good time. But I’m trying to debate if going is the best use of my money and my time. I’m very much in the mode where I want to make my money work for me the best way possible. But I also don’t get to travel much and where I am there isn’t a lot of people in the dot com / web 2.0 type crowd. My pal Steve has offered to let me crash in his hotel (right across from the convention center!) so I’d just need the ticket and and air fair. About $600 ish and then food, which is about like anywhere else. I’d be spending that money anyway. The only travel I’d need would be to/from the airport and that’s not much. If Aeryn goes we’d need our own hotel and while she’s into blogging, and I know she’d have a blast at the parties, I don’t know that meeting a bunch of web geeks is exactly her thing.

So, I need to decide if I’m going and if I’m going to take Aeryn. Anyone else out there going to SXSW?

Technorati Tags: SXSW, Blog World Expo

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As of Wordpress 2.3 the tables categories, post2cat, and link2cat have been removed. New tables replace them but they aren’t the same. Wordpress is moving more towards tagging / taxonomy, which is fantastic. However, many plugins are still using the old table terminology. After I upgraded I did a search in all the plugins I used and disabled them until they get updated. One of them I don’t really use anymore as WP has the features I need to replicate it built in (customizable post listings) while I do want Google sitemaps back.

So, keep that in mind when upgrading that it might break some of your plugins if they do business with the categories, post2cat or link2cat tables.

Technorati Tags: Wordpress, Plugins, Upgrade, 2.3.x