Category: Computers

Mac OS X and Windows

Google AdSense and Amazon Affiliates

It takes about 30 minutes to get started with google adsense. For the cost of some space on your website and some effort to get the code in you can for little effort earn … well, possibly peanuts per year depending on the popularity of your site.

But I don’t want grotty adverts on my site! I hear you cry. Quite right too. By default google makes its best effort to work out what your page is about and serve relevant ads, but you can also restrict ads by keyword. Google text-only ads are not very intrusive and you can specify an exact colour scheme to match your site.

If you want more control over what you advertise, a better plan might be joining Amazon affiliates, which allows you to advertise a specific product on Amazon’s site. That, or go into business yourself.

Of course the fact that I mention these two big names is yet another example of the winner-takes-all nature of internet business: the bigger you are, the bigger you get.

WordPress blocks Affiliate Links? (Close but no cigar)

iframes, WordPress, affiliate networks

One of the difficulties with wordpress is the security restrictions which blocks iframes. Thus, including this iframe:

<iframe src="http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?t=cafeencounnet-21&o=2&p=20&l=ez&f=ifr&f=ifr"></iframe>

may result in a blank space thus:
Empty Space!
instead of :

You could have run afoul of one of these gotchas:

  • If you’re wordpressing on a hosted service, security restrictions may simply stop you doing it. Not much you can do about that except move.
  • You may have AdBlock or some other ad blocker switched on in your browser – and hence block your own links! Right click on the page and see if you have ‘Block an ad on this page’ and “Don’t run on this domain” in your menu. Choose “Don’t run on this domain” to exclude your own site from adblocker. Similarly with other adblock technology.

Why would you want to have iframes on your site? If you’re an Amazon affiliate, or part of some other affiliate network (google affiliate network, doubleclick and a host of others) then your link to the network is usually via an iframe or a javascript tag.

Restore files from an Apple Time Machine Backup to Windows

As noted in Reading a Mac OS X disk from Windows if you can plug your Mac OS X drive into your Windows computer then you can use HFS Explorer to read it.

This works fine for Apple Time Machine Backups: look for the directory called /Backups.backupdb/ and within that, the name of your computer. You’ll find dated directories of your backups. If you’re just after the most recent version of your files, then look for a directory called “Latest”.

It’s quite clever — the folder for a given date shows you not just files backed up on that date but everything that was on your original disk at that date. The magic of file system links.