aStore – The Simple E-Commerce Store
Amazon has a tool for Amazon Associates that allows you to build and customize your own Store with any selection of products from Amazon.com. We currently use Amazon for their context relative Omakase Ads contextual text links, we were curious about the aStore so we built one. You can create up to 100 stores with a custom selection of Amazon products for each store, you can choose entire Categories, Subcategories, ListMania Lists, or pick individual products one by one to include in your store under your own named Categories and Subcategories with individual customized descriptions of the products you choose. Each Category page you create also allows you to provide a description of the Category to be displayed on that page. After you choose your products you can specify the colors to be used on the site and a header logo, if your lazy you can choose a predefined color scheme. Once your store is built you have a choice of linking to it directly, including it in an iframe or a frameset, the code to do this is generated based on the option you choose. Amazon pays you the Associate rate on all sales. Amazon's associate program is very accessible to new publishers and doesn't put stringent requirements to sign up and get started. We've turned the store into a product recommendation area of the site, WebGuy Recommends, which allows us to showcase the products we recommend. There's a great article on My Digital Life on techniques for integrating your aStore into your blog.
Google Apps Rocks!!!
I just signed up for the standard Google Apps account, which is free, and I'm extremely impressed. Any small business stands to save tons of money if they only used it for the email service. All you need to have to sign up is your own domain name, and the ability to modify your MX records.
The standard service includes:
- Google Homepage
- Google Calendar
- Google Web Publishing
- Google Docs and Spreadsheets
- Google Talk
- Google Mail
Now all of these apps can be customized for your domain and your users, there's a Management application that allows you to set up new users and configure custom urls for all of these applications. I moved all of my email hosting over to Gmail, so now I have the greatest Ajax web application for email access to my domain email, along with the same POP client support I had with my host before. I had been using mail2web.com to access my pop account because of the non-existent web mail access at my host. Not to mention that my mail took away space from my hosting account limit.
I definitely think that Google has something here and it doesn't hurt to try it out, heck it's free, and I do love free. To get to the sign up go to http://www.google.com/a
LifeLock – Stop Identity Theft before it Happens
You wouldn't leave the door to your house unlocked at night in the hopes that you'll catch a thief red-handed, would you? Then why wait until thieves open credit accounts in your name before being notified that there's a problem.
Up until recently I was a big proponent of Equifax's Credit Watch service, whereby an email notification is received whenever a change occurs to your credit report. You then have to sift through the changes and make sure nothing fraudulent has occurred. Sounds a little too late to me, after all if something has happened and somebody has managed to steal your identity and open credit in your name, the damage is already done and you're left a mess to clean up.
Google Code Search – Great "Source" for Developers
I happened to be in Google Labs today poking around and noticed Google Code Search. If you're looking for a code snippet or example, this beats poking through links in the regular Google search. Just type the snippet that you're looking for and off you are with dozens of examples returned. I've already found tons of Java snippets and examples, next time I'm looking for a code example I'll definitely start here.