Brown PHP

I’ve been working on a little side project in my spare time that I’m happy to announce that I’m now opening up the public beta. Auction alerts is an alert system that searches eBay for auctions based on keywords that members subscribe to.

I’ve been privately beta testing it for a little while now with a handful of people and things have been going along smoothly. Now I want to open it up to the public. I’m not taking the beta off however because the content and design is still fresh and I want to get some more opinions before I call anything concrete.

This site is definitely useful for people that use eBay frequently, but even if you hardly use eBay at all it can still save you money. To give you a quick idea of what the site is about, you first login after registering for free. You then click, “Create Alert”.

Now you provide a key phrase that you want to search eBay for. You also provide your max price for the auction you’re looking for and how frequently you want the site to search for new auctions. Once you add it, you can create a few more, or you can log off and wait. After the amount of time that you chose is up, the site’s algorithm search eBay for the items you want. If it finds auctions, it emails you. If it doesn’t, it won’t. Simple as that. Currently, I’m only allowing 5 alerts at one time. That’s because the site is limited per number of calls it can make to the api per day. I am awaiting a response to eBay to increase this limit. I’ll keep you updated about that.

I made this tool awhile back to save me some time so I don’t have to troll eBay for deals anymore. The site works especially well for electronics because electronics most have model numbers. Having model numbers greatly helps in finding auctions for the exact product you’re looking for.

I’m also going to try to integrate Twitter with Auction Alerts a little more closely. So look for some experimenting going on there. I’m going to do without a blog for the site. I’ll probably fold like a lawn chair and make one after awhile though, lol. I would like to provide all the information and updates for the site via Twitter. If you want to follow the Auction Alerts Twitter account check out @auctionalerts.

This is going to be an ongoing project for me while I’m not at my day job. I already have a few features that I’ve started working on to add to the site. So I would love to hear any feedback from you guys. Look forward to hearing your ideas.

I currently just launched a new site about a week ago, Whey Powder Protein. I’ve been getting into the routine of beginning to make a few niche websites to generate income via affiliate marketing and Adsense. I know this is no new method by any means and this isn’t new to me either. However I wanted to take a different approach to a site like this other than the normal approach of spamming it to hell.

I created some content for the whey protein site on my own, but most of it was written by experts in the health field. I wanted the content to be genuinely informative rather than any regurgitate horse crap that is on a lot of other sites like this. (continue reading…)

Sponsored Tweets has started a challenge to existing members to help bring in new members. The existing member that brings in the most referrals will win $1000. If I win, I will share it with the people that helped me get it! This will be going on for only a few weeks so I don’t have much time.

If I win the $1000, I’ll give $900 of it away! $300 will go to 3 random people that tweet out the link that is posted below and signs up with Sponsored Tweets. The link below will redirect to Twitter with the status that others need to retweet. There will be two links in the status update. The first goes to Sponsored Tweets to sign up and the second goes to this article to describe this competition. Feel free to change the status update anyway you like as long as you keep both links and the @dlbrown06 in it so I get notified that you tweeted it.

I’m pretty sure Sponsored Tweets is a fairly new service, but I have already made some money from it. Let me be clear that I didn’t have to spam the hell out of my followers to make money. The most Sponsored Tweets I have sent out in a day have been 2 and I don’t plan to ever go over that. I don’t want the people I follow to spam me so I certainly don’t want to spam my followers.

I’m confident that if you guys enjoy tweeting, you’ll like this service. Shoemoney showed that he made over $15,000 in ONE month using this. People would pay him a lot of money per tweet for his huge cult following.

So if you enjoy tweeting and there are a lot of people that enjoy reading your tweets, you don’t have anything to lose by trying this out. I’ll keep you guy posted on the results of this and if/when we win! If I do win the contest, that will begin my own contest to give out my prize winnings to the people that helped me get it.

IMPORTANT: Make sure you sign up to Sponsored Tweets with the same Twitter username that you used when you Retweeted the link. If you don’t I won’t know you did both!

MY ST PLUG: If you would like me to tweet about your business, just click, Tweet About Me!

I have been using Twitter for a little while now and I think most of you can agree that the more time you put into it, the more you get out of it. Without Twitter I would have never connected with so many like minded people. After using the service for awhile I have started following a large number of many interesting people. Now that Twitter Lists has been added to Twitter, I can finally organize this following into groups.

Twitter made creating a new Twitter list so easy that anyone can take advantage of it. In the right sidebar of your profile, simply click the “New list” link. After this, a dialog box will pop up allowing you to name the list and choose whether your would like it to be public or private. Selecting a private list will only give you access to the list and no one else.

I immediately started four different groups that summarize my current four different interests. The lists that I have created I’ll be adding to and maintaining as time goes on. My four lists are:

• PHP Tweeters: This list includes a majority of the most influential PHP developers and evangelists.
• SEO Tweeters: Like the PHP list, the SEO lists includes some very noteworthy SEO specialists.
• iPhone Tweeters: I have this list just because I have an iPhone and I’m interested in the apps, bug fixes and news.
• Fun Tweeters: Right now, this list only has in the hosts to the 404 podcast. I’ll be adding other interesting tweeters to this list that don’t really relate to any specific category.

So feel free to follow these lists and if you feel like I am leaving some important Tweeters out of a Twitter List just leave a comment or contact me through the blog. Also please comment your lists that you think would be interesting for other people to follow.

I am sad to say that I have taken the Informative Post down so that I can change my hosting plan to a more affordable package. I would like to extend an enormous amount of gratitude to all the authors that have devoted their time and effort to make the Informative Post a success, but due to my very busy schedule in trying to balance my new job with the site I was very overwhelmed and I had to let this go.

If anyone would be interested in taking over this project I would be happy to auction off ALL of Informative Post’s source code, so that someone else could take over the project. I would love to give it all away, but as many of you know, I have devoted a lot of my own resources into the Informative Post.

So every article that was being offered on the Informative Post, will now be directing to this page on BrownPHP. If you are new to Brown PHP, this is my own personal blog. I write articles covering all sorts of topics, not just PHP articles.

If you would want to follow me, you can find me on Twitter. I’m constantly Twittering all day!