Software Channels

In the last weeks we have been swamped with people who upload copyrighted materials, tried some credit card fraud schemes or are just extremely annoying.

We have today changed the sign-up process to activate accounts with a one-time payment of $4.95!

That is sad, because we wanted to enable ANYONE to sell quickly, but the amount of fraudsters was just so high that we are unable to handle all the single cases any more. In order to increase the quality of tradebit and filter out the bad stuff, we had to take action quickly. The next weeks we will improve that further and I hope that we will have more time now to help the individual merchants with more attention per request.

Do not hesitate to ask me, if you have any questions about the new model: puzzler(at)tradebit(dot)com - I will do my best to help!

Last week another fine Pubcon ended in Las Vegas. I was there to speak on 2 topics:

• Hosting Issues And SEO: How your choice of hoster, setup procedures and speed affects your site ranking with the search engines.
• Code Installation: How managing a code base (in my case PHP) can be set up to work with Open Source projects like Wordpress and your own creations.

and I moderated another session about the best practices with CSS and Javascript usage. My friends and respected Internet marketeers Todd Keup and Ted Ulle showed some pretty neat slides that will probably be posted on their sites.

The pubcon was great but also exhausting: dry and warm weather combined with all-day conferencing plus the parties at night are not a refreshing combination. Well-known SEO celebrity Greg Boser was one of the poor souls who got hit by a serious cold afterwards (read his tweets) and some others reported serious outages after the conf. So now you know, why it is named PUBcon

Lee Odden from TopRank did a short interview on AudioBoo of Neil and me to sum it all up: Listen to the interview here.

One of my highlights was the Search Engine Smackdown on the last day of the conference, where Matt Cutts of Google said that the search giant considers to factor the loading speed of a page into the ranking factors.

Especially the loading speed of pages was part of my presentation and I disclosed parts of the Tradebit setup in it.

Here is the PDF download of how you can improve your loading speed by using the Open Source software squid, including an example configuration in the presentation.

The last week was quite busy - today I came back from PubCon with a bazillion new ideas and now we will catch up this week to make tradebit “Christmas ready” and implement some changes we are supposed to roll-out this week.

We are far behind the new product roll-out and I hope we can catch up until Friday. Bare with us, while we work on the new things here.

In the next days we will perform business as usual and as soon as we have news, I will publish those here! Meanwhile you may want to follow me on Twitter for any instant product news: http://twitter.com/trabit - I will publish on all channels, when we have something new to say!

While I am in Vegas for pubcon a lot of new merchants signed up and we are slowly running low on storage. So I ordered a new storage server yesterday which just arrived in our rack with ThePlanet.

We are currently preparing the cluster to facilitate the new storage box and that will take a few hours (for that I had to skip the keynote speech today, doh!) and once it is setup we are closing in on 30 Terabytes of storage.

If you upload something and you get an error message within the next 4 hours, please do not hesitate to send me an email to puzzler(at)tradebit.com so I can investigate the problem.

Now I am off for a few more hours to hear more speeches at the conference. Some posts about pubcon will follow also soon!

Workload is not getting better. I fixed some minor bugs today and Martin is still in San Francisco after the Paypal developer conference. I think he brings some good new features that will ease the payment process and improve the fraud protection further back with him. Tomorrow I will leave for the US and spend a few days in Boston, Vegas and the Bay Area again to meet up with fellow webmasters, merchants and Internet marketeers.

While on the road, new blog posts will be rare and I will not implement code changes. Martin will release some fixes until next Tuesday, but I am not sure if they are worth to mention on the blog. We are still working on the new content to roll out asap and when that happens I will put up more details about the next steps on tradebit.

Until December we will come up with some profund changes and annouce them here shortly before we start…

So - have a good weekend, solid sales and healthy traffic!

Just a short heads up: I just uploaded a slightly changed detail page for the product details - it now has a twitter button, that you just need to click and add a short link to your twitter feed.

For that we registered a short domain called “tbit.ws” which directs you to the detail page for any given product ID. These links look (for example) like this:

http://tbit.ws/32050694

and are much shorter than the original, which would steal too much space from the 160 characters of twitter. So, if you want to inform your followers about a certain product: go to the detail page and hit the twitter button!

Additionally: this does not just work for twitter, this works for any product ID you want to link to!