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Showing posts from 2009

Referral Link Hijacking

Online referral programs are everywhere. You can see them appear in social networking sites, forums, blogs and advertisement. People are just doing their business. What is a referral program? The main concept of a referral program is that you earn something from the work of someone you refer. The more persons you refer the more is your earning potential. Some programs apply multi-tier or multi-level referral scheme where your earning potential is multiplied. You promote a referral program through a unique link assigned by the organizer to you. This is an example of my referral link http://17104.powerbarclub.com . The number 17104 is my unique ID as the member of the Power Bar Club. You place this link in your websites, blogs, emails and advertisement. You talk about the link in Twitter or other social networking sites and forums. These referral links create a huge traffic in the Internet. The people that rides up the traffic has great cash conversion potential because referral links

Access Control

Access control is about controlling user flow within your application. Do not mistaken access control with security which is a bigger subject in itself. Access control begins by authenticating user and limit his or her activity in your application. An activity is something like creating, updating or deleting a content. There are always finite number of activities that can be done in a given application. Each user can be assigned to a set of activities that he or she is allowed to do. Access control is usually tied to session management. However, you do not need session management to have access control. When a user log in, a session is created so that the user is remembered for the subsequent access. Otherwise the user has to keep on providing his or her credential for each access. We can also keep a list of activities that the user is allowed to do in the session record. Some applications let the session alive indefinitely and some applications time out user after a duration of inacti

Retweet with Link

Twitter users are familiar with retweet. A tweet is a 140-character-or-less text which is supposed to be an answer to the question "What are you doing?" . Twitterers compose these texts and publish them in Twitter. Anybody can read those short texts. As a Twitterer you either compose text like that or follow other Twitterers to read their texts. Because the short text is like a short burst of words people tend to refer to it as 'tweet' which matches the sound of Twitter that purposely carry a bird in the logo. A retweet is a copy of somebody else tweet. You should acknowledge the author of the original tweet in your retweet. This is done by starting the retweet with ' RT @author: '. Replace 'author' with the Twitter handle of the author of the original tweet. Supposed that @ chelahmy tweets "Heavy rain in Kuala Lumpur. S.M.A.R.T. tunnel is expected to be closed" . @chelahmy is a Twitter handle. If you want to retweet @chelahmy then you sh

You've Landed Here Because of My Retweet

You must have clicked on a link in a retweet that bring you here. The retweet starts with ' RTL ', which stands for ' retweet with link ', and ends with a link pointing here. This has nothing to do with the content or the author of the tweet that I reweeted. You may want to learn more about retweet with link here . If you have landed here not because of a retweet then you may want to search Twitter with keywords ' RTL @chelahmy ' where this link appears on those retweets. Generally this link is shortened on those retweets. Why I place this link when I retweet? I do this because I want to promote my blog. I don't blog that often. I am a software programmer and right now I am programming around Twitter. You may find that most of my blogs are about my ideas around Twitter. I would like to write about my programming in Twitter but that may come once in a while. Ideas will come more often. There is not much different in term of process to come up with an idea a

Twitter E-Books

Why e-books? I have been asking this question since the beginning of wiki and search engine. I believe many of you are asking the same question. We can just do googling to search for any information. Chances we will land on a wiki page with our first search result. We all know that almost all information today are free. As free as the Internet. Again, why e-books and pay for the prices like the print books? I would rather buy a print book myself. I will answer this question from the content point of view. The only reason that an e-book is better than print book is because there is no actual print book that you can find in any book store for the said e-book. Well, majority of e-books on the Internet fall into that category. An e-book organizes its content just like a book. We read an e-book using a computer or an e-book reading device. We can print an e-book for off line reading but we have to bind it ourselves or get a printing and binding service to make it look like a print book. For

Viral Tweet Instruction

This is a scheme to generate viral tweets. Do it only for good causes. 1. Tweet something that will make people want to know more about you. Or, tweet something that will lead people to your blog or website. Make sure you place a link to your blog or website in the tweet. 2. Retweet the latest tweet by the person X who introduce you to this scheme via Twitter direct message. * 3. Also retweet the latest five retweets by the same person X. Do the earlier retweet first. 4. Send a direct message to people you know to tell them about this scheme. Make sure you provide them with the link to this instruction . You may copy the same direct message you received from person X. * If you get into this instruction not from a Twitterer then you may assume that person X is @chelahmy . And the direct message can be something like this, "Make your tweet viral to reach as many people as possible http://bit.ly/ipNym ". Good luck! May this scheme works for you. If you feel that the schem

A Twitter Usage Pattern

Twitter means different thing to different user. So the usage may vary. Some people use Twitter as a game to find as many followers as possible. I use Twitter mainly for feed aggregation. I read tweets more than I tweet myself. Thus, follower count is not my concern. I think follower count is distracting. Some even suggest that Twitter hide follower count . I follow tech journalists like @ TechCrunch , @ rww , @ slashdot , @ alleyinsider , @ techreview and @ databazaar . I keep on looking for tech journalists with great sources to follow. Well, there are too many tech news that I can chew in a day so I just skim their headlines. Twitter's short text makes it easier to skim the headlines. Each tech line is accompanied with a link to the blog post where the full news is published. Because I am living in a different time zone I will read the news few hours late. I consider being late is an advantage to me because I can also read the comments. I use the comments to check my own opini

Authentication by Mentioning using Twitter

Conventional method of authentication is to send an email with a link back to a user. You can achieve the same result with Twitter . You don't have to ask your user for an email address anymore. Your user will have one less worry that she will be spammed by email. With this method you don't have to ask for your user Twitter password. And you don't have to register your application to the Twitter's OAuth . The method is called authentication by mentioning. However, your user need to have a Twitter account. How does the method works? Prepare a short text and ask your user to tweet it and do not tweet anything else until the process is complete. She will have to inform your application that she has already tweeted the text. Your application will then verify that the user has indeed tweeted the text by reading it through Twitter's API . It is as simple as that. Your application needs to know your user's Twitter name to do so. Your user have to sign in to Twitter bef