When I first started getting involved in freelance web development the requests for building online stores were few and far between. In recent years this has totally changed, as people want more and more to begin selling their products and services online. This trend has increased just as quickly as people’s concerns and interests in Search Engine Optimisation.

I’ve used my fair share of Ecommerce Software in this time and, really, they’re all about the same. They come in two flavors: hosted and self-hosted. My preference is to always go with the hosted solution because while the costs are usually higher the headaches are few and far between. A lot of the hosted solutions also have really excellent hooks that let you tie into your own CMS or scripts.

The one big knock on hosted shopping cart packages is that you lose almost all control over the look and feel of the interface. This is unfortunate because the best Web Design firms out there didn’t exactly build most of these carts. This is where the hooks they provide or so important. With the right hooks and programming you can do as much as you can on your side of the equation to offset what’s lacking on the hosted side.

It took a long, long time but YouTube finally announced additions to their API that actually make it useful. With the release of the features listed below we’re about to see the floodgate open on third-party YouTube applications.

• Upload videos and video responses to YouTube
• Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)
• Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales
• Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales
• Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software

I hope someone combines this with the new iPhone SDK and makes a YouTube application for my iPod Touch that’s actually worth a damn.

Yesterday, Erik Karey released phpBayAds, his eBay ads script, for free to the public. Think of phpBayAds as a self-hosted version of the old AuctionAds program. Erik was kind enough to answer some questions I had about his new release.

With the wild popularity of BANS and phpBay Pro these days it seems like you’ve hit a gap in the marketplace for eBay affiliates. Can you take a minute to describe what phpBayAds does for those that haven’t heard yet and who is most likely to benefit from using it?

I’ve noticed the increase in the popularity of the eBay affiliate program for awhile now and I’ve even started using phpBayPro on a few websites of mine and found great success with it. I also noticed a lot of press on AuctionAds (now ShoppingAds) and it’s shortcomings.

All of these things got me thinking about what type of products I could develop to capitalize on the publicity surrounding the eBay affiliate program which eventually led me to creating phpBayAds.

phpBayAds lets you create adsense-styled ads that feature images and links to eBay auction products using your own eBay Affiliate ID. So when a user clicks on the ad and either makes a purchase or signs up for eBay you get the commissions.

Although results will vary from site to site, I think phpBayAds can benefit every webmaster who tries it as it adds an additional source of income to your websites. phpBayAds are fully customizable from the color of the links to the color of the border to the size of the ads and can be made to blend well with any and all websites.

What was some of your reasoning behind releasing phpBayAds for free?

When I initially set out to release phpBayAds I planned to sell it for somewhere around $20. However when I got to thinking about it I realized that at least at the start of my development that releasing it for free and getting the largest amount of users using the script is to my benefit.

I truly want this script to succeed and to do that I need people to use it and I need people to provide me with feedback. I’m hoping that as the script gets more exposure and as I add features that I may release a low cost Pro version which would include more features and functionality.

What are some of the benefits/disadvantages to you as a developer in making people run the script on their own server?

I think the main advantage of being able to run this script on your own server is that you are in full control. Your ads will always be running as long as your own web host is running. You don’t have to rely on any 3rd party website.

In the future as phpBayAds grows in popularity I would like to offer a hosted version for a low monthly cost which would let those less technical users also use the script.

What’s in store for future releases?

I have a number of features that I’d love to add as long as phpBayAds grows in popularity.

One major feature that I plan to add in the near future is reporting. I want to be able to track all of the clicks going through the ads, show what keywords are performing, what ad sizes are working best and present it all in one useful control panel.

As I mentioned above I’d also like to offer a hosted version of the script and perhaps additional ad sizes.

Lastly I’d like to make the ads more configurable by allowing you to set whether or not the ads should have images, price range of the items, geotargetting and more!

The future is bright for phpBayAds as long as people find it useful.

I want to thank Erik for taking the time to answer my questions. You can learn more about phpBayAds and download it for free over at his blog.

On Monday, Google announced that some of their applications had been upgraded on the iPhone and iPod Touch. I finally got a chance to check out the new version of Gmail this morning on my iPod Touch and it’s probably one of the best iPhone specific sites I’ve seen yet. The only thing that closely rivals it is Facebook on the iPhone.

Joe Hewitt is the man responsible for Facebook on the iPhone. Fortunately for the rest of us he released the JavaScript and CSS he used in developing the site. The package is called iUI and is available under the New BSD License. You can get a feel for just what iUI can do by checking out some examples on its Google Code site.

Creating a mobile version of a site is probably one of those projects that most of us get all excited about and then immediately place on the backburner. How much longer can we put a mobile version off? The market share of the iPhone is exploding and tools like iUI can make it easier to get a mobile site launched than ever before.

The Yahoo! Developer Network offers all sorts of excellent APIs, RSS feeds and other resources for web developers. I’ve written in the past about using their stock quote CSV files to get stock updates and today I’ll show you a really short piece of code to gather weather data directly from Yahoo! Weather.

The code below is pretty simple but it relies on Magpie to handle the RSS stuff. I’ve written about Magpie before if you’re interested in learning more. The trick with these weather feeds from Yahoo! is stripping out the current weather and the forecast from between the bizarre HTML markup they’ve put around it all. This chunk of code should take care of that for you.

<?php
	include("rss_fetch.inc");

	$zipcode = "44101";
	$feed = fetch_rss("http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/forecastrss?p=".$zipcode);

	if ($feed and !$feed->ERROR)
	{
		$items = array_slice($feed->items, 0);
		foreach ($items as $item)
		{
			$arr_weather = explode('<br />', str_replace('<BR />', '<br />', str_replace('<p />', '<br />', $item['description'])));
			$arr_forecast = explode('-', $arr_weather[5]);

			$current_weather = trim($arr_weather[2]);
			$forecast_weather = trim($arr_forecast[1]);
		}
	}
?>

When this is done you’re left with a variable named $current_weather that contains the weather as it exists at that moment and another variable named $forecast_weather with the current day’s weather forecast.

I’ve used this chunk of code severals times on intranets I’ve built. A variation on this code that includes weather icons helps power some features at Fore Score Golf Stats as well. A big use there is to show the current weather at any courses a user has played at (seen on the right).

If you want to read some more about Yahoo’s weather RSS feeds then check out the weather section of their Developer Network.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the benefits of building Facebook Applications. I find the whole thing pretty interesting and I might be building a simple app to tie into Fore Score Golf Stats this year. Here are a few sites for those of you thinking about developing your own Facebook Apps to check out :

The Official Facebook Platform Site

The most obvious place to start developing Facebook Apps is the official website at http://developers.facebook.com. There you’ll find the essentials for building an application. You’ll find documentation with details of how the Facebook Platform works. There’s a resources section with code samples, client libraries and more. There’s also a Tools section that allows you to prototype your Facebook application in real time with user friendly test consoles. You can keep up with the latest news about the Facebook Platform as well.

Best Facebook Applications & FaceReviews

Best Facebook Applications posts profiles and reviews of some of the newest Facebook applications. FaceReviews also offers application spotlights and includes an Application Development program for those of you looking for help developing or marketing your Facebook Application ideas. You can use these two sites not only as inspiration for an application idea but to also keep an eye on competition your future app might have.

How to Develop a Hit Facebook App: 29 Essential Tools and Tutorials

This awesome list at SoftwareDeveloper.com contains 29 links to important articles and lessons for anyone looking to get into developing Facebook Applications. There are links for people getting ready to build an app, developers who are in the thick of things and creators ready to market and grow their apps. There are links for everyone in each stage of development. It’s definitely worth a bookmark.

This will probably seem trivial and obvious to most PHP users out there but some of you might find this simple function useful. There are a lot of times when you’ll want to do a quick comparison and then, for example, give an HTML element a specific class based on what you found. The following is a short and sweet function I include in all of my projects to make this easy to do:

<?php
	function check_equal($val1, $val2, $response)
	{
		if ($val1 == $val2)
		{
			return $response;
		}
	}
?>

Here’s an example of this function in action:

<?php
	echo '<div'.check_equal($user, 1, ' class="author"').'>';
?>

In the example above, whenever the value of $user is equal to 1 then the div will be written out with the class of “author” attached to it. Now I can make some changes to my CSS to style that div differently based on the value of the PHP variable $user.