October 2006 Archives
This is the moment to confess a secret passion for affiliate programs. It began almost ten years ago when I set up and managed an affiliate program for one of my first community-driven graphics sites. At the time BeFree (later acquired by Commission Junction) was the state of the art in affiliate system management. It performed admirably, allowing me to construct a large network of affiliates that contributed significantly to the traffic and sales performance of the site. Of course, this was in the pre-Google AdWord era, so sites had fewer options to monetize their traffic. In fact, you might think that Google has pretty much killed off the affiliate concept. But that's far from being the case.
Have you ever been deprecated? Well, I have. In fact, it happened just this weekend. Racing to get a Web page completed, I lost patience tweaking the CSS style I was employing to position an element correctly at several screen resolutions, in both Explorer and Firefox. So I slapped in a <center> tag and called it a day. I'm not proud of what I did. In fact, that very same legacy page contains more than a few stray <p> and <br> tags, not to mention a shocking number of border, width and even hspace attributes. Oh, the shame of it all.
