So first, What is Thrust VPS? Thrust VPS is a (as you guessed it) VPS company that relies on huge servers with 48GB of ram, to provide affordable Linux and Windows VPS’. I guess you could say you get what you pay for, but these guys are atleast well known on various hosting forums, and atleast have enough money for a swanky website design. So I thought, “How bad can they be”?

It all starts with having a 1GB Windows VPS with them. I used the VPS to test automation tools off my own PC, and also to allow me to run applications from work, aswell as home.

Now two mistakes that I made.

1. 1GB of ram is not enough for what I needed.
2. I didn’t install anti-virus.

The latter ran me into trouble as  the automation tool I was using (A scraper of some sort), I was running into a tonne of dodgy sites. Usually these sites are fine because my AV on my home PC (Avast) will block the connection immediately, but alas, time slipped away and I completely forgot about it. Thus, I contracted a virus (The VPS I mean! Not me! :p)

But it is simple to fix right? I upgraded my VPS to a 2GB ram machine, and waited for the ram upgrade to happen. I waited several days and nothing happened. So by this point, I am a little disappointed that a) the upgrade wasn’t instant b) that support doesn’t even realize they have a new order.

I do what anyone else would do. I opened a support ticket asking for the upgrade. Strangely enough, this is the reply I got back :

Please update your plan details with the invoice number.

Ok… Now this worried me slightly. I am logged into my account, opening the ticket, can the support person not already see all invoices/current plans associated with my account?

I reply with my invoice number, and I immediately get flung to the sales department. After getting a canned response from support. I ask, and this is important for the rest of the story to flow :

“While your at it, can we have a complete re-install of the OS? Just to start fresh with the upgraded stats?

Also, is this a genuine windows version?”

The VPS was a slight mess because of the virus, and also because I had to cut down on resources that the VPS would use while being stranded on 1GB of ram. It would have been better for me to simply start a fresh install. They were using SolusVM as a VPS control panel, I know 100% that to re-install is a 1 click process. As for the genuine comment, it was made because if the Windows install was a genuine copy, I could install Microsoft Security Essentials (A decent Anti-Virus) for free.

Approx 5 hours after asking for my VPS to be upgraded, I got this reply :

Sorry for the delay, this has now been done for you. Please could you reboot your VPS via SolusVM so that the new settings can take affect.

Ok, they upgraded the ram. But they didn’t re-install the OS, nor did they answer my question on the genuine windows. I copy and paste my request back in again, asking to re-install the OS, and if Windows was legit.

12 hours later, and approx 36 hours after opening the ticket. I get this reply :

To get your Windows license activated please start a new ticket to support with your IP address and Windows admin password.

Ok that answers my question about Windows being genuine, but what about the re-install of the OS? That was my primary question and 3 replies in a row have skipped over the question.

I reply once again, copy and pasting it in TWICE, just so they can see what they need to do. They come back and reply :

I’m sorry I did miss that part. Re-installing the OS is something you can do yourself rather easily.
http://damnvps.com/wiki/index.php?title=Windows

Christ, so after all that they want me to do it myself. Now look, I am not blowing my own trumpet here. But I am not a computer illiterate donkey. I deal with these sorts of things on a daily basis, but their VNC console would not work for me. I had to reply once again in the hopes of someone helping me.

After asking for help, I get this reply from a braniac called Ryan :

I shall pass this ticket onto support so that they can help you with your issues would you like me to see if they can reinstall the OS to?

No shit Ryan. From the outset of the ticket I have wanted someone to re-install windows. Unfortunately I was asleep so I didn’t get to reply to this ticket, but someone named “karuppu” came to my rescue and replied with this :

Is it OK for you to recreate the server in another node?

Wait what? Why does it need to go onto another node? What is wrong with simply re-installing my existing VPS? I never understood this decision. As I had an existing VPS, all they had to do was reinstall the OS. I reply with this :

Yes, recreate the entire VPS if you want. All we require is a 2003 Windows VPS, and that is it. However you want to get there is up to you.

I mean really. All I want is the VPS setup, however the hell they want to do it is up to them. But unfortunately, even after being put back into support, now they fling me back to sales for some reason. Even after karuppu was about to help me. Finally, after 4 days of back and forth, someone named “Ryan” replies to me ticket :

This has now been rebuilt for you, sorry for the delay.

At this point I was thinking “THANK GOD!”. But alas it was not to be. Here is my reply :

Hi Ryan,

Are you sure? Since the OS is wrong on the existing VPS… And we also asked for Windows 2003 to be installed on the new one, and the new one (apparently) shows 2008.

I will tell you what, I will spell it out for you.

Reply to this ticket, with the exact details, of a Windows VPS with 2003 installed, that I can remote into immediately, that is activated as genuine, that after logging in, I am presented with a blank desktop.

That is all I am after. I am not sure if I am asking too much of you guys. If provisioning a VPS is too much for you guys, just let me know and I will go elsewhere.

Basically, the VPS he had provisioned said that it was 2008 windows (After I had asked for Windows 2003). But my old VPS also said it was 2003 Windows (And it was actually 2008). I could also connect to my old VPS even though from the control panel it said it was shut off, and I could not connect to me new VPS even though the control panel said it was on.

It just seemed like a huge mixup to me. Something that would have never happened had they just upgraded the existing VPS in the first place. After my reply, I sat and waited for someone half-intelligent to help me.

Then, the last straw. Today I receive this absolute peach of a comment from Arun.

Hello,

Shall we go ahead and install Windows 2003-32bit in this vps?

My reaction to this comment was something a bit like this….

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

It was just inconceivable to me that after telling them atleast half a dozen times to just re-install the VPS, we are still at square one.

And just FYI, I sent messages both to their Twitter, and to the owners Reddit account in the hope of someone just stepping up and doing what is required, but instead I have had the run around non-stop.

They have easily some of the worst support staff in the business, infact the worst support staff that I have ever dealt with in my life, not just in hosting.

If you need prompt replies, and intelligent people replying to your tickets. Stay away from Thrust VPS.

I have only worked there just over a week, and already I see things that still astonish me about SEO in a real world sense. Generally I like to think that all developers that code for the web should have a good grasp of SEO technologies. And hopefully keep up to date with the changes that search engines implement. It isn’t always the case, but most people atleast have a good understanding of what will and won’t rank.

Interestingly enough I was talking to someone on my team about SEO. His actual job title is “SEO Developer”. As I got talking, I could tell that he seemed to be sticking by the book. And any sort of “contentious” issue that would get debated to no end at a SEO conference was a simply open and close case for him.

Things such as nofollow links and meta tags were an absolute 100% no impact on ranking issue for him. To me, especially nofollow links, I have a believe that they do work. Blog Comments while devalued, still seem to give me some sort of boost in the rankings. Whether that is because of the rank, or just because my website is “out there” is something that I could argue all day long. We talked about it for a while, and all I tried to get across was that nothing in SEO is a yes or no answer. Everything is shrouded in mystery and it is only with testing for yourself can you see what works and what doesn’t.

Even worse, he told me that <strong> and <em> tags around your keyword had absolutely no effect on SEO rankings. Once again maybe something that could be argued either way, but I think it is probably up there with things that you should do anyway. You can check out here for SEOMoz talking about different ranking factors : http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#ranking-factors

Anyway, I am drifting off my original point here. The SEO Developer also mentioned that our department also hired an external SEO company to work on our sites. After asking them what they did, it seemed they made several onpage SEO enhancements. e.g. Keyword in title tag, keyword in H1 tag. The usual on-page SEO stuff. I questioned about inbound links and what they were doing offsite SEO wise. The other guys in my team didn’t 100% know the answer, but said that before we hired them, we weren’t ranking at all, and now we were.

ooookkaaayyy

Let me just point out something here. The website in question is one of the largest, (probably top 2) in it’s industry. There are 173k links pointing to this site, of which 158k are pointing to the homepage. The homepage is a PR5 page. However before the SEO company was hired, the keywords they “wanted” to rank for were not in the title or H1 tag at all. This alone would (in my eyes) make them  very slim chance of making it to the front page for this particular keyword.

So the SEO company changes the H1 and title tag to be the exact keyword. And we start ranking. But is that an example of how a SEO company can get us ranking? Even though the website itself had over 173 thousand links pointing to it before they even got going.

That is what you call money for nothing kids.

O and just FYI. The SEO company itself does not rank for it’s title keywords within Google.com or Google.co.nz. If that isn’t a good indication of who is ranking us, then I don’t know what is.

Most notably I read through his questions and answers portion here : http://www.affiliatepathfinder.com/webinar-notes-from-affiliate-summit-webinar-seo-from-experience-with-jeremy-shoemoney-schoemaker/

An interesting question + answer stood out in my mind.

Q: Any thoughts on SEO nukeX?
A: Never heard of it. Probably someone trying to pitch their product.

Hmm. I found it kinda strange that Shoemoney had never heard of SENuke. In my mind, there is 2 products that really are “the” tools that everyone knows go hand and hand with SEO. SENuke and Xrumer.

But you know, possibly the sorts of things that Shoe does, doesn’t involve the type of things that SENuke is good at right? Wrong.

Q: What are thoughts on link wheels?
A: They work like crazy. Works really well, but also against Google standards.

Huh. Well, that is kinda funny when I think about it. If you didn’t know, Linkwheels was a term coined by Linus over at Lemonarian (back in 2009). Even back then, he made several blog posts about how amazing SENuke was in conjunction with Linkwheels. So the creator of linkwheels is putting (at one point) all his efforts behind SENuke, and Shoemoney seems to love Linkwheels, but doesn’t even know what SENuke is.

Don’t hate. Part of the reason is that Linkwheels are such a generic term now. They no longer work the exact way they were first described 2 years ago. And have since evolved into various linking strategies for Web 2.0 properties. I wouldn’t even be sure that Shoe knows who invented the linkwheel in the first place.

More so, to me it shows that the sphere of internet/affiliate marketing is so huge that guru’s don’t even know the biggest applications in their own niche (In this case SEO). I can’t talk, I probably wouldn’t have a clue what the bigger PPC/PPV tools are nowadays.

Postback (In a CPA sense) revolves around CPA Networks alerting you to the fact an offer has been completed. Some networks call it a Callback URL, others just a Post URL, it is all the same thing. To think of it in simpler terms, think if the network emailed you with data (Such as IP of the user, the offer, and the payout) each time you got a lead/sale. Now morph that image in your head to think if they called a page on your website each time a lead was completed, this is postback.

The page that the network calls would also include data about the lead that was completed. For example :

http://www.pyrogenicmedia.com/postback.php?ip=111.123.123.456&payout=1.50&offerid=56&subid=45

From that, We know the IP of the user that completed the offer, the payout that we made, and the offer it came from. We can also use a subid or other tracking tool (that the network may provide) to track datasources, userids (for ingame credits) etc.

The page that a postback calls needs to be created by you. Generally a network will tell you what data it will send to you, and what variables it will be under in the url, but the actual page to process the data needs to be created by you. What that page then does is up to you.

Common uses of a Postback are :

• Tracking conversions of a particular datasource.
• Running a gateway company (With the IP you can then unblock them from the gateway)
• Running an incent network (Pay people to complete offers etc)
• Crediting game users for completing offers (e.g. farmville)

Realistically the data is there for you to use. So if all you want is for it to send you an email once a lead comes in, you can do that too :p

The most obvious use is the second one in that list. You can track which users fill out the offer, and then unblock them from the gateway. You would need fancy code to simply “poll” a page repeatedly, checking whether the user had completed the offer or not. Not hard to do but….

Each network has it’s own implementation. Each network can send whatever data it wants, in whatever form it wants. While it is not impossible to try and account for all major networks out there, it is nigh impossible to get a catch all page setup. For example…

Here is Maxbountys call back structure

http://www.mysite.com/callme.asp?s1=#S1#&ipaddress=#IP#&offid=#OFFID#

and here is Peerflys

http://mysite.com/postback.php?offerid=XX&commission=XX&subid=XX&subid2=XX&subid3=XX

Now as you can see, the subids are called different things. In Maxbounty they are labelled s1 and s2. In Peerfly they are subid and subid2. This is just two networks that I know do postback, and they are already giving different data. Can you imagine what it would be like to do this across all networks?

That is a quick introduction to Postbacks (And why I won’t implement them in my gateway). They are simple to implement for one network, but a daunting prospect to try and incorporate all networks into a product. I will leave you with a short list of networks that I know provide Postback URL’s (Not all do).

Peerfly (non-incent)
Maxbounty
CPALead

Know of another network that allows postbacks? Comment below.

I know I haven’t done one of these in quite a while. Part of that is no one sends through their website in the proper avenues. I get asked to write a review of their product for cash (Which I am not that keen on doing), when they could just get it for free. So if you want me to write about your blog/website, send it in.

Today I am going to take a look at PeerflyBanners.com. In a nutshell, the site generates banners/links from the Peerfly network, and rotates them based on a vertical.

Here is a quick example of the banner in rotation (Refresh the page to see it rotating). I have set it to all offers at the moment, more on that later, so you might get some dodgy ads.

Let me give you a rundown of the service. First you need to be a Peerfly publisher. Now you probably have a high traffic website that you wish to stick some CPA banners on rather than just simple CPC or CPM type stuff. The main issue with doing it yourself, is that you have to…

1. Rotate Offers Yourself
To figure out which offers are profitable, you need to gather up a huge list of offers and start rotating through them evenly to see what type of niche/banner is most profitable for you.

2. Keep Up With Dying Offers
This is something that always made me stay away from CPA networks for banner advertising. I really cannot be bothered logging in every day to update my offers. It isn’t about offers being closed down without notice, it is that every week there is half a dozen offers that go offline, and half a dozen that get added. I just don’t want that extra work.

3. Test New Verticals
Maybe something that isn’t on everyone’s mind, is to test brand new verticals on each site. So many people come to me and say “Hey I have this site, it is doing well with offer XXXX, but I want a bit more money with it”. I will usually say something along the lines of “Well, I see you have offers in the XXXX niche, have you tried XXXX niche? It may do better”. And the response from them usually involves “meh” and we move on. Testing out a new niche, especially when you have something that is atleast making you money passively can often be a huge undertaking and one not many people want to do.

PeerflyBanners takes care of ALL of that. PB rotates all overs within the verticals you select, while removing and adding dead and new offers everyday without you lifting a finger. Not only that, to add new verticals requires just a click of a button (Or a few key strokes if you are code savvy) so you can be testing out new niches in no time.

I have actually written about similar services before. Leadbolt had a banner system in place for a while now. But they don’t really care how it does and so you end up with a number of poor offers in rotation. I even wrote how to set this up yourself, but that all involves you having to select, rotate, and remove offers on your own, something that PB takes care of you.

No service is perfect however. And a couple of things that I would like to see implemented. Most of these are sort of wishful thinking, and aren’t really required because the service is already sound in what it does. But it would be awesome to have.

Blacklisting/Whitelisting
While you can select your vertical, you can’t blacklist a particular offer. For example if you want to do a “As Seen On TV” vertical banner, you may wish to not show a particular shady offer (I don’t know why, all those ASOTV items are shady, but anyway). It would be great if once selecting your verticals, you were then taken to a page where you were shown each offer, and given a tickbox to remove it from rotation.

From the resulting javascript, you could have something as simple as var blacklist = “45,5656,234234″

Where the numbers are the offer ID’s separated by commas.

However, there is a slight issue in that if you wish to change the blacklist, you would need to tick all boxes again. Perhaps you could copy and paste your existing blacklist into a box and it would select them? I don’t know. But I want it implemented dammit!

GeoTargeting
Currently the offers coming from PeerflyBanners are NOT geo-targeted. I emailed Luke (The creator of the site, also a Peerfly AM), and he had this to say.

At the moment they are not geo-targeted, but this is an improvement I hope to add soon.

Of course, with the geo-targeting, currently the user will be redirected to a similar offer automatically that accepts traffic from their country (just like all PeerFly links).  I just haven’t set it up to only display banners for their region.

So it is a feature that will be coming soon, just it isn’t quite there yet. Also I would like to add that Peerfly actually has a very good redirect system. I know that every other network seems to have a shady one that constantly redirects people to SmileyCentral, but Peerfly atleast try and find something in the same vertical.

PassThrough
This is something that would come with GeoTargeting. If the user came from a country that PB has no banner for, allow the user to specify code that should be shown instead. Maybe a generic ebook offer etc so atleast that visitor is not wasted.

While I outlined some features to add. As it stands now the service is already very very sound. It actually makes me wonder when other networks will cotten on to the idea that not everyone in the affiliate marketing world are nothing but PPC/PPV.

As a side note. For those that aren’t with Peerfly already. The creator of PeerflyBanners is Luke. An Affiliate Manager at Peerfly. It really shows how much they value their publishers when they go out of their way with things like this. When was the last time you saw AM’s from other networks building things like this?

Want to see your website featured on New Website Wednesday? Send it in here!

Do note that the Serp Checkers I will talk about today are options that are either 100% automated, or allow multiple keywords at once. At the end I will throw in a couple for checking individual keywords quick.y Here are the two options I use most for SERP checking.

SerpTracker.org
Just try if you will, to imagine this site with a bit better design. I will be honest, it looks horrible, and at times has horrible functionality, but is among one of the best (/only) free ones I could find that tracked your SERP results every night, and over a long period of time.

This is the graph for one of my keywords. As you can see you can check it over different time periods, and you can also check different search engines (Even different country locations for Google), in this case Google USA. The rankings update once every night automatically so it requires no intervention from you.

Now the downsides. If you wish to track different search engines, they show up on a different graph instead of drawing another line (in a different color) on the same graph. So one graph per keyword instead of one graph per keyword per search engine.

While the service is free, it only allows you to track 2 websites at once (Although unlimited keywords). For this reason it isn’t great for tracking huge amounts of data, but there is no limit on accounts so I generally create a different account if I need another couple of graphs.

And the last downside, is that the code/design is horrible. Sometimes it can take a couple of tries to login, and I am too nervous to use my usual password with it. Not that I am worried it will be stolen by the admin, but I am not 100% sure it is encrypted with them anyway.

Traffic Travis
This one is my bread and butter nowadays. I love this application to bits and it has become a staple part of my SEO arsenal.

Traffic Travis as you may have guessed from the picture is a desktop application that covers alot of SEO and PPC tools at once. For the purpose of this post I will focus on the Serp Checking feature, but I recommend downloading it to check out what else is on offer.

The Serp Checker is solid. It handles the big 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN), and can handle up to 5 different projects in the free version (More on that later). Unfortunately the tool is not automated which means you have to run it on your own. This is fine since when I logon in the morning, I generally want to see where I am right at that moment, but it becomes super addicting to try and check your serp results 5 times per day.

Unfortunately because of this, the graphing feature does not work that well. It only tracks the last 10 or so checks you did, even if they were all within the same day (Even same hour). So you almost need to restrain yourself from checking all the time.

It also has a nice “report” feature which outputs a pretty good PDF that you can hand out to clients should you wish to. Although it is a paid feature.

Now I have mentioned paid feature alot, so let me clarify. Traffic Travis can be used absolutely free, with some limitations. For the Serp Checker, that means no more than 5 projects (But unlimited keywords within those projects), and no printing off reports or graphs (Although you can still generate them to look at). The paid version is rather cheap, and version 4 is coming out very shortly.

Honestly, I would just download it for the free version. It works immensely well and it is a good insight into what you can do should you ever decide to upgrade.

Other Tools
As I mentioned, there is a couple of other tools that I will point out.

http://www.serprush.com/
Pretty popular. Doesn’t track, just tells you where you stand. Good if you want to go deep into the results on all engines.

http://www.seoserp.com/web_tools/google_top_1000_serps_checker.asp
The very first SERP checker I ever used (5+ years ago I think). Once again no tracking, but good to go nice and deep.

http://www.marketsamurai.com/
Market Samurai is a well known marketing tool nowadays, but it is pricey. The price as it stands now is $150 USD for a lifetime license. It is good, but not something you want to get if you are just starting out.

With that being said, there is still a tonne of work to be done. Obviously the footer is in a bit of a shambles, and I want a much nicer header. But it was sort of a spare of the moment thing, And I don’t want to leave the blog in maintenance mode for much longer while I fiddle around. So basically don’t be surprised if you see things moving around for a while.

I am also doing a spot of spring cleaning. I am about to delete all the pages of my applications. While most still do work, they were cheap and gimmicky and don’t at all display what I am capable of. I built some of them over two years ago in an attempt to be relevant, but since then have realised that cheap tacky applications have nothing on one solid app. So who knows, maybe I have something bigger instore that I can replace all of them with.

Realistically, I will have maybe a few more days with the apps up, then I will remove the lot. If you want any of them, get them now because after that they are gone forever.

From there, I have a bunch of stuff that I want to do a case study on but just don’t have the time. Anyone want to do a small project on the side with me? Everytime I start a new project I forget to start writing it out, and then when I get half way through it is too late to try and backtrack. It is also a bit hit and miss at the moment for me with SEO work, Imagine me writing out a massive long case study into a particular SEO keyword, only for it to go nowhere, meanwhile other projects I have on the boil are going nuts.

Anyway, enough from me. Back to work.

I will skip all the junk about me picking a niche and how I researched the topic and go straight to the site itself. I decided to use WordPress. Mostly because I was going to be doing multiple posts on the topic, not just a single landing page, but also because of the SEO benefits it gives me. Part of that being the wide array of plugins available. However something that I ended up researching quite heavily, was how the theme, and more importantly the ad placement helped out with boosting income. In some cases people had doubled their income by switching to a more click friendly theme.

After doing a bit of digging, I came across CTRTheme. CTR Theme is only one of many themes that supposedly boost your adsense earnings. But it came with a couple of unique selling points.

Multiple Themes
While CTR Theme in itself is one “Theme”. It actually comes with several different layouts that you can choose from. While they don’t differ too wildly from the original scheme, it was nice to have an actual choice. It also means that if there is say, 6 different layouts, that of the 100 people that purchase the product, they won’t ALL be using the same theme. Sure alot of them will use the same layout, but it waters it down just a bit.

Here are the current themes you can use. But in actual fact since I have owned the Theme (A couple of weeks), he has added another layout for anyone to use. I expect a few more will probably be added in the near future.

Random Ad Spots
Cool enough, on each page load CTR Theme actually randomizes which ads will show up and where. For most sites that are made for adsense, it isn’t that important because you don’t expect the visitor to come back, nor do you expect theme to view multiple pages. But with the randomized ad layout, it restricts ad blindness because they can never be sure where the ad is going to be. By that I mean that while browsing a site, you may get used to where ads are so your eyes subconsciously never look in that spot. No such problem with this theme!

Here are the current ad spots built into the theme. Note that you can untick any of the layouts to have them not show (If you think you earn less with that particular ad spot, then don’t show it).

Customizable
Another cool thing about the theme is that while it comes ready to use out of the box. You can implement your own stylings to the theme if you want. It may sound like a given, but some other themes I looked at were pretty locked down and required you to delve deep into the code to change anything. For starters CTR Theme has an interface to change the bulk of the colors on the site (Link color, Header color), that when changed, also change the color of your adsense ads. On top of this, they have a text area inside the admin section where you can add your own CSS to manipulate the theme however you please.

Referrer Blocking Built In
This is another very very awesome feature that was unique to CTRTheme. You can add in sites/referrers that you don’t wish to show ads to. For example, if I submit any of my sites to Digg.com, Reddit or another social bookmarking site, I may not want to show ads to users coming through there. The amount of ads on these sites is bordering on obscene and I would easily get flagged as spam on these sites. With CTR Theme they will suppress ads to any user coming from those sites (Or any sites you choose) so that on first glance the site looks nice and clean, and yet when they come back later, or they link it from their own blog, the ads will show up. A little sneaky, but it is a great feature.

Extended Tracking
So far I haven’t really gotten down to the nitty gritty of tracking things. I track things based on site and ad size, but that’s about it. But within CTRTheme you can actually track using the channels of Adsense right down to the ad layout that gets used (Within the randomization). What this does is eventually (With enough data) you can see which ad layout brings you the most income and start knocking out the less profitable.

Now onto the nitty gritty. The price for CTRTheme is $75USD. But that comes with an unlimited site license. If you have one site that is getting 100 visitors a day, don’t bother. However if you have one site with a tonne of visitors per day (1k+) or a network of sites that are already earning, CTR Theme is a great investment. Plus it comes with a 60 day guarantee should it not improve your income enough.

Fast forward to a couple of days ago. I am reading a “ShitList” thread on a internet marketing forum. The thread is in relation to a product called SilentLock 3.0. It provides a gui interface that then outputs gateway code for you to use. You can use your own offers and it has things like changing the background image etc. (A sales thread is here if you want to have a look : http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=2107764). The thread had complaints about the quality of the program and what not, really, I don’t know anything about the owner or the product itself so I stayed out of it. but then they linked to an example page for the product.

The link was this one : http://bhdubclub.com/silentsoftware/ex/MyGateway12.html

Meh, looks OK. Just your average content locker I suppose. But something set me off. As weird as it sounds, the red color of the headline was this off red color that I distinctly remember having a laugh about how horrible it looked when I created my own Content Locker. Ok, so same red color, who cares right?

Well I decided to look at the HTML source. There are certain things I do in my code that I was going to explain here how they match up with his. But there is no need. His HTML and Javascript code is an exact copy and paste of mine. Literally the javascript is identical to mine, including the comments in the code.

So, I was kinda flabbergasted as you can imagine. Here was someone selling a product, that to be fair did have a gui interface to make it a bit easier to build the gateway (Although anyone with even a smidgen of brains can work it out), that was an exact copy and paste of code I gave away for free. I sort of posted a grumbling that while not illegal, I don’t think we should condone that sort of behavior. Do I care that he is selling my work, a little. What I really care about is people are paying for something that they can get for free anyway.

Through this, it sort of dawned on me, do I need to start putting up the licensing terms for each and every piece of code I give away? This guy literally made an entire product, off nothing more than code I gave away for free. I always think people are so up themselves when they have all these terms and conditions for a free piece of software. But now I am starting to understand why.

I have setup Virtual Machines before (Infact it is part of MCSA training), but that was many many moons ago. So I thought I would go about installing it, and at the same time write it out for anyone wanting to install a VM of their own.

First I had to decide which VM software to use. I have used a couple before but a quick Google search brought up a nice intuitive one that works on all platforms (Linux + Mac + Windows). It was Virtual Box. Aswell as running on all OS’s, it also had a pretty slick interface that looked easy to use. After downloading it (70mb or so), the install was quick and painless.

Now, onto the OS. Pretty much the default nowadays for running virtual machines is a trimmed down version of Windows XP called TinyXP. Inside your virtual machine you can run ANY OS of your choosing. However you do need a “legit” copy. It doesn’t just give you a drop down of what type of OS you want and you have free rein. Now, I am really unsure of my boundaries here, so for some of it you may have to read between the lines.

If you have a computer with Windows Vista or Windows 7, you are within your rights to get a copy of Windows XP (For free) to downgrade. One way to downgrade is to find an ISO image of Windows XP. I recommend getting Tiny XP as it is very light and comes with alot less drives. Try googling for “TinyXP-Rev09.iso”.

Ok great, so now you have your iso right? From whatever means.

Open VirtualBox, and hit create new VM. Name your VM whatever you want, and select the type of system you will be running. Obviously if you decide to go with TinyXP, then select Windows XP, but if you want to run a different OS simply select it from the box. For memory, I usually start with 1GB, and then lower it later. TinyXP + SickSubmitter use around 300mb when going all out, and without SickSubmitter running it is significantly less. Depending on your OS, you will obviously require more or less ram. Next screen, select new harddisk, and make it 10GB.

Ok, at this point the Virtual Machine is “active” but it functions much like a blank computer. There is NO OS currently installed.

You need to select your VM, Hit settings along the top, Storage, Select the disk drive (Will be the second one down, image of a discs), and then select the little disc image on the right. I have highlighted it for you here :

Click it, and select your OS image. If you downloaded TinyXP it will be an ISO image from whereever you downloaded it to on your local computer. What this basically does is make the virtual machine think it has a CD drive, and that the OS disc is in there. A little more complicated than that, but just think of it along those lines.

Ok next, You need to start your VM. And the first time around a tonne of boxes will start popping up giving you info. I recommend you read each one, click “Don’t show again” and then continue on. Because of the way a Boot Order works on a PC, there is a small time window when your computer will say “Press The Enter Key To Boot From CD”. At this point you need to press the Enter key (Duh!), but the popup windows inhibit this and you will likely miss it first time around. Simply reboot the VM and try to catch it again.

You should be greeted by a blue screen like this. Fair not non-techies. It is not a blue screen of death (BSOD).

This screen WILL look different depending on what OS you have. This is the screen for TinyXP, but each OS will have a different one. I will run through the instructions on what to select for TinyXP, but otherwise you are on your own.

- Select 1 to install TinyXP
- Select 1 to install TinyXP WITH IE + Driver Packs. Some people decide not to, but this is the easiest way to install.
- Wait while it installs a couple of drivers.
- Select the partition (There should only be 1, should say 10237MB if you left it default), and press C to create a partition.
- A new screen should popup with the amount of space you want to take up, leave it as default (Should be the complete space), and press enter.
- Press Enter again.
- Next screen select to format as NTFS (QUICK). Make sure you select quick otherwise you will be here a while.

That should be it, it should now run through the install of TinyXP.

One more thing that I see many people do, is that they watch it and start pressing buttons. Your computer will restart many times on the install process. Do not touch a thing. Until you hit the Windows Desktop, it requires no interaction from you.

Once you are at your desktop, you now need to install the Guest Additions. On your VM Window Menu, Select Devices, then “Install Guest Additions…”.

Now we need to allow for the sharing of folders. We need this to be able to transfer files from your local pc into the VM. For example if we have a bunch of applications we want to run on the VM, there is no point downloading them all again when we can simply transfer them over.

Because TinyXP is supposed to be light. It has a couple of services switched off by default. We need to turn these back on.

Inside your VM go…

- Click Start Button
- Go Administrative Tools
- Click Services

Now each of these services needs to be activated in the same way. The three services are :

- Routing And Remote Access
- Network DDE
- Network DDE DSDM

Find each one in the services list. Right click and select properties. Set the startup type to “Automatic” and then hit the “Start” button.

Great, now we should be able to add Shared Folders. Simply hit Devices –> Shared Folders along the top of your VM Window. Click the Folder Icon with a Plus sign on it to the right, and then select your folder that you want to share. I usually make a folder on the desktop of my local PC with the name “VM Shares” and dump everything in there. Up to you!

Once you have selected the folder. You now need to go Start->My Computer in your VM (NOT on your local PC). Up the top of that window there is an icon to map a network drive. You have probably never seen it before, but it is this one :

Select that. Keep the drive letter as Z. Then.. You need to click Browser->Open up Virtual Box Shares, and then select that folder. Hit OK, and you should now have a direct link to the shared folder on your PC.

Ok, we are finally getting somewhere. But there is still a couple more issues we need to clear up. The first of those is networking. Now I spent literally hours trying to work this out. There is many many guides out there with similar content that point to absolute non existent drivers etc that do nothing. One of the most common says that you should use a driver ISO called : networkdriverstinyxp.iso. I can guarantee you, you will never find this driver. I sure as hell couldn’t and ended up getting redirect to all sorts of crazy download sites.

What you actually want is this driver here : http://www.downloadatoz.com/driver/download_driver_37453.html . That driver is for the virtual network card that is by default set on the VM. You will need to download it to your local PC, move it into your shared folder, and then retrieve it inside the VM. Run it and install it.

Open up internet explorer inside your VM and see if it is working. If it is not, then do the following.

- Click Start Button
- Right click My Computer and select Properties from the drop down menu.
- Go to the Hardware tab and then click “Device Manager”
- In the list there should be Network Adapters. Open it up, right click the adapter inside there (Should be named VMware Accelerated blah blah) and select Update Driver.
- A window should popup. Select “No not this time”, hit next.
- Select “Install the software automatically”, hit next/finish.

You are now done, you should be able to browser the internet via your VM now.

And that is it! There are a few more hints and tricks that I think I will leave to another post. For now you have a fully functioning VM that you can install any software on and run it in the background. Another great thing about VM’s is that they isolate it from your main computer. If you are not sure about an application, or you are one of those people that installs applications then uninstalls a week later, this is a great way to make sure your own computer doesn’t turn into a hunk of junk.

If you have any questions or get stuck on any part, post in the comments and I will do my best to help you out. Just because this guide worked for me, doesn’t mean it will work for everyone. I know that plenty of other guides out there for this exact version of VirtualBox and TinyXP never worked for me.