One of the most ball busting things about modern day life in London is wanting to spend as much time with your kids but having to pay the bills at the same time. It’s a balance that seems impossible to achieve. But seems to be a particularly middle class problem. After paying extortionate nursery fees with blatantly unfair T&Cs for our sons second year, for only a part of his third year before staring primary school we managed to get the 15 hours a week free childcare. When your nursery cost is as much as your mortgage cost it really is a solid kick in the nuts every time you see a new invoice.

Imagine our excitement as we have a 9 month old son as well now and are struggling to think about what we might do for his childcare needs when we see that the Government has decided to extend the 15 hours a week helping hand to 2 year old children as well.

But then yes, another kick to the other nut when you find it only for the people on benefits… those who already have rent / travel / food subsidies that us 40%ers are paying for, now we help them get their children in nursery too so they can sit at home in peace while we play train sardines..

Something has to change about how the UK is run, you are brought up to want to be the things that are associated with middle class, but when you get there you feel thoroughly cheated.

So I am an early adopter of windows 8 on both my home computers, the intro price was just too good to miss at £15 each to windows 8 pro including this media centre thing.

My first peeve with windows 8 is that applications have a frozen interface, so far winamp and search engine ranker – you can see from their CPU usage that they are still active and indeed music still pumps out of winamp; but after a couple of hours the labels etc that indicate how many minutes have elapsed or the log of what SER is up to stop moving… and the only way to kick them into action again is to restart the application…

Infuriating…. hopefully win 8 sp1 fixes this.

The only other thing I found I don’t like so far in these few weeks of using windows 8 so far is switching user, this takes surprisingly long for the user select screen to come up.

UPDATE 12/12/12.. :  Left SER running last night, this morning it was still outputting an active log onscreen.. perhaps a tuesday patch this week fixed up the issue I talk about above.

Affiliate marketing used to be nice little sideline getting lots of people into web development who would have never considered it otherwise. Anyone could just setup the most basic of sites, add a few links and Google would come along love what you did and start pointing people at your little site/blog.

That is how it used to be, but now it only seems to be that way for the likes of HotUKDeals who are the big players in making commissions from links (added by other people…). What with Google getting all stuffy over its search algorithms and only sending traffic to blogs who add to its $100 MILLION a day adwords revenues and an overwhelmingly obvious amount of commissions no longer being tracked by networks like affiliate window (who through the power of their tools and signup sweeteners) managed to nick merchants from almost all of the other affiliate networks quite a lot of whom seemed to play the game more fairly, one of ones I remember most fondly was smart quotes who handled financial products.

Even Amazon associates seem to have a “screw you over” policy I found today. I used to naturally use my own link when making a purchase from amazon, then had a commission cancelled for that and enquired why.. they said they knew what I had done and cancelled it – from then I never really seemed to get much from Amazon associates but due to becoming a dad I didn’t really pay so much attention to affiliate issues anymore.

This week I sent a link for a camera to someone and put my tracking code at the end of it though, and saw the sale count in the Amazon associates orders report, he got the camera delivered, but no earnings report entry which naturally I sent them an email to find out what was going on. They used the same reasoning as a couple of years ago although the only connection between that sale and me was my affiliate id.. so they ripped me off to the tune of £25 on that sale alone.. there have been a few in the past like that I can see.. Their actual response is below

Dear Associate,

Thank you for contacting the Amazon Associates Programme.

I have checked your account and found that you have not received advertising fees for the order not appearing on your reports as a result of personal orders being placed through your Associates links.

Due to the proprietary nature of the process, we will not share with you the criteria by which we detect personal orders placed by an Associate. Please know that we are able to determine when an order has been placed by an Associate via their Associates links.

Associates do not receive payment for advertising fees on any personal orders placed. This is because the Associates Programme places certain restrictions on the types of orders that may be placed through an Associate’s web site.

Here’s how our Operating Agreement explains it:
7. Advertising Fees
Qualifying Purchases exclude, and we will not pay advertising fees on any of, the following:
any Product purchased by you or on your behalf through a Special Link (e.g., personal orders, orders for your own use, and orders placed by you for or on behalf of any other person or entity).

Given the relatively slim retail margins on our products and our strong discount pricing, the advertising fees we offer to our Associates can only be sustained by meeting new customers through our Associates. These customers may return to us in the future for items unrelated to the topics served by the Associate web site, and this future business helps to offset the advertising fees we pay. If an Associate orders for their own use, even if they plan to sell the items to customers who cannot order online, it can’t lead to this kind of future business. This is why we can’t afford to offer advertising fees on such orders, as we want to keep the program viable for the long term.

We understand that some orders may unintentionally be tagged to Associates accounts as you are updating your site(s) and checking links. However, we do request that you place all personal orders directly at http://www.amazon.co.uk through sessions not tagged to your Associates account.

If you require any additional assistance or information please use the following link to contact us again:

http://affiliate-program.amazon.co.uk/gp/associates/contact/

Thank you for participating in the Amazon Associate Programme.

Warmest regards,

Samuel
Amazon.co.uk

So it seems in the worldwide recession, affiliate marketing companies / networks are just being complete cocks to personal web publishers ripping us off left right and centre, I think I’ll just shut down all my affiliate sites and save on hosting costs given the people higher up the chain have lost the capacity to play reasonably.

Tracking…. it’s all in the tracking cookies that for one reason or another “fail to track” more than quidco or affiliate marketing networks like affiliate window or commission junction let on.

I lost faith in the whole affiliate marketing thing rather a long time ago and have recently had a test run of quidco for things like buying esure home insurance which surprise surprise.. did not track. My peeve directly with QuidCo though is I see they have a ratings system for your experience with merchants but you can’t leave a review of a company until your purchase has tracked it seems… so all of us with untracked purchases can never warn other potential buyers about their imminent disappointment.

After using Dreamweaver CS3 to CS5 for a longgggg time I had a go at knocking up an android app with a demo copy of Dreamweaver CS5.5 today and I was very disappointed indeed at the interaction between DW and the SDK… a supposed “Easy install”, just does not work.. and even after updating dreamweaver (from the copy I downloaded to demo 10 mins prior) it still did not work like the tutorial outlines… simply bums out on an error that flashes past so fast you have to print screen like bruce lee to catch it…

Turns out after a few bruce lee moves today that the Android emulator does not start up fast enough for dreamweaver… I have a nice looking app in DW that just can’t install to a virtual machine fast enough, although my work laptop is more than powerful enough to do this…

And why is it that I need to have a mac in order to develop iOS5 versions?… massive limitation…. probably self explanatory but needless to say if someone bought the upgrade to do this sort of thing – missing out on the iOS platform would be a massive downer.

Back to Visual Studio 2010, far more sturdy IDE, dreamweaver can be super fast but it can be super flakey at the same time. Year after year since I fixed this bug in CS3 way back in 2007 people came back to my netevolution blog complaining about it happening to them too…