08
Aug 08

Make money for someone special as you surf

As an Amazon Prime member, I buy a fair amount of stuff on Amazon, especially Kindle books and MP3’s. With free 2 day shipping and $3.99 next day shipping, it’s too easy to buy things on impulse.

One cool program Amazon created is their affiliate program called Amazon Associates , where people can create links with their associate ID that when clicked will pay a percentage (around 6%) if the click results in a sale. The associate program is very popular among bloggers as it gives you one more way to make money off something you do anyway, like recommend books.

I see a lot of popular bloggers like VC blogger, Paul Kedrosky, who use this and it occurred to me that while I appreciate the book or product recommendations, wouldn’t it be better to award this benefit to someone in my immediate circle? In other words, shouldn’t a nice Amazon commission on MY purchases go to someone I actually know and care about? Someone who might really benefit from it rather than some Venture Capitalist out West who I’ve never met? It’s really just a matter of substituting the Amazon associate ID’s at the end of the URL. After a quick search, I found a Greasemonkey Script that does this.

Now, whenever I load any Amazon link anywhere in my browser the Greasemonkey script rewrites the link and inserts my friend’s associate ID. If I click the link and buy something my friend gets a 6-10% commission.

I would not recommend using your own associate ID as you cannot make commissions on your own purchases. Of course, if you got your friend to use your Amazon ID and you used his ID, then you might both be able to make reciprocal purchases.

It’s very easy. Here’s all you need to do:

  1. Make your friend get an Amazon Associate ID.
  2. Install and use Firefox as your web browser, if you haven’t already.
  3. Install the Greasemonkey Firefox Extension
  4. Install the Amazon URL rewriting Greasemonkey script
  5. Edit the script and add your friend’s associate ID.

That’s all there is to it. Now any time you buy anything from Amazon, your friend or loved one will get a nice percentage, which can add up over time.

In the future, it might be nice to add a feature to the script to rotate through a group of Amazon associate ID’s from friends and assign one to each link at random to make it more interesting. Or, you could see about finding Amazon associate ID’s for any charities that participate in the program.


11
Jul 08

Free Wall Street Journal: Part Deux

In the previous entry, I explained how you could read full articles at the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) by tricking wsj.com into thinking you originated from Google News. Basically, any WSJ traffic from Google News is allowed to view the full article.

My previous solution was awkward kludge, but it got the job done. Of course, I should have known there was an easier way to do it. The problem is two-fold: the Journal site checks the referer and the URL parameter. So, if you can change the referer and rewrite the URL’s to include the URL parameter, the entire site will be in subscription mode.

Step 1: Change the referer to appear as if traffic is originating from Google News. This is easy with the RefControl extension for Firefox. Just install the extension and set the referer for any traffic to “http://online.wsj.com” as coming from “http://www.google.com/news”. See screenshot below.

Using RefControl to changes referers

Step 2: Rewrite all URL’s on the WSJ site so that they include the Google News parameter. In other words, take all links on the site and add “?mod=googlenews_wsj” to the end. With the referer set manually and the modification in place, you should be able to view the full articles. So, how do you rewrite the URL’s on the WSJ site? I recommend creating a Greasemonkey script to do this, which should be pretty simple. When I get some more time I might do it and upload to my defunct userscripts library.