by theshortstack on July 16, 2010
When it comes to brushing up on your marketing skills, there’s obviously an awful lot of information available online which won’t cost you anything.
While I can thoroughly recommend subscribing to a number of decent blogs to get your daily feed of information, I’m a real stickler for books. It obviously doesn’t make sense to buy a ton of various books when there’s so much free information online, but I tend to find having one really good reference book dedicated to a particular topic on your shelf can be really helpful in advancing your skills.
The question is though, how do you know which books are worth buying for your shelf and which should be left in the book shop?
With that in mind, I figured it would be useful to review a few books on the blog and post up my thoughts as/when I finish reading them.
If anyone has any suggestions or recommendations for books, then do please let me know. As it is, I’ve got a few on the list to get me started.
They are as follows:
- Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics by Brian Clifton
- Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity by Avinash Kaushik
- Twitter Power 2.0: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time by Anthony Robbins
- The Art of SEO (Theory in Practice) published by O’Reilly
As you can see, I’m going through a bit of a technical phase at the moment. That will change though and I’ll stick up a few words about books focused more on general matters like the 4 Hour Working Week and The One Minute Millionaire, both of which I’ve read recently.
I’m already about half way through The Art of SEO, so check back soon for the review.
by theshortstack on June 29, 2010
As I mentioned in my previous post, the last few weeks have been slightly frustrating as far as my websites go.
One of the main reasons for this is that I’ve been trying to get some Geo Targetting implemented into my online poker site.
For those of you who haven’t come across Geo Targetting before, what this will allow me to do is to change my messages based on the country which the visitor is surfing from.
Perhaps the most obvious example relates to the Gold, Silver and Bronze rooms which are displayed across the home page of the site. Should a player from the US visit my site, Geo Targetting will allow me to ensure that all three sites displayed there will accept US players.
If someone from the UK visits, another three sites could be displayed – perhaps poker rooms that accept pound sterling for instance.
Anyway, this technology is based around matching the reader’s IP address with a particular country. So with this in mind, I’ve purchased a CSV file containing a load of IP addresses and their relevant countries.
The complete ball-ache has come about trying to get this information into a standard SQL database. Normally, I haven’t had any problems with the phpMyAdmin software that comes with my hosting package.
However, this time round (perhaps due to the sheer amount of data I’m trying to import??) I’m having no luck at all. I’ve tried reformatting the information myself, but I’m still getting a load of error messages when I try to upload the data.
I guess the other way of doing this would be to convert the CSV data into one long SQL statement, so that the database could be built that way. Again though, that’s caused issues as there doesn’t appear to be any software that will allow me to do that.
Andy over at Affiliate Guard Dog recommended Navicat, but that seems to be a server side software, and I’m pretty sure my host isn’t going to let me install it.
So I guess I’m throwing this open to you, my treasured and trusted readers.
Any ideas of how I can get a load of CSV data into a database? I’m sure it can’t be difficult, which is only serving to make things all the more frustrating at this end!
