Prank Place »
Prank Place, of which Fart.Go is an affiliate, recently designed their site and sent out an email to webmasters entitled "Launch of PrankPlace 2.0". Around the same time, I revamped this website and in doing so, removed the old, broken JavaScript-banner I had coded to randomly display their wares. Thus, a prime time to reinvent such a thing, possibly with less work required on my part.
Unfortunately, their current version, some kind of ASP.NET (1.1?) monster, has issues. I wrote them on two I first encountered, in an email and then using the contact form on their website. Neither garnered any kind of response and I'd just like to air my perceived problems so I can move on to working through them. Consider this a cathartic commentary on the sad state of their site.
First off, let me say their products are just the kind of gag gifts and trickster toys that I believe befit the barmy passerby, especially one searching for fart sounds! Ideally, I'd drop a blob of JavaScript or an IFRAME into the sidebar and a rotating image gallery of vendibles appears. Bonus points if it scans the referring page for proper targeting: fart machine on the fart soundboard, fake poop on relevant gruesome images, etc. Alternatively, text links work well and a classy banner would tickle me just fine.
Nope, it's not that simple. You can link to any page on their site with your affiliate identifier, but it's entirely manual. This is to say that you must explicitly pick each and every URL you want to link to and then create the link yourself before placing it in your HTML. This may work fine for hobbyists writing one-off sites by hand, but mighty collections are just not done so. I see 80+ items perfect for a limited showcase, that's a lot of time intensive chair-ridden labor. And while I'm certainly capable of coding a slick rotator, it's something I did ten years ago and have no desire to rewrite for today's browsers (even with the most-excellent jQuery).
But wait, there's more!
For the longest time their website had individual HTML pages for each product. Those URL's were fantastically short, descriptive, and quickly became absorbed into search engines for pitch-perfect indexing. Even Archive.org picked up copies for permanent archival. That's fantastic news to any web property, especially e-commerce! SEO win!
Ooh but no, those are gone. Every page is some cookie-cutter ASPX with query string variables. While these might be satisfactory on a starter store, they're a downgrade from their previous state. The old page URL's don't even redirect you to the new, valid location. Yes, that's right, they've completely broken all their old links.
Don't break your inbound links, people! It's not difficult to mask a dynamic system via URL rewrite techniques and you continually gain credit as time passes. Remember, time is one thing spammers and phisherman can't buy or fake (with the exception of buying expired domains/websites), so all search engines give great rewards timelessness.
Adding to my pain, there appears to be no correlation between product ID's and their thumbnail. Thus, I have no way of simply storing and enumerating identifiers to retrieve their images. Yes, I can scrape the product pages, but again and again I'm seeing more scraping work required from an affiliate that is trying to help popularize and make money for them. They have all this information, it just needs to be exposed to their sales force.
On a final note I'd like to reiterate that Prank Place has the perfect kooky commodities for this digital compendium of gaseous comedy. Their website just currently blows scentless hot air. And oh crap, looks like Amazon now carries a lot of cross-over cargo
ranting mc-ranterson