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Another way to watch Netflix from anywhere in the world

overplay vpn

I go through phases of loving and not-so-loving Netflix, depending on what’s available and what I’m in the mood for. Right now we’re in the middle of a serious Alias binge (can’t believe I never saw it the first time round!) and at some point in the future we might try and get back into Breaking Bad (we loved the first season but never got into the second season properly). However, we’re in the UK and as you probably know if you’re reading this, the UK library kind of sucks. Thankfully there’s plenty of online services that legally sidestep the regional Netflix restrictions and I wrote a quick guide to a couple of the most popular ones last month.

overplay vpnI’d been telling a friend recently about how Unblock Us works and how we’re getting much more value from our Netflix sub with it, and he asked if it would work on websites other than ‘streaming media’ sites or offer any VPN functionality.

I actually didn’t know as all I use it for is switching Netflix libraries but it turns out the answer to his question is “not really”. They specialise in getting you into sites like iTunes, Vudu, iPlayer etc, but not things like Facebook or Twitter. I did a little Googling and came up with Overplay who, for $4.95, offer an identically-priced called SmartDNS which is similar to what Unblock Us does but will gain you access to a lot more geo-fenced websites, and has servers in more countries. And yes, it also does a proper encrypted VPN service for a slightly higher price of $9.95. Passed on the link to my friend, problem solved.

Personally I’m happy with Unblock Us as it covers almost all the streaming media sites you could ever want to access, and there aren’t that many regular folk who need an encrypted VPN. Also, unlike its rivals Overplay doesn’t offer a 7-day trial. And call me picky but their website is a bit… blah. I know, I know, that’s got nothing to do with the service they offer, but a bright friendly website was the deciding factor when we subscribed to Unblock Us.

On the other hand, if you want or need access to regular geo-fenced sites, and an encrypted VPN that can place you pretty much anywhere in the world as far as the internet is concerned, Overplay could be exactly what you’re after. Hope this helps!

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Editorial

Humble Bundle’s stand-up comedy bundle

humble bundle comedy
Pay over the average and get the Louis CK and Patrice O'Neal shows too

The Humble Bundle is a great site where a bunch of people with something to sell, usually indie games developers, get together and sell all those things in one bundle, splitting the takings between themselves, charity and the Humble Bundle guys. The twist is – you get to pick the price you pay, and how it gets split. I’ve bought a lo-o-ot of awesome games through the Humble Bundle.

These days they don’t just do game bundles. Recently there’s been documentaries, ebooks, and now they’ve added stand-up comedy to their slate with the Humble Comedy Bundle, including:

  • Maria Bamford – The Special Special Special
  • Tig Notaro – Live
  • Hannibal Buress – My Name Is Hannibal
  • Jim Norton – Please Be Offended
humble bundle comedy
Pay over the average and get the Louis CK and Patrice O’Neal shows too

For the next two weeks you get all those for whatever price you like. You could, if you were a bit of dick, get them for one single cent total. Don’t be a dick. To sweeten the deal if you pay more than the current average price being paid (right now that’s about $9) then you get three extra shows:

  • Louis C.K. – Live at the Beacon Theatre
  • Patrice O’Neal – Unreleased
  • Patrice O’Neal – Mr P

I only really know Louis C.K. out of all of them, and he’s absolutely fantastic, I highly recommend you check out any of his shows or his sitcom Louis, but the Beacon Theatre gig is fantastic and well worth $10 even though he sells it for $5 on his own site (because he’s awesome like that).

I’ve heard of Tig Notaro through an email sent out by Louis actually. I haven’t seen any of her stuff yet but as soon as I’ve got this post up I’m going to be grabbing my own copy of the bundle and checking her show out first. Also, anyone who calls their stand-up gig ‘Please Be Offended’ has definitely got my attention, Jim Norton.

The numbers

The first question I asked myself back when Humble Bundle started was “How does anyone make any money out of this?” but it doesn’t seem to be putting off the big names, and the little names probably get a lot of attention they might not have otherwise, so I guess it’s working out for them. This bundle has been on for less than a day and according to their homepage stats so far it’s made $51,000 – though how that’s being split by customers is kept a secret of course.

What with the charity element, it’s not unusual to see people who can afford it paying a lot more for the bundles than the street value, with current top contributors to the comedy bundle paying around $100 by choice, and when there’s anything game-related in the bundle you’ll often see the likes of Notch putting thousands of dollars in the pot, but of course only he knows how he split it.

I’m heading over to pick up my bundle, I highly recommend you check it out yourself and at the very least give Louis C.K. a try if you haven’t already.

Thanks for reading!

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Other

‘Previously, On Arrested Development’ updated with Season 4

arrested development npr

NPR’s brilliant resource for Arrested Development fans – Previously, On Arrested Development – has been updated (probably ages ago but I only just realised) with all the gags from Season 4.

arrested development npr

If you haven’t already heard about this, it’s a cool cross-referenced online ‘encyclopaedia’ of the vast range of running jokes on the once-cancelled-now-resurrected comedy show, Arrested Development. Even the name of the site is an in-joke – there was never a ‘Previously…’ lead-in on the show but at the end of each episode they always do a ‘Next time on Arrested Development’ bit that’s never actually in the next episode, but stuffs in a few more gags from the one you just watched.

I loved the first three seasons, when I finally got round to watching them. And then I rewatched them again and again, and was very excited when Netflix announced they were making a fourth season. Sadly that fourth season wasn’t as satisfying as I’d hoped. I enjoyed it for the most part and there were some truly brilliant moments – I particularly loved Michael and George Michael’s exchange of lies over the phone – but Portia De Rossi’s bizarre new face and the forced focus on one character per episode conspired to regularly jolt me out of the moment. Maybe I just need to watch it again sometime but I’m not really in any rush, which is quite telling…

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Other how-tos

GeoRiot makes international iTunes & Amazon affiliation easy

Amazon iTunes Affiliate GeoRiot
The GeoRiot home page

Amazon iTunes Affiliate GeoRiot
The GeoRiot home page
If you’re running a blog and making a little money on the side with referrals to iTunes and Amazon, you’ll probably have noticed that ‘out of the box’ those programs don’t make international affiliation too easy for you. Most countries not have not only their own store but their own affiliate program as well – which country’s affiliate link should you use to get the best referral income?

I solved that problem for myself by using an cool service called GeoRiot to automatically send my international readers to their local iTunes or Amazon store – and collect the referral from the correct affiliate program at the same time. Plus, their CEO Jesse Lakes is the guy that answers the support emails – that’s very cool.

The problem with iTunes & Amazon affiliation

There’s two catches with basic iTunes and Amazon affiliate links and they’re both down to the territorial nature of the stores and the affiliate programs they use. Firstly, basic clicks on a US store link from a UK-based visitor, for example, will either result in an error if the same product doesn’t exist in the UK store, or the visitor will be taken to the US store where they won’t be able to buy anything.

Secondly, even if your UK visitor manages to find and purchase the same product on their own store, your US affiliate link won’t carry over and you won’t get the referral for the sale. You can only link to one store but no matter which country you decide to use you’ll be missing out on referrals from international visitors to your site.

I ran into this wall pretty quickly when I started looking into the iTunes referral program, being new to affiliation. I started searching forums and that’s how I came across Georiot, which seemed custom made to solve the problem.

How it works

GeoRiot isn’t an affiliate program itself, it’s more like an automatic redirection service. You can get the nitty gritty about how it all works on their site, but it boils down to this:

  • sign up for the various affiliate programs around the world
  • connect your affiliate program accounts to your GeoRiot account
  • set up a ‘Traffic Source’ for each unique location you’ll use your affiliate links
  • create international links specific to your Traffic Sources by pasting Amazon or iTunes product URLs into the GeoRiot Link Generator tool

And that’s it. Their links determine where your reader is from, redirects them to their local store and adds your referral from the appropriate program. Then you sit back and track your international referrals in their Reports section, receiving your payouts as normal from the Affiliate Programs themselves.

Switching to PHG, the new iTunes Affiliate Program

The other awesome thing is how easy it’s making the big iTunes Affiliate Program switchover from Linkshare and DGM to PHG, the Performance Horizon Group, due to kick in on October 1st 2013. The change is largely a positive move as although terms are changing slightly, the percentage commission is increasing and it will consolidate six countries that used to have their own programs plus six entirely new ones into one single program.

However, it also means that referral links using Linkshare- and DGM-specific code need to be updated to the PHG format. For bloggers that aren’t already putting their affiliate links through GeoRiot this could be a monumental task but if you setup with their service now they’ve got some Javascript snippets on their site that can automate the process for you.

If you’re already using them, all you have to do is set up your new PHG iTunes Affiliate Account and enter the user token into your GeoRiot dashboard – that’s it. When a visitor clicks one of your existing links the redirection magic just swaps in the PHG code where it would previously have used the Linkshare or DGM code.

According to Jesse the goal with GeoRiot was to build a system that was future-proof and the way they’ve handled Apple’s switchover to PHG shows the value of that decision. The whole operation feels very user-focussed and friendly – if you’ve ever got a question no matter how n00b, drop them a line and it’s usually Jesse himself on the other end.

The final bonus is, there’s no monthly fees as such. Instead GeoRiot is funded by redirecting 15% of your traffic through their own affiliate code instead of yours. It’s not even a fraction of all your traffic – they allow you to select a territory from which they will never skim referrals. So if you’ve determined your most lucrative referrals come from US visitors you can make sure GeoRiot never skims from your US traffic.

Why are you still reading? Go and check them out!

Viglink – a back-up affiliation tool

itunes amazon affiliate links
The Viglink home page
Actually before you go, just a quick mention of Viglink. They’re another affiliation service but with a different twist. Instead of you going and signing up to hundreds of retail referral programs (not just Amazon and iTunes), you sign up to Viglink who have already joined all those programs on your behalf and grant you access to them.

You add some Viglink code to the head of your site (or use a WordPress plugin) and whenever you use a raw link to a store online that’s part of an affiliate program Viglink is a member of, your Viglink account accrues the commission and they pay you directly instead of the individual affiliate programs. The idea is you stop having to worry about any referral links at all and let the Viglink redirect handle it all for you, even if you didn’t realise the thing you linked was part of an affiliate program.

They also have a tool that will find references to affiliated stores or products in your content that you haven’t linked but could have done, and insert a link for you. I think that’s a bit spammy personally, but it might be a useful tool for your own site.

It’s a very handy service – one of several similar ones, such as Skimlinks – bolstered by the fact that currently only Viglink uses GeoRiot’s background magic to perform international redirects on their iTunes links. This means that unlike Skimlinks, Viglink gets access to all 51 programs and can translate store links between countries.

Because Viglink is collecting the commission for you, they make their money by taking a 25% cut of that commission when they pay out. Contrast that with GeoRiot which redirects 15% of your least frequent/lucrative traffic and takes the full commission – if any – from those referrals.

In conclusion

I only really write about iTunes apps, and occasionally something you might find on Amazon, so while Viglink has a far wider reach I prefer GeoRiot’s laser focus on those two stores. I also prefer their revenue model so as a rule I build iTunes and Amazon affiliate links with GeoRiot and leave Viglink to scoop up the rest.

Give them both a try today – I guarantee* you’ll be glad you did.

*guarantee not legally binding.

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Other how-tos

How to migrate Pixelpost to WordPress

migrate pixelpost wordpress

Until recently I’d been using Pixelpost to power my photoblog, ‘my glass eye • pictures‘ but that software is long in the tooth and not well supported any more. Times have moved on so I decided to migrate Pixelpost to WordPress. It was surprisingly easy with only a few little hiccups, all of which I managed to solve.

This post details how I did it – first I go through the basic steps you need to take to migrate your own Pixelpost photoblog to WordPress, then a section on the problems I had and how I solved them.

[toc]

What you’ll need

You’ll need the following no matter what:

  • PixelPost to WordPress Exporter plugin by ElevenTwentySix. They ask for a (required) $14.95 donation which goes to The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and it’s well worth it for the work it will save you.
  • WordPress installed wherever you want to host the new version of your photoblog.
  • a WordPress photoblogging theme set up however you want it. I went for Retouch Pro by Graph Paper Press.

Install & setup WordPress

Install WordPress to your server following their instructions. I installed it to its own directory on my site and once I’d completed the migration and was happy the site was ready to go live I moved Pixelpost out of the root directory and used the General admin page to run WordPress from my site’s address.

The most important part is that you must give your WordPress installation its own MySQL database. If you don’t, it’ll make wiping the database clean before importing your Pixelpost files damn hard, plus it’s just a good website housekeeping rule.

Once you’ve gone through the basic setup, now would be a good time to start looking for a theme to use.

Pick a photoblogging theme

migrate pixelpost wordpressI went for Retouch Pro by Graph Paper Press. It’s a premium theme but it comes the closest to the look of my Pixelpost site and as a bonus the GPP support forum is excellent. If you’d prefer a free photoblogging theme there’s plenty out there if you do a quick search. Try a few different themes, make some test posts to see how each one works and what, if any, tweaks you’d like to make.

By the way if you find a really good one, free or premium, I’m sure others would love to know about it so give it a shout in the comments below.

Once you’ve picked a theme you need to establish the following things to make the import process go smoothly later:

  • does it require images to be called using HTML in the post content, or does it just need an image to be ‘attached’? (in my case they just need to be attached)
  • does it require Featured Images? (yes, mine needs those set in order to display an image)
  • does it make use of a theme-specific post format other than Standard to display your photoblog posts? (yes, mine uses its own ‘Image’ post format)

Install optional plugins

One of the main advantages of WordPress is the huge library of third-party plugins to add functionality. Here’s a few that I highly recommend, or that may come in handy depending how your theme works:

  • Akismet – a superb spam filter for comments. It comes already installed with WordPress, you just need to generate your own API code on their site.
  • WordPress SEO by Joost de Valk (aka Yoast) – an essential plugin for sorting out SEO optimisation across your site as well as on individual posts. You should really take 15 minutes to go through the tour and set it up nicely.
  • Google Analytics for WordPress by Joost de Valk – effortlessly set up your site with your Google Analytics account.
  • SEO Friendly Images – this will automatically create Title and Alt tags for your images based on variables like post title and image name. Alt tags in particular are extremely important to search engines.
  • Smart 404 – does a great job of intercepting requests that would normally result in a 404 error and sending the visitor to its best guess at what post they were looking for. If your Pixelpost URLs were in the form ?p=123 and you go for the vastly superior pretty permalinks in WordPress this won’t help so much, but it’s handy to have anyway.
  • Auto Featured Image – many themes require Featured Images so this is extremely useful for automatically setting them on all your imported posts. It just takes the first attached image in each post and uses that, perfect for a ‘one-image-per-post’ photoblog.
  • W3 Total Cache – caching plugins make your site run faster, something both your visitors and Google will appreciate. There’s several available and many schools of thought on which is the best and how they should be set up, but you can’t really go wrong with W3 Total Cache. Do a quick search for Yoast’s set-up guide, he knows his stuff.

When you’re done with your basic setup it’s time to wipe it clean in preparation for the import.

Prepare WordPress for import

Assuming you’re starting a brand new WordPress installation for your Pixelpost import, Jeff Mahoney, author of the ‘Pixelpost to WordPress Exporter’ plugin, recommends you only import everything after properly erasing any demo or test data you’ve created while setting it up.

However, if you’re trying to add your Pixelpost blog posts to an existing WordPress blog DO NOT DO THIS! You’ll wipe out all your posts and you won’t get them back. I can’t help with importing to an existing site but I’ve heard of others managing it so have a search once you’re finished reading this guide.

If, and only if, you’re starting with a brand new WordPress site, wipe the existing demo post, page and comment data by logging in to your host’s admin page (e.g., CPanel), navigating to PHPMyAdmin, and selecting the database you set up for this WordPress site making double and triple sure you’ve selected the correct one.

Then select the following seven tables and empty them:

  • wp_commentmeta
  • wp_comments
  • wp_postmeta
  • wp_posts
  • wp_terms
  • wp_term_relationships
  • wp_term_taxonomy

Emptying these tables will also appear to remove any test images you uploaded to the Media Library but it doesn’t seem to remove the actual files from your server. Fire up your FTP app to check in the Uploads directory ([yoursite.com]/[wordpress]/wp-content/uploads) and physically delete any test images left behind.

You should now have a completely empty WordPress site ready to take your Pixelpost import!

Export .xml files from Pixelpost

pixelpost wordpress exporterOkay, we’re nearly there!

First install the PixelPost to WordPress Exporter plugin to your Pixelpost site. You just drop it into the Addon folder in your PP installation and activate it from Admin.

Export settings

From the Addons page of Admin, scroll down to the options for the exporter. As well as the posts database you have the option to include references to the images themselves, tags, categories, and comments, add an ‘img src’ tag to your posts, specify the post author, and split the export.

Remember when you noted if your theme required an image to be called by HTML in the content of a post? If it does, the ‘img src’ option can save you some work by embedding it into the post content during the export so it’s already included when you import to WordPress. Don’t worry if you’re still not sure – leave it off for now and you can always run the export again later if it turns out you need it.

Splitting the .xml is useful if you have a large blog. Hosting servers often have a timeout enabled that is too short to upload a single large .xml file, so splitting the export into multiple files just means you import smaller chunks within the timeout limit.

Don’t worry about the Author selection, you can set the Author during the import process later.

Everything set up the way you want it? Okay – export!

Keep the resulting .xml files together in a folder called something like ‘PP Export 1’ – you might want export again with different variables so it’s best to keep everything clearly labelled.

At this point you’re probably ready to import. However, if you noted that your WordPress theme requires photoblog posts to be set to a specific post format type other than Standard, skip down to the section on potential problems before going further – we may need to do a little fixing first.

Import .xml files to WordPress

All your .xml files are ready? Here we go, this is the fun bit!

Log in to your WordPress admin pages and select Tools -> Import in the sidebar. Select ‘WordPress’ and it will ask you to install the WordPress Importer plugin so go ahead and do that.

Now import each of your .xml files in order, selecting your user account to be set as the Author, and ticking the box for importing media attachments.

As each file imports don’t browse away from the page, just wait. Eventually you should see a list of the posts imported successfully and a ‘Success’ message at the bottom – at this point import the next file. Remember that one of the files, usually the first, contains just metadata and so won’t show any posts imported.

If you get a ‘fatal error’ message regarding a timeout, don’t worry! It just means there was too much work to do before the server timeout kicked in. Simply run the importer on the same .xml file a second time and it’ll skip straight to the posts it didn’t get last time coz it’s clever like that 😉

If you like, double check the Posts and Media pages after each successful import to check the tally is going up accordingly.

Once you’ve successfully imported all your .xml files… that’s it, you’ve migrated your Pixelpost photoblog to WordPress!

Potential problems and suggested solutions

The very first time I tried this two years ago it all went a bit wrong on a number of fronts. However, it was all fixable so here’s some problems you may experience, and a solution to try:

Your theme requires Featured Images to work

The import process will grab your images from your Pixelpost site and attach them to the correct posts, but won’t set a Featured Image. This is no problem – just grab the Auto Feautured Image plugin via the ‘Plugins -> Add New’ page and run it.

The plugin does currently say it’s not been updated in quite a while, but I’m on WordPress 3.6 and it worked. If you’d prefer something newer there are other plugins that appear to do the same thing.

‘Fatal Error’ timeout during the .xml import

As mentioned above, this isn’t as fatal as it sounds, it just means the .xml file was a bit too big for the importer to do its thing before the server timeout cut it off. Simply run the Importer on that .xml file again and it will pick up where it left off. Splitting the Pixelpost export into more chunks can help prevent it happening.

Importing doesn’t grab the images

First, are you sure you checked the ‘images’ box when exporting from Pixelpost? If you did and it still didn’t work there could be a number of reasons, but in my case it was a problem with the filename for around 300 of my images – I’d included a space in them. I was new to running a website back then and didn’t realise you shouldn’t have spaces in filenames!

PixelPost had dealt with this by replacing the space with %20 in the URLs so the images would load. However, the .xml file recorded by the PixelPost exporter left the space in the filename and hence the URL, so the WordPress Importer wasn’t able to find those images.

Jeff Mahoney, the creator of the PP Export plugin, was an absolute star and talked me through how to solve this:

  • run the Export plugin using the existing ‘bad’ image filenames
  • log into the server with an FTP app and create a duplicate of Pixelpost’s ‘images’ directory
  • isolate all the bad filenames in the duplicated image directory and replace the space with an underscore

    (I did this step by downloading the images directory to my Mac, renaming it ‘imagesfixed’, using an Automator action to rename the bad files and uploading this directory to the root of Pixelpost alongside ‘images’.)

  • go into the XML files and do two Find & Replace actions; the first to rename the image references using the underscore; and the second to find all references to the ‘images’ directory path and replace it with the ‘imagesfixed’ directory path.
  • run the WordPress Import tool on the edited .xml files.

This worked flawlessly – thanks, Jeff!

Your theme uses a post format other than ‘Standard’

My chosen theme, Retouch Pro, requires photoblog-formatted posts to be in their custom ‘Image’ post format but the WordPress Importer places them all in the Standard format by default.

You used to be able to change the post format for multiple posts at once using the Bulk Edit option on the Posts page, but a recent update took that facility away. It’s been raised as a feature request over at the WordPress development pages but there’s no telling if or when it’ll return.

I thought I was going to have to manually switch all 650 posts by hand, until I stumbled across a crafty workaround: I switched one of my posts to the Image format manually then I exported it to an .xml file and had a look through the contents in a text editor. Sure enough there was a line amongst the meta that designated the Image post format.

I copied this line, then opened my original Pixelpost-exported .xml files and did a ‘Find & Replace’ to drop that crucial line into the same section of code for each of my 650 posts automagically. Then I wiped my WordPress clean (again!) and re-imported using my edited .xml files. This imported all the posts as before, but set them all to ‘Image’ – success!