We released the BookStats.com page few days ago - a page where you can track book sales and new reviews on Amazon!

Just try this code with PHP:

echo file_get_contents(”http://localhost/some/path/xyz.php”);

If you work on a Linux-system or a Windows-system other than Windows Vista this will work fine, but on vista, the call will hang - after some time you will get just a message “Host refused the connection”; calling the url in a browser works fine.

It’s a bug - just change localhost to 127.0.0.1 and it will work, this is a Windows Vista-only problem, but it won’t be fixed in PHP (see http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=40881).

By the way: Replacing localhost by the computers host name won’t work - you have to use localhost.

Found an interesting tutoriol for setting up SSL with the Filezilla FTP-Server: Tutorial

Gotten 5 x 2 Premium months for free, feel free to use them (if you used one, post a comment for others).

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At elchie.eu (in few weeks a relaunch with more functionality will be move over to bookstats.com) I track the sales ranks of my own books with sales ranks I get from Amazon. Every hour I check the current data and store it within a database to get historical values.

There are some changes within the ranks, some are unmistakable are a sale - but sometimes Amazon is doing some little corrections, your sales rank will get slightly better, but it’s not a sale.

Today a friend of mine and me analyzed all my data I collected for over 18 months - we tried to detect levels, so we want to get some tresholds which indicates a sale for sure. Depending on the previous sales rank (one hour ago) and the current one we got some results depending on the previous rank:

• old rank: 50,000+, new one at least -16,7 %
• old rank: 20,000+, new one at least: -34,3 %
• old rank: 5,000+, new one at least: -17,1 %
• old rank: 2000+, new one at least: -14,3 %
• old rank: 1,500+, new one at least: -3,4 %
• old rank: 1,000+, new one at least: -4,4 %
• old rank: 0+, not enough data collected

I’m tracking right now only my own books, so sometimes they reached a rank in the top 1000, but for a good statistics not often enough.

What does this data mean? For example the Amazon sales rank on 1 pm was 5,541, at 2 pm it must be 4,593 or better (means: less) - if this is true, you can say, a book was sold on Amazon between 1 pm and 2 pm. if the new sales rank just changed to 5,023 for example, this was no sale, probably just other books were degraded.

On April, 9th the CSS naked day will held once again.

Whats the “CSS naked day”? On this day, remove all CSS-styles from your webpage, so the pure HTML content will be shown. This will promote web standards, just keep it plain and simple.

It’s time to show off your body

See also the official page.

If you want to update just the first record and it’s not possible to work with specialized conditions within the where clause in MySQL you can do this:

update table set field=1 limit 0,1

But limit won’t work with T-SQL - what to do? Idea: Use top. Normally top used within select-statements:

select top 5 from table

But using this in an update results in a syntax-error:

update top 1 table set field=1

You have to change the top-syntax to top(n) and it works:

update top(1) table set field=1

[Found on lifehacker.com]

Nice feature with just an URL-hack: Search images by color on Googles image-search.

When searching for a image, extend the url with &imgcolor=<color>

For example:

http://images.google.com/images?q=cat&hl=en&imgcolor=green

The German United Domains Company gives a free TLD-World-Map (value: 29 Euro) away to any blogger blogging about this campaign.

In the first part you will get the free world map. If you take a photo with this map in background and send it to aktion@united-domains.de your blog will be listed on the United Domains-Website - a cool way to promote your blog.

Check here (German): http://www.domain-karte.de

The limit-keyword within select-statements is in T-SQL/MS-SQL not available. In MySQL you can retrieve records 5 to 10 with this statement:

select * from tbl limit 5,5

In T-SQL you have to use a temporary table:

with temp as (select *,ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY id) as rownum from tbl)
select * from temp where rownum between 5 and 10