I won some Amazon vouchers that I didn’t really want so I decided to see if it was worth selling them on Ebay. Just because I didn’t want them doesn’t mean I want to sell them for below face value.

Looking through the listings quite a few of them struck me as odd. Take a look at this one for example.

Amazon vouchers on Ebay selling for more than face value

I don’t know what went through the head of that 6th bidder when they put in a bid of more than £100, but I assumed it was maybe just an error.

Looking through some of the completed auctions, I soon realised this was no error, it seems to happen quite regularly.

More Amazon vouchers on Ebay selling for more than face value

So what is happening on Ebay? Why are people willing to pay so much for vouchers? If anybody has any ideas then please let me know.

I was looking through my website statistics and errors in Google Webmaster Tools and I found something that made me laugh. It’s not an error I have ever experienced before.

If you can’t read the error it says:

Some URLs in the sitemap have a high response time

And what is the URL it is talking about? The article teaching you how to optimise your webpages for a fatser loading time.

I have never really been a fan of nofollow and I think it’s only fair that good comments should be rewarded with a backlink.

So fell free to leave a comment on any article or post here and your backlink will be marked as followed. I use Akismet for spam filtering, so any spam will still be blocked.

In an announcement that deserves a lot more attention than it is getting, the company have announced that for the rest of the weekends in February, you can use Litmus for free.

The free slots begin midnight Friday through to midnight Sunday (Eastern Standard Time) for the next three weekends.

Litmus is a great application, and I would strongly advise you to try their service this weekend for free. Who knows, you might like it and decide a full subscription is worth the price.

Use this php code below in your footer to print a copyright notice for the current year.

This website &copy; <?php echo date("Y"); ?>

This will print out something like this:

This website © 2009

A lot of people (myself included) like to add the first year that a page was published to their copyright notice. You can hard code the starting year and get PHP to dynamically update the current year. Modify this code to suit your needs:

This website &copy; 2005 - <?php echo date("Y"); ?>

Your copyright footer will now look something like this:

This website © 2005 - 2009

Hope you find this tip useful.

The phishing email was designed to look like a notification of a direct message from Twitter. Clicking it brings you to a page that looks like Twitter, but it is not.

While some would question the reason why a hacker would want to access your Twitter account, the fact still remains that any account could have been compromised. Twitter states that 33 accounts were hacked in the second attack, but presumably that can only be the 33 that they know about.

According to the Twitter blog the hacker managed to gain access to some of Twitter’s internal tools that they use to manage users’ accounts.

Whenever you learn that a website has been compromised it is always a good idea to change your password, just in case. You should also check that the email address associated with your Twitter account is correct, and has not been changed.

And of course, always be suspicious of any hyperlinks in email messages. For the sake of safety open up a new browser window and type the address in manually, rather than following the link.

I have never really looked at the source code of Wordpress before, but building a plugin is remarkebly easy. If you are unfamiliar with it, all you do is write your functions in your plugin file and tell Wordpress to execute them when certain Wordpress functions are triggered. For example, you can write a function that is executed when a post is made. You can then “hook” it into Wordpress to be executed at the correct time. You don’t even need to look at the source code either, as all the functions that you can hook into are documented on the Wordpress website.

I am currently still developing my plugin, Wordpress Twitterbot, but if you want to help me test it then just post a comment here and I will send you a copy.

I will let you know how I get on with the development and when it is ready for release.