I am now officially in the affiliate marketing world. After developing the Coupon Sherpa iPhone application with my brother Luke we decided we would also build a full fledged website offering every kind of coupon imaginable. So now our iPhone application is one aspect of what Coupon Sherpa is, with its most important being the website where you can find online coupons, printable coupons, grocery coupons and even coupon friendly blog postings. We just recently finished it and I would say it is some of the best PHP mySQL work that I’ve done. I built a brand new content management system (CMS) for it that allows for multiple users with different types of user accounts with the ability for them to manage all our stores, coupons, categories, banners, links, comments, etc. Both the back-end and front-end of the website utilize a large amount of the latest ajax technology to help keep the user experience seamless for doing such things as submitting contact forms, adding coupon or blog posting comments, or even suggestion hints when a person is using the search tool. PHP and mySQL were used for the framework and I also implored some new techniques I’ve learned recenbtly with CSS to display the content.

Something kind of exciting about the site is that I was actually able to get all our coupons to load dynamically from affiliate networks. Each network that we work with has a different type of api that we use to grab the latest coupons. This forced me to have to create a parser file for each network to work with their xml,csv, or even rest data. We then load any coupons we haven’t seen into our database using a cron job and then either remove the ones we don’t want or enable the ones we want to show up on the website. Seems straight forward enough but it actually took a fair bit of thought to make it all work. We also decided to ask for people’s twitter info on comments in the blog and I was able to access Twitter’s api and load in the person’s twitter image and user account info to display for each comment.

Anyways, a lot of work went into making it happen but it’s finally up and running and we’re excited to see how it works. We’re hopeful that a lot of people can save some money using it.

Some links…
American Eagle Coupon Codes
Kohl’s Coupons
Gap Coupon Codes
Target Coupons

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