This post will walk you through the process of installing PHP 5.2.11 to run under NGinx using PHP-FPM.

NGinx doesn't have built-in support for running PHP, it uses a third-party daemon to spawn instances of php-cgi and then communicates with those instances over sockets.

PHP-FPM is a replacement for spawn-cgi. Runs faster and is more reliable.

Step 1: Download PHP 5.2.11 and apply PHP-FPM patch


Step 2: Configure PHP


Step 3: Install


Step 4: Start PHP-FPM



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PHP ChartDirector is a powerful PHP extension that allows to generate very complex charts. You can visit their Web site here.

This tutorial will show you how to install it under FreeBSD.

1. Download PHP ChartDirector

The download page is located here -
http://www.advsofteng.com/download.html

Make sure you pick the FreeBSD version for PHP, and make sure you choose the good version between 32 and 64-bit. At the time of writing this post, the latest 32-bit version available for FreeBSD was this one -
http://download2.advsofteng.com/char...freebsd.tar.gz

Now that you have the download link, the first thing to do is to find out where is your PHP extensions directory. You can find it by checking at phpinfo()'s output or in your php.ini file (which is usually located in /usr/local/lib/php.ini). Just search for "extension_dir" in php.ini - you will find it right away. In our case, our extensions directory was "/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/current". We can now download and extract ChartDirector...


When extracting ChartDirector, it creates a "ChartDirector" folder that contains these files/folders:


We are mainly interested by the "lib" directory. Let's copy the files that we need...


You can get rid of these 2 PHP files:


2. Determine the right version

To determine the right version of the DLL that you must use, refer to this page -
http://www.advsofteng.com/doc/cdphpdoc/phpinstall.htm

For example, if you have PHP 4.4.9, you will use this one -
PHP Version 4.2.1 and above: phpchartdir421.dll

Even if it's FreeBSD and not Windows, you are going to specify a DLL as the extension in your php.ini file. You can delete all the others DLL's that you are not using, but make sure you keep the "fonts" folder and the "libchardir.so" file - they are required. So your extensions directory might look like this:


3. Configure the extension in php.ini

Now that we have all we need, we're going to configure php.ini to add the PHP ChartDirector extension.

Open your php.ini and add a line like this one in the extensions section:


Make sure you use the right DLL for your PHP version. Save your php.ini file and restart your PHP engine and/or Web server (Apache, FastCGI, etc.) to reload your PHP configuration.

To test PHP ChartDirector, you can use the "phpdemo" directory that you can find in the PHP ChartDirector archive. Just copy the folder in the root of your Web server and point it with your browser (ex: http://yourWebAddress/phpdemo). This demo is also very convenient for charts examples.

This nifty one-liner will count the number of unique visitors in an NGinx web-server access.log file, for a given day:


Replace 04/Nov/2009 with the date you'd like to count the number of unique visitors for.

When installing a FreeBSD system, you're asked if you would like to install the Ports Collection. If you chose no, you can follow these instructions to obtain the ports collection:

Option 1 - CVSup


Option 2 - Portsnap

A lead opt-in web form is a short form, asking the user to provide name, emailaddress, phone and/or other optional fields, for the purpose of signing up for a program, or receiving more information about your offering.



Unlike other shopping carts, the SPI cart doesn't limit you to a single form style or any specific fields.

You can create whatever html form you like, using any design and combination of fields (text, radio button, checkboxes, textareas) as needed.

The only requirement is to have at least the emailaddress field, whenever saving a new lead to the database.

Step 1 - Design your opt-in form

Use your favorite HTML editor to design your lead opt-in form.

For simplicity, use 'name' as the fieldname for the user's name (or 'first_name' + 'last_name'), use 'emailaddress' as the fieldname for the user's email address and use 'phone' as the fieldname for the user's phone number.

Here's a typical lead opt-in form with the basic name,emailaddress,phone fields as well as a few additional custom ones:


Step 2 - Add custom fields to Leads table

Since we're using a few custom fields in this example (traded_indi_stock, traded_option), we need to add those fields to the 'leads' table.

Connect to your SPI database using PHPMyAdmin, locate the leads table and add the two new fields. You only have to do this once every time you're adding a new custom field to a table.



Make sure you're adding the custom fields to the 'leads' table and pay close attention to the fieldnames. The fieldnames you choose are going to have to match the fieldnames you pass to the do_addlead() function.

Step 3 - Save the lead to the database

Now that we have the custom leads in the 'leads' table, saving the lead to the database is the easy part.

The code below renders the opt-in form, saves the lead to the database and redirects the user to a thankyou.html page.


Note about Affiliate Tracking

Often times, affiliates will be sending their traffic to your lead opt-in forms. You're going to want to know which affiliate generated which leads.

Luckily the system takes care of this automatically.

One of the fields in the 'leads' table is aff_id. This is the ID of the referring affiliate and serves as the glue, associating leads with the affiliates who referred them.

When a user clicks on an affiliate link to visit the opt-in form on your website, they typically follow a link that looks like this:

www.YourDomain.com/?aff_id=1234

Where 1234 is the affiliate ID.

As soon as the user lands on the lead opt-in form, the spicart.php include at the top of your file, identifies the aff_id url-parameter and saves it in a cookie on the end-user's machine.

Later when you call do_addlead(), this method picks up the aff_id from the end-user's cookie and passes it along, so that when the lead is added, the referring aff_id is saved as well.

When you have production web servers and databases, it is absolutely critical to have a monitoring system in-place that will alert you whenever service goes down.

Getting Started with website monitoring

One of our favorite monitoring tools is Pingdom. It's a $9.95/month easy-to-use service that will ping 5 of your servers, once every 60 seconds, alerting you via email & SMS whenever any server goes down.

In addition to downtime notifications, the service also provides response-time trends, raw data and uptime-over-time reports:



If you don't have any monitoring in-place right one, you should definitely try out Pingdom or a similar service.

In about 5 minutes of setting it up, you'll have the peace of mind, knowing exactly when your merchant website, affiliate landing page or payment gateway goes down.

Beyond simple HTTP monitoring

While Pingdom and other similar tools are great in letting you know once your website is -already- down, a lot of times the outage can be prevented in the first place, by detecting a decrease available memory, cpu, disk space etc.

At the pinnacle of server monitoring are tools such as Nagios and Munin.

Munin will monitor every single resource on your server, including: memory, cpu utilization, available handles, open connections, average load, running processes and more.

Nagios sends alerts to groups of users based on predetermined rules.



Do It Yourself Server Monitoring

In this post, I'd like to focus on how to create a simple monitoring script, that will survey remote servers for a few critical metrics, displaying the results on the screen.

Unlike Nagios+Munin, such a setup doesn't require installing a monitoring component on each server. Your monitoring script can run remotely, surveying all servers once every 60 seconds on a cronjob, sending an email/sms whenever detecting abnormal behavior.

For the purpose of this example, our script will monitor the following metrics:

= MySQL Database server
* Number of running threads
* Number of threads connected
* Queries per second
* Open tables
* Sample query response
* Number of tables in database

= Any FreeBSD/Linux server
* CPU load over the last 5 minutes
* Available memory
* Open sockets
* Number of running processes


The output of the script will look something like this:


Tip: If you're looking to monitor dozens of servers, consider applying our ssh no password approach, to save the hassle of having to exchange private keys with each server.

A Product Launch is the process of building anticipation and emphasizing scarcity in a hungry market, towards the release of a new product / service, positioned to have the potential to make a significant impact on the target customer's life.

In the Internet Marketing world, Product Launches are powerful marketing vehicles used by Information-Marketers to drive a massive amount of traffic on a specific day ("Launch day"), with the goal of converting the wave of anonymous traffic into qualified leads and then paying customers.

For the past 5 years, SPI has been instrumental in orchestrating some of the largest most-successful product launches online, working with leading information marketers on applying time-tested techniques to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in product revenues.

Some of the recent product launches we handled include ListBuilding, GoogleCashDetective, 7FigurePPCSecrets, LaunchTree, AffiliateClassroom, PPCClassroom, DirectResponseMarketing.

Why does it work

Product Launch Marketing works so well because they build on two fundamental human traits:

#1. Herd Mentality - Follow the leaders
In the weeks building to the launch, opinion leaders and peers within your industry, will all glorify how great this product is going to be and why you absolutely must have it.

#2. Scarcity - Desire to want what we can't have
Using a limited number of units, fixed close date, early-bird discounts, one-time-offers and other tactics, the company will build the impression you must act fast or lose the opportunity to own the product forever.

Examples of great well-planned product launches: The iPhone, "The Secret" DVD, StomperNet 3.0, Gary Vaynerchuk's CrushIt book.

In Numbers

A typical Internet Marketing Product Launch these days, yields $1m (One Million Dollars) on launch day, followed by $200k in monthly residual payments from a continuity program.

It is far easier to convince 2,000 prospects to pay $99 a month, than it is to direct-sell a few large accounts in order to generate the equivalent of $200k in monthly revenues.

1,000 users paying $99 a month = $100k a month
2,000 users paying $50 a month = $100k a month
4,000 users paying $25 a month = $100k a month

50% of the revenues are often paid back to affiliates.
20% is the average three-months drop-out rate.

The SPI Product Launch Program

With the "Product Launch Program", we are now helping dozens of companies in various industries, capitalize on this phenomenal marketing strategy.

The SPI Product Launch Program, is not a how-to tutorial, or an online course.

This program is a joint-venture between you and SPI, whereby our company will work with you, hands-on, on every aspect of your product launch in a joint effort to make it a big success.

What you can expect from SPI, during this process:

* Hands-on consulting
* Introduction to leading information-marketing affiliates
* Access to case studies, analytics and proven tactics, used by leading information marketers
* Access to live front-end and back-office systems, so that you can learn what works best
* Professional services: Landing page design, Hosting, Affiliate system, Payment solutions
* PLR: Videos and mp3 files to complement your member's-only content
* Membership system integration (Wordpress+plugin / aMember / SPI)
* Load testing, to ensure your setup can handle launch-day traffic
* Affiliate emails autoresponder kit
* Corporate address, Call center, Help desk
* Ongoing Software development / website customizations / graphic design

Application Process

Our success over the years has made this service very popular. Committed to maintaining our strong reputation, SPI dedicates a lot of resources to every individual product launch we are involved with.

Unfortunately we cannot blindly accept new clients into this program.

Please contact your account manager (or email us here) for details on how to apply.