Bluenoser's Blog

How to Piss off your customers

Jeff — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 05:23:48 +0000

I got a call earlier this week that the coat that I dropped off at the retail outlet to get fixed was back. I had only dropped it off a couple of weeks ago, and was told that it could take up to 6 weeks for it be get back. That didn’t even occur to me when I got to the call on Monday afternoon, or this morning when I was heading out there. I have a hard time keeping track of time at teh best of times, and when I am busy it gets much worse.

This was not me today

So, I get out there, it is a pain in the ass to get to the outlet in the first place since it is located in one of those parking lot jungles on the out skirts of town. You know what I am talking about, those places that people like to call “business parks” which don’t have the necessary infracstruce to handle the loads, or lack of loads, of people in cars that all try to cram into them.

When I get to the store I wanted to get some gloves, so I go and pick them up, I am a guy so that took me all of 5 minutes. Then I stand in line, and wait, and wait.

This is the point where I am getting annoyed, there are 4 tills, 2 people manning them and 3 floor people wandering around annoying customers that don’t want there help. I stood in line for 15 minutes, and there were only 3 people ahead of me. When I get to the front I explain that i am there to pick up my coat. They search and search and then come to realize that I was called by mistake.

Opps, but then the lady that took my coat in the first place tries to tell me that there would be no reasonable way that my coat should be there, see they send it out only once a week and it takes………

No kidding, but then why was I called, and why is it my responsibility to quesiton when I am called.

The saving grace of the entire experience was that the one that was serving me at the time gave me her card and told me if anyone called to say that my coat was in, I can call her and she will courier my coat to me at no charge.

All in all, it was a 4 hour ordeal that made a waste of my day and all that I got out of it was a pair of gloves.

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Weekend over and Week beginning

Jeff — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 22:48:52 +0000

It is just about time to start getting ready for the week ahead. Today I made some great progress with my business plans and starting to put into motion plans that I developed over the last couple of months.

I have re-read the 4HWW, and have developed a list of goals that I am striving for, and bringing the 20/80 to fruitration. From these thoughts I have started yet another project, yeah I know it almost seems like I am diluting and creating more work, but I think that this project will turn out to be the “one”

For those that don’t know I am an Electrical Engineer by training. Well, almost I still haven’t finished the paper work to get my P.Eng designation, but I still have a month before my self-imposed deadline. I am going to start a training course for a very specific field in the electrical industry. With this course I hope to both help myself by selling packages with it, and also bring more work into my employers coffers by recommending them for the studies. This is a consulting task that I will end up doing, but I am not ready for the liabilty that this would entail.

Training Courses are the new Black

I have begun the task of the training course by writing a spec for preliminary research, the type of research that should allow me to discover what people are looking to know, and what types of questions they are asking. This is a very important first step, as I don’t want to spend too many hours answering a question that only I have the interest in.

I have sent this spec to a few of the contacts that I have used in the past and depending on the response and costs I will either engage one of them or open it up to bidding on a freelance site.

From there I plan to start the research, again I will be out sourcing this. At least at the beginning. When I feel I have enough of the information I need I will write and format the course. I will outsource the actual editing and final formatting. I plan on having a book, presentation, a few tools and an exam to test the “students” knowledge.

I haven’t set a time line for this project yet, that I will do when I have the initial research data. I will be sure to keep everyone up-to-date on this.

And that first picture? It is a Milk Shed, actually it is THE milk shed of my Grandmother in CB where I was on a weekend not too long ago.

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Frustrations with Webmastering

Jeff — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 02:50:45 +0000

I either have to go in ot out of the tunnel.

I give up, and now I need to find an alternative.

I just spent all of this evening and most of my free time yesterday trying to fix one of my sites. I still didn’t really fix it, the site only works when there is now www. in the url. If there is, well 403 everywhere.

Does anyone out there have “people” that do the routine maintenance for their sites? Ensure that the plugins are up-to-date, and fix any bugs that come up?

I would like to move to hosted solutions, however that limits what I can do with the themes, plugins etc.

Ideally I would like to pay someone in batches to update all of my sites and then fix any bugs for me. Is this something that anyone out there has tried outsourceing on Enlance or the other alternatives? If you have any experience with this type of outsourcing please let me know about your experiences. I would especially like to know how you went about writing the description of work.

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Troubles with websites

Jeff — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 01:50:39 +0000

I have a couple of old websites that I keep up and that take in some passive revenue from. That said they can be a pain in the ass when you don’t keep up with the script maintenance.

I am facing the music now. One of my favorite sites that I use as a general soap box that has both a front end blog and a back end forum, is on the fritz. I got an email from my hosting service to tell me that there was a complaint that my site was hosting some malicious script.

It turns out that one of the scripts or addons that were installed on the site was out of date, and now there is a bunch of stuff simply not working. However I think that I am going to take this time and restructure the entire site. I am not taking entire advantage of some newer addons out there that may enable me to tie the different functionality of the site tighter together.

That is enough rambling for today, I have to get to bed and be up early tomorrow for meetings.

And the pic is just there to remind me to relax and just get the shit done, sometimes you just need to breathe.

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Where I am Going with my online Money Making Machine

Jeff — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 01:12:50 +0000

It is starting to get to the point again where I need to re-focus both my life, my work and my business. It really seems that I am doing this pretty often lately, but I am still young so shoot me. I have been reading the Empress and I feel for her. I have set some easy goals for myself and I still think that they are something that I am going to get to.

However, there are some things that I am really getting behind on, my day job just didn’t allow me the time. One of the biggest things was to complete the Black Ink 2 training. I started the seesions, I started building a site, I even started gathering some great content. The niche that I was planning on entering was the Online Conference/Meeting space. This is a space that I see getting bigger, and especially in the turblent economic times. When money is tight people start to look for cost effective means of sharing information. Why fly when you can sit there and hold the meeting face to virtual face.

One of my goals to get to before the end of the calendar year is to start having a positive cash flow on InnovativeMeetings. I have already invested time and money into the site and I don’t think that I can simply flip it and expect to get much out of it as it stands now. My other goals are not involved in my online business space. They are to get my LEED AP Certification and P.Eng. These are two things that will really help my engineering career, and will help me earn the seed money for my online business ideas.

The only way that I am going to be able to reach these goals is to learn how to write specs for out sourcing and learning how to manage that with minimal time commitments. I have worked on this before and have had some cautious success with it.

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Has it really been a Month

Jeff — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 01:48:41 +0000

I can’t believe that it has been an entire month where I didn’t write a damn thing on this site. WOW

It has really been crazy around here. The first week of September I was on Vacation in NYC. If you have never visited New York, do it soon. It is really a blast and you can do it on the cheap. The shopping, Central Park, the shows and the people are amazing. We have been there twice in the last 12 months.

After I got back from there I worked a 60 hour week and then headed to the IEEE sections Congress in Quebec City. This was a great trip, I was able to hang out with a lot of great people and meet some new friends. IEEE is a great place for Engineers to network and meet people of the same vein. Engineers are a odd bunch they usually have to have two lives, one geeky one at work and a “normal” one at home. When at an IEEE event you can sit down with a beer and talk about sports and the LHC.

I even had time inbetween meetings to tour around the city. Old Quebec is the closest that I have ever been to an old European city. It has made me decide that I Old Europe is my next adventure.

And then last week I was in Minneapolis to visit a generator manufacturer and get some classes in. It was a decent trip that involved a very convoluted trip from Halifax to Minneapolis, but that is a story for another day.

I didn’t have a lot of time to spend touring the town. I was staying directly across from the University of Minnesota, and that place is huge. I ended up working in a coffee shop across from the hotel, which was a lot of fun. I talked to some of the students, not locals since I don’t think that I talked to one person who was actually from there.

And then I spent last weekend and this week trying to get everything settled, put out some fires and figure out where all my projects stand. I finished that by the end of the day today, so now life should be reaching something closer to normal.

So what is next?

Well I am back to developing my business plan. There are some courses that I have to finish and then I am going to get back to developing my latest project. I still have the intention of reaching the modest level of $500 of passive proft by end of year. Currently I am at $200 so it is entirely doable.

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Delivery and Schedule issues with outsourcing

Jeff — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 11:37:27 +0000

Starting to get Frustrated

I am currently working on a brand new project. I have approached this new project in a completely different way than I would normally do. I have a plan, schedule, and budget. The schedule necessitates that I can`t do all of the work myself, which is fine because I made a budget for that.

So some of my content has been outsourced, and it is going great.

My site design template was outsourced, well kind of, I simply went over to templatemonster and picked one that I thought would work well.

My first landing page was outsourced, now I don`t really think that it is the greatest, but that is more my fault with direction than that of the designer, and the price was very ~affordable~.

However I needed to get my Wordpress theme developed to match the template that I picked out. So I headed over to DP and made a post. I got a few great offers, too good to be true actually, so I dumped them. I got some over the top and dumped them too. Then I picked one that seemed great. The guy wrote with decent English and wrote respectfully, and the price was mid-range.

However, I would not be writing this post if all went well. This was supposed to be a job that took no more than a week, it has been more like three, and the guy doesn`t seem to be that interested in getting back to me in a timely manner. I am starting to think that he has gotten his 50% upfront so now he doesn`t care. I pay my bills but I am seriously thinking that I need to have a discount on part of the service that I am receiving.

What have you done when your out sourcing project has gone wrong? When the person on the other end of the inter-web does`t give to shits that you have a schedule to meet and knows that they will never meet you face-to-face?

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When Wordpress Align isn’t Working

Jeff — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 23:18:29 +0000

I spent about 15 minutes this weekend trying to figure out why my image align isn’t working with new Wordpress. It looks cool, but I just couldn’t get it to work without doing it my hand. Then today I was catching up on my reader and found a great post from Daily Blogging Tips . Here they explain exactly what you have to do to get your image align to work in Worpress.

It is really simple really, you just have to add the following to your stylesheet.

img.centered {
display: block;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}

img.alignright {
padding: 4px;
margin: 0 0 2px 7px;
display: inline;
}

img.alignleft {
padding: 4px;
margin: 0 7px 2px 0;
display: inline;
}

.alignright {
float: right;
}

.alignleft {
float: left;
}

It is that simple. So now get out there and fix it. And add Daily Blogging Tips to your reader.

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Kiva Loans

Jeff — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 20:20:54 +0000

I would take the advantage of my growing audience to mention something that you as fellow online entrepreneurs can do to help others around the world. Kiva!

What is Kiva?

Kiva is a person-person micro-lending website.

Kiva partners with existing expert microfinance institutions. In doing so, we gain access to outstanding entrepreneurs from impoverished communities world-wide. Our partners are experts in choosing qualified entrepreneurs. That said, they are usually short on funds. Through Kiva, our partners upload their entrepreneur profiles directly to the site so you can lend to them. When you do, not only do you get a unique experience connecting to a specific entrepreneur on the other side of the planet, but our microfinance partners can do more of what they do, more efficiently.

How it works

It is a real simple process, simply get an account, add some cash via paypal (you know you have some in there). Then you can browse the available loans, and pick an individual that you would like to support. Once you support the business that you are interested in, you watch everything happen.

When the loan term is complete the money that you gave out is put right back into your account so that you can then use it again to start a new loan, or withdraw it.

So what are you waiting for? Get over there and get yourself started, make sure that you tell them that jeff{a}hosernews.ca sent you :) And if you are interested in viewing my profile simply click here.

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Twittering Again

Jeff — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 01:12:13 +0000

Well that didn’t take long. I guess I have a real problem.

I am going back to Twittering, but I will be sure not to be using it as I was before, a play-by-play of my life. Instead I will be using it as a micro-blog. I have a lot of little ideas and tips that I think of during the day, but don’t think that they are “important” enough to write a full blownblog post.

Don’t get me wrong, it is not that these things are useless, it is j
ust that they are tips and unless I put together a bunch of them there is not really a point to fill someone’s RSS reader.

So, Join me on Twitter and find out what life lessons (and affiliate business) I learn, as I learn them.

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One Reason Working Online Is Awesome

Jeff — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 18:26:06 +0000

I was trying to get some work done at home today, but for the life of me it was too nice outside.

You can work anywhere, including a pub with free wifi and music. So I did what any smart Haligonian would do, I headed to the pub. The Old Triangle was my choice. I walked around the town and this was the only place that had free wi-fi.

I tried the Aliant Brand that was free up till recently. It really sucks that most of the places that had free wireless in Halifax switched and now you have to either already be an Aliant customer or pay a huge amount to get online….I might as well stay home.

If you are downtown today, come on by, I am probably the only one working on a computer

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Wordpress Link Cloak Installed…Finally

Jeff — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 15:29:34 +0000

I finally got Wordpress Link Cloak working on my site. It took some figuring out, and playing with the settings but all is well now. One think that is not a huge plus for Wordpress Link Cloak is the cost. It is $77!!!, however I think that it is well worth it for the time that it is going to save me on many of my different sites.

However the down side that almost had me asking for my money back, is the customer service.

I know that this is probably a one man show, but being a paid plugin means that it doesn’t have much of a community to help people out when they run into problems. But even being a one man show shouldn’t mean that you don’t reply to your emails for days. I bought the plugin a week from today, couldn’t get it to work and emailed the support. I didn’t hear back for a couple of days and when their fix didn’t work I emailed them again. I still haven’t heard back.

But anyway, if there was a free product out there that did what this WP Link Cloak plugin did, I wouldn’t be using it. The fact of the matter is that there is only one other plugin that does the automatic keyword linking that this one does and that cost another $20 on top of the $77 of this one. The free ones out there need you to automatically copy and paste the URLs, which is not a big deal for a new site, but for an old one that can be very time consumming.

I will be writing a more indepth review of the software in the future, but for now give WP Link Cloak a try and let me know what you think

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Time to leave Twitter

Jeff — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 16:03:25 +0000

I am finally decided to end my Twitter experiment. I will probably stay a member but won’t be actively building my Twitter community. There is no point. Whenever I have something neat to say it is down.

If they had the ability to scale then I am sure that I would stick around longer. But for now I am going to get out of the micro-blogging space. Maybe when fall comes around I will join up on FriendFeed.

What do you think about Twitter. Are they on the brink of failure, or have they already started on the downward spiral?

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My Affiliate Marketing Plan

Jeff — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 09:28:58 +0000

So I have decided to jump in and do some CPA Affiliate Marketing. So now I need a Plan of Attack!

I have a few ideas on what “niche” and market that I am interested in getting involved in. so…

Pick out the niche and product that I want to start targetting.
Find an “aged” domain that has all of the properties that I am looking for, or add a sub-domain to one of my existing sites (this is the way that I am leaning for these tests).
Pick out specific products that I am going to market.
Start working on gathering content and keyword related articles. I am going to use a basic version of wordpress for the CMS as I have found that it works very well, and it is easy to add content to.
Start a PPC campaign. For this I am going to start with Adwords as it is still the Cadillac network when it comes to volume of traffic.
Refine keyword list, refine landing pages, repeat.

My goal is to break even in what ever area that I decide to get started in, however I am going to give myself a month to do this. I am also setting a $$$ limit on what I am willing to put up. I don’t want to dig myself into such a hole that nothing I can do will get me out of it.

As for timeline I am planning on having my niche, domain and products decided on this weekend. Then the landing page, contact page, about page and at least 5 other articles related to the product group published. From there it will be getting some easy links to get spidered. This will take me about a week or so. Then the PPC, this I am planning to have started by the second week of July.

I will have a series of weekly posts every Monday or Tuesday as the experiment runs its course.

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Running into some Writers Block

Jeff — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 23:43:00 +0000

I wrote a post a while ago about writers block, however it has not helped me very much lately. I take a note book around with me everywhere. It sits in my bag and when I think of something that I think that I should write about, or a niche idea that I think I should explore I write it in there.

The pages have been very empty lately.

I think that it may have something to do with the amount of stuff that I do during the summer. It is really too nice to be inside, and I have also filled my evenings with sports. This does not leave a lot of time for sitting and thinking, which in turn leads to burn out. I am starting to feel like I am sinking in a hole, which leaves my mind not relaxed.

I have been trying to get to the gym. Hitting the weights has always been a good way for me to clear my head of everything. When you are there the only thing that you think about is the amount that you are lifting, or the speed that you are going. it really helps to focus for the rest of the day, but I haven’t been doing even that lately. I have been playing ball hockey and ice hockey very late so that means that I am not getting up early enough to hit the gym. This is something that I am missing out on, and it is something that I am going to have to make a priority if I don’t want the advances that I have made in the last month to slde.

So now I am off to play hockey, and then it is off to bed. Tomorrow morning I am going to begin my new workout at the gym to see if I can get focused again, both at work and at home. I hope that this new routine will get me motivated like I was last month.

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Marketing Leverage Contest

Jeff — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 18:27:46 +0000

Marketing Leverage has gone crazy with the contest sponsorships. Not that I am complaining I have joined in a few hoping to get something out of them.

The one that I ALMOST missed was John Chow’s. Today is the last day to enter. All you have to do is reply to his post or write a blog post with a trackback and a link to Marketing Leverage.

This is my post for the contest

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Monetizing this Blog

Jeff — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:44:41 +0000

Today I have sold my last link placement through TextLinkAds. I recommend them if you are interested in selling some text link space. They are very easy to deal with and the payouts are fair.

Currently TLA is the main way that this blog makes money. It is about 25% of my total online income currently, but I am expecting more. I have added the ability to sell private ads using OioPublisher. This is a great plugin, very easy to install and manage. The only downfall, if you can call it that, is that it costs money. I will write a full post on it in the very near future, because it really is worth everything that you pay.

Right now I am offering 3 site wide banners and 1 inline ad. I have “default” banners located there now, so there are 4 spots available, so get them now before they are gone

My next step in my hobby is to let one site die and build on another. The killer for me is that the site that I don’t have to time for is the one with the more profitable niche, however I have more “fun” writing for the other site. Since this is a hobby I am going to leave it this way. I may not let the other site die prese but maybe I will just let it sit and buy some post for it in the near future.

For my next step I am going to start to investigate my entry into the affiliate marketing space….again. There seems to be a number of people doing the same, but I am sure that I can succeed. I have a monthly profit goal in mind that I want to reach for the new year. If I reach it, I may plan on making this hobby into an actual company. This has the advantages of limiting my personal liability, but it costs money.

That is enough rambling for tonight. Maybe in the future when I have more cash flow into this blog I will post my earnings like JohnC and TylerC.

Ciao

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Hosting Rating Site

Jeff — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:39:09 +0000

I am starting to look for some other web hosts out there. I am about to begin to dabble in the dark arts of CPA Affiliate Programs and need to scatter my hosts somewhat. I don’t want to have all of my mini-sites in the same basket, and I definitely don’t want my mini-site experiments to hurt the rankings of my more serious sites.

So along with reading the articles available at WebHostingRating Articles, and now I have found another great WebHostingRating Articles, and now I have found another great webhosting rating site, WebHostingChoice.

If you don’t think that you go enough information at WebHostingRating, there is a good FAQ at Web Hosting Choice. The other great source of information at this site is the Cheap Web Hosting page and their Web hosting scams page, here they talk about the downfalls of going with a host that is soo cheap that it is “too good to be true”….Well you are probably right it is.

One of the biggest scams is the Unlimited bandwidth/storage

Unlimited bandwidth/space - it is simply impossible for a company to offer unlimited space or bandwidth to use. As hosting companies and their associated technologies are themselves limited (i.e. bandwidth or hard disk space), unlimited offerings are usually just an advertising gimmick. Often you will find clauses embedded deep within the company’s terms of service contract that negate the unlimited offering. The clauses are usually arbitrary, such as excessive CPU usage will be grounds for account termination.UnlimBand is a good resource to learn more.

So head over to WebHostingChoice and let me know what you think.

I am sure that if you are new in the online community, or are currently on a hosted solution and want to move to a “self-hosted” solution this is a great place to start you brainstorming on the host that you are going to choose. It is a big decision and your host is going to be a factor in that amount of money that you are going to make online.

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Added Contact Page

Jeff — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:15:57 +0000

I have finially added the very necessary contact page.

Now if you want to contact me regarding this site it is easy as pie. When you use the form, which is a free Wordpress plugin from Mike Cherim, I get an email that I will be sure to respond to ASAP. But I, like everyone, HATE spam so don’t try to sell me something. You can always give me something for free and I will review it. But I won’t give a recommendation to something that sucks

Happy Blogging

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Learning about Web Hosting

Jeff — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:37:40 +0000

Today I found an interesting resource on cheap web hosting.

There are a lot of places that a beginner can get information on the different types of hosting that is available out there. A lot of those resources are too “full”. WebHostingRating articles is very well organized and has some great articles and tutorials.

I have had some time to browse through some of them and the following are some of the articles that I believe would be the most useful to the beginner:

Concept of Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is the type of hosting that a beginner is most likely to use. It is the most cost effective and easiest to obtain.

Intro to cPanel

cPanel is the control panel of choice when it comes to the backend of your website. It is very easy to use, but this article will help you get a head start when you have finially decided on the webhost that you are going to be starting with.

Fantastico Tutorial

Fantastico is known as a popular library for commercial scripts. It is commonly used as a third party add-on that works with cPanel. It was designed to automatically install applications into a website and eliminate the need to upload files through FTP. These scripts are executed from the administrative area of your website. Websites running Fantastico scripts are said to be installed by over 10, 000 servers. With millions of users on a global scale it is easily the most used product of its kind.

Myphpadmin

myPHPadmin is not something that the absolute beginner is going to be using, but take a read because you never know when you are going to have to use it to change a variable in one of you database tables.

Conclusion

All in all, WebHostingRating Articles is a decent new resource that looks like it is going to be growing in the future. Make sure to add its feed to your reader so that you will be notified when new articles are added.

Then when you have figured out what hosting is all about then you can go to the cheap web hostingpage and figure out what webhost you are going to go with.

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Mozilla Down

Jeff — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:20:56 +0000

Thanks to Sean Mulholland for pointing out to me while I was Stumbling that Mozilla has killed its own servers. In case anyone out there didn’t know, the SpreadFireFox was trying to break a world record for the most downloads over the course of 24hrs. I didn’t know that this was a Guiness Record but I guess it is.

However, the servers are DEAD, so if you were waiting for today to download FireFox 3, you are out of luck for now.

This is either a good sign, they have already broken the record, or a shitty sign that they are not going to be able to because their server admins weren’t up to the task.

All I know now is that I sent an email to the entire office at lunch today asking them to give Firefox a try and all I got was emails back asking if I got the URL right, that it crashed their computer or that it was just plain slow.

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Wordpress upload not working

Jeff — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 12:41:15 +0000

I am starting to get frustrated.

Everyone online is saying how great the new Wordpress uploader is, and all the stuff you can do and all of the media that you can easily integrate into you blog. Well I am here to tell you that it is all hog-wash. Well maybe only a little.

For those of you using a lot of images in your post, the image uploader has been completely overhauled as well. Namely, you can uplopad and insert multiple images at once via a new Flash-based uploader. This will gracefully fallback to the original uploader if Flash is not installed, so never fear. There is now a new “Add Media” link in the header of the post window that handles all this now. For those of you who want to debate the philosophical decision to include closed source Flash into open source, and GPL’ed WordPress, knock yourself out.

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I can’t get it to work.
All I get are errors, and I don’t know how to fix it. I have tried a couple of different plugins that claim to fix it, but no luck. What I really want is the ability to upload me image to the directory, and then resize it on the fly. Simply using HTML to resize the image is no good.

So my solution is to use my Flickr Account. I already have a pro account, so that is not a huge deal, but it just adds another way for visitors to leave since you have to link to the image that you are shows according to the Flickr TOS.

So I am crying out to all of my readers. Please HELP ME!!! I will give anyone that helps a month of free advertising space. Hell I will give you a total of 2 months of free space, either one 125×125 banner for one month or two banners for one month.

Make a comment if you think that you can help

::UPDATE::

My “new” buddy Ryan has fixed my problem for me, and it was VERY simple. And for proof see the latest pic to my media gallery.

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Twitter Down Again

Jeff — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 03:40:24 +0000

WTF, just when I want to do some Twittering and waste some time till I get tired enough to go to bed I find out that it is down for maintence. I am starting to wonder if these guys need to develop some ways to monetize the site so that they can get a better set up.

I am relatively new to Twittering, so I really can’t say if this is something that has just started to happen or if this is a regular occurance, but it is really affecting my ability to use the service…..

Wait a minute, maybe this is going to be a blessing in disguse, no Twitter means that there is one less thing out there that is going to distract me from making money…….Thanks Twitter

So I think that I am going to end this post with a picture of my cat. He just loves to sit on top of my computer while I work, which is one of the reasons that I can’t get an LCD.

Well I guess the fact that it would be too light and “The Cat” would simply knock it off the desk.

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PayPerPost, Get Paid to Blog

Jeff — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:33:42 +0000

I am always saying that making money is my hobby, well so is writing and leaving reviews. I used to do this over at Epinions, but now I do it at my own blogs. One of the money makers that I talk about on this site and link to in my side bar is PayPerPost. This is a great way to get paid to blog.

PPP is not something that I use a lot, I have a hard enough time finding time to write my own posts than to spend time writing reviews and plugs for other people. However there is the odd lunch hour that it is raining outside and PPP is there. I can log on, find an opportunity that I like and that I think will fit one of my audiences and go for it. It doesn’t take more than a hour to find thing that you like about the site so that you can write about it, and if you genuinely don’t like the site, and the opportunity is asking that you give them a thumbs-up, well, don’t take that opportunity.

So if I have piqued your interest, getting started is VERY easy. All you have to do is head over to PayPerPost and fill out the necessary information. There are some minimum requirements that your blog has to meet before they will let you in, and some opportunities require a certain PageRank, traffic, etc. PPP uses the “tack” system, so you have to have the correct number of “tacks” for the opportunity.

So what are you waiting for? Get over to PayPerPost and sign up today. You will be thanking me when the money starts flowing in.

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Making Money Online Never Stops

Jeff — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:41:20 +0000

One thing that is amazing about making money online is that even when you are not working on it you are still making money. I am a big fan of the subscription payment. Pretty much all of the money that I make now is through subscription payments, automated systems, etc. So basically my profit INCREASED when I was not working.

Like I mentioned last week, I have been crazy at the day job. But now it has stopped, something like running into a brick wall, one minute you are going full tilt and the next you are stopped dead and sore. I am sore, but not from work, I was playing ball hockey last night and got a ball off the top of my foot, but I will write more over at HoserLife on that, so go over there and check that out, or just register for the HoserLife feed and get all of the great updates.

I know that this is not something that was going to continue for ever but at least I know that I don’t have to worry about losing everything next time I have to take a short break from my constant online work. This is something that is not true if you do a lot of SEM and such, since that stuff changes on a constant basis.

Now that I have more time to spend I will be completing my blog series on how to start your own site. I am going to try to go into as much depth as I can talking about how you pick your niche, how to start your site with free tools, when you should pay for something, how to get ideas for great content, how to get your first traffic and then how to get your first dollar.

From there it is up to you.

Don’t get fooled by all of the “Get rich today” schemes that will tell you that they have a fool proof way to make money by doing nothing. All they have is what I am going to tell you, for free.

So do forget to subscribe to my feed, either by email (form on the side) or RSS reader. ITS FREE!!

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Cleaning out the Wish-List

Jeff — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 17:39:35 +0000

One of the ways that make money online is by using affiliates. One of the ones that I have used since the beginning is Amazon. Back in the day I made a lot of money with Amazon, but lately I have been using it as a filler of sorts. If I see something neat I will link to it and use my aff-id.

Anyway, what I have done now is get paid in Gift Certificates. The last couple of payouts netted me about $70 in gift certificates. So last night I decided to do some cleaning of my wishlist. Some of the books have been in there a while and others I just recently added. Most are regarding business and marketing in general like The Dip by Seth Godin, others are just for fun like the book by Drew Curtis of Fark.

What books do you have in your Wish List? Link to your lists in the comments