Tag Archives: News

Apologies: WP update – updating to Version 2.7

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Apologies to all, but we’re updating the server. The WP-MU officially ended, and we’ve migrated back to WordPress. In the meantime, we’re redoing the overall design of the site over the next few days, so we’re hoping to have a new theme soon. Also, we had some ‘problems’ when we initially upgraded: including missing images, a bunch of spam, some missing widgets, and a bunch of smaller stuff! Sorry. But we’ll get these ironed out.

We’ve now removed the old install, reinstall the original WordPress, updated all the plugins and WordPress, imported all the previous sub-blogs, corrected the URLs, restored the images, removed the spam, removed some useless or broken plugins… but there’s quite a list of stuff to sort out, still. Should be up and running by January 1st.

Monday News on InvestorBlogger dot com

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I’ve been away for a few days, and I’m slowly catching up on the past week’s posting. I hate to disappoint my readers so I’ve back dated a post for each day that I was away. After getting home, I wrote over 4,000 words to complete the task. So here are some of the features from last week.

Five Posts from Last Week.

In Other News,

…Voxant Scripts: No longer works on this blog

Sorry about the video posting earlier on Saturday, but it turns out that Voxant has changed their scripts such that I can no longer place their videos in my posts. I’m not sure why yet, but I was unaware that there’d been a change until I saw an invisible video yesterday. I was already tired from blogging, so rather than waste time, I simply deleted the post. I didn’t want to fight their scripts. Any suggestions?

…Get A FREE Review

I’ve been running a competition for a free blog review. Check this post for more details. It would be fun to see how many people can guess properly. Of course, now that the deadline has passed, I’d like to award the prize to … Drum Roll! It was Michael Turton who wrote: “I’d say you were on or about floor 25. Nice shot, shows the tree-lined avenue perfectly.” I’ll be featuring your blog sometime after Chinese New Year on InvestorBlogger dot com. Thanks, Michael. Michael works there in one of the Universities, so he knew the answer .

…Carnival of Making REAL Money

The 11th edition is now available on the other blog, now so go over and check it out. I’ve posted over 20 links to excellent articles.

…New Project: Adding Images To Your blog

SponsoredReviews’ blog has a great post on adding pictures and images to your blog with excellent advice that covers software, printscreen, royalty free images, etc. It’s an excellent detailed post.

…Should M$ buy Yahoo?
And of course, the big news story of the week is Microsoft Buying Yahoo!. I’m not so sure that this will be good for Yahoo!s customers. I love what they have done with many of their services, but I’m afraid that M$ will just monetize the hell out of the services in ways similar to HotMail, and Listbot.

…First Investments
A friend today was asking about investing in currencies as a way to make additional interest, but he wanted to invest a lot of his money into South African Rand. Is that a wise move? What do you think?

Let’s hear your answers on these or any blog issues!

Monday News: A Carnival, Tidying Up, Chinese New Year and our 1st Martian Reader

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What you’ve missed here…

  1. Saturday Bytes: WMV to FLV and FireFox’s Causing Me Frustration
  2. Technorati: Why you should bother, how you do it, and the ‘dark side’
  3. NetWork Solutions: How YOU can gouge your customers in 10 steps or less – a case study
  4. and our new Advice Column: Your House Is Not YOUR ATM Machine

For the advice column, simply drop your email to us (anonymously, if you wish) and I’ll write InvestorBlogger’s response with some suggestions.

And now the news…

Monday is here, the first day of our holiday at Chinese New Year! Yesterday, we spent the whole of yesterday reorganising the school offices. I had to finish rewiring the computers, too. But it’s done, and the new network will work nicely, I think. One PC will be devoted to running the printers, another to running the network, another to running the photocopier, and another to running our IntraNet blog, I hope.

So, though we use a local network at school, we’ve distributed services across every PC except the notebook to maintain as much of a system as possible should one PC die. I had intended to network everything to just one PC, but then thought perhaps that wasn’t a good idea if there should be a hardware problem. So our services are distributed to minimize impact of broken systems. BUT we don’t have any extra capacity at the moment which is a pity.

The New Carnival 10th Edition and the new host

New Carnival 10th Edition

Yep, it’s out on the new blog, and posted with 21 good stories, and most of the junk removed. I took a huge paring knife to cut out duplicates, irrelevant stories, popup articles, etc., But I’m glad, the edition is good. Next time, we’ll feature a new section: Chinese New Year is approaching, posts that make special reference to that will be given their own featured section!

Chinese New Year: A time to tidy up

Chinese take a lot of time to clean up before the New Year (February 6th this year!) and I’ve really gone to town to clean up my own clothes closet! But I’m so untidy and disorganised that it took me more than 12 hours to put everthing here…

P1000559

into here…

P1000561

and it’s done now… But it was a challenge! And it’s not particularly neat and tidy, but it is sorted out now! What is the secret to being organized, please tell me!?

Amazon’s Big News: Downloads go International!

You’ve got to read this story about Amazon’s announcement:

Amazon MP3 is the only retailer to offer customers DRM-free MP3s from all four major music labels as well as over 33,000 independent labels. “We have received thousands of e-mails from Amazon customers around the world asking us when we will make Amazon MP3 available outside of the U.S. They can’t wait to choose from the biggest selection of high-quality, low-priced DRM-free MP3 music downloads which play on virtually any music device they own today or will own in the future,” said Bill Carr, Amazon.com Vice President of Digital Music. “We are excited to tell those customers today that Amazon MP3 is going international this year.”

I’m skeptical, because their definition of the term ‘international’ may only include Canada, the UK, Japan, France and wherever else there is a localized Amazon site. But here’s hoping.

What’s that guy on Mars doing?

CNET is carrying this picture recently taken from Mars courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell University of a 2″ man.

123manonmars550x401

Nasa has finally taken a picture of a Martian: he (or she) is obviously squinting at the ASUS Eee PC with the 7″ screen while browsing InvestorBlogger dot com. What else could the Martian be doing? Suggestions in the comments please!

Upcoming Stories

These are some of the stories I’ll be posting several stories in the next few days:

  1. What I did with my money
  2. Security and WordPress: Beefing Up Security for your blog
  3. WPBanners: A Fuller Review – Good Value or not?
  4. blogging: Usability Improvements

Do check back this week to see which is posted.

Newsbytes on InvestorBlogger: Apple Hot Air?, Affiliate Linking, Banner Plugins for WP and more…

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Well, there’s a lot of little stuff that I need to share with readers this Friday… So we’re starting off with five stories that caught my attention.

A quick review

Here are my top (I like them!) stories this week:

Do visit and comment on these stories!

Apple Air vs. Asus Eee II PC

Wow! My new friend Nam (from Nationwide and supplier for our school) and I were chatting about upcoming PC products as he was delivering my new PC Baby for my colleague. These exciting products are including the ASUS Eee II PC with 8.9″ screen (The Enquirer) and the MacBook Air. There are no real schematics on the first product yet, except it’s rumored to have WiMax support built-in and extra memory… But…

Still, this week so the announcement of the launch of the new MacBook Air priced at $1899 for the hard disk version and over $3K for the SD version. Enjoy looking at the pictures and watch the BBC video.

MacBook Air

Lust for this device, if you must! Just keep your credit card away from your computer screen…

Of course, you know which one is cheaper and which one is cooler. But Nam was saying “It’s better for companies simply to launch products with as little fanfare as possible, otherwise they risk sales as people wait for companies to launch products in the future. This means no sales now for existing products and no sales for forthcoming products either!”

NetAudioAds News: Hide those affiliate links

I got this newsletter from Charles Heflin, which is something I hadn’t considered about affiliate links and the reasons why affiliate marketers need to hide their links. I’ve bolded the important parts.

Hello Kenneth,

As the PPP opportuity grows we are seeing an increased
level of people signing up directly under the default
account. sellingppp.com has not advertised the PPP
opportunity except for the initial launch back on
December 6th. We are leaving the advertising to our
affiliates (you).

The reason I bring this up is because the only way that
sellingppp.com would get any traffic is because of you.
With this fact in mind we find it interesting that we
continue to get sign-ups by the thousands under the main
account. Very little traffic comes from the search engines,
the rest is coming from affiliates.

The point I am trying to make is the only way we could be
getting that many direct sign-ups is because people are
ripping the affiliate ID off of affiliate links and just
going straight to sellingppp.com and bypassing the affiliate
all together.

This is a strong case for the fact that you should
“absolutely” cloak your affiliate link.

This is just a heads-up … If you are not cloaking then
you are losing sign-ups.

….

Thank you,

Charles Heflin
Marketing Director
PPP, NetAudioAds Group

I’m looking at the possibility of running these ads on this blog for a short while as a test on one of my other blogs to test for acceptability and revenue. But I will consider hiding affiliate links now, I think.

Plugins: Banner Rotators

I’ve been trying different Banner Rotators over the past few months, starting off with Shylock Adsense which would actually rotate a lot of things, because you just need to paste the code. It was easy to use with Adsense because its system naturally limited you to the number of Adsense boxes per page permitted by Google. Worked nicely, very flexible and stable. But when my demands changed, I had to change the software, too.

I’m currently using WordPress Banner Rotator v2.1.3 to handle all the banners, and it seems pretty stable, though some functionality and documentation have issues. It’s commercial software though it won’t break the budget at $14.99 as a download. It’s working well in many ways, but there are some problems that I have discovered with features not working as anticipated. I’ll be doing a full review soon: active banner switch and future date expiry don’t work as anticipated (or not at all), but otherwise pretty stable. I’d like an option to weight ads, too. Some of these problems would be easily solved by setting up ‘ad management software’ and using that code within this software. Such software would manage the ads more effectively, such as OpenAds. It seems pretty stable, though.

Advertising Page

I’ve recently updated the Advertising Page with a lot more information, options and pricing. I’ve even added an ‘advertiser’s mailing list’ which will go live just as soon as I’ve figured out how to operate Zookoda.

Stories in the Works

I’m working on three stories that should come out in the next few days: including one on Technorati Rankings, Using your house as an ATM machine, and ‘E-commerce: Why are some sites so unfriendly to customers?”

Thanks… drop by again soon, will you?

Linkfest Haven, the Blogger's Oasis

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This is an Open Trackback post. During this weekend, you can submit your posts to this site. The Open Trackback article URL is this. The reciprocal ping URL is this. You can also use Linkfests. Enjoy and have a great weekend!

prognosticating journalists?

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Does anyone think that it’s a good idea to follow the prognostications of journalists and their interpretations of what’s going on in the U.S. Economy? I sold my Dow stocks yesterday. I doubt we’ll see a new high point this year. This is a secular bear market (see a real economist: www.frontlinethoughts.com I think his grip on the market is excellent, and well argued. Not the Rah-Rah-Rah stuff of most journalists such as this geezer. “This is tremendous news. It should kick the Dow to 13,000 during the next 12 months … if Bernanke doesn’t get too carried away … a 6% Fed funds rate WOULD throw the market into reverse. The more important barometer, the S&P index, now hovering at 1325, might make a new high during the next 12 months, too. (The S&P’s all-time high is 1527, reached in March, 2000.)” Tax breaks might help in the short term to create a new high, but I doubt that they will make much difference in the longer term. You might call it the sign of a frothy top of the market. The ‘Big Players’ are getting tax breaks so they can push up the market, sell, pay less tax than the average Joe, and get out. Then they will wait as smaller investors who read stuff like this report buy thinking the tax breaks are for THEM. Call me skeptical. Hah! The ‘Big Players’ bought because stocks were cheap, they have made their $$$. You don’t buy stocks just to get a tax break, do you? So I think we can call this the top of the market for a while! Kenneth