The Hobby Webmaster Blog

I have copied my WordPress master folder to two of my domains today. I keep a copy of the WordPress blogging software on the server in the root directory and when I want to set up a new blog I copy it on the server instead of uploading the whole thing from my desktop. To copy a folder on the server only takes a couple of shakes of a lambs tail, much faster than uploading a major software package like WordPress.

I copy the folder to my destination directory and then make a few adjustments for the new blog. The config file has a few settings that need to be adjusted and my background images need to be properly named and uploaded. There are a couple of site specific include files that need to be changed and the WordPress set-up procedure to run. Then the blogs will be operational.

I will be back to post urls to the new blogs later.

I have been preparing my first ebook in PDF format. I downloaded Open Office to produce the ebook because one can export as PDF from the open source Office Suite. The book is titled Website Basics and contains some information that I hope will be of value to those interested in owning a website.

I sent a preliminary copy to Jo at Magic Mega MoneyMakers. She not only offered an opinion on the quality of the book but also did a through proof read and made a couple of suggestions for improvements to the book. I have taken care of the typos and reworded a few awkward passages. I also added a bit of explanatory content.

I am producing this ebook in the hope of generating some traffic to my Before You Buy a Website site. I will offer the ebook as a give away in an article marketing campaign to try to build some traffic to this site. I will offer the opportunity to sign up for an email list, but not require the sign-up at this time. If I build some traffic and don’t get names for the list I may produce another ebook and require an opt-in to download the second book.

The revised PDF is on the server. If you would like a sneak preview go to the DownLoad Page. If you check out the PDF please leave a comment. Thanks!

I now have three blogs with the KeywordLuv plug-in active. These blogs also have a do follow plug-in installed. That means that a commenter can have a keyword link to his site that is a do follow link. The search engines will follow the link and find the site. You will get credit for a backlink which may help in your search engine results position.

I have now had one comment by a user that understood how to work with a blog and the plug-in. The display does, in fact, work as it is advertised. There was not really any doubt, but I have now seen it in action on one of my blogs.

The Save a Penny blog on the Pennies for Wink site is where this action took place. The commenter left a relevant comment to the post to which it was attached. I approved the comment and it is now live. The commenter has a live do follow keyword link for his time. Thanks!

If you want to build some back links check out the blogs at Before You Buy a Website, Selling On Your Website, or Pennies for Wink. Those are the three that have the needed plug-ins installed. I ask that you leave a comment that is relevant to the post on which you comment. I don’t want comment spam or links to bad neighborhoods, but I will reward a thoughtful comment from one with a quality site with a backlink.

I submitted a new article to Ezine @rticles this evening in support of my site MC Rally.com. I had received a communication from them stating that approval times are now short. The article may be live within a couple of days. I will probably place an article with GoArticles with a similar topic soon (I started an article).

Ezine has a double manual approval process. Each article is perused by two editors as well as software scans that check for duplicate content and other standards. The Ezine site is visited by more than a million visitors a day, so the exposure can be great. If the article is picked up by a publication that can lead to even more exposure. The approval process can take up to a week but the email stated that there is currently no backlog. My last article took about two days as I recall.

GoArticles does not have as stringent of editorial standards. If I place an article with them it will be live within a few hours. They do have a good deal of traffic, and I have seen some visitors resulting from some of the articles that I have placed with them. Alexa ranks them at about 1100th in the US as far as traffic is concerned. Ezine is at number 55 in the states.

The article directories are one of the ways to support a site. They will generally drive some traffic to your site. There are good stats with Ezine. I have one article that has been viewed a few times but not driven any traffic. The other two have about 12 and 16 percent click through rates.

One builds traffic incrementally. The more paths that lead to your site the more likely there will be visitors show up. Each article is a pathway to the site that it promotes. In addition the search engines look at how many roads are headed your way when they are determining your position in the results page for a search.

I have just uploaded a page on the Auxiliary Section of the SoftWare Audio Console to the Mixer in a Box site.

I also did a couple of other tweaks while I was fussing with the site. I reordered the left column nav section in a way that I feel is more logical and added one more category to the coming attractions section. I also retitled the video page since there are now two videos to view.

Check out the new pages at Mixer in a Box.

My web-space was hacked last week. I hope that none of you fell prey to the hackers. They had placed a script on each of the index pages on the site that appears to be some sort of Trojan down-loader. I have vacuumed up all the debris at this point and am keeping a closer eye on things now.

It appears that somehow they had acquired the account password and were able to FTP into the site and do their nasty business. I changed the password when I learned of the problem. I was alerted by a forum member on one of the forums that I frequent. He had clicked on the link in my sig and got an alert from Avast AV that my site was an attack site. He listed the problem as JS:Illredir-B [Trj]. I found out at around 1:oo AM (eastern US time zone) on December 31. I believe that the incursions were all on the 30th and 31st. I did not change the password until the morning of the 31st, and that does appear to have stopped the activity.

My blogs were also affected, including this one. I damaged a couple of them learning how to effect a repair. The damaged ones are very low traffic, but I will repair them this evening. I was lucky in that all of the content is in tact. A friend recently had his blog hacked and lost about 6 weeks of the most recent posts.

I did find one file that I had missed this morning. It is easy to tell by the date stamps which files may have been affected. I had just missed the one file. I have many directories and sub-directories on the space. Nearly all have an index page. I have my local copy so I was able to upload a safe file to replace the corrupted files. I spent several hours on the clean-up. I would prefer for this not to happen again.

September marked a milestone. I reached the AdSense threshold for payout from Google (on the 29th or 30th). Sometime within the next couple of weeks there will be a small sum of money show up in my bank account. This will be much fun. It will also go a long way toward paying for the hosting for my little hobby sites.

The initial payment threshold is $100.00. If I recall correctly payments after the initial threshold are in $10.00 minimum increments. If that is the case I will probably get another payment or two before I need to re-up on my hosting account.

In other news, I have had four articles published by article sites. I have seen some additional traffic from these articles already and should continue to see some increase for some time to come. If any of these should get picked up by a high traffic site I could see considerable traffic, but that is a rather large ‘IF’. It is among the first real site promotion that I have tried and I can see that  it could be of value. I had two articles accepted by Ezine@rticles. The first two they had rejected, so this was a minor victory. The two articles that Ezine had rejected went one to Buzzle and one to GoArticles. Ezine@rticles has very high standards for the articles that they will publish, but that makes being published there of greater value.

I have been studying a bit about SEO and recently added an article called HTML Semantics and SEO to my site Selling on your Website. I was going through my Google WebMaster Tools checking for any problems that Google  had found. I need to pay more attention to webmaster tools. There is a lot of information there. Back to the story, the webmaster tools told me that I was in the 24th position for the search for html semantics. There is a link that performs the search for your term so I checked it out. The search result opened and I went to page three (result 21-30). I looked over the page and did not see my article, so I went on to the next page. There was still no sign of the article. Not really expecting to find anything I checked page two. There was my page listed number two on the second  page of results.

I have been working on my Anjolee pages for the Closet Online site. I put up their press release and pages that display a couple of their blogs, and I got started on some catalog pages. You can view the results at http://www.theclosetonline.com/stores/anjolee/. I will be putting up more catalog pages, but there is a problem with some of the available catalog items that are provided by Anjolee. Some of the descriptions do not match the pictured items. I have notified Anjolee, and they are working on the problem.

I reworked my comment software to display in the left sidebar column on this site. I basically like the way that it came out and will probably use it on other sites. Putting the comments in the sidebar makes them visible without scrolling to the bottom of the page. I think that this might serve my purpose a bit better for some things. I needed to adjust the software because the minimum width did not fit within the space available. I think that I still have a tweak or two, but you can see the current result on the catalog pages of the Anjolee store linked above.

I published my second Squidoo Lens this evening. I would call it a work in progress rather than a completed project. This lens is a ‘How To’ lens on using KompoZer, my normal web editor, to modify the code for inclusion in a Squidoo module. The things that can be done in the code are limited by the Squidoo editor, but KompoZer can be used to enhance the appearance of a lens project.

I learned some things about Squidoo along the way. I added an extra guestbook module to serve as an ask the editor space. I am offering to help others use KompoZer to do the things that they want to do with their lenses. I will need to fuss with this one a bit more, but I think that it has the potential to become a high traffic lens. Only time will tell. If you want to check it out go to see KompoZer for Squidoo.