Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

Blogging Can Make You Money, Even if Your Blog Doesn’t

Thursday, February 12th, 2009

blog01 ”It’s true that most blogs don’t make money directly. It’s also true, however, that a large number of bloggers make a lot of money as a result of their blogs.” according to Josh Catone from his blog post on the sitepoint.com website.

While this blog has small ads from Google, it hasn’t made any money from these ads since the ads were included Jan 27 2009.  Has it made any money otherwise? To this point, the answer is no, but it’s still in its infancy.

More of Josh’s interesting post is available at his post on the sitepoint blog 

Google maps Australia’s bushfires to help emergency services

Sunday, February 8th, 2009

Jason, one of our business analysts and senior programmers, moved back to Melbourne Australia in 2000 after spending 4 years with us. I was on an Instant Messenger chat with him today and we talked about the wild bush fires in his state of Victoria. The fires started a few days ago when the temperature in Melbourne reached 47.6C (116F). He said, “It was so hot and dry, everything just exploded.”

I asked him if they effected him and his family and he said that the “closest were about an hour ago [away] – we were booked to go to a weekend away in a place call Marysville in May, but the reports say that town has been wiped out.  All but 2 buildings left I hear, so not so good for the owners of that B&B.” Also one of his mates had one of the fires come as close as the mailbox. His mate’s father was in the thick of the fires and has not been heard from for a couple of days. Hopefully the father escaped and will be in touch as soon as he has a means of communication.

I was checking out Twitter and there was a tweet from Robert Scoble on how Google maps help the emergency services and the residents know the locate of the fires.  The fire map (Feb 08 09 22:00 EST) looks like this: 

Google maps Australian bushfires

Google maps Australian bushfires

More on the Google Victoria fire maps story is at Google Australian bushfire maps.

ScribeFire helps edit your blog, make you money and is free

Friday, January 30th, 2009

Firefox has many add-ons, but one of the best ones I’ve come across is ScribeFire Blog Editor. The current version is 3.1.6. Once you add it to Firefox, press F8 on any page within Firefox and the ScribeFire editor pops up in the lower half of the screen. It’s a simple and straight forward editor. You can add HTML code in line as well as add images and YouTube videos. Once you’ve setup the link to your blog site, it pickups your current list of categories and allows you to add tags to the post. More out of habit, I publish the post as a draft to my blog and finalize it within WordPress before publishing it to the blog.

You can include Technorati tags as well as as sharing the page on many of the social networking sites such as Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, Newsvine and others. I’m experimenting with this post and sharing this page on Facebook.

Did I mention that you can make money with the ScribeFire Editor? You can sign up for ads for your blog in a fashion similar to Google’s AdSense. When people click on these ads, you get paid a small amount. You get paid on the 7th of the month following for your previous month’s earnings. ScribeFire pays on a minimumof $5.  AdSense waits until you’ve accumulated $100 before it pays out.

More info is available at the website here.

Blog your way to better health

Sunday, January 25th, 2009

While blogging may be considered a way of boosting one’s ego, research published in the Journal of Research in Personality suggests that writing blog entries can be beneficial to your health. The full article with links is here

Upgrading to WordPress 2.7

Saturday, December 20th, 2008

WordPress 2.7 was released on Dec 10, 2008. The WordPress dashboard top message urged me to upgrade to version 2.7. I knew I would have to download the latest version, backup existing files, do an install and hope that everything worked out. There must be a way to do this automatically, so I searched on the WordPress.org site.

I found an automatic update plugin developed by Keith d’Souza that would do all of the work for me. I downloaded the plugin and activated it in the Manage Plugins screen of the WordPress dashboard. Under the Posts section in the dashboard, I clicked on the Automatic Upgrade and sat back. It upgraded the blog to version 2.7 using the 5 steps provided in the WordPress upgrade instructions.

Now the blog can be automatically upgraded to version 2.8 when it is available in Mar 2009. Easy and with less hassle.

Upgrading to WordPress 2.6.3

Saturday, November 8th, 2008

WordPress periodically wants you to upgrade to the latest version. There is a message on the admin dashboard suggesting you upgrade. The blog was at version 2.6.2. In the case of version 2.6.3, rather than overwrite all files in the wordpress directory, only 4 files need to be upgraded. They are:

wp-admin/includes/media.php
wp-content/plugins/akismet/akismet.php
wp-includes/class-snoopy.php
wp-includes/version.php

Make a backup copy of these files or rename the current files (media.php > media-old.php). Then copy the new files to the appropriate directories.

Upgrading the blog to WordPress version 2.6.2

Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008

This morning, I attempted to upgrade our blogging software to the latest version of WordPress (2.6.2). I was using the FileZilla client to upload these files.  My brother, John, attempted to look at the home page of the site and all he saw was the install.php command on the home page and not the normal logo. Something went drastically wrong.

In the process, I had accidentally placed the upgrade files in the root directory of the softwarestrategies.ca domain instead of the blog directory. As a result, I had to delete the files in the root directory and recopy them into proper blog directory. Lesson learned – make sure that files uploaded to the website go to the proper directory.

I’m not sure the upgrade gave any more features, but it did upgrade the MySQL database that contains the blog infomation and entries. It also added a couple of WordPress plugins which I have yet to activate. Looks like I’ll have to do more research on the plugins before they are activated.

Not just another computer blog

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

Finally, I’ve added WordPress to our website. WordPress is currently the most popular blogging software on the internet.

I’d like this to be a springboard for ideas on software development, network security and system integration issues.

If you have any ideas or would like to contribute, please leave a comment or e-mail me. Yes I’ll even make you a published author.

Thanks for viewing this website.

Alan Lukachko
Founder
Software Strategies