Archive for February, 2009

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Reasons to Backup Your Blog

Saturday, February 28th, 2009

A while back my site SampleADay was hacked, which thankfully my site did have a backup copy, just one of the reasons I backup my blogs weekly. Make sure you backup your blog at least weekly, just because you know what could happen.

Concerning the reason I had to use blog backup and the hacker, well basically some affliate of fling.com managed to hack into my site and add in porn popups to his or someone else’s affliate code. Let’s just say users were not too happy about seeing porn pop ups on my site and I started to receive complaint amongst complaint. After changing the template I thought I had solved the problem, but no, I had to entirely reinstall my site, making me glad I had backups. This solved the problem, but who knows if I could get hacked in the future, a good reason to backup my blog.

Backing up your blog fights against any uncertainties, I do the same with my music and movies. Sure companies aren’t happy about backing up, but if we buy their music and movies, shouldn’t we be able to keep an extra copy if say our house burns down and we lose everything? Or maybe some thief swipes it all? Backup copies is like insurance and piece of mind.

Tools To Backup Your Blog
https://blogbackupr.com/ – A service to backup your blog online.

I personally make it a habit to make sure I have all my main wordpress files backed up as well as mysql files. The best backup you can do for wordpress is backing up the mysql data for an easy quick reinstall.

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Posted in Blogging | No Comments »

Best Way to Come Up With New Writing Topics

Friday, February 27th, 2009

One of the hardest things for any new bloggers is coming up with new writing topics day by day. There are a few strategies that I’ve come up with in the past for coming up with a new writing topic in a bind including:
1. Using Google Analytics to see what keywords people have used to find your blog, then writing one of those topics more in depth.
2. Criticizing anything in the news related to your blog.
3. Revisiting old articles and updating or further covering those topics/
4. Covering any new tech products

But one of the easiest ways to come up with any new topic on the fly is answering commments. In fact this post is the result of a comment. The commenter asked:
I aslo noticed the fact that many bloggers don’t update their blogs as often as before.

So nick, would you please give your kindly advice about that? Thanks

David Wei

So as I said David, just look around you. Your Analytics gives you plenty of clues about topics that should be covered. The news is a great source to look, make sure you’ve subscribed to tons of blog feeds in order to always be informed, an in the worst case, just blog your thoughts on the topic.

Still no post is better than some half thought out irrelevant post that just pisses off readers.

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Best Time to Start Blogging?

Thursday, February 26th, 2009

People often ask if there is a certain time that is best to start blogging or a new blog. My calendar today reminded me a of a little quote, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago.  The next best time is now.”  The best time to start blogging was 5 years ago.  However, if you still want to enter the game, the next best time is now, not tomorrow.

Sure starting your blog now will be abit harder to turn a profit, since lets face it, we aren’t coming out of this crisis anytime soon.  That doesn’t mean though that starting your blog now isn’t a bad idea.  Some of the wealthiest people have started their business in times of despair.

If you started your business now, then when times do turn around you’ll be ready.

Don’ t wish you planted your treat 20 years from now, plant it today and watch in grow after the next 20 years.
blogging tree

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Posted in Blogging, jobs | 3 Comments »

How To Make “Free” Cell Phone Mobile Calls

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

My mobile phone, cell phone, or however you call it used to eat up about $600 a year in monthly expenses, that is until I came up with a better somewhat “free” solution. I use a combination of prepay phone service as well as internet programs to make my “free” cell phone mobile calls.

Step 1: Download JustVoip
JustVoip lets you make free 16 minute calls up to a few different calls to many international destinations. When it runs out, it takes 5 seconds to make a new account. The feature that we will use allowing it to appear as if you made a call from your mobile cell phone is their caller id feature. There is a verfication feature allowing you to verify your cell phone number. By doing this, any call from JustVoip will show up on the caller id as your cell phone number. Full guide I wrote earlier via this link.

Step 2: Passive Call Forwarding
With T-Mobile I can passively forward all incoming calls to another number. Since I use prepay I don’t want to pay for incoming calls when I am at home. A little hack for T-Mobile users:
Activate Unconditionally divert all calls to number and activate **21number#©
Activate unconditionally divert all calls *21#©
De-register unconditionally divert all calls ##21#©
Deactivate unconditionally divert all calls #21#©

When you are at home I forward all incoming calls to a computer phone which gets free unlimited minutes. I use Gizmo’s 775 which seems to have close its doors for now.  There is always Skype which offers low incming numbers for a small fee each month.

Though I make enough money one of my main goals was to become nonreliant on monthly fees and rather focus on something better, like traveling :)

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