Just Too Little Time » Blogging

Blog, Work and Other Updates

elna — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 17:08:25 +0000

Let’s start from the blog. I just upgraded my blog to WP 3.0 yesterday. Not sure exactly when the upgrade was launched, maybe two weeks ago? One thing I notice about this version is the new default WP theme called Twenty Ten 1.0 which I think is very cool! Have you upgraded yours?
I’m still disabling my Entrecard’s ad setting as I still don’t have time to do my dropping routine. I’ll tell you I kinda miss dropping EC
It’s been a crazy time at the office. Endless paper works! The company have some new business partners in Europe and I have to review all the legal matters.
But there is a consolation behind the craziness. When we reach the agreement, hopefully by the end of the month, they will send me to Europe to close the deal, yey! I know it’s gonna be a business trip, not a vacation, but I think I can still enjoy the trip. So I start dreaming about London, Moscow and Amsterdam
I feel guilty for not be able to take my son on a trip during this school break. Poor boy, it’s been a boring holiday for him. Will think of something to make it up to him.
Lastly, I got my 4th payment from MyBux last week. Unlike previous 3, the last payment was not instant. They changed their policy regarding membership and payout rules, you can read it here. Though it’s not instant, they still paying!
As a total I already received $101.89 from MyBux, means I already break even with my investment as I paid $100 for a yearly diamond membership last month. Here’s my 3rd and 4th payment proofs (the first two payments were posted here):

3rd payment from MyBux

4th payment from MyBux

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Thanks for stopping by everyone, have a great day!

And The Attack (Still) Continue…

elna — Fri, 21 May 2010 05:55:39 +0000

I got another malware alert from Avast this morning when I was in a hurry trying to finish up my dropping. Unfortunately, I didn’t know which blogs had this malware because I had several blogs opened at the time. Should I had known it, I would inform the blog owners because most likely, according to this, it was another malware attack to WP sites hosted on GoDaddy. So if your blog is on GD better be careful because the attack still continue…

Malware hosted on losotrana.com

And maybe this and this can help you to identify the malware.

I have to say, “I’m glad my blogs are not on GD”

And oh did you see bats flying around when dropping EC? I saw them, five times to be exact…

5 suspended blogs

I was not sure what happened to those blogs, seems strange to see 5 suspended bogs in one day. But anyway, note to whoever own those blogs, “Please, do visit your own blog before you visit others.”

Not A Good Record

elna — Tue, 18 May 2010 04:48:29 +0000

Two posts last month and not a single post until the third week of this month. Hmm… not a good record for a blog! I’m beginning to think that maintaining two blogs is not as easy as I thought. However, I just renewed my domain last month and two weeks ago I also extended my hosting plan for another year. So I guess this blog is still running, and hopefully I’ll be more active posting

Spammers Copying Comments?

elna — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 14:57:23 +0000

Today was the day to clean up my spam folder. It becomes my routine to get rid of spams every time I saw their numbers already exceeded the amount of real comments. And shame on me, I was almost fooled by spammers today.

As usual those spams mostly contained a bunch of unreadable characters, or some foreign languages with “cialis” and “viagra” mentioned several times, or the endless “I bookmarked your blog” comments. However, today I also saw few familiar comments among those spams, comments that were previously approved and published. So I thought they were accidentally being marked as spam and (without thinking twice) I just re-approved them.

It took awhile for me to realize something was wrong (yes I was slow, thankfully Askimet was not). I knew I made big mistakes republishing those comments when I saw a girl name was used for a guy author. Here’s the comment:

Spam vs real comment

That spammer copied the content of my published comments along with the commentluv codes, but somehow failed to get the original author’s name, and resubmitted them. I wonder if this will become a trend for them.

Anyway, so I ended up finding those recently republished comments, remarked them as spam then deleted them. Luckily they were all under two names, Amy and Michelle (why use girl names by the way), so it was easy enough for me to find them back. I wonder if there’s a way to kick those spammers out before they managed to leave comments because I’m getting tired deleting these spams.

Bandwidth Update

elna — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 18:59:20 +0000

One week after running an ad on Adgitize, I checked my bandwidth again. As expected, there was an increase in bandwidth usage (about 50%) on the second week of the month compared to the first week before ad. But it’s still far below the 4 Gb quota.

Hmm… maybe I do need to downgrade the plan later

Another Malware Attack ~ Upgrade Your WP!

elna — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 05:59:50 +0000

I was doing my dropping round last night when Avast warned me of a Trojan Horse found in a particular blog. The malware’s name was JS:Small-C[Trj]. Unlike last time when I found Trojan already infected my computer, this time, luckily, Avast managed to stop it before it entered my computer.

I went to Avast forum and found (at least) two threads about this here and here. Apparently this malware has attacked some websites that still running old version of WP. So if you haven’t upgraded your WP to 2.9.1 better do it now (duh) before it’s too late.

Also make sure you have the latest version of anti-virus or anti-malware software running on your computer to make sure you’re protected from these malicious activities. Dropping hundred of blogs everyday is a risky business, don’t you think so?

Advertise on Adgitize

elna — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 05:59:40 +0000

Have you seen my ad on Adgitize? Yup, starting last night this blog is officially become advertiser on Adgitize. I registered it yesterday during my lunch break and got approval about 7 hours later. Not bad isn’t it? Considering my lunch time happens to be Adgitize’s sleeping time (if they ever sleep of course), so the approval was actually done first thing in the morning their time

Anyway, for me advertising on Adgitize is part of my experiment to determine a reasonable hosting plan for my blog. So far I’m quite satisfied with my web hosting company, with $10 hosting plan per year (recommended by them) I got 100 Mb disk space and 4 Gb monthly bandwidth. It’s cheap, but the fact is I never fully utilize my bandwidth, I only use nearly a quarter of it. See the picture here, it shows my bandwidth usage up to the first week of February which only 6% of the quota. So I thought maybe this current plan is too high for a blog (at least mine) so I can downgrade my plan later?

Let’s see what happens after I become an advertiser, I expect my traffic will jump as well as the bandwidth usage! If after advertising the usage is still less than half of the quota, I will downgrade it. My hosting plan is due on May so there’s time to decide

WordPress 2.9: Bugs Fixed

elna — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 23:30:22 +0000

The missed schedule errors I got with WordPress 2.9 are already fixed! After skimming through all suggested solutions in the forum, finally I found an easy way to fix the bugs.

I’m still new with WordPress and not very familiar with their codes, except for the CSS file as I often tweaking my theme. So I’m glad that I didn’t have to go through troubles to fix the bugs. All I had to do was upload the patched files for WP 2.9 (it’s in zip format) to my root directory then unzip it. It will copy three files to wp-includes folder. That’s it! All my scheduled posts (including the missed one) are now published!

Missed schedule posts fixed!

Lessons learned: No need to rush to upgrade. Wait for a few weeks then check the forum whether the new update has bugs or not. It’s still ok to upgrade even if it has bugs (there’s always bugs I think) as long as they already have the solution to fix them.

I also took time to test the built-in image editor, which I think it is useful enough! The coolest feature is now I can set which part of the image I want to show using the editor!

For example, if I want to show the “published” part of the above image, I can reopen the image from the gallery and crop it. Voila here’s the result!

Missed schedule posts now published!

The original file is still intact, so I can still restore its original size. If you click on the second image, it will open the same image as the first one. A very cool feature! WordPress Rocks! Though I won’t use it too often since I hardly upload images to my WP. I prefer to use a third party to host my images so I can save my bandwidth and disc space.

Found Bugs After Upgraded to WP 2.9

elna — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 05:20:47 +0000

I upgraded to WP 2.9 last week and look what I got, a missed schedule post . It was my New Year’s greeting and supposed to be published on Jan 01, 2010 at 1:15 pm Indonesian Time! This never happened before, until I upgraded to WP 2.9 off course! I shouldn’t be surprised though as I mentioned in my previous post that they found potential bugs in WP 2.9 that caused scheduled posts and pingbacks not being processed correctly. I guess I got the bugs !

For your information, most of my posts here, as well as on my boy’s blog, were scheduled posts! I set their time to match with Adgitize hour so I won’t have double post on one day or no post at all. With this strategy I can be sure that I won’t miss my Adgitize article point. So scheduled posts are important to me.

When I google “missed schedule wordpress 2.9″ I found many WP users complained about this problem. Luckily I also found some solutions there and I decided to try one of them that was easy enough for me to do. Let’s see if the patch works!

Upgraded to WordPress 2.9

elna — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 05:57:39 +0000

Just upgraded to WP 2.9, as always, I was a bit late to upgrade my WP. This time was better though, just ten days after the released date (December 19th). Now the coolest new features of this version (according to WP Blog) are:

Global undo/”trash” feature, which means that if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from the grave (i.e., the Trash). This also eliminates those annoying “are you sure” messages we used to have on every delete.

Built-in image editor allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images to show them who’s boss. This is the first wave of our many planned media-handling improvements.

Batch plugin update and compatibility checking, which means you can update 10 plugins at once, versus having to do multiple clicks for each one, and we’re using the new compatibility data from the plugins directory to give you a better idea of whether your plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress. This should take the fear and hassle out of upgrading.

Easier video embeds that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv (and more in the next release).

Are they really cool or what! I haven’t tried any of those yet though! Soon I will, especially the image editing tools… However, just four days after the released date they found a new bug!

Unfortunately, the recent 2.9 release triggered a bug in certain versions of PHP’s curl extension. With these versions of curl, scheduled posts and pingbacks are not processed correctly. To fix this problem as well as a handful of other, lesser issues, we are quickly releasing 2.9.1, the first maintenance release of the 2.9 line.

So be ready for another upgrade. Aiyayaa… so many update!