Newsbites

Newsbytes: Blog Announcement, WordPress Problems, Money Manager Ex, and Goog Stock Price

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Well, this Tuesday’s newbytes brings updates on the latest ongoings on InvestorBlogger dot com.

But first some recent stories that you may have missed:

New Blog or Two: MakingREALMoneyBlog is the new home for the Carnival of Making Real Money. It will be hosted on a Wordpress install with all the usual plugins, that I like to use: BlogRoll Page, All-in-One SEO Pack, Feed Footer, XML Sitemaps, Lighter Admin Drop Menus, obsocialbookmarker, PXS Mailform, SRG Archives, Spam Karma II, and Related Posts. Plus one or two others that I haven’t activated yet. But…

BUGGY WordPress: … some new installs of WordPress are BU G G Y… Yep, the visual editor bar refuses to show up at all on some of my newer sites… Here’s a glimpse, I’m still trying to find out what is causing the problem, but it wasted a lot of time last night, so I’ll be using the code version for most posting until I can find the cause. I will also use BlogDesk.

wonky wordpress

Where did the WordPress Icons go…? It seems nobody knows. There are as many reasons and solutions as there are angels on the head of a pin. I can’t figure out what’s wrong at all. So I moved the whole domain from the original user to another that was okay, and hosted a WordPress Blog without these problems. And voila! It worked… so here goes… Problem finally solved. Now I’ve just got to move ALL those plugins. The technical explanation is: I think the original ‘user’ was jinxed somehow: I had problems setting up WordPress, with faulty permissions, etc.. so I’m just glad that it works now. 😀

Money Manager Ex: Here’s an interesting and open-source alternative to MS Money or Quicken: it’s called Money Manager Ex.

homess

It seems to offer a lot of flexibility, features and charts. It may not be the level of MS Money, but then I never cared for that, it should allow users to begin or learn how to use a Money Managing Program. I have installed it on my PC at home, and I’m wondering about whether it can be used for a USB Key as well. Anything to make my life a little easier!

Clearing out Google: I’ve now removed the nice little screenshow from Picasa from the blog. It was quite an attractive element and added some visual punch, but I moved all the pictures to Flickr as part of my campaign against Google. I’m about to add a Flickr plugin soon, once I find one. Any suggestions?

Out of the nine original Google services I identified as using, I have already dropped three from InvestorBlogger: Picasa, Reader (except for the marketing of this blog!), and Adsense. I’m working on YouTube as a User, and still have to download seven of my nine movies. I definitely prefer to host the movies on my own websites, esp. as YouTube is a PR hole, it sucks links and users and never returns them.

Adsense: is it becoming Add-non-Sense

And last but not least, John Chow writes in his recent post about Google’s raft of changes to its Adsense program:

My gut feeling tells me that Google revenues are down and that they’re doing everything possible to post a good quarterly report, even if that means taking it from the affiliates who help them build their business.

This could be true for a number of reasons: the screws are much tighter on revenue and payouts to affiliates; Google is a PUBLIC company now and needs to march to Wall Street’s beat; the US economy is entering a Recession for many reasons (Oil, housing, inflation, interest rates, jobs, …); AND Google has been trampling on the very webmasters that made it is what it is today.

GOOG: Going down – Can you spell F A S T?

In the last six months, they have lost a ton of goodwill among webmasters for Adsense, PR, affiliates, etc., not to mention publishers, newspapers, mobile phone providers, writers, advertisers… I wouldn’t be buying Google stock at these prices. The stock is due for a huge fall even though it is down more than 20% from its highs just a few months ago. Hope you dumped your stock in the run up in early November.

goog

Guest Bloggers? Interested? SIGN UP!

I’ve decided to open this blog to guest posting… so if you’d like to post something, drop by, register and write away. I can’t promise I’ll publish it, but if it’s a good fit, I will!

And last, apologies for not posting yesterday afternoon as usual, but I was exhausted in the evening… 😉

Panasonic, Prada and Perspectives: Change isn’t that hard, is it?

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Flower shopping: a whole new world view! 

Just yesterday, I went with Christine to a flower market in Taipei. This is something I normally hate doing, but this time something twigged: I may not appreciate the enjoyment and satisfaction she has from growing and keeping plants, but I could enjoy another aspect that I already knew about – taking photographs of the specimens. And the new power zoom of my Panasonic Lumix made it that much more fun.

Fashion affects us all

While I was thinking about this, another example sprang to mind: The Devil Wears Prada. Since this movie is set in the fashion world, most of the girls I knew reckoned that I wouldn’t or couldn’t possibly enjoy this movie. But they were wrong! And I was teased mercilessly for enjoying a ‘chick flick’ but I didn’t see it as a ‘chick flick’ at all. Far from it.

What was my secret? I had found something that I really enjoyed in the movie, the intrigue, the lead character called Miranda Priestly – played by Meryl Streep (one of my favorites since I first saw her in “Out of Africa”) – and the whole business of the fashion world. I also loved the idea that the fashion magazines were somehow connected to our daily lives, as Andy Sachs promptly found out, when lashed by Miranda’s tongue in the following diatribe:

Miranda Priestly: [Miranda and some assistants are deciding between two similar belts for an outfit. Andy sniggers because she thinks they look exactly the same] Something funny?

Andy Sachs: No, no, nothing. Y’know, it’s just that both those belts look exactly the same to me. Y’know, I’m still learning about all this stuff.

Miranda Priestly: This… ‘stuff’? Oh… ok. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back.

But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean. You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of 8 different designers.

Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of stuff.

Shift your focus: Shift your future

That’s when it suddenly hit home to me, if I’m struggling to understand why something is interesting to other people, I just need to shift my focus to something that I am already familiar with, and perhaps, just perhaps I can make a connection with it that helps me to ‘get it’.

When I first started doing the finances, and handling the money, it was a very difficult time for me, as I had to learn new ideas and unlearn my former prejudices – thinking about, talking about, and taking action on finances weren’t things that came easy to me.

How Things Change

In fact, it would be impossible for me to imagine then that I could be writing a finance column about money, investing, loans, credit cards, blogging and technology (to name a few of my themes!). But somewhere between the date I got married in June 1995 and when we bought the house in 1999, a transition took place in my brain that allowed me to grasp ideas and information that had been ‘foreign’ to me for a long time.

Have you had a similar experience? Share with us.  Ever had to tackle something that you had a distaste for? What happened?

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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