eAdventures
Must have wordpress free blogging plugins in 2010
Jan 21st
Wordpress is an awesome open source blogging platform that’s released under the GPL so it’s free for use for anyone. Wordpress can be made into a powerful CMS as well as a simple blog like mine here, so today’s post is going to be about the best “Blogging” plugins for wordpress in 2010 and beyond. Some will help you tie social media into the mix, and some will help with your SEO and increase usability.
Launching a community for photographers
Jan 16th
After I sold my last online community a few months ago, I swore to myself to never, ever launch another one. Apparently I’ve failed, and started a community about photography. We welcome all sorts of photographers of any skill level, no matter what gear they have, or how much they know and try to make them feel welcome while learning about photography. It’s probably not going to be anything great because like always, I have a lack of time to promote the community properly, which was a reason for selling them to begin with.
Any way, if you want to check out the newest Photography forums on the internet, visit Aperture Photography Forums, register and learn about all the wonderful aspects of photography.
How to serve parallel downloads from cPanel servers
Dec 20th
In my other post, we setup Parallel Downloads to Optimize vBulletin 4. But since then I’ve had a few emails asking to cover only cpanel and more indepth of what exactly severing parallel downloads helps the page load. To understand parallel downloads is relatively simple, web sites have grown in size and complexity including numerous style sheets, javascript files, and images. Each file must be downloaded at some point, and each time they are a request is sent to your server. In the old days web servers couldn’t handle sending everything at once, and thats when browsers stepped in to help out. Browsers are hard coded to only download 2 requests at a time, for example if you have 100 files that need downloaded the browser will make 50 sequential requests to the server to get them, BAM BAM BAM BAM over and over again. This leads to a lot of over head and latency issues. They limited the 2 file limit per hostname (example.com) More >
vBulletin 4 optimized .htaccess
Dec 18th
This .htaccess will optimize your server and increase your page load scores (higher score is a good thing). This will set the images to expire after a certain amount of time as well as numerous other optimization tricks for your server. These set the expires headers for images, and set some cache-control headers as well. Place this at the very top of your .htaccess file, remember to back up and test first.
How to serve parallel hostnames for vBulletin Optimize vBulletin 4
Dec 18th
Most modern browsers default to two simultaneous threads per hostname. This leads to overhead and latency as the browser will only grab two objects at a time. One of the biggest pitfalls of vBulletin (especially 4.0) is the amount of graphics and javascript served from the same hostname. Setting up parallel hostnames is fairly simple and I’ll outline the steps on a cPanel installation and vBulletin 4.0 stylevars system. The entire process doesn’t take more than 15 minutes even for novice users, and you can easily do more to further optimize your vBulletin.
Updating cPanel/WHM hangs at FTP or MySQL
Nov 17th
I recently went to upgrade a clients WHM/cPanel powered server, and found a few errors along that way that prevented me from doing so and didn’t find much information readily available about it on the internet so here it is. A nice easy way to fix the problem. At first when I went to upgrade Apache/PHP for them, I was told upcp was already running and I’d need to wait for it to finish. I waited..and waited, after 3 hours I decided it was enough time and went on a seek and destroy mission for the processes.
From the terminal (Windows users, get PuTTy, Mac users just use terminal). Find all the upcp running processes and kill them.
# ps aux | grep upcp
This will give a list of running upcp process and their process ID’s. Then issue the kill command to them
# kill -9 ProcessID ProcessID ProcessID
After I did that, I restarted cPanel services with
# service cpanel restart
And logged back in, and was able to update everything without any problems. Hope that helps anyone who maybe having this problem.
Finally wordpress from the iPhone
Nov 11th
Finally a working wordpress app for the iPhone. Expect more posts on the blog now
FTC Guidelines for bloggers go in effect Dec. 1st
Nov 3rd
Just a quick announcement to all the forum owners and bloggers out there, don’t forget the FTC guidelines for disclosure on your site go into effect December 1st, 2009. This is now less than a month away and anyone looking for a quick FTC disclosure statement can find one at FTC Disclosure Statement.
The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other “word-of-mouth” marketers. The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service. Likewise, if a company refers in an advertisement to the findings of a research organization that conducted research sponsored by the company, the advertisement must disclose the connection between the advertiser and the research organization. And a paid endorsement – like any other advertisement – is deceptive if it makes false or misleading claims.
You can find more information about the FTC’s new guidelines for disclosure at the following links:
- http://ftc.gov/os/2009/10/091005endorsementguidesfnnotice.pdf
- http://davidmchenry.info/2009/10/08/fcc-disclosure-compliance/
- http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/10/ftc-bloggers/
This is an update of a guideline thats over 29 years old. It is worth noting that the FTC probably won’t come knocking on your day unless its a black and white case, but why even risk it when it takes 2 seconds to be straight forward with a disclosure statement
FTC disclosure compliance
Oct 8th
Recently the FCC passed a law that basically states anyone who has a relationship with a product and makes a blog post or recommends the product they must disclose their relationship with that entity. So what a better time then this to let you know.
I’m employed at Broken Snooze and Sundance Studios. I receive a salary and/or wages from them. I use this blog from time to time, to promote products and/or services on this blog. Usually when I receive any compensation from these companies for a product or service I will make a note of it in the post at the end.
If the post does not contain information regarding my relationship, it is because I do not have a relationship with the product or service for promotional reasons.
Moving Domains Finally!
Sep 5th
Well it finally happened, the old owner of davidmchenry.com finally let it lapse and go thru all the wonderful stages of a expiring domain. It finally became available today, which I promptly grabbed and registered for $10.69 but not first without a funny story of sorts.
About a week ago this domain company called “Buy Your Dot Com” emailed and said they will be registering the domain the instant it becomes available and would like to sell it to me for only $99.95. Well to them I replied okay sure, $100 to ensure I get my .com isn’t to shabby, its worth the search engine reputation management aspect alone from it.
Well speed things up to today, this same company emails me says they have the domain available and to send the funds, but I never just send money with out some investigating first. Off to check the who is records on the domain to see exactly who owned it. To my surprise no one did! So feeling in the frisky mood I was, I went and registered it at GoDaddy for the normal price of $10.69.
After that, I shot an email off to “Buy Your Dot Com” and asked if I could buy the domain still. After 15 minutes of waiting, I got a response saying yes I could and to send the money via PayPal or Western Union to their secure holding account. Laughing out loud at this point, I waited a little bit and told them I sent the money and to go pick it up at the WU office, I’d imagine they ran out to their local office because about 2 hours later I got an email saying they didn’t get any new funds for the domain.
That went on for about 3-4 more emails about how I sent it and to go recheck, and then I finally broke the news to them I already purchased the domain from GoDaddy. I’m sure they weren’t impressed with that, but then again I wasn’t all impressed with them trying to sell me my own name for $99.95 when they didn’t even own it yet.
So any way, I’ll be moving this domain from the .info to the .com shortly when time permits. I have a few other projects taking up a lot of time right now like the Free Nintendo Wii Give-A-Way over at the Nintendo Forums.
