Back at the Helm

Needless to say, family matters have taken a bit of a toll on the time I had to work on my business.  However, I was not ignoring it, as you will see in this post.  While I still have a few loose ends to tie down, I am getting back to a regular working schedule on my business. 

I will leave information about my father up for just a little while longer and then retire it from the site.  Thank you all for your thoughts and prayers during this trying time.

A New Look — ExpertWP Review

As you see, LiveOffTheWeb.com (LoW) has a new look, again.  I have been promising a review of the product I use called “ExpertWP”, a version of WordPress installed and configured with certain plugins and settings to make it less vulnerable to attacks by crackers and script kiddies(1).

Well, just like last month when I started to do the review, LoW was attacked again by the same script kiddie as this time.  Last month, he just added an index.htm file which, according to the default settings, would display before the index.php file.  No harm was done and all I had to do to fix it was delete the offending files.  However, this time, he wiped out my .htaccess file several files critical to WP.

It doesn’t bother me as much that WP may have vulnerabilities, but the fact that he was able to access and delete my .htaccess file makes me wonder if he didn’t get in from a system vulnerability instead.

Rather than edit the WP script files again, I chose to use a new theme that required less editing to do what I wanted done.  In order to protect my site further, I also password protected the admin folder so, at least the script kiddies cannot get in from that door.  I will be looking into additional security soon.  In the meantime, I just have to accept the fact that in business, I will have to deal with liars, thieves and crackers.

Needless to say, I will not be writing a review on ExpertWP this month.

(1) “Crackers”, often mis-called”hackers” are people who crack into websites, computers and other network components for the sake of causing damage or stealing information.  “Script Kiddies” are generally kids who don’t know diddly about cracking or hacking, but have acquired scripts designed by crackers to break into systems’ vulnerabilities. “Hackers” are people like me who learn by reverse engineering software and products by looking at or editing the code.  For example, I have edited the code to this WP theme to customize it a bit for my own liking.

The Zombies are Dying!

Caliban Darklock offers a system for sale called Zombie Blogging. The product is only $7.00 and is for sale on the Warrior Forum. I was reading two discussion threads about it and just had to try it out, besides, it came with a free copy of Night of the Living Dead movie.  The system is about creating 50 blogs per week on Blogger using junk PLR.  The way he describes it working is absolutely hilarious in the course, which, by the way, seems to be the biggest reason people buy the book. Anyway, it is easy, and one of the best free ways a beginner can wet his teeth in Internet Marketing.  But, it is a little black-hat, and, like all black-hat strategies eventully become, it was slapped by Google, the owner of Blogger.

Most people who purchased the system used it differently than it was intended to be used and found it useful in their marketing strategies.  I found it was the best first-step for a total newbie because it walked them through the steps of setting up their first blog and populating it with articles. Then it had the student repeat the process until they knew it inside out.  Afterwards, it would be easy to teach the students a new step to be added to what they were doing until they would have the skills to create and market blog style websites without thinking about it.  The process was quick to learn and, once learned, it each blog would come up quickly.

It took me about four hours to complete the first zombie while I read through the book and followed it carefully, one step at the time.  It took about one hour for the second, and about twenty minutes for me to create each of two other sites.  Each site included a blogger account, site, template, and enough content to auto-post every other day for four to eight weeks.

There is an option of setting up the blogs using your own domain and WordPress, but it would be a bit expensive buying new domain names as you would need about one new one per day.  I can still see a benefit using it scaled way down, but for now, I am declaring all my zombies dead and I am gearing up to take another path.

AutoResponder Newsletter

I have started an Autoresponder Newsletter and will be accepting subscriptions soon.  The newsletters will be lessons and tips I learn along the way as I study and implement what I learn into what I am doing.  Since I am already taking notes, I felt like it would be easy to share some of those notes with those who are interested as well.   I want to build up at least two to four weeks worth of messages before I start it rolling. Otherwise I am afraid the subscribers will be bombarded by the originals and edits of the same newsletter over and over again.

So Long for Now

That is it for today’s update.

Buck

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