Federal Trade Commission (FTC)

FTC (Federal Trade Commission) just announced that it approved a final revisions to the guidance it gives to advertisers on how to keep their endorsement and testimonial ads in line with the FTC Act. This new FTC revision can affect all bloggers who write or endorse a product for payment or freebies in return.

Blogger : Disclose or Pay Fine

This marks the first time the FTC has updated endorsement and testimonial rules since 1980. Violations could result in a $16,000 fine. The fine used to be $11,000 but it was increased to $16,000 within the past year. All possible violations will be reviewed on a case by case basis.

While the FTC will obviously have a hard time enforcing these regulations. In order for a blogger to be fined for not disclosing they were being paid by an advertiser to review a product, there would have to be a complaint, an investigation and ultimately a court ruling mandating a fine.

Anyway, if you do blog or write about a product and you are paid, just make sure you do all the appropriate disclosure to avoid the trouble.

Wordpress 2.8.4 Security Fixed

There has been an outbreak on Wordpress community throught the weekend… Many wordpress blogs were hacked by a worm due to a security loophole.

Upgrade Wordpress to 2.8.4 NOW

What is the security issue? Frankly, I do not know and I could not bother to find out too… as I could not understand it anyway.

The solution is to upgrade immediately to Wordpress 2.8.4.

As a user, I have just completed upgrading my wordpress to 2.8.4… just to make sure I can now sleep with peace at night…

To know more about the Wordpress loophole, check out the following post:

• Old WordPress Versions Under Attack
• How to Keep WordPress Secure

I found that there is a way you can configure the blog for using both english & chinese. Here’s the step by step guide that I went through.

How to Setup Wordpress for Chinese Language

1. Open phpMyAdmin in CPanel

In order to type chinese on your blog, you will need to change some settings inside the SQL database. Firstly, you will need to login to your CPanel, then open phpMyAdmin as followed:

phpMyAdmin

2. Select Database & Table of Your Blog

After launching the phpMyAdmin screen, you will need to select the database of your blog on the pull down menu. Once you have selected the database, you will be able to see all the existing tables of the database showing right below the pull down menu.

How to Select Database Table in phpMyAdmin

3. Set Collation to utf8_unicode_ci

Click on the database table, you will see the table structure appearing on the right hand side of the screen. In order to store chinese in the database, you need to change the collation setting from latin1_swedish_ci to utf8_unicode_ci.

To change the collation setting, click on the pencil button and you will be a pop up window appearing. Scroll on the pull down menu to select utf8_unicode_ci and save the setting.

You need to go through this steps for all the fields that has existing setting of latin1_swedish_ci. You also need to repeat this step for all tables in the database as well.

Set utf8_unicode in SQL Database

You are Done… Good Luck to You!

After completing the above mentioned steps, you should be able to type and store chinese text (??? like I do.  Though I have never tested this on other asian language, but I suppose it should work as well. Maybe you can share with me if you do have some success on that. All the best to you!

Migrate Wordpress to New Hosting Server

My earlier post mentioned that I was upgrading my blog to Wordpress 2.8. Finally, after some hard works, I have managed to set up my blog on the Wordpress 2.8 platform on a new hosting server.

I am also doing some tweaking to my wordpress theme to bring in some new feeling and experience to my readers. If you do have any suggestions, do feel free to drop me a comment and I will be happy to hear from you.

Wordpress Migration to New Hosting Server

Migrating wordpress to a new hosting is not really a painful experience. I was quite hesitate to migrate due to fear of trouble or breakdown. After some consideration, I have decided to consolidate all my sites to a common server in order to reduce my running cost. In case if you are running multiple sites and like to lower your running cost, you might want to consider a multiple domain hosting plan. Just for your information, I am using Lunarpage
and I found it the cheapest option to give me everything that I want. Lunarpage page is offering Unlimited storage and Unlimited transfer from only $4.95. This is the best plan that I can find allowing me to host multiple domains.

Step by Step Guide of My Wordpress Migration

I realized that some of you might be interested on how I migrated my wordpress from an old host to a new host. Here’s a quick reference for you in case if you are looking for this information.

1. Upgrade My Wordpress to Latest Version on Old Host
2. Back Up Wordpress Files from Old Host to My PC
3. Back Up Wordpress SQL Database to my PC
4. Create a New Add-On Domain on New Host
5. Install Wordpress onto the New Add-On Domain
6. Transfer all Wordpress Files from PC to New Host
7. Import Wordpress SQL Database to New Host
8. Change your domain name server to point to New Host
9. Login to new host to activate your wordpress theme and wordpress plugins.

DONE!!!

This was the 9 simple steps taht I went through to migrate wordpress to new host,

I hope to be able to bring a new feel and experience to you on this blog.

Wordpress 2.8

Stay Out from Text Link Ads

I am feeling damn frustrated while I am writing this post. Well, I did a check on my blogs today and I found out that one of my blog pagerank dropped. I have been working very hard to increase the pagerank for the last few update and it was incresing.

What is causing the drop of the pagerank now? What is causing my blog to be penalized?

I did a quick check across all my other blogs. The pagerank was not affected at all in all my other blogs. I am scratching my head what is causing the drop of my pagerank.

I came to one conclusion.

The culprit is the Text Link Ads

Recently, I signed up at Text Link Ads and trying to see how profitable text link ads can be and there is the one and only one thing that I have on the penalized blog compared to my other blog. I do have some other blog that I seldom update but the pagerank stayed the same.

I inserted the Text Link Ads for less than a month and I was penalized for it. Plus, I have been updating the blog regularly every other day.

Text Link Ads is Paying Peanut

I was able to sell 3 text links but each text links brought me only $2.20. Altogether I earned $6.60 but it is causing me a much bigger consequence. It is totally not worthwhile to sell through Text Link Ads. I was able to sell text link directly from my site and it brought in much more profit plus, more importantly, Google seems to be ok with that approach.

I know have to scratch my head on how to get out from Google black list, anyone has any recommendation? Share with me and your comment will be much appreciated.

My lesson learnt : Stay out from Text Link Ads if You Like to Keep Your Pagerank

I should not find any excuses to explain why ended with this result, instead, I am looking forward to set a new target for 2009 that I will post at least 100 posts on this blog (With a stretch target of 150 posts).

Merry Christmas to Everyone in The World

Merry Christmas

Christmas is also a time send greeting and best wishes to fellow families and friends, let me take this opportunity to wish Merry Christmas to Everyone in the world and enjoy your fabulous time with your loved one during festive season.

I have seen the following wishes from many blogs and let’s spread the love to everyone now!

MsExchange
The Painted Veil
Santosh Benjamin
Lingerie Blog
600RR.net
ABC Prague
The Inside Stori
SurfTalk
Ordinary Miracles
Hot Trend from World
The Lentil
The PASSION Blog
Online Contests
Devon’s Quiet Corner
Scramping with Carol
Swords & Movie Prop Replicas from Replica Dungeon
Shelley’s Papercrafting Paradise
A Day in the Life
The doc spot
Through Thick and Thin
Tarmac – Automotive Blog
An Author’s Odyssey
Edinburg News
Digger
Computational Visualistics/Software Engineering
Daily life in Finland
My Box Is Warm
Momstown barrie
MommyWho
Recruiter Review
VERACIOUSME
Val’s Altered HeART Journey
~Just My Thoughts~
Lostedalready
Lees
and they lived happily ever after
All My Scrap
~*Pursuing Randomness*~
Hart Family Blog
BEAUTY BE GOOD
The Holder Family
Bakers Depot
scribbled words in a notebook
Bailey Family
The Board Revenue
Party Starts Here >>> ????
Dahlonega 411 – Information and Events in Dahlonega
DarkDwarf Blog
Brown Biographies
the phagos blog
Michigan Reefers
Julye ? ??
Everything
Jean’s Blog
Kristin’s Southeastern Wisconsin Blog
WHO’S YOUR GADDY?
The Parallel Universe
The Coffeeliqueur way
The Clark Family Blog
PC Doc’s Blog
The O’Dell Family
St. Louis Bloggers Guild
AUS style
Veterinary Nursing and Life
Hot Trend from India
Make Money Online | Make Money Blogging

The purpose that I am trying to revamp my blog in order to make it more confortable visually for you and make it easier for you to read. So, it should be ready in just a 1 week. Please bear with me for the time being.

Stay tuned for new update.

Revamp My Blog

Wordpress 2.6

Wordpress 2.6 is released. I like this wordpress very much. Remember my earlier post I talked about how I achieved Google Pagerank 2 just 2 months. I was using wordpress 2.5 then and there was some bugs with the image upload then. It is now solved with 2.6.

Also, the management of the plugin and widget is now easier and more user friendly than the previous version.

There is a page regarding the 26 reasons of using wordpress 2.6 that I found. Check it out for more details.

I have received lots some email people asking how I managed to achieved pagerank 2 in just 2 months.

Well, firstly, I started using 2.5 and I do not use so many different plugin as I did before, I also did not activate any other tag plugin, I rely on the wordpress 2.6 tagging function.

I make sure I have made at least one post a day on average, so, I have approximately 60 posts in 2 months. I make sure that I have back links to my older posts when I type new post.

I also make sure that I included an image in every single post, reason I did that was to SEO the post for Google image search.

It is that simple, the one of the most important plugin that I used was the All in One SEO plugin. Another good feature I like about Wordpress 2.6 is that it will check for the plugin update and inform me when there is a new plugin available. I like this feature to make sure I am using the latest version available.

Alright, I hope that helps to get your started. Remember to start with Wordpress 2.6 if you are serious and want to pull traffic to your side and achieve pagerank 2 in 2 months.