Posted Saturday, August 14, 2010 by momscashblog |
Momscashblog had a chance to be part of Lee Ka Hoong’s of MyBlog2Day.com blog’s contest last month. MCB was asked to donate a gift and I chose to donate a cash prize to the winner of his contest. MyBlog2Day.com holds contest quite frequently and he always draws a good crowd, this one was no different. If you love contest, then check out MyBlog2Day.com and see when Lee’s next contest is, you will want to enter.
The winner of MyBlog2Day.com contest was Onibalusi Bamidde of Youngprepro.com. I was given his email so I could send my portion of his prize via PayPal, which was just one part of his many prizes that he was to receive. I think you’ll find Onibalusi a very interesting young man, I did just from the short correspondence we had through the email about his winnings. I found his personality something that came through even though we were emailing back ‘n’ forth. He’s only 16 years old and from Nigeria. His father died at an early age and Onibalusi had a very understanding mother who evidently encouraged him in everything he did, especially his love of computers. He mentions that he received his first computer at the age of 13 and now at the age of 16 has his first blog. Onibalusi feels that he can and will change the blogging world. You know what ? I believe this young man will, and is on his way to bigger things and will achieve his status of an entrepreneur before we know it. I wish him all the luck and great success that I know will come his way.
When I went to check out YoungPrePro’s blog, I found a really informative and fun blog. His style of writing was easy to read and he writes about content that you won’t find in other make money blogs, which is refreshing in itself. It seems like he’s been blogging for 10 years or more. You’ll find yourself reading his or one of his many guest blog writers post and find yourself saying “I never thought of that technique”. He has great ideas for back-links, traffic that you can deliver to your blog & how the traffic you get can determine a lot about you the blogger. He has great posts about Social Networking that are intriguing and sure to make you think more about SocialNetworking and your blog while making money.
After reading Onibalusi’s blog (more…)
Posted Thursday, August 5, 2010 by momscashblog |
Well MomsCashBlog is finally back online and I couldn’t be happier, it has been a trying time for me and I’m sure that everyone is wondering what the heck happened this time. I’ll tell you it was the same as before, but with a longer length of time. It also was much more involved and that’s what took the time.
This really took a lot out of me and I will tell you honestly if it wasn’t for my new theme that has me really jazzed and all of the positive feedback from all of you, I think I would of thrown in the proverbial towel. I can’t say that this came at a good time (never a good time) with bills, & health concerns, but hey we are all dealing with something… I can’t complain or shouldn’t. Life must go on. I didn’t want this to be a long drawn out post, but I feel that the whole story must be told in order to let some people know what is going on and to calm the nerves of those that are worried about visiting my blog.
HostGator and MomsCashBlog’s Correspondence
Dear Sir/Ma’am,
I have been a loyal HostGator customer for several years now however, over the past couple of months, my website has been infected to no end that is making me reconsider my choice of choosing HostGator as my hosting co. I have always received prompt responses to emails and things of that nature, however the infections in my website are causing me to be offline for several days at a stretch and resulting in the loss of substantial amounts of income.
The “Reported Attack Page” that Google has put up on my website displays servers that my website has been hosted on. One of them includes AS21844 – THE PLANET. Upon further research, it turns out that ThePlanet is actually HostGator but more importantly, the AS21844 server has several instances of infections. On the Google Webmaster Tools admin panel, it suggests that I refer to a guide on the Stop Badware blog that you may have heard of as well. On the same blog is this post that really worries me ( http://blog.stopbadware.org/2010/07/06/what-we-learned ). In that, it states that AS21844 (the server I am hosted on) actually is one of the Top 50 most infected networks.
Although there may be other factors affecting my website, it seems as though the biggest red flag is being hosted on that particular server. Furthermore, if you search for ThePlanet on StopBadware or even AS21844 (http://blog.stopbadware.org/live_search?q=AS21844) you will come up with several instances of this taking place. My webmaster has informed me that instead of switching hosts that I should request to be put on another server on HostGator. Furthermore, he informed me that HostGator should upgrade my SSL version from 2.0 to 3.0 because security does get compromised because of it as well. These are precautionary measures and I am attempting to give HostGator one more last chance before I look elsewhere.
I really hope that you can resolve these issues and get back with me while I attempt to clean my website of any issues that it is dealing with.
Best Regards,
JJ from MomsCashBlog.com
HostGators Reply
Our servers host tens of thousands of websites each, and I think I’d be hard pressed to find one among our thousands of servers that Google doesn’t think there’s malware of some kind on. This is a very common issue, and it does not affect you directly. The problem isn’t with the malware on the server, but the fact that Google doesn’t remove sites from the malware database until the site owner asks them to. Some site owners don’t take a very active role in maintaining their sites, so it could take months for the sites to be removed, even if they’ve been clean all along.
We will not be able to move your sites between servers, as this will not solve these problems. Have you requested that your site be removed from the malware site database yet? (more…)
Posted Thursday, April 8, 2010 by momscashblog |
I have been working on a mini series for Momscashblog about 2 different friends who are making money on-line or rather on the internet. It involves two different posts/stories on how they are making “money by using the internet”. We are all use to hearing or writing about how to make money online and although there is nothing new here, I thought of these friends and how they “used the internet to make money” and how any of us could do the same.
Before I publish Part 1 of my mini series, I felt that I had to write this post when unforeseen circumstances came to my attention. I’ve found myself dealing with these circumstances and knew that I had to vent and bring this new issue out in the open.
My Servers Got Overloaded?
In the last few months I’ve received 2 separate invitations from “The Adword team” that came in February as a Valentine card with a $100 redeemable coupon to put an ad up on Google Adwords. The card came to my home address via snail mail, a red card with a white heart on the front saying “$100 free Google Adwords(tm) offer for Adsense customers – Redeem your coupon code at www.google.com/ads/overload.” Then you are provided with a code that you enter after you have created your ad. At the end of the card was a “special” greeting “Happy Valentine’s Day. xoxo The Adwords team.” (Sweet isn’t it?)
It would be very sweet to use the $100. and put an ad up on Google, are you kidding me who wouldn’t enjoy getting an ad up for nothing? Especially right now with times being hard and some of us are noticing low traffic rates. But there are a lot of problems that have been happening with this Google Adword campaign as I was soon to find out. When you do get to the Adword page and start to put your ads together which isn’t an easy feat in itself. One has to think about what you want to say on your ad then there is the matter of what words are you going to use, remember some words are worth a lot and your ad price could go way up if people click on them leaving you paying a big ol’ bill to Google. Of course this all depends on what your budget is, if you are planning on using the $100 free coupon and maybe are willing to put in an extra one hundred dollars then you should pick your words with some trepidation. If you have a large budget along with the free coupon then you can really make your ad with the best keywords that you want to use. (more…)
Posted Wednesday, January 20, 2010 by momscashblog |
Lately I’ve been having some problems with leaving comments on certain blogs that I was visiting. It made me wonder if I was the only one that was running into these problems and if it bothered anyone else? I wondered if I was just being too anal about leaving comments? Ever since I first started blogging I’ve always been big into commenting, I really like the interaction that a comment allows between the blogger and the reader. I know we all read a lot of blogs everyday or at least try to and I for one always try to leave a comment after reading ones post. Then I started to hit roadblocks now and then on certain blogs, where I was unable to find their comment area or the owner of the blog had you jumping through hoops just to leave a comment on their blog.
“Make sure your site is easy to navigate. Nothing is more frustrating than navigating a site where it’s easy to get lost. This will negatively impact your profitability since potential customers are unlikely to stick around if it’s too difficult to find what they want. Simple and direct navigation is key!” from webreference.com/authoring.
Do You Make Your Readers Jump Through Hoops?
I think some blog owners are unaware that their comment areas are too involve for some bloggers to take the time to either register or sign in to leave a comment. There are some blogs that I’ve noticed that are so cluttered that after you read the post you expect to see the comment area and your unable to find it, you try putting your cursor everywhere to see if you can find the exact spot where you are suppose to leave your comment. If I can’t find the comment area within so many seconds then I’m on my way to another blog, or on to another project that I have to do online. (more…)
Posted Friday, September 25, 2009 by momscashblog |
Here is a guest post by my blogging buddy Plin of
myfrugalways.com, he helps us understand what happens when we are hit with the dreaded “Reported Attack Site” on our blogs and how, what, and why this happens.
Plin:
Here is a post I wrote up. Hope this helps people that is looking for more information regarding Malware.
Malware, short for malicious software, is software designed to infiltrate a computer without the owner’s informed consent. The expression is a genereal term used by computer professionals to mean a variety of forms of hostile, intrusive, or annoying software or program code.
There are many different types of Malware including computer virus, worms, trojan horse, ect. Each different types of malware varies in the way they infect the user’s computer and how much control the Malware has. One of the most common issues bloggers encounter is known as iframe injection attack. In an iframe injection attack, the malware inserts a piece of code that looks like:
/<iframe src=”*some bad website*//” width=1 height=1style=”visibility:hidden;position:absolute”></iframe>/
into your code base. The most common target files are index.* since it is the first page loaded by any website. Essentially what the </iframe/> code does is it forwards your website to the bad website. As a result if a user visits your site they will be directed to another site that might be filled with even more malware.
There are numerous ways in which the malware can infect your account but two of the most common ways are a result of hosting servers and ‘FTP. In the case of hosting servers, some hosting company does setup their security setting properly and as a result when an account is comprise the hacker gains access to other accounts as well. E.g. suppose JJ and my blog sits on the same server and I am running a very old version of WordPress. If a hacker hacks my account and the security is not set up properly, he can now access JJ’s files too even though JJ is very vigilant in keeping her copy of wordpress up to date. This is a known problem for some of the hosting company and it is why one should be wary of free/cheap hosting solutions. If you have ssh access to your account, make sure to change the permission of your files to the highest level.
2. FTP password. Most bloggers work on their wordpress files on their local computer before FTP the files to the server. As a result FTP passwords are often a target of malware. If you visited some unclean website, your computer can be infected with malware that sniffs for FTP passwords. The moment when you upload your files to your FTP account, the password is captured by the hacker and they can now automate the iframe code insertion process using your FTP password. In fact, it is better to use secure FTP (SFTP) so the data exchange between your computer and the server can’t be easily sniffed.
To cleanup after an iframe injection attack:
>Keep your anti-virus software updated on your home computer
>Update your WordPress to the last version. WordPress is known for security flows and they constantly release security patches.
>Change all your passwords. A good password should have a mix of upper case, lower case, and numbers.
>Avoid use applications that requires your password in on a public computer. Internet cafes are especially deadly.
>Check all your wordpress files for <iframe> tag and remove them. The key files are index.* However, other files might also be affected.
>Investigate how the attack was originated. This one is a little more difficult but I would suggest try to think whether you have downloaded unknown software recently
.
Some good blogging practice to keep your account safe:
>Rename your administrator account to something other to admin or administrator account. This will prevent attacks where the malware uses admin as username and simply try all the words in the dictionary. (Hint: using dictionary words as password is a very bad idea)
>Backup your database on a scheduled basis.
Posted Friday, September 11, 2009 by momscashblog |
Last week I had a Malware Virus to deal with, so upon visiting my site you may have seen the blog but also gotten a warning to stay away from this site or you could get a virus. (Don’t worry, it’s very safe!) For those of you with certain virus protection you did not see my blog. In it’s place was a red warning page titled “Reported Attack Site” and a paragraph saying this site was under attack… which is how I found out I had a virus on my own blog! I thought “well, I’ll just go to my WordPress and see what’s up. (Duh!) My site was taken down so there was no WordPress to go to. Also my webmail was taken down, and my blog’s name and domain was removed from all search engines. I’m told that if my blog did get into the search engines it would have had a warning saying not to come to my site. Ouch! But with the help of Hostgator, GoogleWebmasterTools, and Lloyd Lopez, I got through the malware attack pretty much unscathed. I didn’t lose anything and in the end, it was much less traumatic than I expected. Of course, when it first happened I was stressed, but so far, so good.
The message “Reported Attack Site” is a little confusing to me. I’m thinking maybe they should say “Report an Attack to Google” because that is what you have to do. Google detects the malware virus and shuts the site down to prevent it from going any further and protect anyone visiting the infected site. It is then your responsibility to get it fixed and send a report to Google. When it finally gets a clean bill of health they will put your site back up.
I found out that many new bloggers just abandon their blogs when they find the “Reported Attack Site” message because they don’t know what to do about it.Malware virus/hacking is something that all bloggers could encounter, so I will pass on the process that I went through to get my blog back up and running. Keep in mind that there are many different types of hacking and viruses, but mine was a malware virus. To learn more about malware viruses and how to protect your blog, go to WordPress.
1. Call your blog hosting company. Whenever your blog goes down you should call or e-mail the company who hosts your blog. I’d much rather call than send an e-mail because I like instant feedback, so make sure you have the telephone number(s) of your blog host in a notebook ready for these occasions. I use HostGator for this blog and they’re also the host for the MCB Free Blog Tutorial. I cannot say enough good things about them. They are patient, very helpful and easy to talk to for a non-techie like me.
1a. Send e-mail to host security requesting help. HostGator told me I had a Malware Virus and that I had to send an e-mail to HostGator Security to request help and tell them of the warning Google placed on my blog. Security immediately sent notification that they received my request and gave me a case number for the process.
(Of course, you could skip the initial call [1] and just send an e-mail to Security [1a], but I’ve always communicated better through phone… or face to face… and the call was very informative and reassuring.)
2. Wait for notification from host security. It took a while but I finally got an e-mail saying that HostGator assessed my blog and I indeed had been hacked with malware. They told me I was hacked into from WordPress versions that had not been updated, and that my site was now clean.
Problem Solved! (Just kidding!) Now you have to notify Google and wait for Google to approve you.
2a. Report to your Google Webmaster Tools. HostGator told me I now had to let Google know that my site had been cleaned of all badware, so I did. I then checked off the box saying “Please review my blog”..
3. Let Google review blog. I assumed I was in the clear, but Google informed me that they were still detecting “badware” on my site. So I called HostGator and they fixed each problem as Google told us of them. In my case this whole thing took about 3 days before my site was declared “cleaned of badware” .
3a. Wait for OK from Google. I checked my mail constantly and on the third day I was finally got the message: “Status of the lastest badware review for this site. A review for this site has finished. The site was found clean the badware warning from web search are being removed. Please note that it can take some time for the change to propagate.”
Keep checking to see if blog has propogated and you should be up and running when you see your blog online!!
Since my older version of hacked WordPress was hacked into, I had to change my passwords (for Cpanel and admin. log- in too) and make them very strong and I will be changing them often. If you haven’t started a blog yet, make sure you have a notebook or two to hold all of your many passwords, telephone numbers, and dates of expiration for your domain name, blog host, etc.
To decrease the changes of being hacked make sure you have very strong passwords with numbers and symbols mixed in and change those passwords often! If there is anyone who has had this happened to them or can share more information on this type of problem and/or would like to share in comments section or interested in a guest post please leave a comment.
Posted Tuesday, March 31, 2009 by momscashblog |
Here’s a post by a frequent visitor and good friend of MomsCashBlog who formerly had a blog known as consultelaine and who now has a blog named Bohemian Things. She shows us how sometimes we end up in a totally different place from where we began and just the process of starting a blog can get things rolling in the right direction. It’s a great story about finding your rightful place on the Internet and following your own heart.
The Life of One Blogger
by Elaine Murphy
When I first started blogging (again) my intention was to use my blog to make a profit. I will be the first to tell you—pick a subject that you have something in common with. Picking a subject you’re interested in, interested in learning about, or a subject you are already passionate about is a good way to go. This way you would avoid getting bored and run out of things to blog about. Okay, I got it.
As luck would have it I stumbled upon MCB free wordpress blog tutorial. The tutorial was very influential in helping me get set up with my first wordpress blog. Within no time I had a blog ready to go. Things were looking up!
My passion is hair. I love doing hair, and talking about hair. Although I am not a licensed cosmetologist, heck I could pull it off…easily. This was a passion of mine since I was a child so I naturally started to blog about natural hair care. Easy enough, so I thought. Let’s get started.
My blog talked about the latest hair trends, recommended products, and celebrities with natural hair styles. Whatever pertained to natural hair, I wrote about it. Things were starting to change — I was distracted by the template, and started wasting hours nitpicking and altering it out of boredom. I found myself changing templates more often than I would post. It was then that I realized I did not want to talk about hair every day. I asked myself…what is going on here? I became disenchanted with chasing a way to make money online and took a break from it all.
“I quit”, I told myself. Shortly thereafter I removed the blog. Here’s the irony—the blog was not, nor was it ever, about the hair. What I was essentially doing was finding someone else’s products to sell and incorporating that into my natural hair care blog. This wasn’t working for me… as much as I enjoyed talking about hair it did not seem like that’s what my blog should be about. Blogging became tedious and exhausting for me, and I did not know what I was doing. I quickly found out that I needed to learn a few things about the business…SEO, (search engine optimization), key words, Google Adsense, strategies, tips, tools, etc. I felt this extra stuff was keeping me from enjoying the process. This route took the fun out of a passion, a love I’d enjoyed all my life and still to this day. I needed to go back to the basics.
One day I received an email from JJ inquiring about my now non-existing blog—she had been keeping her eye on me and wanted to know what was happening with my blog. I had explained to her it was temporally down and assured her that I did not give up on blogging. I did not want to admit to her that I did stop. She had always encouraged me to keep trying and to stay in the online business.
Then on January 14, 2009, I popped over to MCB to get my weekly fix of encouragement and what was the title of the blog “Start a blog today.” I truly felt like it was written with me in mind. I decided to give it another try. I had missed blogging.
I would blog again only without pressuring myself to make a profit with affiliate marketing. I changed my outlook and the course of my blog… it evolve into an extension of who I am and what I do. I would write about me and my creative process and my own products instead of selling for someone else! I am an artisan. I find great satisfaction in creating with my hands, and blogging about the things I create. I create whatever my heart desires.
Now I maintain a blog showcasing products I enjoy creating. I joined a great community of like-minded crafters and artisans over at IndiePublic. I create products that are an extension of me, products I would be proud to promote. I have a shop set up on Etsy “a place to buy and sell all things handmade” were I sell my Bohemian Things with no pressure whatsoever. I truly love blogging and I never run out of ideas for a post because I am consistently creating and that’s what I found I was meant to blog about.
Had I not stuck with it, I would not have received this wonderful opportunity to share my creativity online and also have a guest blog here at MCB about “The Life of One Blogger”.
Thanks JJ. I owe it all to you.
