I must say that in all my tries in affiliate marketing, it fail most of the time or at some time. Other times, I don’t earn enough to meet the cash out amount, which translate to nothing. Therefore my interest is never in affiliate marketing, but I still like to explore around search engine optimization, and do spend time to explore certain keyword. I must say that predicting the next trend is much easier than to compete in the current keyword for search engine optimization.

From my curiosity and experiment, I somehow got a niche last Christmas whereby I got a small amount of payout from Amazon affiliate alone. It was a simply website created with blogspot and with only 18 blog posts targeting Air Swimmers Remote Control Nemo and Shark.  Pretty happy with the result as it is mainly search engine optimization that result in the payout.

If you host your domain on WordPress.com, this is your chance to monetize your blog. Not sure if they will release WordAds for everyone as currently they are picking those blogs that is eligible for this program base on traffic, engangement, content and language used. The biggest barrier I am seeing is that an individual will need to use custom domains, which means purchasing their own domain name and mapping it there. WordPress.com does it for USD17/year.

A big step for WordPress to earn some money and attract more bloggers.

Kids, don’t do this at home!

Actually it was not quite a simple task for me to move one of my semi-dedicated hosting to a VPS hosting in two weeks. But to reduce my web hosting cost, I had to go VPS and it also allow me to learn more. Plus I am working as a application system administrator, how can I fail in setting up my own server right?

The main hurdle was that my server keeps going down initially and that was very painful as I am restarting my server from my Nokia E72 or my iPad 2 or via my Laptop at different times. Everytime it goes down I had problem connecting to my server or it is way too slow. Lucky I manage to get some sypmtoms and the default Apache and MySQL setting is actually not suitable at all for server of this size.

Fine tuning the httpd.conf and my.cnf for more than twenty times and finally it has been stable. Although there are times it is using swap memory but I am reluctant to go any more lower. The normal memory usage is only around 225 MB which I think is great.

Next step is to do backup. I have done mysql backup daily to be transfered to another server but filesystem I am still doing it manually from time to time.

Visit my Malaysia Classifieds and let me know what you think of the speed. It is pretty good compare to previous hosting in US, currently it resides in a VPS at AIMS datacenter.

For three years I have been working with the unix environment at my 9 to 5 job, it has help me in many ways as a webmaster as well. I would very much recommend any webmaster to have some basic knowledge in unix/linux command line. I have just bought myself some low end VPS to learn all about unmanage webhosting server.

Holding the root is not something new, also I have successfully setup a Ubuntu LAMP previously, so it should be a piece of cake. Not knowing that currently I am working with a low end VPS, therefore I decided not to install any control panel and phpmyadmin. I have moved my personal dormant domain, adiwong.com to the webhosting. It comes with one IPv4, so typing 46.23.67.254 will bring you directly to my server, woohoo!

It is up with Apache (comes default), MySQL (needed some upgrade) and PHP (installed). So my website is up, will restore the original website in days to come. Next plan is to try doing multi-domain with one IP that is given to me. Some OS hardening as this unmanaged service is quite scary as there is no backup and they will do no security. Will come out with a plan whereby I will schedule some backup so that I could restore them when needed.

I know that I may have not blog on Riceblogger for quite some time now as time as change and do little blogging but focuses more on Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization for some of my website. Blogging has never quite been a successful journey for me especially for this blog as I am still few hundreds visitor daily due to some great content written in the past.

Anyhow I still do maintain a few blog especially a car blog that a friend of mine and me have been writing it for more than 2 and 8 months. Some of the Malaysian bloggers that I have seen quitting but their blog are still online as they have other aims to maintain the hosting including Sabahan, Adesblog (from daily to monthly) and 5xMom (although I know she still maintains her personal blog). <— I did a trackbacks hopefully they will see this and not be covered by all the comments yet to be approved.

I am at the same boat as those above as I believe there are so many more better information website or question & answer website that could provide solution to the public. But this blog has helped me a little in my career as I have noted down some tips for mysql and I tend to come back to refer as a notes, so I think I will try to maintain it as long as possible.

Have been so busy lately mostly with my new job as there is still lots of thing I need to do some catching up and needed to focus more time on my career. Also, I have invested myself a brand new Macbook Pro, it has brought quite a lot of ups and down in this recent months. I bought the old model, and only notice a month later, it is now pretty worthless as the 15″ is now the new model is packed with a quadcore i7. So knowing that my laptop is most probably on a 2 year shelf life, I needed to work harder to get the ROI from this new Macbook Pro.

Apple is quite a unique thing but it is not as good as I thought it would be. Firstly, the unibody which I had high expectation as it is a aluminum body which helps to lose heat easily. But it is not that cool that I can work on my lap. Previously, I had a HP Elite Pro from my work, which is an aluminum body laptop, but the bottom is still plastic, I could work pretty well on it even to work an hour or two on my lap.

Moreover I had to learn so many more shortkeys, but it is just too much, I miss the delete, home and end button from the Windows keyboard. Luckily, I still have my desktop but I can’t afford to throw this investment so I will need to bear with it for 2 years until I make my decision for another laptop/desktop.

Plus side is that there is quite some nice program that comes with the Apple OS and the swiping is quite neat that I am less dependent on a mouse.

As for the new website, I am still doing the data entry and trying it out, hopefully it will get better results compare to all my previous websites.

May have gone for a little while as I am so much catching up to do with my new job, I had to do a little arrangement. Although I have not been blogging, my interest had always remains the same, and I found this interesting website. It is a Groupon for Webmaster, for those who are not familiar, Groupon is using the group purchasing power and Internet viral marketing to push its products.

It is quite addictive in the United States, and there are a lot of clone spawning in each countries. But the main topic today was to introduce this Mighty Deals website which is mainly for Webmaster, I found it few days back and been looking for some new deals.

I have bought and installed this Templatic Real Estate WordPress Theme quite long ago but did not find time to promote it as I am quite busy with my new daily job and there is too much to catch up. Templatic Real Estate Theme is specifically meant for one purpose, which is a property classifieds. So I decided to give it a try. I did a Malaysia Property Classifieds. It is quite painless with the install as mentioned on their website, single click auto install. I like that they have included dummy data whereby you could get it started with nice pictures and property ads already posted just for the sick of trial.

The search feature is what make me buy them as I browse through so many wordpress classifieds scripts, very little could do specific advance search feature on a wordpress theme.

Other nice features include the loan calculator, multiple color theme, agent profile site and some small little widget that makes this website great. Despite that, it took me quite some time to add the type feature so that people could search by apartment, link-house, office, shop lots and much more.

Visit my site at http://PropertyTrade.my

Templatic Real Estate Demo

It seems that our Malaysia first blog aggregator is no longer working all the way back to 23 September. As a person that likes blogging, likes the SEO and the community that I could belong, PetalingStreet.org seems to land on the wrong person hand.

I liked the new face lift that is done on the new PPS, but hated that the owner is selling its soul in order to gain his ROI for the amount he paid for that site, I am sure he is doing great as he is selling text link to 5 websites and still able to maintain a pagerank of 2 and not get strip of everything at the early months.

Sadly enough the last tweet by the owner that pingger is down is now 15 days old.

Is PetalingStreet.org still fixable? Will it catch up with the latest web technology? Will there be loyalty at PPS?

I have registered my site with Innity for a long time now. The very first post about Innity was in April 2009. Previous requirements are 2,000 pageviews a day but the new requirements are 100,000 pageviews per month and 20,000 unique visitors a month. I find that in the long term we could earn a steady income. Innity is quite fair allow website publisher to display alternative ads in the event that there is no ads from them, this is what I liked about them.

There is big sites using Innity, therefore allowing Innity to land on great advertisers from Malaysia. If you have visitors from Malaysia, Innity is definitely some way you can make some extra money online.

Their support has been quick as the recent malware issue, they kept the communication with us to solve the issues, and I have inserted their code back to my website. Although it hurts a little, but I think all my rankings regain its position.

Nuffnang has been great at the start but unfortunately I see the income not being stable this few months and also it is not suitable for website as it is mainly targeted for blogs.

So give Innity a try if you meet their requirements.

Since Website speed actually affect your SEO rankings also your visitor experience it is higly recommended that you have a Content Delivery Network (CDN), but most of you will fall in the same category as me as we have little budget and most CDN service cost us monthly fee.

What I am about to introduce is much better it does not only improve your website speed, but reduces the bandwidth ussage, and on top of all those a bunch of basic security to identify and block new threats towards your website. All of this you will get by paying $0, yup nothing. They do provide a paid service of $20/month with advance security. I have tried it on one of my high ussage website and hope its performance does increase, but I am sure that SPAM is reduced so far.

Persenting…..CloudFlare, a service that acts as a proxy between your visitor and your webhosting company. It cashes static content so requests towards your service will reduced. Provides protection against Bots, Spam, Offline Browsing and Site Statistics.

It will be a hot service, as CloudFlare wins most innovative company award from TechCrunch Disrupt conference.

This is what you see in the web security feature that you will manually or blocking Web Spammer, Botnet Zombie and Exploit Attacker. Or you can type in the IP or country you would like to block.

Although I do not find all features like hotlinking protection and live statistics is not working yet, it is good enough for now. Especially for a person who runs multiple websites and one man show is just hard to beat those corporate with staff(s) filtering out the spam.

Site: Cloudflare

I was quite unhappy because my site was hit with this Malware warning last week. But I guess Innity have solve this issue quite responsibly. You can see their report regarding this malware issue at their website. Until now I have not included the code in my site, and yes, I am losing few bucks each day that would accumulate to a big amount.

Am thinking of including the code tomorrow. Have you included your innity code to your site?