There were many that were just a waste of money or over-hyped. Some were good and over time just became redundant or have been replaced by better tools. To save you some time, I decided to make a list of what I still love and use for my online business.

I will be keeping this list updated and refreshed every time there’s material changes. So make sure you subscribe or check back regularly to get the latest updates.

Now allow me to present to you,  my top work-from-home online business tools for 2012.

1. Domain Name Registration

[Go to: Namecheap Domain Registration]

As far as domain registration goes, I like to keep them all in once place. Over time, you will end up with hundreds of domains and having them consolidated makes them easier to manage.

I like Namecheap because their domain registration prices are quite cheap to start with. If you do a search for “Nameheap Coupons March 2012″ (replace the date with current month) – you will find coupons codes that will further reduce the price of new domains by another 2o%. Also, all their domains comes with a 1-year free “Whois” Guard service that will hide your admin email and address and protect you from a ton of spam.

2. Premium Domain Registration

Sadly, its getting harder and harder to find good domain names due to competition. Over the last 2 years, I found myself having to pay for premium domains that are already owned by someone else. If you search on Google for “premium domains” you’ll find a lot of sites that re-sell used domains.

The ones that I’ve used are as follows:

[Go to: GoDaddy Auctions]

GoDaddy Auctions is free to browse but when you find a domain you wish to bid on, there’s a nominal fee.  I use GoDaddy Auctions because there’s quite a large marketplace for the domains there. Also, the process of transferring from the buyer to you is secured via an escrow service so you’re not worried about getting ripped off.

[Go to: Flippa.com]

Flippa.com is a site for buying and selling domains or websites. This service is great because aside from domains, you may even find existing businesses. I also like using Flippa for market research to see if there are any websites in a market niche that I am exploring that is profitable. What I like about Flippa is that you get quite detailed information for each domain including verified traffic and/or income figures from the sellers.

3. Web Hosting

[Go to: Hostgator Webhosting]

Almost all my sites are hosted exclusively by Hostgator.com. Their plans are very reasonable and their customer service is perfect in my opinion. I’ve always gotten a 24 hour response or less whenever I have any issues with my account. My only gripe with them is that their payment system is still a little in the stone ages. The invoices are hard to trace back to the proper account (if you have many) but I’ve not had any major problems with it.

[Go to: Bluehost Webhosting]

Another highly rated hosting service is BlueHost. The prices are just a few cents higher than Hostgator  a month and their account management system is a little better than Hostgator.com. Again, I keep it simple to host all my sites on Hostgator.com but if you were starting from scratch, either of these two services would be acceptable.

4. Email List Management

[Go to: Aweber Email Software]

Aweber is the longest web service that I’ve been using since 2006. Its really the market leader for building an email list as well as sending email messages to the list.

What I like about Aweber? The number 1 reason is deliverability. Every email has over 98% deliverability rate.

They also have a great “blog broadcast” service that allows me to automatically send very nice newsletters to my subscribers once a week with a summary of all my latest blog posts. You will also find that many websites and software have built in compatibility to work well with the Aweber system.

5. Keyword Research

[Go to: Market Samurai Free Trial]

Almost any Internet marketing strategy I can think of should begin with keyword and market research. This is a mistake that a lot of marketers make. If the foundation of your online business is flawed, you will always be in an uphill battle to create a successful site.

I’ve tried a host of different keyword research software and some expensive hosted services in the past. In the end, the one that I still use over and over again is Market Samurai. I use it mostly to plan the structure of my niche blogs and to kind keywords for creating SEO targeted blog posts. I also use it to track my SEO ranking for keywords that I am targeting.

What do I like about it? First, its a one-time only payment. And the team at Market Samurai has updated the software constantly over the years. This is very important as Google is constantly updating their API and ranking data.

The software also has many modules that allow you to do much more than just keyword research. Aside from my main use above, I also use it to find affiliate products to monetize my pages. Its also handy for finding article ideas and research to find what type of content web users are interested in.

The other modules include finding domain names, publishing and syndicating content and getting backlinks to your site. Honestly, I don’t use a lot of these modules but its nice to know they are there when if I ever need to use it.

6. Analytics and Tracking

[Go to: Google Analytics]

Without measurement, you can’t improve. The best website analytics tool out there is the free Google Analytics service. Why is it the best? Well its easy to install, the reports are great and its fully integrated with other essential Google services like Adwords and the Google Webmaster tools.

What I like about it? I love the fact that you can create goals for your website and their funnel visualization report gives you a great view of how your site is performing to drive visitors to the intended outcome on your site.

It also has a ton of other features like tracking search behavior on your site and also ecommerce tracking to match revenue and cost data for your website traffic. To me, any website that expects to be successful needs to have Google Analytics installed and have at least 1 goal being tracked.

7. Social Media Marketing

[Go to: TweetAdder Automation Software]

Getting traffic from social media websites is an awesome way to accelerate the syndication of your content and website. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter is also a great way to build a subscriber base.

However, one of the challenges with social media marketing is that its time consuming and repetitive. That’s why I love the TweetAdder software. It allows me to find relevant users to follow and hopefully add to my follower list. It can generate multiple auto-reply messages and allows you to reply in a way that does not seem automated. It allows you to schedule your tweets and posts and drive traffic to your site.

I wrote a case study on how I use this software to automate my Twitter marketing and how it makes me a very nice passive income on my niche blogs. You can read about it here: How to Automate Your Twitter Account and Earn Passive Income

8. Outsourcing

I am an accountant by training so when it comes to graphic design and coding, I leave it to the experts. I’ve outsourced quite a few projects to coders from “RentaCoder.com which has since changed its name to vworker.com. I’ve also outsourced some content writing jobs to freelancers at eLance.com. The rates here are a little more expensive than vWorker but the site is more user friendly an easier to work with.

Why I like these services? Well, its great to post a job and have a list of people bid for it. Through the selection process, you can fine tune your requirements and get the best deal out of all the proposals. The other important thing is that these services act as a clearing house to make sure you do not get cheated. I’ve had a few cases where the service provider does not deliver and the arbitration process is quite efficient especially when every email is documented via their system.

[Go to: Elance Outsourcing]

[Go to: Vworker Outsourcing]

I just wanted to add one other place where you can get quick and cheap outsource help. Its called “Fiverr.com” and its a directly of people willing to do work for as little as $5. Some people here can write content, submit your site to directories or even create simple graphics or fix CSS problems on your site.

[Go to: Fiverr.com]

9. Working With Video

Video for the web is an essential requirement for online success. Whether its for your sales letter or your content pages, video helps to drive the message through better than just words alone.

One of the best tools to create great web video is Screenflow. This software is for Mac only and for Windows users, I would recommend using “Camtasia”.

What do I like about Screenflow? The software is dead easy to use. It allows you to capture your computer screen together with audio of your voice. Thus is great for tutorials and demos. But my favorite part about Screenflow is the editing tools. You can add titles, texts and effects to your videos very easily.

[Go to: Screenflow Product Page]

[Go to: Camtasia Product Page]

The other important thing about video is how to embed them to your website or blog. For the most part, I upload my videos to YouTube and use the embed code generated by YouTube to add the video to my pages. Another great free service is Vimeo who can host longer HD videos instead of the 15min limit on YouTube.

[Go to: YouTube]

[Go to: Vimeo]

10. Image Editing

If you can afford it, the Adobe Photoshop software will be the tool to handle all your graphic design work. However, the learning curve to use Photoshop effectively can be quite steep. For simple image editing (especially for blogs), I prefer to use a very light tool called Image Well 4. This tools allows me to resize, crop, add captions and text as well as upload directly to my webhost after I’m done editing.

I use this tool to create the images in a lot of my blog posts.

[Go to: ImageWell 4 Product Page]

10. Teleseminar/ Webinar

In my experience, one of methods to get the highest conversions to sales, is the telesminar. Whether its live or recorded. In the past, I used to use the webinar service by GotoMeeting.com. Don’t get me wrong – this tool is great but its also quite pricey. Also, users will need to download a special software before they can join your webinar.

I found a simple service called Instant Telesiminar which also gets the job done. Although you are not able to show your desktop live to your users using Instant Teleseminar, it has all the other features you need. You can answer questions, show slides and allow your visitors to call in to ask questions.

Why I like it? Well, I love the fact that you do not require your users to download any additional software. So all they have to do is turn up at a webpage you send them and they can listen in, see your slides and ask questions. Its also a lot more affordable compared to GotoMeeting and its very easy to embed the whole event into any of your websites so that you maintain branding as well as call to action buttons or links you may have on your webpage.

[Go to: InstantTeleseminar Trial]

Conclusion

Ok, I know I am missing quite a few other items on this list. It would be too long if I added them all here so I only listed the key items. If you wanted to know how I do certain things, just ask in the comments below and I’ll add it to the list.

Also, if you have recommendations of some awesome tools to checkout – please also add it in the comments below. Thanks!

Now, why would you want to do this? First and foremost, its extremely eye catching when viewing the timeline. Here’s an example of what it looks like.

Because it really stands out, visitors are more inclined to “like” your page or engage with you if they like your presentation.

Secondly, when clicked, the user will view the photo series in the “lightbox” view. This is exactly like a presentation and the description and user comments are shown oon the right. At this stage, the visitor is likely to comment, like or share any or all of the photos.

Again, this will broadcast your page and brand on your visitors profile page. You can also display hyperlinks in the description if you want to drive traffic to you other web properties.

Its also a great way to showcase your expertise on a particular subject. Doing it in a cool an innovative way will also boost credibility and reputation.

So here’s how to set this up for your Facebook page:

Step 1: Create a Presentation on Keynote or Powerpoint

Keynote and Powerpoint both have some very stylish themes to create graphic intensive presentations.

The key here is to keep it simple and ensure that your presentation topic is relevant to your market. Make sure each slide has ONE main point and ONE sub-point. Use lots of images to illustrate these points.

Step 2: Export the Photos as Images

Once you’re done creating your presentation in Keynote (or Powerpoint), export the presentation as images. Here’s a short note about the sizes. If you want the full image to be shown on the cover, then your images should be 840px wide by 400 px tall.

I like to stick to the default 1024 x 768 screen resolution in Keynote because I’m just too lazy to edit these in Photoshop. However, I turn that into an advantage because I leave the most important content on the part of the image that is visible. When they user clicks on the image and sees the image in the lightbox, the bottom of the image is revealed and I place instructions there to  click to scroll through the photos.

Step 3: Upload the Images to Facebook in a New Album

The exported slides are automatically numbered by Keynote in sequence. So just upload them to a new album.

Make sure that you upload them chronologically. It can be either the last slide first or the first slide first. This is because Facebook gives you the option to sort either way as long as they are in order.

Also, check the upload the images in “high quality” option so that the full detail in each slide is revealed.

Step 4: Edit the Descriptions of Each Album

Once, you photos are uploaded, its time to edit the album. The title and description is very important because this summary is what your visitors will see and also what your visitors friends will see when the album is shared.

In this step, you will also tell Facebook which album to use as the cover -make sure the correct one is chosen.

Finally, you can also add a description to each photo. This will appear as slide notes when the user is viewing them. The great thing here is that you are free to use hyperlinks so that you can link to your other web properties from the description.

Step 5: Feature the Album on Your Timeline

Lastly, once your edits are done, you should click on the start icon on the top right of the album and choose to highlight this album. Your cover photo will now take over the full width of your timeline and the other slides are displayed as thumbnails beneath it.

Now you’re all set! Good job!

If you want to see what this looks like live – visit my Facebook Timeline here. By the way, don’t forget to “like” my page to get more marketing tips and strategies.

At this present time, Facebook page owners can opt to upgrade their pages immediately or wait until 30 March 2012 when all Facebook pages (ready or not) will be automatically converted to the new format.

As marketers and business owners – here’s several key issues to look our for to get your page ready for this change.

1. Bye Bye Landing Page Tabs

One of my favorite features of Facebook Pages was the ability to add a customized landing page tab. With this flexible page, you could offer special incentives for visitors to “like” your page and get a small reward (usually some content).

With the new change, you can no longer set the landing page tab as the first page your visitors see. All visitors to your page will now see your cover image and latest entry in your page Timeline.

You can still modify apps like Static HTML to show fan and non-fan pages to create an incentive for people to join your page. However, for visitors to see your offer, they will have to voluntarily click on the app and that is quite unlikely for the majority of your visitors.

2. Importance of the Cover Photo

The most prominent feature on each page now is the cover photo. This is a 851 pixel wide and 315 pixel height image is your only chance to make a strong impact to visitors of your page.

However, there are some serious restrictions on what you can place in this area. Here’s the official requirements from Facebook:

Cover images must be at least 399 pixels wide and may not contain:

• Price or purchase information, such as “40% off” or “Download it at our website”
• Contact information, such as web address, email, mailing address or other information intended for your Page’s About section
• References to user interface elements, such as Like or Share, or any other Facebook site features
• Calls to action, such as “Get it now” or “Tell your friends”

Here’s how some top brands are using the cover photos.

This is a bit more difficult for small businesses and individuals who are not global household brands. My recommendation is to place an attractive image that represents your business and add a subtle quote or slogan about what you or your business does.

3. Application Links

Although you can have up to 12 Apps in the info section below your cover photo, only 4 will be seen without the user having to click the “show more” arrow button. There’s still some room to use these areas to display innovative pages or features. For example, aside from photos, notes and events, you can choose to display your blog posts, top products, or an ethical bribe here. You can still add custom HTML pages for fans and non-fans.

In the example below, the LiveStrong page chose to have the photo app, a link to a page to share the message, a link to a page to share a story and their blog in the Apps section of the page.

4. Featuring Items on the Timeline With Milestones and “Pin to Top”

Without landing pages and prominent links to custom tabs, the choice of communicating important messages is left to the Timeline. There are 3 ways to make important content stand out.

First, you can choose the “Highlight” feature for your post. This makes your post take up the full width of the Timeline. However, as new posts are added by you or your fans, the content will move down the Timeline over time and get hidden.

That’s brings us to the second option – “Pin to Top”. You can click the “Edit” button for the post and then select the “Pin to Top” option. This moves that particular post right up to the top of the Timeline (just below the information box). It also flags the content with an orange bookmark icon on the top right of the post. However, this post will only take up either the left or right side of the Timeline even if you had previously chosen to “highlight” this post.

You can only have 1 pinned post at a time. Also, the pinned post will only stay up for a maximum of 7 days.

Finally, you can post “Milestone” items in your Timeline. You need to specify a date for the event, a title and a description. Additionally, the post is permanently features in full width and allows you to add a prominent image. This is great for if you want to outline an illustrious history of your company or brand.

5. New Admin Panel – Interact with Fans and Access Insights

The new admin panel places all the interactive elements of your page in one convenient place. You can see the latest activities in the Notifications panel and you can also see the latest fans who liked your page.

I particularly like the Messages option that allows direct communication with your fans.

Finally, you can access the Insights section to get very detailed demographic information about the people who like your page.

Conclusion

Like it or hate it, the bottom line is that these changes are coming. And you should not ignore using Facebook pages as a major component of your online marketing strategy.

I hope the pointers above helps you to better prepare your pages. If you’d like to take a look at mine, its here. I hope you take the time to drop by and like the my Facebook page.

The worrying thing about this hack is that the majority of blog owners won’t even know that their blog has been compromised. If you have a WordPress blog, please read on to ensure your blog is safe.

I discovered that the injected code is totally hidden from blog owners as well as their readers. It only affects Google bots and hence can affect your Google search rankings and your bandwidth without you knowing it.

What this hack does is to post pharmaceutical spam posts and pages using your blogs header and footer. These posts are only visible buy Googlebots. They then mass link to your injected spam pages and your site listing on Google can be overwhelmed by these spam posts leading to your Google website being flagged and your rankings severely damaged.

Example of Injected Content

I also discovered that they can post links to other infected blogs. When I tracked the source of these incoming links, I found thousands of innocent blogs where the links can only be found in the source codes. These poor blog owners probably don’t know its happening and it will severely affect their page rankings.

How to Check If Your Blog Has Been Infected

1. Go to Google.com and type “site:www.YouBlog.com”.

This will show you all the pages of your blog that has been indexed by Google. In my case, the this is what I found on page 2:

Because I had already replaced the TimThumb files, when I click on the links, it takes me to my 404 Error Page. I thought that was the end of the story and Google will eventually remove these pages from their index. I was wrong.

2. Go to Google Webmaster Tools and do a “Fetch as Googlebot” Query

If you do not already have a free Google Webmaster tool account set up for all your websites, you can sign up here: Google Webmaster Tools.

In the “Diagnostics” section, choose the “Fetch as Googlebot” link. You can then type in a URL and see what the Google Search Bot will see.

As you can see below, when I typed in the URL of the spam pages from step 2 above, the bot returned a status as “Success”.

Meaning that although normal users will get a 404 page error, the Google Search Bots that regularly scan the site will say that the page is working normally. So these offending pages will never be removed from Google’s index.

3. Install the TimThumb Vulnerability Scanner Plugin

Now, even if you have not been hacked after checking the two steps above, I still recommend this step. Install a plugin that checks your theme files for potential vulnerabilities.

You can download the plugin here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/timthumb-vulnerability-scanner/

Once you run a scan, it will highlight vulnerable timthumb related files and with two clicks you can replace them with the latest secured versions so that your blog theme does not break.

Next, because we do not know which files have been tampered with, we need to clean out ALL the files in our WordPress installation.

How to Clean Out Your Blog Installation

Basically, we’re going to do 2 things. The first is replace all your WordPress systems files. The second thing is to replace all your current theme files. Additionally, you should also check through any remaining files manually to see if there’s any injected code.

I’m not a security expert so I will just run through what I did step by step.

Step 1: Update to Latest Version of WordPress and Backup Your WordPress Database

Since all your content, comments, theme settings and other data is stored in your blog database, the first thing you should do is to make a backup in case something goes wrong during the clean up and you need to restore.

You can learn more about how to backup your database from the WordPress.org tutorial page. For me, I just use the WP DB Backup plugin which allows me to create a backup file with one click.

Next, update to the latest version of WordPress. I just used the automatic upgrade process in the WordPress Dashboard for this.

Using my FTP program, I just saved the wp-config.php file and .htaccess files to my computer as a backup.

Step 3: Put Your Blog Into Maintenance Mode

I use a plugin called “Maintenance Mode” and I activated it so that my blog visitors and Google bots will temporarily be directed to a maintenance notice instead of seeing a broken site.

Step 4: Deactivate Your WordPress Plugins

I actually forgot to do this step and fortunately, it was ok. But all the documentation advise for you to actually turn off your plugins first.

Step 5: Download The Latest Version of WordPress

You can download the latest version here: http://wordpress.org/download/

Then expand the zip file on your computer. You will be uploading all the files except the “wp-content” folder. So what I did was I just deleted the “wp-content” folder entirely.

Step 5: Change your WordPress Database Password

Log in to your cPanel. Go to MySQL databases and find the user for your blog’s database. Just click on the username and you will be prompted to type the old password followed by the new password to have it changed.

Step 6: Edit Your WP-Config.php File

In this step, you will manually edit the new “wp-config.php” file so you won’t need to run the installation or upgrade function on your new files. Go to the new wordpress files that you downloaded, open up the “wp-config-sample.php” file.

In here, you will just change the database name, database user and password. Follow the same format as your previous “wp-config.php” file but make sure you change the password to the new one you created in Step 6.

Additionally, in WordPress version 2.6 and above, you need to add your security keys. You can learn more about the new security keys here: WordPress Security Keys

This are just random numbers to increase security of your blog. You don’t really need to remember them. To make it simple, just use the online generator provided by WordPress to generate these keys. Just copy the all those keys and replace that section in your “wp-config.php” file.

Save the file as “wp-config.php” and you’re ready to upload.

Step 7: Replace All the WordPress Files On Your Blog

Now use your FTP software and just copy all the new WordPress files, including the “wp-config.php” file to your blogs directory. Note, we already deleted the “wp-content” folder so that will not be replaced.

Step 8: Reinstall Your WordPress Theme Files

All your theme settings are saved in your WordPress database so you can delete your old theme and reinstall it again without losing your settings.

Log into your WordPress Dashboard. Change the theme to a default theme and delete the your old theme. Then add a new theme and upload your theme again.

At this stage, you should also check each of the files on folders inside the “wp-content” folder as this folder is not being replaced with new ones. Some sites report that malicious code has been entered into the “images” folder or some of the plugin files.

Step 9: Reactivate All Your Plugins

As mentioned previously, I forgot to remove my plugins and the problem was fixed. However, you should actually delete and reinstall each plugin because some reports have said malicious codes were also injected into the pllugin’s php files.

Step 10:  Check That The Problem is Fixed!

If everything went well, your site is now back up and running as before but the difference is that you have replaced the WordPress system files, theme files and plugin files with fresh and clean files.

So go back to Google Webmaster tools and do a “Fetch as Googlebot” again for the same term.

As you can see in the screen shot below that the same page that returned a “success” status is now showing “not found” . That is great news as now its just a matter of time before Google will remove these non-existent pages from their index.

This also gives me confidence that whatever malicious script that was tricking the Googlebots to see the page is now gone!

Good job.

Now you can de-activate the “Maintenance Mode” and go get yourself a cup of coffee!

How to Embed YouTube Videos

Firstly, here are the 5 simple steps to get the embed code for your YouTube video:

Note: The  iFrame type embed codes supports playback on Flash and HTML5 video. This means it will work on computers AND mobile devices. It will load either the AS3 player (Flash) or the HTML5 player depending on whether the viewer’s browser supports it.

The old embed code (if you choose it) is the AS3 player and will only work on computers and mobile devices that support Flash. I therefore do NOT recommend using the OLD embed code unless you are not concerned about the video not being playable on mobile Internet devices. I will now show you how to customize some common parameters for your video.

How to Customize Embed Code Parameters

For the newer IFrame embed codes, you would just add the parameter at the end of the Youtube URL. Start with the “?” to indicate that parameters will be added then use the “&” symbol to define each parameter.

For the old embed code, you will add the parameters to the end of the Youtube video URL after the “?version=3″ and using the “&” symbol to define the parameters.

Let’s look at some examples now to see how this works…

How to Enable Autoplay

In step 5 above, you are given the video embed code that uses an IFrame to embed the video. The code should look as follows:

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/V3oJR5IAMxM” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

Now all you need to do to enable autoplay is to add the parameter “&autoplay=1″ to the end of the video URL in the embed code:

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/V3oJR5IAMxM&autoplay=1” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

The same modification to the Old Embed Code (AS3) will be as follows:

<object width=”560″ height=”315″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/V3oJR5IAMxM?version=3&amp;hl=en_US”></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/V3oJR5IAMxM?version=3&autoplay=1&amp;hl=en_US” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”560″ height=”315″ allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true”></embed></object>

When you paste this code into any webpage or blog post, the video will now autoplay.

How to Start the Video at a Set Time

If you want to start the video 10 seconds into the video instead of right at the beginning, then you just add the parameter “&start=10″ to the end of the video URL in the embed code. The integer “10″ represents 10 seconds:

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/V3oJR5IAMxM?&start=10” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

The same modification to the AS3 embed code would look like this:

<object width=”560″ height=”315″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/V3oJR5IAMxM?version=3&amp;hl=en_US”></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/V3oJR5IAMxM?version=3&start=10&amp;hl=en_US” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”560″ height=”315″ allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true”></embed></object>

When you paste this code into any webpage or blog post, the video will now begin playing 10 seconds into the video when the viewer clicks the play button.

Now let’s look at an example that combines a few parameters at once.

How to Autoplay the Video and Loop the Playback Video Over and Over

Its important to note that the “loop” parameter needs to work together with the “playlist” parameter. This means that we are looping a playlist that has only one video. So the embed code will look like this:

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/V3oJR5IAMxM?rel=0&autoplay=1&loop=1&playlist=V3oJR5IAMxM” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

The same modification in the AS3 embed code would look like this:

When you paste this code into any webpage or blog post, the video will now begin playing automatically and will loop over and over again (which is quite anoying really).

Now that you understand how to modify the various embed codes,  you can knock yourself out with all of the available parameters.

All Other Embed Code Parameters

There are many other parameters that can be used following the same principles outlined above. However, not all the parameters are universally compatible with the AS3 or HTML5 players. If a parameter is not compatible with the embedded player, it will just be ignored.

As good practice, I recommend using the only the newer IFrame embed codes and choosing parameters that are compatible with BOTH AS3 and HTML5 players.

The full list of configurable parameters and compatibility are as follows:

autohide (AS3 & HTML5)
Values: 0, 1, and 2 (default). This parameter indicates whether the video controls will automatically hide after a video begins playing. The default behavior is for the video progress bar to fade out while the player controls (play button, volume control, etc.) remain visible.

• If this parameter is set to 0, the video progress bar and the video player controls will be visible throughout the video.
• If this parameter is set to 1, then the video progress bar and the player controls will slide out of view a couple of seconds after the video starts playing. They will only reappear if the user moves her mouse over the video player or presses a key on her keyboard.

autoplay (AS3 & HTML 5)
Values: 0 or 1. Default is 0. Sets whether or not the initial video will autoplay when the player loads.

cc_load_policy (AS3 Only)

Values: 1. Default is based on user preference. Setting to 1 will cause closed captions to be shown by default, even if the user has turned captions off.

color (AS3 Only)
This parameter specifies the color that will be used in the player’s video progress bar to highlight the amount of the video that the viewer has already seen. Valid parameter values are red and white, and, by default, the player will use the color red in the video progress bar. See the YouTube API blog for more information about color options.

Note: This parameter is supported in the AS3 embedded player and in IFrame embeds that load the AS3 player. (IFrame embeds could also load the HTML5 player.) However, using the color parameter will disable the modestbranding option in the embedded player.

controls (AS3 & HTML5)
Values: 0 or 1. Default is 1. This parameter indicates whether the video player controls will display. If this parameter is set to 0, then the player controls will not display, causing the player to look like the chromeless player.

disablekb (AS3 Only)
Values: 0 or 1. Default is 0. Setting to 1 will disable the player keyboard controls. Keyboard controls are as follows:
Spacebar: Play / Pause
Arrow Left: Jump back 10% in the current video
Arrow Right: Jump ahead 10% in the current video
Arrow Up: Volume up
Arrow Down: Volume Down

enablejsapi (AS3 & HTML 5)
Values: 0 or 1. Default is 0. Setting this to 1 will enable the Javascript API. For more information on the Javascript API and how to use it, see the JavaScript API documentation.

fs (AS3 Only)
Values: 0 or 1. Default is 0. Setting to 1 enables the fullscreen button in the embedded player and does not affect the chromeless player. The fullscreen option will not work if you load the YouTube player into another SWF. Note that you must include some extra arguments to your embed code for this to work. The bold text in the following example is required to enable fullscreen functionality:

<object width=”425″ height=”344″>
<param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/u1zgFlCw8Aw?fs=1″</param>
<param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param>
<param name=”allowScriptAccess” value=”always”></param>
<embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/u1zgFlCw8Aw?fs=1″
type=”application/x-shockwave-flash”
allowfullscreen=”true”
allowscriptaccess=”always”
width=”425″ height=”344″>
</embed>
</object>

hd (Not Required)
Values: 0 or 1. Default is 0. Setting to 1 enables HD playback by default. This has no effect on the Chromeless Player. This also has no effect if an HD version of the video is not available. If you enable this option, keep in mind that users with a slower connection may have an sub-optimal experience unless they turn off HD. You should ensure your player is large enough to display the video in its native resolution.

Note: The AS3 player will automatically play the version of the video that is appropriate for your player’s size. If an HD version of a video is available in the AS3 player and that is the appropriate version for your player, then that is the version that will play.

iv_load_policy (AS3 Only)
Values: 1 or 3. Default is 1. Setting to 1 will cause video annotations to be shown by default, whereas setting to 3 will cause video annotation to not be shown by default.

loop (AS3 & HTML5)
Values: 0 or 1. Default is 0. In the case of a single video player, a setting of 1 will cause the player to play the initial video again and again. In the case of a playlist player (or custom player), the player will play the entire playlist and then start again at the first video.

Note: This parameter has limited support in the AS3 player and in IFrame embeds, which could load either the AS3 or HTML5 player. Currently, the loop parameter only works in the AS3 player when used in conjunction with the playlist parameter. To loop a single video, set the loop parameter value to 1 and set the playlist parameter value to the same video ID already specified in the Player API URL:

http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEO_ID?version=3&loop=1&playlist=VIDEO_ID

modestbranding (AS3 Only)

This parameter lets you use a YouTube player that does not show a YouTube logo. Set the parameter value to 1 to prevent the YouTube logo from displaying in the control bar. Note that a small YouTube text label will still display in the upper-right corner of a paused video when the user’s mouse pointer hovers over the player.

Note: This parameter is supported in the AS3 embedded player and in IFrame embeds that load the AS3 player. (IFrame embeds could also load the HTML5 player.)

origin (AS3 & HTML5)
This parameter provides an extra security measure for the IFrame API and is only supported for IFrame embeds. If you are using the IFrame API, which means you are setting the enablejsapi parameter value to 1, you should always specify your domain as the origin parameter value.

playerapiid (AS3 Only)
Value can be any alphanumeric string. This setting is used in conjunction with the JavaScript API. See the JavaScript API documentation for details.

playlist (AS3 & HTML5)
Value is a comma-separated list of video IDs to play. If you specify a value, the first video that plays will be the VIDEO_ID specified in the URL path, and the videos specified in the playlist parameter will play thereafter.

rel (AS3 Only)
Values: 0 or 1. Default is 1. Sets whether the player should load related videos once playback of the initial video starts. Related videos are displayed in the “genie menu” when the menu button is pressed. The player search functionality will be disabled if rel is set to 0.

showinfo (AS3 Only)
Values: 0 or 1. Default is 1. Setting to 0 causes the player to not display information like the video title and uploader before the video starts playing.

start (AS3 & HTML5)

Values: A positive integer. This parameter causes the player to begin playing the video at the given number of seconds from the start of the video. Note that similar to the seekTo function, the player will look for the closest keyframe to the time you specify. This means sometimes the play head may seek to just before the requested time, usually no more than ~2 seconds.

theme (AS3 & HTML5)
This parameter indicates whether the embedded player will display player controls (like a ‘play’ button or volume control) within a dark or light control bar. Valid parameter values are dark and light, and, by default, the player will display player controls using the dark theme. See the YouTube API blog for more information about the dark and light themes.

This blog was started in 2008 as an experiment as well as a learning tool for me to learn how to blog with WordPress. At the time, I was using the Rapidweaver platform and knew very little about WordPress. I got started writing about stuff I was learning along the way and also on my random personal interests.

Today, I took a serious look at my Google Analytics report and I was blown away. I wanted to share some of the key statistics and my take away action points after my review.

For the year ended 2011, this blog had over 228,601 visits and over 203,460 unique visitors! That’s a lot of people isn’t it?  That’s like communicating with 626 people per day.

And I was also really happy to see that the “bounce” rate was only 3.67% which means that my visitors actually READ what I wrote!

Can you imagine that? More than 200,000 people reading what I write from my desk at home! And all this while I just thought of myself as a hobby blogger.

This revelation also filled me with quite a bit of stress. I suddenly felt the burden of needing to write more often and pay greater attention to each post. Looking back at some of my older posts, I do feel quite embarrassed at some of the meandering posts I made which really didn’t add much value at all to my readers and was kinda all over the place.

So with the new year, I’m also taking on a new perspective as a pro blogger and not just a hobby blogger. My commitment to you, my dear reader, is to create more posts that add value to your life and business.

Presently, I’m working on a newer and more simplified blog design.

My idea is to create a blog that is less about design and more about content. So you can see the logo and design features are stripped down to a bare minimum and that makes the content stand out much more.

I’ve also decided to focus my attention on creating a resource site for individuals and small business owners to be successful online. Why? Well, essentially, that’s what I do for a living and what I’m good at. I run many profitable small businesses from home.

Do let me know if you have any ideas, suggestions or requests on what you would like me to add to this blog. I look forward to continuing the journey in 2012 and beyond with you.

So it began when I got a Google alert that a few of my blog posts has been picked up by Google’s search bots. “Great”, I thought but wait…those posts looks a bit strange. On closer inspection, they were spam posts for sex performance drugs and using pictures of scantily clad women on my blog!

“How did this happen??” I gasped! The links are coming directly from my blog and the posts uses the same theme as my blog!

Well after much research, I found that there’s quite a few security holes that needed to be plugged by the WordPress updates as well as a common plugin called “Timthumb”. The scary thing is that this plugin can be exploited even if its in a theme that is not active!

Wow! So I updated my WordPress installation using the “automatic update”, and that got me a fatal error with one of my plugins. A double-whammy in one morning! After almost 2-hours of trouble shooting, things are back to normal. I thought that at the very least, I’d make a blog post out of it in case it helps any of you.

So here are the solutions in case any you encounter such a horror one day:

If you encounter a fatal error after upgrading to the latest WordPress build, chances are, its caused by a plugin incompatibility. This effectively locks you out of the admin panel and is quite alarming. But don’t panic! The solution is to identify the offending plugin and deactivate it.

In my case, the culprit causing the fatal error in WordPress was the popular “Popup Domination” plugin.

When WordPress can’t find the plugin (because you renamed it), all it does is deactivate it. This allows you access back into the WordPress admin panel. Then you reactive them one-by-one until you find the plugin that causes the error! When you know which plugin is the offending plugin, you can either delete it or replace it with an updated version if it exists.

Now, about how to fix the “Timthumb” vulnerability. I found a simple solution on this post:

http://ravidreams.com/fix-timthumb-security-issue/

Basically, its just a mater of locating the “timthumb.php” file, and replacing it with this one:

http://timthumb.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/timthumb.php

Now, I can’t say if this has permanently fixed the issue but so far, the offending SPAM posts has been removed and everything seems to be back to normal.

From now on, I will definitely make sure to keep WordPress updated – especially if any vulnerabilities have been found and fixed!

It tells the story of the company from its almost accidental beginnings to where it is now with over 800 million users and also explores what may be for the future of the company.

I also like the way that is explores the story from very diverse points of views. In other words, you get to hear directly from Mark Zuckerberg but also from users, VCs, his dorm buddy, advertising companies and even a lady who does Facebook marketing as a consulting business for other businesses.

All in all, it s great piece to give you a inside look into Facebook. After all, when Facebook goes public on its planned IPO next year, there will be a lot more changes that will impact us either directly as one of the 800 million users or indirectly.

Its meant to say when “less (<)” “equals (=)” “more (>)”. Its a concept that I am slowly growing to love.

The idea is not new but one that I am newly embracing. With the challenges we face in the “information age”, I believe its an idea that can only continue to receive greater acceptance. Our time, attention and resources are limited by nature. And the rate of growth of distractions and messages to consume is insatiable. So its a matter of time when something has got to give.

You know what I’m talking about right?

Today, we struggle with unprecedented volumes of information and messages that fights for our precious attention and causes us to accumulate more “stuff” and leave a bigger environmental footprint on our planet.

Ever have trouble managing your email? I do. And also with status updates from Facebook, Twitter and the litany of other social media sites. Even when we are on the move, we’re distracted with mobile devices that beep, vibrate and blink at us at all times of the day.

Do you have everything you need to live? I’m pretty sure you already do. So if you think about it, for most businesses to exist today, they HAVE to convince us to buy stuff we don’t need. On the television and news, theres an endless barrage of advertisements and messages that fight for our attention. The objective and outcome is that it pushes us towards consuming more, buy more stuff, do more activities, multi-task, always more more more!

So when is less equal to more? For example:

• Is it better to have 500 “friends” on Facebook or just 2 or 3 really good friends you actually like to spend time with?
• Is it better to work 14- hour days or earn less and spend more time with your children or your spouse?
• Is it better to have a closet full of clothes you will never wear or just 5 pieces of clothing you love wearing?

These are just a couple of random examples. But at the core of the minimalist philosophy, its all about limiting all areas of life so that you enjoy a better quality of life. Its a very powerful tool. The simple act of limiting a particular area of your life, causes you to immediately value it more and get more out of it.

Listen, I’m no expert in this area. It sounds absurd initially to put any limits on our life choices but the benefits to our mind, body and spirit is tremendous. Not to mention the potential benefits to those around us like our family and friends and ultimately for the planet.

I’m taking baby steps. Here’s 2 initiatives that I’ve already started:

1. I only check email once at 7am (before my running) and once at 5pm.
2. I labelled all my clothes from 1 to 10. 1 being stuff I always pick and wear and 10 being items I have not worn in years. I then donated all my clothes ranked 4 or more. (that was a tough one, but very beneficial to my appreciation of minimalism)
3. I only single-task meaning I make a list of things I want to get done on a particular project and I only work on one task at a time and not move on to the next until the previous one is completed.

Like a real baby – I’m stumbling and falling every so often. Especially since a big part of my business involves social media! But I’m excited. I’m motivated by  even the little benefits as I begin to feel less stress, gain more time and actually get more productive.

I hope to get better at this and continue finding more ways to accomplish more by doing less and experiencing more joy out of life by having less “stuff” and distractions.