DonMorris.com

cPanel Password Syncing

Don — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:12:05 +0000

While making some server changes and resetting some passwords (making them more secure), I ran across an issue where I couldn't log into phpMyAdmin -- even though I was already logged into cPanel. I kept being asked to log in (instead of being logged in automatically) and my cPanel credentials wouldn't work; instead, I was forced to use a database user and password, which only gave me access to a subset of my databases.

Turns out that some passwords don't sync properly between services:

That is correct, though it's not just punctuation, but almost any "special character" that can trip phpMyAdmin up and cause you to be unable to login to phpMyAdmin from cPanel, and may also affect the operation of Fantastico. The password itself is still synced, it seems that phpMyAdmin just doesn't encapsulate the entire password properly; it incorrectly thinks some of the special characters should not be passed onto MySQL, causing the issue.

Tip of the day: use only alphanumeric characters for cPanel passwords.

The Unclickable Flash Settings Dialog

Don — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 19:29:39 +0000

Much as I despise Flash for its crushing memory requirements and its tendency to crash any system I have, I do need to have Flash Player installed to view videos at various times. Usually that's not a problem, since I also use ClickToPlugin to manage when and if Flash is loaded.

However, there's a bug in Flash Player which appears to go back to at least version 10 and which Adobe seems not to have fixed, even though the bug is quite widespread: the Adobe Flash Player Settings dialog which sometimes appears is unclickable. (This issue plagues not only OS X, but also Windows and Linux.) The dialog generally appears whenever Flash wants to gain access to your system in some manner -- for example, when the site you are visiting wants to use your camera or microphone or store data in local storage. Since the dialog is unclickable, it obscurs at least a portion of the Flash object and, for me, makes watching some videos impossible.

The workarounds often mentioned, which involve managing your Flash Player global settings (either using the Local Settings Manager for Flash 10.3+ or the Online Settings Manager), just aren't satisfactory. There is a better option which may just fix the problem completely for you (it did for me):

On Windows, delete these folders: %APPDATA%\Adobe\Flash Player and %APPDATA%\Macromedia\Flash Player.
On OS X, delete these folders: ~/Library/Caches/Adobe/Flash Player and ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player.

Thanks to Katie on the Adobe Forums for posting the answer.

My #1 Affiliate Marketing Secret

Don — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 00:19:23 +0000

Original Author:

Don Morris

Once in a while I'm asked by an affiliate of mine why he or she isn't making any sales of $7 Secrets. Nine times out of 10, that affiliate is missing the one thing I believe every affiliate needs, no matter what product they're promoting: a website.

If you want to be successful marketing products as an affiliate, you need to have your own website—and promote those products from your website.

Here are several reasons why using your own website for promotion is so important:

Personal recommendation

You might be tempted to call it a review, but a personal recommendation is much more powerful than a review. Your experience with the product can often sell the prospect on it much better than the sales copy itself. (Even your negative comments—for an otherwise good product—can increase the honesty of the recommendation in the reader's mind.)

And with your own site, your recommendation can be as lengthy as you like.

You're the expert

Your recommendations and experience, all in one place, gives you credibility that your prospects don't otherwise see in a single advertisement in some other medium. Add your picture and other information about yourself and your readers will become comfortable with you and see you as a person—a person that appears to know what he is talking about.

Just don't make your site all about promotions (or advertisements). Give your visitors some real meat, in the form of information they can use right now.

List signups

Why not? You're the expert! People trust you, and they'll want to know when you have something important to say. Whether they actually sign up to your list, subscribe to your feed, follow you on Twitter, like you on Facebook—in one way or another they'll look for more personal recommendations from you.

Of course, you'll need to have that autoresponder/Twitter account/Facebook account/whatever for them to get on your "list," so get that set up, too.

Search engines

Google, Bing and the other search engines don't index your email messages. They don't care about safelists, traffic exchanges, or classified ads sites. Search engines want relevant web site content. And quality content, from authoritative sites, ranks higher than crappy content from John Doe.

Remember, there's a whole big world out there that isn't seeing your ads, no matter where you place them. Get 'em on your site and let Google do some work for you.

Avoid spam filters

Popular products will be spammed. Spammed products will have their websites blacklisted. If you use email to promote those products and you use an affiliate link for those sites in the email message, your message will likely never be seemed by the intended recipient.

Instead, direct recipients to your site and use the affiliate link there. You'll also avoid having your own email address blacklisted as a result of promoting a blacklisted site.

Avoid frame breakers

I'm not a big fan of traffic exchanges and their ilk, but many products are promoted on pages with code that breaks them out of frames. Since traffic exchanges don't allow such pages, you'll not be able to promote those products directly.

If you must use such methods, promote those products from your own site and you won't violate the provider's terms of service.

Want to see how it's done? One of the best affiliate promotions for $7 Secrets I've seen was written by John Fox some years ago. What makes it stand out for me is that he

Wrote for his audience (it was written from a perspective that would interest them)
Made it conversational (easy to read, draws the reader in)
Pointed out a negative (something he didn't like)
Engaged his audience (see the comments)

And he put the promotion on his own site! He linked to it in a Twitter post and an autoresponder message (perhaps other mediums as well) and he immediately saw sales. Not only that, but the blog post continues to make John money today.

Setting up a website is neither hard nor expensive. One of my hosts is Host Gator; I like them because they're inexpensive and their support team is responsive, but there are many other such hosts out there.

Step up your affiliate marketing efforts and get your website going today!

Don Morris is the publisher of $7 Secrets and pays his affiliates 100% on referred sales of that report.

How do I find out about WSOs?

mrtoner — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 05:02:17 +0000

If you're looking for the latest WSOs (Warrior Special Offers) on the Warrior Forum, going to the forum itself is often frustrating. For some reason WSOs are the only board that cannot be sorted; even if it could be, there's no apparent way to sort by thread start date instead of date of last post (comment). As a result, the threads at the top of the list aren't necessarily the newest offers.

So how can you find out about the newest WSOs? To help you out, I've compiled a (non-exhaustive) list of different services that will let you know about new WSOs, each of which has various advantages and disadvantages. Let me know if you have any others to add!

BTW, each of these services is free; they can offer the service because each link to a WSO is an affiliate link.

WarriorPlus

WarriorPlus is the best known service, since it's promoted in a sticky on the WSO Forum.

Pros:

You can suspend any alert, including the WarriorPlus alert that sends the WSO of the Day
You can receive daily or weekly alerts, in addition to an alert sent instantly
You can subscribe to an RSS feed of all your alerts
You can subscribe to an RSS feed of recent WSOs

Cons:

You can't receive an alert for each new WSO, only those keywords or sellers you setup
RSS feeds and alerts only include the title of the WSO (the WSO of the Day is more informative)

WSO Notifications

There are too many cons (and no pros that I can find) to suggest that you use WSO Notifications. Still, it's there.

Pros:

Cons:

You can't receive an alert for each new WSO, only those keywords or sellers you setup
You can't setup an alert for just any seller or keyword, only those on their subscription management page
You can't actually manage your alerts -- your subscription management page (after clicking the link in your email messages) doesn't populate with your current choices
You'll receive separate messages, messages you didn't sign up for, that appear to be curated offers from the forum
Notifications contain additional "featured offers"

WSO Scout

Easy of the three here to use, WSO Scout is likely your best bet unless you want the configurability of WarriorPlus.

Pros:

Clean, easy-to-read notifications

Cons:

No other options (although that may be a good thing)

Beginning the Big Unsubscribe

Don — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 03:02:25 +0000

What I'm doing today is the antithesis of list building; it's what every online marketer hates: I'm unsubscribing from dozens of lists.

When I buy something online, I usually sign up to the offered mailing list. Sometimes I want product updates, sometimes I want to hear about related news. Most often I want to see how other marketers promote, so I can learn what (or what not) to do.

Lately I've noticed that many of the marketers who count me on their list are simply regurgitating the offers one can easily find on the Warrior Special Offers Forum. In and of itself that's not not a bad thing, but when that's all they promote—and they no longer promote their own products—then I'm no longer interested. Particularly when I can sign up for WSO Alerts or simply visit the forum for those offers.

Do create and promote your own products. Don't spend all your time promoting what everyone else is promoting.

Signal to noise ratio is also a factor in deciding to stay on a list. Give me information I can use and I'll stick around. Ask me to sign up to your list for product updates and then only send me promotions for more products and I'm gone.

Do send valuable information that your subscribers can use. Don't send more promotions than information.

Lastly, I get very annoyed when a single marketer sends me five or more duplicate messages. This happens because I've bought more than one product from that person and they send the same message to each list.

Do use the "supress duplicates" feature of your autoresponder to ensure that only a single message goes out to each email address. Don't annoy your subscribers.

It's important to follow up with your customers and prospects once they're on your list. Just don't make them leave as quickly as they got there.

[6 unsubscribes so far...]

PHP Configuration Files Are Not Inherited

Don — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 06:51:45 +0000

I has a problem that started a couple days ago on one of my sites, where my custom php.ini file wasn't overriding the server's global php.ini file. This meant that certain directives weren't set and one of my scripts wasn't behaving.

In the back and forth with my web host, after getting someone knowledgable about the issue, I discovered that subdirectories in a site structure do not inherit the php.ini file above them. This was news to me (and it may be peculiar to sites running suPHP); I had simply assumed that any script on a site would be subject to the php.ini in the home directory or the web root. I don't deal frequently with the file, so this had never come up before.

There are two ways around this issue. The first is to create additional php.ini files in each subdirectory that has scripts that are executed or included. This could be time-consuming and you run the risk of overlooking a directory.

The second is to include this directive (pointing to the actual directory containing php.ini) in .htaccess, which will cause the php.ini to be inherited by subfolders:

suPHP_ConfigPath /home/username/public_html

For more information, you may want to peruse this article.

Learning Object-Oriented Programming

Don — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 18:17:34 +0000

Want to learn OOP? Stanford University offers a number of online courses from its catalog, including Programming Methodology (CS106A), through iTunes University—for free!

The course is great for anyone who knows how to turn a computer, or at least can identify a computer that's on. You won't get the collaboration that comes from actually being in the class yourself, but it's still a good start in the basics of modern programming. (I'm personally only versed in procedural programming, so this will teach me a lot of new concepts. As the professor says, since my first programming language was BASIC, I'm likely brain-damaged; maybe the course will repair that.)

I've included some links below that will help you through the course.

Stanford University CS106A site
Course textbook: The Art & Science of Java
Course reader: Karel the Robot Learns Java
Eclipse IDE
Class Handouts

Choosing a Personal Finance App (Part Two)

Don — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 17:50:16 +0000

In August 2009, I abandoned my search for a personal finance app to replace Quicken, but have taken it up once again. With Quicken now unsupported on Lion—because Lion won’t run PowerPC apps and Quicken still hasn’t been updated for Intel Macs—it’s time to look again for something to take its place.

Looking back at the apps I’d started with two years ago, I found some immediate reasons to eliminate a few...

Cha-Ching, which may have been a contender by now, is no longer published. Its developer, Midnight Apps, was purchased by Intuit shortly after I set my previous review aside. mini$, too, has been discontinued.
Squirrel has not yet reached version 1.0; also, it’s now only on the Mac App Store and there is no trial version available for me to review.
Prospects hasn’t been updated in 16 months and the developer’s web site and support forum have seen a similar lack of attention. Without an involved developer, there’s no way I would use or recommend this product.
CheckBook and CheckBook Pro continue to be updated, but reporting is still weak and budgets are non-existent.

...and I found two more contenders to pit against the others: iFinance and SEE Finance.

(Well, there were some others—Budget, Cashculator, Savings, Stash—but these were too limited to consider as Quicken replacements.)

As before, my most important criteria was the app’s ability to accurately import my Quicken data. And, like before, Money, Moneydance, MoneyWell, and iBank all did this with no problem. Whoops, no, I just noticed that iBank incorrectly marked all of my income categories as expenses. And Money marked a liability as a bank account and I can’t change it without deleting the account, creating it again, and importing the data separately. (Money also breaks out transfers in a split.)

SEE Finance, as best as I could tell, correctly imported my data; iFinance, like Money, doesn’t allow transfers in a split and breaks those out.

Fortora Fresh Finance has corrected the issue I had with importing transactions with splits, but it still had other issues: it incorrectly identified the type of several accounts and lost one account’s opening balance.

Speaking of account types, some apps have more than others. Outside of investment accounts, Quicken identifies ten. The contenders range from three (iFinance) to nine (iBank). iFinance can’t identify loans as such; both iFinance and MoneyWell can’t identify assets as anything other than bank accounts.

Liquid Ledger still has a problem with opening balances imported from Quicken. And, not noted before, it doesn’t handle sub-categories the same as Quicken; instead, it breaks them out into fully separate categpries. (Not a real problem, but the ability to group expense categories in Quicken was useful.) Given its lackluster design and the increasingly negative reviews on MacUpdate.com, I decided to pass on this product.

iCompta was disappointing. When I first launched it, there was no welcome, no setup wizard, nothing to make a new user comfortable with beginning to use the product. Next, it still can’t separate Quicken data into separate accounts, and when it created categories from that data it insisted on asking me each time—even though I checked the "Always make this choice" option.

Another quirk was its failure to take Quicken’s transaction type (Deposit, EFT, ATM, etc.) and put it into its own Kind (or "Mean [sic] of Payment") field. Yet another was its insistence upon putting "New Transaction" in the Name field when the Quicken data had no name for the transaction.

All of those could be corrected using its rules feature. But reporting? Nearly non-existent. That removed it from the running.

Fortora Fresh Finance has my basic reporting needs down pat. But the app otherwise isn’t compelling; it really doesn’t feel Mac-like and has a number of interface quirks that turned me off.

I then looked at reporting for the remaining apps. iBank has great looking reports; it lacks a printable budget report, but otherwise there is a good selection of reports. Moneydance has all the reports I need and more, but they lack iBank’s polish.

Money also has great looking reports; it lacks a cashflow report, though, and doesn’t have the breadth of reports of iBank. SEE Finance is similar in types of reports, but their design is average.

MoneyWell is weak in reporting. My biggest complaint is its inability to view reports in the app; instead, one must print the report and preview it in Preview. But it’s also missing a standard balance sheet and its Bucket Summary doesn’t work well as an income statement.

(Before I leave MoneyWell behind, I have to mention that I find its bucket metaphor to be confusing. I know they’re just categories, but there’s "Bucket Flow" and "Filling Buckets"—it’s a bit over the top for me. And Smart Buckets: why can’t I create my own?)

iFinance’s reporting is a mixed bag: while its charts look great, I couldn’t create new ones, and although its reports offered nice analysis, I couldn’t generate a standard balance sheet or income statement. On that basis, I pulled iFinance from the lineup.

SEE Finance has my reporting needs met, so I’m not going to drop it just yet, but it’s a bit awkward to get just the right report.

These final four apps—iBank, Money, Moneydance, and SEE Finance—all do budgets, and my needs in this area are rather modest. Still, I find it annoying that iBank won’t allow me to print a budget report or view a previous month’s budget—and that may be its downfall in the end.

Much of my decision in selecting an app has to do with how well it’s designed, both in overall looks and in ease of use. Two apps out of the remaining four stand out in this regard: iBank and Money. A head-to-head comparison will be the subject of another review. For now, you can take my comments and weigh them against your own evaluation of these apps.

The Night Before Christmas (arr. J. Daniel Smith)

Don — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 03:55:43 +0000

A big shout out to J. Daniel Smith, who arranged The Night Before Christmas, a musical performed at our church tonight. I had a great deal of fun playing the oboe; Daniel scored that part beautifully! I've been enjoying his arranging for better than 20 years. Joel Lindsey, one of the writers of the musical, was in attendance and I don't think we let him down. Well, except that we didn't perform two of the pieces, including one of my favorites, In the First Light.

Sesame Street Glee Parody

Don — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 00:56:20 +0000

This was just too funny!