tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-357247372009-11-02T13:55:56.466-08:00Chronicles of a regular guy's rise to earning a living off the web...sockmoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12215969378241877035noreply@blogger.comBlogger87125sock_moneyhttp://feedburner.google.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35724737.post-17080928995364869602009-11-02T13:35:00.000-08:002009-11-02T13:55:56.496-08:002009-11-02T13:55:56.496-08:00

Toys for Tots is one of my favorite charities to donate to every year. For me, it goes beyond simply donating cash (which is always a great donation by the way) by allowing me to go out and personally pick out some cool toys for underprivileged kids.If you think about what the holiday season meant to you as a kid, and how great it was to get a gift, then you know just how meaningful something as

sockmoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12215969378241877035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35724737.post-54631691961937099002009-09-14T07:47:00.000-07:002009-09-14T18:18:59.496-07:002009-09-14T18:18:59.496-07:00

This post is a bit outdated since the hack actually occurred about 8 months ago. But I thought it might be helpful to some folks who find themselves in the same boat I was in.Back in early February I was hacking around my production Linux server when I happened to stumble upon a bizarre command in my "history" file. It was a removal command for a script I had never heard of... My stomach about

sockmoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12215969378241877035noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35724737.post-30280879320648527602009-08-07T12:44:00.000-07:002009-08-07T13:02:02.348-07:002009-08-07T13:02:02.348-07:00

I discovered a very interesting problem in the last month or so in regards to something called the "Bogon list". I had never heard of the Bogon list before, but after doing some research, I discovered it is a list of reserved IP ranges not released for public use.Now from what I read online, many network routers across the internet will by default block request to and from IP address in the

sockmoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12215969378241877035noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35724737.post-21998234158653530322009-01-26T06:28:00.000-08:002009-01-26T06:46:25.281-08:002009-01-26T06:46:25.281-08:00

My ISP starting offering lease-to-own deals many years ago on dedicated servers.  At the time, you would pay an extra $25/month or so to sign-up.  Then after a year, your payment would get prorated down, and after two years you would own the server out-right.I didn't really think much of the long term benefit of it at the time since I was swapping up my servers so often in the early days to

sockmoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12215969378241877035noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35724737.post-40728543718615077522009-01-06T07:34:00.000-08:002009-01-06T07:45:24.097-08:002009-01-06T07:45:24.097-08:00

This one is kind of obvious once you think about it, but I had overlooked it in my code, so I figured maybe some other webmasters out there may have as well.  I found this snippet explaining the tip I want to share from a site called websitedatabases.com: MySQL also uses indexes for LIKE comparisons if the argument to LIKE is a constant string that doesn't start with a wildcard character. For

sockmoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12215969378241877035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35724737.post-40922265982043156122008-12-13T21:01:00.000-08:002008-12-14T07:05:50.509-08:002008-12-14T07:05:50.509-08:00

I've been researching whether or not to utilize the "nofollow" attribute on my user-generated links for about a week now.It is pretty amazing how many different valid opinions are out there on this topic.  From one perspective (Google), Doctor Matt Cutts insists that the world is indeed round, and that we are all safe to use the nofollow tag where ever user-generated content allows links to be

sockmoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12215969378241877035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35724737.post-14262350490372761102008-11-20T06:26:00.000-08:002008-11-20T06:41:34.110-08:002008-11-20T06:41:34.110-08:00

A few weeks back I was reading a forum thread over at DigitalPoint about a webmaster who had added some handy navigation links to his pages that helped him browse through his content more easily.  He was talking about how he had initially added the new navigation links to help him keep up with monitoring the content more easily.  However after implementing his new links, he found the total

sockmoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12215969378241877035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35724737.post-32876913251030589942008-10-27T06:53:00.001-07:002008-10-27T11:19:32.818-07:002008-10-27T11:19:32.818-07:00

This is a huge tip for webmasters out there who have not yet discovered the new 404 feature released in Google's Webmaster Tools.Matt Cutts did an great review on the new 404 error page feature to outline the exact steps you can take to see if you are missing out on a slew of links from other sites that may be simply mis-typed or mal-formed.I reviewed my 404 error stats and found I had close to

sockmoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12215969378241877035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35724737.post-16768524520682112032008-09-10T06:30:00.000-07:002008-11-11T12:04:41.082-08:002008-11-11T12:04:41.082-08:00

Disclaimer:  I do not  recommend you try this technique outlined below.  I am explaining it for the sake of demonstration, and I do not condone this type of search engine "gaming".   Hopefully the more cases like this we expose, the better Google can make their search results.UPDATE:  The following site was finally busted by Google and removed from SERPs.  Good work Google!  It is great to see

sockmoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12215969378241877035noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35724737.post-38365489453408867422008-09-04T08:12:00.000-07:002008-09-04T08:52:24.007-07:002008-09-04T08:52:24.007-07:00

I just dropped by Shoemoney.com and found out Jeremy is having a contest for folks to submit entries stating how they could add value to this event by attending.  The winner gets an all expense paid trip to the conference.  Pretty cool.So being the competitor I am, and having spent my last 8 years in seclusion, I thought this might be something worth going after.  So here is my submission:What

sockmoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12215969378241877035noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35724737.post-6044663035878999732008-09-03T14:05:00.000-07:002008-09-03T14:37:32.286-07:002008-09-03T14:37:32.286-07:00

Have you ever noticed ads showing up on your site from Adsense that don't seem to be contextual for the page or even your site for that matter?  I recently started noticing ads showing on my almost all my pages that had nothing to do with my site or my pages.  They were borderline spammy ads:Weight-loss tricksHow to make moneyEtcI started to add them to my competitive ad filter block list when it

sockmoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12215969378241877035noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35724737.post-10978899186751367512008-06-26T06:20:00.000-07:002008-06-26T06:44:27.050-07:002008-06-26T06:44:27.050-07:00

I recently discovered a wonderful little server tool called memcached. I believe it stands for "memory cache daemon". For sites/servers that are heavily dependent on dynamic data (ie - databases), it can be a life saver. Over the years I have upgraded my server every couple years for more processors and more RAM, but it never seemed to be enough for my growing traffic. Memcached seems to be the

sockmoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12215969378241877035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35724737.post-62866031540345957642008-06-04T08:13:00.000-07:002008-06-04T09:12:29.589-07:002008-06-04T09:12:29.589-07:00

Last Christmas my loving wife gifted me a new iPhone. I had traded in my trusty Sidekick II for this cutting edge piece of gadgetry. The only problem I had with my new iPhone was I could not remote SSH to my servers/websites for maintenance work while on the road. My Sidekick had a great little Terminal application that let me connect to any of my servers from pretty much any where in the

sockmoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12215969378241877035noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35724737.post-52217736362284544372008-04-10T13:37:00.000-07:002008-04-10T13:42:20.706-07:002008-04-10T13:42:20.706-07:00

In regards to starting a website, I guess my advice would be to start small and test your market first. Don't rush off and invest a lot of money until you figure out if the idea/product is going to work... or if there is even a market for it... etc. Patience is also key. New websites can take a long time to catch on, and they require tons of work on the owners part to market and keep it going

sockmoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12215969378241877035noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35724737.post-14005770266454434452008-03-28T10:04:00.001-07:002008-03-30T08:19:00.438-07:002008-03-30T08:19:00.438-07:00

We read it every day in the webmaster forums around the web. Google changed their algorithm and my site disappeared. Webmasters around the world are in a constant state of flux as they chase Google's tail. My recommendation for a more stable site... forget about the Googles of the world.If you launch a site that has gardening information that can be found in 1000 other sites, yeah, no one is

sockmoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12215969378241877035noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35724737.post-438571642902644672008-03-19T08:43:00.000-07:002008-03-19T08:53:51.570-07:002008-03-19T08:53:51.570-07:00

Well it has been a few weeks since my last post on community moderation. For those of you who may not have been following my last few posts on the subject, I decided to change my forum moderation standards from quite flexible and forgiving to more strict and iron-fisted.All my attempts at controlling the fighting and problems with technology were failing miserably. Folks were abusing whatever

sockmoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12215969378241877035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35724737.post-19628067727279399102008-03-06T06:18:00.000-08:002008-03-06T06:32:44.260-08:002008-03-06T06:32:44.260-08:00

So I was reading the latest "Twitter" post on Shoemoney.com yesterday. After commenting that I was "twittered out" from reading about Twitter every day, I was surprised to see my comment was never "approved" to be published. Funny how that works. Anyway, I found it interesting that Shoemoney was actually finding it useful, so I visited his Twitter site/blog/whatever. Un-interestingly I found a

sockmoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12215969378241877035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35724737.post-82511899362842822672008-03-04T16:21:00.000-08:002008-03-04T16:27:19.035-08:002008-03-04T16:27:19.035-08:00

I thought I would share a quick story regarding my recent discovery of a site called naymz.com.I stumbled upon this site while doing a search for myself on Google. It was, in fact, the number one result for me. Intrigued, I checked out the site. One click and the site loads up a page that shows all kinds of private information about me. My current address information, my last 5 residences

sockmoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12215969378241877035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35724737.post-34734009607041836322008-02-24T08:11:00.000-08:002008-02-24T08:50:22.062-08:002008-02-24T08:50:22.062-08:00

Over a year ago I decided to make my community site homepage a static page. It was a page that combined a high number of complicated queries, and hence put quite a load on the database every time it was called. Since our homepage itself usually updated with new content every 5-10 minutes or so, I made the call to have a static version of it created via CRON every 5 minutes or so.The result was

sockmoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12215969378241877035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35724737.post-59245060206165118242008-02-24T08:02:00.000-08:002008-02-24T08:11:26.984-08:002008-02-24T08:11:26.984-08:00

I just wanted to post an update in regards to my last post. It has been a few weeks and things have changed quite a bit! Some users liked the new moderation feature, many did not. Apparently, as always, some users figured out ways to game the system by turning blocks on and off again so other posts could not see what they were posting.Long story short, we decided to revamp the new block system

sockmoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12215969378241877035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35724737.post-87437372358636626312008-02-04T17:55:00.000-08:002008-02-04T18:16:03.120-08:002008-02-04T18:16:03.120-08:00

One of my larger forums (50k+ members) recently encountered a community meltdown. Tension between veteran members had been growing for months and finally folks were letting their steam out. Fighting, arguing, harassing, you name it, it was going on. When you read up on the topic of community moderation, most folks always give the same advice: Just ban the problem users. But what if the

sockmoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12215969378241877035noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35724737.post-7170530265541106892007-12-24T12:08:00.000-08:002007-12-24T12:32:46.386-08:002007-12-24T12:32:46.386-08:00

I agree completely with what Google is trying to accomplish with the change. I think it is a step in the right direction for the industry as a whole in regards to quality.That said... We were hit by the clickable area change as many other sites were from a revenue perspective. We've been testing a few different ad formats to see if can't make up some of the revenue we are losing. Previously we

sockmoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12215969378241877035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35724737.post-7837396000735173052007-11-25T05:52:00.000-08:002007-11-25T06:09:30.102-08:002007-11-25T06:09:30.102-08:00

I was reading an interesting thread over on Problogger.net about readers versus visitors, and who do you try to accommodate more.It got me to thinking about my own site of course, and some changes I had been putting in place recently. About a month back I started to make some changes to my site(s) that focused on enhancing the user experience for members. Previously my site looked and acted

sockmoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12215969378241877035noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35724737.post-37242877487201768012007-11-04T04:43:00.000-08:002007-11-04T05:19:50.369-08:002007-11-04T05:19:50.369-08:00

I am always stumbling across these "top 100 paying keyword" lists in webmaster forums around the web. Top 100, top 50, top 10, whatever... you get the point.Then, as sure as the sun will rise every morning, a flock of newbies comment on how great the list is and how they are going to make more sites and get rich...It got me to thinking. Why do I never pay attention to such lists? I see them all

sockmoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12215969378241877035noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35724737.post-26571951036844361102007-11-03T06:44:00.000-07:002007-11-03T09:54:09.283-07:002007-11-03T09:54:09.283-07:00

Well it was bound to happen. I ran across yet another site that appears to have scraped over 10,000 pages of my content. Luckily for me, their search scripts were not very secure and they allowed me to alter the query string parameters to pull up all the pages I needed to send to both Google and Yahoo in my DMCA violation report.These guys were even dumb enough to use the exact same page title,

sockmoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12215969378241877035noreply@blogger.com1