We did it! We reached another vital publication milestone this week: 2,000 WordPress.com Followers for this Boles Blog! WordPress Dot com followers are terrifically hard to get compared with Facebook and Google+ and Twitter because you can’t really virally — paid or not — advertise to get people to join your blog.
Continue reading → Two Thousand Boles Blogs Followers on WordPress Dot Com!
If you live on social media networks, or if you write a blog, or manage a Facebook page, you’ve certainly seen a rise in efforts to game the networks for profit. Way back on September 11, 2006, I predicted right here on this blog that people would begin to use Avatars — their online identity — to make money by selling their craven image to the highest bidder:
What’s to stop active — or better yet, INactive — blog commenters from getting hired by companies to change their Avatar to promote a website or a phone number or some other advertising blitz? Can you imagine being a new beer company and going out and finding the top 1,000 blog commenters and having them all change their Avatars to the logo for your beer?
Why it’s sheer viral genius! You could buy hundreds of thousands of page views on the cheap that could reach for years back into the history of Avatar-enabled blog pages on thousands of blogs — and the beauty part is this: No one would be the wiser.
The Search Engines already indexed and tagged the old content as safe and sufficient and your Avatar Ads would be silently served up when a search return is clicked through to the blog. The Blogmaster would never know — especially if you were not posting recent comments.
Continue reading → Preventing Avatar Spam and Gaming Facebook LIKEs
The realm of Bitcoin is one of confusion and the dark market. Bitcoin is a tertiary form of payment that is slowly taking over the backroads of the Internet. Bitcoins are holograms, Bitcoins are nothing but bits and bytes in the internet ether and, sometimes, Bitcoins are actually made of metal you can hold in your hand.
Continue reading → Realm of the Bitcoin Black Market Economy
I am still devastated by the news Google Reader will be killed as a service on July 1, 2013. As a writer and publisher, 50 times a day, I get all my clean feed news from Google Reader. Sure, Feedly seems like an okay replacement for now, but what concerns me most about the demise of Google Reader is what that closing means for other non-tip-of-the-spear products like Google Voice and Blogger in the Google arsenal of free services.
Continue reading → Are Google Voice and Blogger Next on the Axeman’s Block?
This morning, I posted a support query in the deep and authentic WordPress.com Support Forum concerning previous discussions of the “Quantcast Pixel” that is loaded for each WordPress.com blog. It seems that if you visit the Quantcast site, anyone can get information on your WordPress.com blog just by entering your blog name at the end of the Quantcast URL. Here’s the text of my support inquiry — I have added the screenshots for this article:
Continue reading → Quantcast Proprietary Pixel Query for WordPress.com
UPDATE – April 9, 2012: The Boles Blogs Network is now back on WordPress.com. We are keeping this article published in case it might help others in the future.
If you’re running your own WordPress Multisite installation, you know having a proper and secure backup plan is a must in today’s wretched world where bad people love to tear down good things instead of building them up from scratch. Backing up your WordPress files and database on a regular basis are not tough tasks, but they can become cumbersome and gruesome if your schedule overcomes you and if you then allow your self-serving security needs to become lackadaisical.
Enter VaultPress! VaultPress is built by Automattic to cleanly and invisibly secure your WordPress installations and VaultPress now supports WordPress Multisite. The catch is that pricing for WordPress Multisite VaultPress protection is confusing. Today, I have the proper answers for you in detail.
Continue reading → The Definitive Answer on VaultPress and WordPress Multisite Pricing
UPDATE – April 9, 2012: The Boles Blogs Network is now back on WordPress.com! We will write another article explaining the why and how of moving back. We’re leaving this article online because it might benefit someone else seeking to export their WP.com blog to a standalone WordPress installation.
Welcome to my first new article since the Boles Blogs Network had to leave our hosting setup on WordPress.com because of a strange billing anomaly that threatened the viability of our publishing network core.
Here’s what happened…
Two years ago, when I moved my blogs from a self-hosted Movable Type installation over to WordPress.com, I had the expert help of Automattic employee Lloyd Dewolf (Budd) — who is no longer with the company — to get all my thousands of posts imported into WordPress.com blogs. As a blogs-warming gift, Lloyd waived the fee for domain mapping for the first year for all my imported blogs. We added a few other blogs during that first year, and I paid the domain mapping fees.
A year passed.
I paid for another year of domain mapping upgrades for all 14 blogs.
Another year passed.
I am now unable to renew, and pay for, my domain mapping upgrades as you can see in the screenshot below. There was a major “Upgrade” to the way WordPress.com now handles their shopping cart that somehow broke my ability to pay my way on the service. Notice there’s no “Renew Now” button for me to click for BolesBlues.com? The domain mapping says it was purchased by “wpcomvip” and not me and that’s a problem.
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