Net Covered Blog

Making Money Online, Miscellaneous by admin

Many of you are already probably familiar with the story of John Chow but for those who aren’t I’m writing this article. Long story short, he is one of the most successful bloggers out there. John Chow is the owner of the famous site John Chow dot Com with his miscellaneous ramblings of a dot com mogul. He makes money online by telling other people how much money he makes online. Despite his struggle with Google, he’s making tens of thousands dollars each month just with his blog.

Back in December 2006 John Chow started a very aggressive backlink campaign, in which he would give a link back for every review of his blog when the text anchor ‘make money online’ was used. He managed to get 870 links from various sites as a direct result of the campaign. This turned out to be very successful for him as in just two months from the beginning of the campaign his revenue has almost trippled. His blog income has grown very fast from $352.94 in September 2006 to $7,011.05 in February 2007 (increase in revenue is amazing -> $6,658.11). Read the rest of the article

Miscellaneous by admin

First of all, the last week was deadly for me. I was struggling in college, trying to get enough credits to pass the exams plus I had to take care of about a thousand other troubles. There are still few problems ahead (driving license exam on Wednesday…) but at least the college stuff is all gone for few weeks.

Secondly, I have suddenly (I was planning to wait for few more months but somehow couldn’t wait) switched to Wordpress 2.5. That’s right folks, this blog is running on completely new engine now and so far I like it. I haven’t encountered any problems while switching to version 2.5. Just copied all Wordpress files into my blog directory (without wp-config-sample.php and wp-content directory of course) and upgraded the database (one click process) and that’s it.

Honestly, the whole “switching process” took me about 2 minutes. I’d like to thank all Wordpress developers for their hard work and especially for making the jump from 2.3 to 2.5 so smooth and fast. Thank you!

Oh and one more thing. Check out my new logo and give me some feedback. Personally, I think it’s awesome but my opinion is very subjective and maybe biased…

Free webmaster resources, Wordpress by admin

Hello. I’m offering the Net Covered theme for free download. Click here to download this elegant theme with emphasis on the content. Feel free to check out my blog to see how it looks. Of course you will need to make your own logo and banners.

April 18 - uploaded the latest version…

Read the rest of the article

Wordpress by admin

Make sure you have read the first chapter and have done everything I’ve been explaining there. In this part, I will show you how to create the wordpress loop. The loop is the most important portion of your theme. It takes care of displaying posts and articles. Read the rest of the article

Featured, Wordpress by admin

Does your wordpress blog look too dusty? Need a new refreshing theme? You’ve probably already spent hours browsing the web in order to find an ideal one but most of the free themes you’ll find just won’t be good enough. Well, what about making your own theme? Yeah. It’s not that hard. All you need is some experience with HTML and CSS plus maybe a little knowledge of PHP syntax (though this isn’t necessary - it’s enough to copy and paste all PHP codes). Read the rest of the article

Free webmaster resources by admin

I’m giving away for free download few ready to use css templates. All are created with an emphasis on easy modification. Featuring valid XHTML and CSS markup.

If you need any help with them, drop a line in the comments. I’ll gladly help.

Webdesign by admin

It’s really difficult to explain to your client why he ought to want his website coded using CSS layout rather than outdated tabled layout. The person usually knows only very little (or absolutely nothing) about HTML or CSS. It’s best to give him/her few reasons anyone without coding experience or knowledge can easily understand. He/she needs simple answers to complex questions.

Attractive Website

This is the best answer and will persuade almost every client. Everyone wants to have beautiful, modern looking website. The reason why to use CSS isn’t just to make a text bold, italic or underlined. The true reason is tables just cannot create so stunning visual experience. Show your client few professional and modern looking websites and say: “This is done with CSS.” I can guarantee almost everyone will be convinced right away.

Make More And Save More Money

What if you still haven’t convinced the client? Don’t worry, this will do it. Everbody wants to gain profit from his or her website but most of the people think that all websites have equal profit potential. The truth is that cleaner and semantic code that separates content from presentation is more valuable and it will rank better in search engines. That means more traffic, more customers and finally more money!

On top of that, CSS will also save your money in a longer run. Sooner or later, you’ll certainly want to change something about your site - whether it be color scheme, font or anything else. Instead of editing every HTML or PHP file by hand you’ll just need to edit the stylesheet and you’re done. It’s less time consuming and will save you much money especially when you are hiring a professional coder to modify your site.

Think Forward

The Internet keeps changing from day to day and so do browser capabilities. CSS is a guarantee of longevity and endurance. CSS protects your site from becoming outdated too soon. It protects your investitions and business interests. When your potential client finds out that CSS will ensure his website’s future and capacitate it for future growth, you won’t need to convince him further.

Blind People

“CSS helps blind people.” Mentioning that when discussing the layout will help a lot. Businessmen don’t like to be seen as ones limiting opportunities of disabled people. That would ruin their reputation. They will come to a conclusion that making their website accessible to blind people will shape their image as a highly professional and smooth company. “It will make things look shiny and reliable,” they will think. And rightfully so.

Conclusion

Of course there are instances where tables will do better job than CSS. Over and above, some things can be done only in tables (I might write about that in the future). When you see that tables would be a better solution be fair about it and tell it to the client. But honestly, those are only extreme cases. Most of the time, the CSS will do better. The only problem is that people still don’t know what the acronym means (even though it’s been around for quite few years). They are familiar with the HTML but don’t know what CSS really is about. That’s why you need to give theme simple and persuasive answers when they ask something like: “Why not use tabled layout on my website?”. The four I’ve listed will do the job sufficiently.

Miscellaneous by admin

SearchMe is a new interesting search engine and it seems like it could become a serious player. But how is it different from other search engines like Google or Yahoo? It offers visual searching.

Right. Once you type in what you are looking for, instead of ordinary list of related websites you’ll see the actual screenshots. That will help you decide whether the site is relevant to what you’re looking for or not without clicking on any link. Additionally, as you start typing - categories appear that relate to your query. That can save some time, too. Of course besides visual searching you will get also standard text search results.

They have already around a billion indexed sites. That’s good start - it’s negligible compared to giants like Google but remember it’s still in beta. We’ll see if it will pull off. I’ve already signed up for a private testing and I’m awaiting invitation within next few days. I will be then able to give you more information.

Wordpress by admin

So you’ve just started a new blog, right? And you need more traffic, right? The problem you are experiencing is the usual one and many other bloggers (including me) are dealing with it. I will tell you what I have done in few last days to promote this blog.

Crucial Plugins

There are few important plugins you should consider installing before you do anything else. All in One SEO is one of them. It gives you almost endless possibilities to tweak everything that hangs together with SEO. You can comfortably change the blog’s title and format, set description and keywords and much more. Another two plugins I really recommend you to use are KB Robots.txt plugin and XML Sitemap Generator for WordPress plugin. You will be able to easily manage and modify your sitemaps and robots.txt file (the first thing search engines do when they visit any site is to request robots.txt file).

Submit Your Blog to Search Engines

This one is a real must do. As soon as your blog is online go and submit it to the major search engines (Google, Yahoo etc). Don’t forget to submit also your RSS feed. Once you are done with that you should consider tweaking your website’s search results via so called webmaster tools (Google Webmaster Tools for instance). Set up prefered domain (I recommend the one without www), submit xml sitemap and so on.

Backlinks!

Backlinks are a backbone of improving PR (page rank) and also your ranking at search engines. How to get them? There are many ways - blogroll exchanges with other blogs (preferably with similar niche), link exchanges, posting comments containing your url on popular blogs etc. I have one very good tip to gather backlinks though. Forum posting. Yes, I have recently noticed that some of my sites are getting strong backlinks from forums such as Digital Point. Of course, you must place the website into your signature and start posting regularly to get some backlinks.

Social Bookmarking

It can help a lot to register at Technorati and submit your blog there. Once you will get good enough reputation the results will be visible. Moreover you will get some additional backlinks. Try using some social bookmarking plugin, too. For example, my blog uses this social bookmarking plugin. It looks smooth and offers many customization options. You can see it at the end of my articles. When readers like your articles they will be able to help you a bit by clicking little icons under each post (like Del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Sphinn, Stumbleupon etc).

Pinging

Update your blog as often as you can (though it’s better not to make a new post for 2-3 days if you’re too busy than to post some boring stuff - articles posted just for the sake of update tend to be bad) and every time you add a new article - ping it! Pinging means letting search engines to know that your blog has updated. Go to Ping-O-Matic or some other similar site and ping. Just don’t overdo it. Ping only when you add new content… no need to ping when you just changed font or color of the links - that’s counter-productive.

Miscellaneous by admin

I have been using quite a few either commercial or free firewalls in the past (including Norton Personal Firewall, ZoneAlarm, Seagate and probably few others I dont even remember) but I’ve got to tell you the truth folks… So far, none of the firewalls I’ve used managed to beat Comodo Firewall Pro 3.0. I’ve been using it for a few last months and I am completely satisfied with its performance, security, easy of use and user-friendly interface.

Comodo Firewall Pro 3.0.18.309 is the final and first release of Comodo Personal Firewall 3 and contains support for Vista, a new interface and a bunch of improved security features, including host intrusion protection, network-based firewall and an application analysis engine. The most important thing about Comodo is that it passes all known leak tests to ensure integrity of data entering and exiting your system. Comodo secures your system against internal attacks such as trojans, viruses, malicious software and also external attacks by hackers. Second appealing thing about Comodo is its simplicity. You don’t need to spend hours editing settings to harden the performance and security. Comodo works just fine with default settings. Even if you need to change something, it can easily be done with a single click.

The only thing I didn’t like is its way of getting information about your system after new installation. You will have to go through day or two of occasional permission pop-ups asking you whether Comodo should or should not trust certain application. The trusted applications are then added to the Safe list. Once it adapts to applications and software you use most often, it will become almost invisible and won’t ask about anything.

Interface

There are four tabs once you open Comodo control centre - Summary, Firewall, Defence+ and Miscellaneous.

The first one you see is the summary. It gives you the information about system status, ingoing and outgoing internet connections, condition of proactive defence (Defence+), traffic stats and more.

Under the Firewall tab, there are many options. You are able to manage stuff like defining a new trusted program, blocking a specific program, view active connections and many other specific features usual user wont ever need but thy can be very useful for more advanced users or when you are planning to use Comodo in your work or business.

Under the Defence+ tab, there is a lot of useful options such as ability to protect files and folders, quarantine a file, view and terminate processes, protection against registry changes and the list goes on.

Miscellaneous tab contains infromation about version of the firewall, you can check for updates, browse support forums to get help and more.

Conclusion

Have you been looking for an ideal firewall? No need to look further - you have found one. Combination of Comodo and proper antivirus will sufficiently protect your computer agains online dangers and will safe you a lot of time, too. I can only recommend this vintage piece of software.