Jerry Leventer

I just upgraded to Version 2.2 of Alex Goodall’s IM-Index

This is a product I recommend. If you already have lots of downloads and project files on your hard drive, IM Index will allow you to more easily organize all your internet marketing projects and information.

And if you are just starting out, the IM Index will provide you with not only a Map of where to put all your files on your hard drive, but an entire Blueprint of How to Get Started with Internet Marketing.

Here’s a snapshot of the IM Index Organization tool, A-Z of Internet Marketing section:

And here’s a snapshot of the IM Index Project Planning section:

What I’ve heard is that the owners of Wordpress have been considering breaking into the Social Networking market. But there’s a catch. You have to use Wordpress MU.

What’s that? It’s the lesser known, installable version of Wordpress that allows multiple users to create their own blogs using one hosting server. That’s what Wordpress.com is all about. For example, http://JerryLeventer.Wordpress.com is located on the well known Wordpress’s MU platform. The difference is that with WPMU anyone can setup that type of multi-user blogging community.

The idea that you have to put all your content on someone else’s site in order to network with your friends and associates does not appeal to a lot of people, including myself. I would rather one of us be the owner of that content. So this will be an alternative to sites like Ning, MySpace, LinkedIn, FaceBook.

That is why Matt Mullenweg has hired Andy Peatling, the guy who developed BuddyPress, and they are now working together to create a Social Networking plugin for Wordpress MU.

TechVibes describes BuddyPress as,

[...] a series of plug-ins that allows you to turn a Wordpress MU instillation into a fully functional social network.

[Read more →]

Here’s the latest information I received from Skype tech support.

The procedure for backing up your history files on a Windows XP machine is the following:

Locate the folder “Application Data\Skype\<your username>” and copy it to another location such as a CD or DVD-ROM.

To restore the history files just copy the files back to that folder.

These files are stored as .dbb files and can only be read with Skype itself. Unfortunately you cannot recover from a corrupt history file.

Be aware that the above files contain all of your chat room history files. You cannot save separate chat room history using that method.

If you want to preserve the history of one specific chat for reading it later, type “/htmlhistory” (without the quotes) into the chat text area and press enter. The entire chat history will open in an internet browser. You can save it for reviewing later by selecting “File > Save Page As”.

Back in January 2006, when I was looking for an online business coach, I posted on Allan Gardyne’s forum asking about two coaches I had heard about. Lynn Terry replied to my post and I went over to Self Starters Weekly Tips to check out her site. I found lots of friendly and helpful people who were in different stages of their own business success stories.

It turns out I had stumbled onto one of the best discussion forums on the internet. I was not experienced enough, however, to appreciate it. It wasn’t till almost a year later that I knew enough to know that spending time on Lynn’s websites was more worthwhile than jumping from one “next great thing” to another. [Read more →]

When you upgrade Wordpress to version 2.3, this will provide automatic settings to fix the canonical URL issues.

Canonical URL’s is not a difficult concept to understand once you look at what the SEO issues are.

If your home page is located at http://www.YourSite.com/ then Google and other search engines will index that page. However, if the search engine also finds your site at http://YourSite.com/ that will appear as a separate page, and could be filtered as duplicate content. If twenty people all link to your site with one or the other URL, that’s fine. But if ten link to one version of the URL and ten to the other, the overall SEO value of those links becomes divided. Your PageRank and your keyword rankings will suffer.

In previous versions of Wordpress, before the upgrade to version 2.3, you had to enter code into your .htaccess file to achieve the desired canonicalization of your URL’s.

That code, combined with permalink structure, would look like the following:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
# - BEGIN - CANONICALIZATION
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^jerryleventer.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.jerryleventer.com/$1 [R=301,L]
# - END -
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

Needless to say, the fix provided in Wordpress version 2.3 provides a much needed solution.

You can read more in this article at Wordpress.org .

[tags]Wordpress, Upgrade, Canonical URL[/tags]

Here are a couple easy steps you can take to prevent your Wordpress Blog from being “hacked”.

1) It is easy for someone to view your themes and plugins folders if you don’t do this one little thing.

Launch your favorite text editor and save a new file as index.php.

Then paste the following code into it:

<?php
// Redirect to specified URL
$URL = “http://www.yoursite.com/”;
header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
header(”Location: $URL”);
exit();
?>

[Read more →]

1996:  The largest Internet collaboration, “24 Hours in Cyberspace,” took place.

1978:  The proceedings of the United States Senate were first broadcast on radio.

1974:  After 84 days in space, the crew of the first American space station Skylab returned to Earth.

1971:  The Nasdaq stock market index opened.

1922:  President Warren G. Harding introduced the first radio into the White House.

1879:  Sandford Fleming proposed adoption of Universal Standard Time at a meeting of the Royal Canadian Institute.

Happy Birthday:
John Grisham (1955)
Mary Steenburgen (1953)
Nick Nolte (1941)
Ted Koppel (1940)
James Dean (1931-1955)
Jack Lemmon (1925-2001)
Jules Verne (1828-1905)
Daniel Bernoulli (1700-1782)

RIP Anna Nicole Smith (d. 2007)

[tags]This Day In History, Technology, Internet[/tags]

As I’m about to upload a video to YouTube, I decided to read their Terms of Service. I fould this paragraph, and I believe it is the most important item to read as far as how it affects your rights when you submit a video.

Basically, the YouTube Terms of Service are telling you that when you submit a video to their site, you are allowing YouTube to maintain a copy on their server forever. If you remove your video from the YouTube site, they still have the right to keep the video. What exactly they can do with it for their own purposes remains a bit unclear due to the legalistic jargon. So, here it is for your reading pleasure…

C. For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions.

However, by submitting User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube’s (and its successors’ and affiliates’) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the YouTube Website (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels.

You also hereby grant each user of the YouTube Website a non-exclusive license to access your User Submissions through the Website, and to use, reproduce, distribute, display and perform such User Submissions as permitted through the functionality of the Website and under these Terms of Service.

The above licenses granted by you in User Videos terminate within a commercially reasonable time after you remove or delete your User Videos from the YouTube Service. You understand and agree, however, that YouTube may retain, but not display, distribute, or perform, server copies of User Submissions that have been removed or deleted.

The above licenses granted by you in User Comments are perpetual and irrevocable.

[tags]You Tube, Terms of Service, Video Upload [/tags]

Here’s a tip that may be useful to those of you who have lots of programs installed and are using the Classic Start Button view.

When you select the programs list from the Windows XP Start button menu, are you unable to view all the programs?

There are two ways to solve this problem.

1) Temporarily set your display to a higher resolution.

If your display is set to 1024 x 768 you may be having this problem. To set it to a higher resolution, do the following:

- Press Winbutton+d to “Show Desktop” and minimize all open windows.
- Right click on a blank area of the desktop and select “Properties”.
- Select the “Settings” tab.
- Slide the slider to 1280 x 720.
- Click OK

The problem with this solution is that you may not want to have your resolution set that high. The main disadvantage is that all the screen fonts become very small and difficult to read.

Therefore, there is another option.

2) You need to access your Start Menu options.

- Locate a blank area of your Taskbar and right click.
- Select “Properties”.
- Select the “Customize” tab.
- Click the “Advanced” tab.
- In the “Start Menu Items” area, scroll all the way to the bottom.
- Three items above “System Administration Tools” you will see a check box called, “Scroll Programs”.
- Be sure that box is checked.
- Click OK, and click OK again.

Now test it to see that you can view all your programs by using the scrolling list, and that’s it.

[tags]Windows XP, Start Menu Programs, Technical Tips[/tags]

I joined Sherman Hu’s Wordpress Tutorials in 2006. In 2007 he began his Huddle webinars for his members. Like everyone else I know who is attemting to find the best tools to get the job done, he has had his successes and failures.

Here’s what he has to say:

I’m returning home to Glance (desktop sharing) and “The Basement Ventures” (bridge lines).

In addition, several regular attendees requested options to listening to the audio on the web/computer, instead of dialing in by phone. After considering my options, I’ve settled on Skypecasts (from Skype.com) as the way to listen to the Huddle as a webcast. This will be a new feature to our Huddle, and fingers-crossed, it’ll work well to be a regular feature. Details will be in the column to the right.

Click here to visit Sherman Hu’s Wordpress Tutorials.

[tags]Sherman Hu, Wordpress Tutorials, Conference Rooms, The Basement Ventures, Glance, Desktop Sharing, Bridge Lines, Skype Rooms, Skypecasts[/tags]