Oct 30 2009

Paypal: Secured On-line Money Banking

Category: BloggingThe Writer @ 8:12 am

Sign up for PayPal and start accepting credit card payments instantly.

These days, with more and more people getting on line to sell and promote blogs, businesses and products, there is a greater need to have a well established money management platform to cater to transactions on line.

If you intend to make money online, you need to start with a few basics:
- credit card
- Paypal account
- reliable and trusted internet banking service

I cannot help you with the third one as it depends on the country you are residing in. But make sure, you are able to access to your banking statements and accounts on- line wherever you are. Some banks appear to be quite sophisticated in their services but in reality the staff is not trained to handle requests with regard to internet banking.

To test whether the staff or banking personnels are equipped with the knowledge of doing such banking transactions, you can simply ask an officer to explain the mechanics of how you may get to view and make transactions on-line. This may take you between 15-30 minutes but it is very important. When you travel, you do not want to get caught in a banking system that cannot serve you on demand. If the staff just hand out a brochure and expects you to read and understand, walk out and leave. Do not try a new bank just for the sake of it. Your money is not a laundry item, you need to get it right the first time.

One of the tools used by banking on line is the one time login password which is given to you to your mobile phone. This is better than the dongle which some banks give you and chargeable when you lose it. I have tried both, and certainly the bank that gives you a one time password through sms on your phone is still the best.

When you have a credit card, only then can you set up a Paypal account that can be linked your account to your credit card. The benefits of the paypal account is that you only need to give merchants your paypal account link and therefore other information will be kept confidential

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Oct 18 2009

2 Wordpress Plugins That Really Hate Spammers

Category: Blogging, wordpress pluginThe Writer @ 2:54 am

Here are 2 of my favourite wordpress plugins that really hate spammers:
1. Akismet
2. Wp-spamfree

Agreed: “An extremely powerful anti-spam plugin for WordPress that eliminates comment spam, including trackback and pingback spam. It works invisibly without CAPTCHA’s, or other inconvenience to site visitors. The plugin includes spam-free contact form feature as well. Finally, you can enjoy a spam-free WordPress blog!”

In particular, I give wp-spamfree the thumbs up because as soon as it is installed, I was botfree and spamfree. Go download them now.

It is one thing to have good traffic, it is quite another when these traffic are just bots or robots that seems to find their way into your comment posts and drop in links that are repetitive and annoyingly irrelevant. These spammers, as they are called, will take a lot of your time and energy off productive work online.

p.s. I did try using comment policy but it did not keep the bots or robots from creeping in on the comment posts. It turns out not effective in keeping those spammers at bay.

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Sep 07 2009

Accused Of Stealing Post? Check Again

Category: Blogging, wordpress pluginadmin @ 6:53 am

How do you know if a post is original and has not been stolen, plagarised or re-edited?

A recent comment on my last post on  Comment Policy Plugin For Wordpress was written in Russian: По-моему, у Вас украли эту статью и поместили на другом сайте. Я её уже видела. Since I do not read Russian, I have to translate it and it actually says, “I think you stole this article and placed on another site. I had already seen.”

I certainly do not need to clarify why I posted the article as this is my homepage. Yet, comments like these bug me because it makes me wonder if readers can ’smell’ if posts have been plagarised, stolen or re-edited? I am feeling quite glad actually that you have made that comment. Otherwise I would not have been able to update this site this week for many reasons; I’ve not been online browsing for a few days. Now I have.

Here is a screenshot from subscribing to Gobala Krishnan’s website since 2008, click to see the bigger picture:

Screen_01 Sep. 07 13.26

Topics on sales and marketing excite me less than website building tools. You can tell that I have only read two letters that do not have anything to do with sales and purchases.

Here’s the letter I received regarding his comment policy for wordpress:

Screen_02 Sep. 07 13.26

Wordpress plugins are great to work with as long as you understand their uses and how to set them right. There are enough make money online blogs and sharing another one online just does not cut out for me. This letter however, is more of a teaching tool, no coupons attached.  If you have read the post correctly, credit to the creator of this plugin is given at the end of the post.

Screen_03 Sep. 07 13.41

How do you know if a post has been plagarised, copied and re-edited? In other words, how is this not stolen?

  1. You give credit (link) to the source of the article.
  2. You do not give the reader option to download the plugin , software or script from your own website. (very importantly not to try this without prior permission to redistribute from your local domain.)
  3. You use the explanation given by the source site and then always make reference back the source file in a hyperlink.

It is easy for me to understand this because every now and then, my own original post are linked word for word without any literature whatsoever to mention that it has come from my website,  except for two words “read more…..” Naughty naughty. That is pure cut and paste, lazy way of giving credit to the blogger who wrote.

Some people look for the about page to read about the author’s profile. I have not created my about page yet because I simply want to use this blog to focus on my journey online and not on myself. Maria Montessori is the only page I have got so far and that is because of my Montessori training background. You can read “How This Domain Is Inspired?”

Linking back to the source url is very important if you have indeed written something about or from another url. It shows your networking presence online and certainly open doors for readers who are interested in the topic to go right to the source with one click.

If you notice, headline news websites are great culprits for posting news word for word from the source without linking back to the source. Just type in Michael Jackson’s news and you can see for yourself. Read at least 5 news on the latest and you can certainly find the same form of writing and layout.

Yet another trick bloggers used to cut and past original text without linking back to the source url is by writing only the first 160 characters in his own words because in search engine optimisation (SEO) practice, only the first 160 and last few of the post will be crawled or spidered completely when a reader enter his keywords. I have read many myself and their google page rank is so high, you won’t believe it until you study the rest of the post.

Another more concrete way to determine if the blogger is genuine, you can look for this banner on his blog:

Page copy protected against web site content infringement by Copyscape

You can grab a banner for your website here Copyscape If you decide to use the banner, just make sure you follow some the rules of ‘white hat blogging’ code of conduct.

Having said that, the banner will be posted on this site from now onwards if that makes you happy.

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