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

In four simple steps you create your own real card swith Saluer Greeting Cards. Really?

1. You choose whether you send a postcard or greeting card.
2. You choose a design, if you want you upload a photo, add frame or sticker, add your personal text and there you are.
3. Your personal card!
4. Add the postal address, do the payment and the card is printed in full colour, and posted by Saluer.

Your advantage with Saluer Greeting Cards?

1. Would you rather not go to a bookstore to look for a card?
2. Would you rather not have to stand in line for a post stamp?
3. Would you rather not have to go to the mailbox in the rain?
4. Would you rather personalise your greeting card with your own photo, your own layout and your personal text?

How is it delivered?

Just 4 steps. Choose the design, personalize it, add the address and send. It helps you not forget and be in time. Create the card now and choose the date of sending. The card will be there right on time!

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.

A is for and

M is for Mother

I is just I

L is  for Love

Y is for You

Father and Mother I Love You

The final test for a student’s language skills usually rests on his creative writing abilities. He language seems to follow a defined natural laws or patterns which Maria Montessori termed as ‘the natural laws of devlopment’. The acquisition of language occurs over a period of time and the more opporunities he gets to express himself in school or at home, the better will be his chance of developing an interest to pen down his thought in writing.

This is a piece of creative writing practice from an 8 year old child wh happens to be quite imaginative and expressive. She was asked to write about  80 words based on the pictures given. She ended up with 167 words. Towards the end of her story,you will see she takes herself away into a path of imagination. “The parents followed the tracks and found their son lying  on a hospital bed. He had not been seen for 2 weeks.” Well in real world, we would have expected the parents to file a missing person report to the police!

What kids say  will tell us that growing is a their job not ours:

A: “Wow! who taught you to do that?”
K: Nobody, I just learn it myself.
I really don’t need your help, I can do many things by myself already.

A: “What have you learn in school today?”
K: I don’t know.
He meant I am still processing the knowledge. Give me a break mum, I just finished an exhausting day at school. Don’t make me think and work again.H

A: “What would you like to eat?”
K. McDonald’s happy meal.
It’s not the food, it’s the toy I want.

A: “What is your favourite tv programme.”
K: Disney channel Hannah Montana
I am a kid anymore, I am a teenager in the making.I

A: “Do you know how to tie your shoelaces.”
K: Yes but mum bought me a pair of shoes without shoelaces.
It’s hassle free and mum does not want to wait all day for me to finish off the last knot.

A: “How often do you have to brush your teeth in a day?”
K: Twice a day.
I know that because I have been told many times since I ate my first chocolate cake.

A: “Are potato chips good for you?”
K: I like them very much.
I am not going to say no because I do want to think that I can never have anymore chips and everything else that goes with it, especially movies.

If a child does not grow, he has lost his job. Nobody does it best than the child himself.

Rice is staple food for many people around the world, especially Asians. In many parts of the world, a family’s income level can also be determined by the amount of rice they eat per day or per month, or grade of rice they consume. For instance, Basmati Rice is considered a luxury food which only the wealthy can afford.

Of course, there are alternatives like wholemeal bread but if rice has been your staple diet, switching from rice to bread is like going through a diet programme.

What if there is a way to help others who cannot afford to buy rice and it costs you nothing but time to go online? What if this method also helps you to practice your language skills whilst you are also playing online?
The FreeRice is a non-profit website run by the United Nations World Food Program. This website will provide such a platform for you to spend as little as a few clicks on the keyboard to answer simple questions (not a survey but educational). The subjects range from the arts, language, mathematics to geography. For every correct answer you provide by clicking on one of the choices given, you will be contributing 10 grains of rice to those in need. The more correct answers you give, the bigger will be the contribution. Neat. And it costs you no money to play it.

Play Video: Full Moon Hanging On Blue Sky; No Star Was In Sight That Night

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:

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:

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.

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:

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.

Whilst it is good to receive regular comments, it is even better if the readers come forward to show themselves using real names and engaging comments. Yet, ‘legitimate comments’ can be stuffed with keywords in the Name column for their website (some smart SEO guru told them that’s how it’s done). Others may drop their signature link (s) in the comment itself. This makes it difficult for you to moderate, and previously you just had to live with it.

So Gobala Krishnan has come up with a neat wordpress plugin that allows you to display your comment policy that helps your readers self-moderate their own comments.

This is a great tool. And if you have a wordpress blog, you would know that AKISMET just will not work anymore in terms of capturing SPAM messages. There are people out there who have learned the trick of the “backlink” trade. Nowadays, the disguise is so cleverly written, you don’t even think you need to delete that comment until you discover the names are different, the emails stay the same but the url has not changed.

Recently, I sent an email to a reader whose comment I have approved. It was a ‘gmail’ account; google sent back a message saying suspended. Whoa!

You can read about how to activate and set the comment policy plugin or download at wordpress.og.