The Blog That 'isnt'

There are no trackers for Facebook!

2010-12-19T20:45:00.000-08:00

In response to literally hundreds of posts/comments per week asking if there are any working trackers for Facebook, we finally put together a page that breaks the news: There simply is NOT any tracker for Facebook out there.

Despite all the rumors and legends, the fact is, there is no good, reliable tracker for Facebook and we spell it all out.

..sorry...

Shamwow Guy

2009-01-10T12:33:00.000-08:00

There is a post at the site about Vince the Shamwow guy, who is now the SlapChop guy. It includes videos of the SlapChop commercial, Vince's ShamWow commercial and a view other videos of the shamwow guy that most people have never seen.

Those Silly Rooster Commercials

2007-09-22T20:15:00.000-07:00

This is just a test-post. You can ignore this post since it's not really about Roosters, silencing roosters, or even Ambien.
There is a post titled Silence Your Rooster at the site, but it relates more to the Ambien commercials. Another post at deadrooster.com talks about doing it with dynamite also.

Myspace Symbol Codes

2007-09-22T20:11:00.000-07:00

This is just a test post:
Different symbols on myspace? Symbol codes on myspace? Star symbol code for myspace? How do you make myspace symbol? Myspace symbol codes. How can you make a star symbol? How do you get a symbol on myspace?

Free eBook: Moving Beyond Adsense

2007-09-21T14:14:00.000-07:00

The eBook has been moved to our new location:

How I made a successful website

eBook Series: The Money Making Part

2007-09-15T08:57:00.000-07:00

Our popular free ebook as been moved to our new blog location:

How I made a successful website

eBook Series: Promoting the Site

2007-09-07T13:49:00.001-07:00

Our popular free ebook as been moved to our new blog location:

How I made a successful website

Drupal: How To Display Ads To Non-Members Only

2007-09-02T12:32:00.000-07:00

Our popular free ebook as been moved to our new blog location:

How I made a successful website

eBook Series: More on SEO and Generating Traffic

2007-08-31T16:43:00.000-07:00

Our popular free ebook as been moved to our new blog location:

How I made a successful website

Would you give your flesh for your favorite website?

2007-08-15T15:18:00.000-07:00

Artwork: $75
Ink: $125
Artist's time: $300

Having your website logo permanently tattooed onto some crazy dude's arm:

PRICELESS

The rest of this post, including the pictures and video have been moved to our new domain. Click here for the GEEK TATTOO post.

eBook Series: TRAFFIC

2007-08-04T14:42:00.000-07:00

Our popular free ebook as been moved to our new blog location:

How I made a successful website

ADLOGGER: farewell to an old friend

2007-07-29T10:18:00.000-07:00

I noticed a few weeks ago that the Adlogger.org support forum was not working. I assumed that Trevor was having server problems and thought nothing of it. I then read a few references on DP Forums about Adlogger being "dead", and assumed they were referring to the fact that the server was down. But when someone came out and made a post referring to the development of Adlogger stopping I had to find out more, and I did:

It is now official: Adlogger is now is dead

Trevor Fitzgerald made the final entry in the Adlogger blog/site on July 12 that sums it up pretty well:

"Unfortunately the development of AdLogger has been put to a halt. Due to some recent changes in the Google AdSense program, AdLogger has been rendered inaccurate and useless. Despite the best efforts to circumvent these changes and maintain a high level of accuracy, our developers could not come up with a solution."

I sent Trevor an email asking for more information on exactly what did not work any longer, and asking for more information. I figured that since I've worked closely with Trevor in the past helping him test Adlogger and even donating to the cause, that he would answer all my questions. It's been several days now and I haven't gotten any response - clearly Trevor is too upset to respond (or maybe my email went into his junk-folder)..

The death of Adlogger creates a great business opportunity for anyone that can figure out how to accurately track Adsense clicks and block ads based on that information. Because Adsense does not provide any tools to website publishers to help prevent click-fraud this is potentially a huge market for someone to come in and take advantage of. Perhaps in the future Adsense can fill the gap that Adlogger has left by providing tools to publishers like click tracking or email alerts when configurable thresholds are reached. Even the ability to specify what domains your adsense PubID can be used on would also be a welcome change. I've read rumors of Adsense incorporating this type of tools into the Adsense program, but thus far these features remain nothing more than rumors..

I've used Adlogger for a long time and I'm really going to miss it. Although it has never been 100% accurate, it has been a great tool to help combat Adsense clickbombs and other click fraud related activity. Sadly, this morning I removed the Adlogger code from the site and wiped a small tear from my eye as I removed the final table from the database.

John Chow's checkin me out

2007-07-27T19:34:00.000-07:00

John Chow's feeling the heat.. He sees me coming up behind him in his rear-view mirror.. He's worried that I'm going to topple him! He knows that the site ranks between #2 and #5 (depending on the day) on Google for the term "Make money on the internet" and he's starting to sweat... either that or he was just really, really bored today.

It was a surprise to see John Chow's smiling face on his MyBlogLog image (I grabbed a screencap of as proof that he stopped by) on the site today.

I doubt that he's worried too much about me because he's a better blogger than I'll ever be - probably because he actually has time to sit down and think about a blog-post before he makes it and does not have a screaming kid and nagging-wife bugging him every time he tries to write anything.. But I digress..

Anyway, thanks for stopping by John... And.. Watch your back because I'm catching up :)

Keep spammers away with Drupal

2007-07-14T09:46:00.000-07:00

Today some dirty spammer created about 25 fake accounts on the site, no doubt in an attempt to post links to his Viagra sites. Since not one single one of these accounts was ever able to make any posts I thought I would share my simple spam-fighting techniques.

One of the best spam-fighting techniques is built right into Drupal - eMail validation. Requiring email validation is what foils many spammers. In order to make posts they must validate their account by providing a valid email address, then clicking the validation link sent to that email address. Since Drupal does not allow duplicate email address, it takes a lot of work for the spammer to go create new email accounts. Most spammers don't bother and move on.

The other great way to avoid spammers in Drupal is using the Bad Behavior module. Bad Behavior stops most spammers, bots and other automated systems in their tracks. Note that if you use the LM_PayPal module for processing incoming PayPal payments you will either have to disable Bad Behavior, or make sure that all the PayPal servers are white-listed.

The last and most low-tech method for spotting spam and fake accounts is to watch your Drupal logs and bounced emails. If you see 50 new accounts created over a period of 1 minute, all with names like "Sue", "Ralph", "Sammy", "Paula", etc, you can be pretty sure they are fake. Watching bounced emails will also tip you off to fake accounts as most spammer's email address are either fake, or over-quota.

Using these very simple techniques have helped to keep GrownUpGeek.com 99.98% spam-free for 18 months.

Always know who's posting about you

2007-07-06T19:26:00.000-07:00

I thought I would share this tip because I think many webmasters probably do not know about it.

Use Google Alerts to see who's posting about you:
Google Alerts is a little-known, free service from Google that allows you to setup alerts based on keywords. Each time a new page is found by Google containing your keywords an email is automatically sent to you. Google Alerts says it like this:

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:

monitoring a developing news story

keeping current on a competitor or industry

getting the latest on a celebrity or event

keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams

I use Google Alerts for all my domain names as well as common misspellings of a few of my domains. Every time someone makes a blog post about my sites or, more importantly posts a link to any of my sites, GoogleAlerts lets me know. Google-Alerts also lets me know every time some scraper steals more of my hard-earned content.

A side benefit of using Google Alerts is that it can give you an idea of how long Google is taking to index your pages. By using Google Alerts I have found that in the last year Google has gone from taking several days to index my new blog posts to only 1-2 hours. Google likes me!

For fun I've also created a GoogleAlert with my name in it. It's interesting to see what other people write about me and it's also funny to see how many other interesting people there are in the world with my name.

http://www.google.com/alerts

eBook Series: User Generated Content

2007-07-06T13:31:00.000-07:00

Our popular free ebook as been moved to our new blog location:

How I made a successful website

My iPhone Review

2007-07-01T13:12:00.001-07:00

I admit it: I got caught-up in all the iPhone hype. From the day that Steve Jobs showed us what the new iPhone would look like, I was hooked. So Friday June 29, at approx 4:30pm I packed up the beach-chair and got in line. It was approximately 90-degrees and sunny, but 3 hours and a case of dehydration later, I had my very-own iPhone in my sweaty, clammy, sun-stroked hands. The picture on the right is my wife holding the beautifully designed iPhone box. She's not allowed to touch the actual iPhone.

iPhone; The real cost:

The 4GB iPhone price was $499 but I opted for the 8GB model for $599. The iPhone comes with earbuds, a charging/syncing dock, and an A/C charging adapter but I needed an additional charger for the office and a carrying case/belt clip. The total cost for the iPhone, belt-clip, extra USB A/C adapter and California state sales-tax came to just over $710. The monthly service from AT&T includes unlimited EDGE network data access, 450 calling minutes and 200 text messages for $59/month. Not exactly cheap.

iPhone; Setup, activation and configuration:
The setup and activation of my new iPhone was incredibly fast and easy. When you first turn-on the iPhone it displays a message to connect it to iTunes for activation. Once connected to iTunes a wizard prompted me to log-in to the iTunes store and enter the "credit-check" number that was printed on my iPhone sales receipt. Total time from connecting to iTunes until I had my new phone number and service: Approx 2 minutes. I was activating new service. Based on what I overheard people saying at the AT&T store, if you are switching from another carrier, it might be a few hours before the number is ported to your new iPhone. The only problem that I encountered throughout the entire setup process was getting the iPhone connected to my WiFi connection. For some reason it took me about 10 tries before it would connect to my wireless AP. This might have been because typing-in the WPA key was the first time I had used the touch-screen keypad, which takes a bit of getting-used to.

iPhone; My first impressions:
It's beautiful - it's like having OS-X on my phone. The iPhone fits perfectly in my hand and it has a good 'heft' to it, weighing several ounces. It has a feeling of a very dense, quality item - almost like a thin bar of gold. The LCD Touch-Screen is bright with ultra-high resolution and is very sensitive to touch, while not being over-touchy. The user-interface is like nothing I have ever used before, with beautiful animations. It is "classic Apple".

iPhone call quality:
Let's not forget - this is a cellphone. Call quality on the iPhone is above-average and surprisingly the AT&T service has better reception at my house than the Verizon service that my other two mobilephones have. The sound quality of the hands-free earbud mic is also surprisingly good.

iPhone Web-Browsing:

One of the reasons I decided I needed an iPhone was so I could surf the web from anywhere. The Safari web-browser built-into the iPhone is great, and is 100% "real" web-surfing, not "mobile web" like on many other devices. Viewing even small-text on webpages is not a problem because you can zoom in on sections by tapping on the touch-screen or by using the "pinch" and "un-pinch" method to zoom in and zoom out. The only issue I have run into so far is that the iPhone web browser does not support Flash. For me this means I cannot use the new Google Analytics interface. Browsing the internet using the AT&T EDGE data-network is blisteringly, excruciating, painfully slow - this is by far the biggest negative of the iPhone. Surfing the web on my WiFi connection was much faster, but still a bit slower than I expected.

iPhone and Hotmail:
The iPhone has built-in connectivity for Yahoo mail, GMail, .MAC and AOL, POP3, iMAP and Microsoft Exchange (as long as imap is configured on the Exchange server). I had no problem configuring my GrownUpGeek.com PoP3 email, but I ran into a snag when trying to configure my 10-year-old HotMail email account. A few years ago Microsoft ditched PoP3 Hotmail access in favor of HTTP mail access. Even with my paid-premium Hotmail account there was no way to directly access my Hotmail from the iPhone. After some searching I was able to find iZZYMail.com. For $17/year iZZYMail allows me to get my Hotmail on the iPhone.

iPhone Camera Quality:
The 2-MegaPixel camera on the iPhone takes very clear, crisp photos and the user interface makes emailing them a snap. Downloading the iPhone photos into iPhoto or your Windows PC is also very easy. On the right is a picture of my dog that I took with the iPhone camera. Click on the picture for a full-size view to see the quality. It's not as great as my 8-MegaPixel camera, but it's pretty damn good for a camera-phone.

It's an iPod too!
The iPod functionality of the iPhone is great, and the "album view" which allows you to 'flip' through your albums/songs while displaying the album-art is great (turn the iPhone on it's side to activate this feature).

Fast-forwarding through commercials in podcasts or switching songs however, takes two hands - something that I could do without looking and with only one finger on my Nano. Either I have not yet figured out the secret of one-fingered fast-forwarding on the iPhone yet, or Apple needs to make this easier. The earbuds that come with the iPhone are slightly different from the earbuds that came with my Nano, sporting a slightly smaller, sleeker design. Also different is the lack of the black-foam booties that cover the earbuds. One thing that is not different is that the earbuds SUCK! Maybe it's just the defective design of my ears, but the earbuds just will not stay in. With the slightest turn of my head or even the weight of the earbud cord dangling pulls the earbuds right out. The earbuds also have a built-in hands-free mic for the phone as well as a mute switch that you activate by pinching it. As soon as a third-party makes a replacement earbud that stays in my ears with these same features, I'm getting them.

More iPhone features:
Other features on the iPhone are SMS text messages, calender that syncs with iCal, photo-album, YouTube access, stock tracker, GoogleMaps, Weather, World-Clock, calculator and a notes-taker. All of these features work as advertised, particularly watching YouTube videos via WiFi. Don't even bother trying to watch YouTube videos while connected to the EDGE network.

Battery Life on the iPhone:
So far battery life has been as expected. I played with it for several hours last night, watched at least half a dozen YouTube videos, made several test calls, and watched an episode of Ice Truckers from the iTunes store and the battery indicator still showed approx 80% full.

Pros and Cons:
Here's the short list of Pros and Cons of the iPhone:

PROS: Beautiful design, simple user interface, web-browsing is the best on any device I've seen, good camera quality, good phone/voice quality, it's way cool.

CONS: Expensive, EDGE network is too slow, the earbuds suck, touch-pad keyboard takes a little practice

How to spot a counterfeit iPod

2007-06-26T18:26:00.000-07:00

This post is now here: Spot a fake iPod

Top Earning Bloggers & Websites

2007-06-22T12:06:00.000-07:00

Paula Neal Mooney has finally posted an update to her enormously popular List of Blogger Salaries. Paula's new list goes into more detail than her previous list, and even has nicer pictures. Of course right there at #32, between Yaro Starak and The Working Nomad, is yours truly.

It's great to have made it to Paula's list. Now I'm shooting for #28 ($100,000/yr).

It's Official: Adsense earnings are down

2007-06-20T18:21:00.000-07:00

Normally a dip in Adsense earnings would not be worth blogging about, but something different is happening this time.

I first noticed a decrease in my overall Adsense earnings in the first week of the month and I made a post at DP Forums. To other members it looked like just another of the endless "my Adsense earnings are down, wahh wahh wahh" thread and I chalked it up to the "summer slump". But a few days later a post was made at Webmaster World, then another at Digital Point, then yet another at Webmaster World. The common thread amongst all of these posts is that a large amount of webmasters around the world are all reporting the same thing: Adsense earnings are down. Even Darren Rowse has mentioned it in his blog. Earnings are the same for many, and even up for a few, but for many more Adsense publishers including myself, earnings are at an all time low.

What is causing Adsense earnings to fall ?
Some webmasters feel this could be the fallout of Google banning the MFA arbitragers on June 1, and yet some others think it may have to do with eBay pulling all of it's Adwords advertising. I personally have no clue as to what might be causing the decrease in earnings, nor am I overly concerned about it. Why? Because I have protection.

Protect yourself against drops in your Adsense income
Regular readers of my blog, and those that follow my posts on DP Forums have seen me say this before, so for give me for repeating myself when I say this:

You must diversify your earnings

Most 'old timers' know this all too well, but for many new webmasters just starting out with Adsense, it may not have crossed their minds or maybe they thought it was too difficult.

There are many ways to diversify your website's income. At GrownUpGeek.com we have several income streams including Adsense, Kontera, CJ, donations, subscriptions, AuctionAds, Ask.com Related Search, Yahoo Publisher Network, ClickBank and affiliate sales. We've even tried and sometimes use TextLink Ads, Adbrite and AzoogleAds. It is these multiple income streams that allows us to pull-in upwards of $6,000/month. Even though some of these sources of income may only generate $5-$25/day, they add-up quickly. As Mubin Ahmed would say, "making money $0.10 at a time".

Some revenue streams such as donations or subscriptions require a large member-base and may not be appropriate for many websites. However others, particularly Kontera are incredibly easy to apply for and add to your website, they earn almost as much as Adsense, and on some days even more than Adsense (especially this month!) Others, such as Yahoo Publisher Network do horribly, but even that small amount of additional income per day can help ease the sting when you're having a bad Adsense day. Affiliate programs like CJ and ClickBank are just as easy to put on your website, but require some effort to create a good "sales page". At GrownUpGeek.com we have only two or three CJ and ClickBank pages, but those pages generate over $1,000/month in sales alone.

The moral of my story is that by adding additional sources of revenue you are less reliant on Adsense and can put a few extra dollars into your pocket each month. It's not as difficult as you might think.

Know your Adsense TOS !

2007-06-16T10:27:00.000-07:00

It seems that not a day goes by that I don't read a post at DP Forums or WMW from some poor n00b that has either had his Adsense Ads temporarily disabled or banned completely for a violation of the Adsense Terms of Service (TOS) that he or she genuinely was not aware of. To be honest, I did not really read through the Adsense Terms of Service and Policies until I had been using Adsense for 4 or 5 months. I skimmed over it when I first signed up and I can remember thinking to myself, "ehh, I'm not going to do anything stupid".. Well, not knowing the TOS and polices is the first stupid thing I did.

The Adsense Polices and Terms of Service pages are huge, and will take a good 10-15 minutes to read - and unless you are a lawyer, most of it is extremely boring. Because of this I have grabbed a few of the TOS and policy points that are most likely to get you into hot-water with the boys over at the GooglePlex if you weren't aware of them.

DO NOT CLICK YOUR OWN ADS - Yeah, you would think this is common sense, but many Adsense publishers are not aware of this very important rule. Of course more webmasters are very aware of this and try to get away with doing it anyway.
DO NOT ENCOURAGE CLICKS IN ANY WAY - Most webmasters know that you are not allowed to ask visitors to click on your Adsense for Content ads, but you also cannot place your ads or adlinks in a way that tricks your visitors into clicking them. An example of this would be making your ads appear as menu items. Note that this does not apply to referrals. In the past there was confusion about "endorsing" (or whoring as I call it) your referrals. This confusion was largely due to the wording in the Terms of Service. Google has updated and clarified their stand on endorsing/encouraging clicks on referrals, and it is allowed to endorse referrals. Have a look at Google's own Referrals Endorsement Help page - Notice too that they use our site, GrownUpGeek.com as a shining example!
WATCH YOUR CONTENT: To most (but not all) webmasters it's obvious that Google does not allow Adsense ads on sites with "Adult" content. Notice that I did not say "porn". There is a difference between porn and simply "adult" so be careful. Google also does not allow Adsense on pages that contain "hate" content, Warez, or anything illegal. But also be aware that content or promotion of gambling, weapons, alcohol, tobacco, prescription drugs (or non-prescription for that matter), fake goods (like phoney Rolex watches), and even term papers or essays are not permitted. A good rule of thumb on content is that if you are not proud to show it to your grandmother, Google probably will not like it. Any kind of black-hat SEO on your pages can also get you banned from Adsense in addition to getting your site banned from the search index.
COPYRIGHTED CONTENT IS NOT PERMITTED: Unless you own the content. This means that copying and pasting from another website can get you into trouble. This is also true for music and videos, meaning that you cannot display Adsense on pages that contain copyrighted music downloads or videos.
DO NOT CHANGE YOUR ADSENSE CODE: All your customizations should be done via the Adsense setup page.
DO NOT PUT YOUR ADSENSE ADS IN YOUR SPAM: Everybody hates spam, especially Google.
NO CONTENT, NO ADSENSE: Your pages must contain content! Pages with nothing but ads are not permitted.
ONE ACCOUNT PER PERSON: You are only allowed to have ONE Adsense account unless you are authorized by Google to have more than one.
YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR ADS: It is up to you to ensure that you and your visitors do not violate the Terms of Service. Google is not obligated to notify you of a problem.
GOOGLE CAN TERMINATE YOUR ACCOUNT WHENEVER THEY WANT: They do not have to give you a reason, but if they terminate your account they have a reason.
DO NOT DISCLOSE YOUR STATISTICS: This one is overlooked by many webmasters. You are not allowed to post any information such as click-thru-rates, impressions, eCPM, etc in public. You are permitted to disclose gross earnings, but that's all.
YOU ARE NOT A GOOGLE EMPLOYEE: Nor are you in any "partnership" with Google. As an Adsense publisher you are simply a independent contractor
Competitors ARE allowed on the same page: In the past you were not allowed to display other contextually based advertising on the same page as Adsense ads. In May 2007 Google updated this policy. You are now allowed to use competing contextually based advertising on the same page as long as that advertising does not have the same "look and feel" of your Adsense ads and as long as they cannot be confused with Adsense.

This is NOT A COMPLETE LIST of the Adsense rules and policies. These are just a few of the rules that I have seen broken most often by new Adsense publishers. If you have not already done so, I highly recommend that you read the complete Adsense Terms of Service and polices available here:
Adsense Terms and Conditions of Service
Adsense Policies for U.S. publishers

eBook Series: Building the website

2007-06-15T16:25:00.000-07:00

Our popular free ebook as been moved to our new blog location:

How I made a successful website

Supplement your Adsense earnings with Kontera

2007-06-10T16:10:00.000-07:00

A few months back I was approached by Kontera and asked if I would like to try their In-Text advertising at GrownUpGeek.com. The account manager was confident that based on my traffic I should be able to earn $1,000/mo easily. Well, I'm happy to say that she was wrong. The first month I earned $1,400, and over $1,500 the next two months in a row (If you'd like to see what a $1,500 payment looks like, check out my picture over at the ShoeMoney.com Gallery.) . Kontera is now our 2nd biggest earner, right behind Adsense and I could not be more happy (or surprised).

What is Kontera?
Kontera uses ContextLinks that are contextually matched to the text on your webpages, similar to the way that Adsense works. These ContextLinks appear as links on your page with small 'pop-up' bubbles that appear when you hover your mouse over them. Visitors click on the pop-up and you earn on a CPC basis. Kontera describes it this way on their website:

A contextually relevant keyword that is discovered in real-time on a web page from within Kontera´s vast network of publishers, and is automatically turned into a link to the most relevant ad from among Kontera´s thousands of advertisers. With ContentLink™ publishers generate incremental revenue while advertisers reach their most targeted audience on a Cost-Per-Click basis.

Kontera is fast and very easy to get started. Apply online and then add the code to your pages and you're done. They do have a few restrictions though, so it is not for everybody. You must generate at least 250,000 page-impressions per month (although they are easing up on this recently), your site must be in English, and your site must be "content rich" (aka not MFA).

Even though Kontera is a contextual advertising system you can use it on the same pages as Adsense. The Adsense TOS has recently been updated/clarified and states that you can use competing contextually-based advertising systems as long as they do not have the same "look and feel" as Adsense.

Since we started using Kontera we have not seen any detectable drop in Adsense CTR, and it has steadily and consistently been earning roughly 50%-75% of what Adsense makes.. If you are currently making $100/day (or per month) you can expect to add an additional $50-$75 by implementing Kontera.

If you want to read more about Kontera's InText system, or to sign up, go to www.kontera.com.

eBook Series: Make the site SEO friendly

2007-05-31T11:04:00.000-07:00

Our popular free ebook as been moved to our new blog location:

How I made a successful website

The Secret To Making Money With AuctionAds

2007-05-25T12:59:00.001-07:00

If you own a website and you have not already tested or at least checked out AuctionAds, get over to www.auctionads.com now and sign up for your free account and start showing ads on your site within 5 minutes or less - then read the rest of this post to learn the secret to earning some decent cash with ActionAds.

First, the basics: What is AuctionAds ?
AuctionAds is a new eBay Affiliate revenue sharing system that allows you to easily earn money on your website by showing image-ads for eBay auctions. Each time someone clicks on one of the ads displayed on your site and then buys an item on eBay, you earn money. Because AuctionAds has great-looking images of the products, CTR is very high and because of the 30-day cookie, each time someone clicks on of your Auction Ads you make money if that person buys anything on eBay for the next month! You can also target your AuctionAds with keywords so that only items that interest your website visitors will be displayed - resulting in higher CTR.

There are other eBay affiliate programs out there, but AuctionAds is by far the easiest and fasted to use. You can be up and running with AuctionAds in less than 10 minutes. And, before you ask - YES, you can use AuctionAds with Adsense on the same site, and even on the same page.

My tips for using Auction Ads:

Select keywords for items that your visitors will be interested in. Don't load your ads with keywords like "Ferrari", "laptop", or "most expensive digital camera" unless that's really what your website visitors will be interested in. You know what your visitors want - give it to them.
Use rotating ads. AuctionAds will automatically rotate ads for multiple keywords by seperating your keywords with a semi-colon ";". For example:

auctionads_ad_kw = “DVD Player; iPod; MP3 player; Wii”;

Use 'negative keywords': Prevent ads from displaying by using negative keywords. The following example will display ads for iPods, but not for iPod cables or earphones:

auctionads_ad_kw = “ipod -cable -earphone -earbud”;

(update: it looks like the negative keywords aren't working right now. I'm not sure if this is a glitch or if they have removed this feature)

The SECRET to making money with AuctionAds:

The secret to earning with AuctionAds is waiting. That's right.. waiting. You know, sit back and forget about it for 30-40 days. I've read too many complaints from people trying AuctionAds for the first time saying they aren't happy with it because they were not making any money after only 7-10 days (or less) and not sticking-it out.

The key with AuctionAds is TIME & patience. Remember that 30-day cookie I mentioned above? As you get more an more clicks, and your referral cookie gets planted on more and more PC's your odds for earning are dramatically increased. I guess I should also mention that the other secrets are traffic and clicks, but hopefully you already knew that. After 30 or 40 days you should start to see the Snowball effect. Depending on the niche of your website and the demographics of your visitors the earnings could be large, or not. But if you don't wait that full 30-40 days you won't know for sure.

To learn more about AuctionAds or to sign up and try it, go to www.auctionads.com

eBook Series: Creating the Website

2007-05-20T10:05:00.000-07:00

Our popular free ebook as been moved to our new blog location:

How I made a successful website

Free online eBook: Getting Started

2007-05-18T18:40:00.000-07:00

Our popular free ebook as been moved to our new blog location:

How I made a successful website

Top 10 Reasons Why ShoeMoney Is So Popular

2007-05-12T11:31:00.000-07:00

Anyone that knows anything about S.E.M., Adsense, or "makin 'mo money on the internet" knows who ShoeMoney is. But why is The Schoe so popular? What makes us all want to be like him? What makes us want to shave our heads, check his blog every day and take his posts at DP Forums as gospel?

After many minutes of research, I have put together a comprehensive list of what makes us all live and breathe Jeremy Schoemaker:

Number 10: He's just a regular guy like you and me

He makes spelling and grammar errors in his blog (just like me!) and isn't afraid to admit it; He loves to veg out in front of the TV watching Lost and he has A.D.D. and can't hold a thought for more than a minute or two. Damn, just like me!

Number 9: He wears a lot of cool shirts and stuff
WTF, this guy gets more free T's, polo shirts and other cool-gear than anybody I know!

Number 8: Hot chicks seem to flock to him
This might be worth more than that giant Adsense check.

Number 7: He's got really hairy arms

...no doubt why the hot chicks flock to him.

Number 6: Hot chicks flock to him and his wife doesn't get pissed
This is what makes ShoeMoney my own personal hero. If I so much as even look in the direction of a hot chick I catch hell from my wife for days. I guess this should really be titled "ShoeMoney is not PW'd like I am"

Number 5: He has a really cool pic of a giant Adsense paycheck

Who wouldn't want one of those?!

Number 4: He drives a Hummer

Actually, maybe this is why the hot-chicks flock to him.

Number 3: He goes out of his way to help those less fortunate than him
Jeremy is all heart. Seriously though, he does help countless webmasters in the DP Forums.

Number 2: Despite his fame and fortune he has not lost his perspective
Mr. Schoe has not forgotten who he is, where he came from, or what is important in life. It would be very easy for someone as successful as ShoeMoney to become a Rich Jerk, but he seems to have kept his head about himself.

...And the NUMBER ONE REASON EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE LIKE SHOEMONEY:
I'll leave this one open to readers. Please post your reason(s) why Shoemoney is so popular.

Free eBook: My Story

2007-05-11T13:14:00.000-07:00

Our popular free ebook as been moved to our new blog location:

How I made a successful website

Make Money Online The Easy Way

2007-05-08T19:37:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I gave AdBrite a try. Honestly the results were not very good and I stopped using it after about one month. The problem wasn't really with AdBrite per-se, but more with the nature of our site and the visitors - but for some websites AdBrite performs very well. I think it is important to try different affiliate programs to find what works and what does not work for your site. Since most affiliate programs like AdBrite, Adsense, CJ, Kontera, etc are all free all you really have to lose is the amount of time you spend implementing them on your website.

Profiting from Others:
I had not used AdBrite for several months but decided to check my account to see what they were planning to do with the $2.68 I had earned while testing them on my site. I was surprised to see that my account balance was over $20! In going through my earnings report I found that these earnings were from affiliates. I had all but forgotten that almost a year ago we posted a how to make money on the Internet page at the site with an AdBrite referral on it - it was from these referrals that I was earning about $0.50/day. These earnings aren't spectacular, but considering the amount of time invested, it's not too bad.

If you haven't tried AdBrite it's worth a try. Even if it does not generate any direct income, try their affiliate program and let others do the work for you - it is by far one of the easiest ways to generate income from your site.

AuctionAds: Earning After Only 7 Days

2007-05-05T21:12:00.000-07:00

Around a week ago I decided to give AuctionAds a try. Because you don't get any earnings until after an auction ends and is paid, I assumed it would take at least a week before I saw any earnings. I didn't get my hopes up very high so I was pleasantly surprised when I checked my stats yesterday and saw my first earnings posted: a whopping $6.45 !

I understand that $6.45 isn't really very much, but considering that Adsense placed in the exact same location as my AuctionAds banner earns even less, $6.45 isn't too shabby.

Because AuctionAds lets me choose the keywords for auctions that I think interest GrownUpGeek.com visitors, the CTR is pretty high - and as time goes on and as more and more of my cookies get planted, I expect the earnings to continue to grow. Jeremy Schoemaker of AuctionAds calls this the SnowBall effect. If he is right then AuctionAds has the potential to be a great income stream.

Free eBook: Preface

2007-05-01T19:33:00.000-07:00

Our popular free ebook as been moved to our new blog location:

How I made a successful website

Drupal: Help Avoid Duplicate Content

2007-04-30T19:09:00.000-07:00

Anybody that knows anything about SEO will tell you over and over to avoid duplicate content. Usually this means don't copy and paste other people's work on your website, or don't buy turnkey sites that display feeds for article submissions, etc.

But if you use Drupal there is another way you can get hit with a duplicate content penalty without even knowing it by improper use of the dreaded "/" - That's right, the / (backslash) character. As it turns out, if you use Drupal it treats www.yoursite.com/a-page and www.yoursite.com/a-page/ as different pages. This means that if a search-engine bot comes to your site via a link with trailing "/" it could potentially index several duplicate pages or at worst a duplicate of your entire site.

I had never heard of this potential issue with Drupal so big kudos to my new friend Alex of pitumbo.com who I met at the April WEMUG meeting. Alex pointed me to this article at blamcast.net that explains it better than I ever could (please take a minute to read it and give it a Digg).

Basically the trick here is to use a 301-redirect to remove the trailing slash at the end of all your URL's. The code to put in your .HTACCESS according to Blamcast.net would look something like this:


#remove trailing slashes
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?yourdomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

I quickly tossed this code into my .HTACCESS file and loaded a few test pages and to my surprise it did not work. I think the WWW -> non-WWW redirect I'm using to remove WWW from all my URLs was affecting it so after some tinkering I ended up with this version which seems to work:

#remove trailing slashes
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^\.grownupgeek\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

If you're using Drupal and are looking to squeeze every bit of SEO from it, I recommend this simple change. Thanks to blamcast.net for putting it out there.

Free online eBook: How I Made a Successful Website in only 4 months

2007-04-28T20:09:00.000-07:00

Back in September of '06 I sat down and wrote a little 12-page ebook that outlined how GrownUpGeek.com had grown from nothing in January 2006 to getting several thousand unique visitors per day and earning over $1,000 per month by May 2006 - and how after one year the website is getting approximately 15,000 unique visitors per day, has been featured as an Adsense Success Story and is and generating $4,000 - $5,000 per month in revenue.

After writing the e-Booklet I made one post at the Digital Point Forums about my new prose and sold hundreds of copies over the next 6 months. Not only did I sell nearly 1,000 copies but the eBook was "stolen" and resold without my permission twice - this is the true measure of the success of an ebook!

In the six months that the ebook was for sale I made a few revisions and expanded the ebook to about 30 pages, and now I'm ready to publish version 4 of the eBook. Version 4 will be posted here in my bl0g and will be available to everyone. I plan on publishing one chapter approximately every-other-week beginning in May of this year.

If you have a new website or are thinking about creating a website for the first time you might be able to get a few ideas from reading it.

Click here for SECTION ONE (Preface)

Drupal: Make an SEO Friendly ROBOTS.TXT

2007-04-27T19:13:00.000-07:00

Google is very picky about duplicate pages and may penalize your site if it finds too much (or any?) duplicate content. To help squeeze a little-bit more SEO friendliness out of Drupal you can add a few entries to your ROBOTS.TXT to avoid duplicate pages from being indexed and keep the search-bots away from pages that they don't really need to be in.

If you are using Drupal 5 or older, try adding these entries to your ROBOTS.TXT

User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /aggregator
Disallow: /tracker
Disallow: /node/add
Disallow: /user
Disallow: /files
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /book/print
Disallow: /filter
Disallow: /filter/tips
Disallow: /comment
Disallow: /comment/reply
Disallow: /spam
Disallow: /spam/report
Disallow: /spam/report/comment

New Myspace Layout and Profile Codes area

2007-04-08T07:59:00.000-07:00

I finally got around to setting up a real Myspace Layouts resource section. It's funny because up until now we've really only had a few pages with Myspace codes, yet about 75% of our traffic comes from people looking for Myspace profile hacks or other "how to modify Myspace" information.

The setup was pretty easy. I found a free Myspace Resource script that didn't really work 'out of the box' due to broken text (CR or LF's forcing new lines) - and several of the variables were broke creating bad URL's. After much manual tweaking I think it's all working correctly. I wasn't able to figure out how to get the script running in the main Drupal install area, so I created a subdomain to install it. Creating a subdomain with cPanel is simple and took about 30 seconds. I then uploaded all the script files into the subdomain, added an HTACCESS file, and it was pretty-much up and running.

If I knew how easy it was to setup a Myspace resource script I would have done it a long time ago. I'm sure now many of our visitors will find more of what they have been searching for.

Yahoo Publisher Network asks Adsense users to violate Google's TOS

2007-03-22T08:26:00.000-07:00

This morning I received an invite from YPn (Yahoo Publisher Network) to complete a 10-minute survey.

&lt;br>

In return for my valuable time they would reward me with a $25 "honorarium". "Sweet", I thought - fastest way to make $25 I've had in a long time!

I started to fill out the survey - mostly basic questions about what is important to me as a website owner, etc. Towards the end of the survey it asked what other advertising networks I participate in. I put checkmarks in Google Adsense, Commission Junction, and Amazon (funny, they didn't have a little checkbox for Kontera!). Then, on the next page they asked me to detail what my "RPM" (that's "Y-speak" for eCPM) for each of the publishing networks I participate in. As I was about halfway through running my Adsense reports to get my eCPM for the last 6-months, it suddenly struck me that Adsense may not appreciate me disclosing this information to their biggest competitor! Just to be sure, I did a quick re-read of the Adsense TOS, which I swore in blood that I would abide by, so help-me-God.

The Adsense TOS states, in part:
" Confidentiality. You agree not to disclose Google Confidential Information without Google's prior written consent. "Google Confidential Information" includes without limitation: (a) all Google software, technology, programming, specifications, materials, guidelines and documentation relating to the Program; (b) click-through rates or other statistics relating to Site performance in the Program provided to You by Google; and (c) any other information designated in writing by Google as "Confidential" or an equivalent designation. However, You may accurately disclose the amount of Google’s gross payments to You pursuant to the Program. Google Confidential Information does not include information that has become publicly known through no breach by You or Google, or information that has been (i) independently developed without access to Google Confidential Information, as evidenced in writing; (ii) rightfully received by You from a third party; or (iii) required to be disclosed by law or by a governmental authority."

Now, I'm no lawyer, nor am I particularly smart, but it seems to me that disclosing my Adsense eCPM to Yahoo would probably be considered as a breach of confidentiality in Google's eyes. Realizing that my boys over at the GooglePlex would probably not be happy with me if I violated my blood-oath, I tried to fill-in some dummy data on the survey form. I entered $99.99 as my Adsense eCPM (ehhr, RPM) and the survey was too smart to accept it. I then tried to enter $0.01, which it also balked at. The survy would not accept $0.00 either.
Knowing who butter's my bread, I decided to forgo the $25 honorarium and bailed out of the survey.

Just a word of warning to all you webmasters that use both Yahoo Publisher Network and Adsense: Don't forget your Adsense TOS - Google knows all and sees all.. Trust no one..

Drupal: A Quick Cure for "WSOD"

2007-03-17T20:11:00.000-07:00

I was browsing through the Drupal Support Forum and this post about the Drupal WSOD (White Screen of Death) caught my eye. I could feel the OP's pain as I read part of his post:

"I physically moved the Tagadelic subdirectory out of the modules directory. This hasn't had any effect: just whiteness, whiteness everywhere. Argh."

At first, it was the "WSOD" (White Screen of Death) reference that grabbed my attention. Back in September 2006 GrownUpGeek.com suffered from a particular nasty case of the Drupal WSOD, which kept the site down for about two days and resulted in the loss of several posts and all user accounts. It was at this point in time that I learned the importance of backing-up your Drupal database often.

The second thing that caught my eye about the post was how quickly the OP's problem was solved - about 3 hours. Support for your Drupal install can be hit or miss at the forums. In some cases your pleas for help and begging for answers will fall on deaf ears and blind, cold, heartless eyes. In other cases such as this WSOD post, and mine from last week, the Drupal Gods save the day.

Drupal Support: There is hope!

2007-03-11T12:43:00.000-07:00

We recently installed the Drupal Userpoints module at the site to track posts, rate users, etc. I was running into issues and decided to upgrade to the new Userpoints 2.0.

After upgrading/installing the newer version I continued having trouble so late Saturday evening made a post in the support-forum at Drupal. To my surprise within hours I had a response from Khalid Baheyeldin, the author of the Userpoints module and co-founder of 2Bits.com.

I Responded to Khalid's post Sunday morning and was again surprised to see multiple responses almost immediately after my posts. Khalid then offered to access my system and look into the problem directly. Normally I would never even entertain the idea of giving a complete stranger the passwords to the site, but I have seen (and used) many of Khalid's Drupal modules and 2Bits.com was already on my list for any future Drupal support (like that upgrade to V5 that I'm so afraid to do myself). I emailed the key's to the GrownUp Geek kingdom to Khalid and held my breath.

Long story short: A few minutes later Khalid sent me an email indicating the problem was resolved. A few more very fast emails back and forth, and the Userpoints module was working as advertised.

I have been disappointed with the level of Drupal support in the forums in the past, but in this case not only did I receive a response to my problem, but I was also offered and received personalized support - all on a Sunday morning! Kudos to Khlid, 2Bits.com and Drupal on a job well done!

Naturally, I do not expect this level of free support for all problems (nor should you), but my experience today proves that there are some great Drupal developers out there that not only know what they are doing, but aren't "too good" to help us n00bs.

Thank you Khalid and 2Bits !

Making Drupal Faster

2007-03-04T15:03:00.000-08:00

How to make Drupal faster seems to be my mantra lately. In my previous post, "Drupal is still faster" I bragged about how disabling User-Pictures (avatars) reduced CPU overhead dramatically, and greatly improved the response time of the site. The only problem is that as GrownUpGeek.com becomes more of a social-site, those user avatars are important!

I posted my user-pictures CPU usage problem at the Drupal Support Forum, and as expected have gotten zero responses. That was expected, seeing as how Drupal is free, and nobody is obligated to help or answer - leaving me to figure out the problem all on my own. What I have found after hours of Googling is that the GD Library is responsible for the excessive CPU usage while rendering the avatars. This makes sense but it does not explain why only some avatars cause problems.

Due to public demand I have re-activated the user-pictures but have chosen to display only certain user's avatars (like mine, moderators, etc) in the forums. I accomplished this by creating a new, hidden checkbox field in all members user profiles with the Profile module that I could then use to choose which members I want to have avatars displayed. I then added this PHP code to my node-forum.tpl file (I'm using FlatForum):
profile_load_profile($curr_user);if ($picture && $curr_user->profile_useImage) {print $picture;}
This queries the "profile_useImage" field that I created to determine if the avatar should be displayed or not. I only did this for the forums because that is where most traffic is, but it could also be used in nodes/blog template files as well. I found how to do this in the Drupal Forums, so even though I dont always get answers, it is still a great resource.

In addition to only displaying selected member avatars I have also further reduced the size limits on avatars to only 50x50px and 10kb in size. I will try these methods for a few days to see how the CPU usage looks. If CPU usage is still too high, and if I still cant get any answers to the GD Library CPU-hogging problem I will probably just remove all avatars from the forum areas altogether. I can do this by removing the "Profile_load_profile" code (above) from the node-forum.tpl.php file. This will prevent user-pictures from displaying in the forums, while leaving them in other areas of the site.

Make Drupal Run Faster

2007-02-25T20:59:00.000-08:00

A quick follow-up to my post from the other day, Making Drupal faster, which was a followup to my post from a month or so back, Drupal Optimization:

After disabling user-avatars at Grown Up Geek, CPU usage has plummeted from daily averages of 35% - 55% down to an amazing 11%-13%. I can say with confidence that this single, simple change has made the greatest impact on site performance since moving from a shared host to our dedicated server.

If your Drupal site is running slow and you have user-avatars enabled, try disabling this feature to see if you get the same astounding results that I did.

More ways to make Drupal faster

2007-02-23T20:18:00.000-08:00

Now that GrownUpGeek.com is regularly getting over 10,000 unique visitors per day (about 40,000 page views), and quickly closing-in on 15,000 visitors per day, I've noticed that performance isn't as great as I think it should be. Page loads for most pages are fine, but creating new forum threads or posting comments can sometimes take 15-20 seconds, and page loads on pages with many comments can sometimes take several seconds.

I figured I should have a look at the CPU usage to see where the bottlenecks might be. A quick check of CPU Usage in cPanel (I'm still pretty clueless about Unix so I have to rely on cPanel WHM) showed me that on most days the top CPU-sucker was the HTTPD (web server) process chewing on one or two .JPG files that turned out to be member avatars. Most of these avatars were from members that haven't been active at the site in months, but had posts on pages or forum threads that are now getting a lot of traffic. Since these members aren't around anymore, I deleted the particular avatar files that were sucking my CPU. Immediately after removing these files I noticed a huge improvement in page load times, and overall performance of the site. I'm not sure why something as simple as a .JPG avatar would make Drupal run so slow, but I think it has something to do with how Drupal renders the images, which is CPU intensive. In an attempt to help prevent this problem from getting worse, I reduced the allowable avatar size down to 70x70 pixels, and reduced the allowable file size to 35kb.

For the last few days since I've been watching the CPU usage and removing these old CPU-hog avatars the site has been running much better..

*Update: My CPU usage logs was still showing high usage from more avatar files. I have disabled avatars (Drupal admin menu, users, "picture support:Disabled") - after disabling user-picture support site performance increased noticeably. Moral: Drupal user avatars slow down the entire site!

For a few more ways to make Drupal faster, see my post from a few months ago here:
Speed-Up Drupal

Viral Marketing: Way to go?

2007-02-15T19:10:00.000-08:00

When I first heard about viral marketing, I thought it had something to do with spreading the word through a virus! Later on when I slogged my way through its index, I was surprised to find I was not far off the mark.

Although it has been around for quite sometime, people really began appreciating the worth of viral campaigns when they saw just how successful Google was with the GMail invite campaign.

The limited number of invites made you feel that it was a huge deal. I was moderating a forum when I received my invite from the forum owner and remember feeling on top of the world.

This is exactly the feeling viral marketing techniques aim to capture. With the proliferation of social networking and bookmaking, my bet is that viral campaigns will assume more importance than ever before. This is because eventually search engines are bound to become smarter and just ignore websites that have no useful content.

Mind you, viral marketing is NOT spamming. The first thing needed for a campaign is a list of people/websites you think are interested in you niche. The idea is to get these people hooked on what you are offering so they can "talk" to their friends and mates about your site.

There are people who swear on a certain technique, but then one man's meat is another man's poison, eh? So stick to the basics initially and then when you find that something works for you, stick with it.

Over at Digital Point forums, znitch-search has an interesting post "10 Contagious Viral Marketing Techniques"

Feel free to add to this post what has worked for you and more importantly what has not!

Every Blogger's Dream Job

2007-02-15T09:23:00.000-08:00

MyBlogLog.com, one of the fastest growing sites on the web is looking for an "Uber-User" to hire as their new Community Manager. The ideal candidate will live in the Bay Area, have previous "community management" experience, be able to speak English, and be an all-around great person.

This is the ultimate dream-job for any webmaster or blogger and I'm sure the stack of resumes is already to the ceiling. Too bad I don't live in the Bay Area...

More clarification on Google Adsense referral policy

2007-02-09T16:11:00.000-08:00

Dan Friedman has further clarified Google's stance on endorsing or bringing attention to the Pay Per Click referrals (such as Firefox and Adwords).

"If you encourage people to download and install Pack on your site and the conversion rate goes up, we're happy to pay the additional cost, because it directly translates to more Pack users for us.
...
Any endorsement or attention drawn to a referral ad must be done in a way that supports the intended use of the product or service associated with it.In short, our policies on endorsing ads are based on our concern for the visitor, the advertiser, and the publisher."

Dan had told all this to me the last time I spoke with him on the phone - I even posted about it at DP Forums but I'm sure nobody was going to take my word for it. Now that it is official many publishers should be able to significantly increase their earnings with Google's referral products.

For the entire post CLICK HERE

MyBlogLog Exploit

2007-02-02T16:24:00.000-08:00

I'm not even sure if this counts as an "exploit", and even Shoemoney says it's too simple to be considered as such - but I didnt know what else to call it.

It seems that by making a simple HREF link and by banging on the back-button and reload-buttons enough times, you can force whatever link (such as an affiliate link) to show at the top of your Top 5 MyBlogLog links. I'm not sure if it's even worth the effort, but it's interesting. For all the complex details (all 3 steps) see ShoeMoney's Post.

MSN AdCenter - Impossible to read TOS

2007-01-13T12:36:00.000-08:00

Based on what I've read from the AdWords experts I decided to give AdCenter a try. From what I've learned the CPC is usually lower with AdCenter, so I wont be throwing my advertising budget down the toilet quite as fast as I have done with Adwords.

The signup process was simple, and quick. But when I came to the Terms Of Service page which I am required to read and agree to, I ran into a bit of a snag.
As you can see from the screenshot above (click it to enlarge), the MSN AdCenter TOS is enclosed in a small box, approximately 1-inch wide by about 1/2-inch tall! Maybe it's because I was using Firefox and not Microsoft's Internet Explorer, but I still find it comical to the point of absurdity. I still signed up, but I wonder what Microsoft is hiding in that tiny box?

Google Adsense Blogs about GrownUpGeek.com

2007-01-08T18:47:00.000-08:00

More love from the Google Adsense team (but no links!).

In today's Google Adsense Blog post, they featured GrownUpGeek.com and put a link to their first referrals-based Adsense Case Study which also features us.

To recap: Google has now featured/posted about us on three separate occasions

I wonder if this means our 15 minutes of fame is over now?

Grown Up Geek featured by Google Adsense again

2007-01-02T20:52:00.000-08:00

This post has been moved to our new blog. See this link:
New Adsense Success Story

My tips to optimize Drupal

2006-12-31T09:32:00.000-08:00

Drupal is a great CMS but it's a bit top-heavy. I don't know how it compares to other CMS's but from my experience it can really push your CPU and memory usage. When we moved to our dedicated server I thought that the almost daily site-crashes would be a thing of the past, but within weeks of transferring our site as soon as traffic started to increase we ran into trouble.

These are some of the things I learned to minimize CPU and memory usage:

Activate the Drupal cache: The built-in Drupal cache displays cached pages to anonymous users, saving the overhead of database queries to build every page. Members that are signed-in get uncached pages
Disable un-used modules. Don't just disable them, but remove them from the modules directory completely. Even when the modules are sitting there deactivated, they still consume memory
Disable the Statistics module: The Drupal statistics module is great. It tracks every pageview and every referrer and is a great way to see what is happening at the site. The only problem is that it tracks every pageview and every referrer - creating a significant load on the CPU - causing a 30%-40% increase in CPU usage during peak traffic. I still turn the statistics module on from time to time, but it's usually off.
Disable (or don't use) too many filters: I disabled the WordFilter and Smiley's filter. We have three moderators so the WordFilter isn't necessary anymore and we don't need the Smiley filter because TinyMCE has it's own smileys
Clear the Sessions Table: Once a week I put the site into maintenance-mode and empty the sessions table. If you get a lot of visitors this table can grow quite large. After clearing the sessions table you and everyone else will get logged-out and will be forced to log-in the next time you access the site. In case you forget, the url to log yourself back in is http://yoursite.com/user if you have SE Friendly URLs activated, http://yoursite.com/?q=user if you don't
Clear the Cache: When I clear the sessions table, I also clear the cache. Before doing this, I disable the cache
Optimize Tables: After clearing the cache and sessions tables I optimize all of the database tables
Upgrade your RAM: I was forced to upgrade from 1GB to 2GB of server RAM. Prior to the upgrade my memory usage was floating around 75%-90%, and would occasionally hit 100%; swap usage was also very high. After the upgrade to 2GB, memory usage floats around 38%-45% and rarely tops 50%; swap usage is usually now 0%

All the things I did are pretty basic, but they made a significant difference in the response time of the site and they also help keep the server from falling over.

How to ban a user with Drupal

2006-12-30T19:43:00.000-08:00

We recently had the unpleasant task of having to 'ban' a member from the website. Without getting into the drama and details, we'll just say this particular member was less than trustworthy or honest - and in a community like GuG, both of these qualities are necessary.

How to ban a user with Drupal:
With Drupal there are a few different ways to ban a member from the site. But no single one is 100% effective. We used a combination of methods to carry-out the banishment.

BLOCK:
Drupal as the ability to block a member by login name. To block a user using the Drupal BLOCK method just edit the user properties and click the "Blocked" radio-button under the status section. The only problem with this method is that it will prevent that particular user-name from logging in, but it will not keep that person from creating a new member name.

TROLL:
The TROLL module for Drupal is invaluable. Not only does it allow you to do a second level of blocking via IP, it tracks all the IP address of all your visitors. You can then easily do a query of a particular IP to see what members have used it, or you can query a member to see what IP's they have used. The Troll module also allows you to block IP's. All IP's entered into the Troll "block" list are redirected to a customizable "you've been blocked" page. Each time a blocked IP tries to access your site, a message is listed in the logs so you can see how often the user/IP tries to get back to your site.

HTACCESS:
The next level of blocking can be done at the HTACCESS level. The Troll module still let's the user "hit" the site and database. Blocking via HTACCESS will not even allow them to get to the site at all. To block or ban with HTACCESS, you need the IP which is easily obtainable if you're using the Drupal Troll module.
Sample of using HTACCESS to block an IP:
order allow,deny
deny from xx.xxx.xx.xxx
deny from xx.xx.xx.xx
allow from all

With HTACCESS you can also block via referrer, domain, ip-range, and more.

Server Level:
If you run your own server and you want to pull out the big-guns you can block the IP at the server. This will prevent access to the website, email, or anything else on the server. You can easily do this with IPTABLES in Apache using this commend:
iptables -I INPUT -s xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx -j DROP

We havn't had to resort to this method yet, but it's there if we need it.

Blocking by IP isn't 100% effective because IP's change - particularly with dial-up users. But if you use the Drupal Troll module and the member has been around for a while, it will give a complete list of all the IP's that he/she has been using. By using all the methods above you can create a pretty effective ban.

The ShoeMoney Posse - Learning the Skills

2006-12-29T15:18:00.000-08:00

I've been reading Shoemoney more and more lately. When I first learned about TheShoe at the DP Forums I got the idea that he became successful by having many small sites. Because we don't run a network of sites, and instead have only one real site (ok, and two failed/failing sites about nothing) I didn't think I could learn much from him because of our different methods/styles.

As I read more and more at ShoeMoney though, I think I might be able to learn a lot - heck, I don't know anything, so it should not me hard to learn something! I'm also going to start seeing what I can learn from JenSense. They both seem to know what they're doing.

Getting eMail around AOL and HOTMAIL spam filters

2006-12-29T10:24:00.000-08:00

Sometimes the war against spam catches innocent webmasters in the crossfire

When we moved to our new dedicated server last month we were really excited. All those problems with the site going offline, email sending limits, and all those other headaches would be gone! Or so we thought...

One of the first things we noticed after moving to our new host was that we weren't getting any of the automatic "this forum thread has been updated" email at one of our hotmail accounts. After some testing it seemed that any email from the site- forum-update notices, new user verifications, newsletters, email sent via PoP3, nothing, was getting to Hotmail/MSN/Live email users. To make things even more frustrating was that we weren't even getting bounce notices or errors. All mail to Hotmail/MSN/Live accounts just vanished into a black-hole never to be seen again. After some Google'ing and a lot of reading I learned that I needed to setup a SPF, ehhr "Sender ID" record. I also found a few other DNS issues by using the tools over at DSN Stuff. So after some futzing around I got my Sender ID up on the new server and cleaned up my other DNS issues - but all of our email was still flushing right down the Microsoft spam-toilet. A little more Google'ing led me to the MSN/Hotmail Postmaster website, which only told me all the things I already knew. My only other resort was to send them an email asking why Microsoft was black-hole'ing all of our message.

Microsoft was really fast:
To my surprise I got a response to my email in less than an hour (at 11pm on a Sunday night!). The email message from a Certified Spam Tech. explained that my (new) IP was blacklisted due to a history of previous spamming. After a few emails back and forth, I was whitelisted and all my Hotmail/MSN/Live member email was flowing like water.

And then there was AOL

The next thing we noticed was that email to AOL members was being bounced. The message that we would get in the bounce message pointed to:
http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/421dynt1.html
Which indicated that we had been reported as "spammers" by AOL members.
Now, lets clear one thing up right now. We are NOT spammers. We HATE spammers. Every email from our site is OPT-IN. In order to get automatic emails about new postings you must "subscribe" to that particular topic. To get our newsletters you must enter your email address then confirm that you actually want the newsletter by clicking a verification link that we sent to your email address. EVERY email we send has instructions on how to MAKE IT STOP - all you have to do is click the damn link and you'll never get those particular emails again. We are probably about as far from being spammers as one could imagine.
So I setup a AOL FBL (FeedBack Loop) which notifies me of any members reporting us as "spammers". I also had to setup "postmaster" and "abuse" email addresses, which I had not done. Within a week or two, members that use AOL were getting email again.. For a while..

After about two weeks I started getting bounce messages again with the 421dynt1.html error. This time I called AOL at their "Spam Hotline" at 1-888-212-5537 and spoke with a very nice young woman who submitted me to AOL's Whitelist. "Great!", I thought, "That was easy!"

REQUEST DENIED:
About two days later I received an email from AOL indicating that my request for inclusion to their email Whitelist had been denied:

Your Whitelist request, with the confirmation code xxxxxxx-xxxx,
has been denied.

The IP address(es) you have entered appear to be a shared IP that is actually
owned by someone else. Since it doesn't appear that you own all the email
that this IP sends, we cannot perform any requests on this IP address unless
requested by the owner.

Shared IP? I don't share my IP with anybody! I pay good money for my own dedicated server and IP! I figured this would be easy to clear up with a fax of my Visa bill that showed how much I forked over to SurpassHosting for my new server so I made other quick call to the Spam-Hotline. I spoke with another very nice AOL Spam Operator and she made it very clear and simple to me - "...That's not your IP, perhaps the owner can contact us..." ... WTF?!

My only choice at this point was to enter a service request at Surpass and ask them to contact AOL and explain the concept of a dedicated server. After about a day (those Surpass guys are quick!) Ray at Surpass replied and explained that when he called the AOL-Spam Hotline, they told him the reason our email was being blocked is because the IP was less than 30 days old - Wait until the domain is 31 days old and reapply, they said. C'mon AOL, make up your mind!

The funny thing is that after Ray's call to AOL, I was no longer getting bounced emails from AOL - problem solved I thought, those AOL guys aren't so stupid after all ......

Then we sent our first newsletter:
On December 27th we send our first newsletter since the whole AOL spam issue started. I got several bounced emails for wrong/invalid AOL address, but it looked like all my AOL members were receiving the newsletter. I have my newsletter module set to throttle email at 500/hr, so it was going to take several hours to send the newsletter to all 6,000 or so recipients. I used that time wisely - carefully removing all invalid email address that got returned.

AOL FBL (Feed Back Loop)
About half-way thru sending the newsletters, I received ONE spam complaint via the AOL FBL. This means that someone marked our newsletter as spam and AOL was notifying me. To me it is particularly annoying that someone would sign up for our newsletter, receive the verification email, click the link that says "click here to confirm that you want to receive this newsletter", then when they get the newsletter, totally IGNORE the link at the bottom that says "Click here if you don't want this newsletter anymore" and instead report us to AOL as "spam". Ok.. Our website IS for "beginners" and most AOL members probably are beginners, but this just seems lazy. I figured oh-well.. Not the end of the world.

It was the end of the world
Or at least the end of my AOL emailing days for the time being. When my chron sent the next batch of 500 emails, I immediately received 5 or 10 AOL bounces - all of them saying that same 421 SERVICE NOT AVAILABLE; "421DYNT" error, which basically means "thou hath been banned from sending email to AOL based on member complaints" - OMG, ONE complaint and I'm banned?!

I'll start over from the beginning
My 30 days on the new server and IP is up next week. I will call the AOL Spam hotline then and see what they can/will do. Although I fully support AOL and their spam-fighting efforts, it seems to me that they might be able to be a little more smart about the way they do it. If my next attempt fails, screw 'em. We will start a campaign at the website and ask all of our members that use AOL to start complaining about not getting messages from grownupgeek.com - maybe that will wake-up the AOL SpamPolice. If it comes to that I'll be sure to make a new post detailing how it works out.

New AdSense Case Study Published

2006-12-29T06:28:00.000-08:00

This post has been moved to the new blog.
See: Adsense Case Study

Carson Daily - Henry Fonda related?

2006-12-28T17:21:00.000-08:00

I've been pretty busy over at the main site so haven't had much time to put anything into the blog lately. Server crashes, hack attempts, trolls, unhappy members - all part of the joy of keeping a busy website running.

All this week I'm on vacation and at home spending some quality time with the Baby-Geek (The Geek has to work, teeheehee). This afternoon the site is running smooth, and the Baby Geek is taking a nap so I decided to spend some time channel-surfing. As I'm flipping through my 149 channels I come across the old classic 12 Angry Men . Since I've never seen it before and since I have jury-duty in 2 weeks I thought I would give it a go. Well it turns out this is a pretty good movie. I wont go into a full review, but I liked it.

So as I'm watching Henry Fonda convince the 11 idiots in the room that they are wrong and he is right, I notice one very important detail:

Young Henry Fonda looks just like Carson Daily !

Now, I don't watch Carson Daily very often, but sometimes as I'm working on the website late at night I'll flip channels and run across his late-night show (I don't even know what it's called) and I'll watch it for a minute or two. Since when I see Carson Daily I'm usually half-asleep, I thought I would use the Interwebs to find some pictures of him and compare them to Henry Fonda.

Well.. am I crazy, or is there a tad-bit of a resemblance? Sure, Henry Fonda is older, but if you've seen Carson's TV show lately, you'll notice that he's not as spry looking as he is in these photos. I will make a new blog-post in 10 years with more updated pictures of Carson and we'll see if I'm right or wrong.

How to block Myspace Trackers

2006-11-05T16:47:00.000-08:00

Worried about protecting your privacy while viewing people's Myspace profiles? If that person has a Myspace Tracker on their profile they can see all kinds of information about you!

Grown Up Geek member Metasyntactic has put together a page explaining how you can easily block Myspace trackers from collecting any data about you.

See Metasyntactic's page here: How to block Myspace Trackers

Hole in Hi5 leaves accounts open to false logins

2006-10-13T23:10:00.000-07:00

So I'm going the referrer logs at the main website, and i accidentally clicked on a referrer URL from someone who had apparently put a photo from our site with a backlink to us into their profile - this Hi5 user must have clicked on this link while administering his Hi5 account. By clicking the link in my referrer log I was instantly viewing his account, under his login, with full access to his entire Hi5 profile - apparently the session ID (or whatever is necessary for me to to appear to be HIM to the Hi5 servers) was passed in the referrer string - giving me full access when I clicked it. I'm no security expert, or even a web-expert for that matter, so I'm not going to pretend that I know how/why it allowed me full access to his profile, but it would appear to be a security weakness on Hi5's part..

The format of the referral string is as follows (I'm removing the real userID and session info for little PoonJab's protection)
http://www.hi5.com/friend/displayProfile.do?userid=
xxxxxxxx&loginid=xxxHXPXKHPGJnnnnnnn&smid=20061013_2660_
5olxxxxYCaxnR4rNT9EK112520nnnn

I'm going to guess that this session will probably expire soon, but I'll keep trying it to see how long it lasts..

Since the chances of having a hi5 member click on a backlink to your website while logged into their account are slim, this is probably not a very 'hackable' vulnerability, but something I would guess that the Hi5 security man might want to take a look at.. I'm sure they don't want to end up looking like Myspace with their "we have no security" security..

I will notify Hi5 about this problem - mostly because i'm curious to see if they will respond or fix it.. It seems that Myspace ignored the notices i sent THEM, until the story about the Myspace secruty hole hit Digg.com - THEN they got around to fixing thier little issues pretty quick! Mr Hi5, if you're reading this in response to the email I sent you: if you reply to my email I will post a followup telling the world how quickly you reacted, and how much better you are than the Myspace security guys!

And before you post comments asking: NO, I did NOT mess with poor little PoonJab's account.. He only has 7 friends, so I felt kinda sorry for him. He does not need me to help make his life any more miserable that it already appears to be..

__________________________________________________________

Update: Saturday morning, after some sleep;
I was looking at this more and discovered that it is a bit more serious that I first thought.
It appears that PoonJab clicked on a link in someone ELSE's (Jorge's) Hi5 profile that went to our site - It is very common for someone to click on a backlink while logged into their Hi5 account! So the referrer link in my log takes me to Jorge's profile, but logs me into Hi5 as PoonJab. It's been over 8 hours and it still works, meaning the sessionID (or whatever) still has not expired. Mr. Hi5 definitely needs to have a look at this..

Update: Saturday morning, after some coffee;
I've sifted thru my referrer logs, and it looks like the majority of refferers have the 'regular' hi5 url:
http://www.hi5.com/friend/profile/displayProfile.do?userid=nnnnnnn

I'm not sure why PoonJab's referrer URL was different. I'll be keeping a close eye on my logs. Maybe I'll have to sign up for a Hi5 account and test it out a little..

Update: Saturday afternoon, after 2 cokes, a PB&J, and a nap;
I spent over an hour seeing if I could get the URL with the sessionID info to display while logged in with Poonjab's Hi5 account info. Three times, the longer SessionID URL did display, seemingly randomly - But no matter what I did I was not able to make it appear. So at this point it looks like if the SessionID URL happens to (randomly) display, and the user happens to click a link to another website while that URL is being displayed, all the information necessary to log in as that user will be sent as the referrer - making it possible for whoever has access to that website's logs take over that user's Hi5 account.

Myspace, Lawyers, Content and Headaches

2006-10-13T20:38:00.000-07:00

Well, it's on Digg.com so it MUST be true.

Over the last week or so we've had a little tit-for-tat going on between us and Joyboner.com regarding some content issues.

The problem began a week or so ago when a Grown Up Geek.com member posted some allegedly 'stolen' content at our site - resulting in a Cease and Desist'ish type complaint, and several other headaches. Caught up in the middle were some new codes that allow anyone to view information stored on private Myspace profiles.

Well, the Joyboner and us have come to an agreement, we've kissed and made up (figuratively of course) and the most important part, we've posted the Myspace codes.

All is now back in balance in the world of the Grown Up Geek..

The disclosure dilemma

2006-09-12T14:49:00.000-07:00

Once again members at Grown Up Geek.com have given us a code that allows anyone to view information (this time, comments) on Myspace profiles marked as 'private'. In the past we have exposed several security holes at Myspace accomplishing two things each time:
1) every pervert and stalker on the internet gets access to private profile information
2) Myspace fixes the hole, making Myspace a safer place
(note; it seems that simply reporting the security issues to Myspace does no good -- we've tried it)

So this time we're stuck on deciding if we should disclose this new hack to the world, or keep it a secret. It's not really a secret because it is floating around out there on the Internet - but if we post it, the whole world will know..

We decided to let our website visitors decide by voting.

Update: Website vistors voted to release the code by 83% .. We released the code, and Myspace fixed it 2 days later..

Yet another security hole in Myspace

2006-09-08T21:29:00.000-07:00

And now it's time for the weekly Myspace security hole!

A tip sent by a Grown Up Geek website member allows anyone to view upcoming birthdays on profiles marked as private.

This security 'lapse' is somewhat troubling because it has the potential of allowing anyone to see who the friends are on a profile marked as private - as long as those friends have upcoming birthdays.

As usual we've reported it to Myspace for them to ponder, and posted more about it at the main website. See: View birthdays on private profiles

New private-Myspace 'videos' security hole

2006-09-02T08:00:00.000-07:00

At GrownUpGeek.com we received a tip from a member (that wishes to remain anonymous) about a security hole that will allow you to view videos uploaded on Myspace profiles marked as private.

This hack/code is another twist on the two recent hacks allowing access to private myspace profiles - a simple URL modification.

Pending verification of this new potential security hole (I don't know anyone with a private profile that has videos on it!), we will post more about it.

Update: Well, it looks like this URL modification does allow anyone to view videos stored in profiles marked as "private". Yet one more reason for not posting real private information on the internet, or in particular, on Myspace.

Myspace private profiles still open to SIMPLE URL vulnerability

2006-08-29T20:35:00.000-07:00

On August 18 2006 a post was made at our website explaining how easy it was to access comments and photos on Myspace profiles set to "private". This vulnerability had apparently been known by the "Myspace underground" for some time, but had not been addressed by the Myspace security people. On August 26, this vulnerability was made public on Digg.com and suddenly the whole world new about it. Once in the spotlight, Myspace band-aided this hole in less than 24 hours (See This Post)

From the moment this backdoor was closed, there were posts on Digg.com and our main website hinting that there were still vulnerabilities on Myspace that would allow anyone to view photos on profiles set to 'private'. I was ready to blab these new vulnerabilities to the world, but I had not actually seen one in action yet.

Well.. Today yet another member of GrownUpGeek.com posted how to use a modified URL that will allow ANYBODY to view pictures on profiles set to private. I've seen it in action and can vouch that it's real. This second vulnerability is very similar to the one published on August 18, but this one only works for private photos (sorry, doesn't work for private comments).

So let this be an open letter to the Myspace security gurus:
IT'S STILL BROKE AND YOU MIGHT WANT TO GET IT FIXED

I'm not going to publish the vulnerability here... YET (gotta give those Myspace guys a chance to fix it.. right?) But it's out there, and it's in use - and if history serves as a guide, this vulnerability may not be fixed until it hits Digg.com or CNN (but I bet you won't hear about it on FOX news..)

Mr. Murdoch, if you need help finding the vulnerability, just post a comment here or send me an email. :-)

UPDATE: 8/30/06
1) Unless you're Rupert Murdoch (or one of his minions) I'm not going to email you the code! Based on postings i've seen by members at the forums area of our website, it IS out there at other sites.

2) in response to this comment:
Why does your webpage have a link saying "New private profile hole published" linking only to this blog post? You have NOT published it...yet. Quite misleading.
The code WAS published on our main website by a member - We then UNpublished the code to give Myspace a chance to fix it (we are trying to be responsible netizens). Based on what I've read in our forums the code IS published at other websites.. The reason for the link to the blog was so everyone could read that the exploit is out there. Upon reflection, we will update the text in the link to avoid further confusion.

UPDATE: 8/31/06
Well, it looks like Myspace has closed this particular security hole sometime in the last day or two. This latest hole, which worked using a variation of "http://mail.myspace.com....." would allow photos on private profiles to be viewed in Firefox after repeatedly refreshing the page.

So that's it boys and girls, it looks like the fun is over! ..until the next vulnerability....

Myspace closes GIANT SECURITY hole

2006-08-27T15:43:00.000-07:00

Late in the evening hours of Saturday August 26, 2006 a story was posted on DIGG.COM about a very simple "hack" (more like an easy backdoor)

&lt;br>

that would allow anyone to view comments and photos on a private Myspace page. Private pages, you may recall is the setting for all children under the age of 16 on Myspace. This was part of the "enhanced security" that Myspace implemented a few months back (previously, only children 14 and under had mandatory 'private' profiles).

The only problem is that (based on user reports), for the last few months anyone has been able to access the comments and pictures of these so-called private profiles by exploiting this glitch.. Now, in Myspace's defense, maybe they weren't aware of this little secret - but c'mon.. it's been floating out there in cyberspace for months - I thought these Myspace security guys were good?!

So it looks like now that this backdoor was on DIGG.COM, Myspace has fixed this security hole - Kudos to Myspace for that. But lets not forget that this little 'bug' has been in the wild since at least April 2006, based on reports from people who say they've been using it since then.

All you parents worried about your kids, all you kids worried about your "private" posts and pics.. NOW you have something to worry about: who's been lurking at your 'private' Myspace stuff...

UPDATE 8/29/06:
A hole STILL exists, allowing ANYONE to view photos on profiles set to private. See THIS POST

Myspace.com hacked - screen shots are proof ?

2006-07-28T19:38:00.000-07:00

Over the last 24 hours there have been news and Blog-reports of Myspace being down due to "electrical" problems, Myspace accidentally mass-deleting thousands of accounts (then UNdeleting them), and now users are reporting that Myspace.com was hacked/vandalized for several hours earlier today.

A reader sent this copy of a report from the Dreamhost datacenter that resides in the same building as Myspace. So it appears that there actually was a power problem today :
The Garland Building experienced a dead short which resulted in a brief power outage today, July 28, 2006. The air conditioning, elevators, and the electrical utility have all been restored.
While on generator power, a dead short occurred from one of our internal telecom users. We are investigating where the dead short occurred. A follow-up memo will be sent by the end of the business day reconfirming our transfer at 11:30pm tonight. We are currently on DWP power until further notice..

- last week at the height of the heat-wave in Southern California there were also several Myspace outages due to heat-related power problems. It turns out the Los Angeles DWP has not upgraded a large portion of it's infrastructure (you know, the wires and those transformer thingys on the telephone poles) in as long as EIGHTY YEARS.. But that's a whole 'nother blog-rant..

So seems that Myspace is having a bad week - on the tail of the power problems, Myspace also appears to have been hacked or vandalized. Below are the screenshots one user was able to grab as 'evidence' that Myspace.com had truly been hacked. If you saw any unusual activity on Myspace today please post what happened or what you saw so we can decide if these are true screenshots, or just someone with too much time on their hands playing with Photoshop: (click each screenshot for a larger view)

Update: 8:52PM, PST
Myspace is DOWN again... hhmmmm

More thoughts on Myspace in School

2006-07-24T19:42:00.000-07:00

I do not want to date myself, but back in my day, not every kid in school had a computer and not every classroom had internet access. In fact it was not until middle school when we had any kind of computer access and then it was in a lab. While I considered myself an advanced computer user as a kid, I pale in comparison to the students today.

Schools may try to curb or limit access for students to get to places like MySpace, which is now the most popular website in the United States, but the reality is the kids get around these restrictions without a problem. A lot of schools implement firewalls like BESS as a way to limit a student’s access to the outside world. Sites like MySpace, Facebook and others are deemed off-limits by most schools. The problem is students easily circumvent these blocks by using proxy servers. If you go to any school, you will find one or more students who host their own proxy server and share it with other students to get around these security measures. On top of that there are thousands of publicly accessible proxies available to everyone. The students are able to use these proxies to access any site on the internet, including MySpace. The reality is the students are better equipped to win this war over the gate-keeping parents and teachers.

In some higher-end schools all the students carry laptops and work away with wireless access from anywhere in the school. The issue is reaching epidemic status in some of these schools, with students on MySpace all day long communicating with other students in their school and around the country. They are busy chatting, adding new friends, and posting up new pictures. Very little if anything school related is being accomplished.

Unfortunately this is the double-edged sword of technology. On one hand you have a vast resource of information at a student’s fingertips. On the other hand you have a chronic time-wasting device that is easily maintained against even the strictest vigilance by schools. The question is how much and how far should schools go to limit access? Anything short of no computers is going to leave any system the victims of today’s computer savvy students.

Speed up your AdSense Updates

2006-07-20T11:53:00.000-07:00

For obsessive users of Google AdSense stats, one of the most frustrating things can be Updation Delaytion. Updation Delaytion occurs when Google's AdSense statistics pipes get backed up and the AdSense stats page doesn't update for extended amounts of time. During this time your AdSense stats become irregularly bloated and backed-up. Usually a large Click-dump comes at the end of updation delaytion resulting in a huge, sudden update of your stats. The sense of satisfaction after a large click-dump is almost indescribable, however because of the pain and discomfort that most users experience during updation-delaytion, most users seek immediate relief at the first sign of and stat back-up or slow-down.

Thankfully the GooglePlex now offers Plex-Lax for gentle, effective relief of Updation Delaytion.

Make Money on the Internet

2006-07-01T20:32:00.000-07:00

Learn the basics of building a website and earning money!

Did you know how easy it really is to build a website and start making money? You don't need to be a computer-geek to build a website - as a matter of fact, you don't need to know much about computers at all. And through the use of affiliate advertisers you can be making MONEY from your website in no time! Many webmasters and website owners make over $100,000 per year! Although it's more common to make $100-$1000 per month, that's still not bad considering how easy it is.

See our Build a Website and Make Money page for basic beginner steps on getting started in building a website and making easy money.

Fix your MacBook squishy-button problem!

2006-06-30T15:49:00.000-07:00

More and more Apple MacBook users are complaining of a “squishy” or unresponsive trackpad button. Some of the Apple Macbooks have a very crispy and responsive feel when you click down the button on the trackpad, however some Apple Macbook owners are unfortunate to be stuck with a button that doesn’t press down quite right.
Read the entire article here: Fix Macbook button

Set your Myspace Profile to PRIVATE

2006-06-22T09:33:00.000-07:00

This is probably the most asked, most emailed, most searched question at GrownUpGeek.com: How do I set my Myspace profile to private so only my friends can view it?

Luckily for us, it's one of the easiest to answer. We've put together a simple, very easy, very short page on How to set your profile to private just to make everyone happy.

See our Set Myspace profile to private page to learn how.

Mother of teen sues MySpace for $30 million

2006-06-19T21:36:00.000-07:00

What the FLOCK?!
So mom is too lazy, stupid or ignorant to watch what her kid does for hours on-end on the computer, but she sure isn't too stupid to pick up the phone and call Larry H. Parker to try and get rich off her daughter's misfortune (I wont blame the daughter for what happened to her, as she certainly did not deserve it, but she IS partly to blame - although not as much has her ignorant mother).
If "mom" had spent a little more time being involved with what her daughter was doing, instead of using the Internet as a baby-sitter, she would not be in this predicament.. Oh.. Wait.. But then she wouldn't be in for $30Million either..

The mother of a Texas teenager has sued MySpace.com for $30 million, after her daughter said she was sexually assaulted by a man she met on the social-networking site.

According to an article published Monday in The Austin American-Statesman newspaper, the 14-year-old said she was contacted by the 19-year-old defendant through her MySpace Web page in April. He was arrested in May, the article says.

The lawsuit alleges that MySpace.com has lax security in protecting its users, many of whom are younger than 16, the article says.

'MySpace is more concerned about making money than protecting children online,' Adam Loewy, who is representing the girl and her mother in the lawsuit against MySpace, told the newspaper.

For the full story, click HERE

Check our keep your kids safe on Myspace page to learn how you can help keep your kids safe online, so I don't end up blogging about how stupid YOU look when your kid does something crazy on Myspace.

Girl's Myspace gets hacked

2006-06-17T14:28:00.000-07:00

And this is news?

Teen Says Her MySpace.Com Account Hacked

A 15-year-old teen said her MySpace.com account was hacked into and the person who hacked it has access to her personal information.

Angel Drott said she noticed her screen name was changed and captions under some of her pictures had been changed to obscene messages when she logged onto MySpace.com one day.

“And it scares me because I talk to my friends and there is personal information, my address and phone number or anything, they can find out where I go to school or anything whatsoever,” Drott told KIRO 7 Eyewitness News.

For the full story click HERE

Man charged with arraging sex with girl, 14, on Myspace.com

2006-06-11T08:38:00.000-07:00

Police in Naperville, IL have arrested another man and charged him with soliciting sex from an underaged girl on Myspace.com. If convicted of the charges, he would be yet one more pervert using the internet to take advantage of underaged children who's parents have no clue what they are up to when they use their computer.

Coffield, who's Myspace name is "Mistercee42", was charged with felony indecent solicitation of a child, and was taken to the Will County Jail in Joliet. Police were tipped off by a relative that had the common sense to contact them when the young girl apparantly mentioned the upcoming rendavous. They then setup a 'sting' by posing as the young girl online and chatting with Coffield, who then setup the meeting.

Once again, the media (and probably the parents) blame Myspace, the internet, and anyone else within finger pointing distance while failing to acknowledge that it is the responsibility of the parents to to supervise their children whenever online, or when they are anyplace else for that matter.

Coffield's "friends" list on Myspace contains only "celebrites" and young females. Although hindsight is 20/20, it's easy to see that a 42 year old male with nothing but young teenage girls and fake celebraties listed as friends could be a problem. Any parent checking on who their child's Myspace 'friends' are might have been tipped off if their 14 year old daughter was listed as a 'friend' of this 42 year old man with sexually suggestive videos and other young girls listed on his profile.

See our keep your kids safe on Myspace page to keep your kids safe online.

Myspace meetup for stupid kid

2006-06-09T17:18:00.000-07:00

Does Myspace only give accounts to retards? Or is it that you PARENTS have to be retards before you can sign-up?

DETROIT - A 16-year-old girl who flew to the Middle East to see a man she met on MySpace.com was detained in Jordan and was headed home Friday, an FBI spokesman said.

U.S. officials persuaded Katherine Lester to take the return flight from Amman, FBI Special Agent Robert Beeckman said from the agency’s Detroit office.

Lester had disappeared from her home in Gilford, in eastern Michigan, on Monday and apparently planned to visit a man whose MySpace account describes him as a 25-year-old from Jericho, said Tuscola County Undersheriff James Jashinske.
Full Story HERE

Hot-sauce Boogers

2006-06-03T17:53:00.000-07:00

On November 13, 2005 I coined a new word/term, "Hotsauce booger".

What is a hot sauce booger?

A hot sauce booger is the dry, crusty thing that grows around the bottle-cap of your hot sauce bottle and inadvertently falls into your food or on the floor and gets stuck to the bottom of your foot every time you use your hot sauce. It is closely related to the ketchup booger and the spaghetti-sauce booger, but has a slightly tangier taste. Hotsauce boogers are more common on thicker hot sauces such as Tapatio, but they have been spotted on thinner sauces such as Tabasco. Hotsauce boogers tend to grow in cool, dry places such as kitchen pantries. The average size of a hotsauce booger is about 5mm, but they can grow in length to over 2cm. The color of a hot sauce booger ranges from black, to dark brownish-red. They are usually crescent shaped and have the consistency of regular nose-boogers.

What to do with your hot sauce boogers?

I generally flick my hot sauce boogers across the room into the sink, but as mentioned above, they often fall to the floor, or into my food before I get a chance to flick them. If they do reach the sink, they tend to rejuvenate and become semi-slimy from the moisture, until they get rinsed down the drain. Because of the dry-nature of hot sauce boogers, it is difficult to wipe them on the underside of a table like one would do with a regular booger - they usually just fall right off.

Don't be ashamed of your hot sauce boogers!

Everybody has hot sauce boogers, so you should not be ashamed of them. Do your best to wipe your hot sauce bottles with a paper towel or tissue often and you can reduce the amount of your hot sauce boogers. Before throwing a dinner party or inviting friends over for tacos, avoid the dreaded screams of "a hot sauce booger just fell in my meat!" by checking your bottles beforehand.

If you still aren't sure what a hotsauce booger looks like, I've included a photo of some of the better 'pics' from my collection. The ruler and the dime on the right are for scale. You can click on the photo for a larger version, so you don't miss any of the detail in the boogers.

MyspacePlus operators arrested in alleged MySpace extortion scam

2006-05-26T14:10:00.000-07:00

I guess the MyspacePlus V2.0 Myspace tracker code will be a bit delayed:
Teens arrested in alleged MySpace extortion scam | CNET News.com: "Harrison and Mondelli, both programmers, operated a Web site called MySpacePlus.com, according to the district attorney's office. The Web site looks to be a storefront for SpyFuse, which appears to be a tool that can be used to manipulate MySpace. A statement on the Web site says the tool is currently unavailable due to an 'unexpected legal complication.'"

FULL STORY

New: How to hack your Hi5 layout

2006-05-24T19:31:00.000-07:00

Hi5 hacks, hack your Hi5 layout, modify your Hi5 !!
So we get a ton of email from people begging for Hi5 layout codes after visiting our Myspace code page - we posted on our Myspace layout page that the codes DO work for Hi5, but I guess we didn't do it in a large enough font. So, in an effort to keep everybody happy, we've made a separate page of Hi5 hacks and layout codes just for all the Hi5 users out there (even though they are 99% the same as the Myspace codes.. shhhh).
Hi5 layout hacks

Easy hacks for Facebook

2006-05-22T19:54:00.000-07:00

Keeping in our usual tradition of explaing things in an easy-to-understand way, we've compiled a few hacks for Facebook at the main Grown Up Geek.com website.

So far we don't have many hacks, so please post 'em if you got 'em!

How to hack Facebook

Is your boyfriend cheating on you ONLINE?

2006-04-28T11:21:00.000-07:00

Is your boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, or 'mate' cheating on you through the computer? Does he/she hide what he's doing online, not give you access to read his email, or suddenly close windows on the computer when you walk by? Today with email, Myspace, internet porn, and webcams it's easy to find an online friend to 'play' with.

Most people 'get a feeling' when something isnt right, but how can you tell for sure? We have put together a page with tips and products to help you catch someone cheating online.

See our online cheating page to help you find out if your lover is cheating on you.

How to get to your Myspace at school when it's blocked

2006-04-24T19:03:00.000-07:00

Due to overwhelming demand we've put together a page explaining how you can use proxies to access Myspace even if your school blocks it. It doesn't work 100% of the time, but it's worth a try if you need your Myspace fix.
How to get to Myspace when it's blocked

What is phishing?

2006-04-15T22:13:00.000-07:00

Once again, in an attempt to keep new computer and internet users safe, the GrownUpGeek.com has put together some tips to help prevent identity theft online. In a page that's easy enough for everyone to understand we also answer the question: what is phishing?

What is phishing?

Mumps outbreak threatens to kill everybody!

2006-04-14T16:34:00.000-07:00

My goodness!
600 cases out of 200million people in the United States and CNN would have you think we're all going to die. Mumps isn't even fatal (most of the time)!
Can't CNN spend their time better worrying about the upcoming war between Iran and Israel.. or.. Iran and the United States.. or.. Iran and everyone else?

..whatever..

Just in case you're the paranoid hypochondriac type, you can read what the symptoms of mumps are, so you can be sure you don't have it.. Maybe what you really have is bird flu.

New Product Review Section at GrownUpGeek.com

2006-04-10T21:33:00.000-07:00

Over at the main GrownUpGeek.com website we've created a Product Reviews section.

The new Product Reviews section is open to the public to post product reviews on everything from high-end personal computers, to washing machines, and everything in between.

Check our our new Product Reviews section and post a review on your most recently purchased cellphone, PC, Blackberry, clothes-dreyer, or anything else!

More Myspace Hacks for beginners

2006-03-29T19:29:00.000-08:00

In addition to our Myspace hacks, we've now added a simple add pictures to Myspace tutorial page for beginners.

Visit the links above, or go to Hack Myspace.

Myspace Hacks!

2006-03-15T22:53:00.000-08:00

We've put together some very easy Myspace hacks so you can customize your Myspace, and we've gathered some links for more advanced Myspace modifcations, hacks, and other ways to pimp Myspace.

Follow the link here: Hack Myspace

apcmag.com: Microsoft bombshell: no EFI support for Vista

2006-03-10T22:18:00.000-08:00

Microsoft revealed today that it will not support EFI booting for Windows Vista on its launch. The news will be a shock for owners of Intel Macs who had hoped they would be able to dual-boot between Windows Vista and OS X. Intel Macs only support booting via EFI.

apcmag.com: Microsoft bombshell: no EFI support for Vista

Microsoft gets 5,000th patent | CNET News.com

2006-03-06T23:28:00.000-08:00

On their march to take over the world Microsoft gets 5,000th patent | CNET News.com

Lock Down Your PC: Secure Your Computer Against Hackers

2006-02-27T18:52:00.000-08:00

Although not quite as simple or easy for new internet users to understand as the GrownUpGeek's site, this web site still has some good information for new internet users on how to keep your Windows computer secure on the internet.
For more basic internet security and Microsoft Windows information see the GrownUpGeek.com's website: Technology and Security for beginners

Lock Down Your PC: Secure Your Computer Against Hackers: "Lock Down Your Home PC: Security Essentials"

The Grown Up Geek hits the AM Radio waves!

2006-02-18T14:05:00.000-08:00

Leo Laporte helps the Grown Up Geek with new iMac problem LIVE on the air!

Not being as well versed in the Apple world as I think I am in the Windows world, I called computer expert Leo Laporte on his live radio call-in show on KFI 640AM in Los Angeles this morning.

Thanks to the Leoville listeners I was able to fix the problem, saving me a trip to the local Apple Store!

Leo was also nice enough to talk about GrownUpGeek.com on the air for a minute or two resulting in a huge increase in traffic!

Thanks Leo! When I grow up I want to be just like you!

Update:
3 months later and the total traffic sent to GrownUpGeek.com from Leo's radio show and podcast has exceeded 60,000 unique visitors.

Proof That Implants Last Forever

2006-01-25T17:45:00.000-08:00

At least we know grandma got her money's worth from that online
weightloss plan and the implants!

Prediction of personal computers in the year 2004

2006-01-21T21:55:00.000-08:00

this is a model created in 1954 of what a 2004 personal computer could look like. The article does not say if it's a laptop or a desktop model.

read more | digg story

If you liked the photo in the link above, click here to read about it's origin.