I am not the quickest on updating my wordpress usually.  It takes me a week or two, between law school and work its a little hard to dedicate the time to upgrading when I am terrified I am break something.  In the meantime, while I am lagging behind updates, its important to make sure that hackers have not been exploiting security holes patched by the next upgrade.  The best way I’ve found to monitor this is by using a great simple plugin called “wordpress exploit scanner.”  You can get it here, just put it into your plugins folder, go to plugins off your dashboard, and run it.  Just a quick note, it will pick up the names of exploits in the plugin file when you run it, so don’t get scared when things come up, just follow the file path and see if its from the plugin, or your blog.

Good luck, hope your blog is safe.

Made a few changes to the homepage of the website.  Changed the archive list in my sidebar to be by year rather than by month, to shorten the laundry list of items on the side.  If you would like to make yours by year as well, change the code in your sidebar to read:

<?php wp_get_archives(’type=yearly’); ?>

I also added a new page - Monthly Archives.  Used the manage feature to make a new page and then used the phpexec plugin to copy this code onto the page to list the archives monthly:

<?php wp_get_archives(’type=monthly’); ?>

Next I copied the link to my Monthly Archives page and added it under my yearly archive list, in case someone looking in the sidebar under Archives would like to see the monthly list instead of yearly.

Next, I got rid of my ShoppingAds ad box in my sidebar.  It was making money but just a little too bulky for my current theme/layout.  If you are looking to make a little extra money you should check it out, sadly its just not for me right now.  I may add it back when I redo the look of the site.

Last but not least I added a new section in the sidebar -  Where I get great deals!  There are three links there now, go check them out.  This area will grow over time!

A new program just launched for blog advertising called BlogRolled.  I signed up and got my blog accepted this morning, we’ll see what kind of income flow it ends up having.

One catch, no affiliate program… Yet.

Finals are OVER!  Sure I don’t really have a summer break, but at least finals are over. 

Now I’m back to playing videogames, watching tv, sleeping, and blogging.

Speaking of games, for those of you who play word games, you should check out this site.  The guy who runs the site is a talented programmer who just put up a script that solves word scramble puzzles.

Check it out…. great for cheating in scrabble too :-p

This is the beginning of a multi-part post about making money with your website or blog.

First off, you should probably have a website or blog to monetize (check out some of my earlier posts that can help you get started:  Create an Icon / Favicon for your website;  Discount on Hosting; Simple Guide to Website Promotion; Optimizing For Search Engines; 5 Ways to increase Blog Traffic; Blogging Guide Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3)

In addition to the tips and instructions regarding SEO and Promotion above I’m going to each day outline 1 income source of mine.

Today:  ShoppingAds 

How does it work?  You display a small ad (you have choices as to the size and display style).  This ad will show ebay ads (pick keywords and it shows ads tailored to those words).

How do you make money?  As users click on the ebay item ads, and purchase them, you get paid a % of the purchase price.

Does it actually make money?  Yes.  There have been days where I have made $13 just on one click/purchase.

Try it out!

This article shows us exactly what is in Chenney’s glasses.  It is not a naked woman, just Chenney gripping is golf club!  Check out the picture and click zoom to go in closer and see clearly what the image is really of.

 ;-)

4969 - not a great score, but I FINALLY BEAT IT.  I have been playing this game since I wrote about it over a month ago in a time waster tuesday post… and finally a win.

 Check out the scoreboard. 

Feel free to add your scores to MofomonGroup as well!

I spend a great deal of time reading blogs, forums, and news articles.  Sure, I only read the “offbeat” news and the tech news, but thats not the point.  The point is, I like to read things on the internet.  A little postsecret on mondays; gizmodo, lifehacker, and Yahoo News on and off all week; and now I’m taking a look at forums.  I admit, I used to read and troll the World of Warcraft Forums, but since I stopped playing over a year ago I haven’t really found a replacement.  Today I came across the Thoughts.com Forums.

I can’t say if this will fill the void that losing the World of Warcraft forums has created, but I have to say, pretty good.  Tons of threads to read, pretty active.  All types of topics from TV shows to Religion to Humor.  Gives me plenty to browse and comment on while I’m waiting for a classmate to finish talking about their attenuated “what if” scenario.   Check it out, start contributing so I have more to read ;-).  Like I said earlier, there is a large variety of topics so it keeps all of us busy.  Not to mention you can flame all the posts you don’t like… Happy Trolling!
Oh, if you like postsecret, you should also take a look at The Experience Project (take a look at their confessions section).

A few months ago I came across a service called Predictify. In my quest to spend all day wasting my time in some sort of “productive” manner I have found yet another venue… The way the service works they have hundreds of questions or polls in a few categories (politics, sports, pop culture, etc) which you can answer. Once the correct answer or outcome is determined you receive your payout (depending on if you were correct and how early you made your prediction). Your answers also give you a ranking (apprentince, scholar, etc.) which determine your payout bonus levels. Not all the questions have payouts, but its fun to test how accurate you are regardless, and you can use free ones to bring up your ranking and payout bonus levels! In addition to these features you can post your own polls/questions for everyone else to answer (you can answer too).

Best part is, it is all free. Registration is free, predicting is free, posting questions is free. The only time you would need to pay is if you posted a question that had a payout.

When you start accumulating a payout, the minimum to pay your account is $20.

Good Luck! Get Predictifying!

• Predictify

A lot of my friends always ask me what I think is the best setup for surfing the internet…

Obviously this depends on you preferences but I wanted to walk through what I think is one of the best setups.

1. Get Firefox! Either


or


Now that you have that setup, lets customize it.

2. StumbleUpon. Get the toolbar, set it up, enjoy it. Trust me when I say you will need this. StumbleUpon allows you to choose your favorite categories of pages and then “stumble” through them randomly whenever you want. When you like something (like this page) give it a thumbs up, when you don’t like it give it a thumbs down. You might think this is a useless toy, but I think of it as a way to take a quick break and discover something new.

3. Get the Alexa toolbar. This provides website owners with a lot of traffic information that is useful and important to us. Also you can take a look at how your favorite sites are doing.

4. Get and install forecastfox. You set it up with your zipcode and have updated weather info for today and tomorrow (or more, its customizable). Means you don’t need to take any extra time to look up the weather, its right there on your toolbar. I set mine up to display on the menu bar so it doesn’t take up any extra space. If you want more info on that days weather, just click on it and it goes to the accuweather.com detail page.

5. This may just be the BEST firefox addon ever. Foxmarks. This allows you to sync the bookmarks of all your firefox browsers, so your laptop, desktop, and work machine will always have all the same bookmarks! Means I don’t need to keep emailing myself links, I just favorite it on whichever machine I’m on and my other firefoxes will sync up and have it in their bookmarks as well.

6. Gmail Manager - this is for those of you that are as obsessed with your gmail as I am. A must have.

7. IE tab - every once in a while you will come across a page that just needs to be viewed in IE for one reason or another. This plugin lets you open a page using the IE engine on that tab in firefox!

There you go, now you have a killer firefox setup. Sure there are a million other things you can add and tweak, but this is a great base setup. Enjoy….. Now if I could only get my firefox to accomplish home automation. Firefox! Why can you not function as our own personal web browser run home automation systems!

If you would like more extension ideas I suggest you also look at this: Lifehackers top 10 must have firefox plugins.