Hotlinking is the practice of loading a image on your site that resides on a different server. Back in the days when hosting companies metered your bandwidth, which is much rarer these days (or at least the caps are much higher), people would “steal bandwidth” by hotlinking to images. Rather than download them to your own server, you’d simply load the image from the remote server and thereby having them pay for the bandwidth.

These days, the bandwidth cost is less of an issue and it’s more about processing. While it’s often better to load the image from your own site, you trade bandwidth for a DNS lookup, it still happens. Most often it’ll be a content scraper but every so often you get a naive blogger or site owner who just doesn’t know any better. The easiest way to prevent this is to modify your .htaccess file. The server will know if someone else is trying to load an image from your server, so you can tell it to load another image or return a 403 Forbidden error.

Stop Hotlinking Entirely

These directives tell your server to only load images on your server if your site requests it, replace “mysite” with your domain. This code will return a 403 Forbidden error anytime another domain tries to load an image from your server.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mysite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ - [F]

The directives instruct the server to do this for JPE, JPEG, GIF, BMP, and PNG files. If you want to extend this to other filetyles, simply add a pipe “|” (it’s the shift-letter above the backslash underneath the backspace key) and the extension. If you want to return an image, rather than a 403, replace the dash in the final line with the path to an image.

Stop Hotlinking from Specific Domains

If you want to allow some hotlinking but not others, you can specifically pick them out:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?blogspot\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?myspace\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ - [F]

This prevents hotlinking from blogspot and myspace domains. The NC tells .htaccess to ignore case sensitivity (so MySpace is the same as myspace) and the OR tells it to prevent blogspot OR myspace. If you want to add another line, make sure it has an OR in the arguments (unless it’s the last one in the list).

Finally, don’t hotlink to other people’s images. I think it’s OK if it’s a huge site like Flickr or Imgur, which is designed for and expects it, but not if it’s an individual’s own site.

About two years ago I changed the name of my personal finance blog from Blueprint for Financial Prosperity to Bargaineering. Don’t ask me why it was named Blueprint for Financial Prosperity but I really felt that having the name match the domain was better than having such a descriptive title. In the last two years, pretty much everything has been changed to reflect the name change… except one thing – my PayPal account.

I don’t accept any payments related to Bargaineering/Blueprint anymore but the Paypal account still retained that name. I wanted to change it but despite my best efforts to find the menu option, I was out of luck. Fortunately, through the power of the internet, I learned that I only needed to load up this url:
https://www.paypal.com/us/wf/f=ap_namechg

Copy and paste that into your browser, log in, and you will be presented with a series of screens that will help you change your business name. Be sure to select “Business Name Change (business name)”, then enter the new one, click “Continue,” and you’re done. There’s no verification or any other confirmation needed, the change is instant.

Well, your IP address is:
38.107.191.84

(Don’t worry, I’m not spying on you, it’s information passed from your browser to my site’s server)

You can bookmark this page next time you want to find your IP or you can use some tools available on your computer to find out.

Windows

On any Windows machine, click the Start Menu and choose Run. Type “cmd” into the prompt, that will open up the command prompt. Type “ipconfig” and it’ll show you your computer’s internet details including IP Address, Subnet Mask, and Default Gateway. The IP address is what you’ll want. If you want more details, like your Physical Address, DNS Servers, etc, you can type “ipconfig /all” to show all the information available.

Mac

Use the Finder to locate the application folders, then locate the Utilities folder. Inside Utilities you’ll see the Terminal application, load that. In that prompt, type “ipconfig” and it’ll display a whole bunch of information, including the X.X.X.X number that is your IP address.

There you go, your IP address in a jiffy.

If you’ve played with Yahoo! YSlow’s Smush.it tool, you’ll probably notice that it will often convert .GIF files into .PNG files. Ever wonder why they do that? It’s because PNG files are patent-free (though the underlying GIF patent, the LZW algorithm, expired in 2003), contain alpha channels, gamma correction, and two dimensional interlacing. All that gibberish means translates into a better version of a GIF file that also compresses better, about 5% to 25% according to the W3.org.

For you trivia enthusiasts out there, GIF stands for graphics interchange format and was introduced in 1987. It uses the Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) lossless data compression technique that was patented in 1985. CompuServe got into a tiff (haha, get it? TIFF?) Unisys, which held the patent, and the PNG standard was developed.

PNG stands for portable network graphics and nowadays it’s widely accepted as an image format by all major browsers. As a result, it’s becoming more popular as it is generally smaller than GIFs by 5-25%.

You may be wondering where the JPEG, joint photographic experts group, fits in all this. It differs from GIF and PNG in that it’s a lossy compression algorithm (whereas GIF/PNG are lossless) designed for photos.

There you have it, the differences between GIF and PNG (and JPEG!).

What is a favicon? It’s short for favorites icon and it’s an icon that represents your site in places like your bookmarks, in shortcuts, etc. It’s a chance for you to distinguish yourself in your reader’s list of favorites sites and they’re ridiculously easy to make.

Is a favicon important?It’s not crucial to the success of your site but it’s always good to differentiate yourself from everyone else as much as possible. A favicon will appear in bookmarks, it will appear in aggregators, and in the end it really doesn’t take much time… so you mighta s well make it.

How do you make a favicon? If you have a site logo, you can use that, or try to find something distinguishable. A favicon is usually 16×16, 32×32, or 64×64 pixel image in the .ico format. You can use other formats but the .ico format is the most supported filetype.

After you’ve created the file, simply upload the favicon.ico (use that filename just to make it easy on yourself) to your root directory and many browsers will automatically pick it up. Internet Explorer will automatically load it.

Then, add this in the header of your website (this lets all the other browsers, the ones who don’t automatically load it, know where your favicon is):

<link rel="SHORTCUT ICON" href="http://www.website.com/myicon.ico"/>

That’s it, as easy as pie.

This is a guest post from Pete of BibleMoneyMatters.com.

When you’re starting a blog, one of the first things that you’ll need to do after purchasing a domain name and setting up WordPress is to give your new website a design by choosing a WordPress theme. While most can probably agree that having a premium theme from the get-go isn’t essential (there are more important things like creating good content, testing and optimizing ads and promoting your site), I think most can agree that some premium themes will give you a leg up by giving you a superior look and feel, in addition to having more functionality available behind the scenes.

When I first started my blog at BibleMoneyMatters.com I was using a free template that I had found through one of the free WordPress theme websites. While the theme I chose was functional, it certainly didn’t give me the flexibility to make the kind of changes i wanted to, to take my site to the next level. After doing some research, I discovered a theme that did everything I wanted, and more. The Thesis WordPress Theme.

The Thesis WordPress Theme

Thesis Theme is a WordPress website framework that gives you a ton of flexibility to create the blog that you’ve always wanted. It gives great design, easily changeable layouts, optimized SEO (without the use of plugins) and a great support community.

Chris Pearson, designer of Thesis talks about why he designed the template:

I built the Thesis Theme because I wanted a framework that had it all—killer typography, a dynamically resizable layout, intelligent code, airtight optimization, and tons of flexibility. Now, after months of field testing, I’m confident enough to offer it to those of you who have come to expect nothing but the finest themes from me.

The theme definitely has those things and more. let’s look at a few of the reasons why I love the Thesis theme.

Superior Design And Backend Options

One of the first thing I noticed when looking around at themes is that so many of them try to do too much with the design, and become a bit too busy while not allowing you easy access to change things you don’t like. Thesis on the other hand has a nice clean design out of the box, has great readability, and if you like to tinker – is easy to customize to your own tastes. The Thesis back end tools allow you to change fonts, swap colors, update menus and change the complete layout of the site. You can have 1, 2 or 3 columns and order your columns however you want. Just about anything about your site that you might want to change, you can do it through the Thesis design and site options menus. If you’re a more advanced user, you can also customize your site further using CSS and PHP, which is made readily accessible through another menu option in the WordPress Dashboard. If you’re not as advanced there are hundreds of tutorials available that will walk you through more advanced changes.

SEO Optimized Site Framework

One of the great things about the Thesis theme is that it is search engine friendly out of the box. While WordPress sites in general do well with search engines, there are things you can do with your theme to help improve your SEO. For example, Thesis has the ability to specify each post’s title tags, keywords and meta tags without a plugin like All in One SEO Pack. Thesis also gives you the option to use canonical urls so that the search engines can index your content correctly. All of these things can be done with other plugins, but having them built into your theme is even better.

Easy Upgrades

One thing that sets Thesis above a lot of other themes is the fact that it is so easy to upgrade the theme when a new version comes out. To customize all you have to do is change two files, custom.css and custom_functions.php. If you’re upgrading the theme you just download the “custom” directory with those files in it, upgrade the theme, and then re-upload those files to the new version of the theme. Done. Upgrades only take a few minutes at most.

With a lot of other themes to make changes to your site design and layout you have to modify the theme’s core files. If you have to do an upgrade, you then have to figure out all the modifications you made to the theme’s core files, and then re-modify the theme once you’ve upgraded. That could take hours or days depending upon how many changes you’ve made to customize your site!

Support Community Second To None

One of the biggest selling points of the theme in my eyes is that it has a support community second to none. When you purchase the theme you get access to the member’s only forum where experts in Thesis are always ready to give a helping hand. In addition there are hundreds of Thesis tutorials out on the web that will help you do anything from change a background image to adding a header. If you’ve dreamed of doing something, someone else has already done it – and put out a tutorial on how it was done.

Thesis Theme Isn’t Perfect

As you can tell I’m a big fan of the Thesis theme, however, it does have its flaws. The theme does have a learning curve for newer users, especially if you want to do anything beyond the basic site changes. The theme uses what is called “hooks”, a framework that allows you to insert your own custom code or programming just about anywhere in your theme. If you want to use hooks, you’ll want to find a good tutorial on them, like the ones found on http://thesishooks.com/. Another downside of the theme is that if you don’t opt to customize your installation, the basic Thesis theme can have a pretty bland, vanilla look. So many people use the theme that your site can get lost in the shuffle if you don’t make changes.

Plugins To Make Thesis Even Better

While Thesis is great, it doesn’t address every need that users might have. Two plugins that I would suggest every new user of Thesis install once they buy the theme are:

• Thesis Openhooks: This plugin makes it easer for all users to use the hooks framework, and allows you to insert ads, text, graphics, etc anywhere in the theme that you want.
• Thesis Import/Export: This plugin allows you to export your Thesis theme and openhooks settings in case your site has a catastrophic failure and you need to re-import them from backup.

Conclusion

Since becoming a blogger I’ve tested out and installed countless themes on the websites that I operate. None of the themes, however, have come close to the Thesis Theme for WordPress when it comes to design options, optimized SEO, usability and flexibility. If you’re looking for a theme to use on your site, I wouldn’t hesitate to purchase your copy of the theme.

One of the small headaches of running your own business is that you need to keep your office stocked with all the boring things an office needs, like printer ink cartridges. I use a Canon i560s printer at home and use up a black cartridge every month or two, so finding an affordable source for them is crucial. My store of choice lately has been 123inkjets.com because they carry basically any generic ink cartridge you can think of. I bought replacement cartridges for my Canon i560s for less than a dollar or two a piece, it’s really affordable.

So how do I get them for free? I combine it with Staples’ ink cartridge recycling program to get $3 in store credit! Sign up to their Staples Rewards program and you can recycle up to 10 cartridges per month and get $3 in store credit. I get the cartridges for free because I pay less than $3 and I can get $3 in store credit, which I use to buy all the other supplies I need.

Help the Earth and get free ink cartridges, a win win!

When you first start blogging, it’s very tempted to sign up for Blogger.com blog. It’s free, it’s fairly easy and intuitive to use, and you can be up and running within minutes. If you have absolutely zero technical know how, using a free service like Blogger or WordPress.com will get you a live blog faster than any other option. That convenience comes at a cost.

Lack of Control

The biggest reason I advise against using a hosted blog platform like Blogger.com or WordPress.com is because you aren’t in total control of your site. While you never have to worry about Blogger.com “going down,” you are subject to its whims. One absolutely wonderful site, Bankdeals.blogspot.com (now living at DepositAccounts.com), recently experienced quite a scare. Ken at Bankdeals has been writing about banking for what seems like eons. You can expect to see a dozen posts a day on the latest banking news and his consistency is almost legendary. However on one fateful day, every single post he had ever written disappeared. There was some sort of technical hiccup somewhere, out of his control, and his content was gone. Thankfully he was able to recover almost all of it and I think that was part of the impetus to move to his own site.

You Can’t Accumulate Link Equity

The second reason, behind control, is that the currency of the web is links. When you write something linkworthy, and people link to you, that’s a valuable indication that you’re a valued resource on the web. As you accumulate link equity, your site rises in the eyes of both your peer sites and search engines. The problem with accumulate link equity for a site on a hosted platform is that you are accumulating link equity for Blogger, or WordPress.com, or some third party service. Your site doesn’t actually benefit.

Hosting Your Own Isn’t Hard

Finally, hosting your own site isn’t very difficult. Many hosts these days have one-click installation for WordPress and one-click upgrades, meaning you just have to tell them you want WordPress and they handle the technical aspects of installing it, standing up a MySQL database, and making sure all the credentials match. Before the popularity of blogs, it wasn’t quite so simple but nowadays the market has responded by making it simple.

In the coming weeks we will have an expert, Mrs. Micah of Blogcrafted, write a guest post on how to move your site from Blogger to your own hosted WordPress site. If you want to earn money from your site now or in the future, you will want to host your own site as early as possible. The longer you wait, the more painful it becomes.

One of the great benefits of using WordPress is that it comes with so much free stuff. You can download a multitude plugins to extend the functionality of WordPress. You can download thousands of themes to change the look and feel of your site. WordPress itself gives you a window into that theme so you can customize every aspect of your design. All of this is possible without any background in software development and therein lies the beauty of open source software and the open source movement.

However, one problem that new bloggers often commit is that of overtinkering.

When you first start your blog, it’s often good enough to download a theme that pleases aesthetically. All too often, and I myself suffered from this, we feel that we should be tinkering with our theme so that it doesn’t look the same as every other blog that downloads that theme. What we don’t realize is that when you’re first starting out, the theme is less important than the content.

Themes are important, don’t get me wrong, but don’t over think it. People get their first impressions within seconds of viewing your site and as long as you have a professional looking theme that is easy to read, you will do fine. Wait until you have hundreds of visitors a day before you start playing with the theme. Wait until you have thousands before you start thinking about buying a theme.

You might be surprised to learn that all of my blogs use free themes. Most of your visitors will not know you have a common theme (you have to at least change it from the themes that come with the WordPress package, that’s too generic) and the ones that do won’t care.

If you’re curious what theme Bargaineering started out as… it was equiX, a free theme that is no longer available. Over the years, I tinkered with it (once it made sense to) to achieve certain goals and today it doesn’t look at all like equiX. Totally free.

Jeremy at GenXFinance.com has been dealing with a vexing problem lately. A series of random websites with the cz.cc TLDs have been using his Google Adsense javascript code to pump up his impressions and driving down his clickthrough rate. Over four days there were nearly 600,000 impressions and zero clicks.

While it may seem a bit harmless (no click, no revenue right?), this is actually something that is quite dangerous. First, Google is always on the lookout for abnormal behavior and this certainly qualifies. Second, there are CPM based ads and in that case the advertiser would’ve been charged, Jeremy would’ve made money, and almost certainly booted.

In Jeremy’s case, it was probably harmless but this is something that can be completely avoided. Google Adsense gives you the ability to block your Adsense publisher ID from being used on any other sites. You can control this by logging into your account, clicking Adsense Setup, and then Allowed Sites.

Here, you can add all the allowed URLs who can load up your code. You always want to do this because there is little benefit, and a lot of risk, for unauthorized sites to use your code. They can do this by looking at your source code and copying the javascript code.

Just remember to add new sites if you put the code on them!