Instead, you’ll have to go to the Domains By Proxy site, log in, and cancel private registration from that side. If you don’t have your login credentials you can request it but it will add a few more steps, and headache to the process. I think it’s a little ridiculous that you are forced to manage private registration through another interface, especially since the two companies are owned by GoDaddy, but I suppose they do get a few customers each year willing to pay for private registration instead of figuring out how to turn it off.

Now wait… eventually it’ll percolate to GoDaddy and you won’t have to pay for Private Registration when you renew.

If you have a bunch of domains and want to do a “poor man’s” private registration, open up a PO Box and use that as your physical address. Depending on how many domains you may have, a PO Box could be a more economic solution… plus you get use of a PO Box.

How to Turn Off Private Registration for Domains on GoDaddy is a post from: wangarific

If you’re like me, you have several Adsense accounts, with different EINs, for your various sites because should something happen to an account (I’ve heard of people being victims of nefarious click fraud schemes and losing their entire account), you don’t want to lose Adsense on all of your sites. What if you link up the wrong one? Unfortunately, unlinking them is not as simple a process as linking them in the first place. Fortunately, in the last few years, the process for unlinking them has gotten much easier.

First, get your Adsense login email and Publisher ID, you’ll need both. Visit this page, enter in the details, and wait. It’s not clear how long it takes to unlink an account but this is the one way to do it.

How to Unlink your Google Adsense and Analytics Accounts is a post from: wangarific

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.

How to Stop Hotlinking Images with .htaccess is a post from: wangarific

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.

How to Change the Business Name on a PayPal Account is a post from: wangarific

(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.

How do I find my IP address? is a post from: wangarific

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’s the Difference Between .GIF and .PNG is a post from: wangarific

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.

How to Make a Favicon is a post from: wangarific

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.

Thesis Theme Review is a post from: wangarific

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!

Free Printer Ink Cartridges is a post from: wangarific

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.

Why You Should Host Your Own Blog is a post from: wangarific