Here’s the quickest way I know to get your WordPress blogs into compliance with the new Google privacy policy requirements.

(Starting April 8, 2009, Google is requiring AdSense publishers to update their privacy policy with information about Google use of cookies for serving advertisements and how visitors can opt out of those cookies if they want to.)

It’s a free WordPress plugin available at http://www.synclastic.com/plugins/privacy-policy.

Cheers,
Gary Harvey

PS:
Seen my Internet marketing rolodex yet? — http://garyharvey.net/rolodex. It gets updated often as I identify internet marketing tools I am using that are not yet on the list, plus when I add other useful finds.

Have you seen http://www.giveawayoftheday.com? I find it handy for 2 reasons.

1. Obviously for the giveaway products themselves – which are commercial software products that are given away for free for 24 hours. Usually you have to install them within the 24 hours to get them working for free. And occasionally there has been a product I have downloaded.

2. But what I find more useful often is the discussion afterwards. Users can download (or not) and leave a comment. For most products that are given away, you will usually find that some of the commenters will link through to a free product that they say does the same job better.

I like that.

Take today’s example. It “allows users to grab images right off their screen, edit them using paint and photo editing tools” but in the following discussion various posters linked through to over half a dozen alternatives, all free.

My favorite, being a Firefox user, was the link through to Fire Shot which is a Firefox browser addon.

Other finds that caught my eye:

FastStone Capture “is a powerful, flexible and intuitive screen-capture utility. It allows you to capture anything on the screen including windows, objects, full screen, rectangle regions, freehand-selected regions and scrolling windows/web pages.” You can add watermarks with this one, too.

Rumshot – “Get classy – use Rumshot to automatically generate a themed and stylish screenshot preview!”

Talk to you later. Hope you found this useful… Read the rest of this entry

With my old computer slowly dying on me, and actually taking half a minute or longer to open any program, it was time to buy a new computer. Three years and 3 months is long enough, especially since my machine is on most of the waking hours of my day (and night).

My son, who is a computer programmer and who now lives here in Sydney, has been urging me to look at what’s available through the online computer auction service at http://www.graysonline.com.au/category.asp?PARENT_ID=3

Actually he went further than that. He found me a beauty. We put in a maximum bid price and let the automatic bidding run. Result: I now have a shiny new Compaq with twice the memory and twice the hard drive capacity as before — and Vista as well — for just over AU$400 delivered to the door.

Talk about a deal.

The auction description said it was refurbished, but my son the computer whiz says it’s never been turned on. No dust in the box. All programs are running as brand new. As you can imagine, we ARE pleased.

***

So… I’ve spent the last few days installing the software I cant live without and transferring stuff from the old computer to the new one. I used SyncToy (it’s free) in the end and it worked nicely.

***

I’m using this equipment changeover as my prompt to also make the move from Microsoft Word and their related products to the free suite of comparable products from OpenOffice. That’s free, too. Read the rest of this entry

I was just over at Russell Brunson’s Birthday Giveaway and checking out what’s available for free there (see below for a short list of freebies that grabbed my attention).

While I was there, there was this one item… I liked the title… but the site looked so amateurish, I wasn’t at all sure I was ready to give him (her?) my email address.

So I did a little check of the page’s source code and then realized that some of our readers might know how to do that. It can be quite a help, so here goes…

1. You’re at a page and thinking about signing up to an offer but something makes you wonder what is going to happen to your email address when you sign up. So…

2. Put your cursor over any blank part of the page, right click and select View Source. (If View Source is not offered there, move the cursor to another blank part of the page and try again. Why blank? Otherwise you might get the details of, say, an image – if you’re hovering over a graphic.

3. What you are shown next is the source code (the HTML or whatever that is creating that page on your computer screen).

4. Scan your eyes down the page (or use control + f — that’s f for find), looking for the form code. It begins with the word FORM and ends with the word FORM, not necessarily in capital letters.

Sometimes that’s not there but something like this is:

script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://forms.aweber.com/form/33/12345.js

This is from aweber so we can trust it. Why? Because you can unsubscribe from aweber mailing lists by clicking the final link in each mailout. Read the rest of this entry

Webmasters, could your hosting account get SUSPENDED? Mine did today. Read this to find out why – and how to protect yourself from this happening to you.

Yes, it’s a bit of a confession really.

Here’s what I wrote to my readers to explain why the sites were all offline.
________

“What a nuisance! My website hosting account has been suspended. It seems that I’m over-using the system’s resources.

So what they do is just turn off your ENTIRE hosting account.

That means ALL the websites you’ve got with that host suddenly become unavailable. Sorry!

I’m using Bluehost for most of my sites but I guess it could be any of the cheaper hosting companies who are running hundreds of sites on the same server. They have to do this to provide service to all their other clients. Understandable enough.

So what triggered this?

I’m still waiting for login access to be restored so I can check this, but my best guess at this point is that I set up AUTOMATIC WEEKLY BACKUPS of all my WordPress sites.

Silly me. I set them up one after another, so they are probably all trying to run at the same time. No wonder the server guys are saying this account is overloading their system.

BIG LESSON. When you set up automatic backups, make sure you dont turn them all on at the same time. Make a list of the sites you want to backup (should be all of them, I’d say) and set up the backups over a span of days.

TWITTER. I posted a brief note about this on Twitter so if you’re following me there, you would have seen it.

ONE SITE THAT ISNT DOWN
…is http://iamgettingoldfast.com/giveaway/go/1613 which is the massive giveaway that Russell Brunson has organized. Definitely worth a look. Read the rest of this entry

If you’re using WordPress like I am, you’re possibly interested in making your blog look more appealing – and if I am right, you’d also like to make more money from the ads you display there. Well, that’s exactly what I’d like to talk about here.

Two suggestions, in fact.

And I’ve just used both of them on my blog at http://www.SydneyWorldMasters.com.

WHAT IS THE SYDNEY WORLD MASTERS, ANYWAY?

In case you are not familiar with the World Masters, it’s like the Olympic Games but it’s for older people.

Actually the Masters Games attract more participants than the Olympics, according to the reports. Personally I found that quite surprising. It certainly doesn’t attract the same level of sponsorship or television time but it does involve more people. And that’s great to see.

As our population ages, my hunch is that we’re going to hear more and more about the Masters Games.

Anyhow, because we live in Sydney and are not as young as we once were (nudge nudge, wink wink), my wife and I figured that setting up a blog about the Sydney World Masters would be a neat thing to do.

PIMPING THE BLOG

That is a funny term, isn’t it? Pimping. Making it “prettier”, of course.

I’ve done two things to make the blog look better.

1) Template. Read the rest of this entry

Since this is where I now share some of the “what’s going on + what I’m doing”, let me mention that I’d seen several emails about this latest giveaway but hadn’t bothered to open them up. Busy trying to keep my focus somewhere else at the moment – not succeeding entirely, but trying anyway.

However tonight (it’s now very late on Sunday night here in Sydney), I got an email from Geoff Shaw with his endorsement of this particular giveaway event.

It’s from a top, very visible IM guy.

So it is attracting plenty of attention and contains a ton of great stuff all at no cost, of course – other than your email address. Since I use Gmail (and they have good spam filters), that’s okay with me.

If you’re interested in participating as a JV partner / product contributor – and building your mailing list as a result, click here.

If you just want the free stuff, click here.

If you want to see what some of the free stuff is, look at the top right corner of my eProfitNews internet marketing blog. The scroller is from this event. When the event ends, I will remove the scroller code.