HOEI

I have been furiously testing Twitter gadgets just like a slew of other folks. Live happened and I did not blog or tweet much for a couple of days. However, this blog and my Twitter home page did not get the memo to stop the presses until I returned. Below is what happens when you tell Twitter Tools to “Create a daily digest blog post from your tweets?” and at the same time telling Twitterfeed to post tweets for all new posts.

And here is the Twitter end:

The way I stopped the loop was to disable the feed for this one domain in Twitterfeed.  I have activated the “Create a tweet when you post” option in the Twitter Tools options.  We will see how that works out.

Mrs. Ozz is a genius! Tonight she asked me, “what happened to Lowcountry Christian Community School web site?” As you can see from that link, there is little to see on their web site right now, well at least until I complete the instructions I am about to share with you. I told Mrs. Ozz that the LCCS administrators had let their domain registration and hosting service expire. This resulted in the hosting service deleting all of the HTLM files for that domain to free up space for the next paying customer. I told my wife that the school administrators had asked me to help build a replacement site which I had promised to do when I got some free time.

The next thing out of my wife’s mouth made me feel REALLY stupid. She asked, “can’t you just get a copy of the site from one of those online services that saves everything automatically?” My response was, “You are a GENIUS! I have not even considered that.” She turned a couple of shades of red as I proceeded to follow her advice.

What she is talking about is something like the Internet Archive WayBackMachine. As a result of her suggestion, I have been able to recover about 90% of the content from the original LCCS web site as it was last displayed in August 2007.

To recover the site I did the following:

1. Searched archive.org for the LCCS site
2. Clicked on the most recent copy of the site (Aug 2007)
3. Using Firefox - selected File - Save Page As (making sure to choose type “web page complete”)
4. Navigated to each subpage and repeated step 3 for each
5. Edit the content and FTP it into the new site location (In Progress)

That’s it. Now I have a pretty solid copy of the content from the school’s site prior to their domain and hosting service expiring. I can use these HTML pages to create the same look, feel, and content that they had prior to the expiration.

By the way, you have not heard the last of Mrs. Ozz. She has got the itch to do a little blogging. She will be joining me on The Land of Ozz(s) and she may actually jump into the mix over at GrowingKids.org as well.

Not so fast there cowboy!

I will step out on a limb here and say that there are very few people who build a publicly accessible blog or web site with the intent that no one will ever visit. While that was not my intent when I built Blog Community College (BCC) more than six months ago, the harsh reality is that less than fifty people total have visited the site since it was built. Well over half of the 42 unique visits to the site to date have come from me or my co-author Chad.

Site Meter stats more than six months after the first post.

There are a few lessons to be learned from this unplanned exercise in blog flop:

Publicity Required - Building a blog requires some very basic marketing if you want people to actually read the blog. We might start by:

1. Registering the site with search engines
2. Using BCC’s URL as my “Website” when commenting on other blogs
3. Notifying other bloggers of BCC’s existence
4. Emailing a  few friends

More Content -Only one video tutorial has been posted out of nearly a half dozen that are in various stages of editing.

Follow Through - Continue you what you start.  While I have not done very good on this so far I believe that this is a pretty good idea for a blog.  That said, there is no reason to sit on it.  It is never too late to follow though.

A flurry of comment spam has been going around in recent days with the following message:

“very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce”

There is no URL and the message is exactly the same on all the blogs where you find this comment.

What is this comment all about and who is Idetrorce?

In my humble opinion, this is a pre-attack campaign for a bigger spam campaign that will come in the next few weeks. The comment above would be okay on most blog posts since it is not trying to link people back to a product of service and it is just a polite disagreement. Once posted on a loosely moderated blog, the blogger might get a bad rap for deleting such a non threatening comment. Read the editors comments on the wormblog comment number 12.

“So I googled and found that it is indeed SPAM.

I am leaving it up though as I would never wish to be accused of deleting someone who simply disagreed with me.”

If a blogger does not block the email address and user name associated with this comment, then they could be opening themselves up to something much bigger coming down the pipe. That is just one man’s opinion. I am not afraid to delete and edit comments on my blog. I have even deleted some comments from people who agreed with me. When it’s my blog I will do what I think is in the best interest of my blog.

I do strict moderation on all comments on some of my blogs. There are very few terms I force moderate on here on this blog, but this user name and email address will be added to my list. I recommend you do the same with your blog. I just don’t have a good feeling about this Idetroce character.

In Wordpress

Go to your Dashboard and select Options/Discussion. Scroll down and enter the user name, email address and IPs from this commenter. By the way, the IPs this person is sourcing from are out of Amsterdam.

The following video was recorded from a Windows XP laptop. This short lesson demonstrates how to connect to a FTP server using Windows Explorer and transfer a file from your PC to a FTP server.

Don’t forget to change the time on your WordPress software if you live in one of those areas that plays the daylight savings time game.  I have not yet found a plugin that automatically adjusts the blog time the way many operating systems do.

When ranking the security status of a PC on a scale from 1 to 5, with 5 being the most vulnerable, this PC ranks an 87.

 This is a screen capture from the Windows Update site for one of my laptops shortly after installing Windows XP Professional and adding Service Pack 2.  Choosing to ignore these updates leaves a PC very open to attacks especially if the machine has not anti-virus software and a firewall is not running.

Visiting the Windows Update site is a good first step to securing a PC.  There are a few other things that I would highly recommend when building or buying a new PC.

1. Purchase and install an enterprise grade anti virus application and subscribe to automatic signature and software upgrades.
2. Install a client based firewall application, especially if you will be connecting to public networks.
3. Use VPN software and SSL (https) web sites as much as possible when on public WiFi. (more HOWTO details to come on this subject)
4. Update your other third party applications on Windows regularly and enable automatic updates where possible. (i.e., iTunes, QuickTime Viewer, Java run-time, etc.)
5. Verify that your PC is not trying to automatically reconnect to Windows Network shares at logon.

I can not impress upon you bloggers how important number three is for those of you who frequently log onto your blog software via http (tcp port 80) over a public wireless access point from a hotel, coffee shop, or your favorite lunch location.  The software to enable a hacker with the capability to capture your user ID and passwords over a public access point is widely available and very easy to use.   The same from utilities can be used to capture unencrypted passwords used when accessing email, ftp servers, and web site control panels.

Do you have a blog? No. If not and you have the slightest interest in owning a blog then continue reading.

I will take you from where you are right now to owning a blog and writing your first blog post in three (3) minutes.

It’s Fast and It’s Free!!!

All you need is a valid email address and three minutes of free time. That’s it. Let’s get started by watching the YouTube video posted below to learn how.

Having trouble viewing this? Download a copy.

This is the first in a series of what will hopefully be many lessons on blogging. This lesson is as basic as blogging lessons get. The filming and editing on this lesson was done by me personally and is very basic. I have partnered with Chad from Chadfusious Says to get a more professional look and feel for Blog Community College (BCC) lessons in the future. Future lessons will include:

• Registering a domain name
• Adding a counter to your blog
• Adding pictures and videos to your blog posts
• Building a blog with WordPress
• And much more

Some of the filming of future lessons has already been completed. While Blog Community College is currently running on Google’s Blogger server, it will soon be transferred to blogcommunitycollege.com. That will be a lesson in itself.  Stay tuned for more from Blog Community College.