I do not post the Hitler videos very often, but thanks to Blogger Shutting Down FTP Service Erik Aronesty left a comment telling us about his script to keep using Blogger with FTP. I have not tried the script out but it looks interesting. If you are being afected by Bloggers decision to close FTP publishing take a look, might be what you need. Erik had the Hitler video embedded on his site and it made me laugh, so here you are to enjoy.

I was reminded recently that I am human. I made a mistake and when I make a mistake it tends to be a big one. Now I am pretty paranoid about backing up data so when I discovered what I did I knew I would be able to restore pretty much everything from the backup I had, but there was a few pages of new content that I did not have a backup for.

As I started fixing my error I kept wondering how I was going to restore that new information that the client had placed on their website between the last backup and my screw up. Then it dawned on me, I had read the pages that the client added to the site on both Firefox on my desktop and Firefox on my laptop. A quick about:cache?device=disk and sure enough they information was cached. The only problem is that Firefox does not give you a very user friendly view of the cached files. I needed an easy way to save the information so I could add it back into the website.

This is where I discovered the Firefox CacheViewer Addon. It allows you to sort the items in the Firefox cache by key, size, type and date. Using the Firefox CacheViewer I was quickly able to find the couple items I needed, save them as HTML files and copy the information out that I was missing.

If you every need to go looking though your Firefox cache for some information that you might have lost, or just want to browse the cache and see what Firefox has saved take a look at the Firefox CacheViewer Addon. It sure helped me when I made my mistake.

It seems like a long time since I logged into Blogger.com to update a Blogger.com powered blog. Blogger.com was the only service I knew of that offered FTP publishing. FTP publishing was a great way to publish a Blogger.com powered blog to your own domain name, before they started offering custom domains. Soon I will not be able too since FTP published blogs since Google and Blogger.com are closing down the FTP publishing feature effective March 26, 2010.

For those blogs that I did occasionally update I will have to consider switching them to a custom domain hosted on Blogger.com. This will have an impact on some of my clients, since it was an easy way for them to update a blog on their website that was easier to learn than WordPress. For those clients that this will effect I will be in touch with you later this week with some easy alternatives for you to continue updating your websites.

Here is a copy of the email that I recieved regarding Blogger.com closing down FTP publishing.

Dear FTP user:

You are receiving this e-mail because one or more of your blogs at Blogger.com are set up to publish via FTP. We recently announced a planned shut-down of FTP support on Blogger Buzz (the official Blogger blog), and wanted to make sure you saw the announcement. We will be following up with more information via e-mail in the weeks ahead, and regularly updating a blog dedicated to this service shut-down here: http://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com/.

The full text of the announcement at Blogger Buzz follows.

Last May, we discussed a number of challenges facing[1] Blogger users who relied on FTP to publish their blogs. FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing.

Three years ago we launched Custom Domains[2] to give users the simplicity of Blogger, the scalability of Google hosting, and the flexibility of hosting your blog at your own URL. Last year’s post discussed the advantages of custom domains over FTP[3] and addressed a number of reasons users have continued to use FTP publishing. (If you’re interested in reading more about Custom Domains, our Help Center has a good overview[4] of how to use them on your blog.) In evaluating the investment needed to continue supporting FTP, we have decided that we could not justify diverting further engineering resources away from building new features for all users.

For that reason, we are announcing today that we will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010. We realize that this will not necessarily be welcome news for some users, and we are committed to making the transition as seamless as possible. To that end:

o We are building a migration tool that will walk users through a migration from their current URL to a Blogger-managed URL (either a Custom Domain or a Blogspot URL) that will be available to all users the week of February 22. This tool will handle redirecting traffic from the old URL to the new URL, and will handle the vast majority of situations.
o We will be providing a dedicated blog[5] and help documentation
o Blogger team members will also be available to answer questions on the forum, comments on the blog, and in a few scheduled conference calls once the tool is released.

We have a number of big releases planned in 2010. While we recognize that this decision will frustrate some users, we look forward to showing you the many great things on the way. Thanks for using Blogger.

Last year I wrote a post outlining some of my Internet goals for 2009. I thought I should revisit that post again here in January 2010 and see how I did. Here were my Internet goals for 2009 and how I did.

1. Posting more regularly, hopefully on Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays. If possible increasing posting frequency to five days a week.
   I was doing alright with this goal until summer came around, then my posting went downhill and has never really gone up again. While I still enjoy writing for this blog, other things seem to come up. In my defense I have been taking part more on Twitter and that is often where you will find me.
2. Increasing RSS subscribers in the LGR Internet Solutions blog to 500 or more.
   Thanks to some stupidity by Feedburner it appears that I accomplished this goal having over 1000 subscribers. But if you take the Friendfeed numbers out of the Feedburner count my subscriber count has remained stable and grown slightly to 300. Not bad considering my posting dropped off.
3. Diversifying my online income so it is more dependable and less reliant on one or two sources.
   This has seen some growth in 2009. While the majority of my online income is still from two main sources I have seen growth in other areas. The majority of the growth has come from diversifying my affiliate marketing into other areas. I have plans to expand this further in 2010.
4. Increase page views and reader participation on all my websites.
   While I would say reader participation has not gone up, pageviews across the majority of my websites have seen significant increases. This has been good for income on several sites.
5. To learn new skills and apply them.
   While I never did finish the Facebook application or the WordPress plugin I was working on, I did learn a great deal more about affiliate marketing in 2009. While I was not a total stranger to affiliate marketing before 2009 I did learn a great deal about how to improve conversions and increase my online revenue through affiliate marketing. Not something that I was planning, but it has been something that I have enjoyed learning.

Overall I would say that I failed on my 2009 Internet goals. I might have failed at my goals, but I had a great year! My business income doubled, despite a global recession, and my client base has remained stable with many of my client work increasing. 2010 is already looking great with work continuing to come in from clients and my affiliate marketing websites continuing to grow here already in January.

How did you do with your Internet goals in 2009?

I have been doing more research on best practices for landing pages recently and came across this great video on YouTube. I have watched and listened to this video several times now and thought I would share it. It has given me some great ideas to improve some landing pages for some of the pay per click campaigns and websites I work on. I am amazed at how some of the little things that he talks about makes such a huge difference in conversions.

If you don’t have the time to watch / listen to the video here are the seven deadly sins that Tim Ash talks about.

• Sin #1 – Unclear Call-to-action
• Sin #2 – Too Many Choices:
• Sin #3 – Asking For Too Much Information
• Sin #4 – Too Much Text
• Sin #5 – Not Keeping Your Promises
• Sin #6 – Visual Distractions
• Sin #7 – Lack of Credibility and Trust

I was also so impressed by the video I ordered his book “Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions” from Amazon.

If you want to save some time editing your .htaccess file check out Htaccess Tools. It has some great .htaccess generators to help save you some time. Generators include:

• Htpasswd Generator
• Htaccess Authentication
• Hotlink protection of images
• Block IPs with .htaccess
• Block hitbots with .htaccess
• Error Document
• Redirection by Language

While you can do all of these things without using an online generator, I have found that for some people using an online generator like the ones available here enables people to manage their websites more. Perhaps one of the most useful generators available on the site is the hotlink image protection. By using hotlink image protection you will be able to save on your bandwidth and prevent other websites using your images directly.

Yesterday was Google’s big announcement and press conference about the Google ChromeOS. Apparently my invite to the press conference must have been lost in the mail, so I had to settle for reading TechCrunch and their post Live From Google’s Chrome OS Event. What is ChromeOS all about? Well Google made this video to try and explain it.

While that is all nice and good, I was happy to see this next post from TechCrunch on how to try out Google Chrome OS. As it happens I already had Virtualbox installed so it was a simple process to download the Chrome OS virtual machine torrent that TechCrunch mentioned. Once I was done downloading the torrent it took me about 10 minutes to get the Chrome OS virtual machine up and running.

There were a couple of tweaks that I had to do to make it run. The TechCrunch article talked about using Ubuntu as the OS when you setup the virtual machine. I could not get it to boot using that setting. Simply changing the OS setting in Virtualbox to Linux – Other got the OS to boot and start up. I also had to tweak the network settings on the virtual machine. Chrome OS is pretty useless with out a network connection, since it logs in using a Google Account. I simply set the network setting in the virtual machine to NAT. It defaulted to bridged when it was created and it would not connect. Once switched to NAT the OS was able to connect to the network and allow me to login.

Here is a screencast I took of the Chrome OS booting up in Virtualbox. It is not the fastest OS on the planet yet, and of course it only boots into Google Chrome. I used a temporary Google Account to test it out just in case there was any malicious code in there wanting to snoop my Google Account login. In fact that account and login are already deleted.

Google is keeping Chrome OS simple. It’s focus is web applications, like GMail, Docs, Reader etc. It is not going to replace your Windows, Mac or Linux desktop right now. As Mark Poppen pointed out in a tweet there are many applications that people use that do not have web application equivalents, yet. While Photoshop web applications are still coming along, and some are getting better like Aviary, the web versions still no not provide the experience that people need.

Chrome OS will not be replacing your desktop anytime soon, but if you have a Netbook and need quick access to your email, reader and other web applications Chrome OS could be the OS of choice for you soon. There are still a lot of questions about the OS and time will tell how the new Google Chrome OS works in the real world, not just Google’s pie in the sky world.

Your IP Address Is: 38.107.191.111

 
It seems like I need this information at least once a day lately from one client or another so I thought I would make it easy for me to find.

If you need to find your IP address often you might want to signup for a service like DynDNS that will assign a domain name to your DHCP IP Address. I use it for my office IP Address and it makes it easy to connect to my office network.

WordPress has released 2.8.5. It is a hardening release, taking some of the latest enhancments from the upcoming 2.9 release. Highlights of the 2.8.5 release according to the WordPress blog are:

The headline changes in this release are:

• A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
• Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
• Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins.
• Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.

More details are available on the WordPress blog. Do not forget to backup your WordPress database and files before upgrading, just in case something goes wrong with the upgrade. The easiest way to upgrade is to use the built in upgrade feature inside WordPress. If you cannot use that feature or just prefer to use FTP to upload the new files you can download the new WordPress release to upload.

Way back in July I open the doors up for people’s webmaster and blogging questions. August was just a bit of a blur between holidays and projects and I have not finished answering all of the questions. I thought kicking off September with the question from Rhett would be a good start to the fall.

Rhett asked:

I’ve been thinking about the shift going on in the web. I think some people are trying to call it web 3.0. I think Scoble is saying 2010. Since I like big questions, what do you think about where the web is going, real time or otherwise, and how your blog will make that shift?

Rhett always likes big questions, and he never fails to ask them. I think part of the shift we are seeing going on with the web right now is really nothing more than the web catching up to what the Internet is. Ultimately the Internet is a tool for people to communicate. In the early days of the web it was mostly simple websites that offered information to visitors, but there was little interaction. Eventually contact forms came along and offering website visitors the ability to send email straight from the website.

Fast forward to today where the web is moving into real time updates with Facebook, Twitter and other services. Social networks are common place and the ability to leave comments of all kinds is commonplace. The web is starting to live up to what it was intended to be, a tool to communicate between individuals. Not just a tool to communicate with each other over email, but in real time with status updates, instant messaging, VOIP and video.

Where is the web going, the web is going to continue to become a more seamless communication medium. Real time and instant updates will continue to become more common. If I knew exactly what the next big thing was going to be I would be out there building it, but I can see that part of the future of the web is to become an easier medium to communicate over. For the most part people still use a computer to communicate over the web, but mobile and other forms are starting to become more important. The web is still not as easy as a phone to use to communicate and there are advances to be made in that area.

Blogs will continue to be an important part of the future of the web. More and more everyone publishes on the Internet, whether on a blog, on Facebook, Twitter, etc. Blogs can become the centre of a persons online activity. Not everyone will use a blog to do this, some will use services like Facebook to do this, but publishing on blogs could change from writing longer posts to becoming the centre of a persons online life.

Corporate and business websites and blogs have a unique opportunity now and in the future, the ability to connect with their clients and customers on a one on one basis. This is not much different than how things were when businesses had brick and mortar locations. Businesses can talk and connect with their clients in real time on the web. Twitter is a sign of this, so are the web chats that you can find on many websites now. Add video and audio to that and make it as easy to use as a phone then the future of the web as a communication device.

The future of the web is exciting as a communication medium. The shift to real time is just the beginning of the next communication revolution that is coming. What do you think will be the future of the web and blogs?