WordPress 2.3 security risks vs benefits
It's recently come to light that WordPress 2.3 will be sending a lot of identifying information from your blog back to WordPress.org.
As of version 2.3, WordPress now periodically (every 12 hours) sends personally identifying information (blog name & URI) to the mothership, along with an alarming amount of information including $_SERVER dumps, a list of installed plugins, and your current PHP/MySQL settings.
Matt Mullenweg(the WordPress guy) has been defending this move in this Google Group thread, insisting that everything is kosher. He also links to a couple plugins that he says will disable these features.
I'm not a big conspiracy person and I'm sure the information is being sent to WordPress for legitimate purposes, but it does add another risk that people will need to take into consideration. When I eventually update to 2.3 or newer, I'll be disabling these features because I prefer to manage risks myself rather than put that risk into others' hands. When updates and security fixes need to be made, I don't mind doing them myself if it means not having my plugins and server info sitting in a database somewhere. Even though I have full daily backups of my blog, it's just another small risk that's not worth the benefits to me. It may be for others, though.
Giving people a reason to come back
My uncle knows I make money online and he apparently has been reading about others who do the same. Recently he bought a domain name and told me he had big plans for it. Of course I asked how. He said he was going to put nothing but ads on the page. I thought he was kidding, but he wasn't. I tried to explain that, for ads to be profitable, he needed traffic and for traffic he needs to give people a reason to read his site on a regular basis. Then he said he was going to offer free ads to get people to come. This is where I sort of gave up because he still doesn't quite get it. He's probably known about this making money online game for a couple weeks and he made the most common mistake thinking that if you build it they will come. I finally convinced him to at least put up a free classifieds script so there's some actual content and a reason for people to be on the site. So I'm going to be doing that much for him, but I don't have the time to really put much more into his site. Besides, I have a solid classifieds domain name I plan on developing soon so I'll be putting all my creative marketing juice toward my own site.
If you're wondering what reason I'm giving people to return to my blog, it's not just my ramblings and random tips; I also plan on making some of my different SEO related software available for free and it will be released on this site. I don't hype it up because it's going to be free and there's no reason to. If people want it, they can have it. If they'd rather pay someone else for the same things that probably does less, more power to them. It won't matter to me either way. More on this in the near future... 
Effective Adsense advice nobody ever talks about
Whenever I read tips about Adsense, people are always regurgitating the same things over and over: placement, blending, etc. Even Adsense ebooks never have anything new to say. I'll never waste your time or mine by posting such tired, played out tips, but I do have one small piece of advice that I've never seen anyone talk about.
If your goal of creating a website is to make money off of Adsense or PPC ads, you need to consider 
your demographic, or who will be visiting your site. For example, let's consider two types of websites. Site 1 will be about Adsense and making money online and Site 2 will be a baking site full of recipes. The likely demographic for Site 1 would be younger people who know about Adsense and can spot an ad a mile away, ironically giving them the label of being ad blind. Site 2's demographic would probably have a wider age range of older people and these people aren't going to be as ad blind as Site 1's audience. Setting aside all other factors like market saturation of each subject, if you were going to market each site equally and get about the same number of visitors, which ones do you think are going to click more ads? The ad blind Adsense-heads or grandma poking around the internet looking for a cookie recipe? Site 2 would definitely have a higher CTR than Site 1.
This is something I've learned from experience with other websites I run. Subjects with wider demographics consistently get better CTR than my blogs with narrower audiences. When I say wider demos, I don't mean more people; I mean wider age range and backgrounds. In fact, one of my higher-earning sites has a fraction of the traffic of one of my blogs, which has lots of traffic yet lower earnings. This is why knowing your audience is so important.
And here are a few things to remember. Always keep your demographics in mind for everything from website accessibility to the method of monetization you use. If you make a website difficult for older people to use, they're not going to be returning. Yet if you make websites too simple, they may seem boring and younger people may not return. Also, I used Adsense as an example, but you need to keep your demo in mind no matter what type of monetization you use. There is no one size fits all solution to monetizing a website so this is one of those things you have to figure these things out for yourself if you're going to be successful.
BlogRush moving quick to dump the junk blogs
When BlogRush went live a few days ago, many people saw the potential to get new visitors. People with affiliate pages and "junky" blogs also saw the potential and signed up, too. BlogRush has acknowledged the problem and they're moving quick to correct it by moving to a manual review process and increasing security to detect cheaters. Here's an excerpt from John Reese's blog:
1. We’re moving to a MANUAL REVIEW process. No more automation. We will be reviewing ALL blogs submitted to BlogRush. If the quality of the blog is poor, they will not be allowed to participate. We’re going to start reviewing ALL the blogs that are currently in our network and will be disabling the accounts for poor quality blogs.
2. We’re continuing to add security measures to our system and we will be mass-removing any and all cheaters that we discover. We will not rest until the cheaters are WIPED OUT and kept from abusing our network. The manual review process will help eliminate most of them as legitimate bloggers that have put in the time to create a decent blog aren’t the types that are going to be abusing the system.
And from the BlogRush dashboard area:
IMPORTANT MESSAGE: Click- through rates are very low right now due to problems with some users cheating the system. We are a few days away from removing all abuse from the system and you will see your click-rates increase. We are also moving to a Manual Review Process for all member blogs which will also increase the traffic you receive. Thank you for your patience -- we're working hard to improve this beta version of our service.
I think there's still a lot of potential in BlogRush so I plan on sticking with it for a while despite its rough start. Every big project goes through growing pains so I can't hold it against them.
Seasonal content
If you have a website that has seasonal content, now is the time to roll out your fall stuff. I've recently started adding Halloween and Fall content to one of my sites and it's beginning to get SE traffic already. Between now and the holidays, traffic will only increase so now is the time to get a jump on things.
20 dollars off at Godaddy
Enter "Catalog5" as the promo/source code and get $20 off purchases of $75 or more for a limited time. I got the promo code from a flyer in the mail today, but I don't plan on buying anything there any time soon.
Classmates.com knows how to get subscribers
A few months ago I signed up to become a Classmates.com gold member so I could contact an old classmate if I wanted to. Ever since then I've been getting regular email updates, which free members also receive, letting me know what's new, how many people have signed up from my old schools etc. A few updates ago the email subject said 1 person had signed my guestbook (see thumbnail). So when I open the email, the left side is telling me what all is new since the last update, the subject says someone signed my guestbook and on the right there are a couple links to my guest book and profile under the heading "You've got their attention".
So, why am I writing about this? For starters, when someone visits your profile, the default action of classmates lets you know who visited your profile unless that person has changed their default setting to keep them hidden. This profile view with the default setting is considered "signing my guestbook". They don't actually leave a message or anything, it's just a visit. It's slightly tricky making you think someone has gone out of their way to leave you a message when it's really just a default setting. No big deal. What's also tricky is that every single email update from then on has had the same subject telling me someone has "signed my guestbook" along with the link inside, but this is the old information is mixed in with new information and new updates. This means someone getting an update might think new people have signed their guest book since the last update and, if their registration has expired, there's a chance they'll renew it to see who's trying to contact them. In reality, when classmates is letting you know someone signed your guestbook, they're telling you about the same old entry over and over and over.
I'm sure this method of mixing old information in with new updates works well to pique people's interest and register or else Classmates wouldn't be doing it. I don't think I would ever do this myself on a pay site, though, because it's just a tad shady and deceptive IMHO. It's still an interesting technique none the less.
Hold the ads when launching a new site
Some time ago someone mentioned that when you have a brand new website to promote, you should leave all advertising off of it for a while until you begin to establish solid traffic. I think it was Shoemoney who said this, but I'm not 100%. Anyway, when I read that it gave me a little reassurance that my instincts were right because I've been doing that all along. When some people have a new website, the first thing they do is get all their ads, like Adsense, to look just right. The only problem is, when you go to start marketing it, if the first thing people see is a bunch of ads, they'll figure it's another MFA site and not pay much attention to it.
Here's how I deal with this using PHP... First, when I'm designing the site, I will go ahead and add the space for advertising or throw in the adsense ads so everything looks how I'll want it to when the site is running full-bore. Then I use a simple PHP snippet to hide the ads until I'm ready to show them.
Most sites I have use a config file for database connection stuff. If I don't have a config file, I'll use any file that gets included with every page or make one just for this. Inside that file, I'll put a simple variable like:
$show_ads = 0;
Then, wherever I have ads, I'll use a simple check to see whether they should be displayed or not, like this:
if($show_ads){ //show ads here }
Obviously you would replace "//show ads here" with your ad code or an include or however you show ads. By doing it this way, I can do site design all at once, getting it to look just right, then hide the ads while I market the site. A few weeks or so down the road, I just switch the $show_ads variable to 1 and voila, advertising suddenly appears throughout the entire site.
Black hat white hat jargon
Everybody has their opinions on this and there are a million posts about it already so I'll keep mine short. I've never cared for the hat jargon and people who use these terms sound silly. The only purpose it's ever served is so that certain people can look down their noses and point their moralist fingers at others. I think this is the main reason I never cared for these terms. When people turn everything into ethical discussions, it turns me off because all I care about are the dry, technical aspects of how and why things work. When someone finds a new way to get targeted traffic, I'm interested in things like why it works and whether it can be applied in different situations. Whether it is against one search engines rules or another's really doesn't matter to me. I may use the new technique and I may not. Time and risk isn't always worth the reward, but I will have at least learned something new that may come in handy down the road somewhere. Black hat, white hat, gray hat, the end goal is always the same, but some paths to the goal are shorter than others.
So, my official opinion on SEO techniques and their hat color is: I don't care. I don't judge others and don't care if others judge me. (This post is for future link back reference so I don't have to explain myself if someone finds any of my methods objectionable.)
Advanced photo resizing
I generally prefer to blog about SEO and marketing type things, but this is too cool to pass up. A computer science major in Israel has developed a new way of resizing, cropping and manipulating photos. You have to watch the video to get a sense of how cool this is. I would like to see something like this in Photoshop. Although it would be pretty handy to have in a web browser, I don't think that will be happening for a long time.