Some of you guys may have noticed that my blog was down sometime last night. I don’t know how long it was down but I noticed it around midnight (eastern time) and it seemed to affect every single one of my blogs that are self-hosted Wordpress blogs.

If you came to this site, you probably received a message similar to the one below:

“Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@datmoney.com and inform
them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that
may have caused the error.

Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while
trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.”

Of course my initial reaction was to contact my hosting company regarding this. I have no idea what was wrong but all of a sudden when I woke up this morning, everything seemed to be back to normal.

I received an e-mail back within a couple hours from my hosting company and it seemed I looked like a complete nutcase because they told me that everything seemed fine and all my sites worked.

So, IndoContest e-mailed me directly informing me they were seeing the same error message. First of all, I want to thank you for taking the time out to do that, definitely appreciate it. Indo also suggested that this happened because it seems that I run 25 process at a time. And I guess this happened to Indo before and someone tried to hack their blog.

Was someone trying to hack my blog(s) as well?

The weird part about this whole thing was the fact that I have some static html sites on my hosting server and those seemed to appear just fine without any Internet Server Errors so that just tells me it was strictly anything that was Wordpress related.

Now, I was pretty upset at this fact especially since I have a few blogs that I run that I don’t tell people about. Of course, if they saw the Internal Server Error message, then they probably figured out who runs that blog. Eh, it was bound to happen but I’m still going to try to play it off like it wasn’t me.

So, was someone in fact trying to hack my blogs? Was someone trying to jack my affiliate links to direct to theirs? Has this happened to anyone else before?

Any information would be greatly appreciated. I want to get to the bottom of all of this.

It seems that people are contacting me more and more to become a sponsor in their upcoming contests. Now, I don’t mind sponsoring an ad spot (on one of my many blogs), text link, and a custom made banner design or whatever, but more and more people are asking and I only have a certain amount I can give away. So, I’m going to pick and choose who I sponsor.

Below are some reasons why I won’t sponsor your contest:

1. Not asking me personally and sending me a generic spam-type message. Again, I’m getting more and more requests to sponsor people’s contests so if you’re not going to even address me then you probably won’t even get a response back.

Not to sound like an ass or anything but you came to me to get a sponsor for your contest not the other way around. And if you look at any posts, it says my name right there. So when I receive a message like:

“To whom it may concern (or hi):

My name is XYZ of this site. My site is growing very fast and receiving XXX amount of visitors daily.

I am looking for sponsors for my contest that would be willing to contribute XYZ prizes.

If you are interested, please reply to me before this particular date.

Best,
Their name”

90%-95% of the time this message is either a copy and paste method or a bot. If you were to take 2 seconds to replace “to whom it may concern (or hi)” to “Jay” then I might have fell for your trick.

Though, sometimes it’s even worse. There are people who put “Dear Webmaster or Blog Owner” and you obviously know what that answer is going to be.

Read the rest of this entry »

I do not want to end up like John Chow or any other person who ends up turning their MMO, entrepreneur, blogging tips type of blog into one that ends up talking about what they ate for lunch and talk about random posts that doesn’t really help my readers at all. On top of that, I don’t want to forget my roots and how I got here in the first place; networking and socializing.

First of all, I stopped using social media and bookmarking sites to promote my blog because I wasn’t too happy with the end results. Don’t get me wrong, the traffic was great but I felt a majority of it wasn’t quality traffic. Instead, in the past months, I’ve been focusing more on SEO to get a large part of my traffic but my networking status has gone down a lot. And that’s going to change pretty soon as well.

I’m that type that feels if you give, you shall receive. And I haven’t been that great in giving so I’m sure my receiving on the networking end has gone down. Actually, that’s more like a fact. I haven’t been as good in commenting on other blogs, helping people out, just socializing even. And I know that is a turnoff for many bloggers.

I mean, who likes a blogger who never takes the opportunity to even check out their readers’ blog, converse with them and just network. And trust me, if you network, there are a lot of benefits from it. More than you think.

But I’ll talk about that in a later post.

I have to step up on the posts that I write on this blog because I like receiving comments, I like when the posts help my readers, I like socializing and helping people out. So, I’m hoping to work on the posts that come on here and hopefully that will attract other readers and possibly more commentators.

When it comes down to it, we can all get traffic but it’s the readers that we want. See, readers are the ones that will continue to come back, readers are the ones who will comment on your posts, readers are the ones that you will eventually network with and readers are the ones who make your blog the way it is.

With that said, I’m going to start off by changing a few things on my Market Leverage contest to win a Nintendo Wii such as making it a little easier to enter and give more options. I will make the updates tomorrow or the next day when I have a little more time.

But in the meantime, I’m going to start focusing on better and helpful content, getting more traffic and readers with various promotion tactics and trying to stop procrastinating on all these projects I’m currently working on.

So, have you guys lost focus on anything that you should work on?

Okay, what in the hell is up with Akismet? I mean, this spam filter just isn’t working like it’s supposed to be and it’s getting rather annoying.

Now, all of us Wordpress users know Akismet is a spam filter which is supposed to filter actual spam. Now, I understand it’s not perfect because we will all occasionally catch a regular legit comment in the spam filter. And yes, I do occasionally check to make sure some legit comments are sucked in there because I do appreciate comments from my readers. But recently, Akismet just hasn’t been meeting expectations.

Besides catching occasional legit comments filtered into the spam section, it does the opposite. It lets a TON of real spam, particularly porn spam, get through like it’s a regular comment.

Again, I understand once in a while but when porn comments that are obviously spam are getting through 10+ times a day, then that’s a problem.

Now, personally, whenever someone comments I get an e-mail letting me know I got a new response but it’s starting to get annoying when I’m getting double spammed when all these porn comments are getting through.

What am I supposed to think when it says “have hot sex porn has left a new comment on this post.”

And if you guys ever pay attention, a bunch of times when I’m not around to check these things you’ll see those porn comments on the “recent comments” widget on my sidebar. I try to get rid of it ASAP but there needs to be something done.

Anyone have suggestions? Akismet spam filter just isn’t filtering all this spam!

For the record, I was going to post something else but I had to get this off my chest. Spam is so annoying!