A very interesting video from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) about the Long Tail of content.  Specifically, it’s about niche content sites that use Internet advertising to run viable online businesses.  Some great sites that you may not have realized would be business-worthy.

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Here’s a great (free) ebook from Chris Guillebeau of “The Art of Nonconformity.” It’s all about how he became an “overnight success” online in only 279 days.  It’s a great read for artists, writers, and anyone who is looking to get noticed online and build an audience (instead of just pushing products and services).

If you’d like to express yourself and perhaps move into a new life doing something you love (and that is creative), then spend a few minutes and read Chris’ ebook.  And, you should sign up for his email list or follow his RSS feed. He’s always got something interesting to say.

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Man, I’m sick of these scumbag spammers!  I’ve been deleting bad comments from a site I own after finding out the bandwidth had exceeded the limit by quite a bit, and noticing there were all these spam comments (mostly links to viagra and porn sites) in the comment section of quilting tips.  What a great group of people who are adding this shit to my sites by exploiting a security hack.

Now, I wish that the programmers who had created the site had done a better job of securing the site from these types of malicious actions, but the fact remains that the people who do this are complete scumbags.  Perhaps they are making money by adding these links to my site, but it really makes issues for me and costs me money in time and bandwidth costs.  And I’m not making money with the site.

And, to make matters worse, my friend told me that there was an issue with this site.  He came to chuckbutt.com and his virus software told him that there was a potentially unsafe file on the site.  I’ve had this issue before so I quickly found a javascript that had been added to my WordPress template.  How does this happen?  I’m sure I’m doing something wrong as far as security, but all I know how to do is to remove the code and go forward from there.

Damn, I really can’t stand this!  It’s a huge violation of my site, and these people are making it less likely that I’m going to continue to want to do business online.  Don’t they realize they are hurting business and the Internet?  Of course they do, but since they seem to be making money, they don’t give a shit.  If there was a way to get back at them, I would.  But instead, I have to spend time manually deleting the spam comments from my site until I can figure out how to secure the site from these attacks.

If anyone knows how to prevent this type of attack, I’d love to know.  I think they are using a SQL Injection attack, but I’m not competent enough in PHP to secure the site.   Instead, I’m just deleting the comments from the SQL database.  It’s a pain in the ass.

These people are scum!

Enough of the rant…

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