Just a note to address the video issues going on with this site right now.

Up until today I was paying for a premium video account over at Blip.tv. They have informed me that they have elected to cancel my membership because ”selling through videos is against their policy”.

Strangely enough, as my readers know all too well, I, too am against any selling in my videos, and none of them contain any kind of sales whatsoever.

Further investigation reveals that they have recently cancelled a number of authority sites from the use of their system.

My guess is we were using too much bandwidth, or perhaps Bliv.tv marketing gurus decided that all the exposure we were providing them at no cost was just a bad thing. Maybe they need to get out of the city and get some fresh air, who knows :>)

Needless to say, I strongly advise against the use of Bliv.tv, or any of their services. My staff and I invested about 300 hours in converting and uploading videos to their system, not to mention endorsing them on a massive scale, as well as paying the monthly fees.

So, at this time, as I prepare for the conference next week in Orlando, we are also trying to locate a respectable and professional video service provider to restore the videos on this site and a few others.

As Blip.tv has evidenced that our loyalties to them were ill-placed, I am open to suggestions from eaders on other video service providers capable of multiple format conversions and RSS feeds of video data to iTunes for syndication.

From everything there is something to learn, and in this case I would have to say that we will run a longer trial before committing time and money to future third party service providers.

In the mean time, if you don’t mind putting a note on all of your blogs and sites telling users to avoid using Blip.tv services, I think you will be doing your readers a real service, and they will respect your attempt to protect them

Thank you for your patience as we get this sorted out.

from such unscrupulous service providers.

Cheers!

Ron Davies

iPhone continues to dazzle as Blackberry’s “abacus” leaves much to be desired for the habitual or professional WordPress blogger.

Do you have a WordPress blog that you would like to keep updated while on the train, riding as a passenger in a car, or just sitting on Starbucks warming up with a cafe latte?

If you use iPhone, you are indeed in luck. iPhone continues to reward those that avoided or left the “crackberry” for the real McCoy, at least as far as power, flexibility, ease of use and breadth of applications and speed are concerned

Just click the iTunes icon on your iPhone, hit “Search” and type “WordPress” and you will immediately be rewarded by a whole selection of instantly installable iPhone Apps made just for managing your WordPress blogs.

The onebi am authoring this post on is free, and I look after 6 blogs with it, all without cracking my notebook open.

If you love to “work it” as far as your WordPress blog is concerned, this is the way to go!

You need only go install the (probably free) iPhone App, and log in to your blog ad an Admin, and under “Settings” go to “Writing” and enable the check box for “xmlrpc”.

That’s all there is to it! You are blogging anywhere, any time.

To do this on Blackberry, simply return it to your local cell phone shop, and get an iPhone.

It will be the best thing you do for youself this year!

Cheers!

For a very long time I have researched the single biggest deterrent preventing Internet marketers from using WordPress as their main CMS and marketing platform.

Those that have tinkered with earlier versions of WordPress found the installation cumbersome and complex, not to mention the rather convoluted process of locating, installing and configuring the very limited, almost always unstable plugins that seemed to be unworkable depending on the WP version you were installing them on.

All this has changed with WordPress versions of late, even more so for 2.7. The rules for plugin development have been firmed up, and the stability is far far better, not to mention that the plugins developed for Internet marketers have come a long, long way.

Now the plugins range from SEO positioning and optimization to traffic analyses and RSS aggregation, automatic replacement of words with masked affiliate links, automatic emails sent to commenters, completely self contained affiliate programs and much more.

To cap this, of the 40 or so plugins that I use, all but 2 of them are free, including free updates.

The final show stopped for most is the hassle of locating the right plugins, and uploading them via FTP, setting permissions, etc., and although WordPress 2.7 has some facility to help this, it is still not going to do much of the work for you.

Enter my latest solution for revenue bloggers;

Killer WordPress Plugin Pack With Auto-Installer

A download-able, completely self-contained installer that runs in Windows that uploads, installs and sets up the top WordPress blog plugins that I use personally.

Even better, it is free :>)

You can download the installer by simply completing the form below :
(I have to send a license download).

There is a Help Page that you can open right after starting the installer. It even checks to ensure that your server is 100% compatible with the system, and keeps you informed of the status as you go.

I am working on a simple video that shows how to use it tomorrow.

Cheers!

Ron Davies

PS: Happy New Year!

CubePoints is a very cool point reward and management system for WordPress that enables users to earn points by  commenting at your site.

Motivate users to participate in your blog discussions by offering them points which they can use to purchase goodies of any variety, and even donate them to other users.

Awarded a certain number of points for each comment users make. Should the comment is deleted from the admin panel, the points will automatically be deducted.

CubePoints has an admin panel providing the admin with the ability to adjust the points of  users quickly and easily.

CubePoints Admin Interface – Manage the points of your users:

CubePoints Admin Interface – Configure CubePoints to your liking:

Allow users to donate to other users, directly from the comments box:

Get Cubepoints Here

If you’re one of the WordPress users that has upgraded to WP 2.7, or one of those smart people that have installed the “Wassup” plugin for WordPress, you may be wondering what the “wp-cron.php” file is about that keeps popping up in your stats. Don’t worry, it’s nothing nasty, just the WordPress blog engine executing a few commands and updates based on date and time.

Below is a link to download the WordPress Cron Demo plugin. It demonstrates how the WordPress Cron feature can be used to accomplish a number of things.

Taking control of your WP Cron processes (Cron just means “chronoligical” or “time-based”) can help free up resources in your WP install and your web server.

Installation & use:

1. Download Cron Demo v1.0 and extract to a local folder.
2. Upload extracted contents to wp-content/plugins folder and activate from plugins tab in WordPress admin panel.
3. Go to the “Options� administration menu

Plugins Page

[tag]Cron Demo, Plugin, WordPress Plugin, Cron, WordPress Cron[/tag]