Tech and life

Despite having a copyright notice at the bottom of every page, my blog posts have been stolen for several months now by a content scraping site. I was alerted to this as I use a free service called FairShare to monitor the web for content copied illegally from my blog. The scraping site is MakeMyComputerFaster and they’ve been copying not just part of my posts but the whole deal. Here’s an example. Strange thing is most of my posts aren’t giving tips on how to make your computer run faster so I don’t really see what’s the point. They’ve even copied the warning at the end of my post that it’s been copied without permission. Actually, I wonder if this post will appear there after I publish it? What I want to do here is go through the steps I’m taking to try and stop this and the difficulties I’m having.

Contact the owner of the site copying my posts

If you read any post on blog plagiarism, this is always the first recommendation. It’s worth a try but my first point is that any site serious about content scraping just isn’t going to make their contact details freely available. And so it is with my problem site. There you’ll find no contact form, no contact email, no contact details, and you can’t comment on any post. The owner calls himself James Brooks but I wouldn’t think that’s his/her real name. So what next?

Run an eWhoIs search

As you can see the eWhoIs search brings up the information that the site has been registered through WhoIsGuard to protect the owner’s real identity. No surprise there. The only other info of note is at the bottom of the page:

So the site is hosted by pipeDNS servers.

I’ve also read that it’s possible to track anonymous bloggers by using their Google Analytics code. Unfortunately, this content scraper didn’t use Google Analytics as it didn’t show up in the eWhoIs report so a Reverse Google Analytics ID Lookup wasn’t possible. But it’s worth bearing in mind for the future.

Contact the host of the site copying my posts

So I’ve emailed the agent for pipeDNS who deal with claims of copyright infringement (justHOST.com) pointing out the position and giving examples of my plagiarized posts and asking if they can contact the site owner to see if the illegally copied posts can be removed. So far my email to pipeDNS and 2 emails to justHOST haven’t got a response and the illegal content is still online.

What next?

Well, looks like I have four options:

1. Just ignore it. The site has PageRank 0 so there’s little likelihood that the copied posts are going to outrank mine in a Google search.

2. Submit a DMCA takedown notice to the host pipeDNS asking for the illegal content to be removed. Looks like that’s the only way they will take any action unfortunately which is a pity. It would have been nice if they had made some effort to police the content scrapers they host without having to resort to a DMCA notice.

3. The domain expires on 27th January 2012 as seen in the graphic above. Wait and see if the owner renews the domain or just lets it lapse.

4. Hope that the bad publicity of this post gets a response and he/she takes all the illegally copied posts down.

What do you think I should do here? Drop a comment below. I’ll write a Part 2 to this post when there’s more to report.

Well, after starting blogging here in August 2008, 3 years and 3 months later I’ve made it to my 200th post! If you do the math, that’s just over five posts a month – not a great amount so I’m never going to overload your RSS reader or email, and that’s probably a good thing.

I’d like to thank everyone whose subscribed to or kept in touch with the blog so far, especially those who’ve taken the time to comment. Blog comments and subscriber numbers are the two things that encourage bloggers to keep going. If you’re a long time reader, thanks for sticking around. If you’re new here, I’d love you to sign up to the RSS feed for the blog or to have posts delivered to your email inbox. You’ll find the subscription buttons at the top right of the page. Hopefully the fact that I’ve put out 200 posts over three and a bit years will convince you I enjoy blogging in my spare time and intend to continue at it.

I hope you will take a look around – with 200 posts now, there’s lots to look at. I don’t reblog tech news as there’s plenty out there doing that. You’ll mainly find tech tips here – things I’ve worked out and learned in the day to day working with my PC, software and online sites. I like to pass on what I discover. Problems I’ve solved, apps and free software I find useful, hardware I use, learning and working with WordPress, continuing my journey with Linux, discovering and using great online services, online privacy and so on. And you’ll also get the occasional post on my take on life in general.

Here’s a selection from the 200 posts which you might like to look at:

A short Twitter list to follow for great tech links

Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop screen replacement: not as hard as you think!

Points to consider when choosing screen capture software

Eliminate PC overheating and shutdown by trying a simple procedure

Improve search in Word by closing the search pane

The new search feature (Ctrl-F) in Word 2010

A generation of change in PCs

Remove FeedBurner tracking queries when clicking website links in Google Reader

Quick tip: Remove Windows.old folder after installing Windows 7

Send free SMS reminders to your mobile phone

Some Ubuntu resources for beginners

Useful links: Free wi-fi hot spots

Useful links: A to Z of search

How long should a good blog post be?

Give us this day our daily fruit and veg

Receiving low balance account alerts by SMS from your bank

Hopefully there’s something for everyone there. Well, here’s to the next 200 posts and more. Thanks for reading!

Image credit: gamillos

Just a cautionary tale today. Until recently I was only partially backing up this WordPress blog. I didn’t realise this and thankfully I never had to restore the blog from backups otherwise I would have learned my mistake too late – and it’s just not enough to rely on your blog host to come up with the backups when there’s a problem. Some are better than others but they can’t be relied upon.

So where was I going wrong? Well to put it simply, there are two important things you should be considering in a WordPress backup – your blog database AND your files. I had read enough posts about WordPress backup plugins and I installed one (WP-DB-Backup) very early in my blogging history to backup the database of posts. But that’s actually not enough. If you’re not backing up your files then really important stuff like all the image uploads for each post, your plugins, and your themes (including css and php files) aren’t being backed up and you’ll need these to completely restore your blog quickly in the event of a disaster or your blog being hacked.

Backing up your WordPress blog database

There are different ways to do this but I’ve always used WP-DB-Backup and use the option to download the backup to my hard drive although you can also have it emailed to you. On my PC, I’ve created a new folder called My Sites for my blogs as I already have My Documents, My Pictures, etc and this continues a consistent folder naming policy. I then created the folders Techandlife/Database Backups in this folder. I also backup this database backup regularly to an external backup hard drive so I have a second copy.

Backing up your WordPress blog files

Again there are different ways to do this but I use an FTP client to download the WordPress files to my hard drive and again also backing this up to an external hard drive. The important files on your WordPress blog are all in the directory public_html/wp-content. Again this goes into my My Sites/Techandlife folder. I must admit I don’t back up regularly enough but I try and do it once a month, so at worst I’ve lost just the last month of posts. The FTP client I use, Ipswitch WS FTP LE is a classic freeware product and still works fine under Windows 7. You could also use FileZilla for your file backups.

Another way to backup your files is with the WordPress Backup plugin.

Backup everything at once

I haven’t tried this but understand that EZPZ One Click Backup will backup (and restore) both the database and files but I note on the download page that quite a few people have problems getting it to work. Everything mentioned so far are free solutions but there are also paid solutions like WP Dolly Pro and monthly subscription services like blogVault.

I’ve never had to restore my blog from backup yet so I’d love to hear your experiences with backing up and particularly restoring your WordPress blog. Did it work for you? What did you learn? Which backup plugins do you use if any? We all want to be fully prepared for this disaster waiting to happen and know that we’re in good shape to get going again as quickly as possible. Drop a comment below with your experiences, good and bad.

I love getting comments on blog posts and I’ve already blogged my arguments for keeping posts open for comments. Thankfully, most posts I make receive mostly positive comments and I haven’t had to deal with too much negative stuff. Obviously I listen to the negatives and try and improve if I’m at fault. But I think we can all learn something from negative comments on tech advice blogs – and that includes the commenter, the audience and myself. Here’s two general examples based on comments I received recently.

Your tech tip didn’t work for me

This particular post had about 10-15 positive comments. People really liked the tech tip I gave and it worked for them all. Then one person left a comment just saying that it didn’t work for them. Fair enough. But it would have been nice if the commenter had given a bit more info on what he had tried before leaving the negative comment. If the tip worked for me and the first 10 commenters then perhaps the problem may not be the tech tip but a conflict in that person’s system causing it to fail to work. If they had access to another computer, they could try running it on that for example. The main thing is just try your best to figure out why it doesn’t work for you and eliminate your set-up before leaving a negative comment then we can all learn if there are particular set-ups where the tip won’t work.

Criticise, but at least offer an alternative

In another post, I reviewed some free software which I thought was pretty good. Again a number of commenters liked it. Then one person accurately pointed out some failings in the software and said he was disappointed. Again fair enough, but it would have been nice if, instead of being completely negative, the commenter had recommended a free better alternative or one that they used themselves so again we would have learned something. But there was nothing.

So if you leave negative comments on tech tips blogs, help us all to learn from your comment and take something positive from it.

Any comment on blog comments? Drop a comment below.

In the past, you’ve probably come across an interesting blog post and wanted to make a comment only to find that comments are closed, probably because a month or two has passed since the date of the post. Is closing comments a good idea? Why would you want to close comments anyway?

Well some people feel that it’s hard to deal with comment spam if all posts are left open but really, a good WordPress plugin like Akismet should deal with that. It may also be worth closing comments on posts which are no longer relevant, for example, old outdated tech news, or a post about a website or web service which is no longer available, or a contest which has finished.

I’ve kept comments open on all posts and I’m delighted to see that people are still commenting on older posts. Of course not everyone reading my posts subscribes to the blog so I don’t expect comments straight away or even in the first 2 weeks after posting. Many people are obviously reaching the posts from keyword search results at a later date and dropping comments when they have something to offer. Many of my posts are tips or things I’ve learned while working with my PC and software so if someone has a tip to improve on my tip or make me more productive then I’d really like to hear about it. I have updated posts in the past with tips in the comments. Also if readers find a post helpful I love to hear that too.

You can actually follow all comments on this blog in your RSS reader by subscribing to the comments feed. Just copy and paste that link into your RSS reader.

Do you close blog comments after a set time or leave them open indefinitely?

There are quite a few screen capture utilities out there including the basic Windows Snipping Tool which comes with Windows Vista and Windows 7. This is fine for a plain screen capture but if you’re a blogger, sooner or later you’re going to need to be able to annotate and obfuscate (blur) text in the image so an alternative utility has to be found. Here are some points to consider when making your choice.

Able to capture anything on your screen, not just in a browser window

This is the first problem I came across with a number of utilities including Awesome Screenshot, Aviary Screen Capture and other browser extensions which offer screen capture. You may occasionally want to capture part of an image from a file on your computer (not in your browser window), a Word or Excel screenshot, etc. and these in-browser utilities won’t work outside the browser window. Utilities like the Windows Snipping Tool, Greenshot, Shotty or PicPick will be fine here.

Launch from hotkey or delayed launch

Occasionally, you’ll want to capture a pop-up window or a drop-down menu in your screenshot. If you launch your screen capture utility with a mouse click, these windows will disappear. You’ll need to launch from a Hotkey like the Print Screen key so as to retain the pop-up window or drop-down menu on screen. Utilities like the Windows Snipping Tool, Greenshot, Shotty or PicPick will be fine here. Greenshot, Shotty and PicPick launch from Hotkeys and here’s how to  launch the Windows Snipping Tool from a key combination.

Annotate image and obfuscate sensitive text

A utility that doesn’t do this isn’t much use for bloggers. You’ll occasionally need to be able to draw text on the image, highlight parts of the image, draw arrows to point out certain features, and obfuscate (blur) any sensitive text. Utilities like Greenshot or Shotty will mostly work. However, Greenshot has to annotate with text in a text box which you don’t always want. Yes, you can set the box outline to zero width but the text box still obliterates underlying features. Sometimes I just want to add text without a box and without hiding the underlying features. On the other hand, Shotty will do this, but there is no facility to draw arrows in Shotty. However, PicPick is able to annotate text directly on the image, obfuscate text and draw arrows. Here’s a screenshot of a screenshot in PicPick showing blurring, text annotation, box highlighting and arrows.

Of the screen capture utilities I’ve looked at, PicPick is able to do all that I want. Which screen capture utility do you use?  Drop a comment below.

So you’ve registered your domain name and paid for web hosting and your blog or website is up and running. Great! But don’t forget to renew them when the time comes.

Very often you can set up your domain name and hosting to auto-renew which is a great idea. But if you haven’t updated your payment card details because you’ve missed that critical email alert, you may face losing your domain name – and risk someone else snapping it up before you get the chance to renew. Fail to renew your web hosting and your blog or website is taken down and your email comes to an abrupt halt. I know – it’s happened to me (twice).

I’ve missed the email to renew hosting on two occasions amidst my other emails.  I do monitor my website uptime with Montastic and knew the site was down. Initially, I just thought it was server maintenance which happens occasionally. Emails dried up. After several hours I logged in to my website control panel and discovered that no site was being hosted as the web hosting had expired. Thankfully on both occasions, after filling out the Contact Us form and responding promptly when they explained that hosting had expired, my site and emails were quickly reinstated after paying my renewal fee.

I vowed not to let it happen again. I’ve set up SMS reminders for domain name renewal and web hosting on Google Calendar. I’ve blogged about SMS reminders before and so far I’ve found the Google Calendar SMS reminders to be excellent. You can set up reminders years in advance on Google Calendar. I also have all events synced to Rainlendar my desktop calendar so I get a second nudge. I went for a reminder a week in advance so that for auto renewals I can check payment card details are up to date and for other sites I’ll just go ahead and renew.

How do you deal with domain and hosting renewal? Have you lost a prized domain name because you forgot to renew it? Drop a comment below.

When you settle on your blog theme and modify it to your liking, it becomes just that – something that you think looks good. But what about everyone else? Do they appreciate all those hours of toil you’ve put in picking fonts, colours, header graphic and heading sizes? Yes, I know you can do website testing and look at heat maps. And, of course, from your own surfing, you pick up an idea of what looks good to you, and conversely, the sites where you click the back button as quickly as possible! Good site design should help to make your experience on a site memorable.

There are some fundamentals of good blog practice, layout and design which are pretty much common sense. Let’s have a quick look at them.
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It doesn’t matter whether your article title is being seen on an RSS reader, on Twitter, Facebook or Delicious,  those few words in your headline are vitally important. They’re the difference between attracting a potential reader to click and find out more or pass over to another article. So you have to get it right first time.

I work in list view in Google Reader so when I’m browsing new posts, all I see is the article title and perhaps part of the first sentence so I know how important the first impression of the title is. Here’s some points to consider when composing your title.
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It’s important to monitor how your blog host provider is performing. You may only have one chance to attract a visitor from a search query or a backlink to your blog and if your site is down temporarily for some reason, chances are they may never retry your link and discover your blog. There are a number of free services which will monitor your site and email or SMS you when it’s down, and back online again. I’ve been using the website monitoring service Montastic for about a year now and I’m quite happy with them. The free plan actually lets you monitor up to three sites with an interval down to every 30 minutes. Each site account also includes an RSS feed.

Of course it doesn’t have to be your blog that you monitor, could be any site you’re interested in. The reason I mention this now is because I’ve noticed that of late my blog host Bluehost isn’t providing the uninterrupted service it used to, so I must contact them and find out why. Here’s a snapshot of email alerts I’ve received over the past week from Montastic. You can see that my blog was down for parts of most days.

I have another site with a different host which I’m also monitoring and it isn’t experiencing anything like this sort of downtime so it’s time to put in a ticket with Bluehost.

So I can recommend Montastic, but other free blog monitoring services were reviewed in a Mashable post back in April.