Boxing Day - Problems Almost Over

Christmas day was another one of those days. I logged on to my computer and got lots of warnings saying that my computer had the worm.win32.netsky and by coincidence I don't think; 2 new icons had appeared on my desk top for spyware scans. My IE kept on opening and trying to take me to spyware removal sites - another big coincidence!

Logic told me that the computer didn't have the worm and that in fact it was a scam. I've almost finished an article about the fraud and will post it here during the next few days.

I've almost sorted out my server dilemma. I've signed up elsewhere and should be able to start moving my membership sites tomorrow. It will be a relief to get them back up and running again, I've lost a lot of time during the last few weeks due to the server problems. Thank goodness I did back ups of the sites else I would have had a lot more work to do than just moving them. I'm just leary of the actual moving, my technical abilities are not all that. I suppose that I could pay somebody to sort them out for me but there wouldn't be any challenge in not doing it myself.

Was surprised to see some articles submitted to BB Articles on Christmas day and quite a lot today. Not surprised to have to decline several, a shame because most of them were good articles if only the site guidelines hadn't been ignored. It's the time of year for holiday destination articles. I really enjoy reading them and hopefully I will have plenty of fresh articles to add to Articles Abroad once it's back online again.

I tentatively joined the new website advertising wonder Pay Per Play a couple of weeks ago. I think that it could make money and plenty of it if you have a high amount of traffic. My only reservation is that the noise from the 5 second adverts might drive visitors away. I browse with the sound turned down so it won't bother me.

The Negative & The Positive

The Negative
Calamity seems to be following me this month. My server for the new membership sites Eprofits Centre and Articles Abroad took over a week to get back up and running. The sites were extremely slow to load and when I tried to send out newsletters to apologise for the sites being down I found that all of the cron jobs were missing and I had to set them all up again. There was also regular patches of downtime.

If you have read my earlier posts you'll know that cron jobs and I don't get on so it was no surprise that I set them up wrong. Each site has over a dozen so lots of mistakes to be made. I got the Articles Abroad cron jobs sorted but 3 of the Eprofits cron jobs weren't right and emails were being sent to my inbox every 10 or 15 minutes. I was limited for time and just deleted the emails twice a day until I had time to figure out what I'd done wrong.

The time came yesterday. I tried to log on to Eprofits and found that the site had been suspended with no warning and no explanation. I could only think that either a scammer had latched on to another of my sites, or the cron job emails going into my site inbox were considered as spamming, though I wasn't letting them build up.

Another possibility was that several days before my monthly fees were due to come out of my account I got an email saying that my payment was overdue and my account would be terminated if I didn't pay. It was the second month running that I'd had that warning email and when I complained I was told that it was just a reminder. Reminders don't tell you that you are late paying, nor do they make threats.

A few hours later Articles Abroad was suspended, as there were no problems with the cron jobs that couldn't have been the reason. My 2 new ventures down twice in one month and just as they were starting to gain momentum. The server support could only say "The server just is not acting right. There are still some bugs we are fixing."

The other problem that I have with them is that it is an hosting reseller account and I haven't been able to log into my hosting cpanel since they got back up and crawling again. Fortunately it is a new account with no customers, but what I have at the moment is one site up and running out of 3 but that site is totally useless because I can't set up accounts for new customers.

So I am paying for a service that I'm not getting. 3 of my sites are not doing anything and as I extensively advertised them the suspended pages won't be doing my credibility much good. Of course I am now in the process of looking for a new server. I got back ups of the sites, but I've never moved a site from one server to another so I'm a bit apprehensive about moving even though I know that I must.

The Positive
During the down time I was able to spend more time working on my older sites. I haven't done much with them since setting up the article directory so it was long overdue.

I've also been messing around with various scripts and software and found a neat little script that builds Youtube sites with content that automatically updates. I built 3 mini sites, the last one taking all of 5 minutes. You can see that site at www.bb-articles.com/spicegirls I think it's rather neat and have a few ideas on how I can use the mini sites to aid my business.

More positive is that BB Articles Alexa ranking is now 285,386 and still rising। A massive improvement in a relatively short time. Some really good writers are now becoming regular submitters so I can only see a good future for BB Articles.

Merry Christmas

I'll be glad when December is over!

December started out really positively. I converted my newsletter into a downloadable pdf file - almost a magazine. My new sites were gaining momentum and getting new members, BB Articles and my other sites going great then crash!

My server for the membership sites went down on the 6th and over a week later is still not up and running despite promises. Then I found out that one of my other sites on another server had been suspended because some git had latched on to it and scammed others. Over 20,000 hits in a couple of days must have made it worthwhile for the scammer. I absolutely hate the thought that people have been scammed using my webspace and hope that the scammers get caught.

Lots of other little things have been going wrong so I just hope that Santa brings a nice surprise to make up for it all then 2008 watch out!

A Great Weekend & A New Business

I spent the weekend visiting my grandchildren Harrison and Isabella and had a great time. They have moved to a new 4 bedroomed house about 30 miles away. The 4th bedroom is for me when I go to stay, but 2 year old Isabella decided in the early hours that she was sleeping in there too. It was lovely waking up in the morning seeing her smiling face on the pillow next to me.

Harrison decided to give me a belated birthday party and chose a My Little Pony Cake. His gift to me was a set of 3 small spades for my ex overgrown garden. What he doesn't know is that the overgrown garden that he knows has been landscaped recently. He is going to grow up believing that his spades have worked miracles!

I have a week off work and am using that for the business. On Monday I set up a new site using memberspeed software at http://eprofitscentre.com. There are other similar membership sites but I will try my best to make it different. I set this site up because I wanted to use and test all of the software's features before developing a new JV in January with a totally different idea to what I've been doing so far. All of my new membership sites will have article directories and all will have lots of features for members to use.

With eprofitscentre.com I'm setting up my first internet affiliate programme. It looks quite easy to set up and use with this software but they could be famous last words!

BB Articles has now got an Alexa ranking of 410,990 and still rising. I'm really pleased with it's progress and the steadily rising traffic. The search strings show a healthy amount of people searching for article directories and various information - some of them are hilarious!

A Busy Autumn

It's been far too long since I updated this blog and a lot has been happening. At the beginning of this month BB Articles was given a Google page rank of 2. I thought that was quite good for a 4 month old site.

Traffic has been continuously rising and already the November figures up to present are higher than all of Octobers traffic figures. Search strings for anything to do with article directories are starting to heavily feature, which is probably a result of the rank.

Unfortunately I am declining more articles than ever. It isn't a matter of me changing the guidelines. The only guideline that I have changed is that I no longer accept articles with gambling links. It's more a matter of me being more thorough in sticking to them myself when approving articles. Many article submitters do not read guidelines, or if they do they ignore them. The guidelines are there to set standards and maintain a high quality which benefits authors as well as myself.

This week I set up a new niche travel article directory/membership site at www.articlesabroad.com Using memberspeed software. At least I can start as I mean to go on with quality articles.

Article Marketing Success And Sheep Do not Mix

I like article marketing and find it an enjoyable and profitable way of promoting my websites. I never plan articles, the ideas just come out of the blue from something I have seen or heard. Once I start writing the words just flow, but before I write an article there are two things that I consider.

1. Why am I writing the article?
2. Would it be of any use to webmasters for their sites or for newsletter publishers?

It does not take rocket science to figure that I and every other article marketer am using articles to benefit our own promotions, but they will be of little benefit to us if we do not produce quality articles that others will actually want to read and use.

Owning my own article directory I have read thousands of articles, many of which I would never use on my other sites or in newsletters and many I have declined for various reasons. Let us consider the rights and wrongs of articles starting at the beginning.

Attention Grabbing

Your title is your headline, there to grab attention and many people never look past the first 2 or 3 words. I could have called this Sheep Do Not Mix With Article Marketing Success but I want people who are interested in article marketing and not sheep to read it. Another type of title that will not grab me is The Top 20 Tips For Passionate Sex. It would be more likely to create interest if it was Passionate Sex My Top 20 Tips.

Writing Standards

Spelling and grammar are important. You are promoting yourself and your business and you need to present yourself as professional to be taken seriously. I write my articles in Word first and use the spell checker. I sometimes fall out with it because I am English and prefer not to use Americanised spelling.

If you have problems with writing but good information the answer is to use a ghostwriter or copywriter. There are plenty of good writers advertising on the Internet and personally I think that one good quality article will do more for your business than 10 poor articles.

Know Your Subject

Good advice for writers is that they should always know and understand what they are writing about or their articles have no credibility. I was gobsmacked last week to read an article about my own country that I knew to be very ill informed and by somebody I suspected had never set foot on our shores. The guy could not even spell Britain right and as his misspelling was in the title he sunk without trace before he even started!

Original Copy

The best and most memorable articles are purely original, thought provoking and offer different viewpoints to a subject. Some writers submit zillions of slightly changed articles about the same subject over and over; yawn. They are boring and eminently unreadable after the first one or two. There are exceptions where writers are providing updates and news about their chosen subjects. I would use those articles for my sites.

Lists of quotes from the bible for instance are not original articles. At least 90% should be your own work and quotes only used as a point of interest not as the whole article. Submitting articles on behalf of others is suspect, how do readers know whether you have filched them or not? Plagiarism, not worth going there, eagle eyes and google will find you out!

Advertorial Blues

An advertorial is an advert written in article form. They carry no unbiased information or advice that would be of any help to anybody interested in that subject. There are plenty of places to advertise for free on the Internet, so trying to fob adverts off as articles is unfair on directory site owners or visitors who want to read articles not adverts.

Link Usage

The reason most of us use Article Marketing for promoting our businesses is to place links to our websites in the author resource boxes usually placed at the foot of articles.

I like to maximise the potential and use the up to 3 links usually allowed. Many article directories allow active links, but some do not. A problem can arise when articles are automatically submitted if the script the site uses strips the html. I prefer to submit manually mostly and then I can activate the links myself or just put my website address if the site doesn't accept html links.

Links within the articles are unacceptable on most directory sites, but as you get 3 chances in the resource boxes there is no point trying to cheat.

All Keyed Up

You will be asked to provide some keywords for your articles so choose wisely. Study your content and consider what somebody who might be interested in your article is most likely to enter into the search engines. A poor example is if you are writing about search engine optimisation and your title is SEO, Internet Business Bread And Jam, you would not use jam and bread as keywords unless you wanted to attract hungry people. Apart from that your articles credibility takes a nosedive if you do not know what a good keyword is.

Readability

Finally, your article should not be repetitive and should be interesting. Short paragraphs make it easier to read, text talk makes it more difficult. All capitals in the article body or title are a no no, they only stand out in the sense that the reader feels shouted at and nobody wants to feel like that.

I hope that you have found this interesting and useful and that we get lots more quality articles to read.

Article Source: bb-articles.com

Captcha & Increased Traffic

I haven't had much spare time lately but I've started to make small changes to BB Articles. I added a Captcha to the sign in page because the site was getting spammed. Submitters will need to visit the site now because automatic submission software won't work.

What I could really do with is a script that will decline plagiarised articles. My heart sinks when I log on and see a long list of articles waiting for approval. About 3 out of 20 are approved, the rest are plagiarised, advertorials, have links in the body of the article which most directory sites don't accept, or are too short. I have a minimum wordage to 500, although if a 450+ word article is full of good information I let them through. I now have a script that I can run to automatically delete articles of less than 450 words.

Some directories have a much lower wordage allowed but the best usually want 500+. Some of the more experienced directory owners say that less than 500 is an advert. I'm not sure if I agree with that but I wonder how small articles fare with google. When I use my web design software XSitePro it warns me to increase wordage on a page to 500 because it helps with google rankings. If that's so it makes sense to ask for 500 word articles, better for the writer and the site.

When I searched for BB-Articles in the google rankings it said that the site couldn't be ranked because of nofollow links which must have been set with the software, though a lot of the pages are indexed. I'm not sure what to do about that because they will have been set because there are so many outbound links which the robots would follow off the site. Maybe a google sitemap will solve that problem.

The Alexa rankings are doing great. Around 1,011,000 when I looked a couple of days ago. That might sound high but BB Articles has risen over 500,000 in around 3 weeks since the last time that I checked. I was curious and checked out some of the competition at random and out of 15 sites BB Articles was fifth in the rankings. The lowest was over 5,000,000 and the highest around 40,000. As all of those sites are older and more established the result was very pleasing.

I read somewhere that the Alexa rankings were something to do with traffic, which figures because traffic has steadily increased since the site was launched just over 2 months ago. The biggest increase becan when I started to use Traffic Explosion which was launched on August 22nd. I was sceptical about it working but the site stats tell me it is bringing traffic in and that will grow as more join.

I joined a web ring of article directories yesterday so hopefully that will help to increase traffic.

The Sun Came Out And So Did My Spare Domains

Lots of sunshine this week and everything seems brighter. More new writers for my article directory and the plagiarism has declined but not completely stopped. I stopped smoking but I must admit that I got stressed one day and caved in and bought a pack of 10 cigs. The next day my mouth tasted foul so I guess that taught me a lesson.

Instead of smoking I started to build a new site around an unused domain that I had at www.cashwrite.info It's not brilliant but I was experimenting with designing ads with adobe photoshop and using several smaller ads instead of an header. I had only used photoshop once before so for a beginner I'm quite pleased with the results.

I've decided to give the article directory a new look next month and I might use the same type of ads on the site to make everything look more coordinated. I didn't alter the design much when I installed the directory because I had never worked with anything like that before, but now I feel more comfortable with making alterations.

BB Articles has seen a steady increase in traffic. Quite gratifying considering that I've not had a great deal of time to promote it. Realising that you can't sit still I've been looking into ways of increasing traffic and came across a new traffic exchange programme that I actually totally understood and because it involves advertising the traffic that you get is targeted rather than random. It's early days for seeing how well it works.

One of the things that put me off the traffic exchanges that I've seen before is the feeling that untargeted traffic is worth squat and that I'd rather have visitors who are interested in my sites and are more likely to spend time on them and of course spend.

Another good thing to happen today was that I found a use for another spare domain www.dumpthatad.co.uk I got it a few months ago when I was trying to figure out how to get an advertising media that I used to run offline on to the internet. The idea is fun but a bit complicated for the internet, so I used the site for playing around with ads. I've been a bit stubborn and haven't been cloaking my affiliate links, but today among the masses of products that I own I found a link cloaker with a website and decided that the dump that ad URL would be perfect for the link cloaker site.

I've decided to give the link cloaker away free as an incentive to opt in to my mailing list. Lots of work to do there because I have a few ideas to add to it.

I've got some more spare domains lying around, I just hope that I can get everything else done before I happen upon a use for them!

Banging My Head Against A Brick Wall

Today was the pits. I got home from a hard days work, logged on and saw more new writers and more new articles than any day since I stopped automatic submission. I should have been pleased, I was pleased until reality snuck in.

Despite adding a paragraph in red above the article submission page about not accepting anything that is plagiarised etc. 27 out of 36 articles submitted I suspected were plagiarised. Some of the same writers that I had deleted their accounts for that reason signed up again and submitted more plagiarised articles. 6 of the articles were not written in English and as the site is all English I had to decline them. 3 decent articles left and a heck of a lot of my time wasted.

I have come across article directories that have suspended submissions because of spamming or plagiarism and I don't blame them.

Because so much of my time is being wasted I have less time to promote the site and write my own articles. That will have an effect on the genuine writers and of course my business. One little ray of sunshine is that I found a very low cost article writing service which I am now recommending to the cheats. I've no doubt that most will ignore me, but maybe some will get the message.

Newsletter and Forum

I have been so busy moaning that I haven't added the highlights to my month. I started a newsletter at the beginning of the month and it was quite well received, no complaints anyway!

I'm only going to send the newsletter out monthly, that's enough. I get newsletters from some companies almost daily and have stopped bothering to read them, but I still look at the less regular ones. Apart from the newsletter being about article marketing I want to encourage new ideas and will give anything new developed by subscribers a mention in the newsletter.

I have plans to publish an online magazine in the future, but I need to free up some serious time to develop the idea properly.

I will also be adding a forum to the site in the near future. I wasn't really into forums until I joined a really good forum last month. You get free advertising for posting and I've learned quite a lot and made some good contacts there too.

I'm looking around for a good script, may even get one made if I can't find exactly what I want in the meantime I'll continue getting free ads on my favourite forum.

What Next?

This blog is turning out to be more of a moan than a blog but I guess we all have to get things off our chests somehow.

During the last couple of weeks a lot of my time has been wasted checking articles for cheats. Something like 3 out of 4 articles submitted have been plagiarised fully or partially and the amount has been growing.

At first I felt sorry for some of the posters, I know that not everybody can write acceptable quality articles and I know that a lot of people cannot afford to pay for ghost writers. I feel that these cheats want to jump on the article marketing bandwagon and plagiarism is their only option.

I can't condone plagiarism though. I know that some article directory owners have been threatened with the law for accepting plagiarised articles and I am not prepared to put myself in that position.

Some of the cheaters have had the nerve to try it on more than once. I've deleted accounts and they have just signed up and cheated again. I have now added a notice about plagiarism to the article submit page. It is going to be one strike and they are out. I know where I can get a script to block people and I will install that if necessary.

I wonder if these people think that because I am relatively new to owning an article directory I have no experience of spotting cheats. If so they can think again, I've been writing on internet sites for years and can usually easily spot plagiarised work. There are lots of tells to look for and google does the rest.

To end on an high note my 2 and 3 year old grandchildren came visiting today. We went to the park and did lots of sliding and playing on the swings. Much more fun that checking plagiarised articles!

Fresh Start?

Thankfully the automatic article submissions stopped but only when I took the script out. Articles are still filling up my inbox despite me emailing the article submission company several times asking them to stop sending them. I have deleted hundreds of articles, a waste of my time and I wonder how many good articles I'm losing because of this.

I've tried blocking the company but the email address they are sending from is hidden and with my email account used being on my domain you can't get at the source as you can with hotmail.

What I feel like at the moment is pulling the site down and starting all over again. A new design and far less articles. If I did that it would take time but the pros are starting to outweigh the cons.

Less articles would mean that the site would be faster and all of the functions would work. I would be able to get rid of articles that I don't want, for instance about weapons. Reduce the amount of categories and have all of the articles in the correct categories which would be better for the rss feeds and better for the writers. I would also lose all of the articles with incomplete resource boxes. In hindsight it would be like that now if I hadn't opted for the automatic submission company doh.

The only con really is time. I would have to save the old site on another server and gradually move the articles submitted manually and the best articles to the new site. But, I have been spending a lot of time moving articles to the correct categories etc. and I would guess that if I continue it will take me longer to go through all of the articles than start afresh.

It would be nice to have a fresh start so maybe I've talked myself into it!

Up To My Eyeballs In Articles

What an hectic week. An enormous amount of articles were waiting for approval on Tuesday and every time I approved some more came in. Most of them didn't have category suggestions so the approval process took longer because I had to figure out what category they belonged in. Some of the articles were pretty obscure which made it harder.

There was such a huge backlog by Friday that I pulled the automatic submission script and started to email members to ask them to post manually, hopefully that will slow things down but not bring things to a standstill. I realised that a lot of my time was being wasted unnecessarily and I was struggling to find time to promote the site or make improvements. My other sites are so neglected they might as well not exist.

Other problems that the automated script brought was that html was being stripped out of the articles resource boxes, that I got fixed with another script. Then I realised that the automatic submission was creating lots of unnecessary categories, for instance doubling up with computer and computers. It also created a main category called Speaking and sub categories under that of religion and online auctions - weird!

I'm now trying to sort out the categories and have already deleted quite a lot. I've decided not to accept any more political articles or articles about weapons. I don't think an article directory is the place for political debate and I don't want links to sites selling weapons on any of my sites. I'm toying with the idea of not accepting any more articles about religion too. I find some of those articles interesting although I'm an atheist, but some of them are just plain preaching and can hardly be called articles. I'll just refuse those for a while maybe.

The only bit of light relief this week was when I looked at the article website statistics. A searchstring that was - how to use covert hypnosis to get women to sleep with you - I laughed when I saw it but now I'm going to search to see if there is anything like that on the site. The thought of some creep using hypnosis to get sex makes me shudder, surely that would be classed as rape. Then it could be BS, and I don't think it's possible. However if it's on the site it won't be for long.

Disaster strikes

It's sod's law that when I think everything is going great something goes wrong.

I was delighted a few evenings ago to see some articles from an old business friend who I hadn't been in contact with for 5 years had been submitted to
www.bb-articles.com through Article Marketer. I'd always enjoyed reading her articles and settled in for a good read. It was great until I noticed that her resource box was incomplete and had no links. I looked through all of her articles and found that most of them were the same.

I was going to email her anyway and make contact again, but I wasn't happy to have to tell her that the resource boxes were incomplete. We both thought that it had been caused by the mass submission from Article Marketer, my friend blasted them and I asked them why it had happened.


Article Marketer got back to me and very nicely explained that my script was stripping out the html. At first I thought that they meant the article directory script but then the day after I realised that they might mean the script that I had bought to enable my site to get mass submissions from
Article Marketer. It's a nifty little script, apart from enabling mass submissions and adding on of categories automatically it also stops the same article from being posted twice and declines articles that are too short or too long.

Anyway I contacted the guy that I bought the script from and he altered it for me. Apparantly he had recently changed it because there were complaints that it was letting through articles with affiliate links in the body and too many links in the resource box. Unfortunately the revised script took it's job too seriously and stripped the html.

The good news is that my new script is working fine, it's different in that I now have to approve every article. That I prefer anyway, I can delete anything that I think are scams and I don't like complete advertorials and can delete them.

The bad news is that there are thousands of articles on my site with incomplete resource boxes. Up to present I've been able to correct nearly a thousand because many of the articles were also sent to my inbox. If there are some that I find that I can't correct I email the individual authors with the links.

I did initially attempt to email all of the authors but there are too many for the email system on my site. I was advised to use an autoresponder but I haven't figured how to use one of them yet. Ok I'm a dummy but I don't like the idea of mass emails anyway.

I'll probably end up going through them all and correcting what I can. I will take many hours but I don't think it's fair on the writers not to have links or contact info in their resource boxes.

Another problem that I had was with the mass input of articles came many new categories. Some of the sub categories have long titles and were overwriting themselves. It made the site look really messy and you had difficulty reading what the categories were.

I found the solution to that problem at AD University. There are some great tutorials on how to customise Article Dashboard sites - and I understand them! Now my home page has just the categories and the messy sub categories have been hidden away from site.

I found another bug in that there is a strange memory error when you click on the top articles link. It can't really be a memory error, more like a tiny script error. I've seen the solution somewhere so once I've got time to look for it again I'll fix it.

Wow nearly 40,000 articles

There have been times when I wondered if I was taking the right step with an article directory, but now I know that I have. Who would have imagined that there would be so many articles within 2 weeks of launching? I certainly didn't and more are still coming in. The articles mostly arrived through joining a company called Article Marketeer who submit articles for you.

They have 2 options, by email or with a nifty script. I chose the email option because it sounded easier. My mistake, my inbox was flooded with subscriptions and articles and I had to place these on the site. I was going bogeyed with the effort and decided to try out the script. Despite my fears it was easy to install and the subscriptions and articles are coming in automatically now.

I was worried that the automatic members wouldn't visit the site but I am seeing that many are and some are posting articles by themselves.

Another worry is that I wasn't getting to check the articles before they were posted. Article Marketer check them for you but I have thrown some out that I have seen. Either for being unethical or just complete advertorial with no personal experience or advice. I don't see the point in advertorials. Most readers will see that they are just ads and not what they are looking for when they do a search about a subject. Apart from that if they want to purely advertise they aren't getting a freebie.

Many of the articles that I have read are informative and of good quality. That I find pleasing but I have to admit to some cynicism as regards some who call themselves as Internet marketing experts. My cynicism arose when I read some of the articles giving advice about Internet marketing. What I couldn't understand was if they are experts why do they not use keywords appropriate to the articles?

Some just use a couple of words from the title. For instance the title might be 'Put some jam on your bread' they would use jam and bread as keywords. I am not an expert on Internet marketing and am reading the articles to gain more knowledge about that area, but even I know that somebody putting jam or bread into a search engine will not be looking for advice about Internet marketing.

Ok that's a wild example and I will be happy to be corrected if I'm wrong. If I'm right then I'm not 100% happy about advice from those who are not walking the talk.

Anyway on the bright side the site is getting lots of hits from unique visitors. More in the last 2 days than in 2 months on my other sites. It remains to be seen if it makes more money. I'm going to be good and wait a while before checking the various advertising sources.

What next? Unfortunately the category section on the home page has been messed up somewhat with the input from Article Marketer. I will be working on fixing that and making some improvements over the next few days. Then I will push the boat out with promotion. I have lots of articles kicking around and will be flooding other sites with them to get back links. That will be stage one and a continuing process until www.bb-articles is blasted all over the Internet. It looks like the Busy Bee is back in spades!

What the heck is phishing?

I got an email from my hosting company telling me that they had removed my site because somebody had phished it. Not 100% sure what that is but I think that it's some cheapskate who hijacks your site and tags theirs on to it to make use of the bandwidth you have paid for - when webspace is so cheap nowadays too. Or it could be some weirdo hiding their illegal site in your pages.

Anyway I read the email a week after receiving it and found that my site was fine because several days earlier I had taken that site down and parked another of my sites on that domain.

All I can say is phish off to the cheats.

Welcome to my blog

What a frustrating week I've had trying to set up my article directory. I'm terrible at understanding technical instructions and had to do many a google search before what I have done so far clicked.

I had 2 false starts when I tried to set a directory up on my own webspace. First of all I tried to install an article beach site and couldn't get it working properly. Then I tried Article Dashboard. I got everything on the site and started to customise but realised that the email confirmation for new joiners wasn't working. After many hours of searches and hair pulling out I realised that a thing called cron jobs exists and couldn't find any mention in my cpanel. I emailed the guy that I bought the space from and was told that they didn't allow cron jobs because of security issues. I understood but when I looked at the advertisement that I bought the space from cron jobs was there large as life.

For those of you who I am baffling with 'cron jobs' it's something to do with the site automatically sending confirmation emails, newsletters and news of posts etc. If you want your own article directory type site then make sure that you get a host that offers cron jobs.

Anyway I wasn't too bothered because I didn't pay much for unlimited space for life and already have something like 7 personal sites hosted there and the ability to host myself. I decided to pay a monthly fee for hosting the article directory with the recommended hosts.

I bought the space and started to publish the site. Every step of the way was more difficult and time consuming with the recommended hosts than with my own space. I finally got there and guess what? I couldn't get the cron jobs to work when I signed up for an authors account.

I joined the article dashboard forum and went through every recommendation posted by users. Nothing worked and I would have been bald if I had literally torn my hair out. I was almost ready to give up but emailed the recommended hosts first.

It turned out that I was using an hotmail account for the test author sign up and hotmail was filtering out the confirmation emails as spam grrrr. I might have thought about that one earlier if I hadn't signed up as an author on the Article Dashboard site and received the confirmation email with no problem. I added the BB-article site to my hotmail safe list and now everything is working great - I hope! Just got lots of customising to do but the site is ready for posts.

What I find strange about Hotmail is that they filter out emails that you want to receive as spam, yet the only spam I have received in that account in 7 years must have come through hotmail selling the address to spammers and scammers. I know that because I used it as a private address for 7 years.