eAction

Sometimes, out of the blue - it seems like the world has turned against you. Trouble falls on you like hailstones.

It’s important that you not lose your ability to think and to seek for good, wise answers. Don’t just freeze up and cower in panic. I’m thinking both physically and spiritually now - find shelter, try to determine where it is coming from, and how to bring it to a halt. It may take some humility to admit your walls or fences are down, or your roof has holes. Don’t get hung up on accepting or assigning blame. That might delay getting the help you need.

There is bound to be someone else who has experienced this too. Seek them out and find out what they would do. They may have learned the hard way, NOT to try this or that. Heed their warnings, try the best of their advice, and if that doesn’t work, go find some more solutions. Eventually you WILL fix it.

When it’s all done, you can sit back, analyze, and marvel at all that you’ve learned from that crisis.

Setting up my blogs last year and running them has been generally easy and untroubled. I don’t think I’ve had the swarms of visitors that are often predicted when people urge blogging on you, but that may be because I had not worked very hard at promoting them. I just have too many things on the go.

However, one day while working in the Dashboard area (administrative part) of this eAction blog I came to a place where I could tick a check box if I wanted people to be able to “ping” my blogs.

Nothing much happened, except that occasionally I’d get a comment from some pharmaceutical link with garbage words, or a line to the effect of, “I really don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t care. The world can go to pot.”

Well, I’d set up my blog to notify me by email whenever there was a comment, so that I would have to come moderate it. It would not automatically show up under my blog. So then I’d have to go delete this crazy nonsense thing. I’d heard of spamming in the comments to a blog, and this must be it.

But then they began to increase to duplicates and triplicates, and they happened more frequently.

Last week I suddenly got 98 one day and 106 the next! I went to look for solutions to this!

At WordPress, from where my blog software comes, I discovered that this was happening to many, many others. Apparently spammers had found a loophole in the older versions of the software, whereby they could set up robots to flood our blogs’ comments with spam.

Now WordPress is a group of volunteers who design, improve and promote this free software, but they are keen and bright, and they quickly wrote up patches to solve this problem, but you had to have the latest version of the program for the patches to work. Some others had written patches too, which would capture and delete the spam, and the WordPress site recommended and gave links to them as well.

I went to check and discovered that I had version 1.5.2 and the latest one was 2.0.2. With one click in my site’s admin area, I was able to upgrade to the latest. Then I went to install the patches. However, there was a catch. They wanted my WordPress API number, and I couldn’t find that anywhere. I hunted all over my WordPress Dashboard and couldn’t find that number.

So I went to the forums, and read other’s posts and learned some things, but still couldn’t find my API. Finally i decided it was time to register for the forum and ask my question. It took until the next day to have time to go back once I got my confirmation taken care of, but later when I checked again the following morning I found someone had given a simple answer. I had to go to the WordPress.com site (I was on the .org site) and apply for membership. Then I would be sent my API by email.

Sure enough. That solved it! Then I was able to install the plugins Akismet and Spam Karma2, They went to work instantly, and all the spam was captured. When I go check now, I see lines reporting that Akismet has just dealt with 80 since I was last there, and SK2 has handled 584 since it started.

Mind you, I have disabled ping-backs altogether, and also comments, until this clears up. I don’t want any friends’ comments lost in the bleaching out of this stink. On the forums I read that it was the setting to allow for ping-backs (links from other people’s blogs) that was the loop-hole in the first place.

If you are a friend, or a wanna be friend, and really want to reach me, I think you can find other, more conventional ways. It’s those unhuman robots we’re fighting against right now! Not you.

There are usually answers to every problem. The trick is to know how to search for the answer. Develop good research skills, and you’ll find the people who are glad to help out. Watch especially for topic specific forums. Just remember to be polite and clear - you don’t gain any points if you spill your anger at the world on those people. They like it too, if you go back to say thanks.

Thinking again, about my niece’s hint that she’s interested in trying out Linux I’ve just gone hunting for more helpful info for newbies. The tutorial site I got to first was http://www.linux.org which has some excellent pages of easy to understand explanations about trying out linux. It even recommends the idea of a dual boot, which I found last year when I was considering it, to be an idea that was treated hesitantly (not very recommended). Now it seems it is described as the best way to get your feet wet with your first Linux experience.

Dual boot means that you keep your Windows operating system on your computer, and add a linux one. Then when you boot up the computer, you choose which one you want to enter, then with a click you are loaded into either your Windows OS or your Linux OS.

Problem is, to decide which Linux to try out first. I went with Mandrake 9.1 for my first effort, then ended up with Suse 9.3, and less than a year later was ready to dump Windows 98 altogether and go with the Suse alone.

While clicking on the Distros link on Linux.org, simply because I was thinking of a spare OLD computer I have downstairs that doesn’t seem to be able to take my Mandrake or Suse, I decided to see what there was in the smallest distribution (distros) that would work with Windows. Just to give my niece more options, and perhaps to find one that would work on the OLD 486.

Well! Nice surprise. There’s a long list of these “minimal distros” as they are called. Some fit onto a floppy disk and can be run in RAM. So you really don’t mess up your computer if you decide that one is not for you. You get to pick up and handle as you do when you shop in person in a shopping mall. If you like it, you keep it (if you’ve downloaded it), and if you don’t - just delete.

I haven’t had time to try any of these out yet this morning, but I’ve downloaded a few;

AmigoLinux looked a little complicated as I have to figure out which of those files, out of quite a few, I need to download, so I by-passed it for now. Maybe another day.

CoLinux - I downloaded this one, as it says it is suppose to work together very well with Windows. It just fits into a folder of it’s own and is very cozy with Windows. We’ll see. It is at http://www.colinux.org.

Topologi-Linux http://topologi-linux.sourceforge.net/index.php?menu=1 - looks good, and I liked the helpful information pages, but when I tried to download it nothing happened. It was a little large, so instead of trying again, I skipped that. I may go back to it again.

MuLinux - http://mulinux.dotsrc.org/mulinux.html - is suppose to be extra good for those old DOS/Win98, ready to toss out computers. But it isn’t maintained or kept up at all, so it isn’t going to keep improving. However, this is truly a small file. It almost downloaded like a graphic, so I’m going to try this one especially on the OLD 486 box downstairs.

If you have valuable stuff on your current computer, and you hesitate to mess it up with something totally new, try this route first. If you haven’t got an older computer, maybe someone else you know is about to throw one out. Ask if you can have it to experiment on. Install one of these minimal linux distros, and explore. If it breaks - it breaks. (shrug).

What will happen most likely is that you’ll suddenly have a new hobby and a new passion!

P.S. I have been getting floods of comments that are PURE SPAM. Until I figure out how to deal with that, I have disabled all comments on these blogs. Those who are my friends will know how to reach me. Spammers - God will deal with you!

“We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.” (Marian Wright Edelman)

Isn’t that the truth?

It is, in fact, easy to go overboard in either extreme. We spend too much time on the big picture and the big difference we want to make in the world,, and not enough on the details and the small changes that will get us there. Or, we spend too much time on the details and forget why we are doing them.

Let’s egg each other on to stay balanced!

Have you noticed that the people who market e-books and digital products from their sites are making money, as my Dad would say, “hand over fist”? Perhaps you are thinking to yourself, “Well, bully for them, but I can’t write an e-book. I don’t DO software either. I haven’t got anything to sell!”

I would guess you haven’t heard of Public Domain materials yet, right?

Maybe like me, you have known for a long time that Public Domain means that the copyright has run out on some book or artwork, or whatever - some intellectual property. If something is attributed to Anonymous, if someone has donated their written or artistic work to the public domain then anyone can use or re-publish that material without fear of being taken to court for breaking copyright.

But did you know that many things written before 1923, and all inspired work or information (i.e. music, inventions, artwork, writing, technology, etc.) to which no one claims ownership, is in the Public Domain? Works published in the United States between certain years, which were not renewed have fallen into Public Domain. As have some works or reports from your governments. Included in this are works by Shakespeare and Ben Franklin and many other well-known people. We need to take time to study up on these factors.

If you have produced something like this, even from Public Domain materials, and have attached your own name to it, then you automatically have copyright to it if you live in North America, or most other democratic countries. You CAN register it with your national archives, but if you can show your original work with your name on it, then you already have copyright for the length of your life - plus 50 years. You may leave your copyrights to your heirs in your will.

Marketeers are discovering this huge, humungous treasure trove of intellectual property which they can dress up with a modern look and appeal, and then re-publish freely. No fees or licensing required.

A few months ago, I came across some who tried to sell the secrets for finding this vast body of free knowledge. Now I am discovering sites on the net that give that information away! It’s hard to keep a secret on the net anyway, isn’t it?

Since the public domain is a treasure trove of information and resources to be used by future generations, many advocates are concerned that its stagnation will make it more difficult for future generations to find creative inspiration.

Just now I’ve been reading on this site http://www.public-domain-sources.com/ but there are many more. Just watch out for those who write long sales pages, to convince you that you can NOT do this without their helpful book or course. If you are patient you can dig up all this stuff for free. You can also learn how to use it to build your own web business and start making money.

I think the key is to be able to discern or tell, which is going to be seen as valuable by the public and which is not. Not everything lying around for free is the golden goose egg.

I am not an authority on this - yet. Take time to research and study this opportunity for yourself!

Find yourself a cache of Public Domain treasures in your area of interest and expertise. Then do any or as many of the following as you can;

Simply re-sell it

Turn it into web content for your site

Re-package it (eg. Walt Disney turned old fairy tales into new and popular movies).

Reproduce it in other media formats. (audio, CD, DVD)

Convert government booklets into how-to products

Sell reprint rights to your product version of it.

Upsell - that is, use it as a freebie or bonus to attract buyers to your other main product

Create a viral e-book for everyone to give away - inserting your ads, of course!

Put it as content on your site, along with Google AdSense - make money from Google.

Turn the content into 500-800 word articles to distribute and publish - all linked to your site.

My niece emailed this week asking for advice in installing Linux on one of their two drives on their new computer. So I’m looking for the simplest, easiest tutorials to help her get going.

In doing a Linux/Google this morning, I have found some good tutorials and only had time to go through one. Fortunately, it is quite simple, and I’ve already learned some things about the commandline commands that I had not been able to figure out by myself yet. tldp.org/LDP/gs/node5.html

However, I just ran into a wee problem when I saw the sort command, and thought, “Hey, just what I need to sort that list of subscribers to my mailing list.” I had downloaded it the other day, but wished I could alphabetize it. Only Kate, my plain text editor, doesn’t seem to have that feature.

So,… I dutifully found the path to the folder that file is in, then gave the command sort > myfilename

Hmm. Nothing happened. But the tutorial page says that this is normal. Now you have to give the cat command for it to display the file. I tried that. Nothing happened.

Hmm? So I went into Kate, and opened the file from there. Oh-no! It’s empty now!

I can still go back to my online web-interface for my mailing list and fetch it again, but it looks like I need to some “safe” practicing with these commands in the konsole yet.

:) I’m ahead of my niece, but not far enough to be a big wise guru auntie.

P.S. Let me save the links to the other tutorial pages here, so I can find them another time. You might want to look there too, for all I know.
Linux.org/lessons/beginner/toc.html
yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/
linux-tutorial.info/

It turns out I was just reading one lo-n-g page out of an online manual. The index to it is here;
tldp.org/LDP/gs/node1.html (A part of the Linux Documentation Project).