eAction

When you test something, you try to be thorough, don’t you? It can be rather embarrassing to decry something as stupid and useless, only to have someone else come along and prove that it does work well. Often the key is merely persistence and the humility to ask questions of those who understand how it works.

Many books are never written because the author gave up on the first draft.

Gardens become wild jungles when the gardener doesn’t keep hacking those weeds with a hoe.

Often a piece of fabric gets pinned to the pattern pieces, and even cut out, but not sewn together into clothing.

There must be a zillion online businesses signed up for enthusiastically that vanish for lack of diligent fingers on the keyboard!

But you and I are not going to be one of them, are we?

We’ll keep plugging away convinced we will succeed eventually!

I seem to be re-learning a lesson about placing classified ads. The better quality ones, the ones set up for local cities, etc., do not allow you to post ads with affiliate referral links in them. They want ads for items for sale or for services and jobs, and community announcements.

Just yesterday I placed an ad for a free e-book to download, geared to work-at-home Moms. I soon had an email telling me it had been deleted for being illegal.

Illegal? Well, only on that site.

I’ve just done a search for classifieds that allow affiliate links, and it seems there is only AdlandPro and a great barge full of the ones that you really don’t want your ad to be seen in. Oh yes, there are classifieds sites that allow affiliate links, but the caliber of ads is low, and your ad will not come before the eyes of the people you really would like to join under you. - or I should say under me.

I’ve gone through phases of trying classifieds in the past, and found that most of them were free-for-all (ffa) sites, and those sites are set up to trap your email so they can flood YOU with their ads. That’s not the crowd I want to run with.

This tells me that I should work a little harder at my ads on AdlandPro, and I should be making room in my life for some other methods of promotion.

Since last year I’ve heard, or read, a lot of advice about writing interesting and informative articles that subtly refer to whatever website or affiliate program I want to promote, but with the clickable link in the bio or resource box which comes at the bottom. That is in fact, my deluxe ad, and since these articles are posted on article directory sites, the links to my site are worth far more than in a classified ad. It also means that visitors come to see my site and explore around it, rather then just landing on an affiliate program page, and clicking away as fast as they realize what that is.

If you can chatter helpful stuff on any given topic you should be able to write an article too, though, naturally, there are tips and tricks for writing a more productive article that will really score high for you.

I really want to be thorough about my campaign with classified ads, so I’ll work at submitting mine on a regular basis at AdlandPro for a while, to test the effectiveness of those ads. There’s no point in dumping the baby out with the bathtub water if there’s hope, right?

But you will find my advice here shifting to articles over the next while. We’ll see if we can’t make that a whole lot more useful to you. Even if you’ve never seen yourself as an article writer before. It’s a learnable skill!

But you’d like to get in on the bargains, and you have trouble getting out to the physical malls - I know! Me too! Guess what - now there’s MyPowerMall with over 1000+ online stores that have better prices than downtown (some with free shipping), plus MPM gives you rebates on top of that! No recruiting of signups with the Personal Mall; just shop as you need to. Have a look at this Bouquet of Enterprises

I need to interrupt my series of Linux lessons in this blog to give you some lessons learned through personal experience.

First, do not update the kernel in Suse 10.1 - at least, not on this computer!

I had that experience one weekend the beginning of September. I normally do my backups and then an update through Yast on Saturdays while I’m buzzing around the house doing my cleaning, etc. When the updater pointed out there was something new for the kernel I thought nothing of it and left it checked. Sunday morning when I rebooted my computer I had serious problems! I couldn’t login to Suse 10.1

Thankfully I could still get into my older Suse 9.3 on the second hard drive. After two long days of trying to solve the problem, and finally realizing that the first drive was toast, I re-installed Suse 10.1 on the second drive and managed to keep my files intact. Praise God!

The weekend of our Canadian Thanksgiving that happened again. Everything was coming along so nicely, what harm could there be in a kernel update? This time I could login, but my sound was gone, and I couldn’t connect to go online! It didn’t take quite as many hours to come to the conclusion that I had to re-install my Suse 10.1 again, but it sure is tricky to see to it that the system files are replaced, but not my personal files.

I tell you, I shouted “Hallelujah!” when I saw I had succeeded!

Well, this week I’ve had another lesson, albeit something different. Last Friday night my favourite internet radio station suddenly went dead. I clicked on their blue button several times, and no-go. It was nearly time to shut down for the night anyway, so I didn’t make much of it. But the next day and for the next four days. I could NOT get that station. Everything else was working fine.

For about a week or so they had been offering about five formats for receiving their streaming audio, now I discovered they offered only Windows Media and Adobe Flash. Well, this is a linux system, so the Windows Media does me no good. I did some hunting on their site and found a notice that they were now offering only these two most popular formats. Oh no!

Well, I checked and found I had a flash player, but to be very sure I went download the Adobe Flash player. I’m new to installing individual programs in Liinux so after trying two of the three ways described there, I was getting rather frustrated. Besides I was beginning to pine for my BBNradio.org. I missed it a lot!

I had other obligations so I didn’t work on the problem continuously. I could still switch to another internet station and get nice music there (though after a while I realized they were replaying the same stack of CDs over and over again).

I snitched a half hour here, and another there, over a couple of days, and discovered that I had the Adobe Flash player installed; all I had to do was move or link two files from the player to Firefox. Yes, but where were they? I couldn’t find them.

Finally, Tuesday evening I got back earlier after supper than usual, so I prayed about it, and went to look on the forums for dialogues with others who might have had the same problem. Within about 15-20 minutes I’d found such a forum thread, followed the instructions for locating those two files,libflashplayer.so and flashplayer.xpt and how to create symbolic links (sim-links).

Just in case someone else is hunting for this information I want to spell out the steps here.

1. Open your super-user file manager where you have to log in with your root password.
2. Navigate to the directory /usr/lib/browser-plugins/
3. Since you are really in Konqueror you can divide the window into two by clicking on Window on the top menu, and then on “Split view left/right” (or Split view Top/Bottom if you prefer).
4. In the second window navigate up one and then to firefox/plugins/
5. Now grab with your cursor the file in the first window, libflashplayer.so, and drag it over the divider line to the firefox/plugins/ folder - right-click and hit “Link here” on the popup menu.
6. Grab the other file also, flashplayer.xpt and drag it over, and also right-click and hit “Link here” on the popup menu.
7. There. Close the file manager Close your Firefox if it is open and re-open your Firefox.
8. Try a site and link that calls for your Adobe flash player to jump into action. See if it doesn’t do it nicely!

I am happy to say I have my BBNradio.org playing again all day or as long as my computer is on. Just be patient and keep learning to do better research for your linux solutions. They are out there.

I’m one day late, I know.

Here’s something that may never have happened to you, but it’s not something you need to dread. A dear pen pal friend (age 83) and her brother, who has retired from the farm and moved in with her, so they can look after each other, showed up in Saskatoon on Wednesday evening. They booked into a motel and Louise called me to invite me to have breakfast with them the next morning, that is, yesterday morning. I agreed, thinking this would be great. We could visit over breakfast - I could fit that into my day easily enough.

We had a lovely breakfast but then I learned that they had another plan. They wanted to come see my little home. Fine. I’d be happy to show it to them. they came bearing gifts. They had ordered in pizza the night before, and got an extra one, so they gave me that pizza to heat up and enjoy later. Louise had a lovely sweater and a jacket that used to be her sister Margaret’s that she wondered if they would fit me. Perfectly! And - she had a a card for me with an envelope inside and that had a wad of $100 bills in it!

That’s not all. Louise and John wanted to kidnap me from my work and take me shopping for the day. They asked for a mall that had a Bay and Sears store in them. That’s the Mid-town Plaza just 9-10 blocks from me.

Louise took a lot of time examining some lovely designer suits, but I didn’t have the heart to blow $300 on a suit (I needed the money for other things I considered more important), so I had to be careful not to admire anything too much - else she might buy it for me!

Delightful dilemma, eh?

When they got tired enough to stop and bring me back later in the afternoon, I sat down to make a list of priorities and then took off to do some quick banking and get a good haul of groceries. I expect to spend more online yet today, and I think I’ll go shopping tomorrow in another store where those nice suits might be a small fraction of the original cost.

Oh my, but I’m blessed with wonderful friends! I told Louise that I want to be like her when I grow up.

P.S. I had a very productive evening at my work, and as you can see, I’m a day late with the eAction, but that’s not the end of the world either, is it? Wouldn’t you like to be kidnapped to be blessed like that?

I recall when I first came online in 1999, I was astonished to find so many sites where I could place free classified ads. After trying out a great many of them, I discovered that some of them were not any great help. Mostly they were tricks to get my email address so that the owner of the classifieds site could swamp me with his or her ads. I’ve learned to despise those sites.

For quite a while I’ve avoided placing classifieds because of that experience, and I think to some degree they lost their reputation for some years. However, there are a few outstanding sites, that seem to be above board, and effective in reaching real people with your ad, and drawing some positive results. I don’t think I’ve found all the good sites yet in this regard. (My campaign to try them out is disrupted quite often). But I’ve been reading very good things about at least two or three classifieds sites, and I can recommend them to you for now.

If you have not been placing ads yourself, you might like a short primer on how to go about it for the most effective results.

The one with the best reputation is Craigslist.org, so let’s go through the steps for that one You can become familiar with that one first, and as you have time, add other sites to spread your ads further.

Explore Craigslist.
1. I suggest you go to the site and just explore it, read their directions, and frequently asked questions (FAQs) and look over ads in various categories so that you see how others are using it. Keep in mind that not everyone is doing it right. You’ll come across some bad ads, so look at a good cross-section for a better chance to see good classifieds that bring results. You want to learn what kind of ads go into each category too. It doesn’t hurt to visit some of the discussion forums too.

Sign up for an Account.
2. If you have enough time that first day, you could also sign up for an account. There is no charge. You’ll notice that posting an ad is free, except if you are advertising a job. There is a charge for those. You don’t even have to sign up but having an account will make things easier and faster for you in the end.

Prepare Your Classifieds.
3. Prepare a plain text file in your Promo folder with the ads you want to post. Make sure all your ads are within the guidelines. Fortunately, on Craigslist, you are not limited to a word count, and experienced users say that your ad will go over better if you know to use some html coding. That is, at least control which words are bold (dark) print, and the size of the fonts. (Don’t go totally crazy). You can also upload a number of photos to show off the item you have for sale. Take time to prepare good photos and have them ready in another folder to upload when you start posting. If this takes a few days, so be it. Why waste time on something you don’t do to the best of your ability?

Start Posting Ads.
4. This will probably happen on another day. At least I am not able to get it all done in just the one hour block of time a day I give to this. But if you have done the previous steps, you should find it fairly easy to place a number of ads in a single hour. Just remember that you can get into trouble if you place the same ad in various categories. So go slow when you are deciding on the best category for each ad. The secret to success in not in swamping Craiglist with a single ad, but getting it into the right place, and going back to edit or re-post it within the required number of days before it expires.

Set a Routine to Return.
5. Prepare a schedule or mark a special little calendar to help you routinely go back to repost your ads when they are about to expire - assuming your ad is for a service or something that is not sold out. And of course, to place new fresh ads as you get more ready.

As you find other classifieds sites that are above board and effective, you can add posting to them as part of your routine. Another one you might try is AdlandPro. If you become an affiliate and place a link to AdlandPro on your website, you are allowed unlimited free ads.

If you are interested in free promotion, free advertising, marketing or networking, then this is the right place to be. AdlandPro has been offering free and paid advertising services to small businesses since 1996. They have the most complete and most affordable advertising solutions for small businesses and home entrepreneurs.

As an Affiliate you can do following on AdlandPro at no cost to you:
1. Place your free ads in the classifieds and community pages ($2.50 value)
2. Place your free ads in The Free Traffic Exchange (120,000 users) ($2.50 value )
3. Free subscription to the “Adland Digest” Newsletter ($5.00 per month value)
4. Obtain free leads for your business using the community system ($5-$10 per lead value)
5. Earn money with the affiliate program (up to $10,000/month if you do everything right
6. Participate in discussions to learn more about marketing and promotions through the Adland Digest ($5.00 per month value)

Don’t take my word for this, check out some testimonials.
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Before I ever tried or owned a computer I read about them, and decided that what I needed most for my writing career to take off and prolific was to have a computer. That would put an end to pausing to throw the typewriter carriage back to the left at the end of each line. And glory be - I wouldn’t have to crumple a sheet of paper and start over every time I made a typo! I could fix it all perfectly first and then print my articles, stories, and documents. Ah-ha! the end of white-out and correcto-ribbons! I went through so many of those.

Well, when some people get to a computer they often look for the games, and they do nothing but play boring games. However, you may be one of the many millions, who like me, want your computer to be a writing machine. Guess what, a linux operating system is ready to help you with this in a handful of fine ways.

If you are looking for a fancy word processing program, most distributions of Linux come with AbiWord, KWord, (part of the KOffice suite) and the OpenOffice.org which is every bit as good or better than MS Word. But there are some smaller, lean/mean text programs hidden in the system too. Let’s discover those just now.

There are 3 or 4 plain text editors that will pop up in your console when you issue a brief command, like;
vi (brings up the vi editor). To get out of it, use this command: ESC :q
It has more complicated commands to learn. It’s the oldest and had loyal users.

joe (brings up the joe editor). To exit use Ctrl+K+X to save and quit, or just Ctrl+C to quit without saving. It uses the control key (^) plus two other letter keys to get around. Like Ctrl +K+H gets you help and a list of all the commands.

pico (brings up the pico editor). To quit this one, use Ctrl+X This one keeps the command clues at the bottom of your screen all the time, so you don’t have to memorize them. You’ll note that here it is just the Control key plus one other letter, so it is more simplified.

These are still fairly new to me. I need to try them a bit more often, but I do see that they can take the place of a lot of scribbles on scratch pads, if I need to make quick notes in a legible form, and not wait for a big hefty wordprocessor to open, or I don’t want hidden codes to format my text body.

There are a number of other such plain editors in Linux that use a graphical interface. The first time I installed Mandrake I discovered GEdit by Gnome. I liked it a lot right away. It reminded me of Textpad which I’d been using in windows, and I was instantly at home in it. Then I discovered KWrite and Kate which are part of the KDE desktop suite of programs. Presently I use Kate the most. It’s the first program I open in the morning for my journaling and writing hours, and it’s the last program I close at night. I usually have a row of tabs (files) open at once, and switch back and forth willy nilly, doing all I need to do except when I have to produce a formatted document for someone else.

Documents done up in a word processor will always have hidden codes for even the most basic punctuation. If I copy and paste those passages into a web page, I’m bound to have strange greek-looking symbols tossed into the page. Then I’m stuck with the unhappy job of going through the coding to find the punctuation marks and spaces, and doing them over in a plain text document.

Some people do all their web design from scratch in a text editor. I guess I still like the features of Quanta Plus best (it has Kate incorporated into it), but we can talk about that another time.

For now, don’t hesitate to try out various plain text editors. Sooner or later you’ll find one that fits you like a smart glove!