Blogger Finally Responded My Request to Restore My Old Blog
Today blogger’s support finally restored my old blog angelchen1111.blogspot.com to me. It took me five days to actually get a response! I had to say something like “I emailed blogger support like thousands of time and there’s still no response” in order to get them reply to me. It also said that it doesn’t guarantee that they will restore the deleted blogs to us. So never ever delete your blogger’s blogs because there are always spammers watching for them!
China’s Network Damaged by Earthquake
Yesterday I started to have problem connecting to the Chinese websites. They all seemed to be down. I thought it was my connection’s problem, but it isn’t. It was because the earthquake in Taiwan that “damaged telecommunication cables linking the Chinese mainland, disconnecting users with overseas Websites.” Today the problem seems to get better as I can connect to many websites again, but still there’s problem with the network in China. Many websites are still not working and the connection is still very slow at times, and because of the damage, many users from China can’t open properly websites located in the U.S. or other countries.
Forgot to Take Back the Blog I Deleted Yesterday
I forgot to take back the blog angelchen1111.blogspot.com that I deleted it yesterday. Now somebody took it over and is spamming with it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Now I see the “check computer now” spam when i go to technorati, and when I type in angelchen1111.blogspot.com it will redirect to a “check computer now” spam page! I reported that to google and hopefully they will take care of it. Google should do something to stop it! People are spamming by taking advantage of deleted blogs.
Shopping Cashback on Buying Things Online
Do you want to get additional cashback besides the discount that they offer online? On the website InstantProfitz you “can get automatic rebates for shopping at your favorite merchants – and all sorts of new ones too! This ‘cash back’ is in addition to and separate from any discounts you may get at hundreds of online merchants!” All you need to do is to make qualified purchase at their listed merchants through their links, and you will get the percent cash back listed on their website for that merchant after 30 days.
There are many famous online stores including Radio Shack, Circuit City, Best Buy, and even Half.com on their list; through the links on that site you can save some additional $$$ besides their original discounts.
For more information click here, also don’t forget to check out the FAQ, it contains some important information on how it works.
Godaddy.com offering $1.49 .info domain for sale(updated)
Right now www.GoDaddy.com is offering $1.49 .info domain for sale! Right now it’s even cheaper than namecheap.com! I immediately grabbed some .info domains after seeing that. You actually don’t need to buy anything extra along with the domain to get that price. You can just buy the domain by itself for $1.49!
Make WordPress K2 Themes Refresh Faster
The pages with wordpress K2 theme loads fast when you click them, but if you try to refresh the page it will be very slow to load, while other themes don’t have this problem. To fix this follow this guide taken from K2’s forum:
find the folder js inside the K2 folder, then for each .js.php file comment out the ‘require(….. wp-blog-header.php)’ line and replace ‘!get_settings(’gzipcompression’)’ with ‘( ob_get_length() === FALSE)’. After that the first few lines should look like this:
//require(dirname(__FILE__)."/../../../../wp-blog-header.php");
// check to see if the user has enabled gzip compression in the WordPress admin panel
if ( (ob_get_length() === FALSE) and !ini_get('zlib.output_compression') and ini_get('output_handler') != 'ob_gzhandler' and ini_get('output_handler') != 'mb_output_handler' ) {
ob_start('ob_gzhandler');
}
Then add the following lines on the top of the files livesearch.js.php and rollingarchives.js.php after the php tag:
// Echo a translated string.
function _e($text, $domain = 'default') {
global $l10n;
if (isset($l10n[$domain]))
echo apply_filters(’gettext’, $l10n[$domain]->translate($text), $text);
else
echo $text;
}
For livesearch.js.php, comments.js.php:
replace all
bloginfo("template_url")
with
echo str_replace($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'],'',realpath(dirname(__FILE__) . '/../'))
There are two instances of these in comments.js.php, and one in livesearch.js.php.
After all these the pages will refresh very fast.
Original post in which this guide is taken from…
Phishing PayPal email in my Gmail account
I got a phishing spam PayPal email that mimics the address services.paypal.com in my Gmail account, with title “Notification of Limited Account Access,” and a url that asks me to verify my paypal account but pointing to http://www.soios.com/matiz/varios/www.paypal.com/ssl/, which is not paypal’s website. It’s actually from servidor01.mimela.com, not paypal’s server. Here’s part of the heading of the email from the original message, which can be seen in GMail by clicking the arrow next to the reply button and then click “Show original.”
Received: from servidor01.mimela.com ([64.22.85.7])
by mx.google.com with ESMTP id 26si58691192wrl.2006.12.03.18.12.08;
Sun, 03 Dec 2006 18:12:08 -0800 (PST)
Received-SPF: softfail (google.com: domain of transitioning services@paypal.com does not designate 64.22.85.7 as permitted sender)
Received: from soios by servidor01.mimela.com with local (Exim 4.52)
id 1Gr3KQ-000599-7W
for myemail@gmail.com; Mon, 04 Dec 2006 03:13:10 +0100
Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1"
............
Message-Id:
Date: Mon, 04 Dec 2006 03:13:10 +0100
X-AntiAbuse: This header was added to track abuse, please include it with any abuse report
X-AntiAbuse: Primary Hostname – servidor01.mimela.com
X-AntiAbuse: Original Domain – gmail.com
X-AntiAbuse: Originator/Caller UID/GID – [32705 32706] / [47 12]
X-AntiAbuse: Sender Address Domain – paypal.com
X-Source:
X-Source-Args:
X-Source-Dir:
Here’s the picture of the email (click for original size):
My experience with switching in between paid web hostings
Yesterday I started to look for a reliable web hosting. I searched online trying to find a good yet reliable web hosting and realized that many of them either require you to pay for a whole year at once to get a cheaper price(which is still not cheap), or have too few bandwidth per month in general.
After hours of struggle I found Host Department and almost signed up for it, but its website was very unprofessional and very tricky, i.e. you have to click “Php Web Hosting” in the bottom of the page where it says “Host Department’s Specialty Hosting:” in order to get php hosting package at the same price instead of the non-php, also the advertisement in the home page is very confusing and the sign up process is very poorly designed, i just gave up before paying for it.
I then tried GoDaddy’s hosting’s Economy Plan, it allows you to pay about $8 for the first two months and $4 each month afterwards. But alas, while GoDaddy is good for domain registration it really sucks for hosting, it takes about thirty minutes to do what you could have done instantly in other hostings, like setting up the account and creating a mysql database, its server software is very outdated, it gave me hard time to import mysql databases because of its older version of mysql. Finally it doesn’t seem to support .htaccess that well, you can’t make custom error pages there, but only in the freaking control panel that takes even thirty minutes to change custom error page. I also heard other people say about the lock table issue when hosted on GoDaddy. Because of all these I gave up GoDaddy and asked them for refund on the hosting account calling the non-toll-free number.
Later on I stopped looking for cheap web hosting because for me they’re unreliable unless they provide less features like space and bandwidth. I looked for some more expensive yet reliable ones and found HostGator and DreamHost. HostGator got many positive honest reviews from some trusted sites like whreviews.com, while for DreamHost it has more disk space and bandwidth. I had asked some people who is using it about its reliability and many of them didn’t have any problems with it. But I first decided to use HostGator anyways with its baby plan since it allows me to pay with paypal and I can try it the first month for $0.01, the plan is $9.95 each month and with a promo code like “jury” you can get $9.94 off for the first month on plans other than hatchling(the cheapest one, billed annually and 1 month free with promo code), I was very satisfied with it and didn’t have any reason to switch.
But today I had one little problem, a problem that probably won’t apply to you. I asked one friend from China to visit my blog and surprisingly they said they can’t open it anymore since I switched to HostGator, I then asked others to try to open it and they can’t either! I started to realize that HostGator is blocked in China by its “Great Firewall”, just like Blogger had been blocked! That really frustrated me since I’m planning to develop a Chinese website with other registered domains in the same hosting account to take advantage of its multiple domain hosting, I also didn’t want to lose any visitors from China. I had to switch again since what I’ll lose is just one cent. I then switched my blog to DreamHost today, which has a lot more nice features, space and bandwidth, and I’m very satisfied with it. It has many more features than HostGator plus 200 GB Disk Storage and 2 TB bandwidth even with its basic plan with the same price as HostGator’s baby plan.
Bonus: if you sign up with the promo code USEFULHOST50 for DreamHost you’ll get
$50 off (the maximum possible) on any hosting plans
Blogger blocked again in china?! (not anymore)
Today I asked some of my friends in China to open my Blogger’s blog, surprisingly nobody could open it while I could, then I though maybe Blogger is blocked again. After that I searched “blogspot blocked china” in google and found many recent blog posts that said they can’t open blogger’s blog recently and blogger is probably blocked in china again. Fortunately I moved my blog from blogger to WordPress a month earlier, so now this blog is still accessible worldwide.
update: it’s unblocked on 11/21/06 or earlier.
Today I changed my blog’s template to TripleK2
Today I changed my blog’s template to TripleK2, a theme based on K2 but with three columns, with a very nice style TechnoBlue(found in the same website). Now I have one sidebar on the left and one on the right. The theme is similar to 3k2, but I didn’t use 3k2 since the last time it’s updated is like half years ago, it uses a much older version of K2 which probably has some bugs that cause trouble. I really liked the style TechnoBlue, since it looks very nice and neat, if you’re looking for a three-column K2 with a nice style it should be your choice.
Others:
