Images Not Showing Up in RSS

If you are using WordPress and your post images do not show up in your rss feed, most likely that is just a settings problem.

Check "Settings", "Reading", "For each article in a feed, show", did you select "Summary"? If you selected "Summary", your post images will not be included, and only part of your post text will show up in your rss feed.

Also, depends on what WordPress theme you are using, some might display your full blog post in a big chunk of text, no images, no paragraphs, no format at all. Anyway, try select "Full text" in "For each article in a feed, show", and see if that solves the problem.

Secondly, if you are using Feedburner to manage your rss feed with the default setting, your rss feed might show up without any formatting. Sign in your Feedburner account, go to "Optimize", enable "BrowserFriendly" and "SmartFeed".

BrowserFriendly would apply clean visual formatting to the raw feed XML for much improved readability in all modern web browsers, and SmartFeed would publish and translate your feed into a format (RSS or Atom) compatible with your visitors' feed readers.

How to design a profitable browser game

Many people want to make money online, some are interested in browser game development and believe that they could make a killing in the online game business. They could be right, or wrong.

If you are interested in getting into the online game industry, it's better that you are a game fan yourself, play a few games and see how other people are doing. If the players really enjoy the game, most would not mind sparing a few dollars or more for some better features and stuff. From a player point of view, what would make you interested in purchasing game gold?

Here I want to show you one example - Rail Nation. Rail Nation is a free online railway simulation game which is about hauling goods to cities, the association and city which haul the most win the endgame. I'm in no way affiliated with the game company. While I'm playing the game, I found the developers quite smart in designing the game features.

In the game, a high level lab requires a certain amount of game money to upgrade. If you do not use game gold, you will be required to wait a few days to save up enough game money to first upgrade your bank a few levels and then your lab. If you use game gold to buy the "plus" account, you instantly get your bank account double in size. I believe if one likes the game enough, one would not mind spending a few dollars per week for the extra feature. Then there are many other ways for you to spend game gold, normal game upgrades would take hours to complete, with game gold you get your building upgraded with one click.

Another huge difference between this game and others is that, this is not the ordinary hit and slash game, you won't get destroyed by your competitors. It's all about logistics planning, where to lay a track, what to haul, where to make a stop. This is an interesting game that requires your brain to do some careful planning. Since nobody can destroy what you built, you can play at your own style or work with others and have more fun.

A game without new features would bore people easily. According to the latest game newsletter, the upcoming update will include some new engines, new tech tree, new game rules, and better interface. That's exactly what game developer should do - get more features and new items, and keep the players interested in.

Is your browser game making money? Do you need any creative ideas or features? I would be happy to throw you an idea or two.

AreYouAHuman not working with Contact Form 7?

After using AreYouAHuman's plugin PlayThru for some time, I got to say that PlayThru is one of the best captcha programs that actually works. And its design is way better than those captcha plugins that use images for verification, some of those images are really hard to read for most of the time.

Currently, the daily number of spam comments almost reduce to zero, that is pretty amazing! Afterall, PlayThru is quite fun to use, who would mind to play a little flash game from time to time?

Another great advantage of PlayThru is that it works with Contact Form 7 very well. However, I noticed that sometimes PlayThru would stop working, i.e. the flash game works, gets verified, but the message content could not be submitted. I figure there must be a bug or conflict of some sort after the plugins' updates. So I edit the contact form, re-select the PlayThru element, insert a new PlayThru tag into the form, and the form works again. So next time, if there is any update on your AreYouAHuman or Contact Form 7 plugin, remember to check your form again.

Your Ad Doesn't Show Up on Tumblr?

Adding an advertisement code to a Tumblr blog could be a little bit tricky. After all, you have to edit the template file to insert the code, you might have to test it a few times to get things working. Sometimes, the ads show up alright in the preview, but not in the live blog, the ad area just goes totally blank. What went wrong?

There are few things that might help to get your ads working on your Tumblr blogs.

Does your blog have a domain name? If you are serious about making blog money using your Tumblr blog, it might worth the money to invest in a domain name. Some ad programs only work with a blog which has its own domain name, a sub domain won't work.

Is your blog content unique? Do you reblog other bloggers' work, or simply copy and paste lots of content from other sources? If most of your content are original and unique, you shouldn't have much problem getting your ad program approved. On the other hand, if you only reblog other people's stuff, you might get your account banned.

Do your blog posts mainly display images and not much text? Actually that's perfectly ok in some cases. A good example I found is a Tumblr theme designer's blog. His Tumblr blog just displays 10+ image thumbnails for people to download his free themes, and his ads have been there for ages. Again, your content has got to be unique!

One final point - Nowadays, many people don't use any ads on Tumblr, they only consider Tumblr as a good traffic source, i.e. it could be more effective if you just direct your Tumblr traffic to your other "money" blogs.

New Category Posts Do Not Show Up on WordPress Homepage

Recently, I installed a theme called Bayside for my gift idea blog. Bayside theme is a really cool Pinterest, masonry style theme with an automatic infinite scrolling feature. I believe this type of theme is great for a gift blog, photo blog, or any blog with lots of images. Anyway, naturally I created a few more new categories and added more posts and stuff. Now, here comes the problem - blog posts that are under old existing categories do show up on the homepage, but not those that are under a new category name, so what went wrong?

After spending a little time to sort things out, I found out that it is all just a careless WordPress setup mistake. I forgot to edit Settings > Reading > Front page displays, select "Your latest posts"...

Here are 2 more tips for setting up Bayside theme:

After editing the reading setting as described above, now all the posts from all categories are showing up correctly. But it's kind of weird that the post title from the latest post shows up as well, it's a huge title with H1 tags. To remove that, add body.home #content h1.page-title {display:none;} to the style.css file.

The default design uses a gray gradient, I found it darkened the images a bit too much, so I just removed the file gradient-overlay.png file from the folder images, and the gradient is gone.

Google Analytics Tracking Not Installed

I tried to setup Google Analytics for a new blog, and the Tracking Info page kept saying "not installed". I got really frustrated, and then I noticed something.

The old code is something like:

<script type="text/javascript">

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-<your number here>']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
  })();

</script>

The new code is like this:

<script>
  (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
  (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
  m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
  })(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');

  ga('create', '<your number here>', '<your domain name here>');
  ga('send', 'pageview');

</script>

So I removed the new tracking code, and use the old code with the appropriate account number, and I got the "Status: Tracking Installed" message instantly.

Unable to login WordPress admin page wp-admin?

Recently, I have a little problem with my WordPress admin login. I can access the wp-admin page with Firefox and Chrome, but not with Internet Explorer. The browser returned a "HTTP 406 Not Acceptable" error. When I clicked more info, it says, "This error (HTTP 406 Not Acceptable) means that Internet Explorer was able to receive information from the website you visited, but the information was not in a format that Internet Explorer can display."

So I contacted my Hostgator support, and found out that my IP was temporarily blocked. They got it fixed within minutes. That's some kind of service! How did that happen... It appears that lately, there is a some kind of global WordPress brute force flood, and I happen to login quite often lately, so my IP got blocked. :)

For more info of this brute force flood, you can visit this Hostgator blog post, or this CloudFlare post. CloudFlare provides a possible explanation of how this could happen:

"One of the concerns of an attack like this is that the attacker is using a relatively weak botnet of home PCs in order to build a much larger botnet of beefy servers in preparation for a future attack. These larger machines can cause much more damage in DDoS attacks because the servers have large network connections and are capable of generating significant amounts of traffic. This is a similar tactic that was used to build the so-called itsoknoproblembro/Brobot botnet which, in the Fall of 2012, was behind the large attacks on US financial institutions."

So if you have also received this HTTP 406 error, contact your hosting support to whitelist your IP.

Do you need a .cn domain?

Few days ago, I received the following email:

"Dear President & CEO,

We are an organization specified at dealing with domain name dispute and registration in Asia. We have something important on intellectual property right need to confirm with your company.

On February 29, 2013, we received an application formally, one company named "somenamehere" applied for the Brand Name "somenameherealso" and some domain names with our organization.

After checking, we found your company is the original trademark owner. If the company's action haven't been authorized by your company, so their behavior will conflict with your interests. In order to deal with the matter better, please contact us ASAP. (If you are NOT President, please forward this to your President & CEO, because this is urgent. Thanks.)

Best Regards,

Andy
Auditing Director

Web: http://www.huynic.org
Tel:+00852-30775989
Fax:+00852-30771254
Mail: andy.chan@huynic.org"

Some people who are not familiar with Internet domain name system, might actually believe that this is some sort of real online marketing threat. If you reply, I bet they will write back and suggest you to purchase a list of domain names. However, do you know how many domain extensions out there? As of now, there are 22 generic top level domain extensions, 3 US top level domain extensions, 253 country code top level domain extensions and a few others. Some extension like .tm is quite pricey, their minimum registration period is 10 years and the retail cost is US$1000 for the 10 year period. There are so many, you can't register all!

If you have another variation of this type of ad, please post in comments.

Credit Report Scam

If a website tells you they need your credit card for membership registration and they promise you they are not going to charge you anything till you are ready to purchase their service, don't believe it.

I visited a website which supplies dropshipper datafeed service, it is a completely free service which does not require any purchasing. I was asked to fill in the credit card data, and I was told clearly that nothing will be bought, no transaction will be made.

After a few weeks, I found out that there’s an unauthorized transaction from some credit report company, the transaction amount is around $20. Searching that credit report company name plus the keyword scam, there are numerous complaints about this company. Some people suggest that only card cancellation would work, or this credit report company will keep charging $20 on a monthly basis.

How did all that happen? I think “someone” from the datafeed service website work with the credit report company in some way. By sending an order to the credit report company, “someone” can earn some affiliate money.

Should I follow Google Adsense recommendation?

Recently I received a Google message saying that I should replace my 336x280 ad with a 300x250 one. Is Google Adsense recommendation any good? Should I follow their recommendation? The message is sort of like this:

"Replace your 336x280 ad units with 300x250 units
20%-30% predicted increase in earnings.
Ad unit "blah blah blah" is size 336x280. Our tests show you're likely to earn more if you replace it with a 300x250 ad unit. Learn more."

So I tried to search on the Internet for some advice. Here is what Google wrote in one of their help files:

"We have strong confidence in our simulations; but we watch implementations closely to determine whether there's skew in results, and whether we need to alter thresholds. We don't believe there are situations in which one of our recommendations will result in a loss of revenue, but if you have an example case, we're interested in hearing about it."

They sound pretty confident in what they are doing. Alrighty! let's do it! If this change is significant, I will report back in a few months.