Ravi’s Rants

1. Create a file called phpinfo.php




2. Enter these few lines of code in it: (you can copy-paste from below):
   
   <?php
phpinfo();
?>




3. Upload this to your root folder (where your home page (index.htm or index.html etc) lives.




4. Access this script via the browser like this:
   
   http://www.YourSite.com/phpinfo.php




5. You should see a nice page come up, with the PHP logo and headers, that shows all of your PHP configuration and settings. If you see it, then: Hurrah, you can run PHP on your site!




6. If you see some kind of errors, first try changing the file’s permissions (chmod) to 755. (CHMOD Tutorial)




7. If that still doesn’t work, then you’re probably SOL (S#!t Outta Luck). Confirm it with your web host.




8. If your web host doesn’t support PHP, don’t waste your time - or your web site - with your current host. Just switch to where I host my own sites.




9. WARNING: Don’t forget to delete the phpinfo.php file from your web site. Hackers can figure out a lot of stuff from this page!

I was recently in the market for an “e” fax solution. I looked at quite a few services. My basic requirements were these:

• Reliable
• Low cost (not necessarily free - because I wanted the service to be reliable and accountable)
• Didn’t need a local area code - anywhere was fine, as I don’t receive too many faxes
• Offer a free trial - so that I can experience it first-hand
• Offer a decent number of incoming pages in the package
• Offer a low-cost pay-as-you-go model for additional use

• After hunting around the web, looking up various forums and wasting time on made-for-adsense spam and junk-review sites, I stumbled across MaxEmail.com.

  You can get your incoming faxes sent to your email address as a PDF attachment.

  I went through their 1-month free trial, was highly satisfied with the quality of their service, and just now signed up for a whole year at $24/year (their “lite” plan).

  If you are looking for something similar, go check out MaxEmail.com

I’ve thought about selling my RSS Feed Publishing Script for a long time.

And then one day, I just decided to give it away.

All I want is for you to try out my free newsletter. You can leave any time. No questions asked. And you will never hear from me again.

Your permission to send you really good stuff (I think - You decide) is not asking for too much, is it?

My FeedMonster script will allow you to publish any RSS or XML feed from any web site - even my own blog feed from RavisRants.com - on any page of your web site. It takes under 2 minutes to install and set up. Publish either one feed on a page, or multiple blog feeds from multiple sources on a page.

Go here to subscribe and download the FeedMonster and 14+ other PHP scripts.

Once you download and install my scripts, don’t hesitate to send me your feedback.

If you’ve ever wondered about the power of influence that videos - even free ones - can have in selling commercial products, look no further.

Recently, I was on the receiving end of this power, as I shelled out about $3,200 to buy a Yamaha Motif Keyboard - thanks(!) to two powerful videos on YouTube.

I’ve chronicled it in my rather new blog, MotiFreak.com.

Camtasia is giving away a slightly older version of their famous screen-capture software, Snag-it, that lets you go beyond the “Prnt Scrn” button.

Here’s where you can download it.

A Print-Screen Tip
If you press the “Alt” + “Prt Scrn” buttons together, you will capture only the front-most (active) window - which means you no longer have to capture your entire screen along with pieces of your desktop and other windows open, just to get a screenshot of your browser window.

Also, it helps to reduce the size of the browser (or whatever window you’re trying to get a screen-shot of) first, and re-size it to a much smaller size before hitting “Alt” + “Prnt Scrn”. That way you won’t get a gigantic image when you’re just trying to capture just a small portion of the window.

Going by the PageRank (PR 6), you can guess how many sites are linking to this post on JoelOnSoftware. The content is that powerful.

Here’s the summary:

1. Fix everything two ways
2. Suggest blowing out the dust
3. Make customers into fans
4. Take the blame
5. Memorize awkward phrases
6. Practice puppetry
7. Greed will get you nowhere

Post: 7 Steps To Remarkable Customer Service

The whole idea of podcasting is not to be just able to publish your audio files online, but to make your audio posts “subscribable” - i.e., your listeners should be able to set up their podcasting software (like iTunes) to subscribe to your feed, in which case the software (in this example, iTunes) will automatically download your newest posts to their hard disk, as soon (or soon after) you make your posts live.

Which means, when they next sync up their mp3 player (say, iPod), your newest audio posts will automatically be synced from your subscriber’s hard disk to their iPod.

That’s the real “subscription” model of podcasting.

So how to make your WordPress feed refer to your podcast? Simple:

1. Create your audio file (mp3, mp4, etc)
2. Upload it to your server (into a folder in your main directory, say “podcasts”)
3. Your post can have your usual text content, but make sure your post has a link to the actual audio file. Note: It has to be the full path.

   Wrong: <a href=”yourfile.mp3“>My podcast</a>
Right: <a href=”http://Example.com/podcasts/aug2007-vol1.mp3“>My podcast

4. WordPress automatically links your feed to your audio file, such that if someone were to view your blog posts in a feed reader, and clicked on the link for your audio post, then they won’t be led to your blog, but the audio file will start playing instead.
5. Once your listeners “subscribe” to your feed, their podcasting software automatically downloads new files (posts with your audio file in it) to their hard disk automatically.

WordPress is not perfect - not just yet. But there really isn’t any software out there that can do all it does: well written, open-source, extensible, has lots of plugins, and has a great community around it - like WordPress.

So, just make peace with the “comparison war” (which is better: WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc), simply download WordPress (or sign up for a free blog online), and get going with your content.

Content is what makes money - not your blog software.

• Creating an e-business…
• Learning a new skill…
• Being the best at what you do…
• Building something worth building…
• Creating something worth creating…
• Saying something worth saying…
• Doing something worth doing…

All of these take plenty of time - and effort.

It is very easy to just look at the end-result of other people’s successes, ogle at their fortunes, and forget (or conveniently ignore) the painstaking path they had to take in order to get there.

Life is very much like the video you are about to see.

It takes inspiration, vision, persistence, creativity, and most importantly, quite a bit of perspiration too…

Now go create your Purple Cow, Raving Fans, Fanatical Support, Positively Outrageous Service, Mona Lisa - or whatever else you want to call it.

Doesn’t matter what the name is. The idea is to do something remarkable.

Ravi Jayagopal
Author, “No Business Like E-Business“

Maybe quite a lot, and mostly not a lot.

“Huh?”, you say?

If you look at this “top bloggers” list, you may end up buying into the fantasy that blogging will make you big bucks.

Not every blog will make that kind of money. Actually, it would even be fair say, that less than a fraction (less than 1%) of all blogs will make big money. Maybe a little more than a fraction will make decent money. But 95% of all blogs will not make any money. Why? I think there are quite a few reasons.

In my new book “No Business Like E-Business” that is being released shortly, I quote figures from Guy Kawasaki, about his self-disclosed ad revenues on his extremely popular blog. Here is a snippet from the book:

Excerpt from “No Business Like E-Business”

Imagine blogging for a whole year, ending up with a very popular blog that has 23,457 subscribers, ranked #45 out of all blogs in the world, and earning (brace yourself) a whopping $3,350 for the entire year!

Now stop imagining - this stuff is real.

I’m talking about Guy Kawasaki’s blog (blog.guykawasaki.com). These statistics only prove my theory further, that:

1. It is very hard to get tech-savvy folks to click on ads the way the average surfers (moms-and-pops) do.
2. It is not easy making a living just by blogging.

I myself own a site targeted at moms-and-pops, and I made many, many times more than what Guy’s #45-ranked blog earned. And mine is a very small niche, and a lot, lot, lot less less popular than Guy’s blog.

Here are some key stats from his blog:
• 2,436,117 page views (about 6,200/day)
• 23,457 RSS feed subscribers
• Total advertising revenue: $3,350 for 1 entire year (= $1.39 cpm)

You’ve got to take these stats with a pinch of salt, because these stats could be skewed due to a number of things – especially due to improper optimization for Adsense (or ads in general). Like mentioned earlier, Adsense optimization requires a lot of continued experimentation and tracking – in other words, a lot of focused effort - in order to make it work, which I’m guessing Guy probably didn’t due for various reasons.

But then there’s the other school of thought that overrides common sense. If you read the actual article, you will see that most of them did not start the blog with the sole intention of making money.

The main take-away here is that blogging may not make you directly cash-rich, but there are a lot of indirect, intangible benefits of blogging that simply cannot be overlooked:

• Build your brand: Develop a group of regular readers who are more likely to buy stuff that you actually sell down the line. Brand yourself as an expert in your niche. You will sell more books, get more paid consulting gigs, and all of that will eventually snowball into…. selling more books and getting more paid consulting gigs.
• Looks great on your resume: Unless you are putting up personal pictures or talking about stuff that you did when you were drunk, it adds a lot of value to your profile, because not everyone is capable of writing, and even among those few, not everyone is capable of writing about a focused subject in a professional way
• Ad-revenue: When you eventually start getting a lot of traffic, there will be plenty of ad-revenue opportunities (mostly CPM types); don’t count on PPC revenue, because tech-savvy folks just don’t click on ads.
• Develop original content: If you sat down to write a book, you may get overwhelmed by the amount of writing that needs to be done, and the sheer amount of effort that needs to put in. Instead, just start blogging chapter by chapter, and you could eventually compile those into a book (or other product).
• Blog posts can be transformed into articles: Writing an article for the sake of writing one can be extremely boring and painful. Instead, write short and crisp posts, and over time, you can pick each one up, expand it a little, and convert it into articles that can get you some incoming links.
• More traffic: Writing great posts that are instantly digestible and usable, and submitting to sites like Digg and StumbleUpon can not only get you tons of traffic, but also potential new subscribers and maybe even sell more of whatever it is that you are selling.

- Ravi Jayagopal
Author, “No Business Like E-Business“

You know what is Blog-And-Ping. Blog-And-Bookmark is quite similar.

You first blog about something (hopefully) interesting, then once your blog’s ping service has done its work on the back-end pinging all of the various web sites and your post is live, then you go to work as follows.

Use a one-to-many social bookmarking tool like AddMe.com or Socializer. I use AddMe on my blog itself, but use Socializer when I am actively bookmarking my own posts. Also check out the one-form-many-bookmarks site OnlyWire.com.

Add a bookmark to your post at all leading sites starting with StumbleUpon.com, Digg.com, Reddit.com and Netscape.com. You should do it manually for these sites, and use OnlyWire.com for automated submission to the rest of the sites.

I highlight StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit and Netscape here, because those are the ones that send about 95% of the social bookmarking traffic that my blog gets. The rest of them add up to only about 5%, but pursuing them is still worth it due to the number of back-links (incoming links) you will get.

See the Feedburner statistics (screenshot) below for RavisRants.com.

Note the spike in traffic every time I do blog-and-bookmark myself. It not only brings in a fresh supply of visitors, but also increases my number of average subscribers (Feedburner only reports that number for one given day, as the number can vary from day to day). This is not only a great way to get first time visitors, but also to get some new feed subscribers.

So, don’t forget to blog-and-ping, tag-and-ping, and blog-and-bookmark every single time you post.

I save about 1/2 hour every week on grocery shopping thanks to this list. That’s 26 hours a year. Assuming I would have done this for at least 40 years of my life by the time I’m dead, that means 1040 hours saved (26 * 40).

1040 Hours = 43.33 Days

Yes, I get (at least) an extra 43 days of my life back because I used a simple, grocery list.

Can you imagine how much more you and I could save if we got just a little bit more organized in stuff we do every day (or week)?

Click here to download and customize the original excel spreadsheet that I use.

Take a copy of it and stick in on your refrigerator. Every time you run out of something, or if you are expecting guests and need more of something, just quickly jot it down. Yes, it is more productive than just writing down a plain list on a erasable board.

- Ravi Jayagopal

I was getting about 500+ spam-comments a day. I’m now down to about 20. Based on my personal experience with spam, I have created a list of “bad words”, which, when used as a blacklist, will make most of your spam go away.

If you’re using Wordpress, copy the list below and paste it into the “Options > Discussion > Comment Blacklist” box.

Now WordPress warns:

“This is a list of words that you want completely blacklisted from your blog. Be very careful what you add here, because if a comment matches something here it will be completely nuked and there will be no notification. Remember that partial words can match, so if there is any chance something here might match it would be better to put it in the moderation box above.”

So, go through the list and weed out any words that you think might be acceptable for your blog. So here goes…

Note: This list will be updated as often as I find new words to blacklist. So bookmark this post (see “bookmark” and “subscribe” links in the menu to your right) and check back occasionally.

4free
4u
accutane
actos
acyclovir
adderall
adipex
allegra
Alprazolam
altace
ambien
Amoxicillin
amoxil
amphetamine
anal
anime
antibiotic
arousal
atfreeforum.com
ativan
attorney
augmentin
Azithromycin
babe
baccarat
bdsm
benadryl
biaxin
bitch
blackjack
blowjob
bondage
boob
booty
bowflex
bulabital
bupropion
butalbital
camry
car
carisoprodol
cartier
casino
celebrex
celexa
chick
cialis
cipro
citalopram
claritin
clonazepam
cock
codeine
codine
Crestor
crotch
cruise
cruises
cum
cunt
cyclen
cyclobenzaprine
cymbalta
dada
diazepam
dick
didrex
diovan
directbookmarks.info
dodge
doxycycline
drugstores
edvttj
Effexor
elavil
ephedra
ephedrine
erotica
escort
estate
facial
famvir
finland
Fioricet
forex
freewebs
fuck
gambling
gay
glucophage
gucci
helsinki
hentai
holdem
honda
hoodia
horny
hummer
hydrochlorothiazide
hydrocodone
incest
indianapolis
jaguar
jewelry
Lamictal
lasix
lesbian
lesbians
levaquin
levitra
Lexapro
lexus
lipitor
loan
lopressor
lorazepam
masterbating
mazda
medication
meridia
metalica
mevacor
Minolche
myfreedir.info
mysex
necklace
Nexium
Nicotine
nissan
norvasc
nude
orgasm
orgy
Oxycodone
Oxycontin
p0tassium
panties
panty
paxil
penis
percocet
pharmacy
phentermine
phpbb
plavix
poker
porn
Potassium
pravachol
prednisone
prevacid
prilosec
propecia
Protonix
prozac
pussy
rape
refinance
ringtones
ritalin
rolex
roulette
seroquel
sex
shemale
silveno
slot
soma
sphost
swinger
tadalafil
tadalis
tawnee
teen
testosterone
tetracycline
tissot
tit
toon
toyota
Tramadol
Trazodone
twinks
ultracet
ultram
valerian
Valium
viagra
Vicodin
vioxx
Wellbutrin
wholesale
Xanax
xenical
xxx
zanaflex
Zenegra
zithromax
zocor
Zoloft
zolus
zovirax
Zyprexa

Last updated on…:
2007: 3/30, 3/31, 4/2, 4/3, 4/20, 7/17

• Backdrop and Shower curtain from Wal-Mart: $18
• Tripod from Sears: $30
• Expensive, Wireless Headphone (with “compander circuitry”) that sounds like crap: $100
• Cheap-looking, Wired Headphone that just works: $20
• Pink-shade Table Lamp: $10
• 100W bulb (that you need to keep switching off between takes because the lamp-shade says it can handle only 40W): $2
• CyberLink PowerDirector: $90
• Getting great feedback from (rather kind) friends and family who enjoyed your spirited attempt: Priceless!

Ok, I finally gave in to my alter ego (”Wilson”) and started a channel on YouTube.

Had a lot of fun creating the videos. Here’s what I ended up learning (and buying), in order to make a half-decent video:

• Ventriloquism is 60% “funny script”, 30% “sense of humor and timing” and only 10% “mouth-not-moving skills”
• You need to have a decent back-drop (read, your computer desk in the background really sucks). So, got some fabric from Walmart for $6, an extra long shower curtain for $12, and walla - bearable background for my videos! I just placed the shower curtain on the front edge of my book shelf - so didn’t even have to bring out the screwdriver (or my drill) - and no nails were hurt during the hanging of my backdrop.
• Need a tripod - so got a 66″ tripod (~ $30) from Sears - ordered online and picked up the same evening in-store. The 3rd-party merchant I found on Amazon that was selling the 70″ tripod I really wanted, said it would take 3 weeks to ship. I wanted it like, er, “yesterday”. So, 6 inches short, sure, but got it in 3 hours flat.
• You need more-than-good-enough sound. My spanking new $100 wireless headphone bought-just-for-this worked like crap. Went back to my old $20 wired, brandless headphones that I bought from Staples 4 years ago, and the sound is like 10 times better (see difference in sound between video #1 and #2 below). So all you really need is a half-decent mike - don’t splurge on the microphones, unless you have the $500+ ones.
• Need good video editing software - have had PowerDirector for a few years now - have edited a few home videos and stuff. Paid for an updated version - it kicks butt and has pretty much everything a non-power-user would need. Very happy with PowerDirector (~ $90) so far, but I have a feeling I will be outgrowing it sooner than later (especially, when I think of doing, say chroma keying (the green-screen stuff).
• Of course, you need a camcorder (I have an old, big-ass Sony), and the cable to connect it to your computer (faster if you have a FireWire port).
• The regular lighting in your room is no good. So I borrowed my 8-yr old daughter’s pink-shaded table lamp (without her permission, and got yelled at later) and set it up on a chair next to me during the shoot.
• If you have PowerDirector (PD) installed, it automatically prompts to be launched when you plug your camcorder in. Just put the camcorder in “Play” (VTR) mode, and hit the red “Record” button in PD, and it starts recording right away. Once you finish recording, hit “Stop”, save the file, edit it (very intuitive interface) to add sound effects, transitions, trimming out bad takes, etc
• PD v5 has a cool new “Create File for YouTube” feature - where it will create a slightly low-res Windows media file (.wmv) that has a smaller file size compared to MPEG’s (given YouTube’s 100MB limit), and will even upload it directly to YouTube (provided you’ve logged in previously, of course)
• Create a new YouTube account with the same name as your channel (because you can’t change the login later).
• Create and upload the video directly from PD.
• Wait for like at least 2-3 hours before you can see it live (used to be live within just 10 minutes as recently as 6 months ago!)
• Any changes you make to your channel (description, change to template, colors, etc) will take anywhere from 10 minutes to a few hours to take effect.
• Wait for it to go live, spam your friends and family, and publish the video on your site or blog

Before launching on this venture, I had performed ventriloquism only once - I had learned it a few hours before my daughter’s b’day party a couple of years ago. So, “amateur alert” ahead

Episode 2: Terrorists and 72 Virgins ($20 headphones)

Episode 1: Wicked Wilson - Woman On A Plane ($100 headphones)

The channel home page is: YouTube.com/WilsonTheWiseOne

To be notified of videos as they are added, please subscribe to my channel at the above link.

Ravi Jayagopal / YouTube.com/WilsonTheWiseOne

FTP stands for “File Transfer Protocol”.

It is what you use to “transfer” (or upload) files from your computer to your web site - and vice-versa.

To make it easy for you to learn how to use FTP software, I have created a video tutorial, available at this link. It is about 2+ MB in size.
So, too bad if you are on dial-up (sidebar: if you are still on dial up, then I can’t help you - in fact, no one can!)

The video will redirect to my site WebmasterInABox.net at the end. I’ve also used a cool, royalty free sound-clip from the web. Let me know what you think of the video, so that I can make more (and better) videos.

Click here to launch the video.

- Ravi Jayagopal