I love it when I log into my WordPress admin area and it tells me that  a new WordPress is available. I love upgrades. Yes, really.  On this occasion, however, I lost the battle when I came face to face with the Wordpress 2.6 Upgrade and a 404 Error.

First it’s very important to note that in WordPress’s 3 Step Upgrade Guide, there is in fact a Step 0. Step 0 reminds you, and wisely so, to back-up your WordPress install, because as good as the WordPress community is, they are all still human.  So if a bug in the code sneaks in or you’re trying to cyber while you upgrade and not paying attention, then a back-up is a very handy fall-back for if your site falls down.

Moving on - last night I downloaded the new Wordpress 2.6 with trembling hands, anticipating the new features, the improved speed and that new software smell.  I followed the instructions for the upgrade (backup, delete & upload, click upgrade) and after I did something nice for myself, when I logged back into 1earthadventures, everything seemed fine.

But then I noticed in my Feedjit that somebody had landed on a 404 error page, which shouldn’t happen.  As I clicked on a single post, before it even loaded, the title turned to “Oops!” that signified the serving of a 404 error page.  Turns out that all my single posts under Wordpress 2.6 were inaccessible and got a 404 error page instead.

As my main page worked, the obvious error was with the URIs and at first I thought perhaps my fancy URIs were turned off by mistake.  Checking the settings in the admin area, this was proven to be false.  I checked my .htaccess file just to make sure none of the conditions in there where accidentally erased, but that too was untouched.

Next I turned to Google and said a prayer, which was answered in the form of several WordPress forum posts.  But alas, the Wordpress 2.6 upgrade had only been release a few hours prior and the only help the forums proved to be was to show me that I wasn’t the only one having this 404 error problem.

A moment ago I searched for this again and stumbled across this bug report, which outlines the problem.  In essense, for those of us who use index.php in the URI, this problem will persist until they fix it, or until you fiddle with your code and temporarily fix it yourself (read that bug report for what to do).

The problem has been escalated and is now considered critical and is destined for Wordpress 2.6.1. Obviously it will affect a lot of bloggers, so lets hope everybody backs up first. But it should, as far as I understand it, only affect those of us who use index.php in our URIs.

In the meantime, I’ll figure out to get rid of index.php in my URI without screwing up all my links in the search engines.  In one of the posts the moderator said that if you’re hosted on Unix/Linux, then you really shouldn’t need to index.php in the URI - as that work-around came about for the benefit of those hosted on Windows IIS.

I’ll explore that and hopefully I can beat the Wordpress 2.6 Upgrade and 404 Error dilema before the 2.6.1. fix.

Update 080717 - Wordpress 2.6 404 Error Fix/Solution

Thanks to the feedback from amy-wong.com and Kerry Webster, I’ve solved my 404 Error issues.  First I went into my WordPress settings and in the custom URI I simply removed “index.php” from the string.

I can’t remember why I chose to have index.php in the first place, but I didn’t want to remove it because I thought my links from other websites and in search engines wouldn’t work.  But as Amy Wong confirmed, the links still work as they simply direct themselves to the new URI sans index.php.  I tried this in my 2.5 install first to test it, before I upgraded - because that pesky “index.php” is what broke my 2.6 install.

Oh, the trick above apparently is guaranteed to work if your site is hosted on an Apache server (on Linux), but if you’re hosted on Microsoft’s IIS you might have problems - as index.php was left in there for the poor people on IIS.  Kerry Webster created this work around, but Kerry, I suspect, is a server admin, so you might not have the access required for this stunt and I’m not entirely sure your host will be keen to try it.

Anyway, after that, I once again installed WordPress 2.6 and *tada*, it worked like it should. No more 404 Errors.  So yay! for upgrades! Yes, it bombed at first, but the upside is not only do I have a fresh release of WordPress, but also much tidier URIs.

Rock on, WordPress!

If you enjoyed this post, do subscribe to the 1Earth RSS feed!

There are many conspiracy theories in this world. Loose Change is likely not one of them.

I had a conversation with a friend last night and inevitably high fuel prices came up.  We had a bit of mass hysteria here in Kota Kinabalu on Tuesday as a rumour spread that the petrol stations would be closed for 3 days due to some or other strike.

There were some talks of unhappiness about petrol commissions and losing out due to credit card payments, but no firm plans to strike (which is apparently illegal anyway for petrol kiosks, a seller of controlled items).

Nevertheless, the rumours spread like wildfire and by 3pm on Tuesday the roads started jamming up as people rushed to fill their cars.  KKliens, whenever there’s more than 2 people participating, seems to throw all rules, traffic and otherwise, out the window and quickly petrol stations were jammed from all sides as people pushed and shoved and tried to cut their way to the front.

The queues into the petrol stations spilled onto the roads, blocking single lane and, in many places, double lane roads and by 5.30 when I left worked, the entire city was grid-locked.  I passed petrol stations where people had entered from both the entrance and the exit and with the stations jammed, nobody could go anywhere.

I eventually made it to Julia’s where we hung out at the pool until about 7.30pm waiting for the traffic, passing at glacial speeds, to clear.  Police drove around town broadcasting over loudspeakers that the rumours are false.  I received a text message from The Star at 7.51pm also announcing this.

So back to our conversation; we spoke about how gullible we as humans sometimes are and that if enough people believe something, whether it’s true or not, it will be perceived as truth.

Governments manipulating this gullibility and herd mentality came up.

There are many governments today that lie to their people, but none are under the spotlight quite as brightly as the American government.  I’ve read many articles calling George W. Bush the worst US president and biggest liar in history and starting wars under false pretenses to benefit in various ways, most notably stakes in oil.

But the lies and deceit go much further than fabricated evidence about Iraq’s real threat to the world. Much, much deeper.

I’m not sure why I haven’t stumbled across this before, or even heard of it prior to my friend bringing it up last night.  Loose Change is a documentary looking at 9/11 from an angle you never contemplated. Or perhaps you have.

It’s an hour and a bit long, but the time will pass in a flash.

If you enjoyed this post, do subscribe to the 1Earth RSS feed!

Is GrassRoots Advertising and gr-ads.com a scam or not? Here’s my experience.

A month or so ago somebody who says her name is Kristen Romero contacted me saying she’s from a company called GrassRoots Advertising at gr-ads.com, and that she wanted to do some sponsored links on old posts of mine.

What she offered was generous for a small-time blogger like myself, so I looked into it.

After investigating a little bit, things seemed seriously fishy:

• Their website is very old-looking, which is very odd for an Internet advertising company;
• They seem to only employ good looking people, except for the CEO and web designer. The web designer seems to be a 70 year old, which is quite odd too;
• If you download the employee pictures, right-click and look at the properties, the Meta data on the pictures indicate that they are stock photos;
• The company has no contact details listed on their website, other than an email link to the CEO, but it doesn’t give a hint as to where they’re located;
• Something really odd was that they claim to have enough business for 2008 and can’t take on anymore;
• From domaintools.com I learned that their domain has been in existence for 6 years, although the company was established in 2004.  This could mean something or it could mean nothing;
• I also saw their company details were hidden by a proxy service, which, I guess is not all that uncommon (Spam is problem for us all), so this was inconclusive;
• So then I looked at the headers of the email she sent me, and the domain groundupadvertising.com was revealed - registered in April 2008, it’s likely in reaction to the bad rep they’re fast gaining for gr-ads.com.  The website looks similar, but is a wee bit more realistic.  It looks like this site incorporates things to counter what people says make gr-ads.com look like a scam (the staff of this company is not SO good looking - although it still looks like stock photos);
• If you ping either domain, you get the IP Address - 69.72.214.98 - a host in the US.
• Both domains have robots.txt with only - user-agent: * - and - disallow: / - in it, which to search engines means “To all search robots, index nothing on this entire site”.  Again, for an Internet advertising agency, this is super odd as it means nothing on these websites will show up in searches.

Aside from a lot of odd tidbits, amplified by a suspicious mind, there’s nothing conclusive to say that these people were trying to scam me.

As I also use the email address she contacted me on for PayPal, I thought I’d give them a go (I didn’t have to expose info she didn’t already have).

I posted the text she gave me and a few days later the payment came in PayPal (from Find Your Dreams, Inc. - no info on that either), as agreed.

End of that story.

Bad Mouthing

Two days ago Kristen again contacted me and said a blogger she couldn’t negotiate a rate with had put up an unfavourable post about her and it was attracting bad comments.  She asked if I would put in a good word for her, and as I had no problems with my experience, I was willing to give an honest opinion.

I read the post and contact Kristen again about the issues raised in the post and in my own mind.  I told her, I could give an honest opinion, but my honest opinion is that I too thought that they were scammers, but tried them anyway and my suspicions were proven false.

In another email to Kristen I asked her to explain a few things to me so that I could comment on that post and put her in a better light, because my honest opinion alone will not.  Here’s what I said:

The woman wanted x amount for her website and that wasn’t what you offered - you negotiated, she declined - I honestly don’t see the big deal.

But I can see your dilemma with the negative post and you did good by me so I don’t mind to put an honest opinion up there for you.

But here’s my honest opinion and maybe you can shed some light on it so that I can understand: Your website does come across as a scam website, and as the only contact with you it makes your business seem shady as well. Here’s why:

a) it’s like a 1990’s-style website, (quite out of step for a Internet advertising company)
b) your domain details (and registration address) are hidden,
c) there’s no actual company information on your site,
d) there’s no contact details of any kind,
e) you claim to have enough business for 2008 (wow!),
f) your employees are ALL unbelievably good looking, and
g) the meta data on your employee pictures DOES indicate that they are stock photos.

The only reason I gave you a try is because you offered a good rate, and you only need my email address for Paypal, which is pretty difficult to use in a scam by itself, as it’s virtually in the public domain anyway.

Obviously not many people make these deductions and are still willing to take the risk.

Yet you did what you said you would and in good time too, so I don’t really understand - why the masquerade and the dodgy website when you do legitimate work?

But alas, the only reply I got from Kristen was to say “you’re right i think its ridiculous and i just don’t know or care anymore..“.

Epilogue

So I’m now no closer to knowing than I was before.  All I know is that Kristen contacted me with an offer, we negotiated, I did my part, and she paid as promised.

Is this company dodgy as hell? Sure. Is there at least a ton of fish around gr-ads.com? There certainly is.  Are they scammers? Well, I wasn’t scammed and I didn’t actually read about anybody that was scammed - just those who say they look like scammers.

So the question remains, and more importantly is there any proof either way: Is GrassRoots Advertising and gr-ads.com a scam or not?

Update 080715 - Just picked up a comment from Rose Desrochers, somebody reported that a rep from bridgeofknowledge.org contacted them for something that sounds like our friends at gr-ads.com / groundupadvertising.com.  Surfed on over and wouldn’t you know it, my friend Kristen Romero is employee No.1.

Other employees include Lauren Keidis, Amy Callahan, Sean Callahan (Yay! They finally got a male employee that isn’t the CEO or an octogenarian web designer - he was a famous television blurb writer in the 90’s) and Melinda Hathaway.

The non-scam (or scam, depends on your school of thought) is evolving, as now they include a contact page, they don’t brag about how they don’t need any more business and they don’t have stock-photo employee mug-shots anymore.  But the temptation to carry on with the employee profiles are just too strong…

Bridgeofknowledge.org is a more noble enterprise. They are a bunch of students who got together to provide links, or a bridge, to useful knowledge, which is where the paid-for-links come in.  Obviously Sean Callahan didn’t write the copy for the front page, because he has a keen eye for detail and there are various typos on the front page. (Please note, I make no such claims, therefore typos on my pages are perfectly acceptable).

A quick whois on bridgeofknowledge.org reveals that the domain was registered on 8 July.  I bet right now they’re hating the Internet community. It’s not so hard to carry on legitimate business on the Internet, why not try to not be one of those shady advertiser they talk about on their front-page blurb.

The gr-ads.com /  groundupadvertising.com / bridgeofknowledge.org saga continues…

Update 080724 - Through links from the other blogs that have posted about this company, there are at least four related domains. They are:

• gr-ads.com
• groundupadvertising.com
• bridgeofknowledge.org
• firstdayads.org

The design of these websites are quite similar. I was contacted by gr-ads.com, some other people from bridgeofknowledge.org, and yet other by firstdayads.org.  Both my and other people’s emails had groundupadvertising.com in the email headers, and this is how we know they are related.

I’ve established that they’re not scammers.  They offered me money to place links, I did it, they paid me. No scam.

But I still had this question: Why if your company is legit do you choose such unorthodox methods that puts your company in bad light?

Apart from what I’ve listed above, here’s some other things that doesn’t make sense. 

• On Rose DesRochers, ‘Kristen’ posted this photo saying “Here’s another cute one with me sarah and jen“.  Below, in that order, you will see the picture from that link vs. the gr-ads.com employee profile pics.
  
  
• Arguably the third addition below to Sarah Raymond’s pictures are the same person as at least the middle picture above.  The middle picture above was found on Sarah Raymond’s gr-ads.com employee profile picture, and the third one is Kayla Milledge from bridgeofknowledge.org (employee pofiles have been removed since this post).
  
• Next is Amy Calahan who works or worked for gr-ads.com, but also works for bridgeofknowledge.org (but they’ve removed their employee profiles). Could just be a namesake, of course.
  Info she gave to the two companies are a little different although she admits on both to growing up in the mountains of Vermont.  On her gr-ads.com resume she said she graduated from SUNY New Paltz with a degree in Communications, but to bridgeofknowledge.org she said she has a degree in Information Science from SUNY Oswego. Both Amy’s personalities enjoy the park and building web pages.
  
• Luaren Kiedis also works two jobs at gr-ads.com and bridgeofknowledge.org. She replaced her stock-photo gr-ads employee pic taken by Jim Jurica, with another (on the right) at bridgeofknowledge.At gr-ads.com Lauren said she “has a degree from Ohio State in communication“, whilst over at bridgeofknowledge.com she graduated with a degree in Liberal Arts from Ohio State. At both jobs she said she likes being on top of water, snowboarding, softball and going for long runs in the woods with her dog named Dylan.
  

More absurd than the time that I’ve spent on this article (you’re right David Salsberger, I need another hobby), is this company that seems to be going out of its way to look illegitimate, when they actually do pay people money like they say they do.

Why?

Update 080822: Because it’s informative, and because people tell me about it, webmatchers.net is the newly discovered addition to the websites associated with gr-ads.com.

Big up to geekhideout.com for linking the latest in a slew of domains to these guys.

Why do they insist on the corny profiles?  We now have the following websites in our non-scam scam scheme, with the latest one in red:

• gr-ads.com
• groundupadvertising.com
• bridgeofknowledge.org
• firstdayads.org
• webmatchers.net

Jen Keenan, now with her 3rd company, is the common denominator here.  Although both her profiles claim she graduated with a BS in Marketing and Minors in Theater and Computer Science, the institution changed from SUNY Plattsburgh at gr-ads.com to SUNY Brockport over at WebMatchers.com.

Does the BS here refer to bull shit?

Anyway, you can’t cross reference many of the sources anymore, because over at bridgeofknowledge.org they’ve taken down employee profiles all together, and at groundupadvertising.com Jen Keenan’s profile is no longer a link, and it looks like they’ve change employee pics for many of the other profiles too.

Think they’re paying attention to Blogs?

Update 080824: Well, if you’ve been following this saga and haven’t discovered this gem of an information source yet, then head on over to miqel.com where not only has Miqel done some serious investigation into this scam (no more no-scam, it IS a scam), he’s laid it out bare for everyone to see.  Good work Miqel.

Miqel also implicated a few new domains in this scam, not to mention SEO Guru Jim Boykin, bringing the list down to this:

• gr-ads.com
• groundupadvertising.com
• bridgeofknowledge.org
• firstdayads.org
• webmatchers.net
• smallstepsbigleaps.org (the page design we all know and … well, it’s familiar)
• www.webuildpages.com (this Jim Boykin is apparently an SEO guru, oops!)

Anyway, he also notice that bridgeofknowledge.org is “experiencing difficulties” with their hosting account and is asked to contact their hosts… hmmm.  As for this moment the other websites are all still intact.

So what’s the next step?  This Jim Boykin actually makes a living of claiming to be an SEO guru with seminars and the works, and I can’t help but notice that internetmarketingninjas.com, which looks like his home page, is based on the very same design as many of the other implicated domains in this scam - which is a little more than coincidence in my opinion.

If this so-called Guru really is the king pin of this scam, then surely something should be done about it?

How much money could such a scam extort from unsuspecting clients who thought they were buying legitimate services and how many blind-to-the-truth-because-we’re-slightly-greedy-for-easy-money-bloggers, such as myself, have been scorned by Google for associating with the dark under belly of the paid-for links world?

Anyway, nice scam, but now it’s out.  So the best thing to do for those looking for SEO or paid-link campaigns is to avoid scams the likes of which Jim Boykin has been associated with and front companies gr-ads.com, groundupadvertising.com, bridgeofknowledge.org, firstdayads.org, webmatchers.net, smallstepsbigleaps.org.

I guess the status of the near-urban legend of “Is gr-ads.com a scam or not” is now: TRUE

If you enjoyed this post, do subscribe to the 1Earth RSS feed!

I’ve cottoned on to this a little late. You can download Firefox 3 on 17 June and help set a world record for the most downloaded software in a 24 hour period.

The reason that I’m so far behind the times is actually because I’m so far ahead of times.

You see, I upgraded my Ubuntu Gutsy to Ubuntu Hardy what, two months ago, and the new install came with Firefox 3, albeit a Beta.

However, at some point last week I got an update notice and one of them was Firefox 3, which I now believe is not a Beta anymore, but an actual stable release. So being all 3′ed up at home on Ubuntu, I didn’t really pay attention to my ailing Fx 2.0.0.14 on XP at work.

Be a Firefox Fan

I’ve been a Firefox fan for as long as Firefox has been a viable alternative to IE and I started using it full time when they were the first of the two to introduce tabbed browsing. By the time IE7 (I believe it was) caught up with this feature, I had moved so far away from IE that there was no turning back.

I have IE on my work computer to cross test my websites on different browsers, but it’s still IE6. I can’t be bother to spend the energy to upgrade to a bloated, slow and unsecured late model release.

The only complaint that I had with Firefox 2 was that it was a little tad on the slow side when I came to web page rendering, but that seems to have been sorted out in Firefox 3, which is quick to start up and loads pages in a flash. On Ubuntu it does and I’m sure it will do it equally well in Windows.

Ailing Internet Explorer

I maintain a handful of website, probably about 9 or so, and in all their server logs it’s clear to see that Internet Explorer no longer dominates absolutely. To be sure, the vast majority of web surfers still use Firefox, but none of my sites have more than 90% IE visitors.

1Earth, for instance, last month had 55% IE users and 37% Firefox users, the rest spread amongst Safari, Opera, Netscape, Konqueror & various PDAs/Mobile phones in that order. But my work websites have more IE users, between 75 - 85% depending on how corporate the website is. The more corporate, it seems, the more IE.

Firefox is your step in virus prevention

With various virus outbreaks on our network at work, my first step in virus protection for the afflicted, is to install Firefox. Chances are far less to get some sneaky, unauthorised piece of software installed using Firefox than it is Explorer. Especially if you’re on of those click-crazy-know-nothing-much users who surf and click on any random pop-up box (which Firefox blocks by default, btw).

And Windows Update sends out virtually daily security patches for Windows which often involves an Explorer plug (and Windows Media Player for that matter).

So for me, it’s just easier to avoid the entire threat, and surf safe with Firefox.

Firefox 3 is amped

With Firefox 3 comes a slew of new features and performance enhancements, most notably less RAM usage, which pains me endlessly at work where all my applications are RAM gluttons.

But I digress.

Help make the web a safer (and faster) place to be. Download Firefox 3 on 17 June and you could be part of a world record!

If you enjoyed this post, do subscribe to the 1Earth RSS feed!

SocialSpark just sent out an invitation for beta testing a day or so ago, and either they’re getting seriously desperate, or there was a major error in their code.

Perhaps it was good, but misguided intentions. Whichever way, SocialSpark managed to hijack my site.

My humblest apologies to SocialSpark / Izea / Blogger Choice Awards!

They DID NOT HIJACK my site.

And thanks to Dang and Dan for not calling me a dumb ass in their comments, although I’m sure those who come after them might.

Turns out, I requested a sponsored opportunity, and what I described as hijacking my site was, in fact, a sponsorship… which looked like it hijacked my site.

If it was written somewhere, I didn’t read it, but the effect of blacking out my site, popping up an advert, fading back to my site and popping up an advertising bar at the bottom nearly made my heart stop, as I didn’t expect it.

In fact, I didn’t even know the sponsored opportunity had been approved, as with SocialSpark it seems as if you have to queue for everything - unlike PayPerPost which is either you get it or you don’t.

So ok, I overreacted, and again, my humblest apologies to SocialSpark / Izea / Blogger Choice Awards who DID NOT hijack my site.

Say what you’re thinking: I’m a dumbass.

If you enjoyed this post, do subscribe to the 1Earth RSS feed!