I first installed the Limit Login Attempts plugin some time ago but after forgetting my password a couple of times I disabled it. You see, with so many blogs I don’t always update all of the passwords at the same time. So, by inserting an incorrect password one too many times, I would end up locking myself out of my own blog. Not fun!

Change of Heart

I recently decided to reinstall the Limit Login Attempts plugin. After looking at my traffic logs. I found quite a few IP addresses accessing my WordPress Login screen. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why someone besides me is spending time on my Login screen.

By installing the Limit Login Attempts plugin, I’m able to add a layer of protection between would-be hackers and my blogs. The plugin allows me to set the number of login tries before being locked out. I can also configure it to notify me after a pre-set number of lockouts. Some blogs I set the number to 1 and other blogs to 2.

Several Tier Lockout

After a lockout, the hacker, er I have 60 minutes or so before I can try again. I’ve actually increased the lockout time to about 6 hours. After that, if anyone gets locked out again, the lockout time is increased to several days. In the meanwhile the plugin logs the IP address and the username used when attempting to login.

Oh, and to get around being locked out because I forgot the password, I created a second login username and password that is impossible for me to forget. Therefore, if I happen to lock myself out using username #1, I can always use username #2 to gain administrative access and reset the lockout.

Security Layer Number 2

Because my blogs are hosted on HostGator, HostGator provides a feature in their control panel called IP Deny Manager. By adding the questionable IPs to IP Deny’s list, those IPs are denied access to all of my HostGator sites. So, at the end of the day when I receive all of my “too many login attempts” notifications, I gather the IP addresses, log into my HostGator account and add the IPs to the list so those particular hackers won’t be able to access my sites again.

This is not foolproof because if someone truly wants to hack in, they will, but I can’t just sit idly by and watch them gain access to my sites.

A Little Advice

After installing a new blog, always change the username from the default “admin” to something a little less predictable. Each hacking attempt tried using “admin, Admin or webmaster” as the user name.

Maintaining a blog is sort of like gardening. No matter how much you care for your garden, weeds are always ready to take over. You have to weed out the online hackers just as you have to pull weeds from your garden.

Recently they sent out a newsletter spreading the news about a new graphic  they created on the mind of a blogger. The graphic was well done and well thought out (well, mostly well thought out).

It is a graphic interpretation of what we bloggers must consider every time we create a blog. We have to think of things like selecting the proper URL, subject matter, SEO, quality content, driving traffic to the site and of course social networkability.

The graphic showed different people in various stages of creating a blog. The graphics are cute and non-offensive.

A Diversified World

It saddened me, however, that as I viewed the rather long graphic which, by the way has a height 7,341 pixels and a width 600 pixels, is that there was not one single person of color represented in the graphic.

Maybe as a NY Knick fan I’ve gone Lin-Sane, but I didn’t see an Asian in the graphic. With the large number of writers in India, I didn’t see an Indian in the graphic. Neither did I see anyone in the image that looked like me.

The Flattening of the World

Being born and raised in America there was a period of time when all I though of was America and American things. The Internet has helped to change my view. Because of the Internet, everyone is just a mouse-click away.

There was a time here on NJFM when I reviewed various writing opportunities. I quickly found that most of my opportunities were for American writers. After writing a few reviews, I realized I was leaving most of the world out. As a result, I changed my criteria when reviewing writing sites to include information on whether or not the gigs were open to non-American writers.

For me to ignore that piece of the world would be short sighted. Yes, No Job for Mom is written from the point of view of an American because that’s what I am, but I do try to consider non-American writers when writing about online opportunities.

It seems that Infolinks needs to consider the multi-cultural nature of the world when putting together graphics outlining steps for becoming a blogger.

Not an Incendiary Post

I do not write incendiary posts and this is not an open forum for racist remarks. Any comments written in that flavor will be deleted. The reason why I wrote this post is because, as Maya Angelou says, “When you know better, you do better.”

And yes, I sent an email to Infolinks congratulating them on the attractive graphic and suggested that in the future they should include people of color.

Knowing that I can’t control Google, I continued on doing what I do, playing around behind the scenes and writing occasionally.

An Enlightening Email from Google

Imagine my surprise when I received an email from Google notifying me of “Failed Ad Crawls.” In essence their AdSense ad crawler was having a hard time crawling my sites because of my robots.txt file.

If the AdSense crawler is unable to crawl my site, Google is unable to display the most relevant ads to compliment my site’s content. This is most probably what lead to my decrease in earnings (although things were just fine a week or so ago so I’m not sure why the sudden change).

Amending the Robots.txt File

Way back when I first started playing online I was aware of a file called robots.txt file. I think I might have played around with it back then, but after switching to WordPress, I forgot all about it. Apparently WordPress installs a default robot.txt file and that’s what I had on each of my blogs.

My robots.txt file for most of my sites looked like this:

User-agent: *
 Disallow: /cgi-bin/
 Disallow: /wp-admin/

I have a few sites where the robots.txt was even more sparse and looked like this:

User-agent: *
 Disallow:

The sparse robots.txt file belongs to non-money making sites so I’m not so concerned.

Anyway, Google recommended that I add the following code to the top of my robots.txt file to allow the AdSense crawler in:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
 Disallow:

After doing a little research, I went a little further and modified my robots.txt file to look like this:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
 Disallow:

# Google Image
 User-agent: Googlebot-Image
 Disallow:

# global
 User-agent: *
 Disallow: /cgi-bin/
 Disallow: /wp-admin/
 Disallow: /wp-includes/
 Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
 Disallow: /wp-content/cache/
 Disallow: /wp-content/themes/
 Disallow: /trackback/
 Disallow: /feed/
 Disallow: /comments/

Sitemap: http://www.insertsitemapurlhere.com/sitemap.xml

I don’t totally understand all of the robots.txt file stuff, but it gives me something else to research. In the meanwhile, I’ve made the changes and have noticed an increase in earnings.

A Little More Robots.txt Info

The robots.txt file is usually located in a domain’s root directory. So, if you type in the domain name followed by /robots.txt you can read anyone’s robots.txt file. Mine is here, eHow’s is here, Suite 101’s is here and CNN’s is here. There’s no secret, but you can see how each of them differ.

Over the next few days I’ll play around with my robots.txt file to see which brings in the best return. I’ll be reviewing the robots.txt files of successful sites to see how theirs read.

Golf and Online Writing

My husband always says that golf is a game of inches. I feel online writing is the same. It’s not actually inches, but a game of tweaking. If tweaking my robots.txt file will make a difference to my financial bottom line, call me a tweaker.

This neat plugin is especially helpful if you have old blogs with lots of posts. Finding all broken links on old blogs is just about impossible. Broken Link Checker continually checks for broken links and sends notification emails when broken links are found.

After testing the plugin on one of my smaller blogs, I installed it here on NJFM. The plugin found over 200 broken links on this site. When you consider that I’ve only got a little over 500 posts, 200 is a rather high percentage of broken links.

Waning Interest

As I was fixing the links I realized most of the links came from NJFM’s comment section. It made me realize that I’m not the only one who loses interest after building blogs.

The majority of the broken links were from folks who created a new blog, came here to No Job for Mom and got very involved in the community. Over time they lost interest and allowed their blog’s domain name to expire thus resulting in broken links (this is not a complaint, just an observation).

The People Factor

I think cleaning up broken links improves the reader’s experience. I know I’ve read quality and compelling comments on other blogs only to be later disappointed when I clicked on the commenter’s website link to find that it was a dead end.

SEO Factor

I am not an SEO expert but I would think search engines appreciate blogs with current links as opposed to blogs with a ton of broken links. Whether or not fixing broken links improve search engine results remains to be seen, but it can’t hurt.

Broken Link Checker has earned its way onto my favorite WordPress plugins list.

In those 5 years I’ve earned and learned quite a bit. The largest contributing factor to my online writing success was the decision to transition from up front to residual earnings.

The Changing Seasons

If you’ve been writing online for longer than one year, you know how much things have changed in that short period of time. I’ve witnessed even bigger changes over the past 5 years.

The one underlying constant is quality content works and people like to be told what to do. So much of the Internet is either providing information to help people make a decision or telling people how to make the decision. We are a thirsty bunch for being told what to do and how to do it.

Switching Gears

Regular NJFM followers may have noticed the decline in posting frequency. As I look at the evolution of the Internet, the evolution of my interests and changes in my off line life, I’m finding that NJFM holds a different position in my list of priorities.

While I still enjoy blogging here, I’m finding my enthusiasm is waning. There’s nothing worse than placing uninspired content on a blog just to keep things going.

What am I Saying?

I’m not quite sure. It’s like this. I like to blog, but I like to be inspired when I blog. There are times when the inspiration is hot and on fire and there are other times when it’s not. It seems that I’ve temporarily lost my enthusiasm for writing about writing. I haven’t lost my enthusiasm for writing, it just writing about writing has lost its luster for the time being.

This is not a “RIP” post for the demise of NJFM. It’s an “I have to follow my gut” post because the one thing freelance writing has taught me is to follow my gut.

I’ll continue to post here from time to time, but not as frequently as in the past. Call me crazy, but I think you would much prefer to read inspired content instead of prattling drivel about writing online.