Blog

Happy New Year all!

I hope everyone had a great year in 2011 and an even better year in 2012. We will continue to live, learn and earn.

Growing Money was recently hacked by hackers using a method known as “backdoor” intrusion. Our ISP, DreamHost discovered that the website has been compromised and deactivated the site on Friday July 8th, 2011.

Since then, we ran a  security scan and removed malicious code that was sneaked in this site. Today, we are back and running!

As a reminder to all website owners, including myself, this is an important lesson to keep security measures tight and up-to-date. I welcome any information on how to protect websites and any web security plugins/tools to install for WordPress.

One tool that was recommended by DreamHost Security Team is the Exploit Scanner for WordPress. It is a useful tool to help find malicious code in your files and database in WordPress.

Wish all of you a happy and prosperous new year!

Image credit: TheHolidaySpot

Have a Happy Thanksgiving!! Fill up your stomachs and loosen up your wallets.

Here’s a little history on Thanksgiving.

Growing Money Blog is updated with a new, clean and simple theme, the PrimePress. The theme is minimalistic and loads up fast on web browsers. My posts now show up fine without any formatting issues. Previously, the images cluster up with the text and it was annoying.

There is an option to display banner on the top. I will use it to put up an ad but may have better ideas for that spot in the future. The posts are shown on near the center, a little on the left side, but in clear fonts and a white background. There are two sidebars to the right of the screen, which will show article categories and important reader options.

I got the theme running live as soon as I installed it. I will add customizations to the theme/blog on the fly. Let me know what you think about this new theme.

Growing Money New Theme

For the record, this is a snapshot of the old theme:

The Permalinks structure have been updated for this blog to make the URLs look more legible. However, the new structure seems to have caused a problem for all the old links, which are now broken. If there is a post that you are looking for and cannot view it anymore, please use the search function on the right side, using keywords from the post title or content. I will try to find a fix for this problem. If there is a broken link in the post, please leave a comment or email me.

Does anyone know of a WordPress plug-in or a way I can have the old links automatically redirect to the new links in the permalinks structure? Is there a way I can manually redirect a certain post to the new link? Please contact me if you can help or leave your contact in the comments so I can reach you. Thanks for your help.

Growing Money Blog has been updated with a new green template, the Passion Duo Green. This template loads up fast and has a clean layout. It was designed with adsense and advertising in mind. There are spots for ad units on the top and right side of the blog. It comes pre-loaded with six 125 x 125 ad units on the right.

I customized the blog to fit my needs. I removed four ad units and showed only two 125 x 125 ad units on the right and installed my Google search from adsense. I had to create new adsense units for the blog and placed them in strategic locations on the blog. I also had to change some of the colors to match the theme.

The template did not come with all the things I wanted, so I had to modify some of the code. I added a tag line under the blog title and other small modifications to make sure the blog layout displays correctly.

Changing templates can be time consuming. All in all, I spent about eight hours for this process of changing template, but I think this template suits the blog well.

Please note that Growing Money Blog is in the the process of updating to a new blog template on March 14, 2009.  There may be brief interruptions. The blog themes may be changed several times in a day, but all the links should remain intact. Please do check back later if you experience any loading errors. I apologize for any inconvenience.

I have switched over to the ArchitecturalDigest theme for my blog. I had noticed a problem with the i3Theme template. The right sidebar is not displayed correctly in Internet Explorer 6.x. About 20% of my readers are using IE 6.x so that is a decent size of the population.

The ArchitecturalDigest theme seems more appropriate for a financial blog. I have received some positive feedbacks about the ArchitecturalDigest template. I was told that the theme looks nice and professional.

There are two things I noticed about the ArchitecturalDigest template that may be a concern.
1. Hyperlinks are not underlined. (perhaps this can be fixed).
2. There is not page titles (About, Contact, etc)

I think the answer to the problem with hyperlinks is in the CSS file. As for the page titles, I can just add it as a widget on the sidebar.

ArchitecturalDigest theme

i3Theme theme – right sidebar is not displayed correctly in IE 6.x.

Browser share – IE 6.x 20%

I have updated the blog to WordPress Version 2.6.2 and are making some changes behind the scenes. There are some improvements in the new version, such as cleaner layout, faster interface, and more features to help with writing a post.

What are some popular blog tools/widgets/plugins that have been used by successful bloggers? I am thinking of tools that would track/increase traffic and more efficiently organize blog posts.

The next step for me is to update this blog with a new template.