Author Archives: Rand Wilson

Now Available in iTunes / iBooks !

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iBooks iconYou all may remember the eBook I wrote in 2007 about how I first started GrownUpGeek.com and the things I did that made it a success. For those that don’t remember: I sold approximately 1,000 copies of the .PDF version at $10 each. About two years later I made an HTML version available here in the blog for free.

Well now my incredibly popular (back then at least) eBook is now available for FREE in the iTunes iBook store!  If you have an iPod, iPad, or iPhone running iOS5 or newer, you can download and enjoy it all over again!  CLICK HERE TO PREVIEW or DOWNLOAD

With Apple’s release of the free iBooks Author app, easily creating interactive eBooks/iBooks and publishing them to the iTunes store is a great way to reach millions of potential readers.  My eBook has only been in iTunes for 4 days and it’s already been downloaded nearly 100 times – I might just have to squeeze-out another ebook!

Tips For Content Writers Looking For Work

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This week I posted an ad at the DP Forums looking for a news-writer.  This is the second time in two years I’ve made such a post and since the type of responses I got were nearly identical both times I feel that I owe it to the world of potential content writers out there to give some tips on getting work:

  1. READ THE FUCKING AD!!  If the ad says “send me a private message”, don’t reply with a public question.  If the ad says “I DO NOT WANT XYZ TYPE OF A WRITER” do not send me a PM (or worse, post publicly) that you a very good “XYZ” writer and ask me how much I’m going to pay you for all your great XYZ writing!
  2. Don’t bother me if based on the very few requirements in the ad, you are not even close to being qualified!  If the ad says “you must be able to write in near grammatically perfect English” don’t send me a message written in Pidgeon English at the grammar level of a 7 year old asking how much I am going to pay you
  3. When sending an example of your work, make sure it is your BEST work!  And OMFG, if that is your best work, please refer to #2
  4. Don’t send a clearly ‘canned’ response that really has nothing to do with the ad/request that I posted.  You are supposed to be a professional writer, right?  At least put in some effort and WRITE a response.. and for God’s sake, don’t send something that has been re-written by some kind of 10 year old “keyword rewriting” program
  5. Don’t make ME work – Don’t make me go searching some spam-farm looking for  your samples of work, or make me beg multiple times over multiple emails to see examples of your work.
  6. If you can’t read, can’t speak/write english, have the IQ less than 9 year old encephalitic, or worse, all of these things combined, then please, leave me alone and just keep writing for eHow.com – you two will go well together.

Fortunately out of the 100 or so responses I received, there were 2 or 3 that actually met my requirements and will have some work waiting for them should they choose.

 

Facebook Meta Tags for Drupal

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I was having trouble getting Facebook “Likes” and Facebook “Shares” to properly pickup my page summaries any time someone would “Like” or “Share” a page.  Instead of picking up the first few sentences of text from the page, Facebook was picking up my Adsense code – showing (Adsense code) jibberish on people’s Facebook Wall any time they shared one of my pages.  Facebook was also picking up the wrong images to display with the “Share”.

After 3 minutes of research and by using the Facebook Debugger Tool (VERY helpful!) I found that the Facebook crawler was confused by my lack of Open Graph (OG:) Meta tags.  I was using the Facebook Social Drupal Module but it only provides the bare minimum Open Graph meta tags for Shares and Facebook “Likes”.

For getting these additional Facebook meta tags, I found the Drupal Open Graph Meta Tags Module.

This module makes it easy to add Open Graph meta tags (http://opengraphprotocol.org/) to a node to enable it to be come a “rich” social object. For instance, Facebook uses this information to work out how to preview shared content in a user’s Facebook profile (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/share).

This module makes it easy to select the image thumbnail used to represent the node (used by Facebook when constructing a preview). The editor is shown a list of thumbnails of all images associated with the node (both as fields as well as images embedded within the node’s body content).

If need be, meta tags can be restricted to specific content types and access to administering and editing meta tags can be restricted by role using Drupal’s built-in permissions system.

After getting your Open Graph meta tags configured, you may notice that when Sharing or Like-ing pages, Facebook is still not seeing your tags – this is because the Facebook crawler has the old page cached.  You can force the Facebook crawler to re-crawl your page and update it’s cache by using the Facebook Debugger Tool.  Just enter the URL and hit the DEBUG button, and the Facebook crawler / bot will recrawl your page and update the Facebook cache.

My (DNSBL) Blacklist list

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Here is my current list of DNSBL’s that I use for blocking [much] spam, proxies, hijacked PC’s and “problem” IP’s.  Note that even using all of these DNSBL’s at the same time still will not prevent all spam, but when used in combination with Akismet, your site can be 99.9% spam free.

The real use for these DNSBL lists is to block open proxies and other IP’s that can cause trouble:

  • rbl.efnetrbl.org
  • spam.spamrats.com
  • combined.abuse.ch
  • xbl.spamhaus.org
  • web.dnsbl.sorbs.net
  • dnsbl.ahbl.org
  • problems.dnsbl.sorbs.net
  • opm.tornevall.org
  • cbl.abuseat.org
  • dnsbl-2.uceprotect.net
  • dnsbl.mags.net