The demise of Entrecard?

Many of you will have noticed that Entrecard has not been working properly for weeks. The owners of the web site have made no statement about this, which rather suggests that the site is not being maintained any more. This would be a great shame as Entrecard has provided bloggers with a lot of traffic over the years.

There are no alternatives to Entrecard which offer the same benefits, but I would like to suggest that Adgitize is the closest. As with Entrecard you can earn points by clicking on adverts on those web sites that have the widget and by having readers click the ads on your blog(s). To advertise your site you need to pay money (via PayPal), but this is no hardship because you will receive payment each month (again, via PayPal) relative to the number of points you accrue.

Unlike Entrecard you only have to click 100 ads per day on Adgitize to receive the maximum number of points. This is reduced to 50 if you advertise on the site. A single monthly advert costs $14, but if you post regularly and click 50 ads per day, you can cover most of this expense. If you post every day then you will actually make a profit of a few dollars. So you may want to run the widget for a couple of months to accrue enough money for your first advertisement.

Even if Entrecard hasn't shuffled off this mortal coil, Adgitize offers an excellent means of getting extra traffic, as well as a way to communicate with other bloggers on its excellent forum.

Another site redesign

I was never truly happy with my former template design for this blog. I have finally found enough spare time to affect a redesign along simpler and cleaner lines. I may continue to noodle with it over the next few weeks, but I want to keep it is unfussy as possible. Please let me know what you think about the sleeker look.

Calling all bloggers

There are two things that most bloggers would like: extra traffic and extra income. Adgitize offers both for very little effort (especially for those who already use Entrecard). Adgitize works on a points system where the more points you accrue per month, the higher your earnings.

After your registration is completed you will be able to earn 100 points for posting to your blog (up to a maximum of 100 points per day) and you will also receive up to 100 points per day for visits to your site. You can also click up to 100 Adgitize ads per day, each earning a point. Adgitize also has a lively forum where you can accrue a further 100 points per day by adding posts.

By doing the above you can start earning, but you wont receive any traffic until you purchase advertising on Adgitize. You will receive an extra 100 points per day when you have an advert running, and you only need click 51 ads to earn the full 100 points. Last month, my Modern Historian blog received 1,486 vists from Adgitize for only $14.

The best thing about this is that the advertising can pay for itself, and even leave you with a surplus of funds. Last month, I earnt an extra $6 after advertising expenses. I try to post dally on at least one of my registered blogs to maximise my earnings, which has the added benefit of motivating me to post frequently and thus further increase the exposure of my sites.

So if you want extra traffic and a little extra income while joining a friendly network of fellow bloggers, you could do a lot worse than checking out Adgitize.

Two great new Blogger features

I recently noticed that Blogger has added two new much needed features. The first is spam comment detection. I, like most bloggers, have suffered from people leaving comments that are little more than advertisements for others sites. The system seems to put all comments that include URLs into a spam bucket, which is accessible from the Dashboard (click the 'Comments' link for your blog, and then go to the 'Spam' tab). Occasionally genuine comments will end up in the spam bucket, but since I receive email notifications of all comments, I can quickly restore them. This means that I will no longer have to consider switching the settings to moderate comments.

The second feature is a stats page, again available from the Blogger Dashboard. This appears to be a scaled down version of Google Analytics, which I will continue to use for more detailed information.

Adding a Mixx button to the footer of each Blogspot post

Recently Graham at Entrecard published a post promoting the use of social content website Mixx. Having become disillusioned with Digg I thought I would give it a try. I have created a profile on Mixx and added the code to my template to put a button in the footer of each blog. The code available on the Mixx site didn't quite work properly so I have edited it to work on Blogspot pages. This code will now use the correct URL for the post, making submission easier.

Now I make it available to you all - or at least those of you who know how to edit your Blogspot templates. Those of you who don't know how should read an introduction to customising the post footers in their templates, like this one from The Blog Doctor. You should be able to easily alter the code of the other Mixx buttons to work too by changing the image source.

<a expr:href='"http://www.mixx.com/submit?page_url="+ data:post.url'><img alt='Add to Mixx!' border='0' src='http://www.mixx.com/images/buttons/mixx-button1.png' style='border: 0px; padding: 2px'/></a>

myLot

For some time I have been looking for various ways to make money online. I have found a few services that do pay regularly for completing surveys, searching, clicking adverts or taking part in competitions. I have noticed that those that pay well tend not to last long, probably because of cash flow issues.

There are plenty of services that do not pay well (if at all) and so are not a particularly efficient use of my time. Paid to Click (ptc) services stand out in this respect as they only credit a fraction of a cent per click, so you would need to click several hundred links to earn one dollar. I am also wary of scam sites: as is often the case, if something looks to good to be true then it probably isn't.

A few months ago I signed up to myLot. This is a social networking site offering similar services to facebook, bebo and myspace. While myLot is not as sophisticated as these other sites in design or in the variety of services offered it does pay money to those who contribute to the many discussions, upload their photographs and refer their friends. Also, if you write a blog you can use myLot to promote it by adding it to their blog directory.

I have found that I am paid a couple of cents per discussion comment. MyLot make payments monthly via PayPal or moneybookers.com as long as you have at least $10 credit. I have yet to receive payment myself, but I have seen many proofs of payment and no accusations that the site is a scam. When I do receive payment I will write another article to show it.

So, if you need a little bit of extra cash and would like to join an online community that is part Yahoo! Answers and part lo-tech facebook then you could do a lot worse than signing up at myLot.

My myLot profile.

A couple of comments about Blogger

Scheduled Publication
I have to say that I adore the new scheduled publication feature on Blogger. It means that I can write one of my 'On this day in history' posts on my Modern Historian blog when I have the time to write it and then schedule it to publish on the appropriate day. Saying that, on one occasion I scheduled a post to publish the day after I had only half written the post, and of course this far from complete article went live because I forgot to finish it.

To schedule your posts on Blogger just click the 'Post Options' link when composing a new post, and change the date and time settings to some date and time in the future. When you click 'Publish Post' Blogger will take you back to your list of posts and tell you that when the new post is scheduled to go live.

Formatting problem
My blogs all have 1.5 spacing (or at least I think it is 1.5) between lines of text, but when I put some features into a post this spacing gets reset and the text following a bullet list, for example, will look different to the other text. I could find no way round this, so I resorted to setting up bullet points manually.

Recently I found a solution. If I went to the 'Edit Html' tab on the new post page and put all the text following the bullet list (or whatever) between paragraph tags - the default 1.5 line spacing was restored.

<p>So the subsequent paragraphs would look like this.

With the paragraph tags at the beginning and the end.</p>

Maybe this will be of help to others who are having the same problem.

Rick Rolling

Stop it now!
It is not big and it is not clever - and it is certainly not ironic.

Please note that this site is going through a redesign again. I am playing with transparency at the moment. Watch this space.

Plagiarism

This is my first proper post (or should that be 'rant'?) on this blog since I decided to change its direction... and it is a doozy...

I have discovered the first case of what looks like plagiarism of one of my posts. Last week I wrote a post as part of my 'On this day in history' series on my Modern Historian blog about the launch of the fateful Apollo 13 mission to the Moon. While I was chain dropping entrecards I noticed a post on another blog that bore a striking resemblance to mine, but there was no link crediting me as the original writer. On closer inspection I noticed that the poster had made a few cosmetic changes to the text.

Here is the text of my post:
On April 11th 1970, A Saturn V rocket launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida carrying the crew of the Apollo 13, James A. Lovell, John L. Swigert and Fred W. Haise, on what was intended to be the third manned landing on the Moon.

Two days into the mission a faulty oxygen tank caused an explosion that damaged the spacecraft's oxygen supply and electrical systems. The astronauts and ground crew faced a race against time to find a solution to the life threatening situation and achieve a return to Earth.

By using the Lunar Module as a 'lifeboat', reducing energy consumption and making repairs to the oxygen supply system the spacecraft managed to splashdown safely on 17th April.

This is the text from the other blog:
April 11th 1970 — A Saturn V rocket launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida carrying James A. Lovell, John L. Swigert and Fred W. Haise, on what was meant to be the third manned landing on the Moon.

Two days into the mission a faulty oxygen tank caused an explosion that damaged the spacecraft’s oxygen supply and electrical systems. The astronauts and ground crew ran a race against time to find a solution to the life threatening situation.

By using the Lunar Excursion Module as a lifeboat and making repairs to the oxygen supply system, the crew managed to splashdown safely on April 17th.

The blogger has since changed their post so that it no longer resembles mine so much. This happened after I messaged them via entrecard (because I couldn't leave a comment on their post) to point out that it was customary to credit the original post with a link, otherwise it looks like plagiarism.

As it was, they decided to make a counter-accusation that I was the plagiarist in the amended post. They assert 'some sentences and sentence fragments in the complaining blogger’s post were lifted word for word from' the Case Western Reserve University astronomy site (their emphasis).

Of course, this is simply not the case. A quick read through my post and the information on the CWRU site will show the falsity of this claim. The fact is that I used the information on the NASA site that I mentioned within my post, and even then I composed original text and didn't copy and paste anything from it.

I had not seen the site that I am accused of plagiarising until today. Although, it is worth noting that if you search on the first paragraph of my post in Google then the site I am accused of plagiarising appears after my post at the top of the list.

It is also interesting to note that the blogger still hasn't included a link to my original post so that the readers of that site can judge the validity of the accusations for themselves. Admittedly, the blogger's failure to mention my blog means that the accusations are aimed at an anonymous party.

This whole episode has made me think about the business of authorship on the web. I have absolutely no problem with anyone quoting my sends verbatim, as long as I get some credit. There are many hard-working blog authors out there who share the fruits of their labour with the world, and there are many bloggers who simply regurgitate the work of others or just post the latest cool video they have found on YouTube.

So, I say a hats off to those bloggers who create original texts (you know who you are) and a salacious gesture to those that leech the work of others.