Hopefully someone else up here in Canuckistan can use this;

Name: Rogers MMS
APN: media.com
Username: media
Password: mda01
Server: 172.25.0.107
MMSC: http://mms.gprs.rogers.com
MMS Proxy: 10.128.1.69
MMS Port: 80
MCC :302 (should already be filled in)
MNC: either 720 or 72 depending on your SIM card (should already be filled in)
APN Type: mms

Enjoy MMS!

1. Login to phpmyadmin

2. Find your wordpress database.

3. Go to the ‘wp_posts’ table in the database.

4. Hit the ‘sql’ tab in phpmyadmin, and use a variety of the following commands.

To Delete Posts By Date:

DELETE FROM `wp_posts` WHERE `post_date` like ‘%2008%’;

To Delete Posts With Certain Content In The Body:

DELETE FROM `wp_posts` WHERE `post_content` like ‘%test_content%’;

To Delete Posts With Certain Content In The Title:

DELETE FROM `wp_posts` WHERE `post_title` like ‘%test_content%’;

Note that you will have to change the contents between the % and % in those sql statements to your own.

That’s it. Watch it delete your posts in just seconds, instead of hours and hours of work through the wordpress backend.

Hope this helps you out too.

ERROR 1016 (HY000): Can’t open file: ‘./202_SITENAME/202_locations_block.frm’ (errno: 24)
ERROR 1016 (HY000): Can’t open file: ‘./202_SITENAME/202_locations_block.frm’ (errno: 24)
ERROR 23 (HY000): Out of resources when opening file ‘./202_SITENAME/202_locations_block#P#p413.MYD’ (Errcode: 24)

WTF?

I have plenty of RAM, and resources on my new box so this was a little confusing. Turns out that you need to make a couple adjustments in order to re-import the database on Linux servers. Here’s what I did to make it import properly.

first, you have to edit the security limits for mysql on your NEW server, especially if you have a high number of connections to databases. This is done like this;

# nano /etc/security/limits.conf

and add these lines to the bottom

mysql   soft    nofile  24000
mysql   hard    nofile  32000

Then, you’re going to have to edit your my.cnf, which for me on Ubuntu is done like this;

# nano /etc/mysql/my.cnf

and add this line in the tuning section

open_files_limit        = 20000

Now, go back to your original server, and re-dump the database like this;

mysqldump -C -i –single-transaction -u root -p DATABASENAME >>DATABASENAME.sql

Then, scp the file over to your new server like this;

scp DATABASENAME.SQL username@hostname.com:

Once the file has transferred, ssh over to your new host and issue the following commands (for Ubuntu, may be different on other Linux flavors)

/etc/init.d/mysql stop

/etc/init.d/mysql start

mysql -u root -p

<entering password>

then, once you are inside the MySQL command line you’re going to want to select your database like this

> use DATABASENAME;

then, you’re going to want to import your database from the old server

> source DATABASENAME.SQL;

wait a few seconds, you shouldn’t see any errors and then you’re done. You can exit the mysql command line now;

> exit;

Now you should have a perfectly working P202 installation, on your new server migrated from an old one.

Incase you’re wondering, no I did not go remove these settings – figured higher limits were good anyway – if they cause a problem on my server I’ll update this post for y’all.

Hope this helps someone else as I had to do a couple hours of searching, and testing to get all this sorted out.

Pretty straightforward really – I’m sorry to say this about OpenX because I really did like them for a number of years. Lately, they’re just shit. Yup, completely and utterly shit.

Ever since the name change to OpenX they’ve been going downhill, and I think nearly everyone in the community will agree with me – including some of their very own (former) developers.

Riddled with vulnerabilities, slow and non-required code and other problems we’ve probably all experienced with it. Not to mention no automatic optimization of your ad zones.

This past week, the final straw was picked. My OpenX installation was hacked, AFTER I had applied the latest security fix to it. Talking around to buddies, this happened to a number of people as well. I couldn’t believe it. Of course, I was venting my frustrations to one of my buddies and he told me he had recently switched from OpenX to Google DFP for the very same reasons.

I hadn’t even heard of Google DFP at the time. So, I went over to their site, logged in and got started creating my placements (websites), ad units (ad zones) and my orders (advertisers).

All I have to say is – WOW. It’s actually pretty cool. I remember the first times I was using OpenX it was quite complicated and difficult to understand how to setup the campaigns and the advertisers and ad units. Not so with DFP, just a few minutes of clicking and I figured it out.

Let’s take a look at the process for Google DFP versus OpenX shall we?

Google DFP Process:

1. Login using your existing Google or Google Applications account.
2. Click Inventory, Click Placements
3. Create a placement (eg. Sitename.com-Sidebar)
4. Click Ad Units
5. Create Ad Unit (eg. Sitename.com-Sidebar-Left-125×125)
6. Click Orders
7. Click New Order and add your advertiser, save it, then upload your image or html for the ad.
8. Click Inventory
9. Click ‘Generate Tags’ and copy the code to your page.
10. Wait 10-30 Minutes for Ads to Appear. You’re Done.

OpenX Process:

1. Buy a Domain name for OpenX
2. Buy Server Space for OpenX
3. Create OpenX Database
4. Install OpenX
5. Setup and Configure OpenX  (gfl if on windows hosting by the by)
6. Secure OpenX on your server.
7. Ensure Maintanance Mode is setup for OpenX so your ads will eventually display.
8. Now you can start setting up your ads.
9. First Click Inventory, Then click Websites & Zones
10. Add your website to OpenX
11. Add zones to your website
12. Now click back to Advertisers & Campaigns
13. Add an Advertiser
14. Add a Campaign to your new advertiser
15. Add some banners to your advertisers campaign
16. Set the zones in which your ads will appear  in banner configuration
17. Go back to Websites and Zones
18. Find your website and Zone
19. Click on it, then go to the fourth tab ‘invocation code’
20. Generate your invocation code
21. Go and paste it into your site along with any other relevant code
22. 10-60 minutes later your ads should start appearing.

As you can see OpenX requires a lot more clicks, typing and setup to get your ads and advertisers into the system. Nearly double in-fact. And it’s quite possible I’ve forgotten something here.

With Google DFP it’s actually much easier. Far fewer clicks are required and the added benefit that you can have it fall back to traditional Adsense ads if your network or in-house ads aren’t converting. As far as I understand their documentation the fallback will happen automatically if you select Adsense fallback when creating your ads.

There is one kind of major gotcha that I noticed thought. Due to Adsense terms and conditions, if you have more than 3 ad units on a page no ads will display, even if it’s just fallback to Adsense. Not too big of a deal but still something to note. I had to turn off Adsense fallback for all of my ads except one on the page and then all ads were displaying.

Bottom Line – Google DFP is quicker, easier, and probably far more secure than OpenX to use for your advertising delivery throughout your network. The only problems I’m having with it is the fact that it does sometimes crash Firefox or IE, but I haven’t had any problems with Chrome yet. I do wish they’d make a nice desktop application like they have for Adwords, but I’m sure that’s coming down the pipe.  One other thing I noticed is stats seem to take a long time to show up. As of this writing I’ve had DFP setup for two weeks and I still have no data available to create a report. I’m sure they’re still working out the last bugs in the system so this should be fixed soon.

Anyone else using DFP? What are your thoughts? Have you also migrated from OpenX? Let me know in the comments, I’m interested what others think of Google DFP vs OpenX.

Yup. I said it. And on top of that I also admit that it happened to me.

Rewind about to about 2 years ago when I first got into this industry and I kept saying ‘oh, $500 a month while I sleep would be good enough for me’ and I truly meant it – at that time. People kept telling me once I reached that point I would want more, and of course I didn’t believe them.

So much I’ve learned since then.

Once I was up to $500 a month I wanted that to be $1000, then I wanted it to be $3000 and etc. Well eventually I did reach that point and boy was I on flying. I was so happy with myself, spending money left and right, not really working, and just generally having fun with life. It was honestly the best 6+ months of my life. Did way more things than I had in the past, met a lot of new people, travelled to a bunch places and events and so much more.

This all sounds well and good so what’s the problem?

Cockiness.

Once I started surpassing the amount of money I wanted to earn per month ‘while I slept’ I basically stopped working, and just partied with friends. Sure, I did a bit of work here and there but nowhere near what was required to keep things a-float.

This ended up with me spending all my profits and not re-investing them in any new or, already successful ventures. Huge fucking mistake.

Classic mistake that probably everyone makes but nobody really wants to admit. We’ve all seen the warnings in forums and on IRC but I think a lot of us refuse to believe it will ‘happen to me’. Well, I’m here to tell you that it does, and probably will.

Let’s face it, when you aren’t making any significant money and then suddenly you’re making quite a bit of money while you sleep it’s pretty fucking fantastic. This makes it very easy to lose sight of the original goal, which for me anyway, is to make enough income passively to live and have fun without having to sit at a computer all the time.

This past month it’s really hit hard, with paying bills becoming troublesome etc. And, I’m basically right back to where I didn’t want to be – grinding 60-70 hours a week at the computer just to get back to where I was originally. Had I stuck with it, I’d probably still be down around 5-7 hours of work a week to attain the same financial benefit.

All in all, great lesson learned. I wish I wouldn’t have had to learn it this way, but overall it’s probably best I did because nothing teaches like experience. Take it from me guys (and, gals) don’t get cocky when you start profiting, and keep at it, cause surer than shit something will fail and you’ll go from making thousands, to nothing, literally overnight.

What came in the file?

An executable, some text files, the license, and a pretty boring Readme file. I understand this program was made by a programmer, so documentation will by default be lackluster; however the documentation for this is pretty much nonexistent. If you don’t know what you’re doing I could see this getting a bit confusing (and, from some of the comments in the forum thread for the program, it’s apparent that it is). But, if you

First Impressions

First off, I must say the threading is incredible. It did bog down my computer a little bit when I would put it up to 100+ threads, but that’s fine if doing it overnight and nothing else is running. When running with more than 10 threads, I did experience problems in Ableton Live and Reason though, so it is something to note. Especially since I’m running on a Quad Core with 4GB of Ram.

What’s It Do?

So, what’s the program all about? Simple really, you load into it a list of your links, and optionally some spun titles, and it will run through your list and submit them to the common services out there to hopefully aid you in getting quick and relevant backlinks (depending on your titles, and submissions of course).

Does It Support Proxies?

The other great thing about this program is the option of using proxies. I used scrapebox to sort my list of proxies, and then I just loaded the same file in MegaPinger and was instantly sending my pings out through proxies instead of direct to the site from my lowly cable modem. Great stuff.

First Run

I tested it out on some small link lists, and everything worked great including the title spinning for submissions. Then I decided I should put it to the real test, and I loaded up my list of all links from the past little while (around ~4400 of them).  This told me there was about 398912 pings to be sent out, and gave me a fancy little progress bar.

Then I loaded my list of proxies into Megapinger and set it to run. These proxies are kept in a simple text file in the MegaPinger directory. Along with the failed and succeeded ping lists text file that you can refer to later.

I let this run, and kept an eye on the CPU usage and memory usage, and it was pretty constant to what this screenshot shows below.

This process took about 24 hours to run, if I kept it down at 50 threads. When I increased it I was up to about 300 pings a minute, so the time went drastically down. So far so good. Much quicker than any other pinger I’ve used and I’m sure I could have tossed it up to 500 threads and got upwards of 800 pings a minute with fast proxies, but I didn’t have time to test that much.

Problems

I did notice a slight issue, that if you pause the pinger and start it again, for some reason it would double my ‘left to be pinged’ list, and thusly re-ping all the sites it had already done. Minor annoyance since I don’t really pause MegaPinger, but something to note.

As of this writing a support ticket, and message has been sent on the forum to Mattseh without a reply (but it hasn’t been very long! ).

Overall

MegaPinger is a Great product with a great price. Aside from the small bug mentioned above I don’t see why you shouldn’t be using this to ping your links.

I’m not going to get into whether pinging is worth it or not, there are many sides to that argument, which you guys can discuss in the comments

Basically he got the full Canadian experience. Including but not limited to real beer, seeing bears and deer in the wild north, eating poutine, French pornography on TV at all hours of the day and of course Canadian Cigarettes.

Now, you may be wondering, why is this important?

It’s Simple, Really…

Face to face conversations generally mean much more than any electronic mediums – especially when building business relationships. Why do you think that people still fly from New York to Tokyo to meet business associates, sometimes even for seemingly unimportant meetings? That’s right, it’s because more can get discussed, drawn on napkins, explained with hand gestures or even reading micro expressions in person than online. All of this obviously leads to stronger relationships, and ultimately more money down the road.

While it’s easy to converse using instant messaging, telephone and other electronic methods they aren’t always the best. Talking face to face, often leads to more in-depth discussions, and aides in the level of trust that each person or business entity gives to each other.  Not to mention the fact that it seems every cat in this industry has ADD or ADHD, so jumping back and forth from topic to topic in real life can be easier to follow than online with the constant scroll. It sounds silly, but if you think about it I think you’ll probably realize it’s true for you too – why else would you pay all that money to attend the various conferences?

I do think that electronic communications are great for quick ‘hey, what was that offer again’ type things, but when getting right down to discussing business more can be accomplished in 2 hours of talking over beer than often can be done with 10 hours of IRC or Instant Messaging.

I think we got more conducted in 9 days, than we had for the past 2 to 3 months online. For real.

Why did I write this post? Because I think that many in the industry, especially the younger folk take face to face meetings for granted, and would prefer everything to be electronic. When I was younger, I remember my dad telling me to ‘make friends with your banker, don’t do everything electronically’ and that advice has saved me thousands of dollars. The same principle applies to affiliates or any business really. Getting to know someone in real life is better than just being a client number or contact on MSN.

Last night I was practicing my DJ’ing and at about 2AM a text message came into my phone from a phone number located in british columbia, but with no name associated with it. The text message said;

“Way to go dickwad, posting your phone number on facebook for all to see, you loser”

To which of course, I replied with

“Huh?”

And I immediately received this auto reply

“Welcome to Twilio SMS. For more information, see http://twilio.com/sms“

Maybe this is an old technique, but I’m not so sure. It looks to me like they’re scraping, or otherwise gathering information from Facebook users and spamming their cellphones. Using messages like this will surely invoke a response from most people, and apparently automatically sign them up to this Twilio service.

Brilliant? Kind of. Until they get caught.

Have you seen shit like this before?

Just the other day, it occurred to me that there’s only a only a few short months left before Affiliate Summit East is happening and that it’s just about time to start thinking about it again.

Last year was a blast, and my first ever conference in the Affiliate/Internet marketing industries so I was pretty green and didn’t really know what to expect. Now that I’ve been to a few other conferences and know a lot more about the industry, its politics and the people involved I’m sure it will be even better than my experience was last year.

This year I’m hoping to conduct a little more business and sight-seeing than partying. I’ve been to New York several times but never really took the opportunity to travel around the city seeing some of the more popular things so that should be fun and also a little easier on the liver than last year. Not to mention the pocketbook – 40$ for two gin and tonics, WTF?!@?

With parties having guest appearances by people like Biz Markie it’s certainly hard to not get caught up in running around town all night partying with your friends. Alas, one should remember that the primary goal of any conference is to meet people, get new ideas, and discuss business whether it be deals, mergers, or simply ideas for the future whether collaborative or not.

Last year I didn’t spend much time at the conference itself, instead I went through the exhibit floor meeting many of the networks and affiliates. However, I was still hesitant as to what I should have been asking or even talking about because I was still relatively new to the industry. So, instead I kind of sat back and watched as my Internet buddies did the talking and I absorbed the information I needed.

This changes as you hit more conferences and meet more people while of course learning more about the industry. This year I expect it to be even better than the past Affiliate Summit’s I’ve attended because I personally know more about the industry as a whole.

Flatly, this year can only be better because last time was fucking rad and I was newb.

This year I intend to meet more people on the floor and probably visit a few or more sessions if I can to see what trends the more experienced people are talking about, and just to network a little further into the scene. While the forum crowd is a great resource and many friends can be made, I’ve certainly met other people on a whim at a conference that have turned out to be better partners or friends.

Looking forward to seeing you all again, I’m sure I’ll think of more to write sooner to the conference.

And now, back to el’ grind.