Category Archives: Tony

Tony is one half of Debbie And Tony and write about many different topics, including Technology and Travel, Photography and Poetry, Ancient History and also what is going on in the lives of Tony And Debbie.

Article Publishing Summary 23rd May 2011

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This is a summary of my publishing activity during the last week, as well as the status of my lenses on Squidoo and my reviews on Best Reviewer.

I hope you will take a look at them and also hope that you enjoy them.

Yahoo Contributor Network

This is what I have published in the last week, enjoy:

  • The Day We Almost Won the Lottery

    Buying a lottery ticket can be an exciting experience, one that is filled with the anticipation of how your life could change if you won the jackpot. This is a story about how we almost won the lottery.
  • Could These Chinese Villagers Be Descendants of Roman Legionnaires?

    There are stories of a Roman Legion led my Marcus Crassus that was defeated in what is now Iran in 53BC. Is it possible that survivors made their way to China and settled there. People in one village have Caucasian DNA as well as Caucasian features.
  • What Happens when a Cop Steps Out of Bounds

    Police Officers are expected to respect the law like everyone else, and to help prevent crime, but sometimes they misuse their powers when something happens in their personal life. This is one of those stories.
  • Should Having Children Be Something You Earn and Not a Right?

    Society today has created groups of people who have children because they are careless as well as those who have children purely to get additional child benefits. Is our future one where being a parent might be a status that you have to earn.
  • White Tiger on the Loose a Local Offbeat News Story

    Reports that a white tiger has been spotted on the outskirts of the city you live in are not what you want to hear on the news. This is what happened in our city this weekend, but as usual things are not always what they seem in this offbeat news story.

 My traffic on Yahoo Contributor Network has really taken a dive lately, which is one reason why I quit publishing my News From A Weird World series last week.  I hope to restart this if my article popularity picks up, but writing has to be worth the effort in any case, unless it’s just for my benefit to document things of course.

You can also Click Here to see my latest articles up to date, rather than wait for the next summary posting.

Squidoo

These are my Top 5 ranked lenses on Squidoo:

I also recently created the following lenses on Squidoo:

 

Best Reviewer

Best-Reviewer allows you to create review lists and to get paid using Google Adsense Revenue Sharing.

These are the most recent Best Reviews that I have created:

 

If you yould like to create reviews of your own and earn through Google Adsense, it’s very easy, and many reviews only take 5 minutes to create.  Click HERE for more information.

Do The Taskbar Shuffle

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I don’t know about you, but when I power on my PC, I always open tasks in the same order, and expect to see the tabs in the taskbar appear in the same sequence.

Have you ever found that for some unknown reason Windows resequences these tasks for you, and it’s impossible to change the sequence back?

Yes I know, call me anal retentive, but I am a creature of habit ok, and it really annoys the heck out of me!

I have even gone as far as to close all the tasks and re-open them, which is annoying when you have a lot of browser tabs open.

Apparently Microsoft have fixed this in Windows 7, and users can now drag the tabs to the order that they want, but help is also at hand for those of us using Vista or even XP (like me).

A small FREE program called Taskbar  Shuffle provides this functionality, and it’s just brightened up my day, having seen my 8 open programs do a quick random reordering.

It’s easy to install, did I say FREE, it’s free of viruses too, and you can download it from the Nerdcave.

Give it a whirl and let me know what you think.

Article Publishing Summary 16th May 2011

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This is a summary of my publishing activity during the last week, as well as the status of my lenses on Squidoo and my reviews on Best Reviewer.

I have felt pretty drained both mentally and physically in the last week, and so the number of articles I have written is less than normal.  I also had a stressful time trying to book flights and accomodation in Florida for our summer trip, but now that these are done, I can hopefully relax a bit.

I write on a number of topics, usually it depends on what comes into my head on any given day, so it could be a travel story, memoirs from my life, something from the daily news, or even a poem inspired by something.

I hope you will take a look at them and also enjoy them.

Yahoo Contributor Network

This is what I have published in the last week, enjoy:

 My traffic on Yahoo Contributor Network has really taken a dive lately, which is one reason why I quit publishing my News From A Weird World series last week.  I hope to restart this if my article popularity picks up, but writing has to be worth the effort in any case, unless it’s just for my benefit to document things of course.

You can also Click Here to see my latest articles up to date, rather than wait for the next summary posting.

Squidoo

These are my Top 5 ranked lenses on Squidoo:

I also recently created the following lenses on Squidoo:

 

Best Reviewer

Best-Reviewer allows you to create review lists and to get paid using Google Adsense Revenue Sharing.

These are the most recent Best Reviews that I have created:

 

If you yould like to create reviews of your own and earn through Google Adsense, it’s very easy, and many reviews only take 5 minutes to create.  Click HERE for more information.

Google Really Doesn’t Like Yahoo And It’s Hurting My Earnings

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It’s common knowledge that there is little love lost between the two search engine giants Google and Yahoo, but in recent months when Google modified their search engine placement algorithm, it seems that among the sites that have taken a huge hit is Yahoo.

Google’s claim is that it is trying to lower the relevance of “Content Farms” in it’s search engine, but if like me you are a writer on the Yahoo Contributor Network (or YCN for short), you will have seen traffic to your articles drop as much as 70% in the last few months.

It’s easy to see that Yahoo articles are either not listed, or listed low in the list of pages, if you search on Google for the exact phrase “News From A Weird World”.  This is a series that I have published on YCN every Wednesday for the last 15 months.  If you look at the domains that are showing up in Google, it’s places where links to my articles have either been added manually by myself, or have been added through RSS Feeds.

The first site that I see is Redgage, where I manually added a link to the article.

Then there are 2 links to Delovesto.com, my main blog, where I also add links to these manually.

Thirdly, we have my blog on Blogspot, where I sometimes add links manually.

Next, She Told Me, which is an Adsense Revenue Sharing site where I share many of my articles.

Then we come to The Laughline, my humor site, where you guessed it, I manually added a link to my articles.

Are we seeing a picture here?

Next comes Zimbio, where links to all my articles are submitted via RSS Feed.

After this is a Squidcast (news item) that I sent out about my Squidoo lens that is an index page for News From A Weird World.  Google does by the way love Squidoo.

Finally, a single entry for YCN at the end of the first page of Google, and it’s for an older article published in February.

The second page on Google lists 2 entries from Digg,  2 more from Zimbio, one from Stumpedia (manual submission), and then one from Qondio, another writing site where I had written an article about Offbeat News items and linked to my News From A Weird World lens on Squidoo.

Another entry for Delovesto.com and one for Redgage.com completes the second page on Google.

But where are the remaining 60+ News From A Weird World articles that I published on YCN?

The third page on Google begins with my Squidoo lens Offbeat News, the predecessor of News From A Weird World, then Zimbio, Redgage, and several sites that copy the introduction to articles but do at least link to the main article instead of plagiarizing them.

Finally on this page, a ca.news.yahoo.com search page that no longer exists.  Bizarre!  All of these come before all but one of my original articles on YCN.

The good news is that there are 2 more listings for News From A Weird World from YCN on the fourth page of Google, but who is going to look that far down?  Also on that page are what looks like more plagiarized versions.

In total, only 3 or 4 out of 60 of the original articles seem to be included on Google, which is really poor.

Many other writers are experiencing the same thing, so maybe it’s time to look at writing elsewhere, somewhere that my articles do get well listed on Google, and I think that this list shows very well which some of these sites might be.

There are more ways than one to earn money from writing.   You can get an up front payment (nice to have), payment based on traffic (which is what I have mostly been getting from YCN), and you can earn from Affiliate links and advertising like Google Adsense (which I do on my blogs, as well as on other sites where my articles are to be found.

At the end of the day the key is TRAFFIC!  Without traffic you aren’t going to see earnings, and traffic is very much dependent on search engine placement.

If the site that you are writing on is getting penalized by Google, then no matter how good the SEO is on your articles, traffic will suffer.

I would definitely be interested to hear feedback from anyone else who is a writer and who is experiencing similar problems.  It’s always good to know places to write where search engine listing is good, and where earnings are generally better.

Article Publishing Summary 9th May 2011

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This is a summary of my publishing activity during the last week, as well as the status of my lenses on Squidoo and my reviews on Best Reviewer.

I write on a number of topics, usually it depends on what comes into my head on any given day, so it could be a travel story, memoirs from my life, something from the daily news, or even a poem inspired by something.

During the month of April I wrote fewer articles than usual on the Yahoo Contributor Network, because of the A-Z April Blogging Challenge, and I have instead been busy writing articles on our blog here.  The challenge is now over (I completed it successfully) and it’s time to see what project takes my fancy in May.

I hope you will take a look at them and also enjoy them.

Yahoo Contributor Network

This is what I have published in the last week, enjoy:

  • News from a Weird World : Offbeat News 4 May 2011

    In News From A Weird World this week, you can find the following stories: Australian learners go for world record, Nude cyclist arrested, Deaf men stabbed in bar, How not to deal with noisy neighbors, When paying your respects isn’t safe and more.
  • An Evil Monster Could Live on My Street How Would I Know
    Where do criminals hide? It’s not always where you would expect, therefore can the Pakistani government be criticised for not knowing that Osama Bin Laden was living where he was, right under their noses.

 

You can also Click Here to see my latest articles up to date, rather than wait for the next summary posting.

Squidoo

These are my Top 5 ranked lenses on Squidoo:

I also recently created the following lenses on Squidoo:

 

Best Reviewer

Best-Reviewer allows you to create review lists and to get paid using Google Adsense Revenue Sharing.

These are the most recent Best Reviews that I have created:

 

If you yould like to create reviews of your own and earn through Google Adsense, it’s very easy, and many reviews only take 5 minutes to create.  Click HERE for more information.

Promote Your Content And Earn With Redgage

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Get Paid For Uploading Pictures Videos Articles and Links with RedgageHave you heard of Redgage yet?

Whether you are a writer/blogger, photographer, own an online store where you sell products, you will be aware of the need to promote your content in order to get backlinks, which are vital if your content is to get a good position in the search engines.

Practically everyone has heard of sites like Twitter, Digg, Delicious etc, which are widely used for promoting content, but a site called Redgage is far less well known.

Redgage is a content directory that allows you to add Articles, Pictures, Videos and also Links to content that is held elsewhere, and not only does Redgage give you backlinks, they also pay you in various ways, so you can earn as well.

The primary method of earning is by accruing money through page views on the content that you have uploaded to Redgage.  In other words, you get paid every time a visitor accesses anything that you have uploaded.

You can also get paid a Bonus if an article that you wrote on Redgage is featured on the front page.  These bonuses can add up, and also being featured on the front page, the earnings from page views also add up.

Redgage also have a daily drawing for a $25 gift card.  To enter the drawing, you need to acquire raffle tickets, which you can do by uploading Knowledge Based Content to Redgage, by referring people to Redgage, or by referencing Redgage in an external article (see HERE for more information).

By now I am sure you are wondering how you get paid with Redgage.

Once your earnings reach $25, you can apply for a Redgage Visa Debit Card, which they will sent to your home, anywhere in the world.

You can then keep topping up the debit card with your earnings, and of course you can use it to buy just about anything, as Visa is universally accepted worldwide.

Hopefully I have sparked your interest, and if you would like to know more about Redgage, just visit their HOME PAGE.

Oh yes – Redgage is of course FREE to join, and it’s perfect for promoting articles or blog posts, photographs, videos, Squidoo lenses, items in your Zazzle store etc.

Article Publishing Summary 2nd May 2011

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This is a summary of my publishing activity during the last week, as well as the status of my lenses on Squidoo and my reviews on Best Reviewer. 

I write on a number of topics, usually it depends on what comes into my head on any given day, so it could be a travel story, memoirs from my life, something from the daily news, or even a poem inspired by something. 

During the month of April I wrote fewer articles than usual on the Yahoo Contributor Network, because of the A-Z April Blogging Challenge, and I have instead been busy writing articles on our blog here.  The challenge is now over (I completed it successfully) and it’s time to see what project takes my fancy in May.

I hope you will take a look at them and also enjoy them. 

Yahoo Contributor Network

This is what I have published in the last week, enjoy: 

  • News from a Weird World : Offbeat News 27 April 2011

    In News From A Weird World this week, you can find the following stories: Sex in space myth or fact, Who is not invited to the Royal Wedding, Knitting The Royal Wedding Party, Big Brother Is Watching You, Remote control robbery doesn’t pay and more.
  • Where Can You Ask the Barman for a Pint of Piddle?

    In the middle of the South Coast of England lie a handful of villages on the River Piddle. Their names were changed in Victorian times to avoid embarrassment, but now the name is proving to be trendy, with local Beers named after the area.

 

You can also Click Here to see my latest articles up to date, rather than wait for the next summary posting.

Squidoo

These are my Top 5 ranked lenses on Squidoo: 

I also recently created the following lenses on Squidoo:

 

Best Reviewer

Best-Reviewer allows you to create review lists and to get paid using Google Adsense Revenue Sharing. 

These are the most recent Best Reviews that I have created: 

 If you yould like to create reviews of your own and earn through Google Adsense, it’s very easy, and many reviews only take 5 minutes to create.  Click HERE for more information.

Creating A Sticky Post In WordPress

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Sometimes it’s helpful to create a sticky post in your blog, one that stays at the top of the home page and appears as the first post.  Actually, sometimes it’s useful to have several sticky posts, but just how do you create these?

Simples if you know how…

Wordpress Sticky Post

If you are creating a post in WordPress, the top right of the screen ought to look like this image above.

To create a Sticky Post, click on the Edit field to the right of where it says Visibility: Public, and the screen should change to look like the image below.

Wordpress Sticky Post

All you need to do to make your post a Sticky one, is to check the box that says Stick this post to the front page and then click on OK.

You can easily test this by modifying an older post, making it sticky, and then viewing the home page for your blog. 

To stop a post from being sticky?  Well I will leave you to figure that out…

How To Schedule A Post In WordPress

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The ability to be able to schedule a post in any software package that is used for blogging comes in very handy, especially if you want to be able to write posts in advance and then to have them published at a pre-determined date and time.

Just how you schedule a post in WordPress isn’t that obvious to some people though, but this short illustrated tutorial should have you scheduling your posts easily from now on.

How To Schedule A Post In WordPress

When composing a new post, the top right side of the screen should look similar to the image above.

Click on the link that says Edit to the right of Publish Immediately, and the display will change to show the Date and Time that you want your post to be scheduled as below.

How To Schedule A Post In WordPress

All that you need to do in order to schedule your post is to change the date and/or time, click the OK button, and that’s it.  Simples…

One word of advice, if you are going to schedule posts in advance, you should always make sure that your wordpress blog has been set to the correct time zone.

You can do this on the General tab under Settings on the Dashboard.

The A-Z April Blogging Challenge

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Along with around 1,500 other writers I have been publishing articles in April as part of a challenge to write 26 articles, each with a theme of a different letter of the alphabet, beginning at A and working through to Z with each successive day.

A-Z Blogging Challenge

There are no prizes, just the feeling that you have accomplished something when you complete the mission, plus having 26 more articles on your blog, and hopefully some more regular followers.

So What Did I Write About

Beginning with the letter A on April 1st, here are the articles that I have written for the challenge so far:

A Is For April – which means April Fools Day, practical jokes, and a quick summary of the A-Z Blogging Challenge.

B Is For Brain Tumor – which my wife was diagnosed with in January, and has now almost fully recovered from thankfully.

C Is For Come Find Me – where can you find me on the internet.  If you would like to follow me on other sites like Facebook, Twitter or Stumbleupon, here is where I am.

D Is For Dine With Me – which discusses various articles that I have written about food and dining.

E Is For Evony – one of the most addictive multi-player games online.  Here I dealt with the addiction that my wife and I both had, and how games like Evony can destroy your lives.

F Is For Fish & Chips – the Great British Takeaway meal, and with my wife having spent some time in her grandparents Fish & Chip shop when she was growing up, a subject that she knows a lot about.

G Is For Gloomy Mornings – don’t you just hate waking up when it’s still dark and you look up to see just a grey sky full of threatening rain clouds.

H Is For History – one of my favourite subjects at school and ever since.  I especially love ancient history, and here my followers get to find out what it was that first interested me in history.

I Is For International Calls – which used to cost a small fortune, but which if you know what to look out for when buying an international calling card can now cost less than an inter-state phone call.

J Is For Jamaica – which is about my first trip to Jamaica in 1989 to install a computer system for one of the petroleum companies, but it’s not about work, it’s about my experiences there and my travels around the island.

K Is For Kingston Jamaica: That Is – ja mon!  This article goes on to describe more of my travels around the island of Jamaica and what it was like to be working in Kingston.

L Is For Lime Cay In Jamaica – the final part of my trip to Jamaica describes the pirate town of Port Royal, a visit to paradise at Lime Cay, and getting stranded adrift in the middle of the sea in a small boat.

M Is For Money Can It Make You Happy – which asks the question that if money is the root of all evil, why sometimes you need money to be happy.

N Is For Nuts! – which means anything from peanuts and cashews to an expression that was made famous during the Battle Of The Bulge.

Oh Dear My Muse Has Left Me – and how to overcome that dreaded phenomenon otherwise known as Writers Block.

P Is For Payne – not PAIN, PAINE or any other spelling forms…

Q Is For Queue – it’s just something that British folk do…

R Is For Reverse – meaning a change of direction, and this article changes direction after inspiration from an unexpected source…

S Is For Spam Comments – just something that has become a fact of life these days, but we can deal with it if we choose.

T Is For Today – I didn’t want to write my “T” post about the same thing as everyone else, and I wasn’t sure what to write about, so I thought “why not Today”.

U Is For Upside The Head – one of those phrases that really winds me up and makes me see red.

V Is For Vampire Woman – let the freak show begin as strange people try to change themselves to look demonic.

W Is For Wedding – and in 2 days time it’s the Royal Wedding, a huge celebration in the UK.

X Is For Xylophone – that often forgotten musical instrument, related to the Marimba that originated in Africa, and that is very entertaining to see someone play.

Y Is For Yawning – what is it that causes us to yawn? Is there a scientific reason?

Z Is For Zecharia Sitchin – a man who probably came closer than anyone to unraveling the mysteries of man’s most ancient times.

Whether you are a new visitor to Off The Record or whether you have been reading my articles for a while, I hope to see you back here reading my future articles, and if you do like them, please leave a comment, and help by sharing them.  You can find a Share button at the end of each article.