Ironically, I now have a real job with a real W2.  I am now a teacher at a Technical College.  It’s all doing about the same things, except now I have really good insurance and a much steadier paycheck.  However as most of you will no doubt point out, it’s still not doing the things that I would really enjoy doing with my work day.

On the positive note, this should give extra negative motivation to break out of career I’m in and get into something I want to be in.  For once in life I would like to do, think, ponder, and act about only one thing during my day.

So, in a way this is starting over in the quest for the REAL last W2.

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His work wasn’t very extensive.  It was just a bunch of gibberish on the home page article.  I didn’t see any other mischief so I went to log in and clean it up.  It had been a long time since I’d logged into this site and autocomplete didn’t budge. I dug my password out of my Password Corral and entered it to no avail.  What’s up now?  I had a hard time believing a hacker would gain access, change my password, and then only put up a gibberish article on the front page with no links anywhere.  Must have changed it myself and then just not entered it into Corral.  No matter.

I then started the task of searching out how to reset the admin password in Joomla.  Of course Wordpress has a link on the login page to send you a new password when you forget your keys and lock yourself out.  I am not sure why this feature hasn’t found it’s way into Joomla.  To complicate matters the password handling procedure somehow changed between versions way back so you have to find the right article to get help.

Conventional Wisdom

In a nutshell, the process is simple.  The password is in the database all hashed up in MD5, I think.  It is ‘unhashable’ but most articles suggest that it is way easier to just insert a known hashed password into the database and change it that way.

That had been my preferred method, however since it has been a while since I have a.) used Joomla much and therefore, b.) locked myself out, I couldn’t find my list of known hashed passwords that I had complied for just such emergencies.

Generic hashed passwords can be found in the Joomla help forums or you can Google up MD5 Hash generators like the one at Miracle Salad.  Put in your intended password and it generates the hash you will need for the database.

For Example:

password    5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99
ninja             3899dcbab79f92af727c2190bbd8abc5

Very good, now what?

Most will tell you that now the database for your Joomla site has to be modified a bit by pasting the known hash into your database to get your locked-out self back in.  This assumes you have access to your database and can navigate around phpMyAdmin.

Easier Approach

There is, however, a much easier and much faster approach to this problem.

Disclaimer.  If you totally destroy your database and therefore your site, by poking around the database then don’t blame me.  Like with messing around with the Windows Registry, back the stupid thing up before you start.

Log into you control panel and fire up phpMyAdmin.  On the left is a list of all  your databases assuming there are more than one.  Click on the one your Joomla site uses. On the left again is now a list of tables in the selected database.   Look for jos_users or whatever prefix you had Joomla use when you installed.  Click on users and in the right side of phpMyAdmin, click on the browse tab.  The screen should then have a list of the site users, one being ‘administrator’. Click the little pencil near administrator.

Then next screen you see should have tables with the admin name and password hash amongst many other things.  On the line called user_pass, in the field under Value, simply enter the password you want to use in plain language.  Then in the dropdown to the left under Function click MD5.  Click Go to save your work.

Go Try It Out

Now open up a new tab and try your log in with the password you just entered.  Should work great.  phpMyAdmin should have automatically hashed it for you. Mine did last night.  No messing with hash generators and no searching for notes of the generic password hashes you saved from last time.  Now, exit phpMyAdmin before you bump something and kill it all.

When you do your first WordPress MU install  one of the first nuisances you run into is the lack of a theme editor “out of the box”.  A quick trip around Google will inform you that it is a huge security hole to enable an editor in WPMU.

Being a fairly unpopular fellow, my WPMU installs have an amazing lack of real users, so I really don’t have many security fears.  So, dang it, give me my editor back.

Several blogs offer the answer.  Simply open admin/includes/mu.php and get yourself down to line 530 (in PSPad anyway) to find:

unset( $submenu['themes.php'][10] ); // always remove the themes editor

This line prevents the editor from being loaded. Either comment or delete this line.  Save and re-upload.

You’re supposed to now be in business.  However, on my sites, I find that, yes I do now have a link in the backend for the Editor, but when I click it, the next page says ‘Disabled’.

I quizzed my code guru buddies in IRC and found no one n00b enough like me to use the theme editor.

Anyway, to get to the point, I noticed the file returning the  ‘Disabled’ message was theme-editor.php.  The WordPress powers that be are pretty much opposed to theme editing and yet they ship with this file.  I poked around it a bit and noticed this:

require_once(’admin.php’);
wp_die( ‘Disabled’ );
$title = __(”Edit Themes”);
$parent_file = ‘themes.php’;

Either comment or delete the “wp_die( ‘Disabled’ );”  at line 11 or so.  This will allow the editor to load up and you’re then on your way.

Good luck with it.

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The fascinating thing here is not Susan’s bushing eyebrows or nice voice or peoples inherent rudeness these days.  The really fascinating thing is the speed at which here fame and demand exploded.

A few years ago a hot new talent ot emerge on a British talent show may have gained world attention after a few weeks or months or maybe years.  When I first became aware of Charlotte Church she was maybe 14.  That was several years after her big ‘debut’.  When Susan Boyle hit the stage, Susan Boyle also hit Youtube and the social networks.  It’s now been a week since her performance and the video on Youtube now has over 31 million views.  Thats one version of it.  There are others on you tube.  That’s 31 million views in a week.  That’s what you call VIRAL.

Gary Vaynerchuk put it best in the keynote address at Affiliate Summit West in Vegas back in January, when he said the gate keepers of media have now been removed. There doesn’t have to be some high and mighty person across the desk who decides if your stuff is good enough for the world to want.  Now can put your own stuff out there and let the world decide it it is what it wants.

The world is wanting more of Susan Boyle.  Yes, her demand may be short lived, as some predict, but she will undoubtedly retain a cult following for many, many years to come.  It’s the power of Social Media.  The world decides what it wants and what it is willing to pay for.

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What does this have to do with Internet Marketing? Probably nothing, but one particularly obnoxious tune in the movie was where the Friends were doubting where they were and Rabbit was sure that all they had to do was follow the map.  Remember, though, that the map was just something hastily drawn up by Owl, the perceived authority.

Rabbit sang:

Never trust your ears
Your nose, your eyes
Putting faith in them
Is most unwise
Here’s a phrase you all
Must memorise
In the printed word
Is where truth lies

If it says so
Then it is so
If it is so
Well so it is
A thought’s not fit to think
‘Til it’s printed in ink
Then it says so
So it is

Never trust that thing
Between your ears
Brains will get you nowhere fast
My dears
Haven’t had a need
For mine in years
On the page is where
The truth appears

That’s the mentality of normal people when it comes to the internet. If it says so, then it is so.  They see Jenny lose weight and blog about it with the Dynamic Duo available to try for free and they eat it up.

Then Sally, then Jessica, then Becky, all the same pictures all the same stories, all the same offers. They see Brian and Jeff and Mike all rake in thousand’s with Obama grants and line up for theirs. If it says then it is so.

Aff Marketers are so quick to capitalize on this mass naivete to the detriment of us all. Fleece them for a few months with this, until they wise up, then fleece them with this other thing for a few months till they figure it out.

How long will it be before the common folk all say “Buyer Beware”?

The internet is a gold mine.  The sheer population numbers involved stagger the imagination.  Just a dollar from each person online today would more than set anyone up for life.  If we kill the goose to get our golden eggs quicker, there may not be any more eggs for anyone, ever, and then won’t we look real stupid.

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Right.

Well, I have this small site I created for a local band.  Decent little community.  With the proliferation of Xrumer the poor guest book was taking a beating. More and more spam until this last week I would clean it out in the morning and find a dozen more by evening.  Finally, I broke down and did some upgrades to the security.  In all the haste to get this non-profit chore done, the tables got overwritten and all of the last two year’s worth of entries were gone in a flash.

Bummer. Surely they will understand. The band , I mean.

This story has a less than unhappy ending.

I could find no sql dumps for this site anywhere, though I know I had made them at one time. Hey, half a guest book is better than none at all. I even called Godaddy.  They have a recent backup, right?  Yes they do.  And for a mere $150.00 USD they will be glad to send you  a copy.  One more reason to get the heck off of Godaddy’s tit.

Then the bright idea hit me.  Check the Google cache. A quick site: search and surely enough the spiders had been there last week.  I printed out dozens of pages of now precious entries which can be manually re-entered. Whew.

Moral of the story for me.  You can’t be in this business and be very lazy.  There are lots of little details that either have to be attended to to personally or they have to be delegated.  Ignoring such details is begging them to bite you in the butt.  Even the small details.

Then, there’s the process of finding someone successful to *cough* copy *cough* (ripoff).  You do a Google search of your intended keywords and then start immediately clicking the Sponsored Ads in the right pane of Google SERPS.  Got to check out the old competition, right?  Well, yes that is true.  Know thine enemy.  Not everyone knows, though, or stops to consider that every click on those links costs somebody some cash.  This is, after all, PPC — Pay Per Click.

While you’re looking for campaigns and landing pages to jack, you’re jerking the cash right out of your competitors pockets.  And it’s a good chance that it’s probably somebody you pester with stupid n00b questions in the chat channels.  You get stuff to steal, Google makes a little bit and the poor aff marketeer loses money and potential market share.

Tip 1:  AT LEAST right click on the add, Copy Link Location (assuming you’re smart enough to use Firefox) THEN copy the link into the address bar.  Strip the link down to its location and then go there and steal them blind.

OR better yet.

Tip 2:  Download the SEOBook Toolbar.  It’s a very useful toolbar that will automatically display backlinks, Yahoo linkdomain info, PR, etc.  The best feature is on the Competition part: Show PPC Destination URLS.  When it is active, the destination URL of the Google Sponsored Ads is listed under the ad.  You can then easily visit and get ideas without costing the hard working, non-douchebag, aff marketer a ton of clicks for your laziness.

Get the toolbar and quit being quite as big a douche.

It’s true, that this business can be started and a basic amount of success can be had, with a basic set of skills.  But that is the end of it.  You can’t outsource everything, forever.

Here’s a list of basic commitments in knowledge that have to be made.

• HTML or XHTML The basic language of the web.  A must have.
• CSS Cascading Style Sheets.  The thing that pretty much makes the place look like it does.  Yes, a site can be thrown up with Wordpress or Joomla and a theme used right off the shelf, but do you really think you need to look just like everyone else that grabs things ‘off the shelf’?  Even basic color changes and font adjustments take a small amount of CSS handling.
• Image Editing I know, images can all be bought or scraped somewhere, but there comes a time when they need resized, cropped, or whatever to make them more effective.
• PHP Familiarity with a server side language will need to happen eventually.  Sometimes a tweak is all some plugin needs to be made more effective.  If you don’t know how it works on a basic level it’s hard to be creative with what you need to get done and communicate it to your outsourced programmers.

Understand that some of the brightest competition in this space are people that have been in this game (internet) since they were kids or are college trained computer geeks.  It’s hard to come into this battle arena and fight to win against such opponents.

The good news is that you don’t have to have those skills to get started. Wordpress on shared hosting is so simple.  Getting offers to promote at various networks and buying some clicks is not hard.  All it takes is a bit of cash to get you rolling.  But before too long you will find out that, ultimately, the learning curve is steep.

Be prepared to invest in yourself.

Eric

The Summit 09 was in Las Vegas again.  For someone who had neither been to Vegas nor an Affiliate Summit, it was a grueling 3 days.  I’ll be posting more in the next few days about different aspects of the summit and the various people I was able to meet and what I perceived to be the value of the whole experience.

Til then,

Eric