Hmmmm…. I scratched my head for a few hours.  Visited some forums, including WordPress.org’s own forum, and people were definitely posting the problem.  But nobody was giving  any helpful information.  In fact, I saw some serious blind leading the blind, and one poor bloke got talked into deleting his whole web site AND disgarding his database (OW!), and starting all over, trashing hundreds of articles.   I was dumbfounded at that, but not that dumb.

So, even though it was a known issue, there was no known “fix” for it, because it is actually a “feature” of the php language WordPress is written in!  Yup.  If the code somehow gets cross threaded and the web server can’t decide exactly what to display — you get a blank slate.   And it’s not just WordPress.  It’s Joomla, Drupal, and any other content management system that is written in php.

So I stepped through and treated it as if I’d been hacked, and using ordinary FTP, stepped backwards one step to the previous version of WordPress, by replacing my 3.0 code with a clean copy of the 2.9 code.  Amazingly, no luck!   Well, it had to be in the plugins then, so using FTP, I simply renamed the plugins directory so WordPress would assume there were no plugins that day.  Voila.  I could see the admin login page

Now the next step was to go through the plugins one by one, and replace them with fresh code.  Well, what did you know – some of them are no longer available from WordPress.  They must have been no longer compatible with the most recent version of WordPress, and got “retired”.   One by one I replaced each plugin with its most modern self, or a replacement for it (since WordPress offers 4000 plugins anyway).  I finally realized what the two sites that had failed had in common — In both of them, I had replaced the ordinary “TinyMCE” post editor that comes with WordPress, with the FCK-editor plugin, which enabled some special purpose I’d needed those days.  Ah well.  Found it’s now called CK-editor, continued updating the rest of the plugins, and all is well.

Now barely a month later, all my web sites are now prompting me to “upgrade to 3.1″

Naaaah.  I think I’ll wait a couple more weeks, and not be so out on the bleeding edge front that even the forums are lost.

The common theme seems to be that somebody had come in and used the self-registration feature, or had found a backdoor (because the site was running an old version of its CMS code) to register themselves by force.  Then they could tamper with the plugins’ code from the inside, or with the CMS code itself.

But really, the fix is pretty much the same.  I’ve found the quickest most straightforward way to recover your site is to bulk-replace all the CMS code (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Mambo, something proprietary) with a fresh copy of the most recent version, and then check your .htaccess file.  I prefer to do it from the outside, that is, using FTP to just overwrite it all, because if a site has been hacked, I don’t trust that the internal update links from within the CMS itself will completely wipe out the problem.  Once you know you have clean CMS code, go through and install all clean code for all your plugins / extensions.  Just deactivate and delete them, then reinstall and reactivate them, one after the other.   Finally, check all your registered users.  If you’re supposed to be the only one, you can shout “Bang you’re dead!” as you hit that delete button.  If you have to sift through multiple legitimate users, you’ll have to use your judgment as to who belongs there and who doesn’t.   Particularly suspicious to me are people from far flung countries you never expected would care a whit about the subject matter of your site.  But alas, I run a legitimate Russian music site, so that Russian subscribers/members from Russia is not that much of a surprise to me.

With this fresh replacement of all your code, including your .htaccess text file, and the weeding out of your users, the odds are pretty good you’ve taken care of the problem.  The only possibility left would be your mysql database.  Yes, that could be corrupt, but judging from my own experience, less likely.  The only way to be sure is to plan ahead of time.  There are plugins and extensions available you can install in your site which you can use to schedule regular backups of your database.  If you post often, you probably want a daily backup.  If you post less frequent updates, you could get by with weekly backups.  But as long as you have that running on autopilot, you can be sure of having a clean copy of your database to restore, and thus stand to lose a minimum of work.

Hope this helps!

So now, I am very excited to be adding osCommerce to the list of offerings through at Sun Web Studio. osCommerce is very nice storefront catalog & shopping cart software, with a great many features for just getting down to business, attractively presenting many categories of products, and automatically calculating shipping rates and sales tax. It also has the built in ability to keep accounts records, run specials, and especially nice is the ability to stay in touch with customers via email newsletters. This is so very important to your online business succeeding and thriving.

Yes, it enables us to change and customize templates, too. Your web site will be beautiful!

I had at first proposed WordPress or WordPressμ (μ=mu=multi-user) and that might actually become part of this project, but I quickly realized it was bigger than that. Don’t get me wrong. I really like WordPress. It started out as a little blog software that grew into a very nice CMS – Content Management System. But I started thinking this project needed something different, something as big as a major news outlet would use, with many sections, each a web-site and a half in itself.

I’m a big fan of Open Source, so I started looking seriously at Joomla. I had dabbled in it a year ago, but didn’t have a project big enough to fully explore it. So wow, now I’m heavy into it. It is NOT like WordPress at all. You have to define things before you can define things before you define things, and the documentation hasn’t really caught up with it. You have Components, Modules, Plugins, and Extensions, that are arranged in a flip-over hierarchy. Sometimes things outrank other things, and sometimes it’s reversed. And Categories & Sections are not the same. And God forbid you should write an article before a Category is defined for it. God forbid you define a Category before a Section is defined for it. God forbid you want to build a Menu before all your Sections and Categories are built. God double-forbid you want to enter content anywhere before your web site is finished!

Well, I am finally getting the hang of it, but Joomla has a pretty ultra basic Registration form, and a pretty basic Contact form, and God hang you for thinking a Registered user is a Contact! So of course, we need to go trolling for expanding Extensions to collect all this data.

Which brings me to what to do with this data??

Ha! Well, I’ve told you previously about SugarCRM. CRM=Customer Relationship Management. You need that for big projects. But I didn’t want to have Joomla collecting Registration/Contact data for me to manually import or type into another database every day! So I went looking for an automated method to collect all the data we needed, and stuff it in a CRM, and I found these people, OpenWebApps, who wax quite elequent about vTiger, an Open Source competitor for SugarCRM, and who very kindly provide another extension for collecting unlimited fields on your contact form, er um, registration form, in Joomla, and importing them into vTiger. Wow, that’s exactly what I need.

So I’ve gone through the process of installing Joomla (configuring it will be an ever ongoing process), and I’ve gone through the process of installing vTiger, both on my client’s preferred hosting service, and every hosting service has its quirks. But I got them both working fine now. And both have nearly empty databases.

NOW the job will be getting them to handshake, and it is at this point that I stop and fix some dinner, because my head is going to explode! But don’t worrry. I’ll rest a bit and come back to it. I love a good challenge!

With the intent that we were going to start her WordPress web site today, she brought up GoDaddy and I watched her again find her chosen available domain name and put it in her shopping cart. GoDaddy, a pretty slow web site under the best of circumstances, overburdened with its flashy shell game of menues, ground her older laptop to a halt.

We figured while we were waiting for her laptop to find it’s way out of the morrasse, we’d hop onto my newer netbook, and she could buy her hosting where we had planned to do, and then we’d come back to the GoDaddy screen and complete her domain purchase.

I didn’t see whether it crashed and she rebooted, or whether she simply closed the browser and started over, counting on her shopping cart cookie to carry her forward (GoDaddy cookies are very quick to maintain products in MY shopping cart, I’ll tellya), but we found ourselves starting over with an empty shopping cart.

So she entered it again in the prominant domain search box.

What? What??? WHAT???? It was now labelled a “Premium Domain” which GoDaddy would gladly sell us for $1,788 bucks!!

Something was very, very, wrong. And I was LIVID. I AM livid.

I immediately did a whois on it, and got these results:

Domain Name: SECRET<redacted>.COM

Created: 2004-08-17

Expires: 2010-08-17

Nameservers:

THIS-DOMAIN-FOR-SALE.COM

NS.BUYDOMAINS.COM

Registrant:

RN WebReg

RareNames, Inc.

738 Main Street, #389

Waltham, MA 02451

Administrative Contact:

RN WebReg

RareNames, Inc.

738 Main Street, #389

Waltham, MA 02451

Voice: +1.781 839 7993

Fax: +1.781 839 2801

E-mail: brokerage@buydomains.com

Technical Contact:

RN WebReg

RareNames, Inc.

738 Main Street, #389

Waltham, MA 02451

Voice: +1.781 839 7993

E-mail: brokerage@buydomains.com

Billing Contact:

RN WebReg

RareNames, Inc.

738 Main Street, #389

Waltham, MA 02451

Voice: +1.781 839 7993

E-mail: brokerage@buydomains.com

Hmmmm… So it says somebody has owned this domian since exactly 5 years and 10 days prior to us trying buy it, but it supposedly was a pristine domain from GoDaddy.

Well, I wasn’t born yesterday. I know a stinking rat when I smell one, and I called GoDaddy. To the best of my ability to reconstruct it, this was the conversation:

GoDaddy Support: Hello, this is Steve. How can I help you?

Myself: Hi, I’m helping a friend with her web site, and we just tried to buy a domain name from GoDaddy, and saw a really weird thing happen. It was available, we both saw it, and we put it in the shopping cart. Then her browser crashed and we had to start over, and when we searched on it again, it came up as a “Premium Domain” for $1,788. We know it had been available, we both saw it, but a whois on it now shows that somebody has owned it for over 4 years.

GoDaddy Support: What was the domain?

Myself: Secret<redacted>.com

GoDaddy Support: Yes, that domain has been owned for over 4 years.

Myself: Then why did it come up as available on GoDaddy’s front page?

GoDaddy Support: I can assure you that domain has been owned for over 4 years.

Myself: Yes, I know what the database says. I pulled up a whois on it myself. So apparently GoDaddy’s database was wrong, because it told us it was available when it wasn’t. Or, GoDaddy’s database was correct, and the date on the whois database is wrong, and when we left our shopping cart, something tipped somebody off and it was really just bought 5 minutes ago, and somebody changed the date on it.

GoDaddy Support: That’s not possible, that would have to have been be some kind of hacker to tamper with a government database.

Myself: Yeah, so? It happens. I’ve even known some pretty smart hackers in my time. Stuff like this happens. So I’m telling you something is very wrong. Either the whois database is wrong, or the GoDaddy front page was wrong in telling us it was available. The both of us here saw it happen right before our eyes.

(My friend asked to speak on the phone.)

My friend: Hello, yes, I’ve been looking at Secret<redacted>.com on your GoDaddy front page for 4 weeks now, and it always told me it was available. Only today after we tried to buy it, crashed, and tried again to buy it, did it came up as a premium domain, and wanted $1,788 for it. It’s not that I even wanted that domain name that badly. It just really bothers me that somebody would be so underhanded.

(I could no longer hear what GoDaddy Support was saying. A couple of minutes later, she gave me back the phone.)

Myself: Well, I know that there’s nothing that you or we can do about it now. That guy owns it now. But there is something really wrong, and you really need to fill out a problem report, because there are only two possible scenarios – Either he has owned it for over 4 years, in which case GoDaddy’s database is telling people domain names are available when they’re not. Or he has owned it only a few minutes, in which case he somehow was connected into GoDaddy and quickly keyed in on an “abandoned” GoDaddy shopping cart, then hacked the date in the government database to hide his tracks. So my friend and I can’t prove a damn thing, other than that there are now two eye-witnesses to what happened. It is one of those two scenarios. You might have somebody crooked on the inside helping him. You need to write a problem report.

GoDaddy Support: Well, if we saw a lot of this kind of thing, it would be a problem, but we generally don’t get these kinds of complaints.

Myself: There is still something very wrong. It doesn’t matter if you don’t see a lot of this kind of thing. Most people wouldn’t call you and tell you. The GoDaddy site is so slow, a lot of people would totally give up and wouldn’t even bother calling you. Or they might blame themselves. Or they wouldn’t realize how really wrong this kind of thing is, or if they did they wouldn’t bother calling you to tell you you had a problem. But I’m telling you you have a serious problem and need to write a problem report so GoDaddy knows about it, no matter how little you generally see it.

(We said our goodbye pleasantries and hung up.)

By this time, after about a half hour worth of conversation, my friend had come up with a domain name she liked even better, Sacred<redacted>.com. This actually fit the spiritual theme of her planned web site even better, yet was just as “sexy” a domain name as the first one had been.

But for dang sure, WE DIDN’T BUY IT FROM GODADDY.

A few times in months past, I’ve tried talking to other theme authors about different anomalous behaviours, only to get back a lot of head scratching and pretending to not know what I was talking about. So maybe it wasn’t fair this time, but I didn’t even bother writing to the authors of either Default or BlueBerry. I just started Googling, er, um, Binging “How to add a sidebar to WordPress Default theme”, and found this page.

It’s a pretty nice informative page, and if you scroll way way down, it even gives a mention to adding a sidebar to the single archived pages of a Default themed blog (my case). You just edit the ‘single.php’ file, and stick in a <?php get_sidebar (); ?> statement.

Got that?

No hint, though, about where in the file to put it!! (Nice.)

That part I had to figure out myself, and now I’m telling you — But before adding the new statement to call up the sidebar, you have to make room for it. The content of those single archived pages has been made wide to fill the space the sidebar used to occupy, so you have to make it narrow again.

In the ‘single.php’ file, find the line near the top that says:

<div id=”content” class=”widecolumn”>

Change it to:

<div id=”content” class=”narrowcolumn”>

Now you can scroll all the way down to the bottom, and find the very last line, which says:

<?php get_footer(); ?>

Just before that line, insert the line that says:

<?php get_sidebar (); ?>

So what you end up with in the last two lines of the file ‘single.php’ is:

<?php get_sidebar (); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

Voila!

Why go to all that trouble you say? Well, so your visitors will never get confused! People who run out of things to read and click on on a web site (like navigation) soon leave and take their business elsewhere. And that’s not what you want for your web site, is it?

Or more importantly, how large do you want it to be??

Entire national companies have risen and fallen on how well they keep track of and manage their customer relationships. If you are always chasing new customers, but not taking care of your existing customers, you fall. If you only take care of your current comfortable list and never reach out to new prospects, you can expect to go down too, as times change, needs change, people move, retire, or even die.

If your business is very large, or you want it to be, you need to serve a large and growing base of customers and potential customers. You need effective customer relationship management. And lets face it, the days of paper schedules and Roll-o-dexes is gone. (You can’t even buy Roll-o-dexes any more.) Computers rule the day, and web based applications rule computers, as your businesses often outlive their computers!

I have been just wow-ed by the recent discovery that customer relationship software has been going open source (meaning free to download, install, customize, & run). The leader of the pack is SugarCRM, and it is scaleable as your business grows. You can keep track of not only customers and prospects, but your employees, sales force, sales campaigns, meetings schedule, and phone calls. I can think of at least one major national chain that went under within the past 5 years by spending millions trying to develop this type of software, and here it is handed to us small business owners on a silver platter!

Just install it on the non-public side of your web site, carry a laptop or netbook with you, and the world becomes your office.

According to InsideCRM.com, SugarCRM is the 800 pound gorilla in the open source CRM category, and it installs much the same as other mysql/php scripted programs.  Which means I can offer it to my own customers.

SugarCRM Front Page

The above is the front page of SugarCRM, containing the menuitems:

The front page sidebars offer quick views for updating the new contact database, events calendar, and income pipeline, while sidebars in the various functional pages are context senstitive, with straightforward buttons.

SugarCRM contains standard business functions, and I promise you is of incalculable value.  As your experience grows with its use, it will make itself more and more indispensible.

This addition to Sun Web Studio’s offerings warrants updating this site’s subtitle!  

Before you roll your eyes in your head because the reputations of robot translations is so bad, you might consider that the industry is continuously advancing, well parts of it are anyway, and the ones making the most progress can indeed give the reader a sense of what is being said. If you’re not bilingual yourself, the best way to test a translation is to translate it back again, and see if you can read the double-translation. You can even test it in several languages, to convince yourself for or against putting translation flags on your site. So far, my own tests have led me to use Google’s translators, as far and away the ones most likely to help me communicate with people around the world.  Yes, Google offers a gadget:

But personally, I prefer the friendly look of linked translation flags reaching out to a worldwide audience. Either way, looking at my web sites in various alphabets of the world is very cool

The power of WordPress is in how its functionality is compartmentalized into plugins. There are so many useful plugins available that no matter what your business model is, or how big or small your organization is, WordPress can handle it. If you are a sole proprieter and have products to sell, there are shopping cart plugins available to integrate your site with PayPal or other credit card processors. If you like to write and blog and let advertisers pay you, there are plugins for positioning ads around your site. If your business is based on one-on-one meetings with clients, there are calendar plugins where you can set business hours and let customers schedule their own appointments. Of course there are plugins for tracking your web site traffic so you can gauge the site’s success and usefullness.

Another great feature of WordPress is that it can support one author or many. The owner of the site can assign usernames and passwords, or he/she can set the settings to allow many members of his/her organization register their own accounts. This barely scratches the surface of what WordPress can do. The possibilities are as infinite and unique as their are web site owners and business models.

First in becoming recognized as the friendly expert is to set up a blog, and post to it frequently.

Second, you can offer a newsletter and you want to collect email  addresses of people who want to hear from you.  If you had an ebook to  sell, you might offer them a free chapter to entice them to subscribe to your e-newsletter.  You can send people chatty emails with free info, and once in a while send them a sales pitch, particularly if you are turning out new products too.   A lot of the big name marketers use expensive email services like aweber and ConstantContact, but there is an open source software called “poMMo” you can install on your own web site.  Although it has a  steep learning curve, it can save you a lot of money in the long run, as long as you don’t abuse your web hosting service, and use the throttle feature so you don’t overload their servers.

Thirdly, and these days it’s almost more important than an email mailing list, is to get on Twitter, and tweet a lot.  Draw many followers, and  increase who’s following you by following a lot of people yourself. (SteveWeber, a very down to earth internet marketer),  has a $5 product on how to supercharge your number of “followers” without getting your account suspended by Twitter.  I myself tend to get overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of people on Twitter, but I hear “TweetDeck” really helps you sort out everybody cross-talking with you.  Tweet, be friendly,  chatty, social, and be conversational.  Answer other people’s tweets, besides just posting your own.   And every once in a while, post a link to your most recent blog post where people come to visit you, see your blog, and yes your sidebar link to your sales page for your product or affiliate product.

The trick is finding a niche that’s biting.  Travis Sligo of “Bum Marketing” (another down-to-earth low cost marketer I follow), says the lonely hearts market is a very hot market.  He’s got an ebook on how to win back your ex that is raking him in money hand over fist.  He’s marketing it himself through an alter-ego he’s created (he wrote the book under a pseudonym), but he’s also got it on Clickbank for affiliates to pick up, too.

So I’m tellin’ you, the bottom line of every marketing training package I’ve seen out there is just be an online social butterfly. Get out there — blog, email-newsletter, & Twitter.   If you wanna throw in Facebook &  Linked-In, Diggit, free classifieds, and others, ok.  But the first 3 are the first 3 and will get you the most bang for the effort.

Clickbank is good but they only do ebooks, and there are other affiliate programs out there too.  I sell a physical product in a certain niche, so I’ve been using  PayDotCom.com (which has no up front costs), but they do ebooks too, and Click2Sell.eu is a serious competitor for them too.

My nature is a little more on the introverted side, so I’m just getting the
hang of all this myself.  But technically, the above is how you do it.

Best wishes, God Bless, and good night

http://www.SunWebStudio.com
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