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Google CheckOut is checking eBay out – Who is the winner?

June 12, 2007 By Terence Chang 1 Comment

Today, News.com post the news about a protest happening in the Boston. “Google is hosting a party at the eBay Live customer event in Boston on Thursday night for eBay sellers who are angry that eBay has forbidden merchants from offering Google Checkout as an online payment option.”

The “Let Freedom Ring” Google party seem already have more than 300 sellers sharing their painful experience about eBay. As eBay seller myself. I don’t really like what eBay is charging and the fee on Paypal. Currently, Google checkout charges no fee for seller until 2008 (Read here). I was not a google checkout fan since day one. With their no-fee checkout process, many sellers like me will want to give it a try. Especially, for most online retailers like me, who owns and operates their own online shopping e-commerce web site, will not want to pay for any fee for transactions. So Google is checking out eBay. Who is the winner?

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Filed Under: Business, Marketing, Review, Technology

Increase Alexa traffic ranking by 5 million points in 10 days – Just Stumble!

June 11, 2007 By Terence Chang 48 Comments

Is it possible to increase Alexa traffic ranking by 5 million points in 10 days? Yes. I did. What does that mean to me? Why I still think that Alexa traffic ranking won’t do any good to my site. Is Alexa traffic ranking too easy to be manipulated? Would you get more benefit from it, if you have high Alexa traffic ranking? Does it drive more traffic to your web site?

Increase page ranking with DIY marketing strategies – Why Alexa traffic ranking won’t do any good to my site

June 10, 2007 By Terence Chang 15 Comments

On June 1st, I post the “Increase page ranking with DIY marketing strategies” on my blog after I implement my DIY marketing strategies on my blog. In just less than a week, I have found my Alexa traffic ranking dramatically increased from 5million to 2 million. WOW. Is that a success or just lucky?

This is a snap shop of my Alexa page ranking on June 1st, 2007. It was ranked as 5,857,920. My goodness. That is really low.

This is a snap shop of my Alexa page ranking on June 8th, 2007. It’s now 2,215,547. WOW. What a improvement in just 7 days.

For just 7 days, I can’t really tell you if my DIY marketing strategies works or not, but I can definitely tell you what I have done in the past 7 days to improve my Alexa traffic ranking. I will also tell you why I found the Alexa traffic ranking did not and will not do anything good to me. You will understand my reasons why I stop paying attention on Alexa traffic ranking.

First of all, the screen of my site was old. I have since changed my blog template to the new one two months ago. So Alexa did not update my screen. As I mentioned in the previous post, I use Alexa redirect to redirect traffic to my blog. Well. The only two places I used the Alexa redirect were on that post and on MyBlogLog.com page list. I took it out on June 6th, 2007 after reading the following blogs on the Internet, which claimed Alexa does not work and sucks.

Windows Live Writer Review – Round Two

June 7, 2007 By Terence Chang 7 Comments

After my first review of Windows Live Writer, I have received a comment fromJoe Cheng [MSFT] about my review. Joe Cheng is a developer of Windows Live Writer from Microsoft. So I decided to give it a second review.

Joe Cheng gave me some hints and tricks about the Live Writer.

Me: For example, for File upload, I cannot really use it since I can?t upload images to my wordpress upload directory.
Joe Cheng: This could be due to a PHP bug that we?ve seen on some configurations. Writer generally works fine when uploading images to WordPress. E-mail me and I can help you get to the bottom of this.

PS. The quote function in Live Writer is kind neat. I like it.

Me: And I don?t even have clue about comment policy, and author field. There is no such field in the editor for me to enter my name.
Joe Cheng: Comment policy and author are available at the bottom of the screen. Next to ?Set Categories? and ?Set Publish Date? there?s a little up-arrow, which reveals more post options.

Ah. Now I know where to put my slug, comments permission, author information and excerpt and trackbacks URL. I was not aware of the Up-arrow. It should be more obviously. Now I am also able to add and modify my categories on the fly or just reload my categories from my WordPress blog. Nice!

Me: However, the quality for resizing doesn?t seem good enough. It?s getting really blurry.
Joe Cheng: Yes, we have an image processing bug that?s causing that. It will be fixed in the next release.

Well. I will include some image and try the upload features. There was an permission issues with my WordPress. There is no write permission to the folder for upload. I have changed the permission and image should be uploaded this time.

Me: However, when I have more than two windows opened the same time, and with real-time spell check enabled, my CUP usage is going crazy. It slows down my entire PC. I close all of the running application and still get 70% CPU usage and 94MB memory usage.
Joe Cheng: That must be a bug?we have never seen that before. Unless the CPU usage is coming from svchost.exe, not WindowsLiveWriter.exe. If it?s the former, the workaround is to go into services control panel and disable the Windows Live Setup Service. If it?s the latter, can you please e-mail me?

Yes. The CUP usage is 98% by svchost.exe. The svchost.exe is using 90% of the CPU when I start the Live Writer. Now it drop down to 0%. If I trying to type something or doing preview, it bump up to 90% again.

I manually turn Windows Live Setup Service off in the services (manual). I got a warning from TrendMicro saying some system configuration is changed. Well. WLSetupSvc.exe automatically starts after I reboot my pc.

When I look at the Task Manager. WOW. I found that Live Writer is using 68MB memory. That is a lot of memory.

OK. While I am typing this blog. I check the HTML source code. It’s adding a bunch of style code into the image tag. All of the border options like this. style=”border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px” I guess that is how they construct the drop shadow. Well. There is no option for me to just set normal border (1px solid #000000) like BlogDesk did. Or I will have to rely on WordPress template style sheet.

So what is my conclusion?

I feel better this time. I just don’t like the CPU usage. I can live with the images upload and image quality.

One thing worth to mention is the capability to link back to my previous post by clicking on the “Link To” when insert a hyper link. I can choose from my previous post on my local disk or on my WordPress blog at real time. That is a nice feature. It save my time.

Technorati Tags: Windows live writer, review, memory usage, cpu usage, offline blogging

Filed Under: Review, Technology

My choice of offline blogging – BlogDesk over Windows Live Writer

June 6, 2007 By Terence Chang 4 Comments

As a heavy blogger like me, offline blogging becomes very important piece of my blog works. I primary blog for fun and to put down what my thoughts was and some of the tips and tricks I have learned in my life. So I can come back to check it out later or few years later. So while I am traveling, I would love to continue to blog.

There are many offline blog writer tools out there. You can find the some of them from “The wrong advices.” , (PS. I think it should name awesome advices), which is one of my must read blog everyday. I download the FireFox plug-in “ScribeFire“, which allows you to blog right from your firefox browser. Well. It’s a nice and neat tools. However, I have to remove it after I made one serious mistake. It’s my fault, but I just could not live with it. In the ScribeFire blogging tool interface. There is a place allow you to see your previous blog entries. It’s load from my worldpress blog site. I thought it was like RSS feed or RSS reader, so I thought it is saved on my local computer. So I delete some of them. WOW. I suddenly realize that I am deleting my really blog entries from my blog. What a mistake!!! So I have to remove it to prevent it happens. It’s not very clearly indicate the danger. Again. That is my fault. I don’t blame on the plug-in. It’s a good tools. It’s just not what I expect. I have put together my review about the BlogDesk below.

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Filed Under: Blah Blah Blah, Review, Technology

Increase page ranking with DIY marketing strategies

June 1, 2007 By Terence Chang 11 Comments

[Updated on 2007-06-11] Since I post this blog entry about my DIY marketing strategies on June 1st, 2007, I have received over 1000 unique visitors to the page. What a suprise! As the side effect, I believe that many of you (my visitors) have pushed my traffic ranking on Alexa much faster than I ever expect. My traffic ranking has been up 5 millions points in 10 days, while my other sites are still struggling. Yes. You read it right. 5 million points (See how?). Read more about my thoughts on “Alexa traffic ranking won’t do any good to my web site.“

There are many marketing strategies for improving your page ranking on Google search engines result pages and Alexa page ranking database. My blog was PR4 way back to 2004, but I have not update my blog for years. Now my page rank is down to the PR1. So here comes my strategies to get my page rank back as much as possible. I am really technical in web programming, but not really into the Internet marketing. I have done many research on the Internet and found good resources about increase your page ranking without spend a dollar. Here is my DIY marketing strategies list.
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