Terence Chang Photography

99% Or 1% – Your Choice

That Way
Image Source: Lt. General Rochambeau

I know I will piss 99% of the people who read my blog post. That’s OK. My blog is for people like me, who wants to be the 1%.

Personally, American dream isn’t about being the 99%. It’s about being the 1%.

You can blame on richer people or politicians, but you can’t deny the fact. They’ve achieved what the 99% can’t not achieve. It’s the reality and it’s just like the food chain. You have to work your way up. The brutal world isn’t fair. You have to put your effort into your future.

Put yourself in the 1%’s shoes. You will see the world differently.

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Personal Branding With More Exposures

About Me Banner
What do you think about the above AboutMe banner? About.Me is a cool personal branding service that gives you a one landing page to show off your info and link to many services you already have. The services include YouTube. Flickr, WordPress.com, Facebook, Twitter and so many more. I’ve decided to just add my personal blog and photography blog, Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

Although the service is free, it is still really buggy. I have to update my profile page many times in order to get it right. There seem to have some cache issues in their system. As you can see, you can simply link to many of your online profile, social networks and upload your own background image, which I’ve post on my HDR Cozumel Beach.

My purpose of using this service is to basically gain extra exposures. You know how important exposure is to the website. So this is definitely a great place to so. The catch is that you will have to spread the word out, otherwise, no one will know the page exist. You can find the page at About.me/Terence.Chang.

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Simple Free Restaurant Website With Facebook Comment Box

Restaurant Photo galleryI know what you are thinking. I have been promoting WordPress for building restaurant website or any website for a while. However, when it comes to cut cost, there must be other options. I built a free restaurant website example a while back to demonstrate how easy and fast you can get your site up running. Best of all, it’s free. Of course, the time you spend on building the site is NOT free.

You can read the post at – Build Restaurant Website for FREE! Now I am taking that to the next level by adding photo gallery, direction and review page. So I was doing a favor to a local business friend to build a quick website at very low cost to drive instant traffic to the site.

Redbrick Pizza Gilbert is a well established pizza restaurant in the USA. The store in Gilbert and Chandler wants a website in just matter of few days. So I helped them put together a single page restaurant web site at first. Now the site has grown to multiple pages.

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Block WordPress Remote Comment Spam Bot

SPAM!
Image Source: SPAM Courtesy Of: MasterMan

I am so tired of getting spam comments on some of my sites. I’ve also tried many anti-spam plugins.

  • Spam-Free Plugin
  • Comment Math Questions
  • Comment Quiz
  • Comment Captcha
  • Double Opt-in
  • Change default comment page name from wp-comments-post.php to something else.

Guess what? None of them work so far. There are company in India hiring real people to crack the CAPTCHA code for spammers. The SPAM-Free plugin only blocks those from your blacklist or known SPAMMERS. Comment Math isn’t working when it always easy to calculate.

Most WordPress spam comments are submit from automated script running on anonymous servers with random forged IPs. So the spammer never visit your website. That really sucks out of my valuable time to fight spam and delete spam comments.

One of my site just post a new article. Within few hours, I got over 100 spam comments with ZERO visit and page view.

What can I do about it?

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The secret of invisible Facebook fanpage : Part 1 : Social Search

fb_like_secret

[Update]

The secret of invisible Facebook fanpage : Part 2 : Open Graph

Really? Is there a hidden or invisible fanpage on Facebook? Do they really exist? Why should we use invisible fanpage?

There is no doubt that Facebook is now the #1 most visited single domain website on the Internet. People not only have one or more personal profiles, they also have more than one fanpages.

I am currently conducting an experiment using the hidden/invisible fanpage to engage with fans and drive traffic from Facebook to my websites.

What?

Yes. You heard it right. The purpose of using invisible fanpage is to drive traffic to the external website. In theory, it is the greatest tool to monetize the traffic from the largest social network for affiliate marketing, company promotion, new blog post notification and engaging with your fans OUTSIDE of Facebook.

For example, when you like this blog (click on the LIKE button at top of the page below the huge banner), you will become a fan of my hidden/invisible fanpage. Regardless what fanpage you have on Facebook, the first thing you will do after creating your fanpage is to invite people to become your fan by Liking your page! There is no difference to the invisible fanpage. I call it invisible or hidden fanpage, because they are not visible to anyone on Facebook other than the admin of the page. In other words, you can’t see the fanpage’s wall, photos or discussion. All you see is the destination page on the external website. You do, however, see the fanpage update on your news stream on your wall.

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CodeIgniter image_lib bug in the image process loop

Few days ago, I post a Facebook social plugin problem on one of the project, which use CodeIgniter PHP framwork. Now I identify a new bug in the Codeigniter image_lib library.

The image was not resized correctly. Now the issues is resolved. I have post the problem and solutions on my personal Take It Off Road blog.

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Prevent Facebook Social Plugin to load page twice – CodeIgniter

facebook_logo

Recently, I discovered one of my web project build on top of CodeIgniter is having issues with duplicate page views. It only happens to FireFox and Google Chrome browser. It looks just find on IE, Opera and Safari browser. So I keep researching and researching and finally found out that Facebook Social Plugin is hitting the page after the initial page load from the browser triggered by the end user.

I am not sure why it doesn’t happen to browsers other than FireFox and Google Chrome. There has to be a way to prevent this from screwing up my page view counter.
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Free Restaurant Website Example with Blogger

You may ask me what in the world does Terence has anything to do with building a restaurant web site?

Obviously, you don’t know me that much. In the past two years, I have been working very hard as sole Internet entrepreneur to help local businesses pay less and do more on the Internet. I have built many large scale web sites for corporations as well as for small local businesses.

With my search engine optimization knowledge at local sector, I’ve helped more local businesses getting on top of major search engines. Local search marketing has become one of my very strong skills on my resume even I left Corporate-America a long time ago.

Many local businesses, especially local restaurants, don’t have huge budget to pay for their own domain, web hosting and hire designer to do all the works. However, running local business without a web site is like sell a product without a brand and business card.

So I have been asked many times by some very small restaurants to show them how easy they can host their own restaurant websites without spending fortune. Yes. there are ways to do so. Using blogger.com’s free blog platform is FREE and easy. The idea is to start a web site a minimum cost. When the web site bring enough revenue, the business can decide to move on their own domain, and web hosting. In other words, I still prefer to host the web site on WordPress blog platform.

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