RevenueQuest

Sorry for any downtime you may have noticed. I switched to a new server at my host with more features. I use HostGator. 100gb of space and 1tb of bandwidth for 9.99 a month.
There probably won’t be any changes here at RevenueQuest with these new features.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Remember that site that I said I was working on a while back? Well it has taken longer than I thought to finish it up. Despite the delay, I think I am making good progress on it lately.

One of the features I want to include in the site is Shopping.com’s API to allow price comparisons/shopping. Unfortunately, I can find very little documentation on this. If anyone knows of any good tutorials out there or if you understand it, please let me know. I have e-mailed one of the A-List bloggers out there to see if they will help me out any. I’ll let you know how that goes.

Popularity: 2% [?]

John Chow has found a Wordpress plugin that will upgrade you to the newest version of Wordpress. I will be installing this plugin as I always push upgrading Wordpress to the side and it never seems to get done.

It is important to keep all scripts up-to-date. People find security holes in scripts and can exploit you and your site. Unfortunately, I have first hand experience with this.

A year ago, a news script I had installed on a website I made for my high school’s Track and Cross Country teams was exploited. I forgot to update the script and someone was actually using my site, server, and script for a phishing site. Needless to say, my site was closed by my host, I and the high school itself received some strongly worded letters, and a friend that began running the site for me when I left for college, had a meeting with the principle.

In the end, it all got worked out and I hope no one was tricked into releasing personal information. Moral of the story, upgrade your scripts!

Popularity: 2% [?]

Raising your Alexa ranking is all about getting more traffic. Or so you thought. There is a catch. As other bloggers have highlighted this week (John Chow and Kumiko), your rank is actually based off of the number of visitors you get that are running the Alexa toolbar.

Until recently, the tool bar was only available for Internet Explorer. If all your users were, for instance, Mac users that ran Safari. Alexa would not be counting any of your visitors. Unfortunately, the Alexa tool bar still is not available for Safari. It is, however, now available for Firefox.

Download Sparky (Alexa’s tool bar for Firefox)

Back to the point of this post… hopefully you just downloaded the Alexa tool bar. Now, when you visit my site, it will increase my Alexa ranking.

In short: The easiest way to raise your Alexa Ranking is to ask your visitors to download the Alexa tool bar.

Popularity: 4% [?]