Kevin Muldoon

I was browsing around the web recently and noticed that ProTycoon, a making money online type blog, was for sale. The blog was started by David Shaw in February but due to college commitments he had to sell up.

When I bought the blog it had 116 subscribers, an ok amount and a good base for developing it more. This was also the domain I had to transfer away from 1and1.

My first priority is to post with some regularity on the site. I’m aiming for at least 3 posts per week but as long as there’s 2 good posts every week I think it will grow. My first goal is to get to 1,000 subscribers.

By that stage I should be able to make a little extra money from advertising and I’ll be able to review products and services that aren’t suitable for my other blog Blogging Tips.

I wasn’t looking to buy another blog but hey, you’ve got to strike when the iron is hot!

You can read more about my purchase at the link below :

ProTycoon Returns

On Thursday Kolby finished up the design of Electric Bandits. He did a great job of skinning his initial design of the forum and I’m very pleased with the outcome. The forum has a top and bottom sponsor area and a place for ads on the right hand side too. The latest threads are displayed at the right hand side of every page too, which I believe will make for a better browsing experience for users.

When I approved his initial design I paid half of the cost of the design via 2checkout. After finishing it off on Thursday Kolby asked if I could pay by Western Union. I was happy to do this however it wasn’t as easy, the whole process was a nightmare.

After signing up I clicked on the send money online option and proceeded to enter Kolbys details. There was 5 or 6 steps in the payment process but by step 3 it had signed me out because of inactivity, which was strange because I’m a quick typer and I was going through the procedure very quickly. So I had to sign in again. This time I got to the credit card stage but after submitting I was logged out again because of inactivity. On the 4th attempt I successfully submitted my card but the payment was rejected and told me to call up. This was around 10.45pm and their telephone support ended at 11pm.

It then took me 3 attempts to be able to speak to someone as twice I got a dead tone after going through dozens of options. Finally I spoke to someone and tried to make the payment but it couldn’t go through because my bank had declined it. This was at 11pm so I was unable to do phone up again.

So I had to call my bank and on the 2nd call got transferred to a department which told me that they had stopped it because they thought it was fraudulent. This is the 6th or 7th time Halifax have done this with me and it can be quite annoying. It’s good to know that if someone stole my card they would stop that person running up a large bill but it’s annoying all the same to have to go through all this. Last year they stopped my card when I was in Japan and I had to spend an hour in a phonebox calling the uk to try and get the hold taken off.

Anyways, they tool the hold off and I did the payment through western union online. The payment couldn’t go through so I had to get up early the next morning and call again and finally it went through. Paypal are bastards but I don’t recall going through all this hassle with them!!

I really do hate these automatic phone services. They always make it incredibly hard to speak to someone. When I called about my credit card I had to go through 3 options, enter my credit card number, date of birth and expiry date all on the phone. I was then given 4 options. To choose the first 3 options you had to press 1, 2 or 3. The 4th option was to talk to a representive and you had to press *0. When I did this the first time it just went dead…..WTF!! Why didn’t they just make it 4 or even 9!!

This video pretty much sums up Thursday evening for me!

Getting the payment to Kolby turned out to be a pain in the butt but he was very easy to work with and I’d definately use him again. If anyone is looking to have their forum skinned I recommend checking Relivo out.

Next step for Electric Bandits is a unique logo. I’ll post about that soon

I picked up a blog the other day. The guy who owned it was too busy to run it so wanted to sell. He had blogged for me before on BloggingTips so I was confident that everything would be ok and promptly sent the money.

Everything did go ok and the owner David sent me the domain and hosting details within a few minutes of payment. However, the domain is registered with 1and1, a UK registrar. I’ve had to transfer several domain names from UK domain registration sites in the past and it’s always a pain in the ass. First of all, like all domain registration companies, their FAQ section only tells you how to transfer domain names in, not away from their company. This is a shitty policy that ICANN has never cracked down on.

I put in the transfer request from Enom and entered the authorisation code and then sent them an email about the transfer.

Today I got this reply :

Thank you for contacting us.
We have further checked the domain here in our end and basically, the
status is still waiting. We would like to inform you that we will be
releasing the domain name, 5 days after the start of date. So, if after
that alloted time, and if still your domain name will still be on
pending status, then please let us know so that we could further check
it here in our end.

Thank you so much for your cooperation.

If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

I emailed them back but after a few hours, still no reply. No surprise there then. So it looks like I’ll have to wait 5 or 6 days to get my domain. Why are UK domain registration companies such bastards when it comes to transferring domains away? Are they scared people are going to realise that other registrars charge less for more functionality
————————————————————————–

UPDATE : Perhaps I posted this too early. Shortly after I posted this I got the reply

We are pleased to help you on your concern. Actually, 1-2 days is for
the approval of the transfer between the domain owner and the current
registrar. After that, another 2-5 days for the registrar to registrar
handshaking.

For further information, please refer to the link below:

Policy on Transfer of Registrations between Registrars

http://www.icann.org/en/transfers/policy-12jul04.htm

I’m pleased and surprised that they got back to me. Perhaps I’ve been lunlucky but in the past I have always had to fax an authorisation letter or even register it for another year before they authorised the transfer.

Electric Bandits is a website which I have put on the backburner for quite a while now but I’m still making moves to get it started. Long term I hope I’m still running in a few years time as it covers a lot of things I’m interested in ie. geek stuff : gaming, computers, gadgets etc. Half the battle with running a successful forum or blog is being interested in the subject so that it doesn’t feel like work ie. it’s easy to update and participate in them because you’d probably be posting on a forum about the subject anyways.

I’m going to be spending some time and money promoting the site over the next 6 months but the first thing it needs is a good forum design. So I posted an ad in the paid services room in vbulletin.org and got a few emails about the job. Relivo responded with the most professional reply and thankfully they had a portfolio to match. They had actually redesigned one of my older forums which I sold last year (Freeroll Forums) and they’re not too expensive either.

The designer, Kolby, messaged me last night to say that he had finished the first draft.

Here it is :

Notes about this design :

• Forum design has room for 728×90 banner at top. Will probably have room for one at bottom too.
• Forum has right sidebar. This area will display forum stats, latest posts, sponsors etc.
• This logo will not be used. Kolby admitted logos aren’t his strong point so was happy to knock $50 off the price. I’m going to hold a contest at SitePoint once the design is live and get a colourful logo which grabs peoples attention.

It’s quite difficult to tell how the final version will look just now but I’m optimistic. It’s not an overly fancy design but it’s clean and professional looking and is perfect for a tech site. Kolby has been great to work with so far so I can definately see myself working with him again for future forum redesigns.

What do you think?

Well the weekend in Belfast was a blast, it’s a pretty cool city. Going over via air reminded me how close Ireland is to Scotland. Takeoff to touchdown only took 22 minutes!

As always the main purpose of Monday is to get my ass to the gym and shake off my weekend head and make a start on the weeks work. This Monday I was mainly working on a $1,500 competition for the Blogging Tips Forums and making sure everything was in place for that.

I’ve also been in touch with a designer who is going to give Electric Bandits a classy, professional and unique design. Once that is out the way I’m going to be looking at some ways to promote the forum natrually.

If I get time I’m going to look into some ideas for a mini site. I built two mini sites the other week but those were content based, I’m going to try and find some good offers and build a website around those, something I haven’t done in a long time.

Anyways, onwards and upwards!

After having a well earned holiday of 5 days in the amazingly beautiful Valencia (Spain), I came back to 2 of my forums being attacked by a host of spammer bots. On Electric Bandits, which is a very new forum, they had managed to post about 50 posts advertising drugs, sex aids and more. When I logged onto the forum I could actually see the bots registering via the ‘Who’s Online’ page so I realised I had to do something sooner rather than later.

The current version of Vbulletin (3.7) has many features to help you deal with spammers. You can select several posts and delete them as spam and by doing this you also get the option to ban them and mark all their posts as spam. It works really well. However, this is more of a treatment and not a preventer ie. it doesn’t stop the bots registering in the first place.

There are a few hacks available but the first one I tried, called No Spam!, seems to be working very well. All it does is add a question to the registration page, something which the bots won’t know. For example, you could ask the question ‘Is a banana yellow or blue’ or something else which is similarly obscure.

I get spam quite frequently on my blogs but I don’t recall ever having a spam attack such as this in the past, hopefully it isn’t a sign of things to come.

Kevin

p.s. if you are a spammer, feel free to stick a sharp pencil in your left eye and twist, it’s the least you can do!!

2 weeks ago I managed to pick up a forum for what I consider a bargain price. The site in question is RetroWheels, a forum dedicated to car enthusiasts.

I paid $130 for the site. The forum isn’t really active and the people who did post on it were paid however :

• The site came with 10 months left of a year long vbulletin license, worth around $80
• The forum has a pretty good design. Nothing amazing but definately something I’d have to pay a little money to get something similar

I am pretty busy with other things just now so I’ll have to wait to develop it. Add to this the fact that I don’t know too much about cars and you may question this purchase but as I said, with the license and design it was a good price.

Also, this week I have started a forum with a good friend Kevin. It’s a baseball forum for UK and European fans. I’ll tell you more in a few weeks but it looks like it will do well. Kevin will be posting on the site more than I am however I will look after the tech side of things. Kevin is also a huge car nut and once we get the forum going he’s interested in posting on RetroWheels and going 50/50 on that so it should have a happy ending.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

Link : RetroWheels