Mrs. Mecomber’s Scrapbook

If you are as old as I am, you remember that old television commercial for Eggo waffles, where the kids scream at each other “Leggo my Eggo!” Eggo waffles were pretty good. I might even have screamed that at my brothers to get one.

Anyway… I’m quite off the topic, lol. There’s a new cute computer game for Lego lovers (I have two sons who have spent a small fortune on Legos). C|Net does a good review and has a download link. It sounds like a very cute game, and I’m sure my sons will love it. They are quite the Lego fans– they are members of the online Lego Club, too! So now, instead of buying tons of Legos, we can buy a ton of ram to run the new games!

I blogged about the grocery store, Hannaford’s, problem with security a few weeks ago. Hannaford’s is a huge grocery store chain here in the Northeast. I was affected by the data breach (as were most Northeasterners) and had to get new credit and bank cards. I am closely monitoring my statements, still.

To be more accurate, Hannaford’s security wasn’t the real issue; the finger of blame goes (once again) toward credit card companies. You can read more about it here.

But Hannaford’s is to be commended for their speedy response to this problem.

The supermarket chain Hannaford Bros. Co. has spent millions of dollars on additional security measures since last month’s revelation that hackers may have accessed up to 4.2 million credit and debit card numbers, it said yesterday.

The grocer, based in Scarborough, Maine, has stores in Massachusetts and several other states. It has started encrypting card numbers from the moment they are swiped at checkout counters. And it has tapped IBM to monitor security for its computer network around the clock.

But Hannaford’s top security executive said some other retailers are probably still vulnerable to similar attacks. “The latest threat wasn’t anticipated,” said chief information officer Bill Homa. “The bad guys are one step ahead.”

Hannaford told Massachusetts authorities it found unauthorized computer programs, called malware, on servers in more than 270 stores. When customers swiped their credit cards, the malware intercepted the data as it was transmitted from cash register to credit card processors.

The malware stored the data - card numbers and expiration dates - on store computers and later sent the information to offshore computers, where it could presumably be picked up by the thieves.

I am appalled– APPALLED– at the complete disregard bankers and companies, and the government, for that matter, have toward us and our data. It has gone too far and we really need to pressure these people to halt their data mining!

Last I heard, there were over 7 million blogs. Holy cow, that’s a lot! I contribute to that batch– I’ve got 7+ going. Hee. Marketing all seven is SUCH a chore. I monetize most of them, so I am always keen for ways to connect with other bloggers, advertisers, and to increase my traffic. I use a variety of networks for these purposes; some work, some don’t. I also am looking for new blogs and bloggers to give me ideas for content, too. So a good, reliable Blogger Search website is crucial for my blogging business. I found another one and this one looks good. I see a few people I know already in the group. It’s Blogoria.com. Registration is easy and- get this!!!– using the website is a PIECE of CAKE! I hate having to hash through reams and reams of ads, profiles, and other junk just to find what I’m looking for. Blogoria is simple, sleek, and looks great! You can search by “channels” (topics), country, blog name, language, etc. And if you have blog(s), list them for more exposure. The more exposure, the better.

I can’t believe it. A month after Wordpress releases their greatest, much-heralded new version (2.5), there’s another update to it already! I am flabbergasted. Updates are major events for many bloggers. I have five Wordpress blogs, so it’s a horrible hassle. Apparently, this new update plugs a few security holes and adds a few new features.

I wasn’t terribly impressed with the change from 2.3.1 to 2.5, honestly. There were some features I liked (the Dashboard organization is good), but some I loathed (not being able to switch widgets from sidebar to sidebar). I am very reluctant to move to 2.5.1… although I know I will very soon.

If you have Wordpress blogs and hate the hassle of updating them (*constantly*), check out a free plugin: Wordpress Automatic Upgrade. Remember: ALWAYS back up your MySQL files and backing up your Wordpress files with their handy exporter isn’t a bad idea, either (Dashboard >> Manage >> Export). And before using any automatic upgrader, it’s wise to deactivate all your plugins manually, even though the upgraders say they do it automatically.

Renate’s Merilin blog, titled Renate’s Merilinatomy, has got the be one of the funniest and most enjoyable blogs I’ve perused. I was absolutely tickled with the writing style. When I clicked the Renate link at the top, I was greeted with:

In Chinese, the sound ‘Renate’ means ‘bite the wax tadpole’.

LOL! OK, you’ve got my attention! What is a wax tadpole, though, ancient Chinese natural acne treatments?? I read on and was enjoying a high level of entertainment with this:

I’m Renate, and I Google everything. I was born on an autumn day in 1982 in the northern regions of Norway, where the hospital had their flag up, because a princess was born… I’m not your average Norwegian. I’m not tall, not blonde and I definitely do not appreciate a good snow day. You won’t find me whooping with joy as I swoop down the skiing tracks. You might find me at the bottom of said track, drinking cocoa and thinking about how my socks are wet, but I wouldn’t count on it.

Renate also studies history– an obsessive hobby of which I am also addicted. So what have we, between the two of us– we both love geekery, history, and humor. And I am of Norwegian ancestry!

Seriously, this is a fine blog for the more literary readers. There are also VERY FEW pictures. I saw NONE on the first page. It’s all Renate’s writing that the reader must connect with. And she does not disappoint! The style is fun, quirky, everyday, and masterful. Is Norwegian Renate’s first tongue? Because she writes like my English teacher: impeccable. This is a terrific blog for REAL readers.

About the theme. It’s a Wordpress-powered blog, and the theme is all home-grown by Renate herself. It is very sleek and I love the swirly emblem in the header. However, there are a few discrepancies. I see a very long html code tag in the sidebar, which detracts the eye and ruins the elegant look of the theme. Also, the titles to the posts are not clickable. Clicking the “permalink” link at the bottom of the post enables me to view the individual post, but it is one of those “picky” things about blogs that I personally prefer. And the comments, which I would like to follow, look like this:

Ikkje sånn kjempemange flere timan enn med tog, men betydelig mindre komfortabelt. Og så må æ jo uansett toge til Oslo for å ta bussen, så det hadde vært veldi digg å slippe å veksle så mellom transportan.

I guess I need to study my Norwegian a little more! I’ve been stuck on Swedish Chef Swedish for so long…

Everything else worked well. There is minimal content in the sidebar (reminds me of those Pergo ads I see in magazines– a beautiful wood-looking floor with just a few pieces of colorful furniture). I am used to the big baubles of American and Asian blogs, so the minimalistic Scandinavian look was something akin to culture shock. But I like it.

I like learning about how people live in other countries. Renate’s Merilin blog is wonderful for such a purpose. (And, Renate, I’m REALLY REALLY sorry about your home loan and the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis. It’s not my fault and I have been against the moneylenders schemes, ok?!)

In the mood for some good reading? Try Renate’s Merilin.

I discovered a tutorial on how to disable the caps lock key on computer keyboards. I don’t know about you, but the caps lock being where it is on the keyboard drives me beserk. I am ALWAYS hitting that DURN THING AND THEN I HAVE TO GO BACK A RE-DO ALL THAT I HAVE TYPED. Gr! The computer keyboard is still designed the way it has been, for… what is it now, 100 years? since the typewriter burst on the scene. Very little modification has occurred.

The tutorial, here at the How-To Geek (a good website) is short and sweet. This tweak does require you to tinker with the computer registry. Like the electric circuit panel of your home, you don’t want to be sticking your hands in there if you don’t know what you’re doing. With caution and a backup, you can’t really go wrong, however.

With the caps lock disabled, the Internet will be a quieter place! And now we can go about doing useful things,like blogging about wine racks or something. Heh.

Ever been “scraped”? It’s the name (oh no! another funky new name for something Internet related!) for a blogger whose content has been stolen and that content republished by another blogger. And without crediting the originator. These scrapers surf the blogosphere, looking for content for the specific purpose of stealing it to “create” their own blog or website. It’s a disgusting, heinous practice. Search engines like Google and Yahoo, penalize websites for “duplicate content.” Your website or blog has a decreased chance of getting indexed (and therefore visited by readers) if there is more than one copy of your work out there. So scrapers are the bottom of the pool of scumbags, worse than card-sharks at poker tables.

I came across a great website that tells bloggers how to fight back. Hurray! It may come in useful for you if you are a blogger. You can check it out here. There’s a downloadable pdf form, too. Many thanks to this blogger for bringing this to the forefront! Scrapers should — and now can– be stopped.

Amic Email Backup
I was initially very impressed with this program. It’s is a speedy little program that will backup all your emails, whether it be Opera Mail, Eudora mail, Thunderbird, or the ubiquitous Outlook Express. It will backup all your emails and settings with the click of the mouse. It stores the information in a small file and keeps it in the My Documents folder. You can move it to a safe place (like a flash drive separate from your computer’s hard drive) in case of a computer crash or reformat. I love that you can schedule it to backup automatically (I have mine set to every 2 days but you can backup every month or two or three).

When the day comes and you need to restore, you click on your stored file, and Amic begins. The process of restoring your email is another simple click away. IF IT WORKED. It didn’t work for me. The backup process went smoothly, but when I tried to restore, an error notification popped up telling me the file was corrupted.

This could be a great little program. I use Windows Vista, so perhaps this was the problem. I have not tried it on XP yet. If you are looking for a quick little program to save your email, this is free, at least. If it works for you, please let me know!

If you have made any phone calls to any business in the past several years, you’ve come across answering services. I am actually amazed at how many small businesses are hiring answering services for their business. Such luxuries used to be reserved for the higher-end corporations, who could afford it. Not any more! The Internet has been a huge boon for the small business and free-lance entrepreneur. I make a lot of telephone calls to contractors, electricians, etc., and invariably I get an answering service. The ones I’ve encountered are excellent quality. In past where I might have gotten a tired and irate secretary, I now get a considerate telephone professional.

If you’ve got a small business– or even a big business!– check out Answering Services from Map Communications. They’ve been in business since 1991. They have a specialized medical answering service available for medical businesses (a REAL plus for any doctor’s office, believe me!). And calls are NEVER put on hold. They offer voicemail and also offer specialty call screening– the screening of calls as you request that they be screened. I see now why such service have become so popular!

Map Communications offers a free 7-day trial and also have a video where you can learn more about their services for the busy business.

I have discovered that the President and CEO of Bluehost, my new and favorite web hosting company, has a blog! It’s Matt Heaton.com. I love it when CEOs have blogs. Blogs are extremely personal and allow you to interact with the higher folks up the food chain. He has some great insights to offer about his business. This recent post about identity theft is very good.

There is no incentive to fix security problems. In fact, there is TONS of money being made by these companies on all that fraud that is happening out there. Chargeback fees to companies doing the billing are getting higher and higher. As the fraud increases Visa and others simply increase the discount rate that merchants like us pay to interchange for processing to compensate. No problem right? Wrong, guess who pays? The consumer always pays in the higher prices that merchants are forced to pass on in ever increasing credit card fees.

I’m no high-falutin’ businesswoman, but I do have some interest in how businesses run. And some of his posts are extremely enlightening to consumers like me. Give it a read, you’ll find it very interesting and readable.

Plus, it’s very interesting to know that he was a missionary in Taiwan and now has five children! Cool!

Zero and Up is a relatively new blog (Feb 08) but the style of the theme and the content quality makes you think it’s been around a while.

The theme is very striking, and very professional-looking. It’s another one of the new “making money” blogs that are cropping up everywhere. Because there are so many blogs like this coming out of the woodwork, these kinds of blogs have to be “above the fold” in style and content to maintain a reader base. So far, so good. Posts like “Four Reasons Why This Post Is Good” and “Don’t emphasize your absence” are excellent topics. I also very much enjoyed the post that asked specific bloggers why they chose their blogs names and what those names signified. It’s creative posts like these that spark a reader’s curiosity, and encourages the reader to return. Good work with such creative content.

The theme is simple but sleek (and custom made, too). There’s some text at the top of the nav bar about advertising on the blog. I was SO relieved to see a blog without dozens of 125boxes screaming “YOUR AD HERE.” Man, I hate those things. There actually IS an empty ad box in the sidebar, but it is amazingly inconspicuous (maybe due to the green color?). I am so used to seeing dancing bears or ladies on shower stools with virtual flashing neon…. those 125boxes can be a real pain, especially when they are so obviously empty! But Zero and Up is wisely keeping those boxes at a minimum and downplays what’s there. That’s a real blessing to the blog reader.

Things are neat and organized; there are a scanty few links to archives and a meta link list… perhaps it’s a tad bit uneventful? There is so little in the sidebars that the blog does give off an “I’m new” aura to it. Throw in some linky love lists or a few more interesting links to posts or something. But watch out for the flashing 125 box syndrome!

Overall, Zero and Up is a good blog to watch. I am very pleased about the content quality. I’d like to see the blog develop. Time will certainly tell!

I’m taking a little break from blogging about business performance management software and am finally back in the blog review business! I have a little list of blog reviews to do, and now that I am on Wordpress and everything is settled, I can comfortable blog away!

Bloggin’ Mama is a “frugal” blog. These have become very popular recently. I must say that I do like them much better than the typical mommy blogs. Mommy blogs are nice, but… I tire of looking at baby pictures day after day, lol! Bloggin’ Mama is all about what’s hot on the ‘Net– saving money!

The template is very nice and simple. It’s a basic, general free template, but it suits the blog content very well. The buttons and banners are minimal, and even the AdSense ads (a bane of mine) are not very distracting. The Bloggin’ Mama has done a good job with keeping the reams of content well organized. I loved the sidebar categories section, and the well-titled links. Everything is very easy to look over.

The posts are filled with tips and techniques for the typical frugal mother. Some posts have cute photos of the baby, and they lend interest. The RSS feed button, so necessary these days, is large and obvious in the header.

My first suggestion would be to tweak the header a little. It’s rather dull, and the brown color is dingy. I would stick with the streamlined look– nothing fancy at all. Maybe just the blog title with fancy letters? No flowers, no baby bottles, God-forbid, no bills with Ben Franklin on them (HOW many blogs have that, now?!).

Also, every individual post has a list of AdSense ads before the comment section. I guess it’s OK, but… it lessens that personal touch and feels intrusive. I personally don’t like AdSense and I surely don’t like AdSense within the content of a post! It looks awful. But that’s my personal preference. Finally, the buttons could be organized a little better. There are big ones, little ones, long ones, narrow ones all over the place. I prefer the buttons to give a flowing feel. Cluster them in order of size, or in order of category (linky buttons here, pay to blog buttons there).

Over all, Bloggin’ Mama looks like a great blog. A few tweaks and it could be even better!

Need some tips and advice on building a better blog? I’ve seen a lot of “advice” for blogging blogs… and I have to say they haven’t impressed me terribly. For one, their own blog is usually a mess! There are blinking ads everywhere, they have too many colors, crooked titles, etc. I can’t say I’ve ever been impressed. I was wowed with stumbling across Blog Design Blog. This is one helpful blog! And the design is gorgeous! Plus, the theme is available for free by the designer!

The articles are great. They deal with style, balance, color. It’s a lesson in art as well as blog design, lessons that could be carried on into other things. I am taking a hard look at my traveler blog, and Blog Design Blog is giving me some ideas.

I have been hearing of this new email broadcast program developed by IZEA, and am given the opportunity to review it. It’s called Zookoda, and it is nifty online software that allows you to send your latest blog posts via email to subscribers. Use of Zookoda is free, so that a big plus. I decided to check it out, since I am seeing growing interest in my home improvement and travel blogs.

You need to register to use Zookoda. It’s like anything else, you need your name, your email, etc. Very quick and easy to sign up. After the verification email, I logged in to see a slew of possibilities before me.

The thing I wanted to do right away was tinker with an actual email and get a feel for how good it will look. Creating an email was extremely easy. I entered the name of the email title (I just called it “New York Renovator”) and put in my RSS feed. Zookoda took my Feedburner RSS url just fine. Everything was so easy!

Next, I took a look at the templates for email format. These were a little sparse, but they still were very nice. There were four pages of Blogger-type templates. This is wonderful if you use one of these for your Blogger blog! Your email will match your blog template. However, I don’t use Blogger templates, but I did think this template was stylish.

I tried out the Zookoda template, and liked it best of all.

If you are comfortable tinkering with html, Zookoda allows you to tweak the template. Or you can even use your own custom template. I liked the flexibility of this. You can also use some of their basic images, too. I don’t like “plain jane” type templates, so these little customizations won me over.

Next was customizing content. I could pick and choose what blog posts I wanted to send. This customization is extremely helpful if you want to send only your best posts or if you want to send an anthology. Zookoda also gives you the option to send emails on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. This is terrific!

Finally, Zookoda offers a way to manage everything. You can create mailing lists, manage the lists, view real-time click, unsubscribe, and other activities, and you can even email blog content in text format for your mobile readers. All this is pretty amazing for a price tag of FREE.

IZEA is a blossoming mover-and-shaker in the blogosphere. Zookoda, combined with their RealRank system, SocialSpark, and Blogger’s Choice Awards, is showing the real prowess of this company as they continue to churn out innovation after innovation. I predict they will soon be the next blogger powerhouse of the Internet.

So if you’ve got readers, check out Zookoda. If you want readers, you’ll definitely want Zookoda- this will draw them like flies to honeycomb. Zookoda is clean, classy, and simply a breeze to use and manage.

Hello Frugal Hacks visitors! I am new to Frugal Hacks for this blog, but I’ve been on the blogroll for my other blogs, New York Traveler.net and New York Renovator, so several months. I’m a frugal gal, and what you’ll find here are tons of geeky tips, helps, tutorials, and advice– all free! I also blog about programs, downloads, software, and news (especially security issues)– for free! Very rarely do I ever buy any computer programs, and I review what I find useful and present them here.

If you are a simple blogger or blog reader just looking for tips and news about free programs, you will find many helpful things here. If you are a “professional” blogger and are looking for news and buzz about things that will help your blogging, you also will find help here. Like my description says, I talk technology for the average computer user. I like the KISS method (Keep It Simple, Silly!) I hope all my hard work will help you!

If you have questions, need information, or need some tech help, feel free to leave a comment here or fill out the Contact Me form (click the tab at the top of the blog). I will try my best to help you. I may not be able to help, or I may not get back to you immediately, but I promise I will try.

Thanks for visiting! I hope you visit again!