Husmodern (Swedish magazine) 1923

OK, this wasn’t what I had in mind to keep me occupied. The ultimate mean clean.

First: my sister went ill again and there were some cleaning involved there too, but I’m sorry I can’t tell you about it….

Let’s just say that this have and will keep me a bit more occupied than usual - in case you have or will miss me. I can’t make around to you all for the moment. You understand that, I hope. Real life and near and dear ones have to be put before blogging - or? *LOL*

Second: I’m really occupied washing for the moment, I’ve been neglecting it too long now. No clothes to put on soon! *lol* Yeah, yeah, I hear you, but it’s too cold to go naked! Really!

Third: Today my computer was nearly washed out by an evil Trojan and bootsector virus. Despite the fact that I do NOT open email from strangers, I haven’t installed any new programs, I’ve not been on any less serious websites (no porn, we make it ourselves ;-) . How the heck did they get here? *sigh*

I’ve been working on it now and I think my other darling, Avast Antivirus, and we did it together, we washed the virus out! I do hope it will continue to work and not come back!

I must say that I’m really impressed by Avast and especially that they make it available free for home users. That is truly very generous of them. This is the second time Avast saves me. The first time I had Norton Antivirus, but that didn’t help at all.

Thanks ALWIL software for Avast Antivirus :-)

The old cleaning lady

UPDATE…

Fourth: Tonight I’ll have difficulties to sleep since my best friend Miss Ass. Lifecruiser phoned late in the evening to tell me that I shouldn’t be worried, but she is on the way in to the hospital…. Terrible pain in the bowel area. Let’s hope it’s nothing difficult, because it usually is when it comes to her. I’ve never meet any person with such a bad luck!!! When shall she ever get any peace and quiet…?

1. If you want people to read your post as soon as possible - to increase your blogs popularity, you have to ping after you’ve published a post. It’s a very important subject for all bloggers.

2. There are services on the internet that scans blog for updates and publishes the recently updated blogs. As soon as you’ve updated your blog, you should let them know that by sending a ping to that service.

3. A ping is like a handshake between two people. When you’re shaking hands you get to hear the news from her/him. So, by pinging you tell services like blogrolling or Technorati that you’ve updated your blog.

4. In Wordpress: There are a ping function built in already, called ping-o-matic. You find it in Wordpress Admin Panel under Options => Writing. On that page’s (Writing Options) bottom, under the header “Update Services” You can se a box where it already is written rpc.pingomatic.com.

5. Wordpress is executing the ping automatically, but I personally don’t think it does it fast enough, so I do it manually by Pingoat for now.

6. Besides that, if there is a problem at the pingomatic site, your blog posting can be slow. I don’t recommend to add more pinging services there for that reason. As a matter of a fact, some people even removes it from there to speed up their posting time and handle it all manually.

7. All you have to do is to go to Pingoat’s site (link at the end of this post) and the first time you have to fill in your blog name, blog url and what services you want to ping. Pingoat has a long list of services to ping for you. I have Pingoat bookmarked in my browser for easy access.

8. In Blogger: If you have set that up in Blogger, it pings Weblogs. (Dashboard, Settings, Publishing, Notify…) I don’t know exactly how it works, but I’ve noticed on my mothers Blogger blog that it hasn’t been pinged directly after I published the post, so I guess it’s the same there as in Wordpress.

9. Example how to ping a Blogger blog on Pingoat:
Blog name: Your blogs name
Blog url: http://yourblogname.blogspot.com
XML feed: http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml

10. You can click on the headers to mark all services you want to ping under that header, instead of clicking one by one. Click on the button “Go Pingoat!” and you’re done.

11. Pingoat tells you if you already have pinged recently, so it’s no danger in pinging manually. I’ve been pinging like this for many months now.

12. You can get blacklisted there, by mistake or because you’ve tried too many times with the same post (it looks like spam), but it’s only to contact them and they fix it. It has only happened to me once so far. In the meantime I used pingomatic.

13. I highly recommend to start pinging there as soon as you’ve published a post - if you want to ease the way for more traffic :-)

Oh, and sometimes people use the word ping as shortening for pingback, so don’t mix up the two different words! Read what a pingback is here.

pingoat.com
pingomatic.com
Read more on wordpress Codex about Pinging

NOTE: Every comment is equally welcome, even if you’re not participating in this Thursday Thirteen-thing, we ♥ LOVE all comments :-)

Want to participate? (more…)

Join

At first I thought that I would start the new year kind of mild and just make one tackle today: cleaning my desk. You can see the results below. Quite a difference I’d say!

Then I happened to Stumble Upon a site with an excellent Map guide function Schmap.com that made me aware of other tackles I have to do. It called me back to the real world.

You know that we’ve been travelling a lot before? (If not read our travel report) And maybe you’ve noticed that we only travelled twice during 2006? This is mostly because of my health issues.

The Schmap Player is an excellent guide to different places in the world which is essential for a traveller and it made me aware of how much I really miss it… I really long for to go somewhere now. To explore. To enjoy. Ahh…

If only my health would allow me too… It’s mainly my back, stomach and my lack of iron I need help with.

So the tackle I have to make as priority #1 this year is: my health. I just have to kick my ass to act in the matter to find a new doctor that actually can help me. That’s how it has become in this real world.

It shouldn’t be that hard to achieve, it’s just that the health care here in Sweden is really bad for the moment, I’m sorry to say! We are left with the service of something called Vårdcentralen and they really don’t want to help with you with anything that may costs anything.

Like tests to see if I still got the lack of iron for an example. Can you imagine that they won’t test me for it again? I’m still going bald and feeling very tired, can’t say I notice any improvement and since I have problem to eat the iron pills, this don’t come as any surprise to me, but maybe for them.

The “fun” part of it is that they tortured me with forced me to go through a much hated gastroscopy back in June, they said it was so very important to find out the reason behind the lack of iron. Then when the results in the gastroscopy didn’t tell about any problems, they suddenly lost their interest totally.

After that they weren’t at all interested in finding out what’s wrong. They dropped me fast like a pooped diaper…. I’ve asked for tests several times, but I don’t even care to tell you about the respond to that, it makes me so mad even though it actually is like a parody.

So I must hunt for a private doctor that actually care for the patients. It might not sound like a hard tackle for you, but for me that’s not well, it sometimes feels like climbing Mount Everest!

Wish me luck :-)

Reminder rest Tit’s:

1. Kick my ass to find a new doctor
2. Deal with my health issues
3. Kitchen cupboards
4. Porcelain boxes
5. Clean bathroom
6. Clean hall closet
7. Basement storage
8. Sales ads

(Have you noticed that it keeps adding up tackles to this list all the time instead of the opposite? *lol*)

See the latest post and Tackle It Tuesday participants over at 5 minutes for mom.

I love to dance, but I’m no good dancer - if it’s other dances than Disco, because I grow up during the disco era. Luckily Mr Lifecruiser is, so I only have to follow him - not in belly dancing though ;-)

I’m sad though, that the dancing is decreasing. I’m afraid that it will disappear totally eventually. There seems not to be any interest for dance among the youngsters, they’re mostly standing there when they’re out or in party’s.

Why is that? Are they too shy? Is it not trendy enough? Is it not cool to dance? Or are they just too drunk? Or too much pressure to dance perfect?

I hear so many people say that they can’t dance, but really! They are not participating in a dance competition, it’s just to dance and have fun! That’s the main thing. Dare to make a fool of yourself, if that what you think you’re doing. I say not, because if you’re having fun - you’re always a winner!

I do think that it should be compulsory in school to learn different dance styles and to practise it in reality - not just scratch on the surface of it. It’s common knowledge to be able to dance and I think it would ease the path for dancing tremendously. It would have helped myself very much.

These days when people talk so much about diets and workouts, why not take up dancing as an excellent diet method? You’re so occupied making yourself tired with dancing that you got no time to eat and you’re burning lots and lots of fat while doing it - and it’s FUN!

For singles it’s an excellent opportunity to meet each other and it’s accepted to actually touch each other too :-) What can be better than that?

Mr L and I have been discussing going to a dance school, but never seem to get around to actually do it. Partly because of my back of course. I shouldn’t dance that much, but it’s so fun so I keep forgetting that and then I’m totally dead the days after that….

Yes, I know, there still is some dancing out there, but it’s too little! So I wish for a Ballroom Blitz to explode - soon….

Come on - shake that body :-)

Which type of dances do you like? Or would like?

Click here to learn to dance:
Ballrom Dancers
Dance steps tutorial online
Dance steps
Salsa dance steps
Disco dance steps

UPDATE: If you by any chance made a comment on this post and it isn’t there now, it’s because my database has been created from a backup since then…

Life is fun. At least if you’re virusfree and have a working computer. Which I have. Now :-)

It took me a while to fix it. Totally fresh install on formatted harddrives, because I had so much crap on it and the old Win installation were not quite functional since a while back.

And yes, I had backups. On most the important stuff. I think. We’ll see if I miss something later…

I did run a lot of online virus scans, just to make sure there is no virus there any longer.

I opened the computer to dust it too. Probably the dust made it park the head in the drive and freeze it, so better to clean it while I was on the go. Or as I use to say: while my pants were down anyway ;-)

Now comes the tricky bit, to keep the computer as clean as possible and not begin to load it with all kind of unnecessary stuff…

I don’t bother to install Norton Antivirus again, it take too much space and I decided to install avast antivirus instead. I really like what I’ve seen and heard about it so far. And it’s free - awesome!

I will stick to Lavasofts AdAware to check for spywares and malicious content, it’s very useful.

avast home edition at avast.com
Ad-Aware at lavasoft.com

Did I ever tell you about my VIRUS FREE YEARS?

I’ve been using computers and Internet since the beginning of Internet and have some very fond memories from the virusfree years I’ve had. So many years and so much fun surfing.

Now that’s just a memory. It’s getting more and more complicated to protect your computer. It’s not only viruses, but malwares, spywares and all sort of things.

The other day I accidently clicked on a link in a spam comment on this blog and it opened my browser - which I closed at once - and *swosh* my computer got infected for the very first time, by a Trojan called Trojan.Zlob. Appearently it’s very difficult to get rid of. And very many seems to be infected with it. *heavy sigh*

It is a backdoor designed to give the attacker remote control over a compromised PC. It changes essential computer settings and modifies certain files. Zlob starts automatically on every Windows startup and stays hidden in background. It waits for remote connections and allows the attacker to download and install additional software, execute certain commands and manage the entire computer. Zlob can be very dangerous.

And yes, I have an antivirus software installed, Norton Antivirus, but obviously it didn’t manage to stop this one, even though Symantec claim that it does.

What is worse is that I had to do an online virus scan to find out what it was infected of, because Norton Antivirus Scan don’t detect the trojan at all. It wouldn’t let me do a scan with AdAware (my Spyware software) either and my browsers (both IE and Firefox) were shutdown with an error message so I couldn’t perform the online scan either at first.

I found (by running RegKleaner) that it keeps installing something called Spyware Soft and put it in the Autostart too. I managed to get rid of that, probably temporarily.

I’ve been reading about this Trojan on the internet and it seems like it’s a lot of steps needed to go through to get rid of it, with a lot of fuss and while I was writing this, I was running another spywarecheck on the computer, when it just stopped. Blue screen syndrom. Reboot problems, because it tries to boot from CD-ROM suddenly.

I know how to fix so it reboot properly from the hard drive, but I don’t want to, because the virus will still be there. I’ve been trying all day to fix this horrible beast.

I don’t have the time or energy to format my hard drive and try to do a completely fresh install of Windows, for the moment.

I’m using Mr Lifecruisers work computer right now, so I guess I’ll have to lean on that for a while until I can fix mine.

My computer is just a memory for the moment. *sigh*

I think I’ll just go to bed… (it’s 02:00 am)

I don’t like that there is a lot of bloggers that don’t seem to be aware of - or choose to ignore - the copyrights rules on the internet. I guess they don’t think that they will be discovered.

I’m also quite annoyed by the fact that some people hotlink to our pictures on this blog (I can see that in our statistic software on the server) - stealing our bandwidth that we’re paying for. So I’ve begin to put up this picture for them instead:

I just change the real pictures name to something else and this one to the name they hotlink to. Quite embarrassing for them, but also informative.

I could have just changed the name of it, but I think that this way is more effective. After all, there are many people out there that is not even aware of what they’re doing. Now they get to know.

There are other ways to do it too, like the hotlink option in the cPanel at the webhost or directly in the .htaccess file, but I’ve had some problems to implement them and this works for now.

Recently I stumbled over some very good summarizing information about the copyrights at Godbit, that all bloggers should be aware of.

Rules of Thumb on the Internet:

(These are rough guidelines, but they’re good ones)

- If it’s on the internet, it’s copyrighted.
- If you didn’t originate it, you don’t own the copyright.
- When in doubt, ask for permission.
- Or be certain as to fair use (and cite the original author).
- Or look for works available under a creative commons license.
- Don’t infringe copyrights.

Read what more Godbit writes about Copyrights
Webmasterstop about hotlinking and cPanel
The Site Wizard about hotlinking and htacess
Our earlier post about Copyscape

NOTE: You’re welcome to download :-) this picture of mine if you want to use it yourself when being hotlinked.

Time to celebrate! We were applying to be members of The 9rules Network a while ago and out of 700 sites, 111 were selected - and we’re one of them!

*jumping up and down in excitement*

We were quite surprised by this great honour. Of course we were hoping, but in this good company, how could we stand a chance? Maybe it was our passion and love that drawn their attention.

What is the 9rules Network then?

As stated on the website:

“The 9rules Network is a community of the best weblogs in the world on a variety of topics. We started 9rules to give passionate writers more exposure and to help readers find great blogs on their favorite subjects. It’s difficult to find sites worth returning to, so 9rules brings together the very best of the independent web all under one roof”.

Some members seems to be concerned about not being that exclusive any more since we, the newbies, have been selected, but is it really less exclusive just because of the increase? I don’t think so. The exclusive part don’t come from the amount of members, it comes from being one of the kind, passionated of what we’re doing, which we all are.

The benefits with 9rules is not only to increase our traffic to this blog, it’s a community which help each other with our common passion for building websites to be the very best, by helping each other to reach our goals. Making more friends, giving and getting advices or feedback and sharing projects or ideas.

They originally started in 2003 with a set of 9rules for living:

- Love what you do.
- Never stop learning.
- Form works with function.
- Simple is beautiful.
- Work hard, play hard.
- You get what you pay for.
- When you talk, we listen.
- Must constantly improve.
- Respect your inspiration.

For us, these rules are not only rules, it’s the way we already live and will continue to live - in cyberspace or in real life. Actually we think that the first rule “Love what you do” would be enough to cover in the rest of it.

We want to keep the passion of writing on fire as much as our love to each other. The only difference is that in our love to each other there isn’t much room for more improvements since it’s already flaming perfect ;-)

When it comes to this blog, the process is going on, we’re working on it constantly. We already update regularly, but we don’t think that’s enough. Oh no. We are determent to improve our writing skills further and also the design of this blog layout.

The layout has been an issue since the beginning of this blog actually, but since we’ve been busy travelling and being ill ;-), the re-design part have to wait a little.

Though the most important thing of all is our readers - yours - impression of us and the communication with you. We love your comments, short or long, fun or serious - as long as we get some kind of reaction from you.

So, keep coming back, it’s YOU that keep this blog alive!

Opening up the Dom Perignon’s to make a toast for us, it’s we together that made this blog to what it is today.

Technorati Tags: 9rules

We’re going to upgrade Wordpress to the latest version for this blog any moment now, so if there should be some problems during or afterwards - be patient please.

If you have the chance to set up your own domain at a webhost like Blue Host, you should definitely consider to use wordpress as your free blogging software. Be sure to choose a webhost that gives you Fantastico which offers you easy installation and upgrades of WP through your webhosts controlpanel. If you don’t want the webhost solution, you can have a free account at wordpress.com. Personally I don’t like the free account there so much, but that’s probably because I have had the own webhosted variant already…. I’m spoiled :-)

NOTE: If you decide to get an own domain name, don’t forget to make sure that you get the privacy protection service. It’s not sure it’s for free, but if you don’t, your address details is available for anyone who does a whois look up in the internet!

The wordpress.org have very good information about all the stuff regarding WP, one of the best. I always read a lot there - especially now before doing the upgrade. To make sure not to do anything clumsy.

There is a lot of information to get about wordpress in Technorati tags too.

NOTE: We need to upgrade this blog several WP-versions in steps, so keep this post in your mind for a while.

This post will be about Copyscape, which I’m sure, a lot of you already know about. But I think this is such a great tool, that I want to spread it as much as I can.

I think that all bloggers are like me, we don’t like the idea of some one actually stealing our blog content, which we have been struggling so hard with - in sweat, blood and tears to create. Right?

Copyscape is so simple to use, you just enter your URL and it will search for copies of your content. It’s a free service so why not use it? They also have a paid option if you want a more automatic scan frequently, but the free service probably is enough for the average blogger.

Why use this service and not Google? Well, in Google you have to enter proper search frases and stuff to actually look for your content. With Copyscape you just put in the URL and it will do a search on a lot of your stuff at one and the same time.

Go there and do a check up of your own blog!

Let Copyscape scan for copies of your blog

Read Global Web Rights at Copyscape
Forum post about what to do When All Else Fails

Plagiarism Today