PerformancingAds is a blog advertising network. I was a publisher of their service and I had no complaints against them until this month. During November, they abused my advertising space and displayed ads for extended period without paying me a cent. Now, I am convinced that PerformancingAds is a cheater. Here I am going to tell you what happened with me and what I think about their game.

It all started with two ad bookings on November 3, 2008. I am not going to mention the names of the advertisers here, because it will be a free publicity for them! The two ads were booked for one week. It was clearly stated in the region booked mail that they sends to it’s publishers when an ad was booked. I have original copies of the two emails and I can produce them anytime.

As each of the ads were not related to any explicit materials, I accepted them. The ads went live on specified time and I forgot about them until I saw them on my blog after ten days. First I thought, I am getting extra money for the usage. But, when I checked my account, I saw that they will pay me only for one week. And in detailed information about each ads, it is stated that they will expire on November 30. But my account reports clearly states that they were booked for one week only. Then how come they will expire after 4 weeks?  And how an ad became self-booked ad? Take a look at the screenshot below.

Sensing something fishy, I contacted them via the contact form, on November 17. Now reply for three days. Then, on November 20,  I told them via email that I will remove the ad region, unless the ads are removed from my blog. Their reply arrived quickly with a finger towards their developers! And you know what? Their reply to my first mail arrived on November 24. What a fast customer service.

They said that it was server glitch that prevented ads from refreshing, but they resolved the issue and the expired ads should disappear from my blog. I thought that at last I got some kind of a customer service! But, soon my happiness changed into anger. The same two ads again appeared on my blog.

It is enough. I made a decision to quit. These cheap people have really cheap minds. They must understand that every blogger have full rights on their blogs. And partnering with a third party for revenue doesn’t reflect that the blogger is poor and desperate for money. I have money, I have dignity and I respect my blog. So, I quit.

Finally I wrote to them that if within 24hrs they are not going to remove those ads, I will quit and will openly discuss the matter on my blog. I was sure that there will be no replies and I was right. I am not going to claim any unpaid money or money for the referrals. Let them eat my money.

You may ask, why I am writing this blog post, when I am not interested in PerformancingAds? This for you my dear friends. When it can happen with me, I am sure that it will happen with you also. Already many bloggers have expressed their anger on this service. I am sure that you have probably heard about many of them. So, this is the time. Think once again, if you are using them right now. And if you are new to this field of make money online, avoid them. Otherwise you will regret one day!

The bottom line:

“Avoid PerformancingAds. They will eat your advertising space and you will get nothing”.

The developers of WordPress has released a new version of the world’s most popular blogging platform. I am sure that you have noticed the news on your dashboard. The new version, WordPress 2.6.5, fixes one security problem and three bugs. The security issue is an XSS exploit that only affects IP-based virtual servers running on Apache 2.x.

The first bug fix prevents accidentally saving post meta information to a revision, the second prevents XML-RPC from fetching incorrect post types and the third adds some user ID sanitization during bulk delete requests. These bug fixes are not so important. Still, it is recommended that you upgrade your installation as soon as possible.

Want to know about the changed files only? Here is the list:

• /wp-includes/post.php  (2 differences)
• /wp-includes/version.php (1 difference)
• /wp-includes/feed.php (1 difference)
• /xmlrpc.php (2 differences)
• /wp-admin/users.php (1 difference)

The last WordPress release was version 2.6.3 and now it is 2.6.5. So, WordPress avoided the version 2.6.4. Do you know the reason? well, it is because of the fake WordPress site that was distributing Trojan with a fake WordPress 2.6.4 release. For your own safety and smooth blogging, download WordPress from the official site only.

Link building is an important aspect of blogging, specially when you want to make money online with your blogs. Link building is not a tough job. You just need some patience and some hard work. You can get some good links to your blog by using various white hat SEO methods such as blog commenting, forum promotion, article marketing and link exchange. I know most of you are aware about all these stuffs and I am not going to bore you with a long article about all these things. Rather I would like to tell you about a simple Firefox add-on that will help in link building and SEO.

The add-on that I am talking about is SearchStatus. What actually it do? It displays Google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete Rank of any domain name right within your browser. So, what’s the big deal? This add-on comes with some powerful features that you can use to spy your competitors and to improve your own blog. For example keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa incoming links, Alexa related links and many more.

You will be able to realize it’s power only after installing it on your browser (Firefox off course). Just get it from here and install it. Once it is enabled, you will see it in the bottom right of your browser. You can also change it’s position to some convenient place, from the options menu. Now browse the web as usual. When you are on a web page, it will automatically get information about the Google PageRank, Alexa Rank and Compete Rank of that particular page or domain, and displays them unobtrusively on your browser. You can enable or disable these ranks anytime.

How to use SearchStatus for link building? I am sure that you would love to get some nofollow free i.e., dofollow links. For this you need to know where you can get one. You have probably came across some dofollow blogs and even directories of dofollow blogs. But, mind it, many bloggers are cheating fellow bloggers by announcing their blogs as dofollow, when their blogs are still using nofollow on links!

So, how to know who really offers dofollow links to it’s commentators? Let’s use this Firefox add-on to get some good links. Right click on the add-on icon and select the ‘Highlight Nofollow Links” option. From now on when a web page uses nofollow on links, it will highlight the link. Go to blogs and post comments when you see no highlighting on comment links. Similarly use some brain and get good nofollow free links from relevant sources. So, with this add-on no one can cheat you about dofollow links. Just continue posting good and relevant comments on dofollow blogs and soon you will get a bunch of one way links to your blog.

In my view SearchStatus is a powerful add-on and it is a must for every blogger. I am using it for last few months and getting extremely positive results on some of my new blogs. Besides using for detecting nofollow links, I use SearchStatus to get a quick overview of a new site. It saves lots of my valuable time. If you are not using it right now, try it today. I am sure that it will become one of your favorite Firefox add-ons.

Want to find out who is talking about your topic of interest on Twitter lately? Want to discover the hot topics on Twitter? Then I think you should give Tweetag, a new Twitter-based service, a try. This Belgium based service that will enable you to browse the public tweets through tags. Tagging and Twitter? How it is done? Tweetag uses a automatic tagging system, which analyzes and tags more than 200K tweets every day. These tags helps them to generate nested tag clouds so that you can easily browse through the sea of endless tweets.

On their home page, Tweetag sorts out and displays the 40 most frequent topics being discussed on Twitter. The size of each tag varies with it’s relative importance. A tag about which more people are talking about, appears big compared to a less talked about one.

You can also search with your own tags to find out who is talking about what lately! You can also use multiple tags to refine your search. You can add tags to the selection by clicking on them. A click on a tag in the “selected tags” bar will remove it from the selection.

For example, want to check tweets on Google voice search on iPhone? Just use Googe and iPhone as tags and start your search. The results are presented in four tabs - all, links, questions and replies. So, if you want to check the links posted on Twitter, related to your topic, just select the “links” tab.

Tweetag has a developer API which one can use to build cool apps and widgets based on their data. Well, this is just a beginning for Tweetag. In near future more features such as thematic tag clouds are expected to be added to the Twitter-based service. Before that, why don’t you give it a try?

I need help from my blog readers. I am looking for a good e-newspaper script or software. You may ask why I need an e-newspaper software? Well, I run a local newspaper, which is gradually getting some good exposure. It is a weekly newspaper and covers mostly local news and related articles. A few weeks ago my editor-in-chief suggested me to consider an electronic version of the newspaper. His suggestion was genuine as many of our readers stays in foreign countries and a recent survey revealed that many local readers also wants an e-version. So, I took the suggestion seriously and now considering to launch the e-version in January.

I need your Help!

That’s why I am looking for something that can replicate the original version of a printed newspaper, in an user friendly format. I run websites and blogs, but I don’t have any knowledge about e-versions of newspapers. After my initial search I found that there are some scripts that can give the feel of a newspaper, by using images as pages. But, I am not happy with my search results. Can you help me find a suitable product that will help me in publishing an e-version of a printed newspaper?

I want to retain the look and feel of the paper version in my e-newspaper. That’s why when a reader visits the e-version, he/she must be able to turn pages like a printed newspaper. I know what I need here - a pageflip effect. But, I don’t know how to create a control panel like WordPress dashboard, so that my editor can manage the issues and users. Do you know about any particular script or software that works like an CMS for e-newspaper publishing? If you do, please feel free to inform me via comments or email.

Some of my friends have suggested me to hire a freelancer. So, I am also considering to hire someone to write a custom script. But, if there is something good available in the market, why should I spend my money on freelancers to develop something that I am not familiar with? What you say? That’s why, if you have any kind of experience or information related to e-newspaper publishing, please help me. I really need to decide on it, within this month. Otherwise my editor will continue to disturb me with his phone calls! Please help.