Rob Ferrer’s Thoughts and Writings

I’ve been using My Search Funds (the site that pays you to search) for a little while now. Up to now they have used Ask.com to provide the search results.

I was surprised today to find a Google results page when I searched. I thought I had selected the wrong search engine, but I checked, and I had used the correct search option. This is great if they are able to start to use Google, because the results are much better.

I checked the FAQ on the site, and it’s changed slightly. The wording is now:

“Our results are taken from Yahoo!, Windows Live Search and Ask (and shortly Google) and are presented to you based on how many of the search engines they appear in so we hope your results will be just as good if not better!”

This looks like they are going to use a combined results page, but no sign of that yet. I don’t know how this will affect the revenue share, but I doubt they would do anything to make them and us less money!

There was a “New Message” on my account today, but it was blank!

If Google is here to stay, there’s now even more reason to sign up for this service. My earnings are now coming up to £20 - the minimum payment level - and that’s after less than 2 months!

[Update]: I found a message on the search page:

New Improved Search Results!
Now you can use MySearchFunds to search three major Search Engines in one go! Shortly we will be adding Google to this and improving the presentation and speed of results so please stick with us.

SORRY!
We are having a few minor problems with our meta search service which should be resolved next week. In the meantime why not enjoy results from Google.

They also mention cashback shopping - in fact they are giving 50% of eBay’s revenue on winning bids already.

I got three pieces of junk mail today (old fashioned snail mail) from 3 different car insurance providers reminding me that my policy is up for renewal. Two of the mailings were from the same company (one from Direct Line, one from Privilege - part of direct line), the third was from Churchill, which as far as I can tell is an unrelated company.

The interesting thing is that I renewed my car insurance a couple of months ago. I’m assuming this is because a few years ago I had a bonus accelerator policy lasting only 10 months.

I used to have a policy with Direct Line, so can understand where they got the information, but I don’t know where Churchill got it - is there a database for sale out there with this information in!?

I was writing an email to a friend, and tried to copy and paste a URL, but all that get pasted was “Text copying disabled”.

I thought maybe the site was preventing copying, so I disabled Javascript and tried again. Same problem. I tried copying some text within a text editor. Same problem.

Eventually I realised is was a survey I was completing in another tab (I like to multi-task). I looked at the source, and saw no JS. All there was was a piece of flash embedded.

Once I closed the survey everything worked, but it’s a bit worrying that flash can take over your computer to such an extent!

Does anyone know of any security settings that could stop this? Is there anything else Flash can do to take over a computer?

Update 2008-05-20:

I’ve had a lot of people coming to this blog looking for how to fix this. If I’m right, the easiest way to fix this will be to close all web browsers.

If this doesn’t work please let me know and I’ll look in to it. If it does work, feel free to comment too - I’d be interested to know how widespread the problem is.

For those who don’t know, Yuwie is a new(ish) social networking site which shares a percentage of their ad revenue with its users. Sounds good in theory, so I thought I’d give it a try.

Yuwie seems to be based on the MySpace model, with each use having a profile, a photo gallery, a blog etc. You can customise your profile backgrounds and colours in the same sort of way as you do with Myspace (you can see my profile here). As a social networking site it seems pretty good, although there is nothing new. It used to be a bit slow due to the number of ads, but this seems to have got better, and the ads less annoying.

How much you earn depends on a few things. The number of “control panel” pages you view are counted, and so is how many times your profile is viewed by other members. Every month your total views gets multiplied by the monthly RSR (Revenue Sharing Rate), and then you get 10% of the total (I’ll explain why later).

Because the number of views your profile gets directly affects your earnings, everyone is very keen to make friends, in fact there are many “clubs” dedicated to getting more friends. People also advertise their blogs and pictures, in the hope they will get more referrals.

A lot of the content is based around making money online, but I have found some good stuff - for example I am a member of a group of arty people where people post their work - from poetry to ironwork and everything in between.

Now, you may remember I said you made 10% of the revenue for your views. This is because the rest is shared between the people who referred you up to 10 levels. This means a big way to make more money is to refer people of your own. in fact you earn the same percentage on your own views as you do the people 10 levels down, which means the real way to make money has got to be to recruit people and build up your tree - you could be completely inactive and still make lots of money.

Earnings

The Yuwie help pages give an estimated monthly earnings of over $10,000 dollars. This assumes everyone has 1,000 views and everyone refers 3 other people. It also assumes a slightly higher RSR than it was last month, but the sums add up.

So, I said I had my first full month, and so can reveal that my earnings for March were……

…$0.03

OK, so it’s not huge at all, but I’ve got no active referrals.

Recommendations

If you like social networking sites, give it a go, and treat it like any other social networking site: add your pics, customise your profile, make new friends, invite your friends.

Do not use it as a way to make money. Don’t add rubbish to your profile in the hope it will get a few more views (see my blog on Yuwie for an experiment I did with a different profile pic). There are lots of better ways to make money out there, probably including flipping burgers.

If you are good at inviting people and have lots of friends who like this sort of thing, then you may well make a bit of cash. I didn’t invite all my friends, because most of the people I know aren’t into this sort of thing.

The one thing I have found is that this isn’t a scam (I’ve seen evidence of payments), but you need to be realistic.

Use my referal link to sign up (or go straight to my profile to bypass the annoying sales pitch)

Additional note: a much better way to earn money for doing very little is My Search Funds - I’ve built up over £12 so far (see previous post).

I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 today, using the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin. I had a few problesm. The main one was although it asks for FTP details so that it can change the permissions, there are many files it doesn’t. The second problem I had was I didn’t read the bit that says “Click here to upgrade then come back”.

I also decided I ought to change the theme from the default. This was much easier. The main issues are with the Gallery integration - the gallery doesn’t look quite right.

On a similar subject, I can’t get the image frames bit of it working, which means if I want to change anything about WPG2, I have to enable image frames, change the settings, then disable image frames again to stop error messages being displayed. This may be because I am using an SVN version of gallery - I may look into this if I get a chance.

I’d like to add my vote to Weebl’s campaign to Bring Back TV Theme Tunes, and also use it as an excuse to link to their great theme tune for Lost.

After discovering The Mobile Outlet had gone bust, we decided to ring T-Mobile to reduce the tariff Abby was on since she doesn’t use all her minutes.

It says on the back of every bill we’ve received “You can move to a lower priced plan after your six months”, so we assumed this would be no problem. Abby rung customer services, who informed her that they changed the terms a while ago to mean you had to be with them for 11 months before you could change. After a bit of discussion Abby passed the phone to me. I pointed out that since it stated 6 months on the first bill, and at that stage we had the right to return the phone, the 6 months statement formed part of the advertising which made us continue with the contract.

The operator informed me there was nothing they could do, and that their systems wouldn’t allow it to be changed. I asked to talk to a supervisor. Initially she stuck to the same story and told me there was nothing she could do. That gradually changed to “If I could reduce the plan…”, eventually to “We will let you reduce your plan.”. They were totally unsympathetic to the fact our cashback fell through, despite the fact they were paying this company to sell their phones.

It’s only a saving of £10/month, but it’s some consolation. The lesson of the story is that even if they claim there is nothing they can do, and that their systems won’t allow it, that is a lie as they were able to action our request without even escalating the problem further. If you want to reduce your price plan, and you have it in writing that you can, stick to your guns and you will get what you want.

Please note, I have no formal legal knowledge, and they may have been in their right not to let us downgrade, but I doubt it. Let me know if you have similar experiences or problems.

I woke up on Easter morning to find a good covering of snow, which was a bit of a surprise! Unfortunately we had a bit of a lie-in, so a lot of it had melted by the time I got out to get some pics. There’s a few in my gallery though, including some of my faves:

According to an elderly couple, all 11 ducklings survived the snow.

I like this one, but it’s a shame the daffodils were dying!

This is my attempt at being arty on a walk on Easter Monday.

See the rest here.

I read about OpenID a while ago, and decided now I have a blog, I should get myself an ID to let me log in to the various sites that support it.

I assumed there would be a WordPress plugin that let me do this, and I quickly found and installed WP-OpenID. To my disappointment I discovered that this plugin only adds the option for visitors to login using their OpenID, but not to use my blog as an OpenID. This does mean if you want to comment you can sign in with your OpenID however!

There are lots of 3rd party OpenID providers, and in fact I probably have more than one through other sites, but I wanted to keep everything separate from other providers, so I decided to set up my own.

Now, from here on, I am not reliant on WordPress, and this applies to any homepage or blog, whatever the platform. This is why I didn’t find many useful search results when searching for WordPress OpenID providers/plugins.

The solution is to install a little PHP application called phpMyID. There are lots of other blog posts that describe this process, but I will put a quick summary of what I did here. This assumes basic PHP/technical knowledge.

Firstly I downloaded phpMyID from here and unzipped it. The readme is pretty good - read it! I renamed MyID.config.php to index.php since I put it in it’s own directory (in fact own sub-domain: openid.robferrer.co.uk). Note, somewhat unusually, the config file is the main file which should be loaded, and is not included by another file as you would find in many other apps.

The readme tells you to upload the files and visit them. In fact this is only required if you are running PHP in safe mode, but I did it anyway (I also noticed a PHP error, but I’ll mention that later).

Follow the instructions to create the MD5 hash. I did this on a linux command line, and don’t like entering plain text passwords directly because it stays in the history. I could probably have worked out another way of typing the command, but the easiest solution is just to type ‘history -c’ after you’re done to clear the history.

I mentioned that I had a php error. This seems to be any configuration options that aren’t set (left as default). It works ok, but may (depending on your server settings) display warnings which prevents the headers being modified. The simplest solution to this is to turn off error/warning display in the php settings or (as I did), add the line “error_reporting(0);” to the top of your config file.

Other changes I made were to turn paranoid mode on (this asks you each time if you want to share your ‘identity’ with a site), and set up the sreg array with my details (to save you looking it up, the UK timezone is ‘Europe/London’, and country is ‘GB’). I’ll leave it up to you to decide how much of this information you want to fill in, bearing in mind any site which you log in to will be able to read it. I also set the idp_url, but it’s probably not needed

Re-upload the files and check you can log in. You may have to use the .htaccess (I didn’t), see the readme.

Finally, you presumably don’t want to enter your phpMyID url when you log in to a site, so put the following tags in to your homepage header:
<link rel=”openid.server” href=”http://openid.robferrer.co.uk/” />
<link rel=”openid.delegate” href=”http://openid.robferrer.co.uk/” />
(obviously replace http://openid.robferrer.co.uk/ with the URL of your phpMyID installation). If you want to use your blog URL, edit the WordPress header in Presentation->Theme Editor. You should now be able to enter your blog or homepage URL on any site that supports OpenID.

I had a small issue that stopped me logging in as www.robferrer.co.uk instead of openid.robferrer.co.uk. Not sure what the issue was. but this seems to be ok now using the settings described above.

I hope this helps someone searching for the same things as me!

In September last year, Abby bought a phone from The Mobile Outlet offering completely free line rental in the form of cashback.

The first cashback was due in January, but we heard nothing from the claim. I discovered today that Mobile Matters (UK) Ltd (T/A The Mobile Outlet) went into administration on 15 Feb. We’ve submitted a claim to the administrators, but I don’t hold out much hope, which means we are £420 out of pocket!!

The next step is for Abby to ring T-Mobile to see if they will reduce her line rental - I’ll keep you posted.

The Mobile Outlet site is not working at the moment, but I got the administrator’s details from Google’s Cache. If you can’t get those details, they ask you to send details to:

Begbies Traynor, Burley House, 12 Clarendon Road, Leeds LS2 9NF or by e-mail to mark.pintar@begbies-traynor.com

Another thing worth doing is signing the Downing Street Petition to make the networks responsible.

Let me know if you’re in the same boat. I’ll keep this updated if we hear anything from the administrators or T-Mobile.

[Update: 26 March] : Abby got an email confirming she was listed as a creditor of the company -it’ll be interesting to see what happens!

[Update: 2 April]: We managed to persuade T-Mobile to reduce the price plan - see the main post.