Jim Makos Blog

My blog contest awarding three copies of Dave Farrar’s book “The Perfect Punter” has ended! Congratulations to the three winners who will get notified by email about how to get hold of their prizes! The book giveaway began 40 days ago and 3 winners were picked among 70 entries randomly by Punchtab.com itself. I was [...]

WordPress plugins like Limit Login Attempts increase security of WordPress blogs regarding admin login. The plugin sent me an alert today that there have been several IP lockouts after they tried to login and hack one of my WordPress blogs. This comes only two weeks after I moved to VPS hosting for better security; a [...]

Since Google adopted website speed into their ranking formula two years ago, every blogger worries about their page speed and website loading times. Making money by blogging is all about content and invaluable content will keep visitors inside your blog, no matter how long they have to wait until your page completes downloading. But the [...]

Speeding up a WordPress blog includes enabling Gzip compression via EasyApache on Linux servers. Since I transferred my websites to VPS hosting, I focused into speeding up my blogs, but I quickly found out that I had to mess with Apache interface. If cPanel is used for managing the server, EasyApache is an easy way [...]

Moving my domains from HostGator shared hosting service to VPS – Virtual Private Server – has been quite an experience during last week. I made the decision due to allegedly improved security that a VPS or a dedicated server provides compared to shared hosting, since my websites were malware-infected the previous weekend. Domain transfer completed [...]

All of my blogs and websites were infected by a trojan virus this weekend. HostGator, the hosting company of the websites, were unbelievably supportive and although I contacted them on Sunday, they responded within an hour letting me know that they had completed the scanning process! It turns out that the same virus has infected [...]

Blogging is all about writing great content, right? Google Analytics can determine if your old posts were well-written, but your permalinks need to include the publishing date so that Analytics can sort the posts by date. WordPress permalinks do exactly that by including the year, month and day the posts were published in the blog. [...]

You know there is something wrong with your blog when you are asked to publish a porn-related post! I was offered a pre-written paid post to have it featured in my gambling blog today and although the money is good during the economic crisis, I’d rather keep my blog away from the porn industry. However, [...]

It’s always useful to know how much bandwidth your blog actually uses to deliver your precious posts to your loyal readers. Although most popular hosting companies offer unlimited bandwidth, there are times like speeding up your blog when you really need to know how much gigabytes per month or per day get transferred from your [...]

New blog contest! I’m giving away 3 copies of Dave Farrar’s new book, The Perfect Punter! Dave Farrar commentates on football for ESPN and was the chief football commentator on Eurosport for 10 years. His journalism covers a wide range of sports, with a regular focus on how to become the perfect punter. Now, he [...]