How to Watch Netflix, Amazon Prime and HULU on Your Hotel TV

Everything ROKU

The choices in room entertainment while you’re checked in to your hotel room are limited streamingand expensive. I ran into this problem during my travels and I figured out how to bring my home entertainment into my hotel room without paying a dime.

Of course its easy to watch Netflix, Amazon Prime and HULU on your laptop in your room but its not the same experience as watching like at home on the big screen.


I’m going to show you how to hook up your ROKU or Chromecast to your hotel room TV and WIFI. I have written to detailed step by step instruction posts on how to do it. Continue reading How to Watch Netflix, Amazon Prime and HULU on Your Hotel TV →

How to Setup Your Chromecast to Hotel WIFI

Everything ROKU

There are two ways to run your Chromecast in your hotel WIFI. The first method which I chromecastwill cover here first is to purchase a HOOTOO Tripmate travel router. This router you’ll need because in some cases  hotels will only let you have one device at a time connected to the internet. With the HOOTOO travel router you can connect up to 5 devices at a time thus circumventing the device restriction. This device is one of the best things I’ve purchased and I won’t leave home traveling without it. Its only $32!

Ok lets say you’ve got your HOOTOO and you’re in the hotel room. What do you do next? I put together these simple instructions for you to follow. Continue reading How to Setup Your Chromecast to Hotel WIFI →

How to Connect Your Roku To Hotel Wifi

Everything ROKU, product reviews

So you and your family are all checked into the hotel room and you find yourself scratching your head trying to install your ROKU.

You would think that connecting your ROKU to the internet through your hotel room should be easy right? But you can’t do it because the hotel internet connection requires you to login in with your room number and last name and you can’t do that through your ROKU.

Confused? I was for the first time but I figured it out and I’m here to show you how to do it. Continue reading How to Connect Your Roku To Hotel Wifi →

5 Reasons Why Attorneys Should Switch To WordPress

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I decided to write this post because one of the attorneys at my school approached me to update her website. It was hard coded mess with some old html and it was pretty bad looking. As a favor I said I would update her old website to WordPress.

attorneys

When I spoke to my client I explained the benefits of updating the site to WordPress. Here are a couple of things I explained to her.

1.Ease of Updating

If you have a hard coded site you can’t really make changes to it until you ask a developer to do it. With WordPress you don’t need an HTML expert or coder to make changes. All you need is a web browser to add and edit pages to your site.

This makes it easy for you to add attorneys to your website or add new practice areas.

2. Blogging

WordPress is a great blogging tool. As an attorney you can setup your WordPress blog easily.  Having a blog allows you to keep your clients up to date on case law and it builds credibility.

3. Hundreds of Themes Available

There are thousands of themes or designs available that can benefit your practice.

WordPress allows a law firm to benefit from improvements in themes and plug-ins to bring potential clients to the site. As WordPress improves the more your practice benefits.

4. Search Engine Friendly

WordPress is SEO friendly. It makes it easy for you to rank well on the search engines. Its built in from the ground up. With additional plugins you can rank even better.

5. Mobile and Tablet Ready

Many of the themes built around WordPress are mobile and tablet “responsive.” That means when a user loads your website on a tablet or phone it will render properly so that the experience is better.

How To Convert Your Law Practice To WordPress

I’ll show you step by step how I converted this law practice website over.

1. List all of the old files. If you have access to your clients site you can do it through sftp or if you don’t go to google and type:

site:yourclientsite.com

There are three elements to retrieve for each page.

Title Tag, Description meta tag and content page.

You can extract this for each page and put it in a text editor.

 

 

The first thing I did was access the 10 pages she had on the site and pasted them into new pages on the WordPress site. I chose to 301 redirect the old pages to the new pages but I could have easily kept the file extensions buy just updating the permalinks page.

Essential Theme

I chose the Genesis Theme and selected a child them that she liked and I started customizing it.

Plugins

If you are running any site with WordPress you need some plug-ins that are essential. Specifically I’m recommending three here that an attorney should have.

1. Pretty Good Security

This is essential if you’re running a wordpress site. It features 5 things that you need.

a. Hiding login pages- Many bots are searching sites to find

b. backup – the site mails to you on a schedule the complete back up the site so the site can always be restored.

 

How To Restore An Old Website Automatically

website-development,

If you’re trying to restore a site with less than 50 pages you can do it by hand most of the time using Google’s cache, bing or archive.org. However if its larger than 50 pages you might want to consider using the tool called Warrick website restoration. This project was started by two students at …. and they built this tool to automatically restore a damaged or lost site.

A couple of things. To get started you will need a machine running linux. I would recommend Ubuntu since its one of the best distributions and pretty easy to install and setup. The instructions are pretty easy to setup and install. If you have questions on how to do this I would recommend reading the instructions at warrick.cs.odu.edu.

To get started the best way is to pick from sample dates of the site you want to restore from archive.org. I did a post on how to restore and old website with archive.org.

After you find the date that best sample date you want to type out the following instruction from your linux machine.

Suppose you find the date of the sample you want is April 15, 2004 and you want the site stored in directorya/

sudo ./warrick.pl  -dr 2004-04-15 -D directorya -B http://www.example.com

This script will do its best to restore the site from all of the sources where it can find them. When its done your site will be restored.

If you don’t want to restore the site yourself, we can do it for you. Please read my next post to find out how.

 

How To Restore An Old Website

website-development,
Archive.org or WaybackMachine
Archive.org WayBackMachine

Some of the sites I’ve purchased over the years are from people who’s sites have disappeared and become inactive.  So I’m presented with the problem of how I restore these sites. It’s actually quite easy to do it. All you have to do is use a tool like archive.org otherwise known as the WayBackMachine. The first step is to type in the domain name you want to restore. If it exists in the archive thats a great first step.

After you type in the domain you will get a page that shows the number of samples taken during the year the site was active.

Start by clicking on the yellowed out boxes, where you see the most samples (black graphs). You will then see a blue dot on the calendar date the spider for archive.org went to grab the site. Click on the blue dot to pull up a copy of your site.

Once you click on that blue dot the site you want to restore comes up. However there are a few things that have been added that you will have to be aware of.

How to strip out the Wayback Headers

When the Wayback machine displays a sample of your site it includes some additional HTML and modifies  links of your site. It’s actually pretty easy to identify these. But first we must do a file save as to save our first sampled page.

Open up a text editor and open the page you just saved. The front part of the page should look like this.

If  you noticed you will see several links that precede the links of the site you are trying to restore. These need to be removed using your text editor. Use your text editor to remove these by copying the links above and replacing them with nothing (NULL). After you are done with that you can now remove the Wayback header HTML from the page. This is done by removing the text between text that looks like this:

<!-- BEGIN WAYBACK TOOLBAR INSERT -->BLA BLAH BLA <!-- END WAYBACK TOOLBAR INSERT -->

With your text editor start with the first <!– and delete everything up to “–>”

That should now leave your restored page without any traces from archive.org.

How To Name Restored Pages

This can get tricky because the first page that gets restored is usually the front page which usually is named something like index.html, index.htm or other name. However to restore the other pages of the site will require you to name them correctly.

Restoring Remaining Pages of a Site

To restore these pages one at a time, I would recommend that you click on the link of the page you want to restore. In this example, we can restore the page from the link titled “Radio Streaming AAC – Flash player..” To do this, open this page in a separate window and you will notice in the address bar that the link to the page is actually a directory of /radio-streaming-aac/. So you can create a directory with the same name and copy the file named as index.html if you like.

As you can see this can be tedious work to restore a complete site with dozens of pages. But there are other ways to restore this even faster with a really neat tool. I will post that in my next blog post. Best of luck!

How To Move an Old Site To WordPress

website-development,

As you know I have dozens of sites and most are coded in raw HTML back in the day when I created them. Now that WordPress has come along it offers a compelling case to convert these sites over. Here are a few of them:

1) WordPress makes it easy to update content and add content as needed without the use of conventional layout packages such as Dreamweaver and NVU.

2)There are many widgets and plug-ins that make it easy to port your site over to wordpress from a fixed url site.

How to get started.

The first step in converting an old HTML site to WordPress is the get a listing of all of the files on the current site. So for example, if you have a site with five pages then list out like this:

1)/widgets-to-buy.html

2)page1.html

3)page3.html

4)page5.html

Next you want to open up each of these files and copy the content (not menu or navigational content).

Create a new page under the Dashboard menu of wordpress.

Name the page so that its permalink matches the old page. So for example number one might be widgets-to-buy.

Save that page and start again until all of the pages are complete. Add the new address of the redirected page beneath the page in the list so it will look like this.

/widgets-to-buy.html
http://www.yoursite/widgets-to-buy

After the pages are all added the next step is to add in 301 redirects so you can redirect traffic from the old pages to the new wordpress pages. I download the “simple 301” redirect plugin for wordpress.

What you do here is for each page add on the left part of the menu

/widgets-to-buy             http://www.yoursite.com/widgets-to-buy

Just repeat this for each page and soon your site will be ported over.

Navigational Elements

Now that all the pages have been imported, the next step is to add a navigational menu or sidebar. I recommend using a menu and this makes it easy to add drop down menus to your site so that people can get to the areas of your site.

This is done in the “Appearance” section of the site and under menus. I’ll talk about that a little later.

Moving My Sites from Godaddy to Hostgator

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The downside about having so many sites, up to 22 right now is you have them spread over so many hosts. Keeping some sites on their own C block addresses are helpful to add links to my other sites in my network. However the big problems is you have to deal with so many different hosting panels or cpanels.

So this week I single handedly moved 14 sites over to Hostgator which I just love for the fact that I can have an unlimited number of domains and a large number of databases. Plus some of my sites where coded up in hard HTML and I really wanted to port them over to wordpress.

I was spending about $65 per month to host come sites on Godaddy through a number of plans and I just got tired of having to keep track of them all. As of now I have these sites on two business hosting accounts that I can add more sites as I grow. The other benefit hostgator uses a slick cpanel interface making it a snap to run my business.

I still hold my domains at Godaddy but I just had too many hassles at Godaddy for hosting.

WordPress

Since most of my sites where hard coded years ago in HTML I switched everything over to WordPress so that it makes it easier to manage my content on all the pages. The only thing I had to do was to redirect the old pages to the new wordpress pages.  I use what is called a 301 redirect which tells google and other search engines that the page has moved permantely to the new wordpress page. It’s done through the .htaccess file located in the root of the your site. Once you do that then you can efficiently add more content to your site without the hassle of modifying pages throughout your site.

Clickbank As A Source of Passive Income

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There are many sources of passive income. Some you are familiar with are: real estate, stock dividends, bonds, interest on checking just to name a few. But to build substantive income from these sources requires a large principle or financing in the case of real estate. Most of these options are out of reach of most people but there are other choices.

What this blog will discuss step by step is how to build passive income. With just a few bucks and some hard work you can have a substantive income online from Clickbank.com.

So What Is Clickbank?

Clickbank is a marketplace of digital online products. These products are ebooks ( “electronic books”) developed by writers targeting specific niches.

Essentially clickbank is the broker between the ebook vendors and product affiliates (that’s you). Vendors place their products on the site and share a portion of the revenue with affiliates. In most cases your share of revenue is 60%-75% so it gives you the incentive to promote their product.

What Are These Ebooks About?

There are hundreds of niches Clickbank ebooks cover. Some of these include Weight Loss, Health and Fitness,  Parenting and Families, Self Help, Home and Garden just to name a few. Finance, Credit On Clickbank you will find products that are focused on a given niche.

How Do You Make Money With Clickbank?

As an affiliate you get the chance to choose the product you want to promote. After you have picked one, you setup up a website to promote it. If someone comes to your site to buy the product, Clickbank processes the order and later sends you a share of your portion of the sale.  That’s in a nutshell how it works.

But of course there is more to it than that and that’s what I’m going to be writing about.

My next post will take you through how to choose Clickbank products with Clickbank and research a given niche.

Check Out My First Clickbank Site

Unemployed? How Can You Make Passive Income Online

Online Passive Income

Many of my friends have lost their jobs during the downturn in the economy.

For those who have been looking for a new job it’s been almost impossible to find work with so many people vying for the same job. I posted a part time job for my business and I received 240 applicants!

My friends have shared some gut wrenching stories. One close friend had lost his job, and after two years of unemployment benefits exhausted, he lost his marriage and just recently lost his home. To make matters all the worst, his mother is suffering from early alzheimer’s. I feel for him.  I always tell him that if he ever wants to talk to please call me anytime. This blog is dedicated to him.

Being Out of Work Is A Good Opportunity To Explore New Income Sources

Losing your job and being unemployed can be a overwhelmingly negative experience. At times there is a tendency to let these feelings fuel negative thinking.  Instead this is an opportunity to explore how to build a different life for you and your family.

So while you are watching daytime TV waiting for the the next interview why not create a source of income from something you love. After all, with just a computer you’re using now and little time and determination you can get there.

Read This Blog So You Can Build Your Passive Income

Over the next several months I will be showing you exactly how to build a passive income from your computer. I won’t charge you how to do it. All that I ask is you follow the steps in my blog to make it happen for your self.

What my wish and hope is you will be so successful you will never have to go back to work again unless you want to.

So over this year I will be writing and showing you how to build a passive income on the cheap while you sit at home and think about your future. In fact, my goal is to enable several of my friends to build businesses that make them $2k-$3k per month. Now you won’t get rich from this but you could if you continue to build from this point on.

So take that journey with me and you will never look back again!