BlueLayerMedia - Creative Web Services

You wake up in the morning one day and decide to browse your site to see how many visitors are on your site.  With cup of coffee in one hand, you click that bookmark that you’ve clicked now for the 504th time but…this time something is different….a dark red screen.   Hmmm…could this be your site?  A look in your address bar confirms it is your site.  What on earth could have caused this!?!?

Unfortunately, someone found a security hole in your website and exploited it. In most cases the “hacker” has injected your pages with various types of malicious code which could be anything from porn sites, to Viagra sales to programs designed to infect your visitor’s computers.  On top of that, they probably have left a file in your website allowing them free access to your host and in turn, any other sites/files you have on that host.

This warning obviously won’t go away on its own. The malicious code must be removed, your site secured and then Google notified that the clean up was completed.  Once Google verifies your site is fine, the warning will be removed.

Unless you’re proficient with HTML and in other cases PHP, trying to clean up your site can leave it in worse shape.

We have completed over 55 clean-up type jobs where we were able to successfully remove the malicious code and in most cases provide additional security to the site to keep it from happening again.  In some cases your site is your livelihood and time is money.

Our average clean-up cost is $40.00USD, one hour of our time.  For a specific quote, please contact us and we can take a look at your site and give you an exact quote and time frame for us to clean up your site and get it back on its feet!

Just Released!

What: Our latest WordPress plugin!  Update Notify Change. This plugin will hide WordPress core and plugin updates from every user-group outside of the administrator user-group.  Unlike other plugins which simply disables the update checks, this plugin merely hides the updates.  Now no one else but you or your administrators will know when something needs updating on your site!

Requirements: A server with IonCube support. (Most servers already have the IonCube loaders running for you.)

Cost: $2.50USD

Where to buy: HERE

Supported: Yes

You’re Invited!!!

What: BlueLayerMedia’s 4th of July Extravaganza

When: July 3rd through July 5th, 2010

Where: Right here!

Who: First 100 new customers

Details: To help celebrate the 4th of July, BlueLayerMedia is offering the following:

• 1st month of hosting free on any hosting package
• 15% off for the lifetime of the new account
• FREE script installations with the new account*

Simply enter the coupon code: “BLM4th” without quotes during checkout and you’ll receive the first month free.  Your account will be adjusted for the 15% off after your account is set up.

Current Hosting Clients: In order to show our appreciation for your patronage, each time you refer a new customer during the same period of time, you’ll receive 2 months of free hosting instead of the standard 1.

Have a Happy and Safe 4th of July everyone!!

*Script installations subject to approval by BlueLayerMedia staff.  To see if we will be able to install your script, contact us prior to your purchase.

Are you having troubles installing Prosper202 on Hostgator?  Join the thousands of other people who are also having trouble.

If you’re frustrated beyond belief, don’t give up just yet!  We have something tantalizing for you!

Switch to our hosting with it’s unparalleled customer service and get a months hosting for FREE plus a free install of Prosper202 to get you up and running quickly!

This offer does have limitations:

• Expires on 8/31/2010
• Good for the first 100 users
• Applies only to the Professional Hosting package

If this sounds too good be true, place your order and enter the coupon code PROSPERHOST. Be sure to mention “prosper install” when placing your order so we know you need an installation.

We also have our fix available to our members which has been reported to get people up and working on Hostgator servers.  For more information check HERE.

We look forward to having you as a client!

WordPress is an outstanding blogging platform and is almost a great CMS as well.  However, it really isn’t the best option in terms of providing general support.

With that it mind we decided to add a new set of support forums which can be found here.

By using these forums we are hoping to increase the communication with all of our current clients, future clients and even those that have suggestions for us.

We hope this makes interacting with us that much easier and finding the support you want even easier!

From time to time BlueLayerMedia provides sponsorship opportunities to individuals and business alike.

Our first sponsorship comes in the way of coding and hosting.  We are developing a site for a girl’s volleyball league and are hosting the site as well for one year.  Once the site is done, we will add it to our portfolio for all to see.

If you are looking for a sponsorship opportunity in the way of hosting, coding or something else, drop us a line and we’ll be more than happy to review you proposal.

How To Install PHP-Nuke

As part of our ongoing efforts to provide additional benefits to our clients, we are now offering search engine submission of your website. We all know that submitting your site to various search engines is one of the key steps in generating traffic to your site.  It’s kind of like giving Google, Yahoo, etc. a kick in the pants and saying “Hey, I’m here now!  Look at me!”

We will submit your website to over 100 search engines for the low, low price of….FREE! On top of that, we’ll provide you with a report which shows exactly what search engines your website was submitted to.

To help get our new service off to a good start, we are offering it FREE to the first (5) people that comment on this post.  Before you comment make sure to include a valid URL and email address so we can email your report to you.  It is that easy!

With over 7,200 plugins freely available for WordPress there is quite a bit out there which can help enhance and improve your website. It is easy to simply add multiple plugins and accumulate a large amount over time. Adding multiple plugins should be done with some caution as I’m sure many users have discovered why. Plugins have and will conflict with other plugins, especially those which rely on the use of jQuery, MooTools etc. WordPress is already a lightweight, lean, mean blogging machine. No sense overdoing it with plugins and slowing it down.

We use a total of 11 plugins on this site and we could probably do away with 1-2 of them.

For those interested, here is our list and I suppose you can consider it our recommendations:

• All In One SEO Pack: Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines.
• AntiVirus: AntiVirus for WordPress is a smart and effective solution to protect your blog against exploits and spam injections.
• Google XML Sitemaps: This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog.
• Popularity Contest: Popularity Contest keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses them to determine which of your posts are most popular.
• Download Monitor: Download Monitor is a plugin for uploading and managing downloads, tracking download hits, and displaying links.
• WordPress Exploit Scanner: This plugin searches the files on your website, and the posts and comments tables of your database for anything suspicious.
• WordPress Popular Posts: WordPress Popular Posts is a sidebar widget that displays the most popular posts on your blog with your own formatting.
• WP-PostViews: Enables you to display how many times a post/page had been viewed.
• WP-SpamFree: An extremely powerful WordPress anti-spam plugin that eliminates blog comment spam, including trackback and pingback spam.
• WP Security Scan: Scans your WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities and suggests corrective actions.
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin: Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site.

There you have it. 11 simple and effective plugins to keep us, our site and our visitors happy!

I thought it was time we give an update as to what we’ve thought about using RentACoder (RAC) to keep us busy when work contracted directly through our site is slow. We have been on RAC since we started nearly three months and the experiences have been a mixed bag of both good and bad.

On positive side of things, we’ve maintained a 9.95 rating after completing over 61 jobs. Because of our high rating and customer satisfaction, BlueLayerMedia was given an award as a TopCoder by RAC. Additionally, we have had an opportunity to work on a few very large projects and work with some very good people.

My feelings overall toward RAC are divided. They do have an excellent business model….for themselves. There really is nothing for them to do outside of mediation (we’ll talk about that more later) and approving new jobs. I would assume the new jobs are reviewed by staff member before posting, but from what I’ve seen there are no standards as to what is posted. I saw a job posted where someone wanted a ‘coder’ to remove a blog post from someone else’s blog. Outside of hacking the blog every other person out there, including non-technical people would immediately see that is an impossibility. It took me sending them a message to have job removed.

As I mentioned before, RAC has an arbitration process which allows a buyer and coder to try and resolve their differences first, between themselves and if that is unsuccessful with the help of an arbitrator. We’ve had to use the arbitrators only on two occasions and in both incidents, I was left with the impression that RAC was more likely to side with the buyer rather than the coder. If you think about it, it does make more business sense. They need the buyers to keep posting jobs in order to keep their percentage coming in.

The first time using an arbitrator we were hired to install a script. A couple days in to the project and we noticed the script was pirated. Doing what we thought was the right thing, we notified RAC and one would assume the buyer’s account would have been suspended or some type of action taken against him. This wasn’t the case. In the end we were both admonished not to use/install pirated software which just boggled the mind. It seemed there was a great deal of a lack of common sense.

Lastly, selecting jobs with “fix my site to 100%” can be a never ending nightmare for a coder. Once a job is accepted and price agreed upon, if the dynamics of the job change, there is no re-negotiating of the price. If you bid $25 because you thought the job would be a simple fix and it turns to be an utter disaster, there is no wiggle room at all, without going in to mediation. If you’re lucky and the buyer agrees to self mediate you’re lucky. If they press for a arbitrators involvement, you are guaranteed to lose because you did not comply with the original bid to fix their site to “100%”. Also, once a job is marked complete by a coder it can stay in that open status until a buyer closes it and accepts 100% of your work. If they never respond to you, your only recourse is to contact an arbitrator and wait for weeks on end for it to be resolved.

I pulled this off of a recently opened job: “have some simple PHP tweeks needing to be done on two sites. VERY BASIC STUFF…. must be able to do the work now!” This is all the information that is provided and from here you have two choices. Either post a message and ask for more details and hopefully receive a response or post a bid and hope that ‘very basic’ truly is. You can see by this example how easily it would be to get stuck in a losing situation if you’re the coder.

One of the few positives about RAC is they use an escrow service. Once a bid is agreed upon between buyer and coder, the buyer must place the funds that were agreed upon in to an escrow service before work starts. This prevents coders from doing work and never getting paid.

Remember in the beginning how I said RAC has an excellent business model for themselves? Here’s why. They charge a significant fee to jobs that are done via their site. The most laughable is when a buyer posts a $5.00 job and RAC’s fee is $3.00. Leaving a whopping $2.00 for a coder. The fee they charge is a based on a percentage and on one of the larger jobs we did, netted them nearly $1000.00 in fees…..for no work on their end at all. Pretty nifty huh? Unfortunately, this leads to us and I’m sure other coders having to increase their fees to compensate for the overpriced RAC fee.

People looking for coders to do work for them should be very selective. There are many, many distrustful people that will take your money and run. Take the time to research your coder, the work they’ve done in the past and find out what others had to say about them as well.

In order to offer our clients a net of safety we employ a 50/50 method which is commonly used by most freelancers. 50% payment upfront and remaining 50% after completion.

If you’re interested in seeing what we can do for you, feel free to contact us here!