This widget displays a single random stanza from a random Blue Oyster Cult song.

I never submitted this to the WordPress.Org repository. It is not a “serious” widget.

Installation:
1. Download the Blue-Oyster-Cult-Widget zip.
2. Unzip the Blue-Oyster-Cult-Widget zip
3. Upload the Blue-Oyster-Cult-Widget directory to your wp-content/plugins directory.
4. Activate the plugin.
5. Drag the widget to the sidebar

The economy should be heating up a little. The economics of politics dictates that there should be some loosening of the economy leading up to election day so that the incumbents can have a little good news.

Some time in November I will put this up for sale again.

I will post the results of the auction in a few minutes.

At least some of the interest in the domain came from spammers or scammers who wanted me to list the domain for sale on their websites. I think that many of the watchers might be of this flavor.

I cannot put the domain up for sale on eBay again for a while because I can not transfer the domain for 90 days after renewing it. I ran into this problem before. Registry.com locks up the domain after you register it for several months.

I am not sure of my plans for the domain. I am going to switch it to WordPress and test a plugin I have that turns Google Alerts into blog posts.

I may install setup WordPress as an MU site and give away free domains to bloggers. I would have to have my own advertising on the pages. My experience with MU is that only spammers sign up, but my plugin to stop spammer registrations will help with this.

This is the code in WordPress to get a complete post with all the formatting and short codes included, suitable for emailing.

global $post;
$post = get_post( 'some id' );
setup_postdata($post);
$processed = apply_filters('the_content', $post->post_content);
wp_reset_postdata();

There is a truism in poker:  If you can’t bet smart, bet crazy.

So I re-listed the domain and raised the buy it now price to $99. Next week it goes up $149.99 with a make offer option. I’ll keep raising the price until the perceived value is higher and someone with cash buys it.

I have decided to renew HarmonicaBlog.com if nobody buys it. I’ll figure out some way to make money off of it.

I closed another site recently that was not performing, but had a pretty good template based on a free WordPress theme. I used just the format, not the WP programs. I adapted that theme for Rockfind.com based on what I have learned in the last year from WP hacking.

I never liked the domain Rockfind.com, but it has a Google Page Rank of 3.0. Wikipedia.org uses RockFind for some of its lyric references. It is too good a property to abandon and I should have gone about working on its SEO long ago.

I’ve registered it with Google Webmaster Tools, and I am going to start tweaking the Meta data and Titles as well as the links to make it more acceptable to Google. I don’t suppose that I can make a sitemap for all 60,000 songs, but I will try to generate one for the 1200 or so recording artists.

I am tempted to make context sensitive ads for Amazon, but I get very little return on any effort that I give Amazon. I might make an eBay panel based on the artist. I might look into iTunes to see if their affiliate program can be fed an artist or a particular song.

Hopefully, Rockfind.com will be making some decent money in the next few months.

You can see the ebay auction: Harmonica Blog Domain for Sale.

I am surprised to see that it now has over 30 watchers with 2 days to go. I am concerned now that the $59.99 buy it now was too low. I am not going to pull it, because I would have just let it expire without any income from the site. I won’t feel cheated because some got a bargain, even it it is at my expense.

If it does sell, I’ll blog about the price and the transfer procedure.

I do well on my other domains, but this one never took off. I set it up as an automatic blog with software to convert google alerts to a blog. The archiving is broken, and I never had time to do much more with the site. There is no original content there, and I don’t get many readers. It costs me about $9 a year to maintain and I made about $5 last year.

I am certain that anyone who wanted to write a few original posts could make some money blogging with this site. Harp players are always looking for information about playing harmonica. My Harmonica related websites get several hundred thousand page views a month. I just don’t have the time for this domain.

Lately, BoingBoing.net has been one place that I always submit. I’ve had some pages referenced at BoingBoing and years later I’ve gotten hits from them.

BoingBoing has created a link list similiar to ycombinator called the BoingBoing Submitterator. It is a popular site and submitting there will get you at least a few hundred curious eyes and maybe more.

The interface is kludgy, however, so I wrote a bookmarklet that lets me submit to the site.

Before you do anything go over to the Submitterator page and get a login. You must be logged in for the bookmarklet to work.

Next right click the next line:

Submit to Submitterator

then click “bookmark this link” or drag the link to your bookmarks toolbar.

To test it, highlight this paragraph:

The Submitterator Bookmarklet lets you submit a web page to the BoingBoing.net Submitterator form with a few simple clicks. It makes the BoingBoing submission process simple and easy.

Then, from your bookmarks, click on the Submit to Submitterator entry. This will popup a form all filled in that lets you submit the page. Just edit the description if needed,  select the category, and press submit.

BoinBoing’s Submitterator is probably going to change. They may not want it to be this easy to plug a url into their listings. If the submitterator stops working please let me know and I’ll try to hack out a new one.

Please excuse the kudgy interface. I needed to cut out all the fat I could to make this work. The form is the ugliest bare bones thing that I could come up with and still fit in IE’s incredibly small link entry.

Once you are sure that it is working you can wander around the net submitting anything and everything.

I made the Stop Spammer Registrations Plugin to check email addresses against the StopForumSpam.com database. In the first hour after I installed it, it stopped 5 registrations. It also prevents comments where the spammer puts in his email.

It is dead simple, just hooking the email validation routine and returning false if the email is bad. I log the last 20 bad emails.