After 3 years of administering and developing the PhilosophyForum.com, I’ve come to the conclusion that’s it’s time to sell it and move onward.  PhilosophyForum.com, the domain name and the content are currently for sale at Flippa.com with a current bid of $15,000 and No Reserve!

While I realize that I’ve not done a very good job of maintaining my blog, my hopes are to do more writing once I have facilitated the transfer of ownership of the Philosophy Forum to it’s new owner.

About the Philosophy Forum

PhilosophyForum.com is was a domain name originally purchased in 2005 from BuyDomains.com and then developed into a forum using vbulletin and vbseo.  The philosophy forum has grow steadily over the past several years to become the most active Philosophy Forum on the Internet today.  With more than 500 active members usually more than 100 people on the forum at all times with 20 or more logged in members at any given time.

At the PhilosophyForum.com you can expect to find a good discussion on any numer of topics including the the traditional branches of philosophy as well as religion, videos, etc. etc.  We also have a ‘dream team’ of well-educated, mature, and highly proficient moderators on the staff that do what they can to promote peaceful conversation without flaming or trolling.

What’s included in the sale?

The sale of the forum will include the following:

• PhilosophyForum.com domain name with 9 years registration
• Owned vBulletin license
• Owned vBSEO license
• Owned vBadvanced Link Directory license
• vB Gameroom license
• owned vBtube license
• All data and content

Basically, the entire thing.  If you’d like to find out more details on the sale, plase visit the PhilosophyForum.com sale page.

Why Am I Selling the Forum?

There comes a time where it’s time to say goodbye and move on and after 3+ years of pouring time and energy into the forum, I’ve decided that it’s time to let go and allow for a new owner to take this forum to the next level.  Besides, I want to spend more time reading and writing and while I love philosophy, I’m not as adept on the academic side of philosophy and I’m confident the new owner will be able to continue on with the forum in a way that will benefit it’s members.

I do have an emotional attachment to the forum because of all the hard work and time put into it but above and beyond that, the relationships with the members and moderating team.  It’s not just a wonderful forum, it’s an exceptional community with some very intelligent discussions.  I do hope to continue membership in the forum and do some blogging there as well as making a positive contribution to the community and it’s new owner for a long time in the future.

I wish the best to the new owner and look forward facilitating a smooth transition of ownership.

Have you ever thought about moving your WordPress website?  Better yet, have you ever thought of creating a duplicate or backup of your WordPress website to use as a clone for reproduction?

If you are a webmaster or domainer, chances are you’ve heard of WordPress and have possibly used it and if you’ve been around a while, you may even have several or many WordPress sites up an running.  Either way, at some point you may want to move or copy your website so let’s get going.   

Moving WordPress

WordPress consists of two major components which make up an actual website, data and files.

1. Database - is a database of tables that stores all of the content of your website.  This will contain every stitch of content on your website including users, links, basically everything.
2. Files – These are the actual files and directories (folders) stored on the server of your host.  A file manager is where you’ll find these.  Files are what makes your website look like it does and communicate with the database to display your website information within the confines of css and templates.

In my case, I have a small business website where I installed a bare bones, WordPress 2.7.1 with nothing but Maintenance Mode installed and a customized temporary landing page.  The objective is to duplicate or copy my website onto another domain name to save time.  Some may do this differently but I’m going to list my steps below how I do it.

Seven Quick Steps to moving your WordPress site:

1. Backup database tables
2. Backup and download WordPress files
3. Upload WordPress backup .tar file to new location
4. Change wp-config file (database access)
5. Import tables to new database
6. Run mySQL queries in phpMyAdmin
7. Update WordPress General settings

Step 1 – Backup WordPress database

While there are of course, many ways to do this I prefer going right into phpMyAdmin in cpanel and clicking on my wordpress database and then clicking on export and making sure all the tables are selected.  I use the “zipped” compression level and save it to a folder on my hard drive.  I like to call mine, Site Recipes.  So now I have a backup of the basic tables within database, now what?

Step 2 – Backup WordPress files

1. Go into File Manager and to the directory where WordPress is installed.
2. Select All the files – Usually there’s a checkbox.
3. Compress Files – in cpanelX theme there is button for that.  I use the .tar selection when it prompts me.
4. Download the file you just compressed into the same folder as your database tables.

Now that I have both a database backup and a file backup we’re going to have to put these both on the new server.  There are a couple things that you should have completed in order to move your website… like a new host or a new cpanel account or simply a sub-directory or add-on domain.  In my case, I’m moving this WordPress site from domain ‘A’ to domain ‘B’ so I have the necessary elements already set up.  These are my Cpanel hosting account and I’ve created a database with username and password.

Step 3 - Upload and Extract WordPress Tarball to location

Do not extract that .tar file you downloaded, simply use an ftp program or cpanel to upload it to your new domain where you’ll be moving the site.  On my hosting account with Hostgator, my files are stored in the /public_html/ directory.  This is the web accessible directory, (when you go to www.yoursite.com it automatically takes you to the /public_html/ directory on your server.  In there it’s going to look for an index file.   So upload that backup to the location of your new website and extract it there.

In cpanelX 11, you can do this within cpanel.  Just select the file and extract it to the location on your server that it was uploaded to, change nothing.  We uploaded to /public_html and that’s where we will extract it.

Step 4 – Change wp-config

There are three things in the wp-config.php file you’ll want to change, (This file is located in the directory you unzipped the wordpress backup in.  The three changes are: (in bold)

/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘cpaneluser_databasename‘);

/** MySQL database username */
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘cpaneluser_username‘);

/** MySQL database password */
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘DatabasePassword‘);

Cpaneluser – refers to your cpanel user login name which is a prefix followed by an underscore then the database name and username.  This information is needed to communicate with the database.

Step 5 – Import the WordPress Database Tables

Now that we have the files and all have been uploaded and extracted and we have configured the WordPress files to communicate with your database, we must now populate the database with the tables we saved from our site recipe or site backup.  Once we have the new database tables in place we’re going to have to run some database queries using the MySQL replace() function to change links within the database.  You’ll need to stay in phpMyAdmin to do this step.

Step 6 – Run MySQL Queries to Change the WP Database Links

First SQL querie we’re going to run is replacing the siteURL in the database.  Rather than looking for the exact table, just select the database we added tables to and select the 2nd tab, SQL.

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = replace(option_value, ‘http://www.old-domain.com’, ‘http://www.new-domain.com’) WHERE option_name = ‘home’ OR option_name = ’siteurl’;

The next database querie we will run is going to replace the URLs within the WordPress posts and pages and stored in wp_posts.  Here is the querie:

UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = replace(guid, ‘http://www.old-domain.com’,'http://www.new-domain.com’);

Again, simply replace the old-domain with your new domain name leaving everything else in tact.  The last querie we will run is going to replace links within posts or internal links.

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, ‘http://www.old-domain.com’, ‘http://www.new-domain.com’);

Now that all the links are changed within wordpress, we are almost done.

Step 7 – Change your WordPress General Settings

Login to your WordPress now under:   yourdomain.com/wp-admin and go to settings, general and change the information in there including your email address and the name of your website.

That’s it!  Your new wordpress site should be up and running.  Below are several links to other methods of moving your wordpress website that you may find helpful.

• Moving WordPress to another domain 9 steps
• Moving Wordpress To A Different Domain
• How to move WordPress site to another server with zero downtime
• Moving WordPress to a Different Domain

Today I’d like to blog about Akismet and the Akismet key provided by Wordpress. Before I get into that though, I’d like to say that up until this time, I’ve been a great fan of Joomla and still am. I started building websites with Mambo and when some of the members left and went to Joomla, I liked support and community members around it. Needless to say, I ended up getting very lucky with this domain name. So not all familiar with wordpress, I thought because it said blog and Wordpress was the most popular, I’d use it. Not only for the experience of using it, but for my clients who may ask for it.

Needless to say, I started using Wordpress from Wordpress.org but did not sign up with an account on wordpress.com. So, my first impression of Wordpress wasn’t all that great. On a daily basis, I was getting so many spam comments it was ridiculous. I had gotten to the point that I just discarded all comments automatically and was almost afraid to log into the justinsblog.com because of the number of comments I have to sift through and bulk moderate.

Anyway, I ended up doing a search on Google and found Wordpress.com and signed up and got my akismet key. I entered it into the little box a couple weeks ago and forgot about it. Logged in today and the only comment I had to approve was a legitimate one, (sorry I did not respond sooner Bryan). I hadn’t even noticed that the emails stopped completely.

So, this blog, which is long over due , is simply my experience with this Wordpress.org software, which is free to all. Use the akismet key and you’ll be glad you did. I was afraid to even log in with the amount of spam comments I had to moderate… while trying not to miss a legit comment that someone took the time to write.

OK, blogging is getting better. I hope to put more up here and now that I actually remember that this site is here, I think I’ll start using it. Thanks to the Akismet Key, I’m beginning to like this wordpress software. … OK, can I be done now?

As a domain name collector, I’ve found through the years that there are different ways to monetize traffic to a domain name. I’ve recently experienced a product called “Build a Niche Store“, and consider it to be the best $100 I’ve spent on a ClickBank product. With so many products out there on the market, it would be impossible to use them all but when it comes to monetizing domain names that fall into a niche category, Build a Niche Store is the best I’ve seen.

What is Build a Niche Store?

Build a Niche Store is basically a website system or builder that allows you to create a website quickly serving Niche eBay products via an affiliate RSS Feed from Commission Junction. Essentially, Build a Niche Store is a php software you can unzip and upload to your host and produce a basic eBay Niche store within minutes. The neat thing is that it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to do this. There’s also not an overwhelming learning curve. It’s simple and effective and it seems to be working well based on my experimentation with it so far. The product cost is around $100 and is available for purchase through ClickBank.com.

Niche Stores and Ebay

An eBay Niche store actually makes a lot of sense. If you think about it, you can go to eBay and it takes a while to find exactly what you are looking for. There are so many options and so many ways to search eBay, it can be confusing for someone wanting to browse a certain category. Basically with a Niche Store, you do that searching for them and provide them narrowed results in a nice looking template. The beauty of this is that eBay will pay you for products that are sold through your eBay store.

Hockey Store – StickRack.com – example

This was my first BANS site. Nothing fancy and not a lot of time into it, but effective so far in producing more income than it would if it were parked at Sedo, Fabulous, Domain Sponsor or any others. This website was basically slapped up on the server with about 2 hours getting used to how things work and reading directions. The neat thing is, it’s already producing a little bit of income which so far is more than traditional parking. The potential is there, the next step is optimizing. I’ll do some blogging on this as well.

How you make money with BANS – Build a Niche Store?

That’s simple. eBay has an affiliate program that is managed by Commission Junction that pays you for traffic you send through your site to eBay.

“You will be compensated for traffic you send to ebay.com in two distinct ways: earn between 50% and 75% of eBay’s Revenue (not item sale price) on ALL Winning Bids or Buy It Nows (BINs) within 7 days of an affiliate action AND up to $35.00 for each active registered user!”

Now, I’ve been an eBay powerseller and have sold products on eBay. There’s a lot involved in this. First you have to set up your eBay account… which can take up some time. Then you have to take pictures of items and write descriptions. Usually powersellers have some sort of services they purchase monthly to assist them with this. Once your product is sold, you collect payment and then box and ship to the user. Selling on eBay is not a piece of cake at all. It takes work and emails and following up with your customers. There are many times I’ve sold items and actually lost money on poor shipping calculations, PayPal fees, damaged goods, etc.

With BANS you just sell others peoples items. It’s that easy. The Build a Niche Store software is a content management system all by itself and you simply enter your CJ.com PID into the correct spot on the set-up and then enter the category number of the Ebay items you want to host. The auctions are fed into your site through the affiliate RSS feed. Essentially, you can set up and optimize a store and it’s on autopilot. Then build another one and keep going. The sky is the limit. What’s neat, is you are making money and not having to deal with all the headaches of being an eBay seller.

Here are some steps with Links to get you started:

1. Build a Niche Store – First step, read the page. Understand it. It’s not a lot of phony hype and it does work. It also provides you with exact directions. Purchase and download the zip file.
2. Commission Junction – Sign up through their affiliate program. Search for the Advertiser eBay and request to be added as an affiliate. This process is usually approved automatically and quickly.
3. Hosting Account – Get a hosting account through HostGator. For Niche Stores, I recommend the Swamp which is $14 a month and can host unlimited websites.

The rest is relatively detailed but not difficult at all. I will produce a video for this and upload it eventually with text to follow.

For anyone who purchases Build a Niche Store through my link and gets hosting from Hostgator, I will help you set up your first store as well as your hosting account. Use the contact me link on this website.