Wisetechie Blog : Ctrl your Tech Life

Update 2: I really hope this agent is wrong in what they wrote :

The email from Paypal says that the banning of personal payments to and from India is a permanent change. Please read the Paypal email below regarding the banning of personal payments.

Thank you for contacting PayPal.I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience, but the system did recognize that it was a personal type of payment processed in your account. It also shows that there’s no shipping address provided to you,and that’s one factor to consider if it’s a personal payment or not.

This change will be permanent in PayPal, and personal payments will no longer be allowed to be sent TO or FROM India. The personal payment option in the checkout page will no longer be available to India customers, but you can still continue to use other payment options, such as eBay checkout.

We hope you understand our situation and thank you for your patience. We’re available to answer any questions you might have. Just give us a call at 1-402-935-2080 and we will try our best to give you immediate answers. We appreciate your business.

Update: Techcrunch is the 1st major blog to catch it

‘If you are a Paypal user having your country selected as India and have gotten any payment from Paypal, it will be reversed if its marked as a personal payment. There has not been any clarification from Paypal in this regard , only emails detailing that the transaction is reversed causing a lot of problems to the account holders.

They claim that they are working on correcting this though. Here is the message I received :

Hello ABC,

Your payment of  $$$ has been sent back to the sender of the payment. 

We reversed this payment because we have stopped allowing personal payments to be sent to or from India.

If this was a payment for a purchase of goods or services, and not a personal payment, then you may contact the buyer and have him or her resend the payment as follows:  (a) click the Send Money tab, (b) select "Goods," and (c) provide a shipping address.

If this payment was a personal payment such as a gift, then we have requested that the sender find another payment method until we restore personal payments to and from India.

We are trying to resolve this issue as quickly as possible and we’re sorry for
any inconvenience.

Thank you,
PayPal

Amitabh Bachan started blogging on Bidadda and one fine day he releases some of his blog stats. Around 37000 visitors in the first 6 days of September, takes us the whole month to reach that number.

BigAdda also must be laughing all the way to the bank, great work from them too. So here is the thing if you are an actor/actress, start blogging. Not only will it dispell the whole thing about actors being dumb , it will also help you earn some money if you bomb at the box office (not that Mr. Amitabh Bachan is). For actors blogs may also act as bridges between fans and themselves.

I remember quite a few CEO blogs, CEO blogs inspire confidence in the company and give a platform to customers to share vital feedback with the company’s top management, something which might be prevented by corrupt mid level management. I personally am very impressed with people who hold big positions and still take out time to blog, the biggest example being Matt Cutts from Google. Others include some sportspersons and prominent journalists.

The obvious advantage to blogging if you are famous is that you dont have to go through the initial hiccup stages, a new site when started needs a lot of intellectual capital. A new site needs 100s of articles before its even notices. Wisetechie.com itself took a lot of time to get where it is today. And thanks to all our readers for their support

A word of caution for anyone using WordPress version 2.1.1 , upgrade it to 2.1.1 immediately. It appears that some crackers gained access to WordPress servers and changed a part of the WordPress 2.1.1 download code.They changed the code in two WordPress download files (“theme.php” and “feed.php”) that would allow someone to execute remote PHP code on your blogs. Thankfully the guys at WordPress detected this in time and averted a catastophe (hopefully).

Anyway i am safe now and hope your version is safe too !

Got Questions about this ?

You can email them to 21securityfaq@wordpress.org , which has been specially setup to deal with this particular problem.

It turns out that the site was nothing short of a scam , no embezzlement was involved but scam nonetheless. The site warlier gave free domains to people with the option of showing or not showing ads. I was one of the stupid few who signed up and made a cool TLD alias to my already existing earlier domain. With time my site became popular both on visits and search engine Page Rank. DOT Tk or .tk Page Ranks are in no way affected by the fact that they open the page in a frame. Anyway , i recently checked my DOT Tk or .tk alias and was horrified to see a 15 second counter and POP UP ads. POP UP ads are THE WORST form of advertising. Yuck, my site looks like a CHEAP for PROFIT only website now , YUCK again , so i am slowly fazing out the DOT Tk or .tk domain. So an advice to all of you , stay clear of DOT Tk or .tk domains and if you already have them , look for alternatives. The free domain is not worth it. Also there are a number of restrictions on the DOT Tk or .tk domains

1. You cant register more than 3 free domains on a email address.

2. You must guarantee a minimum number of visitors each month or they will take away your site and suspend it.

3. I have wasted a lot of time in trying favicons for the free DOT Tk or .tk domains. And i have come to the conclusion that its not possible.

4. You dont own the domain , Dot TK does , so even if your site becomes hugely popular its of little use to you, moreover you are making them money by showing the ugly DOT Tk or .tk ads.

I went over to a friend’s blog, and i was surprised to see the links having a tooltip which was actually the thumbnail of the site it was linking to. What a perfect way to know beforehand what the site you are going to open looks like , the service was being provided by snap.com. They have a cool domain name no doubt , but hows their service ? , I checked out the site and i was really impressed. The only thing which may deter people from using this service is the fact that the tooltip must have a link to snap.com , anyway all free services have backlinks these days. You can see the script in action on

Ankit’s Life and Technology Reviews

I did not deploy the script on this blog as i still am looking if something better comes along.

Another one of my favourite things , the meta refresh tag is a powerful tool. A common meta refresh command will look like

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”600″>

This command is put in the tag of your document. the tells that the tag is meta. The http-equiv=”refresh” sends a command equivalent to the HTTP refresh command which tells the browser to refresh the content. 120 is the time in seconds after which the page should refresh itself.

A further modification of this command exists :-

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”10;url=http://wisetechie.com”>

Here instead of the page refreshing you to same URL , you are in concept redirected to a new URL.

Use these tools wisely my friends

I dug this from yahoo’s site

Yahoo!’s Web crawler recognizes standard HTTP result codes. The basic types of redirect recognized are:

• 301 – Permanent Redirect
• 302 – Temporary Redirect

This means you should keep the delay as low as possible , 0 seconds i recommend if you want search engines to think of your refresh as a hard redirect. That way SEO doesnt suffer.