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Article Submitter v3 The facts and myths

What is Article Submitter and does it work?
The fact you are reading this article is proof enough that Article Submitter does work as this article was submitted with the software. But beware!! There is much to do before this submitter software can be used without crashes.
The Article Submitter software is quite good really, its sadly let down by its database of article websites that will accept your articles. Having spent days taming this beast and forcing it to do what it should do anyway, I decided to write this article about Article Submitter so others could make wise and informed decisions about buying submitter software.

Like I say, the software does the job, but needs a day or two invested into making it work to acceptable standard. If you are not prepared to spend this time then Article Submitter is not for you. As it simple does not work out of the box! If however, you are prepared to give up a couple of days and fine tune Article Submitter, you can submit articles all day long on virtually auto pilot. And submitting articles does work. You get loads of good backlinks, the search engines will love you and your site will rocket up the search engine listings. Creating and successfully submitting informative articles about whichever product or service your site offers, will generate high quality visitors and increased affiliate or sales revenue.

Why on earth the guys (or gals) down at Article Submitters office dont clean up the database is a total mystery to me. I used the latest Version 3 with the latest (supposedly cleaned) database to try out. The database had over 400 article sites listed when I got it. After deleting out the bad url’s, hacked sites and just simply badly set up sites, there were only just over 200 sites left. What took me two days would have taken them a couple of hours to sort out.

Basically, once you have created the author information page, you register it. Have a big sheet of paper and pen at the ready.

As this software goes through the automated process of registering a new account with all the article sites, you will need to note the failed ones. There will be 404’s, php / script loading faults, hacked by MOu34d, stuck pages or just times out. Note these urls in Article Submitters menu (left top) Where ‘Directory:’ will show the submission sites url you are on. In the
travel category for example we found initially around 40 dud sites for one reason or another. Close down Article Submitter and open up the file directories.cdb with note pad (Make a backup copy first in case you mess up). Scrolling down the list of directory sites, find the bad ones and delete everything beginning with containing the bad site. You can find some worked examples at my website linked at the bottom of this article. Save the file and open the program again. Click ‘Manage article directories list’ the page will then show in pink any sites that failed for some reason to register the author details. Note all of these and after closing Article Submitter, open up directories.cdb with notepad again and delete all those sites as before.

Next, choose your article and start submission. Have the pad and pen ready again as there will still be quite a few missed first time round and some will time out with bad php or poorly hosted. So note all these down again. When a site freezes or shows blank page or does some other weird php badly written script failure, just click the ‘Skip url’ button after noting it.

By now, you will have been working on the software for some hours and probably wondering why the heck you bothered. Well, Ive tried a few article submitters over the years and this one is brilliant once you’ve made the changes, it will work like a dream on virtually auto pilot.

Article Submitters database is stored under C:/Program Files/Submit Suite/ in that folder you will find a file named directories.cdb. This is the main file that Article Submitter stores information about which article directories to submit to.
Modifying it is a breeze once opened in Notepad.

For a complete worked example, go to the main article at bottom of this article. You can also download a cleaned Article Submitter database from there as well as a free trial copy of the software to experiment with.

Antivirus Computer Software – Safeguard Your Personal Computer From Dangerous Viruses

Before a discussion of antivirus software can begin, it is important to know what a virus is. The virus we are talking about here is not the medical virus that can spread from one person to another, but a virus for a computer. It is funny because both types of these viruses have some similar properties in that computer viruses are contagious, and spread and infect other computers very quickly like human viruses. They are very common and most people have had the unpleasant experience of a computer virus just like the medical virus. In most cases a computer virus is a executable code. They are designed to create problems on the affected computer. You will know if you have a computer virus very quickly, because nothing will function as it should. If other computers are connected to this machine by network or email, the virus can be spread very quickly because the virus replicates itself to enter and infect these computers.

These viruses do basically three types of damage to the computer it affects. First is trojans or worms which are designed to steal important personal information such as your ID’s, passwords, account numbers, and other personal information found on your computer. Another type is designed to gain access to your machine and then hijack it. Once it has control of the affected computer a hacker can use it for malicious purposes or as a spam machine to send thousands of unwanted emails. The last type is sometimes referred to as macro viruses. This type of virus is designed so they can delete or overwrite the system or data files on the affected computer. This causes the computer to crash and become unbootable or non operable. Many of the computers that get this type of virus have a crashed hard drive which is not repairable and all your data is lost permanently.

Now the best way to combat these infections is installing antivirus software. Good antivirus software comes with features like a built-in firewall and usually offers an access to online data backup. This antivirus software have the option to deactivate the malicious viruses. This antivirus software protects your computer from virus attacks in three main methods. The first method is prevention which involves detecting and eliminating new viruses from your computer. They get the latest virus definitions from their server so the know what to look for and protect against. The second method is cleaning infected computers. This involves detection and extermination of the virus, along with repairing the damaged files. The last method is protecting your computer by monitoring emails, downloads and protection while internet surfing. Also this method regularly scans your computer or a preset scheduler to keep you virus free.

Antivirus software is very effective in finding and deleting harmful computer viruses. Even so, computer users should follow some safety rules to stiffen protection even more:

-Do not open unsolicited e-mails. A lot of people tend to open unsolicited e-mail containing viruses, either unknowingly or absent-mindedly. A good rule of thumb is to never open emails from people you don’t know.

-Never download an attachment to an email without scanning it for viruses first. Even if you are sure of the source and what it contains, it is always better to scan it before downloading.

-Make sure you also use a firewall.

-Don’t download free software or music. When you do this you are just asking for trouble. So avoid this as much as possible.

-Don’t use free antivirus software. They don’t work very well at all. Buy I good one and remember you get what you pay for.

-Search on internet for antivirus reviews and research yourself for best antivirus software.

Could Not Open Socket reCAPTCHA Error

After months of receiving spam through my contact forms I decided it was time to add reCAPTCHA to them in the hope of stemming the tide of garbage. This now under the control of Google I thought there wasn’t going to be an issue with this. Having just installed reCAPTCHA on my works websites I knew what to do and all went well on those sites. On the Friday I did 3 forms on my own sites and all worked as expected, on the Saturday I did the last form I had, but that one didn’t work. All I kept getting was a ‘could not open socket’ error.

Initially I thought I must have made some error in the code but after checking the code against that which I had done the day before I could see no error. And more over the 3 forms I did the day before that worked, now no longer worked and displayed the same error message, what the hell?? Most frustrating was the fact that this was all the message said and gave no clue as to what was causing it. I made a number of attempts to find which section of code that was at fault by adding echo’s throughout the php code but none of them showed, only that damned error message. I thought there must be something wrong with the server.

Someone must have had this issue before so I turned my attention to Google for an answer. As I started to type ‘could not open socket’ the autocomplete came up with ‘could not open socket recaptcha’, ah ha! But I couldn’t think why it could have worked yesterday and not today? After reading many unhelpful posts’ I found this: http://code.google.com/p/recaptcha/issues/detail?id=26 which although didn’t have the exact answer it did help me to realise the answers to my own issues.

After reading through this thread I came to the conclusion that my problem was 2 fold and explained why it had worked yesterday and not today. The main problem was my web host, in their attempt to be helpful they introduced (a long time back) blocking of outgoing connections to remote IPs from within my sites. This is one to be aware of if you are auto blogging using wp-o-matic, any feed you add will most likely be blocked by this until you add the IP to the allowed list from within your control panel.

I assume there is a good reason for them doing this but it can imagine it has caused nightmares for the inexperienced. Obviously it had worked yesterday because it was new, once the server knew the connection was being made it blocked it. It was probably the number of tests I did that made the connection get noticed and was possibly a good job it was noticed so quickly or I might not have noticed it for some time.

So which IP was I to add to the allowed list? The line of code in recaptchalib.php identified as the problem in the above thread was:

define(“RECAPTCHA_VERIFY_SERVER”, www.google.com);

So what I needed was the IP of google.com.