I wanted to add Facebook commenting to NealCampbell.com to see if it makes commenting more popular. When a blog is just starting to grow, commenting is one of the ways bloggers get paid. It’s not money, but encouragement to continue writing that creates a happy blogger.

I tried a couple WordPress Plugins before finding the one I’m now using. I chose Simple Facebook Comments for WordPress by David Nelson. It is super simple to get working. Have three tabs or browser windows open, one for Facebook, one for your WordPress site and one for these ten easy steps:

1. Download it from David’s site, or even easier search for Simple Facebook Comments in the Plugins section of your WordPress Dashboard. Look for David’s name to make sure it the right one.
2. Install it. Activate it. Find it in your list of Active Plugins and click Settings.
3. Go to https://developers.facebook.com
4. Click Apps and then the button that says + Create New App
5. Don’t get scared! You’re not going to have to code anything!
6. A pop-up box will ask you to give your App an App Display Name. Pick anything and it will tell you if that name is available or not. It apparently doesn’t matter what you name it. I didn’t fill in the blank for App Namespace.
7. Add your contact email and that’s all you HAVE to do for it to work.
8. Go back to settings for the Add Facebook Comments to WordPress plugin in your WordPress Dashboard.
9. Enter your facebook user id, probably your name, and then the Facebook App ID that was generated when you created your App.
10. Answer the rest of the questions in the Add Facebook Comments to WordPress plugin settings, save it, and you’re done!

I crawled in bed last night, fired up Twitter and Facebook and saw that my mom is now on Twitter. I followed back and then noticed my mom set up a blog on blogspot. Wow! I’m impressed. I’ll tell you what I think it was. I set up an HD projector at her house over the holidays and she watched Julie and Julia on Blu-ray. I think that’s what got her motivated.

I’m proud of my mom for stepping out to do some work on the Internet. She’s an automative paint expert, AND she’s funny. That’s what she plans to blog and tweet about. When I was learning to drive, she painted an MG and taught me how to drive a stick in that car.

Over the next few days, I’ll walk my mom through building an online blogging brand, and I hope other moms, dads and grandparents get the bug and start blogs of their own.

My mom wants to write about paint. This is her first post and I love it…

I’ve been selling automotive paint for years and every week or so someone comes in to the store where I work and they have a car they want to paint. Granted, sometimes they want to do it with a spray can or a paint brush and I’m forced to keep a straight face and not groan, but there are a good number of people out there who truly want to learn and don’t always have a good source for information. My favorites are the ones who soak up any information I offer like a sponge and come back time after time with more questions. It gives me a feeling of being useful and helpful and there have been some who’ve made me feel as though I have adopted them and their project cars. It’s a great feeling to see their finished projects and to see how, many times, they can’t wait to do it again!

So….. I decided to write a blog. Easier than publishing a book, right? At least I hope so. Over the next few weeks I’m going to share information with any one who wants it and I invite you ask questions. I don’t know all the answers, but I’ve painted cars myself, as well as helping customers find answers to questions and work through problems and I’m hoping I can help you too. Please ask me and if I don’t know, I will make every attempt to find out for you. Whether your project is your daily driver or a future show car, a hot rod honey or a neat old truck, let me share my experience with you while you share yours with me.

There are two things my mom needs to do and two things you need to do, if you want to build a blogging brand.

1. Add a profile photo to your work. That puts a face on your brand and adds trust. Tweeting and blogging without a profile pic is like shooting a news cast with the host of the show hiding under the desk.

2. Don’t use blogger. Use WordPress. You can set up a free account at WordPress.com and created a professional presence. Blogger is really out of date and says your blog is just a hobby.

3. Get a domain name that fits your brand. I bought my mom, CarPaint.TV, and set up a WordPress account for her on Dreamhost. I’ve been using Dreamhost for years to host all my sites. It’s great because you can set up multiple WordPress sites with one-click installs. If you sign up for an account at dreamhost.com using promocode BUTTER, you’ll get $25 off a year of hosting PLUS a free domain name registration.

I’ll continue to make suggestions for my mom and share them with you in future posts. The next one will be How to Setup a WordPress Blog and custom, @yourdomain Gmail account. If you’ve ever wanted to re-paint your car, visit CarPaint.TV and my mom will teach you how.

If you stop by my blog from time to time, thank you! You may have noticed, since I finished my last production project, I’m blogging more than ever. I recently read a post on copyblogger called 3 Reasons You Should be a Formulaic Blogger. It made a couple points that got me thinking about how I’ve blogged in the past and how I want to blog moving forward.

NealCampbell.com has always been about me. I started writing here as a therapeutic vent. Up until recently, I haven’t cared if people read what I write here. That’s changing as I move on the next phase of my life. This blog will probably never follow a formula or focus on a specific topic, but I have lots of brands in development that can and should.

OMGfun.TV is a brand I’ve had on the back burner all year. It’s a blog where I’m curating things I find online that make me smile. It’s a light, family friendly site designed bring a few minutes of cheer when you need it. You can watch the best of YouTube on OMGfun.TV without experiencing the hateful comments that sometimes make YouTube yucky. Content is broken up into categories like, Babies, Cats, Cool, Cute, Dance, Dogs, Fun, Gadgets, Kids, Pop, Puppies, Science and Tech. Each post so far features a YouTube video, and when I can find it, the story behind the video. As content builds , I’d like to produce a show featuring the best stuff. I also plan to open the site up for viewer submissions.

Check it out. Tell your friends, thanks for watching and for supporting my advertisers!

Nicholas Young from Machine.FM helped me understand what was happening. It was an easy fix. I just had to drop new WordPress files in FTP to overwrite the code. That fixed the malware warning, but didn’t get the site back in Google. That was a different kind of hack.

My .htaccess file had been modified to tell the Googlebot the site had permanently been moved. The fix for that was to delete that code. It took me a couple of days to figure out how to edit the .htaccess file. Files that start with a dot are usually hidden. Your FTP client can probably reveal hidden files on your Web server. Once you do that, you download it to your computer, but if you do it without changing the name, it doesn’t show up after the download. I couldn’t even find it when searching for hidden files. The solution was to duplicate the .htaccess file on the Web server before downloading and rename it anything.htaccess. Then when I downloaded it, I was able to edit it in TextEdit. At first, I didn’t see anything wrong with the code. It matched the example at WordPress.org.

Now here’s the Google part! Remember when a major complaint about Google was the complete lack of customer service? That’s no longer the case thanks to Google+, but it’s nothing like traditional customer service. It’s more akin to six degrees of separation. I put out a call for help on Google+ asking for help from any Googler paying attention. Someone saw it and asked a specific Googler to help. It turned out to be a Google engineer. He looked at the problem and posted some links to help me fix it.

Since I didn’t see any problem with the .htaccess code, I told him I thought it was something else. He suggested scrolling to see if bad code had been placed after a bunch of blank space. Since there was no scrollbar on my TextEdit file, I hadn’t thought of that. I used the cursor and dragged down and sure enough, there was the code telling the Googlebot to go somewhere else.

Problem solved and my blog is back at the top of a Google search for my name.

As Google crawls our websites, they aren’t only looking for information to deliver great search results, they are also looking for code that “could be dangerous to site visitors.”

When we find such pages, we flag them as harmful in our search results, and also provide this data to several browsers so that users of these browsers will receive warnings directly.

It’s a big, red scary warning that discourages visitors from proceeding any further. If you visited nealcampbell.com Sunday, you would have seen the following warning:

nealcampbell.com contains malware. Your computer might catch a virus if you visit this site. Google has found malicious software may be installed onto your computer if you proceed. If you’ve visited this site in the past or your trust this site, it’s possible that it has just recently been compromised by a hacker. You should not proceed, and perhaps try again tomorrow or go somewhere else. We have already notified nealcampbell.com that we found malware on the site. For more about the problems found on nealcampbell.com, visit the Google Safe Browsing diagnostic page. If you understand that visiting this site may harm your computer, proceed anyway.

Google provides a great service called Google Webmaster Tools. It will tell you exactly what malicious code has been injected into your site, making it somewhat easier to clean up the problem.

Instructions for clean up weren’t very helpful so I asked a programmer friend for advice. He took a look and guess what? The malicious code on my site was the coding equivalent of having a kid write something on your car window with shoe polish. It is annoying and it takes time to clean up, but it didn’t present any danger to my sites or to visitors to my sites. The code was harmless, but Google’s warning was harmful. Google essentially took several of my sites offline by telling visitors they were potentially dangerous. If Google wants to do that in search results, Google has the right to do that. It’s their search engine. Google should not have the power to stand between a visitor and a website when the visitor is coming directly to the site by typing the URL or clicking a link. That’s going too far.

I can’t remember how long I’ve known Daniel, but I think it’s been since 2006. Before he really started making waves around Silicon Valley, he and I used to chat about new media, school and how he was connecting to big names in technology. I remember pinging him on iChat sometimes when he was up too late and telling him to go to bed!.

If Daniel did, in fact, ask for/accept a MacBook Air in exchange for a post on TechCrunch, that’s a bad thing. If he didn’t know it was bad before, he knows it now. The best part about being so young is that he has plenty of time to redeem himself.

Daniel is probably the best networker, I’ve ever met. I’ve admired his ambition. I’ve watched him go to school, work at QIK, attend tech events and put off sleep to accomplish as much as he could as quickly as he could. Daniel has tons of potential and this doesn’t change that. If he learns from the mistake and continues to pursue his dreams, I still look forward to watching what he’s going to do.

I hope the adults that Daniel has reached out to in Silicon Valley will reach out to him and be there for him. Let’s give him the chance to redeem himself and shine like those of us who admire him always thought he would.

Plurk, by the way, is now my official curse word.

UPDATE: There are still some issues. I’m having to put HTML in to make paragraph breaks and the sidebar is down at the bottom. Wacky.

Since I was there, I didn’t really appreciate Dave Winer’s perspective. I was on Jason Calacanis’ side.

Dave blogged,

Bottom-line, he needs to figure out a way to build the company so that many others can profit from it. Otherwise I don’t think it has a prayer against Google, which we like less and less as a company, but who basically offers an equitable proposition to the users of the Internet, who the Gnomedex crowd represent in a loose kind of way.

That was really nice advice, if you think about it. We make money from Google because they have a system that makes it possible. Will Mahalo provide a way for it’s users to profit? I don’t know, and I think that might have been the point Dave was making. His point was overshadowed by his inappropriate shouting during Jason’s speech, but in hindsight, I think he was really trying to help.