I had a chance to interview Heather Havenwood, author of the book Sexy Boss. Always staying ahead of the curve, Heather gave us some insights into an amazing technique to improve your digital marketing game.

This interview is all about Chatbots.

Even though I have played with chatbots quite a bit, I am not currently using them for my pages.

Also, Heather's book:Sexy Boss - How Female Entrepreneurs Are Changing the Rule Book for Money, Success and Even Sex, and How You Can Too!

I know I'm sharing this almost a year after I recorded it, but it is still relevant as the chatbot race hasn't been settled yet.

Affiliate Summit takes place throughout the year and all over the world so take a look at it if you want to learn more about Affiliate marketing and related fields.

As more companies join the chatbot world, how do you feel about it? I asked my friends about it on Facebook and they had mixed reactions to it. I'd love to hear how you feel about them.

The post Interview About Chatbots with Heather Havenwood aka Sexy Boss appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Emailing unsubscribers is nothing new, email marketers have been doing this for over a decade but there's always some newbie that thinks they just discovered the biggest secret in the planet and start sharing it and posting about it.

And they automated it whoop dee do!

You may be tempted to put unsubscribers into a new "why did you unsubscribe" funnel. And you can even do it so it looks like you did it manually through your Gmail account, you know, to add that "personal touch."

Hint, it's not a secret and it's not all that impressive. You can easily do this with Zapier, or IFTTT or even manually from within your Gmail account.

Still, don't do it.

If you're faced with the choice to do this or not do it-- Don't do it... yes, it's clever and "neat" but it's annoying AF and most likely illegal, plus it will most likely damage your technical reputation and email reputation with the big email providers.

Should you follow up with people that unsubscribe from your list? Maybe, but probably not automatically. If they are only subscribed to one of your lists and they already chose to unsubscribe, they don't expect yet another email.

The post Email Marketing: Sure Fire Way to Annoy and Alienate People appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Clearly, I'm being sarcastic. But I do want to make a case for why you don't want to use Jetpack to manage your blog's subscriptions.

You don't want to kill all chances of your blog making money, right?

So WordPress.com is great. It offers a terrific free service and a premium service for a fee. WordPress.com also offers a number of add-on services you can use on your self-hosted or WordPress.org based website.

Through a plugin called Jetpack, you can get access to a lot of services usually only available to wordpress.com users. But because we want to monetize our blog any way we want, we are using WordPress.org, the self-hosted version of WordPress.

But at the same time we want the functionality that WordPress.com users have! What a conundrum!

The solution is that you can install some services through the Jetpack addon. One of the add-ons available through Jetpack takes care of blog subscriptions.

I cry a little every time I see a blog using the built-in WordPress.com subscriptions. So much potential wasted.

Sad.

Please, don't use it.

While I think that WordPress.com is great and the services they offer are solid, for reasons I already covered in a previous post, I'm trying to detangle all my websites from all the WordPress.com services.

Just like I discouraged you from using Akismet on that last post, today I'm discouraging you from using the built-in subscription feature that comes with Jetpack.

This blog post is all about making a case for you to STOP using that addon or module.

Stop it, now.

As in right now, when you finish reading this article, you need to go and take the steps I list at the end.

I mean, you only need to do what I say if you want to do the right thing, and only if you want to make money with your blog.

Even if you're not ready to make money today, you need to do this so that you can actually make money any time you are ready to start.

First, let's look at where the problem exists.

In your self-hosted WordPress blog, go to your dashboard, then to your Jetpack control panel and get to the settings for Jetpack.

From there, head over to the Discussion link at the top. (see screenshot below).

You can scroll down from there and you'll see the Subscriptions section. I highlighted that in the screenshot below.

When you use this feature, WordPress.com users can easily subscribe to your blog. Also if they leave a comment and want to, they can subscribe to future comments in that article.

Once this is activated, you can use a widget to add the subscription widget to your sidebar, so visitors coming to your blog will be inclined to put their name and email and subscribe.

Sounds fantastic doesn't?

It isn't.

Here's the problem with this service for you as a blogger trying to make money.

You don't have control of what or when stuff goes to those people that subscribe to your blog using this service.

For example, WordPress.com will automatically send an email to everyone that subscribed immediately after you publish your blog post.

The email is very generic and the text will be just an excerpt from your blog post and it will have a link back to your article.

This is a problem because you don't have control over when the email goes out to announce your blog post. You also don't get to define what text goes out in that email.

If you publish your blog post at 9:00 pm but you want to email your subscribers at 9:00 am the next day, forget about it. You can't do it.

This is a problem because if you press publish to your article, walk away for a few minutes to get a good cup of coffee, but when you return you re-read that article just to realize you were not supposed to publish it yet.

Maybe it was the wrong article, or maybe it needed a little more work. You immediately unpublish it and get to back to work.

You think all is going to be okay. Right? I mean, it's only been two or three minutes.

WRONG!

That article already was sent to your subscribers and the few subscribers that decide to open that boring email, then by the grace of God, decide to click on the link will find that your blog post doesn't even exist because you had to unpublish it. Or it's incomplete.

How embarrassing!

But besides getting our egos bruised a little bit, the bigger problem with that last scenario is that the people that clicked through may just end up unsubscribing because you sent a broken link.

But you didn't even send the link! Right? You just walked away to get some coffee after all that work you did.

It was WordPress.com that sent it. And this is when you realize you wish you could control the timing and send it only when you're ready.

But you can't.

There are more problems with this subscription system though.

For the subscriber, it is very tedious and the user experience isn't great. They have to click and confirm too many times.

If the subscriber isn't logged in to their WordPress.com account but they decide to subscribe to your blog with the same email that they use for WordPress.com then they will be asked to log in.

That can turn people off that don't want to take that step right now or are unable to for whatever reason.

But that double-confirmation is killer, it's killing your relationship with your readers. I recently logged into my WordPress.com to look at my own subscriptions and see if I even remember seeing these recently.

I didn't recognize any of my subscriptions, which means that I'm not getting notified correctly. But that wasn't the most surprising thing.

This was the most surprising part, I had subscriptions pending confirmation from years ago. I had a total of 42 pending confirmations.

I'm sure I'm not the only one with this same issue so that means that people that wanted to subscribe to you will never receive your updates because they never confirmed their subscription.

But It's All About the Control

There's one more problem with this service besides not being able to control the timing.

You don't have the people's email addresses, so if you wanted to send them a special announcement, or a message that you aren't going to post publicly, you really can't do it easily.

You could export the subscribers and use that list to email them manually or try to import them into Aweber, or whatever email list service you have or want to use.

If you are already stuck in this situation, that may be the only way to get out of it, but now you can rectify this problem and get a proper email list sign-up box so your readers can really subscribe to you.

So how do you fix this problem?

Step 1. Sign up for a free trial account with Aweber here.

Step 2. Create a list in Aweber for your blog subscribers, create a form for this list.

Step 3. Install the form on your blog with a text widget or the new HTML widget.

Step 4. Remove the old WordPress.com/Jetpack subscription widget.

Step 5. Turn off the subscription service in the Jetpack dashboard.

You will have a little more responsibility this way, and it is a little bit more work, but you will also gain so much more in terms of control, messaging and the ability to nurture the relationship with your readers as best as you see fit.

In Conclusion

As you set up your blog for business or start a blog for business, this is one of the little details that you don't really know until you find out the problems that come with it.

Using the built-in subscription system seems easy, it takes 10 seconds to set it up and you think all is well. But it isn't.

For reasons I talked about in a previous blog post, (see: Gripes with Jetpack and removing Akismet) I recommend you avoid using Jetpack altogether, establish a proper email list and use that to build the relationship with your readers.

The post Want to Monetize Your Blog? Don’t Use Jetpack Subscriptions appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

WordPress.com vs WordPress.org

If you don't know what the difference is between the two, WordPress.com is the commercial version of the free and open source software provided in WordPress.org. The goal of WordPress.com is to get you to sign up for a free account which provides a free basic blogging experience.

Eventually you'll realize you can't do much with it and you'll need to upgrade, or better yet move to WordPress.org which is a self-hosted solution.

Self-hosted means you need to get a web hosting account and setup WordPress yourself, have someone like me help you or have the web host do it for you. The benefits is that you can do whatever you want with it and aren't restricted too much.

A few years ago, Automattic, which is the parent company of WordPress.com and the biggest contributor to WordPress.org started merging little plugins into Jetpack. But Jetpack sucks. I've always thought that and even years after it came out, I still dislike it a lot.

I wish they'd leave the plugins as standalone modules. There's quite a few plugins and functionality that have fallen "victims" to the Jetpack beast.

Getting Rid of Jetpack and Reliance on WordPress.com

I've decided to get rid of Jetpack in my sites after I went through a catastrophic website crash where I had to deactivate all plugins and carefully fix the problem before reactivating plugins.

My entire site was only partially functional for two or three days. This wasn't the fault of Jetpack, but Jetpack added to the headaches when restoring it.

I'm still fixing things now, but the process of reactivating Jetpack was painful and frustrating so I decided that it was enough and I started to find replacements for any of the modules that I use which Jetpack provides.

I also want to replace any plugin that requires a WordPress.com account.

There are two main plugins that I care about. Jetpack stats, formerly known as WP Stats. And Akismet a plugin designed to prevent comment spam. Akismet is actually standalone plugin but still requires a WordPress.com account.

I might also address the caching module and the "better search module soon.

But First, Akismet.

The first plugin I want to replace is Akismet. Akismet is great at preventing spam, and it's by far the biggest anti-spam comment plugin for WordPress, but it isn't the only player in town.

Furthermore, the terms of service clearly state that Akismet is NOT free if you're monetizing your site or if your site is a business site.

I've never heard of Automattic going after someone for using the free plan of Akismet in a commercial site, but the terms are pretty clear:

Akismet Is Not Free

If you want to do the right thing, you will not use Akismet for your money-making blogs. That's just what the terms say. But you can find other plugins that are free and you can use without paying.

I'm going to try the plugin that is the most popular and seems to cover what I need. Even though I don't get a lot of comments on this blog, when I had Akismet deactivated for two days or so, I received over 150 spam comments so it's necessary to have something in place to prevent comment spam.

Free Alternatives to Akismet

There is a trend where the best plugins are getting converted into a hybrid model of free and paid features. Many of the alternatives to Akismet aren't free either, but there are still some. That was one of the requirements I have for this type of service.

Other things I considered were wether the plugin is actively updated and how many active users it has.

I consider it active if it has been updated within the past few months or up to a year, and it should have about 10,000 active installations or more (Akismet has over 5 million).

Here's are the alternatives I found:

Spam protection, AntiSpam, FireWall by CleanTalk

No CAPTCHA, no questions, no animal counting, no puzzles, no math and no spam bots. Universal AntiSpam plugin.

Free trial, then yearly subscription (link)

Shield Security for WordPress

Shield is easy to setup – you simply activate it. Then a step-by-step wizard will walk you through the basic configuration. Shield Security does it what it needs to do, and alerts you if and when you need to informed.

Free version and Pro version with extra features (link)

Stop Spammers

Stop Spammers is an aggressive WordPress defense plugin against comment spam and login attempts. It is capable of performing more than 20 different checks for spam and malicious events and can block spam from over 100 different countries. Stop Spammers uses multiple methods for detecting spam and may be too aggressive for some websites.

Free  (link)

Anti-Spam

Anti-spam plugin blocks automatic spam in comments section. No captcha required. The plugin is easy to use: just install it and it should just work.

Free and Pro version available (link)

Antispam Bee

Say Goodbye to comment spam on your WordPress blog or website. Antispam Bee blocks spam comments and trackbacks without captchas and without sending personal information to third party services.

Free (link)

I Decided to Go with Antispam Bee.

Antispam Bee has a good number of downloads and active installations at a little over 300,000. It also gets regular updates.

The plugin was easy to install through the regular dashboard, and after activating it the settings page is really simple and straight forward.

So far it seems to be good and working as expected. I haven't received any spam comments in a few days but it caught about 65 of them so it seems promising. In a few months I might come back and do an update to this or a proper review.

Let me know in the comments if you think there's anything I should add or if you have any questions!

In Conclusion

Despite what some people will tell you, Akismet isn't technically free. I also don't like the reliance on WordPress.com so I decided to do away with it.

I evaluated a bunch of plugins first, and decided to go with Antispam Bee. It seems reliable, it's free, and it has a good amount of usage. It also gets regular updates.

I'll run with this for a while and post back if I find any problems with it, but if you're looking for an alternative to Akismet, then this should be a good place to start.

The post Gripes with Jetpack and Alternatives to Akismet Plugin appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

But Youtube has some flaws, and one of those is the subscription system. If you use Youtube on a regular basis, you know that most channels encourage you to subscribe to them so you can stay up to date with their videos.

Obviously, after a while, you may end up being subscribed to hundreds or even thousands of Youtube channels.  What happens then is that Youtube can't notify you of all the updates. It wouldn't be practical.

Youtube came up with a solution for this, and they introduced the "subscription bell," a little icon that is available next to the subscription button on each channel. This bell icon lets you tell YouTube that you want "all notifications" from this channel. You can think of it as a priority status for that subscription compared to the other subscriptions.

But this doesn't solve the problem of too many notifications. You may have a thousand subscriptions and clicked the bell on 300 of those to receive all their alerts. But if those 300 channels are very active, then this is not a solution either.

I got sick of this notification mayhem and decided to unsubscribe from all Youtube channels so I could start from a blank slate. I went to the Youtube settings to look for a way to unsubscribe from all channels. No luck! Youtube wouldn't want me to unsubscribe from all channels because it would go against their goal to keep me on their site for a longer period of time.

So I went to use one of my favorite tools to make an unsubscribe script for Youtube. This tool is called iMacros, it's free. Even though it works with Firefox or Chrome, I think it works much better with Firefox, so that's what I used.

The following video shows you how it works and some of the basics. After the video, there are a few notes and also a download option for the script so you can just start using it yourself right away.

How to unsubscribe from all youtube channels, notes.

You need to install iMacros as an extension for Firefox.

If you want to subscribe to some channels after you have unsubscribed from all, I recommend that you back up your subscriptions first. You'll find the backup option on the bottom right of your Subscription management page. This option will let you download an OPML file which you can read with an RSS reader like Feedly.

Use this unsubscribe method at your own risk! Youtube doesn't have an interest in making it easy to mass-unsubscribe from all channels; they have an interest in selling advertising. One of their goals is to keep you on the site as long as possible, and they accomplish this by trying to show you content you would be interested in based on your previous watch history and subscriptions.

Using a script to unsubscribe is probably not something Youtube would endorse or encourage so use it your own risk. It's for this reason that I deliberately made the script with lots of pauses and time delays. The script is intended to be convenient, not to be fast.

If you are pushing the boundaries and Youtube decides to prevent you from unsubscribing quickly, you'll see a screen like this when running the script:

All you have to do at that point is wait a minute or two and then start the script again.

You can run the script manually, and it will unsubscribe you from 25 channels. Just use the "Play" button.

To run the script mostly automatically you should use the "Play (Loop)" option and specify the "Max" number of loops to run through. I ran the script ten times at a time, and this made it so that I unsubscribed from about 250 channels at a time. See screenshot below:

You'll notice that the script has a screenshot command, this is to take a screenshot of your subscriptions before it unsubscribes you from the first 25 listed on that page. If you don't want to keep screenshots, you can just delete that entire line. Screenshots are saved to the designated "Downloads" folder for iMacros.

If you want to remove the time delays (not recommended), you can delete the lines that say this:

SET !VAR1 EVAL("var randomNumber=Math.floor(Math.random()*4 + 2); randomNumber;")
WAIT SECONDS={{!VAR1}}

I recommend if you're going to "loop" the script to do a few hundred unsubscriptions at a time, you leave the last time delay so that there's a pause each time that the loop starts over. This delay may prevent Youtube from flagging your account or limiting you and showing you the 504 error I described above.

I was able to run the script on ten loops, and it only gave me the 504 error twice, depending on your Youtube usage and other factors you may not see it at all or you may see it more frequently. If you see the error every time it loops, you should log out of Youtube, clear your cache and log back in.

For more documentation and information on iMacros, you may want to take a look at the extensive documentation they offer in their Wiki here.

The script is here. Download it to your computer, put it into one of the iMacro folders, then play it through Firefox using the iMacro commands.

The script is herehttps://notagrouch.com/wp-content/uploads/youtube-unsubscribe.zip. Download it to your computer, put it into one of the iMacro folders, then play it through Firefox using the iMacro commands.

The post How To Reset Your Youtube Subscriptions appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

This is a pretty good movie. I enjoyed watching it. The preview will give you an idea of what to expect and I highly recommend it. Totally worth it, watch the preview below, then you can watch it if you want instant download. It's how I watched it because I hast to miss the red carpet event! @#^($)#*. After that then I give you a little more expanded review and with some spoilers. Beware.

Living Dot Com Trailer (Official - HD)

Now, one cool little tidbit I can share with you is that I was there while they filmed John's part. John invited me over to watch and hang out, it was pretty cool actually. I'll dig up some pictures and maybe behind the scenes video. It was fun. But also a little revealing, after watching the movie, I know they had to cut out so much for the final product. Just from John's part along, they cut out at least a couple hours of footage. I can't imagine how much we missed from the other featured entrepreneurs.

Featured in the movie are:
Zac Johnson, John Chow, Jeni Larson, Peter Nguyen, Andrew Warner, Chad French, Dr Edward Leamer (UCLA). All of them experts in their fields and extremely successful and besides making millions of dollars online, not much different than you and me. Yes, I'm talking multi-million dollar successful. Some even in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah, seriously. All the money comes from online marketing of sone form or another. Crazy.

Watch the movie here or download it for later. And here are some screenshots from the movie itself:

The post Living Dot Com appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

What is Automator? Automator is a very simple yet powerful scripting and programming tool available in all modern macs. It's job is to automate tasks very much like this one. If you have a relatively new Mac, you have Automator already installed so this download should work for you.

There are many apps on the App Store that can re-name many files at once, these batch file renamers cost in the range of free to $20 or more. But most of the times, you don't need all the fancy bells and whistles. Personally when I see a price tag of $20 dollars or more for something like this I get a little ticked off.

Shouldn't this be a part of the basic operating system nowadays?

It's one of those things that I don't quite understand. OSX and Windows AND Linux all should offer a way to rename many files at once with some basic control and customization. But they don't, so here's a quick and simple solution.

This little script does the trick for me and maybe will work for you too. Follow these instructions or watch the short video at the end.

Installation

1. Download the file
2. Unzip it
3. Double-click it
4. Install as a Service

Usage

1. Select a bunch of files you want to rename and right-click on them to bring up the context menu.
2. Go to the Services menu item
3. Select "file-renamer"
4. Chose the new name you want and any other parameters you want to change and then click continue.

All the files you selected will be renamed according to your rules. Note that there is NO easy way to undo this so make sure you really want to do this.

Uninstall

1. Go to your System Preferences Panel
2. Go to the Keyboard control panel
3. Select Shortcuts at the top and make sure Services is selected on the left.
4. Scroll down until you see the batch renamer and uncheck the box.
5. If you would like to completely delete the file form your computer, right click on "batch renamer" and select show in finder then you can just trash that file.

More info

If you want to check out the other options available, open Automator and open the file renamer script to explore the other options. By default, the script will rename the files in a sequential manner using the "new name" you provide and will append a 3 digit number at the end of the file, using dashes to separate the name from the numbers.

The main options really are about the way in which each file is renamed, but the other options can be handy as well. Add date or Time to your files, Add some text, change between upper case and lower case, or Replace part of the name with "replace text".

Here's a quick video on how to batch rename files on your mac using this script.

The post File Renamer for Mac, Free Download appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

If you want a free solution, Aweber offers a free account as well. Try them out here, using my affiliate link.

Some of the really fancy email systems out there like Infusionsoft, Marketo, Aweber, and others let you do what is known as a targeted drip campaign. This really just means that you can send specific messages to a sub-group of your list based on what they do or don't with your emails.

For example, if your reader clicks on a link that is in your email, you could send a follow-up email based on that click.

You could send an email announcing two specials on your website for example. Standard email as you've done in the past. Let's say that the email includes Link A, and Link B.

Let's also talk about two readers, hypothetically Jane and Joe. If Joe clicks on link A, he can be put into a queue to receive certain emails after that click. These emails could be specially crafted for people that click on link A.

At the same time, Jane clicks on link B. This action puts her into a different queue with different emails.

This is a marketer's dream because you can easily send different emails based on the actions of your reader. The same can be done for people that don't click on any links. This is a really nice addition to Mailchimp. You can read about this and other changes in their blog (they removed this blog post so the link has been removed).

They've updated the way auto-responders work, the features available, and other stuff worth taking a look.

The post Autodrip and Autorespond with Mailchimp’s new Features. appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Ifttt is similar to other services like Yahoo Pipes, or Tarpipe; it takes a source of content and sends it to a destination. The source can be an email, RSS, SMS, Facebook, Read it Later or others. The destination can be Twitter, email, a phone call, a blogpost or others.

A common use of such a tool is, for example, taking a blogpost and automatically sharing it on Twitter; that's an easy example. Using what you call tasks, ifttt can do much more than just retweet your blogposts. It can save a picture you've shared on Instagram and upload it to Facebook. Maybe you want to change your Twitter profile picture when you update your profile photo on Facebook; yes, ifttt.com can do that for you.

So for my SMMOC friends and collegues, here's a brief video introduction to IFTTT.com. The video should give you a good overview of what you can do and how simple it is to use.

The post Introduction to ifttt.com for #SMMOC appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

OSCAR promises to find anomalies on your logs and alert you of them, faster, and more accurately than a security professional could do, and at a fraction of the cost. Having someone parse through logs on an ongoing daily basis for example, is very expensive, so much so that only big data centers and high-tech firms can afford the 70 - 150K range for a security professional like this. Not to mention that this task is usually a waste of time for someone with the skillset to actually do it. Ironic is it not?

OSCAR claims to do this job much cheaper, better and faster. OSCAR is still in beta as of this writing, but to be frank, this is not going to be your normal webapp or virtual appliance that the general population will use. But if you're running a start-up, if you have a hosting service or manage a lot of applications, OSCAR may just be what you need. Check them out, they're accepting applicants to their beta program right now.

Some of things that made this very interesting to me:
Freemium model! It doesn't require a point to point VPN. You don't have send your syslogs to them. It uses standard SSH so it's secure and easy to implement. It will alert you via email, so you can then route that to your favorite device. And it has an easy to use Dashboard. All winner points on my book. Their alert system is based on "automated anomaly detection" which means it follows patterns and picks out the anomalies; brilliant.

Let's see how this develops, and if you want to want to take it for a spin, join the beta program.

The post OSCAR Security Event Management appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

If you didn't know about Formulists, it doesn't matter much now, but I'll give you a quick rundown.

Formulists was a tool to help you manage Twitter lists. You could create lists based on certain parameters and then Formulists would keep those lists up-to-date. For example, a list of people that often talk to you directly.

The service never really worked for me because you had to constantly keep logging into it, and the time it was supposed to save me by making my lists was instead taken up by me having to log into the service.

Maybe this is part of why they didn't succeed. But I wish the team the best, and like they said in their goodbye blogpost, I'm sure they've learned a lot of good lessons along the way. Every failure is a true success if you learn and adjust. It is rumored that Henry Ford failed at least three times before FORD motors was born. Imagine if he had given up at the first or second try!

Good luck to Formulists, it was nice to know ya.

For those of you that want to find something that can help you with Twitter lists, take a look at SocialBro. Even though it isn't automatic, it can help you dial in a group of people and easily add them to your lists.

The post Formulists for Twitter is Going Away appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

If you use both of these apps, you might want to synchronize your Skitch screen captures with your Dropbox files. It is rather simple to do this but you need to do this from the command line. Full instructions are available at the Tips and Tricks wiki from the Dropbox guys.

The trick is to create a Skitch folder in your Dropbox directory, then you move all the necessary files and folders from their original location to this newly created folder. After you do this, you then create symlinks (shortcuts) from the original location of the files and folders to the new location in Dropbox.

On your second computer, you just need to copy your .skitch files into the new Dropbox location, delete the other locations (because they are in Dropbox), and then symlink the original locations to the Dropbox counterparts.

After you do this, each time you save a Skitch to your history, it will automatically be available in your other computer.

The post Synchronize Skitch with Dropbox and keep your screenshots everywhere appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

The purpose of Tarpipe is similar to Yahoo Pipes. It takes a source of data and posts it to a location. The sources available right now are of two types, email or a REST API. If you don't know what a REST API is, don't worry its not very important yet. But it means that it could read information from other websites. The destinations in the other hand are greater in numbers and some of them include WordPress, Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, Evernote and many others.

Essentially, Tarpipe allows you to send an email to a special email address, and this action of sending an email can trigger a whole process which ends up posting the body of your email to your Blog, and then announce it on Twitter while saving it to Delicious at the same time... for example. Anyway, check out the video and let me know if you have any questions. I also have a second video ready which improves on this one and should be made available later on this weekend.

The follow up video is now published, you can watch it here.

The post Tarpipe, Learning by Example appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Some time ago I setup a PXE boot server at work so we could deploy different operating systems to our servers and computers quickly. I'm lazy like that. We use it to deploy Centos 5.3, Centos 4.4, and a few different versions of the Mirth Appliances. Here's how I added Centos 5.4 to our existing PXE boot environment.

A normal DVD installation might take 20 - 60 minutes, while a network installation can take under 5 minutes. I say I'm lazy because I dread downloading the discs, then burning them --or looking for a set that I might have burned months ago-- then actually popping the CD in, making sure the system boots from it, then go through the tedious process of selecting packages, settings, partitions etc; yes I hate doing this when its so repetitive. When you do this 10 - 30 times a month, it gets old.

The writeup assumes you already have a PXE Boot environment setup; I don't walk you through setting that up, but if you have problems figuring out let me know if I can help you or ask questions on the comments; I'll try to get you answers. I walked thorugh this a couple of times and I tried capturing all the important information; if you find a mistake or something isn't clear please let me know so I can correct it. If you follow this, when you're finished you should be able to install CentOS 5.4 from your network without the need for CDs or DVDs. All you need is a system that can boot from the network, usually this is called PXE and its configured through your BIOS.

Requirements

• Existing PXE Boot environment.
• Centos 5.4 Discs. I got the DVD instead of multiple disks. Its easier if you have just one disc.
• Enough space in your repository to hold the contents of the DVD
• Time. You'll need time to download the discs, and walk through this guide. Depending on your ability and experience, you could be finished in about 25 minutes.

The Nitty Gritty

Mount the DVD (iso) to a location so you can copy the sources to your repository.

[08:16 AM] netboot:/tmp # mount -o loop CentOS-5.4-x86_64-bin-DVD.iso /mnt/centos54
[08:18 AM] netboot:/tmp # ls -la /mnt/centos54/
total 619
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root   6144 Oct  1  2009 ./
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root      4 May 27 12:19 ../
drwxrwxr-x 2  500  500 544768 Oct  1  2009 CentOS/
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    118 Oct  1  2009 .discinfo
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    212 Sep 30  2009 EULA
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  18009 Sep 30  2009 GPL
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root   2048 Oct  1  2009 images/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root   2048 Oct  1  2009 isolinux/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root  16384 Sep 30  2009 NOTES/
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    655 Sep 30  2009 RELEASE-NOTES-cs
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   1401 Sep 30  2009 RELEASE-NOTES-cs.html
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    839 Sep 30  2009 RELEASE-NOTES-de
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   1571 Sep 30  2009 RELEASE-NOTES-de.html
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    694 Sep 30  2009 RELEASE-NOTES-en
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   1367 Sep 30  2009 RELEASE-NOTES-en.html
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    694 Sep 30  2009 RELEASE-NOTES-en_US
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   1367 Sep 30  2009 RELEASE-NOTES-en_US.html
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    788 Sep 30  2009 RELEASE-NOTES-es
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   1619 Sep 30  2009 RELEASE-NOTES-es.html
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    852 Sep 30  2009 RELEASE-NOTES-fr
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   1641 Sep 30  2009 RELEASE-NOTES-fr.html
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    766 Sep 30  2009 RELEASE-NOTES-ja
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   1565 Sep 30  2009 RELEASE-NOTES-ja.html
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    706 Sep 30  2009 RELEASE-NOTES-nl
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   1433 Sep 30  2009 RELEASE-NOTES-nl.html
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    752 Sep 30  2009 RELEASE-NOTES-pt_BR
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   1480 Sep 30  2009 RELEASE-NOTES-pt_BR.html
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    801 Sep 30  2009 RELEASE-NOTES-ro
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   1473 Sep 30  2009 RELEASE-NOTES-ro.html
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root   2048 Oct  1  2009 repodata/
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   1512 Sep 30  2009 RPM-GPG-KEY-beta
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   1504 Sep 30  2009 RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-5
-r--r--r-- 1 root root   7048 Oct  1  2009 TRANS.TBL
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    417 Oct  1  2009 .treeinfo

I already have other distros ready so I'll follow the structure I've set already in place. Keeps things neat and tidy.

[08:24 AM] netboot:/opt/mirthcorpnetboot/sources/linuxdistros/centos # tree -L 2
.
|-- x86
|   `-- 4.4
`-- x86_64
    |-- 5.2
    `-- 5.3

Notice the x86_64 directory, I'm going to create sub directory there for 5.4 and copy the contents of the DVD to it. I'll use my favorite tool for this, rsync.

[08:40 AM] netboot:/..../centos/x86_64 # rsync -P -rvvia /mnt/centos54/* ./5.4/
building file list ... 
3515 files to consider
....
....

After we copy the source files I no longer need the dvd.

Centos 5.4 boot options in menu.c32

To add Centos 5.4 as a boot option, we need to modify the tftpboot options and include the sources. We've done the sources part by placing them in the right location in the steps above. Please note that if you want, you could keep the sources on the DVD and just use the mount location; I prefer to have the sources available locally on the drive.

Next up, modifying the menu options when booting. Based on my setup, the files I need to work with next are at the root, under the tftpboot folder. Here's how things look:

[08:48 AM] netboot:/tftpboot # tree -L 2
.
|-- images
|   |-- centos
|   |-- live
|   |-- oralce
|   |-- ubuntu
|   `-- windows
|-- menu.c32
|-- pxelinux.0
`-- pxelinux.cfg
    |-- OLD
    `-- default

8 directories, 3 files

I need to edit the default file under the pxelinux.cfg folder. I also need to include the boot files under the proper folder in the images directory. The actual menu options are handled by menu.c32.

The file pxelinux.cfg has some settings in it, then we have each of the operating systems configured with four lines. Lets look at the one I have for CentOS 5.3

[08:50 AM] netboot:/tftpboot # head pxelinux.cfg/default 
default menu.c32
prompt 0
timeout 300

MENU TITLE PXE Menu
# Start of CentOS 5.3 install
LABEL CentOS 5.3 x86_64 SERVER
MENU LABEL CentOS 5.3 x86_64 Server
KERNEL images/centos/x86_64/5.3/vmlinuz 
append vga=normal initrd=images/centos/x86_64/5.3/initrd.img ramdisk_size=32768 ks=http://localhost/linuxdistros/centos/x86_64/5.3/config/appliancecfg/ks.cfg ksdevice=eth0
# End of Centos 5.3 installation 

For more information about menu.c32, refer to the official documentation.

Our new entry for CentOS 5.4 will look something like this:

LABEL CentOS 5.4 x86_64 SERVER
MENU LABEL CentOS 5.4 x86_64 Server
KERNEL images/centos/x86_64/5.4/vmlinuz 
append vga=normal initrd=images/centos/x86_64/5.4/initrd.img ramdisk_size=32768 ks=http://localhost/linuxdistros/centos/x86_64/5.4/config/appliancecfg/ks.cfg ksdevice=eth0

Notice that I've just changed the "5.3" to "5.4" everywhere, then I'm going to look at each instance where 5.4 is referenced and make sure the files that are being requested are in fact available there. Also notice that the menu entry requests a file named ks.cfg. This is a custom kickstart config file.

The LABEL lines are just that, labels. The MENU LABEL one is what will show up in our boot menu options. The first line we really have to look at is the Kernel image. We have to tell menu.c32 where to find the kernel to boot into a Centos 5.4 installation. Initially, the kernel image will be available where we left the sources after we copied them from the DVD. I found the vmlinuz file under the images/pxeboot folder.

[09:23 AM] netboot:/...../centos/x86_64/5.4/ # ls -la images/pxeboot/
total 9231
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root       6 Oct  1  2009 ./
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root      10 Oct  1  2009 ../
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7397850 Oct  1  2009 initrd.img
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root     265 Oct  1  2009 README
-r--r--r-- 1 root root     659 Oct  1  2009 TRANS.TBL
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1932284 Oct  1  2009 vmlinuz

I'm going to copy that and any other files I need into the /tftpboot/images folder under the corresponding directory. Presumably, based on my previous 5.3 pxe boot configuration, I should only need "vmlinuz" and "initrd.img". Our friendly visual utility tree should clarify things a little.

[09:27 AM] netboot:/tftpboot/images/centos # tree -L 3
.
|-- x86
|   `-- 4.4
|       |-- initrd.3ware.img
|       |-- initrd.base.img
|       |-- initrd.img
|       |-- initrd.r8168.img
|       |-- initrd.r8169.img
|       `-- vmlinuz
`-- x86_64
    |-- 5.2
    |   |-- initrd.img
    |   `-- vmlinuz
    |-- 5.3
    |   |-- initrd.img
    |   `-- vmlinuz
    `-- 5.4

6 directories, 12 files

Make sure there's a 5.4 directory ready and then copy over the two files; in our example above the directory 5.4 is there because I created it earlier, but it is empty. We'll copy over vmlinuz and initrd.img from the original sources.

[09:29 AM] netboot:/tftpboot/images/centos/x86_64/5.4 # cp /opt/mirthcorpnetboot/sources/linuxdistros/centos/x86_64/5.4/images/pxeboot/* ./
[09:29 AM] netboot:/tftpboot/images/centos/x86_64/5.4 # ls -la
total 7
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root       6 Jun  7  2010 ./
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root       5 May 27 12:16 ../
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7397850 Jun  7  2010 initrd.img
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root     265 Jun  7  2010 README
-r--r--r-- 1 root root     659 Jun  7  2010 TRANS.TBL
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1932284 Jun  7  2010 vmlinuz
[09:29 AM] netboot:/tftpboot/images/centos/x86_64/5.4 # rm -rf ./README ./TRANS.TBL

I copied everything (*) then deleted the README and TRANS.TBL files, I don't think we'll need them. This now satisifes the kernel line from our boot options.

KERNEL images/centos/x86_64/5.4/vmlinuz 

Checks and balances

Now we need to make sure the rest of the default config file is accurate. Notice that the next line calls out the initrd.img file and we've also taken care of that with the previous copy command.

Onto the actual OS sources. If you've followed my example and simply copied your previous entry in the default file, your 5.4 files should be ready to go. Since I'm using HTTP to serve the files (see entry where I call out to http://localhost....), I can simply browse to the location via my webbrowser and make sure I can see files there before I test this out.

Looking at the entries on the default file, for the menu entry I mentioned above, I talked about my custom kickstart file (ks.cfg). Kickstart files are like answer files that help you configure your installations to be more uniform by providing standardized answers to things like language options, packages, and other stuff normally presented by Anaconda. Sometimes you can also have kickstart files actually do the entire OS installation plus additional programs as I do with some of our customized installations for our appliances. In the case where you simply want a generic OS installation, you should point to the cfg file under isolinux. The line in the menu entry will then look like this:

append vga=normal initrd=images/centos/x86_64/5.4/initrd.img ramdisk_size=32768 ks=http://localhost/linuxdistros/centos/x86_64/5.4/isolinux/isolinux.cfg ksdevice=eth0

It's also worth noting that I don't really use "localhost" to serve my files over HTTP. I use the actual IP address of the server.

Closing notes

After you make changes to the /tftpboot/ files, you should restart xinetd. In some cases if you're serving HTTP you may have to restart your webserver as well. I don't have to and you shouldn't either but if you run into issues where your files aren't available via the webbrowser then you should take a look at your webserver configuration.

Following the steps I listed here, I got a generic CentOS 5.4 installation menu from PXE Boot so that I can just plug in a system to my network, choose network boot and then pick the CentOS 5.4 installation option. At this point, I'll have to go through the normal installation process as if I had inserted a DVD into the computer. Further customization and automation is possible by using a custom kickstart file instead of the built-in isolinux/isolinux.cfg file.

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