Justin Germino Ramblings

One thing I noticed while using Livefyre is that you still need a way to block or moderate Trackbacks coming to your WordPress site, this requires that you still use Simple Trackback Validation with Topsy Blocker to help prevent trackback spam from showing up on your WordPress blog with Livefyre.

However, I was able to remove GASP, Ajax Edit Comments, Akismet, ReplyMe, Subscribe to Comments by using Livefyre so using the Livefyre comment system allows me to remove 5 other WordPress plugins which reduces load on my blog and helps keep it trim.  As Livefyre requires a user to return to your blog post to reply to a comment it was redundant to have ReplyMe installed and sending out a 2nd email to a user to return to the blog and comment since Livefyre automatically sends email when comment is replied to (unless user changes their Livefyre account to disable notifications).

Overall I am pleased with the amount of SPAM livefyre has blocked since being installed on my WordPress blogs, though I have seen a drop in reader comments most of those comments were spam comments making it through my approval queue.  I found the majority of my regular readers and even the readers who comment for SEO linkbacks are still commenting on my sites even with Livefyre installed.

The livefyre system still however needs quite a few features that it is lacking and it isn’t designed around multi-author blogs very well.  More in another post about this on DragonBlogger.com later.

-Justin Germino

Had the pleasure of eating at the East Village Asian Diner over in Encinitas, CA while I was there setting up our vacation home.  In a sheer overload of restaurants that line the streets up and down the Pacific Coast Highway, this gem of a restaurant was just a random pick when we wanted some “Chinese food” and were hungry on Friday night.

The place has a few appetizers and the potstickers were chosen and were delicious.  The place is family friendly and has 4 LCD televisions 2 of which had some Kung-Fu movie and the other 2 had Ponyo playing for the kids while we were there.

You can find Teriyaki items, Kung Pao, Manchu Tofu but the highlight of the place is their Monk Stone Pots which are a collection of ingredients served in a stone pot that is blisteringly hot and continues to cook the items while it is served to you on the table.

I ordered the Salmon Monk Stone Pot and the bowl came out piping hot with the rice still frying on the bottom of the pot and sizzling while it was served to me.  The chunks of salmon and fried egg in the pot were just some of the winning ingredients.   They also have a house spicy sauce which was very flavorful and not too spicy, though I tend to avoid spicy foods and used a little soy sauce on some of the bowl myself.

All mixed together the food resembles a kind of Stir Fry of rice, spinach, carrots, zucchini, bamboo shoots and more!

I am extremely glad I stopped at the East Village Asian Diner in Encinitas and highly recommend it if you are in the area.

East Village Asian Diner
628 S Coast Highway 101
Encinitas, CA 92024

-Justin Germino

I signed up to experiment with some new blog earning platforms last week to continue my honest and thorough review and testing of everything that claims it can make bloggers money.

Luminate

One of these shows real promise and is called Luminate, this program basically puts small in-line ads over your existing images you put in your post and earns based on CPM/CPC much like AdSense does.  It is a way to monetize a little bit of your traffic stream with your own images you insert normally into your posts already.

I installed the program on DragonBlogger.com on September 1st and it took a few days to be approved, by the 15th of the month it had already earned about $8 which is promising, and I consider any service that adds $10+ a month for doing nothing but passively using an attractive offering.

I also haven’t heard anybody ask or mention any annoyance with it, it doesn’t seemed to have hurt or affected the AdSense running on the same site either.

Link Vehicle

The other program is LinkVehicle, which is another link selling program where you are paid to host links on your site.  Similar to Intellilinks or Teliad it would appear that you can be hired to do blog posts for advertisers as well.  I signed up on the 15th and haven’t been approved or have offers yet but I am curious how the system will work.

Ultimately selling backlinks can hurt site PageRank, but it has been one of the more profitable experimentations in the past year and I have earned over a thousand dollars just by hosting some sponsored links here and there.  It has the lowest amount of work for profit next to just hosting CPC/CPM advertising.

In Summary

I will review the programs for 30 days and give an honest review of each on DragonBlogger.com while adding them to my master make money online list which covers every single program I have tried on the Internet so far to make money with my blogs.

-Justin Germino

Had to take the day off of work today to haul a bunch of furniture to a small home bought in CA to serve as a vacation property for fall, winter, spring and summer breaks.

As we love to be near the beach we figured it was worth investing in a small place to call our own instead of sinking money into hotels every time we came to Southern California which was several times per year and this way we get to stay within walking distance of the beach over in Encinitas.

The environment and culture is always so fascinating to me coming from New York where everything is so fast paced and hectic, sure there were the artsy eclectic types in NY but nothing compared to the social scene I have come to love in Southern California.  There is something just peaceful and tranquil and some of the area’s are not over exaggerated with the obsessions with everything organic, green, vegan and natural.

So this weekend we setup and prepare for the fall break which comes in October where the kids will get to finally come up to a furnished vacation home.  We call it our “Beach Cottage” though it doesn’t sit directly on the beach, it is within a 2 minute walk so closer than we have ever lived to a beach before in our lives.

Naturally my personal blog should probably fill up with pictures of the beach and ocean quite a bit more while on vacations there.

-Justin Germino

Seriously, with all the talk of the defunct Social Security and how it won’t be around when today’s generation is ready to retire in 30+ years I am wondering where is my money going?

I would like a refund and all my Social Security taxes paid for the last 12 years to be refunded and I will use that to augment my own retirement fund thank you very much. 

Seriously, on a more serious note there is no way that Social Security will be empty, they say it can sustain until 2036 and then at 75% of current benefits until the year 2080+ something.  This gives actually a lot of time to get the system redesigned and improve it’s efficiency.  There is a good chance that some Social Security will still exist when I retire which is about 34 years from now, but I know that like many many others I will have to build my own retirement fund if I don’t want to work until the day I die and actually have a retirement.

Truthfully, will I ever not work?  I can’t imagine a life where there is no “job” to wake up and do.  I would always find something to do to keep busy, but I honestly cannot even imagine how different things will be in 36 years with the way technology and industries change over decades.

Some say that jobs themselves will become more obsolete, others say everyone will be working for themselves at some point.  In truth there will probably always be issues with job requirements changing and entire industries vanishing with new ones cropping up.

One thing is certain and that is that you can’t take anything at face value, you cannot rely on others to provide for you, not even the government which people have become complacent about.  Our youth must be taught to save for their future from the start, not live paycheck to paycheck and wait until their thirties or forties before they even think about retirement.

It took far too long and far to many debts before I started seeing the path to the goals I wanted, and I will be paying the price for a while until I catch up.  The good news is small things have been done to invest in the future now so in the end I reach the point I want to be at even before retirement.

-Justin Germino

I will be converting my flagship site to Livefyre in the upcoming weeks based on research looking at external comment managing systems and which one I think is the best fit for DragonBlogger.com

To prep for this transition I decided to install Livefyre here on my personal blog and leave it in place for a while to see how it fares.  Livefyre has many features that I wanted to retain while hopefully reducing the number of spam / bogus comments I will receive.

I saw that Biz Chick Blogs had converted over to Livefyre a few months back and it looked good over there.

I really liked that Livefyre gave you the ability to set custom emails based on comment type and allowed you to set other Livefyre members to become moderators of your comments which is a great feature for multi-author blogs.

So what do you think of the Livefyre comment system, has anybody else used it yet and what are the pros and cons you have experienced?

-Justin Germino

In yet another article in the news, this one on USA Today we read how more and more houses are starting to turn off their Cable and Satellite services in favor of streaming media from the web onto their television sets.  Combining web based media with a local TV tuner means they can handle local content + a ton of online movies and shows to watch and subscribers can ditch the often $60+ per month bill of having a cable or satellite service.

Cable is hurting, as are the stations on cable so the only thing I am waiting for is the ability for TV stations to allow you to purchase a Roku channel for that station so you can watch live web broadcasts from that station in exchange for a low monthly fee.

I would pay say $1 per month for USA, TNT, Discovery each for streaming live television to my Roku for those channels.  This is the only thing preventing me from shutting of my own satellite service and using Roku full time in my main house.  I am even using Roku XDS as the only media hub in a separate home in CA.

[easyazon-image-link asin=”B004CZ9U96″ alt=”Veebeam HD | Wireless PC to TV link | 1080p” src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31a2x2skpRL._SL160_.jpg” align=”left” width=”160″ height=”160″]Netflix really needs to work on building up it’s catalog and find a way to make deals with studio’s that will increase value to subscribers.  The recent string of hits with Stars rejecting renewal and many studio’s unwilling to work with them only serves to weaken the service and in 2012 there will be far less offerings if something isn’t negotiated.

I would pay $10 – $15 per month for 10-15 hand selected channels that I watch, I almost NEVER watch more than 15 separate channels a month (besides the core NBC, FOX, ABC, CBS…etc) and yet I have over 250+ on my Dish Network bill.

Roku still has dozens of channels and the Nowhere TV gives plenty of live news streams so provided you are okay with watching International CNN instead of local US CNN for example.

Another option too is to open up all of the web, screw the “Channel” idea that Roku has.  I have tested and used the Veebeam HD device which allows you to let a computer or laptop stream anything the browser see’s directly to your TV wirelessly.  It works flawlessly and this combined with any website you can visit gives you the option of watching anything online streamed to your TV.

The one problem is you need to have a custom remote or you are tethered to your laptop to do searching while you find what you want to watch.  Combine it with Google TV extension for Chrome however and it greatly saves time.

-Justin Germino

[az_easel item=”B00426C57O,B004CZ9U96″]

So my dog Donut is one of the quirkiest dogs that I have ever owned or witnessed.  She has a ton of odd habits and one of them is that she feels she has to attempt to mark territory when going for walks even though she is a girl dog.

Now, she doesn’t have the right equipment so she instead puts both her rear legs in the air and walks on her front paws while she pees upside down to try and mark a bush or a rock.  85% of the time she ends up piddling all over herself but seeing her do this every single time I ever take her for a walk is hilarious.

It is especially funny because our male dog Porky was neutered before he learned how to mark so he always squats like a girl dog.  It is complete role reversal for sure.

Here is a video clip I took of Donut the Boston Terrier dog peeing upside down while trying to walk on her front paws.

[youtube width=”550″ height=”343″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI33TnVgMDk[/youtube]

-Justin Germino

One of the best covers I have ever listened to of the Police’s King of Pain was done by Alanis Morissette, just listen to the emotion driving the lyrics and I thought posting it on this day was appropriate as I had been listening to the song on Spotify a few times the last several days.

[youtube width=”500″ height=”343″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShZd6SxdaZk[/youtube]

-Justin Germino

Of the six tours we have done during our European cruise from Royal Caribbean out of Rome, Italy the stop at Turkey was the most surprising of them all. We had done a full day tour of the Ancient Ruins of Ephesus which was a massive expanse of Roman buildings that were unearthed with the 3rd largest ancient library in the world exposed to see. The archaeologists are still working on unearthing the other 3 miles of city buried under ground and I can only imagine how big this ancient ruin tour will be in another 10 years.

My wife and I were both amused by the hundreds of stray cats that roam the ruins and perch on columns hoping for pets, handouts or some attention from tourists. They almost seem like Egyptian cats as ancient as the structures themselves and I can’t help but think the area must be rodent free.

In addition to the ruins the tour took us to the small town of Sirine Pronounced (Si-Ree-Nay) which grew dozens of fruits which were distilled into fruit wines like Mulberry wine, Melon Wine and Strawberry wine. I was so surprised by the flavor and aroma of the fruit wines that my wife and I bought a bottle of Black Mulberry (my favorite) and Melon (her favorite) back with us from the trip.

We ate lunch at Artemis restauran which served unique foods we had never before consumed including an opening appetizer of sea beans in olive oil and flat bread. The flat bread with spinach and goat cheese was my favorite, and the main entree of meatballs were unique with a distinct tomato sauce with sour cream on the side.

Out of all the tours we took on our European cruise, Turkey was one of the highlights and was far more than we expected.  We also had a really great tour guide who made the whole tour fun and fresh.

Here are some highlight photo’s from Ephesus / Kusadasi and Şirince.

-Justin Germino