₦airaland Forum

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Let me just park my two cents here. But before i do, i will like to start with the best analogy i have ever come across on this matter. This analogy was given by Robert Kiyosaki in his book Unfair Advantage.

It goes like this:

The African Monkey Trap

To catch an African Monkey, a hunter will cut a small hole in the top of a coconut, the hole is just wide enough to let the monkeys hand through it, he will then place a peanut inside.

The hunter will place this nifty trap in a very conspicuous place for the monkey to find, he would also tie a long, almost invisible string to the coconut.

Unsuspecting monkey comes along, finds the coconut and slides his hand inside to reach the peanut. He grabs the coconut, and tries to bring it out. But as long as his fist is clenched around the peanut, he cannot free his hand. It is this struggle to free his hand that will alert the hunter that the trap has worked.

Slowly, ever so slowly, the monkey will be dragged to certain death. Unless of course he has the courage to let go of the peanut, and thus free his hand.

People are being paid peanuts for so much work, being treated like dirt, and they really have no choice. But thats what they think. They think they have no choice. The monkey certainly has a choice, he is surrounded by the eintire forest. Surrounded by food. And until he can summon the courage to let go of peanuts, he will only continue to strugle and continue to suffer. Until he dies.

My fellow Young Nigerians. Any work that does not preserve your human dignity is no work. You are surrounded by a forest of food, yet you slave away at the hunters trap. You have to wake up and wake up on your own.

In this, no one can help you. Not your mother, not your father, not your pastor, not your imam, not the government. You have to do it yourself. You have to decide for yourself that you are not going to be pulled to certain death by the hunter, and realise at last that there are many many many legitimate ways for you to earn a living.

I'm not talking about any get rich quick schemes here. If you get rich quick, you will get broke quick. Ask all them yahoo boys.

Today we live in the most fantastic times ever. When my creativity can reach a thousand, a million, or a billion people in a matter of seconds or hours. Where geographical distances have been reduced to nothing by smart internet enabled applications, and where what you would deem normal is totally new to someone else in another clime.

Inside this whole amazing mix of technology and human needs lie your answers. What do you know, that others do not? What do you know that you can sell? What is the value you can create from out of yourself? Remember this, Money ALWAYS flows towards value. So i ask again, What is the Value you can create from out of yourself?

You have worked in a call center for a few months, or years, so obviously, you must have had a lot of practice talking to different people from all walks of the Nigerian life.

If my assumptions are correct, then you must be somewhat of an expert in handling complex customers! What stops you from documenting your expertise on a blog, or an ebook, or on a podcast on topics you are an expert at? This is value that some people will pay you for. Think big, your customers may not even be Nigerians. (The internet is your tool, not only for checking instagram selfies). Do you know what the best part of selling yourself in a digital format is? You do the work once, you sell it over and over again. (Think ebooks). The bestest part (pardon me) is that the platforms for selling now exist. eg, downloads.com.ng

Every single person possesses more than one single creative ability. If talking is not your strongest suit, find your strength, hone that skill, sell it on the biggest market place there is: The Internet.

As a retiring web designer, i've made over 60 websites for clients. Web design got so easy, we could do it in 2 days or less, at an average 80k per website, you do the math. And i didnt have to go to one expensive web design school. I taught myself web design on the internet. It is a disgace to anyone's sense of dignity to slave so much and be paid peanuts and on top of the suffering, being trampled upon like a non-entity when you can let go of the peanuts and go find yourself.

No one can wake up for you, it is your duty. Your creativity, which is God-given, was given to you for a reason. Dont be like the foolish man who was given three talents and buried it, it will be taken away from you and given to others who will make use of it.

Wake up, wake up at last, WAKE up Dammit.

You can sell your designs on mediasale.com.ng

Great shots bro. If you Would love you to sell your shots, you can sell on photosale.com.ng

A marketplace for digital photography.
Have you ever had to do a google search for an appropriate image for your web project or blog post or even just something good enough to print and frame on your wall? You probably found what i found. Lots and lots western images that just won't do. PhotoSale seeks to solve that problem by providing the platform for both Photographers and consumers of photography.

Here's photosale as featured on TechCabal
http://techcabal.com/2014/09/04/photosale-stock-photography/

PhotoSale is a project i built, i'd encourage everyone to signup and start selling African digital photos.
http://photosale.com.ng

Opiosko: Please how do i put an opt-in form on my wordpress blog side bar?. Please help i can't see where 2 insert a form table on wordpress. Thanks all.

Install the plugin called jetpack. Connect it to your account and use the subscription widget that comes with jetpack.

Lol, it didn't work here too

I dont mean to sound discouraging, but there are som steps we always miss when putting up a website. I know the idea is great and you are eager to jump into building the next best website on the internet. But there is usually a world of research that needs to be done first and we always overlook that!

Eg, Do such service(s) already exist?
If yes, how well is their idea implemented?
what are the loopholes?
how will your own idea differ and improve on the competition's?
Whats the estimated budget for getting my website known?
whats the business model for your idea (ie how will it make money)

Like i said i dont want to sound discouraging but you will save yourself a lot of hard work after answering those questions but then again, jumping right in may be your best bet sometimes! Cheers

Interesting, I remember when we built flymyads.com... Beautiful idea, great traction. The problem we had more publishers than advertisers and that took more money from our pockets than put in it! Now all that was a about a year ago. Though the service is on the back burner now, it brought many hard lessons and links to better things too.

The real problem is not the idea... those are a dime a dozen... implementation is the problem. As at a year ago from now, the nigerian public certainly wasnt as sensiized to online advertising as it is now and it can only improve!

In our bid to get more advertisers, we realised quickly that if ever it was gonna work, the market wasnt the small businesses cos they hardly had a budget for advertising much less online ads, and when they managed to squeeze something out, they wanted the results immediately, which was another problem.

So what did we do, we looked to the bigger businesses that had advertising budgets and we changed the game! Cheers

To check results, you would have to load the results online first of all... you dont need a plugin for that! To generate scratch cards, you will need a plugin for that! Then again, you may not want to run the whole site on Wordpress. Some web programming may also be needed!

Haba, if you have been using Joomla for a long time you should know its capabilities by now! What i suggest you do is put down all the major tasks that you will be doing and see if there are functionalities within joomla that can achieve it. I'm a wordpress developer and i know i'd be able to find plugins to do that in 5 minutes!

Ah, now an interesting Topic. First let me say that a lot of people will only write that one cms is best because thats the one they favour. But lets try to look at it dispassionately! There are many CMSs all tailored for different purposes!

Personally, i have worked with Both Joomla and Wordpress. But i favour wordpress for one simple reason! Its the Simplest to use. And that explains why a huge army of people around the world use it. Both as simple designers or as themes and plugins developers. Of all the CMSs, WordPress is the most popular. And it all boils down to that same reason. Its simple!It was made for the point and clickers!

And because a whole lot of people are continually developing for the Wordpress platform, it has the most aesthetically beautiful and functional themes!

At present WordPress powers about 16% of the websites on the internet! That's over 60 Million Websites! And thats the largest for any single CMS!

The other CMSs are also good and they do what they are built for. But the learning curve on some of them are way steeper than that of WordPress...

My Dear Bosun... Eyowo and Cashenvoy have their own Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) All you need is to do is find someone who can integrate it for you. There's no need fiddling with those plugins as they aren't tailored for the African market...

For instance in the story of Mat Honan who had daisy chained many of his accounts like we all do: same address at gmail and at yahoo and probably same password. it only required an access into mail gmail account. He had set up his .me account as a recovery email and using another method, the hackers got access to his iCloud account and wiped his iphone and mac... they reset his passwords and was effectively locked out of his own accounts... Thankfully it was only a prank aimed at hijacking his twitter handle which succeeded anyway... My point is that theres no 100% security and if they somehow get in it may not just be a matter of filling a questionnaire!

Thankfully also, theres pronbably no real reason why hackers will be bent on ruining our blogs so we should be thankful... I only feel sorry for Mat Honan who lost 8 years worth of gmail correspondence, his whole mac documents and his whole iphone contents... It can happen!

EasyNaija.com:
Greetings Slyr0x


@mededot. I'm trying to point out that it's pointless trying to steal someones Blogger password when you know they are going to get it back.

My password example was only one of the ways in which a hack could happen. Now suppose a hacker gets in just like the they did, and they have enough information to actually successfully change your password! Doesn't that change the game?

ProEthicalHacka: Interesting that hack attacks are now frequent in the media, maybe is time to sit up and implement security. As a Security Analyst and Forensics Investigator, These questions are on my mind:

How come ?
How did it happen?
Why her?

As a security analyst, the hack attack could be as a result of these issues:
1. Might be as a result of a weak password, guessable password
2. Or she access the blogger in an unsafe Network or compromised PC, once a network is compromise all your key logs and screen shot will be sent to the attacker
3. Or some links are sent to her via her gmail acount and she did visit where the login credential are asked.(Phishing)
4. Or maybe tried to follow some link to her traffic sometime bloggers get high amount of traffic from some malicious sources you endanger your blog by visiting via the blogger.

Hello ProEthicalHacka... and thanks for further enlightening us! would you be available for checking and testing security measures for websites professionally?

EasyNaija.com:
Says the dude who doesn't know the true meaning of the word "Hack".

First, which slowpoke would use password as their actual password?
Secondly, stealing someone's password and formally logging into their account is not hacking, it means that person was not creative enough and someone correctly guessed their password and stole their admin account.

Hacking is writing malicious code intended to break into someone's computer, database, or file storage space using techniques like shell execution, sql injection, e.t.c. This is mostly directed at the host and on the server where the actual files and database are stored.

Even if someone stole your blogger password... wait a sec. What do we login to blogger with? Gmail account... So it's something google can solve easily.

And good luck to anyone trying to hack into a server.

Hahaha, truly you know the meaning of hacking... Have you considered that there is no such thing as 100% security on the Internet? Or you didn't read about the right royal hacking of poor Mr Mat Honan? Well, here's the link. You will discover quickly that hacking is not just writing malicious code! Discover how one seemingly unimportant info somewhere else could jeopardize many things. Enjoy

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-honan-hacking/all/

EasyNaija.com:
Lol. Are you kidding me? You think anyone can hack into google's servers?

dont get it wrong o, you control your portion of google server that you have been loaned by using blogger or whatever! Try using password as your password and see if you wont get hacked!

Well it was certainly an interesting day yesterday when i was contacted to help disinfect a hacked wordpress site... It was no joke! The hacker had modified core wordpress files! Some comments spam could no longer be deleted as the check boxes in front of them had been surgically removed. The bulk action button at the top was also gone! Well, almost gone, it had been partially hidden with only about 2% of its bottom showing.

Other scripts made sure that changing the password of the admin account would load a simple html page at the front end showing only a single word: error...

Also unfortunately for the website owner, there were no recent backups of databases... backing up this one would be same as copying off the botched installation! The only salvage was to export an xml file but even that was limited in the help it could provide!

Last resort, back up the whole thing and start from fresh! adding only what was clean!

For those that still think the hackathon is a joke, take heed! Wordpress users, find and install this security plugin: Better wp security. I have found it veery veery useful...

Bro, the world is moving ahead and you can begin to learn on your own... online and free... Take a look:

http://ayodejiagboola.com/web-design-tutorials/

There are actually a few ways to achieve this. The more experienced users will go to Appearance > Editor and edit the page templates there... But for Beginners (which is why Wordpress is so awesome), a really simple way to do it would be to use the More tag as already pointed out.

When you are creating a post, place your cursor anywhere you want and click the Insert More Tag button (Alt + shift + T). This overrides the default wordpress setting of 55 words excerpts...

I hope this helps!

Where is your template located. If it is on your site, what is your web address? what is your website built with?

Hmmm, Bosun... just like brine said, there's need for you to consider your payment platform: Interswitch? GT Pay? Eyowo? etc... last i checked, Paypal doesn't work in Nigeria so you have to take that also into consideration!

Another thing is that you may need some scratch coding somewhere along the line as all the plugins available may not fit completely the job you wanna do.

Loool, Jide beg them well ooo... alternatively go and build your high fence now o...!!!

khadri: Tanks buddy,but how can i change the logo to my own preferred logo

Change the logo of what?

Town-Boy2233:
id been scam lotta time being a web designer... a customer will come that they need a simple four page site... after frying your hand to add little jara of 2page to make 6page. They will come again that the site is not like nairaland.

Lool, eeya... use a cms and then you can build them whatever no of pages they want. and at a good price too. if they cannot pay your price, dont bother!!!

khadri: pls,who can teach me wordpress,i really know dis stuff,anybody plss

Yaaaay, i can.... i have written a step by step tutorial in pdf format on how to get wordpress installed on your computer and start learning... and its all free...

http://ayodejiagboola.com/web-design-tutorials/

Unfortunately the delayed notification system on Nairaland has made me just see your replies just now! The project is quite involved and I have since taken it onto elance.com. Now i have 12 proposals to choose from and at roughly the same budget that i had initially planned.

I have therefore decided that it is the best way to go for all my other upcoming projects! I get expertise at the highest level, i am not tied to any one developer and i am protected by elance because until my work is done to my satisfaction, the freelancer does not get paid. A pretty good arrangement if you ask me.

Now, for the developers here who still take things like trust and honesty for granted... i wish them Good Luck!
Cheers people

Take heart bro... the world of .ng has opened wide the gates of heaven for us all... there are plenty of domain names that can now be bought and many businesses powered... I've got my first name too and its pretty cool! As the idea behind it is already under construction, i will not be able to mention it here. (sorry)

Cheers all

not at all bro... Enjoy