line-height: normal;

in the relevant snippet of CSS values.

Hmmm, there must be a way to fix this!

Quick Google search: “firefox override css for domain” — the first result was helpful!

What I discovered is that there is a way to permanently “adjust” css values for a domain name — at least using Firefox, I’m not sure if other browsers can do this too, but nowadays they just might have this kind of functionality — so that you can impose your own preferences and override the site’s css values.

In Firefox, it requires installing the free add-on called Stylish.

Stylish lets you customise the look of a website using your own styles.

In my case, I just wanted to change a font size in the css from “12px” to “10pt” — that’s all it took to solve my problem.

So, after installing Stylish and re-starting Firefox, I wrote a really simple bit of css code that applied just to the domain used by the forum:

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document domain("copywritersboard.com") {

.vb_postbit {
	font-size: 10pt;
}

}

In this case, I clicked on the Stylish icon in the Firefox status bar, and chose “Write Style …” and then (as my web page was on the forum site) chose “For copywritersboard.com” from the fly-out sub-menu (as I was on the Copywriter’s Board forum site).

Stylish automatically generated the opening 2 lines and closing line of code, all I had to add in was the “.vb_postbit” section with my font-size setting and the surrounding curly braces { and }.

Done!

Now, every time I visit the site and read the posts, the font used is automatically displayed to my preference.

Of course, Stylish is much more powerful, and can do a lot more that just this little change: I could change fonts, background colors, sizes, headings, font colors … to whatever suits my preferences.

Stylish works best when used in conjunction with the free Web Developer toolbar add-on for Firefox. With this toolbar enabled, I was able to turn on the feature called “View Style Information” under the CSS button — that way, I simply clicked on a post, and it highlighted the relevant css code properties (class name and values) — so I could easily override the value with a simple user style in Stylish.

The only “downside” is that, if you use more than one computer, you’d need to have this free add-on installed with the same code on all of the relevant machines. Still, for me, that’s only 2 computers.

But now, when I’m reading my favourite forum, I can have the post threads look the way I want them to without imposing my preferences on anyone else!

This added a little Twitter icon in my status bar along the bottom of the screen, along with a count of new/unread twitters.

Great, that’s just what I wanted!

However — my status bar has about 15 different tools/indicators on it, and TwitterFox was added on the left-hand end — about the middle of my screen and not where I wanted it. I have Gmail Manager in the right-hand corner, and I wanted TwitterFox to sit next to it.

Enter the Organize Status Bar add-on!

This handy add-on lets me easily arrange the order of programs that live in my status bar … access from the add-ons panel (select the add-on and click on options), or from the Tools menu. I’m obviously not the first user to want to tweak this part of the Firefox interface!

Easy, simple, exactly what I needed!

Thankfully I came along at version 0.5.2 — when a fix was made to have it work with Gmail Manager (critical tool for Firefox users with multiple gmail accounts!), FoxClocks (which I have, but don’t use at the moment) and other extensions.

There is some bug they mention in Firefox which hampers the program, and won’t be resolved until Firefox 3 is released — however, my particular setup doesn’t seem to be affected.

It’s just another great reason to use Firefox. You can use add-ons to improve productivity by giving you extra tools, extend your ability to integrate other applications, adjust the interface to suit your needs… all for free.

I found TwitterFox on Caroline Middlebrook’s Twitter Guide (part 4).

PS: If you want to follow me in Twitter, I’m DeanKennedy.

We just completed our Quality Control audit. You will now notice that all non-English, spam, and low quality blogs (or others that didn’t meet all of our guidelines) are GONE from appearing in your widget.

What kind of “quality control” is in place where literally anyone willing to earn $12 an hour undertakes the reviews?

Comments are CLOSED on the Reese post, same for that topic on the Warrior Forum (opened by Reese and only live for a short time, then locked). So not only does it seem many reviews were poorly made, and good blogs penalised, but any forum to debate such action is closed off. Sure, “that’s life” — and it’s Reese’s decision — but it has involved upset and mistakes — and it is definitely not the way I would EVER imagine building my relationship with my customer universe!

Still, now I have my Adblock Plus filter in place, I’ll never see another BlogRush widget anyway!

because your blog did not pass our Quality Review criteria

Hmmm, is that so?

Let’s go through what I was emailed today… here’s the important part of the message:

The primary reason(s) your blog(s) did not meet our guidelines:
Too Much Promotion And Not Enough Quality Content

Below is a complete list of our quality guidelines…

BlogRush Quality Guidelines:

- The blog contains unique, quality content that provides opinions, insights, and/or recommended resources that provide value to readers of the blog. Articles, videos, public domain works, press releases, and content written by others are okay to be used on the blog, but the ratio of unique content should far outweigh content from other sources.

- The blog should be updated on a regular basis (at least several times a month) and should not just go a few months between posts.

- The blog should already contain at least 10-12 quality posts. New blogs with very little content will not be accepted.

- The blog’s primary contain must be in English. BlogRush is currently not available for non-English blogs.

- The blog should not contain an excessive amount of advertising and links and very little actual content. The focus of the blog should be quality content.

- The primary content of the blog should not be “scraped” content from other sources and/or script-generated pages for the sole purpose of search engine rank manipulation. The focus of the blog should be quality content.

- The blog’s content (or advertising) should not contain any of the following types of content: hate, anti-racial, terrorism, drug-related, hacking, phishing, fraud, pornographic, nudity, warez, gambling, copyright infringement, obscene or disgusting material of any kind, or anything considered illegal.

Actually, at this point, my blog has 36 posts — 26 of which are “quality content” and 10 of which are promotion. That means I have 72% quality content and 28% promotional content.

The blog meets the other criteria: frequency of posting, number of posts, in English, none of the “banned” content listed at the end and nothing scraped.

In my stats, around 95 per cent of my traffic is to quality content — the free PHP local date script that has had tens of thousands of downloads over the years.

It doesn’t say much for the “review” process that turned my BlogRush account inactive!

The creator of BlogRush has started this post in the Warrior Forum to say “sorry” — although that could be perceived as saying “we’re about to kick you in the head, sorry” — a bit pointless to say we’re probably going to remove sites by mistake, and then still do so anyway.

To me, that just says that BlogRush’s approach for reviewing blogs in their network is the wrong one — it assumes I’m bad and then wants me to prove otherwise (after a whole month in a sin-bin). BlogRush has the right to do that, but I can’t say the decision has improved my opinion/perception of the author!

Personally, traffic from BlogRush to my site has resulted in just 10 visits (less than 0.3% of my traffic), so I cannot really see BlogRush being that important.

(Mind you, 10 people were interested enough in my blog title to click the link — so my content can’t be that bad!).

So farewell BlogRush! That’s one less imposition on the load time on my web pages!

UPDATE 6 HOURS LATER…

The Warrior Forum post has already been locked! There are two interesting blog posts here (techipedia) and here (SEOpedia) discussing the subject. Techipedia offers an Adblock Plus solution (in Firefox) to disable any BlogRush widget from being displayed — filtering widget.blogrush.com*

SEOpedia also explains that reviewers were paid just US$12 per hour to undertake the reviews — which included this statement:

We’re looking to hire a bunch of people that would like to earn some extra cash. If you or someone you know might be interested, please forward this message to them. This would be perfect for a stay-at-home mom, college student, or anyone else looking to make some extra money.

Gee, sounds like only qualified tech people need apply! Here’s one requirement for the position:

Must know the difference in a quality blog and one that was solely created to try and game the search engines and/or just run a bunch of ads — and/or what a “scraper” blog is that contains no original content and simply uses content taken from other sites with some sort of software program.

None of that applies to this blog in terms of either a “bunch of ads” or a “scraper” blog … obviously not the opinion of the $12/hour reviewer!

Judging by the comments in the already-locked WF post, and the posts I’ve already found on Google within just a few hours — it seems not every reviewer knew what they were doing.

John Reese (BlogRush creator) was floored by a comment on WF that someone would think less of him because a reviewer made the blog inactive within BlogRush. But it doesn’t surprise me at all that someone comes to that conclusion… “the buck stops with BlogRush” on that responsibility and perception. “Inactivating” a legitimate user isn’t going to do anything positive to perceptions. If you pay a reviewer peanuts, and good blogs get penalised — expect a harsh backlash.

Simply apologising in advance — as I mentioned in my original post — really doesn’t cut it. I wonder what the next step will be. It’s a mini PR-crisis for BlogRush.

So when I read this headline on a website by Russell Brunson:

“The Amazing Money-Making Secret of a 28-year-old Convicted Felon Who Earns More Money Per Year Than The CEOs of FedEx… eBay… Amazon.com… Time Warner… Apple Computer… McDonalds… Microsoft… Nike… Yahoo… Ford Motor Company… General Motors… and Goodyear COMBINED!”

I’ve got to say my interest was rather piqued!

This headline refers to the author of a book named Vince James who wrote a book called The 12-Month Millionaire. Russell asks Vince if he can hire him to find out how to benefit from the offline techniques for someone with ONLY an online business.

Vince’s response:

“Russell, I’ve made as much as $400,000 in pay per week. I wrote my own copy that sucked in $8 MILLION a month - every month. I’ve done it all. I’m one of the guys who “knows what they’re talking about.” And since I’m unofficially “retired” for at least the next couple of years… I don’t feel “threatened” releasing my priceless trade secrets. I want to show you how absolutely USELESS most “experts” are.

I will show you exactly HOW someone can apply these techniques to an online business!”

So… Vince accepts, and the result is a 6-hour recorded interview and transcript.

The interview gave Russell “a paradigm shift that has earned me millions of dollars in the past 2 years.”

In fact, Russell has kept this recorded coaching session and the associated transcripts under wraps for the past 18 months. Unvailable until now! And if you invest in the interviews, you’ll only pay $97.

That makes the interview time each for Russell and Vince worth about $8! I’ll bet you there is no possible way you could hire these two for $8 per hour each for nearly a full work day to spill the beans on what is contained in these interviews! But that’s all you pay with this interview.

Even if you don’t want to buy the product — follow the link and read the whole story. It’s a great example of successful online copywriting. In fact, it’s a free lesson in persuasion, and valid copywriting techniques. Learn for free from the 12 Month Internet Millionaire sales pitch!

And don’t forget to look for the endorsement/quote from the legendary Gary Halbert.

Whilst the site doesn’t mention a guarantee (rather unusual for an internet product!), you’ll receive a 56 day/8 week guarantee from Clickbank, so you have nothing to risk by investing in this product.

I heartily recommend you read the full story at 12 Month Internet Millionaire

In Ryan’s first full calendar year of copywriting, he grossed $121,780, and, after expenses, netted $88,749 in profit.

I first started copywriting back in about 1991, and I wish I could have paid just US$49.95 (backed by Clickbank’s 8 week/56 day guarantee) for such a report!

Check it out: How to Get Your First Copywriting Client in 14 Days Or Less!