The Lady Programmer

Some of you may have noticed an unusual Entrecard widget displayed here in this tech and freelance blog and that of the single parent blog. That widget is called the Entrecard chicklet which looks a lot like those popular chicklets provided by Feedburner and TwitterCounter. Entrecard recently announced this new cool chicklet to Entrecard members. Some members have noticed Entrecard’s announcement, blogged and tried it.

This chicklet was developed by Maddy, the talented guy behind Great Registry Hacks. He was the one who helped me fix the task manager problem I had experienced a few posts ago.

Maddy asked me to try out this widget. I decided to install the chicklets on my two blogs. I am probably the first member to have these widgets even before Entrecard announced this one.

sample EC chicklet

The Entrecard chicklet can either show the popularity rating or the ad price. Once that the chicklet is installed, the chicklet is a clickable link that goes straight to the blog’s original or customized Entrecard profile.

Why Should You Install the Entrecard Chicklet

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I learned that some bloggers had started dropping Entrecard using Google Chrome. Most of them say that dropping with Chrome is easier. Yesterday, I decided to do the dropping chores using the other browser.

Everything is Faster in Chrome

I tried to load the Entrecard website in both browsers with the cache cleared. The website seemed to load up faster with Chrome than with Firefox. The Inbox list loaded up quickly in Chrome too. That’s the only sheer advantage that I’ve witnessed firsthand.

Longer Time to Drop Everything

I realized that the system that I had established in dropping ECs is not applicable to my dropping strategy. It took me 2 hours to do 300 drops for the other blog. I use either a  feed reader or Great Registry Hacks’s Entrecard dropmaster to help me drop cards for my top 25 droppers. Then I go to my Inbox and drop ECs to those who dropped on me a day before. Then I use the remaining drops to drop on the most popular blogs that are related to my blog topic using the Entrebar until I reach the 300 mark.

With Google Chrome, I could not use the image disabling technique to load up sites and drop easily with a plugin similar to Entrebar. The “undo close tab” is not also provided in Google Chrome, not like in Firefox where it remains to be my top handy feature when I accidentally close a site. Firefox is still a better fit to my Entrecard dropping strategy.

Google Chrome is Still Useful

I don’t just simply drop then hop away to another site. I make sure that as I do my drops, I participate on the discussions posted on other blogs. I have Firefox and Google Chrome open at the same time. I do drops with Firefox, and when I encounter a blog where I want to comment on, I grab that post URL and open that with Google Chrome so that I could leave a comment.

I have a problem right now. Not a big one, but I don’t want to be a big disappointment to the recent EC droppers that I have right now. As you’ve noticed I am a humble member of the U-drop-I-follow movement.

I just could not return all your drops. I have been getting more than 300 Entrecard drops in my account for five consecutive days!

I guess I am now one among those who reached Entrecard nirvana of getting more than the maximum allowed drops per day. My highest number of drops reached 390 on the 6th of October, and I’ve broken the barrier since the 4th of October. The last bar shows a lower value because it represents the number of drops done as I am writing this post (13 hours since the last reset).

more than 300 drops in the previous 5 days

I think this has something to do with the sudden increase of advert clicks. I did not adopt any strategy except to advertise on active EC blogs.

advert clicks increase

Organic clicks looked consistent, so I am convinced that advertising did the trick.

organic clicks: no change

My daily 300 EC drops had almost been consistent. I haven’t reached the drop master status. Probably because there are some days where I could not complete the drops (remember the typhoon?) and a few days when I was not able to drop at all.

daily 300 drops

In case you’re wondering, I have already written out some Entrecard tips that I use to accomplish those 300 drops. I have two blogs that I promote in Entrecard; I’ve managed to do all those 600 drops in just over an hour – and bookmark those that I want to comment on or put them into my feed reader so that I could revisit those blogs.

Uh oh! This blog got deleted by Entrecard today!

I got the message when I checked my email Inbox of the email associated with this domain. One of the Entrecard support personnel suddenly deleted this blog’s Entrecard account. The reason: my email autoresponder associated with this blog was ON.

Email settings on My Email Autoresponder

I was happy when I saw the option Auto Reply in my GoDaddy email account. When I purchased this domain, I got a free email address with it. Auto Reply is entirely different from the vacation messages that come from Yahoo, Gmail and other free email services include in their settings.

This Auto Reply email is great to have when someone tries to contact me, to let them know that I had received their messages. But to some, it could be irritating. This morning I got a series of failure notice from mailer-daemon: they all did not like my email. To some it could be irritating and I could easily be marked as spam.

What does this have to do with Entrecard?

When I received the email that my blog was deleted, I could not really believe it. I was suddenly worried about the advertisers who had spent expensive EC credits to make their sites visible on my widget for a day. Entrecard still remains to be the main provider of my blog traffic. I could not afford leave Entrecard – not yet!

My Entrecard account was configured to notify me through email whenever I get whenever somebody leaves an email in my Entrecard Inbox or someone decided to advertise on my widget. Whenever I receive email from other sources, my email account automatically generates an email response. This irritated the Entrecard authorities and they suddenly deleted my account.

I know many stories about blogs getting deleted because of some violations in the terms of service. I checked their rules and references: there were not any particulars written about using email autoresponders in Blog Quality Standards, Illegal Activities and Account Deletion/Reversion. However, the terms of service still states that Entrecard still holds the discretion of deleting accounts and blogs for any reason.

Everything is Back to Normal

After receiving the Entrecard Deletion email, I disabled the autoresponder completely then requested Entrecard support to reopen this blog’s account with all the advertiser’s widgets intact. The Entrecard support was prompt; it did not take an hour to un-delete this blog’s account. All the sites where I had bought advertising on their widgets were cancelled and those credits were refunded back to my account. The advertisers who had bought advertising on my widget do not have to worry much, because the credits that they had spent on my widget were also refunded back to these respective accounts. If you want to check whether your advertisement with my site is refunded back, check it under my Entrecard account number 19751. These refunds were also under the transactions. The items that I bought from the Entrecard shop were NOT affected.

When Entrecard restored my account, my widget cost was back to 1 EC for a short moment. It did not take long before the price rose back up to 1024 EC.

Avoid Getting Deleted by Entrecard

Blogs with music autoplaying in the background are the easiest target of Entrecard deletion, because music significantly slows down the loading of a site. Some blogs that run full page ads also gets easily deleted. Members who also send spam messages are also get deleted. Entrecard may not be able to conduct audit on all blogs but some EC members can find this irritating and can report these kinds of violations. If you want to get active on Entrecard you have to keep your blog up to the blog quality standards.

Don’t forget to make sure that your email autoresponder does not bounce emails to Entrecard support, if you had turned that ON.

I’m so sorry to all of those people who had been affected and irritated with my email autoresponder messages.

By the way, I am able to reach 300 drops per day and get a good amount of traffic. Are you interested in how I do it?

Have you been deleted by Entrecard?

Can You Drop Entrecards in 15 minutes?

No I could not. I hope I do. But It always took me about 30 minutes to an hour to do the maximum drops Entrecard can allow to a single blog. I can just tell my way of dropping the maximum 300 limit Entrecards at a faster rate.

I have been doing the drops for more than a month. I am not able to drop every day, but I get to manage dropping 300 cards (per blog) in one sitting.

That’s one of my Entrecard statistics. It shows on the number of Entrecards drops that I am able to do each day. Whenever I do my Entrecard chores I always manage to make it to the maximum 300 drops (I only have single blog – this one – registered at Entrecard).

Interested? Here’s how I do the (almost) daily Entrecard drops:

Install and Configure ImgLikeOpera

I had to install ImgLikeOpera or ImgLikeOpera Reloaded add-on which can be downloaded from Mozilla add-ons site.

I have to set the options or settings of this add-on. Under “Cache, misc” select “Don’t load images” for the “default policy for new window/tab”.

Go to “Filters”, add the following to the filter list by filling out the “filter” and choosing the corresponding “filter policy”:

• http://entrecard.com, policy 1
• http://entrecard.s3.amazonaws.com, policy 1

Once that ImgLikeOpera is enabled and set to “don’t load images”, I am ready to drop while it’s hot!

Dropping Using the Inbox Drops

The fastest way to open browser windows is to hold down the CTRL key then left-click each Entrecard in my Inbox list. I usually open two rows of Entrecards and wait for the sites to load. Since ImgLikeOpera prevents loading up of images, each sites loads up fast. Sites look uninteresting, but at least each site’s Entrecard is now easier to find. UPDATE: I give utmost priority to the 50 top droppers of the list, then followed by those who drop in the yesterday’s Inbox. The remaining ECs goes to SOME favorite blogs and to new blog sites.

Then I get to drop all the cards until I’m finished. I bookmark sites where I’d plan to advertise, visit and comment along the way. After I’m done with the drops, I revisit these bookmarked sites. But this time, I disable the ImgLikeOpera add-on so that I can see the beauty of each site.

Oh! Before you go be sure to turn off ImgLikeOpera add-on after making the EC drops. In my end my Firefox does not work well with the add-on enabled.

What’s your way of making Entrecard drops?