The last time I wrote I was talking about signing up to postlinks.com and the account problems. Still no joy, but a bit more understanding.

The problem, it transpires, is that there is a check not only on the authority of the userid you have given them, but also the user name. They told me that I had to give them the access details to the userid Admin for the system to authorise me!

It was not explained if I could change the logon details once validated, but the issue I have is that I prefer not to set up blogs with a userid of Admin. But that is what they want.

It is a basic security step to use a user name other than “Admin”. If you use Admin then hackers only have to guess at your password. Use a different user name and they then have to guess both the user name and the password in the same attempt. Combine that with the Limit Login Attempts plugin and you are protecting yourself from brute force attacks.

Hopefully, as postlinks.com is a new system they will soon realise that not every blog uses a user name of Admin and accept a variation of other names. But until then I’m stuck, unable to validate my blog.

I was sent an email this afternoon with the tempting title ‘New Service to Monetize WordPress Blogs’ advertising postlinks.com. It looks quite good, however, I have a problem with it.

I’ve signed up and added one of my WordPress blogs. That bit went very well and there is a plugin to add to your blog, to do something that isn’t fully explained. You also set up a new user within the blog and tell the system the details. It has to be an Author or an Admin, so I created an Admin. Why? Well I’m not giving an external service full access to my blog, but an Author has enough privileges to be able to add and maintain its own posts.

Then comes the time to verify / validate the blog (they use both words) and start earning and that is when it went wrong. I clicked on validate and the system said that I needed to create the userid as an Author or an Admin. However, I checked and I had.

So I’ve got no idea what to do to get going on the system. A shame, it looks like a good idea as you get paid monthly for every link that they post as either a brand new post, a content link from a post or from a comment link. How much depends on the blog’s PR, but every little helps.