Updating templates

I have 5 different blogs that I maintain with quite a variety of consistency. I have completed upgrading all of them to WordPress 2.1.2 instead of being split between 2.03 to 2.1.

Now, I am working on standardizing the templates. The goal is to have the same layout with different banners and different color schemes defined in their CSS files.

Once I have all of that taken care of, I will look into pulling all of the custom information into seperate files that I can generically include into the theme and when I create a new blog, I can copy the template and only have to modify those separate files.

I have 2 of the blogs on the new template and will be working on moving the other 3 over the next week. If I get the time, this blog is next on the list so look for the new layout sometime between this afternoon and Monday morning.

Cleaning up after Ultimate Tag Warrior

I decided to start overhauling this blog by fixing the Ultimate Tag Warrior problem caused by a bad version. I could probably use a newer version and have it clean up the mess but I don’t plan on tagging my posts anymore.

I would backup the DB first, but the bug caused tons of extra records to get loaded into the WordPress tables making backups virtually impossible.

It looks like this is going to talk longer than it should. GoDaddy (my hosting provider) is running extremely slowly and I’m getting a fair amount of timeout errors.

My wp_postmeta table had over 300,000 records. Almost all of them are bad UTW records.

To clean up the records, I used this SQL command:

DELETE FROM `wp_postmeta` WHERE meta_key like ‘%utw%’

If you decide to try something similar, make sure you know how your database works. Not all of them use the same syntax.

Here are the results:

Deleted rows: 301693 (Query took 20.7045 sec)

Afterward, there is only 1 record. And everything is loading much more quickly (although GoDaddy admin page loads are still pretty slow).

That takes care of the first phase of cleaning up this blog. I’m going to be cleaning up a few other blogs at the same time. After I take care of this problem with the other blogs, I’ll be upgrading to WordPress 2.1.2.

Writing about blogging

This site was originally set up to be a generic chat about anything I found or wanted to talk about pertaining to the internet. I planned to focus mostly on blogging but didn’t know that much about it at the time.

Since then, I’ve avoided posting too often over here while developing another blog. I’ve learned a bit about blogging, making a few bucks blogging, and how to stay blogging work.

The other day, I decided that I wanted to start writing over here a little more and decided to use this site to talk about blogging and making money online.

Sure there are a ton of sites like this already online, but they are not mine. One thing that I have learned about writing a blog that you still want to work on a year later is that it needs to be on a topic you really like to talk about and I like talking about this stuff.

I’ve been helping a couple friends with a few technical aspects of their site and realized how much fun it is to share information. My wife has started helping me with the writing on one of the sites and normally just rolls her eyes when I tell her why I edit some of the posts the way I do.

Hopefully, it will be more entertaining to somebody who cares about how the nuts and bolts of the internet and the online advertising work. Maybe you are that somebody.

I’ll eventually be trying to write a post or two a day but it will probably take a few weeks to get there. I want to upgrade to WordPress 2.1.2 since I am horribly out of date now. I also want to completely get rid of the current theme. I liked it when I first installed it, but I want to get rid of the excerpts type of front page. I also need to clean up some database fluff from a bug in a version of Ultimate Tag Warrior I used for a while.

The posts over the next couple weeks will probably talk about these things and the plugins that I decide to use or not use.

Making money online

My Google AdSense money went down just a tiny bit in February as compared to January and December when I started making enough to get a check every couple months. Part of that is that there are fewer days in February. But, I also made just a few pennies less per day than those other months.

But, I ended up making more money in February than I have in any other month because I started listening to people like Darren of ProBlogger and his advice fo not relying on one method of income.

I was able to get one of my blogs accepted into Text Link Ads, and they sold 4 of the positions for the second half of the month which more than made up for the ever so little drop in AdSense income.

Since today is the first of a new month, I logged into my Text Link Ads account to see if any of the advertisers stuck around for another month. All 4 of them did. So, already I am locked into making about 50% of what I normally make in a month. On the first day of the month.

Plus, now I’m a little more protected if the price per click of the AdSense clicks drops or something strange happens with my search engine traffic.

Sometimes I end up reading the advice the big money people write and think but what difference does it make for us people making peanuts. Now that I’ve started to see it in action, I can see two important reasons to start diversifying early on.

1. If you happen to get lucky and have a site get huge, you will already be set up to implement multiple income streams.
2. If the plans are complimentary to each other, meaning implementing one doesn’t steal income from the other, then you can see a fairly sizable percentage wise jump literally overnight. After all, I went from peanuts to…well maybe chocolate covered peanuts while barely lifting a finger.

If you are interested in trying it out, please feel free to use this link to Text Link Ads (affiliate link).

myFeedz is not for me

I am actually shocked at how much I dislike myFeeds, the new “Social Newspaper” from Adobe. It apparently is supposed to use some magic voodoo to sort through feeds and then you tell it what kinds of things you like and it will present them for you.

The interface is bad. The site design is bad. The OPML import just doesn’t work for me on Firefox or IE 6.0.

I do not see myFeedz becoming a regular stopping spot for me. I don’t really need or even want something like this that recommends posts to read based on tags. That might be because if I am going to search for something specific, I will use Google. If I want to find new blogs to read, I almost always do that because I read about them in somebody else’s blog post. For example I found out about myFeedz through Robert Scoble.

So, myFeedz solves none of my wants or needs. Let me know if you find a use for it that I am missing.

Linux Print Shop alternatives

I am thinking about installing Linux again. I am a big fan of it. Not so much because I think windows sucks or anything. Just because I like Linux. I spend a lot of time at a Unix command prompt at work and just dig the whole Linux/Unix world.

I would like to switch my home computer over entirely to Linux, but my wife also uses the computer. The big show stopper for moving her to Linux right now would be the lack of a Print Shop type of program. Something to make cards, posters, calendars, etc. with a decent clip art library.

Does anything like this exist for Linux. I would be willing to pay for it, but I just can’t find anything. I’ve used Gimp and some of the similar drawing/editing programs, but I have not seen anything with the premade templates for cards, posters, calendars, etc with a decent clip art library included.

Does anybody have any suggestions?

Links to other posts

There are always a million things been written about online. Here are a few of my favorite recent tech posts.

Scoble removed Snap previews from his blog…and then wrote about why. If Scoble can just persuade one user to stop using Snap previews, the world will be a little bit better of a place.

Ryan writes about deciding whether or not it is worth while to move a blog to a single site server and paying the higher cost. If you regularly talk about Paris Hilton, it appears that the answer is yes.

Brian talks about a new service that helps you determine which MFA site’s ads are showing up on your site and paying you very little for it. Blocking is fine and the only option right now, but I bet if google let the publishers set the lowest price per click they are willing to receive, that would help fight MFA sites, too.

Review of month in the data cloud

I committed to trying to use online services a bit more than usual last month. My experiment met with some negatives and positives.

First, the negatives.

One of my goals was to use Google Docs & Spreadsheets a lot more for my creative writing and simple spreadsheet needs (which include my todo list). The problem with that is that I got assigned to a client who blocks Google Docs & Spreadsheets. I can get to pretty much anything else Google beside that. Since I do most of my daily planning during breaks at work, that was a major set back.

Google Docs has an annoying “feature” where they convert tabs to spaces when you do a Save as… to convert it to Word/Open Office, etc format. That will probably be a show stopper for my Google Docs use. I’ll have to look at some competitors next month.

Here are some things that went right.

I went back to using gmail’s interface instead of using Thunderbird. I actually prefer the way gmail works for tagging instead of directories. I will still keep Thunderbird for archiving my files for the time being.

I started playing around with Google Calendar and it is perfectly acceptable, but I will probably play with some other options before committing to it for the long run. Google Calendar’s biggest problem is me. I’m bad about using any calendar, online or otherwise, for more than a couple weeks at a time.

Despite the problems I mentioned with Google Docs & Spreadsheets, I still love the way it stores and tags the files. I also love having access online when the firewall actually allows it.

I’ve been a big fan of online RSS feed readers for about a year now. I switched from Bloglines to Google Reader a few months back and like them both about equally. I have stayed with Google Reader mainly because it is tied into my Google account. Recently, it feels a little sluggish and I may be switching back to Bloglines for a while. Rojo seems to have made some improvements since I last tested them, so maybe I’ll give them a little time, too.

I think I’ll try to stick with the experiment next month. I’ll focus on finding a word processor that doesn’t format the tab funny when it exports the file.

I’ll also make sure I want to stay with Google Reader and Google Calendar by retesting a few of the alternatives.

Over the last couple days, I’ve tried both Vitalist and Remember the Milk to handle my todo lists. I’m using Remember the Milk right now but will try some of the others.

I will also look around and explore my online blog editing software. I don’t have a big problem using the Wordpress interface, but I know there are some pretty good Firefox plugins that I should check into.

So, mostly February’s test will involve making sure that of the core online storage services that I use, that I am using the right ones.

Comment Spam

I haven’t checked the spam queue here for a while. I did today and found 372 posts. That is a whole bunch of people that want you to know about their products.

I skimmed through them and then deleted. If you happen to have left a real comment that got stuck there, then I just deleted it. Sorry.

For the rest of you with products you are trying to sell, maybe you need to start sending free samples to all of the bloggers of the world and see if we will write about them after trying them. The post office seems to be the only acceptable spamming techinque left for companies in the United States.

Google PR Update

I found out today that Google is working on another PR update.

I have a blog that is getting a little bit of traffic that talks about my kids and my thoughts on parenting. I started it just as a way of constantly reminding myself to think about being a decent parent. I started the site a few months back and it was too young for the last PR update to affect it.

This time, according to the PR checkers, it appears that I went from a 0 to a 5. Wow. We’ll see where it is sitting when everything settles down in a couple days.

The site has also managed to get indexed pretty well by Google and is starting to bring in a decent amount of AdSense money. It took me over a year to get my first check for earnings through last November. Now, it looks like later today, I will break the $100 barrier for December and so far this month.

This makes me pretty happy. It is nice to get to the point where I can do this hobby for free and make some pizza money. Now, with the new PR update, I’m going to try and get the site accepted into Text Link Ads program to see if I can manage to get another way of making a few bucks off of the site.

In a way, I wish another one of my blogs had been the one to get popular instead. BeAGoodDad is my baby. It is my most personal site by far.

All of the other blogging I do is much more hobby based. I enjoy learning about how blogs work and how the money side, both inbound and outbound, works. I’m looking forward to someday taking the time to learn to write my own CSS and how to pick a get hosting plan. The topics that I write about are of interest to me, but they are not my family.

On the plus side, it is very rewarding to have a site that I care so much for actually be the one that is doing the best.