Hosting Recommendations Anyone?
Jul 11, 2008 Blogging, Reviews, WWW 7 Comments
Yesterday, Ever After received the biggest spike in visitors it has seen in a long time. While the numbers themselves aren’t all that impressive (about 800 unique visitors, 3000 pageviews, and 28000 hits), it was certainly enough to drive wordpress crazy.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if it just gave me the white screen of death, because then at least I could look it up and find fixes to it. Nope, it had to be sneaky and make me think that everything was ok, when in fact, it wasn’t. The footers for my blog and for my wordpress admin panel wouldn’t load. Ok, so maybe I could let that go, but then it got worse. It was like my site was melting from the bottom up, because things from the footer on would just start disappearing one by one. I was pulling my hair out while I disabled and enabled my plugins over and over again.
I think I managed to stop the meltdown of my site by disabling a couple obsolete plugins and installing WP Super Cache, a plugin which claims to make your wordpress Digg-proof. But now I think back about it, this all seems like one big joke.
- The “spike” in traffic I got is the traffic many popular sites get daily.
- My site wasn’t even on the front page of Digg, or any other popular social media site.
My conclusion? Something is wrong with my host. Don’t get me wrong, because Cirtex Host has been great, with affordable prices and all, but if a measily little spike in traffic like that is going to mess up my site, imagine what would happen if my site was on Digg! What annoyed me even more was when I tried talking to their support through chat and AIM (both were “available”) and they made me wait for an hour. One whole gorgeously fat hour. And they probably would’ve kept me waiting had I decided to stick around. So I left a ticket complaining and asking them what was going on, and they replied this morning saying
The server load is normal and there is no server Spike, could you please double check with your end, if you still have problem let us know with the exact URL and logins. Thank you.
I thought the reply was dumb and redundant because I obviously checked everything on my end and realized something was wrong to have left a ticket. But my site stopped melting away and the footer is back, good relief, but the load time for my admin panel is still as slow as ever. Funny everytime something goes wrong, they never reply on the spot (though they are “available”) and their ticket reply is always “everything is sunny side up! :D”. My conclusion? Cirtex Host is good if you have a small personal site/blog looking for a home. However, if you’re looking to use a lot of scripts and databases, or you’re looking to seriously expand your site, you better find another host.
Which is why I’m saying a big fat bye bye and moving out once my plan ends with Cirtex. I’m debating between Holdfire Network’s custom plan and Xfluro’s $10 promotion. Opinions, comments, reviews, and even new host recommendations are ALL WELCOME. I’m getting desperate here. :O
SocialSpark For Mommy Bloggers
Jul 11, 2008 Basement, Blogging Leave a comment
I used to think that blogging was a teen’s thing, as that was how it used to be when I first started out. What was that, like, six, seven, years ago? Maybe it was because I only associated myself with a teen clique or the anime clique, but my understanding then was that blogging was the thing for geeky teenage girls to do. Stereotypical, I know. 
I don’t know when, but now that I’ve seriously picked up blogging again, I begin to realize that the blogsphere is filled with ALL sorts of people. Teens, kids, professionals, and even mommies! Yes, mommies and even daddies are blogging away, and they’re proud of it! These so called “mommy bloggers” have established their own clique and presence, not only in the blogsphere, but on the world wide web!
What separates the mommy bloggers from what I refer to as the “typical blogger” (usually young, under 30, has a job or is a student, has a good source of financial funding, doesn’t require much financially except the usual necessities, etc) is the fact that:
- They are a mommy. They have a baby. In many cases, they have more than one.
- They have a family.
I’m not saying that they’re in debt or bad financial standing because of these reasons. For all we know, they might have married some sugar daddy that spoils them rotten so that they can sit around all day and blog about their fabulous lives. Ha, I wish that was me (don’t we all?). But the fact is, raising a family and having a baby can be a huge financial and physical burden, which is why you see so many “offers” on the net for at-home workers. These types of jobs are perfect for mommy bloggers, but unfortunately, many, if not all, are just scams.
SocialSpark is in no way a steady source of income for mommy bloggers, but it certainly provides them a way to earn some extra cash. It works because these mommies are blogging already anyways, and to top it off, the opportunities are legitimate! You can read more about my review on Socialspark here.
Excluding Sponsored Posts From Feeds
Jul 9, 2008 Blogging, Tutorials 8 Comments
A while ago I wrote about boring your readers with sponsored posts, what a bad idea it was, and how to prevent it. Well, here is something else you can do to save your visitors on having to read about lawyers in Delaware again.
I’ve recently created a new category just for sponsored posts. To abide by the rules set down by advertisers, the category no way suggests that these posts are sponsored or being paid for. If anything it suggests that they suck and don’t deserve to see day light, hence why I called mine “basement“. You can names yours anything you want, so long as it doesn’t suggest that you’re receiving monetary payments in return. Name yours “little bunny froo froo” for all I care, but just dump all your boring boring posts in that one category.
Now I know many of you, including myself, give readers the option to subscribe to our blogs using rss feeds. The last thing you want is for your monotone posts about oven gloves to end up in their inboxes or on their feed readers. Yes, it’s unfortunate that those even have to be on our blogs (hopefully the idea of raking in some cash is of comfort to you, or else God knows why you’re still doing it), but at least we can make our feed subscriber’s life easier by removing sponsored posts from our feeds. There are 2 ways:
- If you use feedburner, simply change your feed url to
http://domain.com/feed?cat=-n, the n being the category you wish to exclude (you can find the number through wordpress). If you wish to exclude more than one category, usehttp://domain.com/feed?cat=-x,-y,-z, where x, y, and z represent the categories you wish to exclude.
- You can use plugins. The Ultimate Category Excluder does just what it says, and some more. However, compatibility with Wordpress 2.1+ is uncertain. Stealth Publish allows you to exclude posts instead of entire categories, so check that out if that’s your thing.
I personally prefer method #1, just because it’s very easy to do and takes less than a minute to complete. I’ve already configured my feeds to exclude sponsored posts. Yay! 
New Design & Dilemmas
Jul 8, 2008 Blogging 4 Comments
As you can see, new layout! I couldn’t really think of a better opening line, but do tell me what you think of it. This was a free theme from Blog Oh! Blog, but I tweaked it here and there to fit my needs. The tweaking didn’t take much time because I pretty much took the codes from my previous design and just copy and pasted as needed. What really took a while was finding the right image for the header. I’m still not completely satisfied, so if anyone has a good photo/image to use or a good idea of what to put there, I’m all up for suggestions.
I wrote a post on experiencing with different blog advertisements a while back, and after a month of using Project Wonderful, I’ve made $0.51. It’s obviously an improvement from the $0 I made from Google Adsense, but I feel like it’s just not quite cutting it. So I’ve decided to finally switch to self-hosted advertising, as you can see to your right, there are 3 125×125 ad spaces available at a first-come-first-serve basis. I will also provide a custom-designed ad at an additional price 
I haven’t made my final decisions on the prices yet, but here’s what I’m planning to use so far:
- $2 for 1 month
- $5 for 3 months
- $7 for 6 months
- $12 for 1 year
- $1.50 for 1 custom designed ad
Do these prices seem reasonable to you guys? Any comments, suggestions, anything, would be welcome.
Another dilemma I’m having is whether or not to buy a new domain name. Google hates my butt right now (the feeling is mutual), but the thing is, I haven’t been taking offers from Payperpost and SocialSpark in a while now. 1) because their offers usually suck, or 2) they just don’t have anything at all. I figured that if I got a new domain name, I could start off fresh and maybe get my pagerank back and dig myself out of Google hell. On the contrary, I just renewed this domain, I like the idea behind the name, and switching names means building up all my backlinks from scratch. Ideas anyone? :/
Boring Your Readers With Sponsored Posts
Jul 2, 2008 Blogging, Tips & Tricks 8 Comments
I’m going to be honest and blunt about this. Sponsored posts are BORING. Unless you have an amazing knack to turn even the most dry topics (like fake plants) into something that will fascinate the people asides from your gardner, people will usually choose to not comment, or even read your sponsored posts. Admit it, writing it is boring, so how can you expect the people reading it to be entertained? If it wasn’t for the money behind it to motivate you, would you still write about the alpine industry? Probably not.
The thing with writing sponsored posts is that the more you write, the more it decreases the overall quality of your blog. From what I’ve read of other people’s (and my own) sponsored posts, they all sound boring and dead. To me it’s like watching the commercials on TV minus all the excitement. It repels readers, or at least, I get repelled away when I see that the first couple posts are sponsored posts. I go to a blog expecting to find some interesting content or at least to hear about your day. Not to listen to you talk about police gear, unless you happened to be a police or the owner of the store.
I know I sound like a hypocrite right now, because that is what I’ve been doing for the past couple months. It didn’t occur to me at first because obviously I don’t view my site the same way a regular visitor would, but after seeing the trend on other sites, I began to realize how ANNOYING it was. So I propose a simple solution:
Pair your sponsored posts with a quality, non-sponsored post. What does this mean? Basically, if you’re going to write a sponsored post, go for it. But right after you write it, write another decent, non-sponsored post, so your quality post will be the first one your readers see, not the one about anxiety medicine. As far as I’m concerned, no rules are being broken by doing this, because usually as long as the sponsored post is on the main page of your blog, the post order is irrelevant. So why not have your readers come to your site and read something decent, so they won’t think that your blog is a wolf under sheep skin? For example, this post will be the first you see and hopefully read when you arrive at my blog, not any other sponsored post. In short, always make sure the first post on your blog is a quality post.
Yes, you’re still writing humdrum sponsored posts and in a sense you are deceiving your readers, but at the same time, you’re making it easier for them. Now they don’t have to filter and skim through posts just to find that something good and real you wrote.
