Ok, it’s hard to say it.  My name is Kathie and I’m a blogaholic.

There!  I’ve said it.  I just can’t help myself.  You see, I get an idea that germinates for awhile and then I realise that perhaps others might like the topic too. And then I’m just playing around you see, looking at themes, experimenting with domain names and then before I know it, I’ve purchased a new domain name (or 2 or 3) and found a template I’ve fallen in love with and then suddenly I have a new blog.  I just can’t help it.  I’ve lost count of how many.  My kids say to me, ‘oh mum, have you got another NEW site?’  And I have to admit I’ve done it again.

I started a gardening one for that reason and another on photography (which I write to every single day).  Another about my home city, another about dodgy photos.  I have 3 that are potential holding bays for books in the future. And that’s not to mention the business ones I own or the ones for clients that I set up. And now a new one as of yesterday all about favourite places for coffee.

It was my eldest daughter’s fault this time. She started the idea when she took me to this fantastic place 2 weeks ago that was a cafe/restaurant/nursery and formal gardens.  Just gorgeous and the food and coffee is really great… and home made!  She was telling me about her favourite coffee places and I said to her without thinking, ‘you know that would be a good idea for a site’.  I kept squashing the idea everytime it popped up after that but yesterday morning (Saturday) because I didn’t have to rush out of bed I let my mind play over the past week or two and then it popped back in my head again!  Before I knew it I was on my computer and looking for a suitable domain name and found a fantastic template and voila!  The site was born.

Tell me, do you think I need help? 

Anyway, have a look and tell me what you think? MyFavCoffeePlace Perhaps you could indulge me and tell me about yours?

Ever had one of those weeks when everything you try seems to turn out wrong? Well, some things anyway. I’ve had one of those weeks and I want to share about it to help you prevent any of the problems I’ve had.

Let me outline what problems I was having:

1. Login problems for a client’s blog – it just wouldn’t view the wp-admin login at all and kept coming up with error messages.  Research via google finally told me to look for ‘white space’ in the wp-config.php file. That means empty lines or spaces that shouldn’t be there. I got rid of every empty line and space I could find, saved it and uploaded and voila!  I could log in again. whew!  That was the easy fix!
2. My family blog – I had files all mixed up on the server from a few years of trying out different things so decided to remove them and then do a reinstall of WordPress to a new folder – I was just basically tidying up the files on the server as it was getting full.  However the new installation just wouldn’t take and I ended up with a blank screen – you couldn’t view the blog at all.  I removed that folder and created a new one and started again. Same scenario. I was stumped.  Further if I added /wp-admin/ to see if I could log in I would just get gobbledegook on the screen – no dashboard at all.  Investigations on wordpress.org and google seemed to indicate my server might be full (it wasn’t) and/or that WordPress hadn’t installed properly – I would need to do a manual install.  ughh!
3. I upgraded another blog that I run for my husband and his mtb racing team to wordpress 3.0 and experienced the exact same problem as no. 2.
4. I accidentally deleted a couple of files from my business blog when thinking I was logged into my family blog (see no. 2) and didn’t stop it in time.  Checked blog and it seemed ok and I wrote a new post to it this morning but when I went to view the blogpost once published the site produced an error message and I could no longer access the blog or view the posts.  I had to call in help from a friend who specialises in this type of work to fix the problem. Reinstalling the wp-admin and wp-includes folders in this instance did not solve the problem.

If you manage one or several blogs then it’s important to have some backup systems in place. I don’t just mean having a backup for your blogposts (you should have that without saying and if you haven’t then login to your blog immediately, go to the plugins section search for the wp-backup plugin and install it – then activate it) but I mean a back up of your actual wordpress files too.

Fantastico which is in my control panel online does not seem to have the option to reinstall or repair WordPress – only to do a new install or remove an existing one.  That’s been fine for most of the time but I’ve had 4 blogs this week (one client, one voluntary and 2 of my own) that have had problems and all of them when I’ve done an upgrade to 3.0 or attempted to change something in 3.0.  Not sure if that means there’s a problem with that version or I’ve just been unlucky this week.  But I did not have copies of the original files – only the edited ones I’d been playing with at some stage.

That means having to do a manual reinstall of the program and the version I’m using is no longer available for downloading from wordpress.org.  So then I had to consider downloading the 3.0.1 version and printing off the instructions for the manual installation.  However, I already had databases set up as they are existing blogs so I wasn’t sure how much of the installation process I could ignore or should take notice of?

If I’d had a clean copy of WordPress 3.0 I could have reuploaded the wp-admin and wp-includes folders in the hope that would fix the problem. I do know enough to keep a copy of the wp-config.php file and not overwrite that one – that’s the file that holds the database, login and username information.

So, what did I do? I looked through my various blogs (I own several) and found one I believed to have clean copies of the wp-admin and wp-includes folders and copied them over to the folder of one of the blogs I was having challenges with. I then proceeded to upload those folders by FTP to the web and waited for the results. Would it succeed or wouldn’t it?

What lesson have I learnt? To make sure that every single WordPress site I manage or own, that I do a full download of each of the folders and files that are installed online and keep them safe (and backedup) in case I need to reupload them at any time.  Having the posts backup file (xml) isn’t enough.  And if you have the tgz backup file, then you need to know how to restore that file.  In the meantime I’ll go back to what I was doing – manual installs of the latest wordpress files in the hope that they’ll become visible again.

I host/manage a memorial blog for a well known speaker here in Australia who recently passed away. As a result I’ve been moderating the comments on the blog.

A week or so ago I noticed a comment from someone I know personally but was posted by someone else. I let it publish because I assumed she had a support person doing it for her – and perhaps they didn’t know how to post it from her address.

But then I saw that overnight someone else had done exactly the same thing using the very same person’s name so I went through all the past comments and found that these two people (I will now refer to as spammers) had copied and pasted parts or whole comments and then posted with their own links.  I went back and marked both comments as spam and deleted them.

If I didn’t know this particular person personally chances are I probably wouldn’t have picked up on this new spam trick and would have let the comments be published.  You need to be ever vigilant with comment posts to blogs you own, or blogs you are managing for other people.

I’ve just had a liberating moment – well, more than a moment, quite a few minutes really. But I feel like I’ve just freed up some of my time and will most likely fill it with something else.

What am I talking about?  My Google Reader. It had become too full with over 1,000 posts I haven’t even read or skimmed through.  It became overwhelming and I decided to cull the list of blogs I was subscribed to.  I got rid of all those which haven’t updated for months – although that didn’t cull the 1000+ new posts I haven’t yet read. And then I went through those that I was really no longer interested in but had subscribed to quite some time ago. That included forums I might not participate in much these days.  I even found there were some dead forums or blogs – no longer active.

Whew!  Feel better now.

And then I added a few new subscriptions, mainly to photography blogs since I have a keen interest in that topic these days.

Now I can get on with my work today feeling a little less cluttered on my Internet desktop.

I forgot to check the amount of webspace available for a multi-user blog before upgrading it and the thing has crashed.  I had to backtrack to find out what I did when a similar incident happened earlier in the year.  And then I remembered.  I had to get it restored to a former backed up version by my IT guy and then add webspace and then upgrade the thing.  Forgot, forgot, forgot!

So hoping he can fix it for me soon so I can increase the space and then re-run the upgrade.  Doh!

You are viewing a blog – a series of articles or posts that make up the blog.  This particular piece you are reading is a post or blogpost.

One of my pet peeves, although only little, is people who ask about writing blogs when they actually mean posts or articles.

It’s just a little thing but I feel it important to educate people – a blog is a collective of posts, thoughts, articles, entries, whatever but the individual items are the blog posts – not the blog.

What do you think? Blog or post?

Many of you know that I’ve renewed my passion for photography and have set up a new site and template to display my photos but there are a few things that just won’t work the way I want it to.  Enter the blog forums – great avenue for learning from others who have a bit more experience than you – or me!

I belong to two active blog forums which I find very worthwhile being a member of.  I am able to offer assistance and provide answers and I’m also able to ask questions and learn from others.  Great way to network and learn about blogging too.

So, if you have challenges tweaking a template or not understanding something else, why not drop by a bloggers forum and participate and learn?

Aussiebloggers

Authoritybloggers

I’m looking for questions that ‘newbies’ would ask about blogging. Things like what is it, how do you do it, how does it work, why?, etc.

If you haven’t yet entered the blogosphere, or are relatively new to it and looking to learn more, what are the things you would like to know?

Or, if you’ve been blogging for awhile but there are things you still can’t work out or always wondered about.

Please either leave your questions here or if you feel a little embarrassed about asking, feel free to send a message to me direct. Your questions will assist in a presentation I’m doing next month – having been a blogger for a few years now there will be things I take for granted that others do not know.

Thank you in advance.

On a forum I belong to we were discussing the benefits of self-hosted vs free-hosted blogs, in this case with WordPress. One of the members was worried she might lose the increased readership she’s been getting over the past few months if she made a move now. And the reason why a move was being discussed was because another member had highlighted that free-hosted version of WordPress doesn’t take kindly to paid advertising and links being on their free supported sites. They are supposed to be non-commercial.  So, the information below gives an outline of the benefits of shifting to paid hosting for WordPress blogs.

If your traffic is increasing then it’s all the more important that you have your site where you have control.  There are things you need to think about:

• On a free hosted site there are restrictions on what you can do and limited templates.
• On a free hosted site – who is backing up your blog?
• What happens if your blog disappears?
• Do you have that content backed up?
• I have heard of people on Blogger.com whose blogs disappeared and some of them were not recovered. I haven’t heard of that at WordPress but I don’t hang around the forums there.  Don’t want to scare you but I do want you to think about this and explore the options available to you. If there is a backup system there, then that won’t be something to worry about.

The reasons why I like to have control on a paid hosting site:

• I can use whatever templates I wish – I just have to research to find them and then upload them, and activate them.
• I can install any plugins I want to use.
• I can make any modifications I wish, including background colours, text, etc.
• I can place advertisements on my blogs without worrying about whether I’m allowed to or not.
• I use a domain name of my choosing without wordpress or blogspot in the address.  Domains that relate to your keywords help a great deal.
• I have a regular backup operating so backups are emailed to me weekly (there’s a plugin for this).

You can divert your free hosted blog to your self-hosted blog – I have done this with blogger. The reasons I do this are:

• So someone cannot take over my old address and use it for their spammy efforts
• So that existing audiences can still find me and update their address list
• So that audiences at the free site can still find me when surfing through blogs.

I first decided to do this with my VA blog about 3 or more years ago – it was a scary thing to do but I did it and am really glad because that blog now carries my main domain address and my audience has grown and my PR (Google page rank) as well.  I discovered that someone took over my old blogger address because I didn’t think about it in those days and they were selling stuff that had nothing to do with being a VA – lesson learnt.  These days when I test blogs on Blogger and then shift them, I make sure I add a message on the top post of the new address and there is a redirect code you can put in html which takes people to the new site in a few seconds. I haven’t tried that with WordPress free site but even if you can’t put the redirect code you could certainly leave a message to say you’ve shifted to a new home address.  And the import feature in WordPress does work quite well to shift old posts if you wish to do that.

I hope that the above information will also help you in your decision making if you have been considering a similar move – whether it be from Blogger or WordPress free hosted sites.

Are you getting one of these messages?  One of my clients was too with her WordPress blog and nothing I did seemed to help the problem. Did lots of research, asked questions at forums and tried to restore her database once again – she’d already had it done previously.  Checked that the index.php file was in place.

We decided to set up a new webspace with a new domain elsewhere and download all the files via FTP and then upload them to the new webspace.  I was about 1/2 way through the upload when I discovered something.  The webspace I’d set up for her was almost full and I had heaps of files to go.

So I went back to her other webhost and had to do a search in her Account Management system to locate the information relating to her webhosting. Gotta love these hosts that don’t use cpanel for ease of use!  Anyway, I discovered that she had 296mb of files in what was supposed to be a 150mb allotment.  I think I found the problem!

I immediately filled out a support request to her host to find out if in fact I was correct and could they do a temporary disk space increase so we could do a full backup and run a database export.  I emailed my client and told her what I believed I’d found. She’d been told by her host that she’d been hacked and she better upgrade her WordPress.

When I thought about it I remembered an incident a year or two earlier where a small website I was working on (25mbs) gave the same error message when I was trying to switch to a new template I’d uploaded and it took me awhile to figure out why that was.  I should have remembered.

So, if you are experiencing that same error message – before anything else – check your webspace allotment.  If it’s full, get it increased and then rerun whatever it is you’re doing.

Please let me know if this post has helped you as I did a search extensively looking for help on this issue and did not come across the possiblity of the webspace being full – hopefully I can save you the hours I put in to eventually find this out!

500 Internal Error, full webspace, server error, webpage won’t view