Simple Mindz couldn’t resist tagging me with yet another one of those damned memes, but she’s hot, so I forgive her.

Alllllrighty then, here are the rules:

• Link to the person that tagged you.
• Post the rules on your blog.
• Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself.
• Tag six random people and the end of your post-link to their blogs.
• Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
• Run from the stampeding mob that ensues.

And here’s my personal list:

1. I am addicted to Starbucks Hot Chocolate.
2. I gave my car a name… and talk to it too.
3. I have a pillow girlfriend named Isabella that I hug every night for comfort.
4. I have more disco and neon lights in my bedroom than the local rave club does.
5. I’m a complete klutz when I’m around beautiful women.
6. Movies make me cry sometimes.

And now to tag six victims.

• Butterflyfish
• Just Something I Was Thinking About
• The IgNoble Experiment
• Casey’s Critical Thinking
• For Serenity’s Sake
• Joie de Vivre

Enjoy!

Tags: beautiful women, blogs, blush, critical thinking, disco, girlfriend, hot chocolate, important things, klutz, memes, mob, neon lights, quirks, serenity, starbucks
Categories: Lincoln's Personal Log
 
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I hate to get sucked into entering yet another blogging contest, especially when they are usually transparent efforts to build backlinks to their sites, but this one was too good to pass up.

David Airey is a graphic designer who, oddly enough, specializes in logo and graphic design, and is currently running a contest giving away $4,000 worth of prizes on his blog, which by the way covers the niche of… wait for it… logo design.

That should provide enough suitable context links to make Airey happy and get me into the contest, but just to boost my chances of winning, I’ll list most of the nifty prizes that’s being offered by his sponsors here, but only if y’all promise not to enter the contest too and thus diminish my chances of winning.

The gold (grand) prize offers a free… wait for it… logo design (from David Airey of course), a WordPress theme design by Nate Whitehill, a personal marketing and advertising plan from Dosh Dosh, one year of free hosting and blog setup from I Love Typography , and a signed copy of Blogging Tips by Lorelle Van Fossen, which I already have a copy of being the Lorelle groupie fan that I am.

One thing I really want out of that list of goodies is Nate’s offer of a theme design. That’s worth several hundred bones right there, and I could really use an expert to fix some of the more grating issues that’s been plaguing my theme since I started blogging. Rather than clean up my own mess though, I think it’d be nice to have somebody else do it for me. :hubahuba:

As for the other prizes, I thought I’d have a little fun here and list them to the tune of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire.”

Logo designs by Roskell, whose name I think does ring a bell, site critiques by Randa Clay, who’ll tell you how to find your way, one hour SEO, linkbaits and promos, $60 worth of books, a problogger who’s not a crook…

Logo design, (not again!), blog optimizing, blog reviews and blogging tips, blogging that and blogging this, WordPress designing, what to do, what to do, never fear, help is here, Brian will take care of you!

We didn’t start the fire, it was always burning since the world’s been turning!
We didn’t start the fire, no we didn’t light it but we tried to fight it!

Podcasting studio, from affiliate and marketing, Mom Gadget , free money, isn’t she a real honey, 3 USB sticks, help you get your hacking fix, Terenia in Edinburgh, they’ll thank me for this little blurb, blog reviews in Blog-Op, WordPress themes from Aaron Russell, Mareddy and her WordPress skills, Marketing Tools Review, hopefully provide a clue, blog writing consultations, all this and more frustrations, time to take a long vacation!

We didn’t start the fire, it was always burning since the world’s been turning!
We didn’t start the fire, no we didn’t light it but we tried to fight it!

Coaching creative professionals, they’ll coach and coach and tell it all, business growth consulting, contract negotiations, a mediator and conflict coach, to keep you all from getting poached, always room for blog improvement, will all this even make a dent???

A banner day for banner ads, all on Blog Experiment, image ads, here and there, don’t have to pay a red cent, a guy who’s Smart Wealthy Rich, providing such a healthy kick, still won’t help me find my niche, but he’ll grant an advertising pitch!

We didn’t start the fire, it was always burning since the world’s been turning!
We didn’t start the fire, no we didn’t light it but we tried to fight it!

Contest Blogger, Freelance Folder, getting bolder, and getting older, lifetime membership, with tips, tips, and more tips, WordPress SEO, just sit back and watch the show, but lookie here, there’s no one here, cuz I ran out of prizes, now I’ll gamble with a ramble, to the end of a blogging age, taking this, all the way, WHAT ELSE DO I HAVE TO SAY???

We didn’t start the fire, it was always burning since the world’s been turning!
We didn’t start the fire, no we didn’t light it but we tried to fight it!

Yahoo, Google too, keyword stuffing, splogging too, stumblers, tumblers, and MySpace with its stalkers, Facebook and API, everything for you and I, search bots hits all the spots, del.icio.us, please stop the dots, Adsense, earning cents, Diggsters and their nonsense, carnivals, reddit geeks, podcasting, YouTube flings, text link ads, are they bad, hope it’s not another fad, show me where to find the door, CUZ I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE!!!!!!!!!!

We didn’t start the fire, it was always burning since the world’s been turning!
We didn’t start the fire, no we didn’t light it but we tried to fight it!

We didn’t start the fire, it was always burning since the world’s been turning!
We didn’t start the fire, no we didn’t light it but we tried to fight it……..

Tags: advertising, affiliate marketing, awards, backlinks, blog, blogging, blogs, consulting, contest, hosting, logo design, prizes, problogging, reviews, seo, theme design, themes, tips, wordpress
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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For some time now I used to have this perplexing problem where I simply couldn’t access the administrative section of my blog without it timing out on me. I couldn’t figure out what was causing the latency issues, and I also noticed that if I tried to access it from a different browser or different IP address, the issue would usually clear itself up. It was an anomaly that only occurred every now and then, so I wasn’t too worried.

Then yesterday it started happening again. Only it got worse. MUCH worse. So bad in fact, that I couldn’t access the Admin page at all. Then I started getting 500 internal server errors after trying to access my admin from different browsers and different IP addresses. Nothing seemed to work.

I finally submitted a ticket to my hosting service, Hostgator. I was a little worried that I would get some half baked tech support dude, but these guys really rose to the occasion. After scouring over every nook and cranny of my blog, a network admin emailed me to let me know they they had been experiencing a lot of issues with WordPress blogs that day, and the only common denominator that they could find was that we all had Akismet installed. They since learned that it was an issue on the manufacturer’s side. The network admin then deactivated my plugin and asked me to check my blog again.

Instant access! Yaaaaaay! My admin page was now loading, and it was smoking fast too. I couldn’t believe it.

But now I had another problem. I no longer had protection from comment spammers, and my blog suddenly became open season for these scumballs. I was already getting comment spam while I raced to my options page and set all future comments to moderated status as a temporary fix.

I then went to the home site for Akismet (which is developed by Automattic,) to see what news there were regarding this issue that was apparently affecting quite a few WordPress based blogs.

Nothing. There was no update to speak of, and the Akismet blog itself hadn’t even been updated in a month. So I used their contact form to send them a polite note inquiring about this issue and how soon it would be resolved. No response. So not only did they hose the administrative portion of my blog, but they blow me off on top of that?

Suck it, Automattic. It’s obvious your support system isn’t worth a hill of smelly beans. This was a problem that had the capacity to lock out God only knows how many WordPress users from accessing the admin portion of their blogs, but this seems to matter to you, not at all.

I suspect this might have something to do with using an older version of the Akismet plugin though (I was using 2.0). When I upgraded to 2.02, everything seemed to work fine. But just by going to their website, you’d have no idea that there had been any updates since 2.0. There’s no changelog or even any other basic information, except for a download link for “2.0″ which in actuality was really 2.02.

This wouldn’t frost my cookies so much if it had been any other typical third party plugin, where you can only expect so much support from its developer. This was a plugin developed by the makers of WordPress itself, and one that required API access to their servers. If something goes wrong, it’s liable to create problems not just for them, but for your blog as well.

So… how about a little bit of courtesy here for us little people, mmmm-kay?

Tags: akismet, anomaly, automattic, blog, blogs, bug, common denominator, downtime, half baked, hostgator, hosting service, ip addresses, issues, open season, plugins, spam, spammers, tech support, web hosting, wordpress
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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My latest link discoveries and finds for today:

• The Top Ten Ways To Tell If She’s Into You (And the 6 Signs That She’s Not!) – Yep, I’ll be damned if I’ve ever seen any of the GOOD body language they list to show that a girl was interested in me.
• Make Money Online: 100+ Tools and Resources – Man, Mashable is starting to turn into a link farm, but this is a pretty good list of some of the most popular moneymaking sites online.
• EBAY TOOLBOX: 50+ Tools for eBay Buyers and Sellers – If you’re an eBay fanatic, this link’s for you.

Tags: advertising, blog, blogging, blogs, body, bookmarks, dating, del.icio.us, ebay, language, Links, love, mashable, monetization, monetize, money, resources, romance, shopping, tools
Categories: Lincoln's Personal Log
 
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I’ve been checking my blog rankings here and there on the web, when I noticed this at Truth Laid Bear’s Ecosystem:

I think they need to fix that.

Tags: blog, blogs, ecosystem, glitch, humor, rankings, truth laid bear
Categories: Blog Fog, Comic Relief
 
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Evidently, letting on that I had more than 75+ WordPress plugins installed raised quite a few eyebrows around the blogosphere. At last count I now have 89 plugins humming in the background, and it might go even higher, if for no other reason than just to see if I can break the 100 mark. I know I know, I’m crazy, I may have fact even turned my blog into a weapon of mass destruction that could take out the entire infrastructure of the Internet in the Western Hemisphere, but I can’t stop. Where’s a Plugaholics Anonymous when you need one??

So how do I get away with all this without causing a NOC somewhere to implode? Well for one, many of my plugins are really not that big, just several lines of code to enhance a feature on my blog (like cleaning up my excerpts so they actually look nice.)

Secondly, the bulk of my plugins only get called on my index page, where they’re used to power most of my sidebar content. On the rest of my site I have no sidebars at all, so these plugins never get called. Ironically enough, I’ve gone with this setup initially because my footer wouldn’t stay in place at the bottom, and instead kept clashing with my sidebars due to using absolute positioning. Now I’m happy I went with this setup because there’s FAR less noise and distractions on my post pages, and it loads nice and fast too. My index pages are permanently cached by WP-Cache so they load quickly as well. Of course, there are still downsides to having a blog structured this way (including no sidebar space for ads), but the upside I think outweighs it all. Another good chunk of my plugins are also only used within the administrative interface, so they’ll never get called when a visitor browses the site either.

For the morbidly curious, here’s my current list of plugins, minus the 89th plugin (to which I’ve been sworn to secrecy not to divulge.)

©Feed
A plugin that helps copyright your feed. A report of copyright, a digital fingerprint and the IP of the feed reader can be added. In addition, some search engines are scanned for the digital fingerprint in order to find possible content theft. The feed can be also be supplemented with comments and topic-relevant contributions. The complete RSS feed can be delivered even if the “more” tag is used in WP 2.1+. Also makes it possible to view related posts using the plugin Simple Tagging. By Frank Bueltge.

Add Lightbox
This plugin automatically adds the rel=”lightbox[ID_OF_THE_POST]” to images linked in a post. ID_OF_THE_POST is unique per post so all images per post are grouped in one lightbox set. By Mdkart.

AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget
Help your visitor promote your website or blog. Put the AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget on your site or blog, so any visitor can easily bookmark it. The widget works with all popular bookmarking services. By AddThis.com.

Akismet
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” By Matt Mullenweg.

aLinks
A WordPress plugin that automatically links keywords in your blog post. By Sean Hickey.

Author Highlight
Author Highlight is a plugin that prints out a user-specified class attribute if the comment is made by the specified author. It is useful if you would like to apply a different style to comments made by yourself. By Jonathan Leighton.

Bad Behavior
Deny automated spambots access to your PHP-based Web site. By Michael Hampton.

Bannage
Bans commentors by IP, username, email, or URI By Shane Neuerburg, Justin Shattuck and Dave Jansen.

BBInfo
This plugin will output the Bad Behavior logs for your perusal in WordPress’s Admin. By Pross.

Chunk Urls for WordPress
This plugin shorten urls in comments so that they won’t break your site. By whoo.

Comment Analysis
Various functions for analyzing comments By Mark Styles.

Comment Quicktags +
Inserts a quicktag toolbar on the blog comment form. js_quicktags is a slightly modified version of Alex King’s newer Quicktag.js plugin, in turn modified from original found here. By Dan Cameron.

CountDown wp-plugin
Show how many days there are to the selected date. By Fiz Vazquez Ripoll.

Cricket Moods
Allows an author to add multiple mood tags and mood smilies to every post. By Keith “kccricket” Constable.

Custom Smileys
Personalize your posts and comments using custom smileys. By Quang Anh Do.

Dagon Design Form Mailer
The WordPress plugin version of the popular and secure php form mailer script By Aleister.

DiggClick
Displays a “digg it” button at the beginning of your posts, with a lot of configuration options. By Michal Nowak.

Digg Defender
Uses Coral Cache to quickly buffer hits from Digg, Slashdot, Fark, SA, etc. By Elliott Back.

Edit N Place
Allows you to edit your post inline, right on the front page of your blog. By Sean Hickey.

Enforce WWW Preference
Provides 301 redirects to queries with /index.php and enforces your use or non-use of www. By Mark Jaquith.

Extended Live Archives
Implements a dynamic archive, inspired by Binary Bonsai and the original Super Archives by Jonas Rabbe. By Arnaud Froment.

Feedburner Feed Replacement
Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while creating a randomized feed for Feedburner to pull from. By Steve Smith.

Filosofo Comments Preview
Filosofo Comments Preview lets you preview WordPress comments before you submit them. It’s highly configurable from the admin control panel, including optional captcha and JavaScript alert features. By Austin Matzko.

Flashifier
Create flash code by enclosing the info in [FLASH]%filename%,%width%,%height%[/FLASH]. By Ryan Meyers.

Flickr Photo Gallery
This plugin will retrieve your Flickr photos and allow you to easily add your photos to your posts. By Silas Partners (Joe Tan).

Footnotes
Allows a user to easily add footnotes to a post. By Simon Elvery.

Fuzzy Recent Links
A WordPress widget that lists a fuzzy number of recently bookmarked links. To use, call the_recent_links(); where you want the tile to appear. Alternatively, do nothing and the tile will display when wp_meta(); is called. By Denis de Bernardy.

Genki Announcement
Display an announcement on your blog By Genkisan.

Get Recent Comments
Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar. By Krischan Jodies.

GetWIKI
Get a WIKI article anywhere on yout blog. By Sajin Kunhambu.

Google (XML) Sitemaps
This generator will create a sitemaps.org compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported By Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. By Arne Brachhold.

Google Analyticator
Adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google’s Analytics. After enabling this plugin visit the options page and enter your Google Analytics’ UID and enable logging. By Ronald Heft, Jr..

Google Sitemaps – Append UTW Tags
This plugin will automatically append the tags used by the Ultimate Warrior Tags plugin (v3.14+) onto your Google XML Sitemap. The Google (XML) Sitemaps plugin (v3.0b6+) must also be installed. By Stewart Farquhar.

Gravatar
This plugin allows you to generate a gravatar URL complete with rating, size, default, and border options. See the documentation for syntax and usage. By Tom Werner.

Head META Description
Insert HTML META description tag: excerpt/content brief for post/Page, description for category, and blog tagline for everything else. By Kaf Oseo.

Hotlink Protection
Prevents hotlinking images without breaking online feedreaders By Lim Dul.

IImage Panorama
Add 360° panoramas to your posts! By Martin Chlupac.

IM Online
Display status for MSN, Yahoo!, AOL, Jabber and ICQ via onlinestatus.org. By Martin Fitzpatrick.

In Series
Gives authors an easy way to connect posts together as a series. By Travis Snoozy.

King Search Widget
Advanced Search Box Widget including Category Dropdown and Search Word Spellcheck Suggestion By Georg Leciejewski.

King_Framework
Framework for King Widgets + King Plugins. Contains Functions, Language, Javascripts used by all Widgets. On the Options page you can set some global switches. By Georg Leciejewski.

King_Text_Widget
Adds a Text widget Options are: in which category or Site Area to show + php/Html output + the html before and after the Widget. By Georg Leciejewski.

Kramer
Implements Technorati inbound links to a post as Pingbacks. Also provides a template function to display general inbound links. By Nik Cubrilovic and Mark Jaquith.

Lightbox 2 Plugin
Used to overlay images on the current page. Lightbox JS v2.2 by Lokesh Dhakar. By Rupert Morris.

Now Reading
Allows you to display the books you’re reading, have read recently and plan to read, with cover art fetched automatically from Amazon. By Rob Miller.

Now Watching
Allows you to display the movies you’re watching, have watched recently and plan to watch, with cover art fetched automatically from Amazon. By Steven Skaggs.

Optimal Title
Mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the ’separator’ to after the title rather than before. By Aaron Schaefer.

podPress
The podPress plugin gives you everything you need in one easy plugin to use WordPress for Podcasting. Set it up in ‘podPress’->Feed/iTunes Settings. If you this plugin works for you, send us a comment. By Dan Kuykendall (Seek3r).

Polite-ifier
Cleans up commenters’ profanity. Also includes a blacklist you can customize. By Elliott Back.

Popularity Contest
This will enable ranking of your posts by popularity; using the behavior of your visitors to determine each post’s popularity. You set a value (or use the default value) for every post view, comment, etc. and the popularity of your posts is calculated based on those values. Once you have activated the plugin, you can configure the Popularity Values and View Reports. You can also use the included Template Tags to display post popularity and lists of popular posts on your blog. By Alex King.

Postalicious
Automatically create posts with your del.icio.us bookmarks. By Pablo Gomez.

Quick SMS
Allows your visitors to SMS messages direct to your mobile phone via email gateways. Many networks & countries now supported, see configuration panel for full list. By Martin Fitzpatrick.

Quoter
Allows commenters to quote other comments (dynamically or server side if they have Javascript disabled) and any other text in a page (Javascript only). By Daniele Mancino.

Random post link
A plugin to create a link to a random published post on your blog. By Fred A..

Random Quotes
This plugin allows you to embed random quotes into your pages. It also has a spiffy management tool in the administrative console. By Dustin Barnes.

RedditButton
Displays the reddit buttons in your posts and can be configured to suit your liking. By Christian Inzinger.

Scripturizer
Changes Bible references to hyperlinks for Wordpress 1.5 and above. By Dean Peters, ported by Glen Davis, updated by LaurenceO.com.

Scrobbles widget
Displays recently listened-to tracks on your site. By Rob Miller.

Show Top Commentators
Encourage more feedback and discussion from readers, by rewarding them every time they post a comment! Readers with the most comments are displayed on your Wordpress blog, with their names (linked to their website if they provided one). By Nate Sanden.

Sidebar Widgets
Adds Sidebar Widgets panel under Presentation menu By Automattic, Inc..

Simple Cache
Simple set of caching functions. Useful for plugin authors to build off of. By Jeff Minard.

Smarter Excerpt
Displays the excerpt using whole words, and includes links and styling. By Charles W. Stricklin.

Song Displayer
This plugin allows you to display the song that is currently playing in your Winamp playlist. You’ll need Winamp and the DoSomething plugin. See installation instructions. By Matthieu Biscay.

Sphere Related Content Widget
Automatically show related blog posts and news articles from Sphere thanks to Matthias Bauer for the thresholding and other ideas incorporated in this version. By Watershed Studio, LLC.

Spoiler Tags
This plugin gives your readers ample warning regarding spoiler information by making it unreadable until the user moves the cursor over the text. You have probably seen this functionality widely used in many different forums. By Navid Azimi.

ST Add Related Posts to Feed
Adds Related Posts to your full content feed. UTW is required By Chris Kasten, aka HandySolo with much help from Otto42 of http://ottodestruct.com/.

Star Rating for Reviews
Insert inline rating stars within your posts based on the score you assign, supports outputting list of reviews sorted by date or scores. By Yaosan Yeo.

Subscribe To Comments
Allows readers to recieve notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. Based on version 1 from Scriptygoddess By Mark Jaquith.

Tiger Style Administration
Revamp the look of your WordPress administration area. By Steve Smith.

Ultimate Tag Warrior
Ultimate Tag Warrior is a tagging plugin, that’s heavy on tag visualization. By Christine Davis (Version modified by Joaquín Windmüller).

Ultimate Tag Warrior: Tag Archive
Renders an archive view, based on tags. Depends on Ultimate Tag Warrior 2.5.1+ By Christine Davis.

Verse-O-Matic
Displays a single random verse. Verses can be added and edited through the Wordpress admin. There is a ‘Verse-O-Matic’ tab under the ‘manage’ tab. Click here for usage instructions. By Chad Butler.

WordPress Database Backup
On-demand backup of your WordPress database. By Scott Merrill.

WordPress Reports
Generates reports from Google Analytics and Feedburner data By Joe Tan.

WordPress Reports Most Active Widget
A widget that displays the most active content (requires the WordPress Widgets plugin) By Joe Tan.

wp-cache
Very fast cache module. Composed of several modules, this plugin can configure and manage the whole system. Once enabled, go to “Options” and select “WP-Cache”. By Ricardo Galli Granada.

WP-CC
Facilitates the usage of Creative Commons licenses. Configure in Options ? WP-CC. By Firas Durri.

WP-Polls
Adds A Poll Feature To WordPress By GaMerZ.

WP-Polls Widget
Adds a Sidebar Widget To Display Poll From WP-Polls Plugin. You Need To Activate WP-Polls First. By GaMerZ.

WP-PostRatings
Enables You To Have A Rating System For Your Post. By GaMerZ.

WP-PostViews
Enables You To Display How Many Time A Post Had Been Viewed. By GaMerZ.

WP-Print
Displays A Printable Version Of Your WordPress Weblog Post. By GaMerZ.

WP-Stats
Display Your WordPress Statistics. By GaMerZ.

WP-Stats Widget
Adds a Sidebar Widget To Display Partial Stats From WP-Stats Plugin By GaMerZ.

WP-UserOnline
Adds A Useronline Feature To WordPress By GaMerZ.

WP-UserOnline Widget
Adds a UserOnline Widget To Display Users Online From WP-UserOnline Plugin. Please Activate WP-UserOnline First. By GaMerZ.

WP Movie Ratings
Wordpress movie rating plugin, which lets you easily rate movies By Paul Goscicki.

WP Plugins Tracker
This plugin helps webmasters track the new releases of the plugins they are using on their websites from their admin panel. By Sugan Shan.

Tags: blogging, blogs, content, design, plugin, plugins, sidebar, web, wordpress
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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