I just spent the last few days squashing some of the remaining bugs on my site, and I’m telling ya, these were cyber cockroaches from hell. I stomp one bug, and another one shows up, stomp that one, then another shows up.

It’s the kind of thing that could suck up whole days of my life if I’m not careful. I see a problem and I think “ohh, let me just tweak this one lil’ thing, shouldn’t take more than a few seconds…” Next thing I know it’s Wednesday, and I had started tweaking that lil’ thing on Sunday. Whether it’s some coding error with a plugin, a flickering bug in IE6, or the layout being a few pixels off in browsers like Safari, I was just resolved to fix every remaining issue on my site so I could finally put it behind me and delve into my real passion, which had always been writing (blogging).

As for web design and all that that entails, it was a good learning experience but man, I have just about had enough of this crap. Next time I want my blog redesigned, I’m hiring a super web guru from Silicon Valley to do it for me. I of course expect to be making some money off my blog by that time, so I should be able to afford it when the time comes.

I hope.

Using the awesome and very promising OIOPublisher Direct plugin, I can now sell ads and other services directly to potential advertisers without the need for a middle-man, which means I’ll keep 100 percent of the profits I make. WOOOOO!!! I’m gonna be rich! Filthy, stinking, disgustingly rich out of my greedy butt, depraved mind! BOOYAH!!!!

Well maybe.

It’ll be interesting to see how I fare with this, but at the very least I’ll finally have total control over what gets placed on this blog. There’s a lot of bad hojos and jojos out there looking to bam-bam your jam-jams with their scam-scams, and advertising networks like Google’s Adsense have done very little to stop them. With this solution I’m hoping the quality of the ads and goods that get served here will be far better than what most readers and visitors usually see elsewhere, and will help to complement this site rather than detract from it.

Well, I can dream anyway.

If you’re interested, I’m offering rock bottom prices right now since my traffic and readership is um, *ahem*, not quite where I’d like them to be right now. You can choose from link ads to paid posting to video ads, and more.

Click here for details, and if you’re interested in installing OIOPublisher on your own blog, let me know and I’ll give you some pointers. Initially it was designed for WordPress 2.1 or better due to its native cron support, but after working with the developer for a few days, he was able to come up with a solution to run cron jobs on Wordpress 2.0.X blogs by using the WP-Cron plugin. Muy coolio.

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?

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.

One of the growing trends I’ve been observing in the blogosphere lately has been the arrival of social networking and Web 2.0 sites that all seem to have one thing in common: they’re all designed to encourage you to store your content on THEIR networks, rather than on your own site. Got photos you want to show the world? Upload them to Flickr. For videos, there’s YouTube. For music, there’s Last.FM, iLike, Garageband and so on. For those who like to write, network or blog, we have MySpace, LiveJournal, Xanga, Vox and blah blah blah, ad infinitum. And then of course we have the specialty sites like Twitter and Tumblr and blah blah blah ad infinitum. Good grief. While I admit that all these sites have their uses respectively, it also means you’re investing a whole lotta time and resources on just about everything except your own blog. People may not even come to your site anymore because your content is now available elsewhere, whether on a MySpace server or a YouTube channel or God only knows where else you’ve been going. Web 2.0 then has not only stolen your time and content, it’s taken your traffic too, and with it a chance for monetization. As a result your blog will eventually wither away until it becomes abandoned altogether, its distinctiveness completely assimilated into the Web 2.0 Collective. Resistance is futile.

Ok, I’m exaggerating, (somewhat), but I have noticed a pattern where bloggers no longer seem to attend to their own blogs with the fervor they once had in the past, and these social networking sites have a lot to do with it. Playing on all those networks can definitely suck up a lot of your time, so much that your creative and physical energy is usually completely exhausted by the time you’re ready to come back to your own blogging home. This actually started to happen with me as well when I noticed I was actually posting more often on StumbleUpon than I was here. Bad Lincoln!! Bad!!!!!

Somehow a balance needs to be struck between utilizing these networks while also maintaining the growth of your own blog, and I think the answer lies in part by observing Facebook’s recent move to allow third party companies onto their platform. For them it’s all about pulling the features and services these companies have into their own network, providing a central location for the very best these third party services have to offer.

In a way I hope that’s what I’m accomplishing here. While I belong to a variety of networks from StumbleUpon to Last.FM (and beyond), using widgets and other plugin technologies has enabled me to pull everything here in one place, rather than watch it all being pushed out there. Even my Flickr Album can be completely viewed natively without any requisite need to go to Flickr. That I think is the key. Follow the Facebook model, and use networks and services to help to promote YOUR blog, not the other way around. Resist the Borg! Fight the power! Viva La Blog Revolucion!

I’ve been troubleshooting my blog to see what’s been causing the added load time, and then ended up spending a couple of bucks so I could correctly send pics to my blog from my cell phone, which previously kept resulting in broken links and improper syntax. I think finally got it right though….

By the way, blogging by cell has been made possible using a 2 year old plugin script…. written in German. Good grief, half the time I wonder what in the blue balls I’m doing here. It seems I spend more time doing blog maintenance than actually blogging. Still, I did manage to build this thing from scratch after months of work and scouring all four corners of the Internet for nifty plugins, so I’m not about to abandon this little project of mine and flee to Xanga just yet.

Anyhoo, after getting sidetracked by the moblogging issue, I went back to analyze why my index page seemed to lag at times when I tred to load it. Apparently, my tags plugin (the Ultimate Tag Warrior) seems to be the culprit. I noticed the load time sometimes jumped to 30 seconds or longer when my browser tried to access the ultimate-tag-warrior-ajax.php file. I have no idea why this is the case, but naturally I thought upgrading it might fix the issue.

Nope. Upgrading only proceeded to break the Tags Cloud shown in my sidebar. One step forward, two steps back. Love it…

I think the simpler solution was to just remove the code for the tags altogether from my index page. It clutters things up anyway, and it’s probably more appropriate to just display them on my individual pages instead. I think I finally licked this problem, but I’ll have to check it from home to make sure.

Ugh, I need a life.