BOOYAH!

It’s time to not only celebrate my blog relaunch, but my two year blogging anniversary!!    And dude, the video totally captures the moment here.  I’m talking a blog wrecked to death, only to come back stronger, sleeker, and totally badass with some badass music cranking in the background and leather jackets and cool black vintage cars cruising the highway and let us go have a throwdown and kick some serious scum of the earth hellbags because baby,  I am back!

Yeah, I’m a little excited here. 

But really, what I just pulled off was a miracle that only God could have given me, and I now have the latest version of WordPress along with a new Who-is-your-DADDY theme that is all kinds of awesomeness. 

I still need to work out a few kinks and decide on a new photo gallery to use, but for all intents and purposes the site is now live, with a sleeker, faster look and a few new bells and whistles I think you’ll all enjoy.   For an idea of what’s new, see the little oval thingie jiggy to the right of each post title?  Go give that a click.

Cool, huh? 

In addition, you’ll now be able to edit comments as well.  I also dropped a few plugins, added a cache system and went with a 2 sidebar look again to reduce clutter.  Yes the ads are still there, but they are no longer as obtrusive as they used to be.  To be honest I got tired of having a larded up ad block embedded inside my posts, partly because I couldn’t quote or post any media content on the fly.  The ad would jam it up and I’d have to manually remove it in order for the post to show cleanly.  Not cool.  But I still need the ads though, since the 50 cents I’m making a day is paying for my newspaper, and I just don’t know how I could live without those two quarters a day, ya know?

As for the dark theme, I’m working on creating a white backdrop just for the posts and comments for easier reading (while still maintaining a dark look), so stay tuned there.  I might have gotten it done sooner but the theme kept overriding my color settings.  Regardless, let me know what you think.

It wasn’t easy though, but I got through it, and now I can finally enjoy the fruits of my labor…. except of course, Google just had to rain on my parade by dropping my pagerank from a 4 to a 3 while I was busy upgrading.    Really Google, why don’t you just suck my ass times a thousand?  Dweebs.

But meh, whatever.  I finally made a leapfrog in upgrading without having to spend a fortune to have a designer do it, my sleek black car will get a nice facelift and wax job by the end of the summer, and in a few more months I’ll be out of debt,  cruising the road and enjoying my new lease on life.  All I’ll need then is a weathered black leather jacket, and my life will truly be complete. 

“Let me just update this one file here….”

Sigh.

I had to go update a plugin last night because of a security hole, but unfortunately that update caused another plugin to break, so I had to go upgrade that plugin as well, which of course caused yet another plugin to break, so I went to upgrade that too, and before I knew it my spam blocker goes down in flames, I can’t preview comments anymore, my images no longer show up, my sidebars suddenly disappears, and then finally my entire blog goes up in smoke, the only thing left in its place being some cryptic error message telling me what an idiot I am and hahaha I suck.

Mother*&^% technology.

Things seem to be ok now, but my goodness, I was up till 4AM last night and had to work through the better part of today before things finally calmed down.

You know what, I think it’s time I gear up for a major revamp. I was gonna just say screw it and have a professional designer do it, but I think it’ll probably be better to set up a test blog closed from the public so I can play around with the latest blogging toys without tearing my hair out and spitting at people, and then when it’s stable enough I can release it for prime time with little fuss. That should also keep me busy enough so I don’t waste my time pining for a girl to love me since that’s never gonna happen because women all suck the ass of a hairy moose and should die in some horrible nuclear explosion bunch of monkey-faced harlot whores they be.

*ahem* Except my beloved womenly readers of course, who are all the very essence of perfection, virtue, and beauty.

See how I suck up to you guys so you’ll continue to love me and read my blog despite my crazy wild women-hating rants? I am so awesome.

My server is having a temper tantrum here, so if you’re subscribing to my feed you may have seen a few duplicate and wonky posts lately. Sorry about that. Stupid stupid stupid WordPress. It’s like my own blog is conspiring to keep me from blogging here.

I’ve been using Hostgator to host my blog for a little over a year now, and I think it’s finally safe to say they’ve proven to be a reliable shared hosting service, so much that I decided to become one of their affiliates. Although I’ve never received hordes of traffic to see how well it could hold up under heavy load, I’ve never had trouble with my site during those times it’s gotten stumbled either (where it’s received hundreds of visitors within a short period of time). My highest peak was when I had about 130 active visitors to my blog at once (and still the server merely yawned). Tickets to help support for one reason or another have always been promptly answered, but my best experience had to be when I was having trouble logging into my WordPress admin one day. I first spoke to someone via live support, who tried his best to resolve the issue on his own before having me open up a ticket so a sysadmin could look into the problem. In the space of about 20 minutes, a systems administrator named David had me up and running after learning that a problem with my Akismet plugin was causing my blog to lag. After I deactivated Akismet and replaced it with a newer version, I was up and running again.

Customer support that’s responsive and knowledgeable, a shared server that remains fast and suffers virtually no downtime, all for an easy 10 bucks a month. I really can’t ask for anything more. They also offer a semi-dedicated solution that’s still shared but where you’ll only share a server with 3 other users, but for some reason they don’t offer any VPS solutions (yet). Regardless, they offer excellent packages for your hosting needs, and in fact mine recently enjoyed a free upgrade (due to Hostgator adding new hard drives to the server I was using).

Word to the wise though: the web hosting industry has had a history of embellishing the bandwidth they claim to offer to potential clients, but what many people don’t know is that such bandwidth will be limited by the server’s CPU and memory resources. Unless you have a vanilla site, you’ll likely never be able to reach the high bandwidth ceiling many hosting services provide because your site will be shut down long before then, due to using too much of the server’s resources. How much you can actually use will depend on the service, and such info is usually buried somewhere in the terms of agreement. Read Hostgator’s Terms of Service and then compare it to other hosting companies for a better idea of how much freedom you’ll have when purchasing a shared hosting account. Regardless, based on the report of other customers, even people who have been slashdotted or dugg have never had a problem with taxing too much of the server. Just make sure you build a good site that’s optimized well (with caching abilities if possible) and you’ll likely never have a problem with Hostgator.

Sign up for a Hostgator account today!

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.

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……..