Blogging – Page 24

I’ve still got hosting problems!

July 18, 2007 by Tricia

Well, I’m apparently still having CPU resource overuse problems with my webhost. I think I’ve done everything I can to reduce my sites load on their servers but obviously something is still using too many resources or they are playing me. I just don’t know anymore.

Some people have suggested that mybloglog widgets might overuses resources. I’m not sure.

Also, last night I was working with my website – all HTML based adding some code and I noticed that when the pages were loading the calls to Google Analytics were taking forever, as were calls to an image or script for Amazon UK. Could script based codes on my site that call to other sites like Amazon, Mybloglog and even Google use too many resources?

That’s all that I have left to go on. I’ve optimized everything else. Every blog and website is using the latest software and all plugins that I kept are up to date.

What I’ve been thinking of doing is starting an account with another web host – perhaps Host Gator since I’ve heard mainly good things about them and moving half my domains to the new host. Then, if I run into trouble with either web host I’ve got a host all set up to move the rest of the sites too? Plus this might help me pinpoint which sites are causing trouble. I could move them one at a time and see what happens.

Any ideas or web hosting solutions?

I’m thinking of trying a Voice Recognition Program

July 17, 2007 by Tricia

I’ve been thinking about trying a voice recognition software program again. Years ago when Dragon Naturally Speaking first came out I used the program.

I used it to answer email and I even experimented with using it to write articles in word that I would then use on my websites. It worked pretty well and I’m sure the latest version probably works quite well.

It would certainly give my fingers a bit of a rest if I could use a voice program to write all the posts that I create each day!

Does anyone use Dragon Naturally Speaking? If you do, are you happy with the program? Does it work well with blog software?

Pet Peeves – comment spam and lack of blog navigation

July 12, 2007 by Tricia

I’ve been getting a little frustrated with the comments that have been coming into our sites lately.

Don’t get me wrong. I love getting comments as much as the next person, but since I’ve got so many blogs it’s really easy to spot commenting patterns and dare I say it? Comment abuse.

I won’t rehash how I feel about this here since I just wrote a post about Comment Spam and Comment abuse over on one of my other blogs – The Web Files.

I hope that you’ll go and read the post and tell me what you’ve been experiencing, especially if you are a do follow blogger.

Over on WebStyle I wrote another post about blogging. Well blogs and their lack of navigation.

Considering that I run the do follow blogroll I spend a lot of time going over sites trying to find comments in order to see if they follow or don’t follow. Lately I’ve been discovering a lot of sites with very few comments in recent posts and I’ve had to search, in some cases, the whole site in order to find a comment to verify a sites do followness.

This doesn’t take much time if a site is easy to navigate but the sites that don’t have next page or older posts navigation links take up too much of my time. Go read some of my blog navigation suggestions if you think your blog might be one of the ones I’m talking about.

What are your blogging pet peeves?

My sites are using too much CPU resources? Help!

July 1, 2007 by Tricia

I’ve gone through a nightmare in the last few days!

I got a message from my web host on Thursday evening stating that my sites/ domains were using too much of the web hosts resources on the server that they were on and that they had moved my sites to a non-production server until I could either figure out what was causing the drain on resources or until I decided to upgrade to a VPS hosting plan or a dedicated servers hosting plan.

Well, both of those options are more expensive and while I know my traffic has gone up recently and continues to rise I’m certain that it’s not high enough to warrant upgrading my hosting account just yet.

So I stayed up Thursday night and worked on my sites. Looking over all the stats to see if I could figure out which files were being used too often or if there were any files or folders in my domain directories that shouldn’t be there.

I didn’t find anything abnormal but I did deactivate a few plugins that I thought might use more of the servers resources than the others. That’s all I could think to do.

I’ve also upgraded the Google Sitemap plugin that I was using to the newest beta version as that one is said to go easier on CPU resources than the last stable version.

So today … well today is Canada Day. We had a friend over for the weekend so I left my sites alone briefly last night and earlier today. We’d been supposed to go out of town, but that wasn’t going to happen when there was the possibility of me losing my sites or of them going down. You see I was still waiting to hear back from my web host. I’d written to them twice since I got their message on Thursday evening and didn’t end up hearing from them until today! Grrrr.

Unfortunately the message that I got from them today was that my sites CPU usage had increased! Aaaah! It shouldn’t have increased! What the heck????

They also told me that they’d disabled the index.php file for this site because:

We have been forced to disable your script(index.php) located in
(/home/thewe22/public_html/feverishthoughts/index.php) as they appear to have
been exploited.

Well what does that mean? Was my site hacked? Did someone try to access my site with a script?

I have no idea, but the result was that Tricia’s Musings was down for the count.

I was advised to again search for any scripts of files in my directories that didn’t belong (didn’t find any) and to upgrade my software.

So I’ve upgraded Tricia’s Musings to the most recent version of WordPress. As I said earlier I also upgraded the Google Sitemap plugin. I’ve turned off Bad Behavior (now I’ll be hit with spam!) and I’ve installed WP-Cache.

I still have a number of plugins running. I’ve turned off a number of them, but I do still have several activated.

If CPU usage is still high I’ll turn off all but Akismet and see how that goes.

If you have any ideas for me as to what else I might be able to do to limit the CPU usage on my sites I’d love to hear it.

My Comment Policy

June 27, 2007 by Tricia

In an earlier post I discussed the fact that all of our blogs, my own and my husbands, are do follow blogs. This means that you’ll get a real link when you leave a comment.

I’m doing this because I’d like to build up my readership and give a little something back to those who leave comments regularly.

Each comment takes a tiny piece of my sites Page Rank with it though so I appreciate getting decent comments. Comments that look spammy or look like someone is just advertising their own sites or products are not appreciated.

By decent comment, I mean that if you are taking the time to reply to a post on any blog please don’t say “nice post” or “Nice blog” or “Nice picture” or “Funny ha ha”. Yes, sometimes comments like this are real, but most of the time when someone leaves such a short comment they are just commenting for the sake of commenting.

Since I’m giving away free links- each one taking a tiny bit of my sites PR with it – please don’t make me regret my gift to you. I can tell when people are following the do follow blogroll or other do follow lists that are out there because these people will hit all my sites and leave similar comments on each one.

Write a comment that adds to the post. Did it touch you in some way? Do you have a similar experience to share? Have you used the site or product that I’m discussing in my post? If so what are you thoughts on it? If you haven’t used it does it sound like something worth trying?

If you really don’t have anything to say about a post don’t feel that you have to comment for the sake of commenting. Everyone loves getting comments but I enjoy getting comments that are little more than “Hey there, nice blog, come and visit mine.”. I bet you do too.

If you leave extra links in your comment do they really relate to the post or are you advertising something?

I’ve taken to removing extra links if I don’t feel that they contribute to the post or that the person is taking advantage of my dofollow policy.

I’ve also deleted comments that do not add to the conversation.

This may sound harsh, but if I feel that someone is abusing my blog to get backlinks why should I allow it. Would you?

I’ve still got hosting problems!

I’m thinking of trying a Voice Recognition Program

My sites are using too much CPU resources? Help!

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