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Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto

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You are here: Home / Archives for Web and Technology

Start sending real letters again

July 12, 2007 by Tricia

theesnail.gif Isn’t it nice when you receive cards at Christmas time, your birthday or special holidays? Some people even take the time to write a family letter during the holiday season, updating the rest of the family about all the major events that have occurred over the last year.

What’s unfortunate about this is that the occasions that I’ve listed above are about the only times that Chris or I ever receive cards or letters anymore.

My parents were winter Texans and while I missed them while they were away I always appreciated and looked forward to the weekly letters my mother would write. Sure, they had a set routine so each letter had a similar theme, but there was always some little story that made each letter unique.

I miss those letters.

I’m assuming that you don’t get as many letters as you used to either. Do you miss getting letters?

Well, if you want to give someone the feeling of getting a real letter again, but like the convenience of using your computer you could use the free service provided by http://www.esnailer.com. Just type out a letter, fill out the name and address of the person you are sending the letter to and then submit your finished letter to Esnailer.com.

Esnailer will print out your letter, place it in an envelope, put a stamp on it and mail it off to your friend or relative for you. All free of charge.

Sure, you might be saying to yourself “well I could do that myself”, but honestly, when was the last time that you did?

At least with Esnailer half the work is done by them and it’s free. Have you taken a look at the price of stamps these days? Believe me, this is a bargain!

Give it a try.





Filed Under: Cool stuff, Culture, Home and Lifestyle, Recreation, Web and Technology, Website Promotion, Writing Tagged With: Birthday, cards, christmas, Esnailer, Esnailer.com, Family, formal correspondence, free, free letter, friend, holidays, person, post, print, send a letter, send a real letter, service

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?

Filed Under: Blogging, The Blogisphere, Web and Technology, Web Design Tagged With: blog navigation, blogger, Blogging, Blogroll, comment spam, Do follow, do follow blogroll, frustrated, links, next page, no comments, older posts, Pet peeves, site navigation, sites, Spam, style

Discover a Hobby – a resource site for hobbyists

July 11, 2007 by Tricia

Do you have a hobby? Sure you do. I think almost everyone has a hobby of one kind or another. Anyone who reads this site regularly knows that I have several interests and hobbies ranging from music, gardening, photography to keeping exotic pets.

What are your hobbies?

If you are interested in starting a hobby – a great thing to do if you have just quit smoking or if your trying to lose weight as a hobby will occupy you – or if you have a hobby that you want to learn more about you should visit Discover A Hobby. This site is a free online guide with information on 100 + hobbies.

The creator of the site, Duncan Davis, started this site a year ago and he spent a lot of time collecting links, articles, videos, highly recommended hobby related books and product information and put it all together on the Discover a Hobby site so that those interested in hobbies would be able to find useful information quickly and easily.

The site has information on hobbies ranging from collecting, sports, arts, music, extreme sports, games and one of my personal favs photography.

I’ve already bookmarked the photography section of this site. As you might already know I just purchased a digital SLR camera and while I’ve managed to figure out a lot of things on my own it sure would be nice to visit some sites that explained all the special features and techniques that I’ll now be able to do with my camera. I’m sure I’ll be spending a lot of time at Discover a Hobby.

Check out the site for yourself. I’m pretty sure you’ll find some useful information. You can even submit articles or links to helpful sites if you want to help build the site.

Filed Under: Affiliates, Entertainment, Finance, Graphics, Great Reading, Movies, Photography, Sports Tagged With: 100 hobbies, articles, camera, Digital, digital camera, Discover a Hobby, forums, Gardening, guide, Hobbies, hobby, information, links, Music, online, photo, Photography, resources, Video

Too much email!

July 11, 2007 by Tricia

You know what I’ve been doing over the last two days? Trying to catch up on all my email. I get so much email coming in it’s ridiculous!

I run a few mailing lists so I get mail from the lists. Most of the time I don’t have to do anything for those emails other than read them and watch the lists for arguments or really bad advice.

I also get a lot of spam! Tons and tons of it each day.

Then there’s mail from forums I participate in, and affiliate companies discussing the latest deals or offers that I should place on my site.

Buried in all of the above are requests for the blogrolls that I run and advertising requests from private companies, email from family and friends, as well as comments from those who visit any one of our many sites.

The last four types of email are what I consider most important, however they easily get buried in the on slot of other email that I have coming in. I do filter my email to separate folders depending on what the topic of the email is, but I still have to go through all of it at some point.

I get over 1000 emails a day! At least half of that is spam but I still have to go through the spam because real mail gets caught in the spam filter all the time.

Between maintaining our sites, the lists and the blogrolls I’m almost ready to hire someone to go through my email and only give me the stuff I need to respond to!

So if you’ve written to me and there’s a delayed response don’t worry I almost always respond if you are asking a question, it just takes a while sometimes!

Filed Under: Home and Lifestyle, Recreation, The Blogisphere, Writing Tagged With: affiliate, blog, Blogroll, blogrolls, comment, comments, email, forums, friends, mailing lists, manage, organize, reply, requests, sites, slow response, Spam, too much email

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.

Filed Under: Blogging, Computers, Data Recovery, Data Storage, Software, The Blogisphere, Web and Technology, Wordpress, Wordpress Plugins Tagged With: account, akismet, bad behavior, Canada, CPU resources, domain, fever, google, home, hosting, ideas, index file disabled, losing, mess, my sites, plugin, sites moved, Software, Spam, too much, traffic, turned off plugins, update, update Google sitemap, VPS, web host, Wordpress, WP Cache

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