A few minutes after i installed Wordpress 2.6 on one of my blogs I regretted it. There is no turning back despite my concerted efforts. I cannot log into any of my Wordpress blogs where I have installed Wordpress 2.6 or higher. The mobile browser just reverts back to admin log in screen over and over again. I also cannot comment.
I will see ig I can find some kind of workaround.

I refuse to pay the INSANE price for Iphone service. despite its rockin browser. The cost for iphone is not that bad- 199 but you pay an additionally 60.00 on top of your existing plan- and even that is not unlimited.
I pay 15.00 a month for my ENTIRE plan including unlimited browser and unlimited texts as part of our Family share plan. ( we have an old plan and DH pays 25.00 and I pay 15.00.

So… I upgraded so a Samsung Instinct this week- labeled as an Iphone killer ( its not) I have been disappointed more by what it can’t do than wowed by what it can.

The browser is so-so. The GPS is very slow and prone to dropping. You pay for everything. Live TV might be cool- but you have to pay 20.00 just for the ability ti access it. Same with Sirius Radio. Comes with no free games.
Battery life is not that great.
Kids like watching YouTube videos in the car and I like the vibrating haptic screen and Qwerty keyboard much more than iTouch /iPhone.
Load time to turn of is crazy slow. Camera is shitty. No flash and no zoom and no way to edit pics on the phone. At almost 500.00 I expected more.
My biggest disappointed bar none is the lack of POP3 mail. I can’t believe I am tethered to webmail or I can pay 8.00 a month to use yahoo account on this phone.
You can play mp4 videos and mp3s. Sound through mono speaker is terrible.
I am also FUMING that the mobile browser on this phone will not work with one of my busier blogs because its using Wordpress 2.6.
I wil persevere a while longer before I give up!

I have also tried other workarounds such as using a web based client like writemyblog.com and using image upload to Flickr with now luck. Ready to chuck phone out the window…

Tags: WordPress Plugins // Add Comment »

Signs That Your Site Is Loading Too Slowly for Visitors

One of my sites- my most profitable blog, took a dive in revenue a couple of weeks ago. On closer inspection the click through rates in the Google Adsense dipped and bounce rate for visitors increased. Most time this says to me pages are not loading quickly enough.
This has happened in the past when I have put an image on the home page and forgot to compress.
I have a very fast connection and sometimes I can’t catch a slow loading page or site. Some warning signs that your web pages and site is loading slowly may be site stalls when you are visiting it include:
- Site lags when you post to your blog
- Your ad revenue nose dives for no reason. Your Adsense Ads are tanking, affiliate links collapse , visitors may be leaving before they have a chance to click.
- You look in your analytics and see a high bounce rate or unexpected bounce rate ( your visitors come to your site and leave quickly)

Reasons Why Your Site Is Slow

- Shared server. From my experience you have to have a pretty hefty traffic surge for this to make a huge difference but worth checking, Chances are if you have a few sites and only one of them is slow- it s not your server. If you suspect its your server load don’t freak out and move your site right away- try using a plug in like WP Super Cache that caches pages and decreases server load first and see if that makes a difference.

- Too many posts on your home page. This has happened to me. I had a blog set up to show 20 posts (!) on the main page. Then I had a slew of images/graphs or scripts in each post. You can avoid this by using the “more” tag in Wordpress editor and reader has to click link off of main page to see entire post OR you can set your home page in Wordpress setting to show less posts.

- Giant image files. Guilty! In haste I have posted 3 and 4 MB photos on my blog and crashed my blog. Oops. Check your image sizes. Your sites graphics should be TINY ( under 10 kb). Images and photos can be compress and published and web with very little image distortion. I like my images to be under 30 kb. Us a jpg compression feature and resolution set to web or 72 pixels.

- Too Many Scripts!
Find out what your resource hogs are. I just discovered that I can see how long a script or object is taking to load very easily using Google Chrome (the new Google browser) . Open Chrome browser a load your page, then right click and choose inspect element, click on resources button, then reload your page. You will get a nice timeline on what loads and how long it takes.

I was quite shocked. I found my culprit(s). Using a tool to test site load time at Web Page Analyzer I could see my site was taking 66 seconds to load on a 56k modem. This is WAY too long. The most glaring problem was a spam plugin I installed 2 weeks ago ( Akismet doesn’t seem to be capturing as much as it used to) . I really like WP-Spam Free but it had to go. Was grinding page load time to a halt.

The other problem was one of my favorite plugins- and this hurt to remove- Twitter Tools. I have left up a couple fo sites when it doesn’t seem to affect the site as much but I had to take down. When I removed my site load time was reduced by a full 20 seconds.
Removing just those two plugins reduced site load time - it went from 66 seconds on a 56 kbs modem to close to 30 seconds, This was more than half!
I also removed some affiliate ads that were slowing down site and not producing any results and shaved off a couple of seconds more.
Three days later and every back up to normal . I am kicking myself over lost revenue. I probably between 3-500 dollars in revenue in the last two weeks because of the slow site. I HATE when stuff like that happens.

You have to keep a close watch all the time for little niggly things that can make huge impact on your blog and your income streams. I hate to say it- but i probably spend 25% of my time creating content and the other 75% checking and analyzing how to improve or maintain. Bit maddening.

I have long been a proponent of more blogs being better but slowly thinking that the time to check and re-check and crunch numbers can mount up to too much time wasted looking at numbers and not enough “creating”.

Tags: Free Tools and Utilities // 1 Comment »

I didn’t realize how much I missed this plugin until I discovered the author has revamped it to work with later version of Wordpress and I literally felt giddy! I can see at a glance what post have taken off. I can often see when there is a news story that has broken by how popular one of my posts is. I can also use the info to create posts on other blogs using different key words or with a different spin. It works in real time and this is a huge advantage to me over analytics programs.

I can’t ell you how excited I am! DailyTop10 plugin no longer break the dashboard in Wordpress 2.6. It works the same way it used to.
I modify DailyTop10 to show my top 100 posts and wrote a post on how to do it, read Modify Daily Top 10 Posts Plugin for Wordpress to Show more Than 10 Posts.

Tags: Free Tools and Utilities // 4 Comments »

You can actually do this without any 3rd party software. It is bit tricky but your can restore your Outlook express email relatively easily.

To Back Up Your Outlook Express Email

It is a good idea to backup your email- especially important ones- on an ongoing basis. If you think your hard drive is failing, you want to format your exisiting hard drive or you bought a new computer and want to move your email over there is a way to do it.

How to back-up Outlook Express Email

You will need to back up each individual file for your mailbox folders. The extension for the folders in dbx.
You will have a folder called Inbox.dbx, Sent.dbx and then for each of the folders you have set up. For example if you have set up forlders for “Family” you will have a database for that called Family.dbx.

Where to find Outlook Express Databases

These folder are pretty well hidden. If you are backing up and have access to your Outlook Express email you can find them by opening your email and in the Folder pane right click on the name of the folder. ( Any folder will do- they are all in the same place)
The files will be in :
C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{Your Numbers Here}\Microsoft\Outlook Express\
If your email is not in admin or you have multiple users instead of Administrator use name of user.

If you go to Explorer you will see all the .dbx files for your folders. Copy /save/burn onto cd/dvd or put on thumb key the ones you want to keep. If you are wiping out your hard drive or hard drive failing do not store these files on the same drive.

Note: If you just save Inbox.dbx you will not save email that is in other folders- you must save individual .dbx files for each folder.

Restoring Your Outlook Express Email

You need to have access to your dbx files ( the database files for your email) To find see above or use the files you saved. If your drive has crashed it is possible to find.
I have used data recovery software successfully. The one I like is Recoversoft Data Rescue and also .

If you are using recovery software do a search for dbx extension files and/or look in directory for:
Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{Your Numbers Here}\Microsoft\Outlook Express\

If you have your files then here goes… This is tedious.

Install Outlook Express
Install outlook Express on your new computer or drive. If you reinstall into same drive, etc as OLD version you may over write your dbx files so make sure you have them saved.

Create New Folders in Outlook Express
Create new folders with the same name as your old ones. You will have course you inbox.dbx and sent.dbx , etc folder recreated for you. You have to make new folders for folder you created eg. ” recipes” or “Family” , They have to be the EXACT same name as you old folder names and are case sensitive.

New Outlook Express Folder CANNOT Be Empty!

There has to be an email in each of the folders for the database to “exist”. If you copy over you old folder then they won’t replace then folders- a new copy will created. eg. you will have an inbox.dbx folder and and inbox1.dbx folder.

What I do is just copy the welcome email from Outlook express into every folder.

Copy Over Your Old DBX files
Now you can copy over your old dbx files. Highlight the folder you want to put into your new version of Outlook express and simply copy over the dbx folders in new you have saved somewhere. When asked if you want to replace then say yes.

Your Outlook Express Email Restored

Your email will now be restored! Check your individual folder and see. If you don’t see the email then make sure you have copied them over to the right spot.
If your emails are not there most likely problems is you have to put in the right spot ( it is confusing) OR you did not create a new folder with same name as old one / put an email int he folder and did not copy over.

Any question let me know and I will try to help.

Tags: Computer and Hardware // 12 Comments »