Big Webmaster

Wow, talk about unloading a bunch of crap off the internet. This will be like cleaning the back corners of the internet that no one visits.

10 million spots now freed up in the Google index!

Wow, you know you spend to much time on the internet when you look at the drinking fountain drain and see an RSS feed there…

Being a fan of WordPress for it’s well written, and very active development community for code, plugins, and themes, and also because it is free and open source. I have always been a little mystified why anyone would want to use typepad, because it is missing many of those components listed above.

The big questions for me on Type Pad has always been:

1) Why pay for the right to use blogging software?

2) Why be  pour your blogging to a domain you do not own? To me that feels like remodeling a rental house on your own dollar.

So here is the answer:

The major benefit of using a service like Type Pad is ironiclly the same reason as the reasons not to. It comes down to this, if someone is paying a fee to a service to run their blog, then the content is likely going to be higher. All you have to do is look at all the lousy blogs on blogger and blogspot, etc…  You are not likely to find nearly the same ratio of quality blogs to spam blogs on a service like TypePad.

Any blog on typepad domain is likely going to get a natural boost for this reason.

How to make the automatic update work with your Wordpress blogs that are hosted on 1and1 shared servers. These are blogs that you set up yourself, not the blog that 1and1 can install for you.

The problem I was having was the update would start, and then just stop after a few seconds.

Then in my wp-content folder I would see a bunch of failed downloads. They were the update zip files with a 0 byte size.

Add the following lines to your .htaccess file in the root directory of your blog.

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

This will enable PHP version 5 + on your blog and then your update should take off.

The udpate to PHP 5 should also make your blog run a little faster and better.

Now that WP 2.7.1 is out, it is a good time to test out the automatic upgrade!

How to display musical notes without images. (ASCII)

The quarter note: ♩ which is ♩

The eighth note: ♪ which is ♪

The single bar note: ♫ which is & #9835;

The double bar note: ♬ which is & #9836;

Here is the stats for our e-commerce store that we run. The store just went live in April of this year, so this was the first experience of a “black Friday”, and all that goes with it.

I was very impressed by the traffic spike, and sales increase as well. The sales kept on coming strong starting on Thanksgiving and really all the way through “cyber Monday”. Very fun and exciting. We ended up selling out of many items and getting very low on others.

This shows the traffic traffic increase. Traffic was triple a normal day.

Thus our November sales were the best month yet this year. Sales did really dip in the summer time, but this is somewhat normal for the industry we are in.

Overall, I think it should be called maybe “Black Friday Weekend”, because while traffic was highest on that day, the sales came in consistent throughout the entire weekend. Good stuff.

How many times have you seen a post like this, you read the exciting description and get to the video, and hit play and then…

“We’re sorry, this video is no longer available.”

Argg.. frustrating right.

Here is how to avoid this problem on your own blog. Each time you embed a youtube video, open up “Any DVD Converter” (or any similar program), and save the You Tube video as a flash file, and then save it, or upload it into a special folder on your blog. This way if your embedded You Tube video is removed, you can place your own copy on the blog (assuming there are no copyright issues). (Any DVD Converter is a free program, make sure you download the freeware version)