* Firestats

I first noticed this plugin today .. while searching around for an invite to Virb.com .. on the Zzap Blog (aka Pearce from Australia).

Thanks to Zzap .. I have now received an invite .. plus a really cool statistics plugin!

At least .. it LOOKS cool. What I like the most is that in the comments .. it shows where the user is from, what browser he/she is using and what operating system the user was on. And I didn’t have to modify the template to add any code .. I just ticked a box in my dashboard firestat options.

Okay. I know what you are thinking .. “Wait! HART doesn’t get many comments” .. well, YES that’s true .. so those little icon graphics shouldn’t be a burden to load.

I will let it collect statistics and see how it looks and what it is really collecting, before I add it to my other blogs and PS .. it works on wordpress version 2.1

FROM SHOPPING CHANNEL TO HEALTH & FITNESS CHANNEL

* Health Cafe, Be Good Today
* Natural Vision Improvement

OPINIONATED CHANNEL RENAMED TO OPINIONATED & LIFESTYLE

* To expand this section to allow “Lifestyle’ish” sites too .. besides your usual Rant, Rave and political discussions

NEW SITES ADDED TO NETWORK AND OPINIONATED & LIFESTYLE CHANNEL

* Adventures In Goldenland
TagLine: Getting Back to Nature: Oranic And Natural For Babies, Mommies and Puppies

* Get With A Natural Lifestyle
TagLine: For The Love Of People, Pets And Our Planet

NEW SITE ADDED TO HEALTH & FITNESS CHANNEL

* Miraculous Cures
TagLine: Miraculous cures of old folklore and other modern medical miracles

HERE IS THE NEW CODE IN OUR SIDEBARS!

* Congratulations to Team Canada for winning the 2007 Scotties Tournaments of Hearts

* 2007 M & M Meat Shops Canadian Juniors – Congrats to Stacie Devereaux Won the Canadian Junior Women’s Championship and Charley Thomas Wins the Canadian Junior Mens Title (again) – February 3-11, 2007

* 2007 Scotties Tournaments of Hearts Women’s Championship – Congrats to Kelly Scott and Team Canada – February 17-25, 2007

I decided to place a “News” script at the top of the CurlingBlog.com for visitors, and readers who found their way to the site via the search engines or bookmarks. At least this way – there was current news on the site every day you would visit. Despite the two major tournaments listed above, offline work obligations have been keeping me away from updating this blog. In fact, most of my blogs have been pre-posts scheduled in advance except for the odd couple of posts on the PetLvr blog and 1800HART blog (and this blog) .. but, definately a slowdown.

Despite my terrible efforts to keep up .. two things have come to my attention:

(1) Surprisingly – the CurlingBlog.com site – seems to have the highest count of subscribers according to Feedburner at the moment!

I am definately have to take better care of my readers next month .. because there are a few upcoming major tournaments in the Curling ‘o-Sphere happening in March 2007 …

* 2007 Tim Hortons Brier – March 3-11, 2007
* 2007 World Juniors – March 3-11, 2007
* 2007 Strauss Canada Cup of Curling – March 13-18, 2007
* 2007 World Women’s Curling Championship – March 17-25, 2007
* 2007 Canadian Seniors – March 18-25, 2007
* 2007 World Seniors – March 25-31, 2007
* 2007 Ford World Men’s Curling Championship – March 31-April 8, 2007

LOTS OF CURLING HAPPENING!

Q) Does anybody want to Guest Post or Live Blog during any of these tournaments next month? If so .. please give me a shout via email .. hart (at) PetLvr (dot) com .. I will give you lots of link love .. (i.e. it’s non-paying gig – but curlers of the world will adore you!)

* And what was the second thing that I’ve noticed in my slowdown of online posting?

Well .. I’ll leave that for another post!

* MyBlogLog – my PetLvr Member Profile

I was “HOT” for about 10 seconds yesterday February 24th .. probably because of my comment on their blog about limiting the joining of communities to 15 per day .. and my subsequent post about that

* And speaking of communities found in MyBlogLog ..

I joined JTChandler OutPost-Earth Community because I thought it was interesting idea. If you go to the site, you can sign up your site into the directory, by location and even city .. and then again by various topics. The site then aggregates your RSS feed with an avatar as you post. People can find new content by category or by city .. which I liked a lot. There was only one other blogger in Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada and I thought Winnipeg should be represented!

If you add more than one blog to the directory .. be sure to use DIFFERENT avatars for each, or else risk getting removed. I initially wanted them all to show off my lovely HART caricature .. but ended up getting suspended when all the feeds started to show up on the page – for spamming! Fortunately, JTChandler was patient with me as I replaced these avatars with brand new avatars that I found online and everything is up and running.

I’ve added 12 sites to the feed directory. Including this site, I’ve added the PetLvr site, the 1800HART site, the Retirement site .. and all of the 8 battling-series sites. At this time, I didn’t bother to add the sites that are more like shopping sites, or with videos, and graphic intensive. I’d like to see if this generates any new traffic for these sites. Although, even if it doesn’t – I’ve found a few new sites that I never had before in my bloglines!

So .. check it out .. I’ve been more curious looking at feeds and sites of bloggers from specific cities and regions, than by the actual categories .. but once there are a lot of sites added to this directory .. well .. it’s got potential i.m.o.

Here’s the graphic you will see in all the sites added .. to help promote them.

Greetings .. from Outpost-Earth-Canada-Manitoba-Winnipeg!

It started with a private message from Hans Chung of PostReach in my Ryze Network account .. and it made me look.

The concept is not new to me. On 62-151.com .. 1800HART.com/picks/ … CurlingBlog.com and The-Singers.com .. I’ve inserted code that shows visitors news headlines everyday when they show up to the site. No news is added to my archives or seen in the RSS Feeds, but for the few amount of people that do come by through their bookmarks, at least they will see something new – if I’m not current on my postings.

So – I am now testing the PostReach code on 8 of my sites .. all on the Battling-Series of blogs. Feel free to check them out .. (and hit refresh) .. to see what a Guest Post could look like. Maybe you might want to sign up too?

* Battling-Addiction.com
* Battling-Cancer.com
* Battling-Depression.com
* Battling-HeartandStroke.com
* Battling-MS.com
* Battling-Obesity.com
* Battling-Schizophrenia.com
* Battling-Stress.com

Currently, as it appears to be in its BETA stage .. it may seem to appear that I am overwhelming the health category and you might see Guest Posts from some of the above blogs in other blogs listed above .. but I’m hoping that once the service gets more popular and there are more people and sites using this service it will get better.

In the meantime .. I will try it out and see if I get any traffic referrals .. I’ve already seen a few clicks in one of my refer stats .. but I just finished putting the code up a few moments ago.

From their homepage ..

How It Works (in detail)

Live Demo

In-line Guest Post Features

Guest posts are displayed right under the first post. They are marked as guest posts with the name of the author and a postreach logo.

Readers will immediately see the first 400 characters of the guest post. They can easily read the whole post or rate the post without leaving the blog. Readers can visit the guest blog if they like the post.

A different guest post is shown every time someone visits your blog. Guest posts only show up on the front page, they are not published into your archives nor your feed.

BOOOOOOOOOOO TO MYBLOGLOG

Source: mybloglogb.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/02/mybloglog_knock.html

In order to reduce the practice of making contacts and joining communities just to spread their face around, we’ve instituted a limit of 15 community joins , 15 new contacts and 5 co-author requests in a day. Straight up, this is a quick-and-dirty approach and these numbers may not be the optimal numbers. We’re going to rely on you to help us tweak these over time so that it maintains a balance of usefulness to members while keeping people from trying to game the system to everyone’s detriment.

Lastly, and this wasn’t part of the original plan, we patched a stupid cookie hole that allowed people to impersonate other members. While you couldn’t use this exploit to gain access to other members’ accounts, you could show up on other sites as someone else. And that ain’t cool.

To MyBlogLog: YES .. closed up holes and fix thing .. don’t deter things or people or the Yahoo investment will go down the tubes because people like me won’t like you anymore.

BOO TO MYBLOGLOG

That’s right. I’m Boo’ing you ..

This is my official policy for MyBlogLog (updated February 21, 2007 in my profile page!) I get more than 15 readers a day you know.

Greetings .. and welcome to VERSION 2.0 of HART’s ABOUT Page! (created Feb/2007)

MyBlogLog policy is to immediately join the communities of readers and faces that appear on any of my blogs. At this time, I might also be adding your site to my Bloglines and following your RSS feed.

I will also add everybody as a contact who adds me as theirs, so feel free to add me as a contact. I will also join your communities and do the same if we are contacts!

If I keep coming back and seeing you as a regular face on one or more of my blogs, I should note that I will probably just add you as a contact anyway .. to remind me that you are not just a passing statistic to my sites, and that I value your readership of my stuff .. even if it’s periodically, or out of curiousity and just surfing!

Sometimes I just join communities of the sites that I like!

Feel free to message any of my communities or the PetLvr main section and leave a comment.

HART (1-800-HART)

– aka –

HART (PetLvr)

* I received a commission cheque from Linkshare today – for the Canadian Accounts

* But – it was all on one sale at Dell Canada – 0.93% commission (less than 1%!)

* After I saw that crappy payout last spring – I started to concentrate on my Amazon products, to reach that $100 minimum threshold (which I also recieved earlier this month). I did want to do more with the musical instruments .. Woodwind and Brasswind .. but they had financial problems and went into receivership or something like that .. I think they mentioned in an email that they were not going to pay any balances, then again mention that they would .. it was too much Drama for a non-earning thing for me to continue.

After tax season when I am less busy, I think I will go back to promoting product like this over at 1800HART.com/picks/ The-Furniture-Site.com The-Lingerie-Site.com Medieval-Site.com and the Item-Site.com .. but I want to take time to represent companies that offer a much higher commission payout than Dell! Now that I know LINKSHARE (LinkSynergy.com) actually pays .. well, as I said .. it’s just good to know!

* I have upgraded from wordpress version 2.0.0 to wordpress version 2.1

I have successfully upgraded both Battling-Cancer.com blog and Battling-HeartandStroke.com blog simultaneously, without incident.

Although, I should say that I started just before dinner – and went to eat in the middle of the upgrade, then watched “The Amazing Race – All-Stars” before remembering that I was in the middle of TWO separate upgrades!

Wooops.. But, uh .. well they are both up and running now .. because “The Apprentice” was on next! :p

I thought I would just post a quickie note about this .. all that was wrong was the new wordpress version 2.1 structure for categories – they are now together in one table with the post categories and consequently, their ID# gets changed during the update.

For instance .. before, when I would have links for Canada under Category ID #1 ..

Canada

[?php wp_get_links($link_cat->cat_id=1); ?]


The category Id #1 is, in most cases, my general “uncategorized” category number. In Battling-Obesity.com as an example, after the upgrade .. my Canada Links page ID is now …

Canada
[ ?php wp_get_links($link_cat->cat_id=48); ?]


A Pain in the butt .. ? but not a big issue really .. just aggravating that I now should go back to all other 24 sites to see if I need to make changes.

* I have upgraded from wordpress version 2.0.0 to wordpress version 2.1

I have successfully upgraded Battling-Addiction.com blog to the latest wordpress version 2.1

There are a few things that I have to still configure, like the Links page – but, this applies to all of these Battling-Series of blogs that I have updated and didn’t notice before.

I will fix this later in the week .. as this will be my last upgrade for a while .. offline work beckens me.