ugh.

Back in February 2011 I moved PetLvr.com/blog/ “blog” and merged that into PetLvr.com “community blog and forum”. Because I’ve been blogging since 2005 and had almost 4,500 posts in the archives of PetLvr + the Community blog … I used a special export plugin and downloaded one month at a time. This assured me all of the posts were complete, as well as the images were moved/merged in tact.

Well .. after I looked at the merge, I had over 6,900 categories and about 8,000 tags. As an example, I had the category “.: Pet Health Care” 589 times in the category list, with slugs ranging from pet-health-care, pet-health-care-1, pet-health-care-2 etc etc to pet-health-care-589.

This has been quite painful, because at the time all I could find was one wordpress plugin that merged categories one at a time … it’s called Category Merge. It works fine, but from March 2011 to October 2011, in my spare time, it has taken me down to about 2,400 categories left to merge. Quite annoying, but hoping no one would notice.

But A New WordPress Plugin Worked Miracles For Me!

It’s a miracle ~

Term Management Tools

Search for “Term Management Tools” in your Add-A-New Plugin feature in your dashboard.

How this works: Got your Posts in your dashboard, and just edit categories like you would normally would, and select the categories you want merged by ticking the box. Then, at the top select from the drop menu “merge” and type in the display name of the category you want (or the same name in my case).

It took me 14 minutes to merge the remaining 2,400 categories into the final 260 or so categories that exist!

Now … if you know about this plugin already .. you’re a lot smarter than I am .. and *geeesh* why didn’t ya tell me about this 8 months ago!?!

You probably already heard that Google started their own URL Shortening Service but, the Google URL Shortener is currently available for Google products only and not for broader consumer use.

I didn’t really get that last part, highlighted above, and didn’t really care. You see, I have my own URL shortening Service, have accounts created and obtaining API for extended statistics at both Bit.ly and cli.gs sites, have preview feature set-up for any tinyURL.com, and my existing sites already have a wide variety of URL shortening services available from plugins activated such as Digg Digg and the like.

HAVE YOU BEEN TO YOUR FEEDBURNER RECENTLY?

I remember setting up a bunch of new blogs back in early October 2009 and noticed that there is no more “PING” series of sites … because the “Pingshot” service just notifies all interested services when my feed changes. Before, I had to select a standard set, plus 5 additional ones and who the heck know which ones were better or not better. Honestly .. I’d rather not know! 😀

* BUT – WHAT IS THIS NEW TAB? “SOCIALIZE” ?

There’s a new tab called “Socialize” that lets you publish to your twitter account – directly from your Feedburner account. You have to first give google authorization (OAuth”) to your twitter account and if you are familiar with twitterfeed.com .. the options are pretty similar. Please see the image below and, of course, check out your own Feedburner account!

By the way .. I use the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin Feedburner Feedsmith Plugin on all my blogs and although I’m not really sure if I need it or not have been using the Full Text Feed plugin that prevents WordPress 2.1+ from adding a “more” link to my website’s feed. So far it ‘ain’t broke my wordpress upgrades to newer versions, so I haven’t stopped using both together.

I AM GIVING THIS A TRYOUT

Currently, I have 93 feeds with my Twitterfeed account .. but, on my new SportsHEN blog (Which will be a front for my five new Olympic Winter Sports Blogs 2010) I have set my feedburner to be submitting my published posts to my newly created twitter.com/SportsHEN account.

This should be interesting to see how this works!

Click on the image to see a bigger screen image view)



View at EasyCaptures.com

Have you tried the Google URL Shortener with your Feedburner account yet?

In December 2009, browsing the Problogger.Community (to which I am a member) forums, I saw Simon Rogers – The Teenage Blogger, requested if anybody “got spare ad space“. At that time, I was debating whether I should convert this blog to Thesis template, or do something a little different with this blog. I mean, I like this template!

So what I thought I would do … is replace my header image that I used to have ….

… and replace it with seven 125×125 banner ads! (see above top below navigation)

Well .. I offered two spots as prizes … for 3 months .. and the winners were announced December 18, 2009 and their banners now appear in my header for 90 days. I am also offering them a permanent link here by this congratulatory post!

Congratulations Teenius Contest Winners

– SHIRLEY’S ZONE – Shirley is a 17 year old blogger, internet entrepreneur and student from Ghana and lives in the second capitol town of Ghana, Kumasi. Shirley is passionate about helping people improve their lives and helping them live a happy life through motivation, inspiration, teaching them about blogging, entrepreneurship, money, and life as a whole.

INNOVATE YOURSELF – Where all the cool stuff happens … Deepika is interested in blogging and very eager in learning new things and sharing information. If you are a blogger without a blog and wish to guest post internet, or recent technologies .. please consider getting in touch with Deepika.

TEENIUS – Make Money With A Teenager – Simon Rogers is a teenager from the UK, just getting ready to start college to study Law, Business, Computing and one other subject. It was Simon’s idea for this contest of giving away $800 worth of free advertising – supplied by bloggers like myself and other great sites – and this is just one of the many simple blogging tips and tricks you will find over at Teenius to help bring awareness and traffic to your site!

So check out all of these sites and Congrats again to the winners!

I have just activated the Backtype Connect wordpress plugin on this blog. What I find interesting, is that I have been using this on my PetLvr blog for about two weeks now, and it really does find other social media comments about the blog post! This includes people tweeting your posts, mentions on friendfeed, comments on digg and reddit – etc – and then it integrates them with your regular comments!

People seem to read more, or want to comment more – when they see other people commenting already.

With twitter, I am using SocialOomph.com (formerly known as TweetLater.com) to email 100% mentions of my @PetLvr and other twitter names .. but, sometimes there are kind tweeples out there that RETWEET my content, but don’t have space or time to include the @PetLvr in their tweet – just the shortened URL. Backtype Connect finds these social comments and adds them to my blog and helps me recognize WHO my tweeting friends so I can praise them and add them to my “Super Tweeters” list (and #fridayfollows etc)

Just go to your plugins in your dashboard, ‘Add New’ and search for “Backtype Connect” and install.

And, speaking of which .. if you are unfamiliar with how Backtype Connect works .. go check it out and input your blog URL or one of your posts that you know has been RT’ed.

Backtype Connect Features

* Display comments from other blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit, and more
* You can configure exactly what sources you want to display related conversations from
* Summarize, display comments inline, or append them to the end of your comments section
* Your readers can even respond to the comments BackType Connect displays

Currently, we support conversations from:

* Twitter – tweets that link your posts
* FriendFeed – on the entries for your posts
* Digg – on the submissions for your posts
* Reddit – on the submissions for your posts
* Hacker News – on the submissions for your posts
* Other blogs – whenever someone links one of your posts

Installation

Note: It is recommended that you backup your database before installing

Go ahead and RETWEET this post from the TweetMeme button at the top right of this post and then come back, hit refresh and see your comment RT show up!

I have been switching most of my blogs away from the YARP or WordPress Related Plugins or other related posts/pages plugins that are available to WordPress users .. and using the LinkWithin Widget. I figured that since in the past 3 days I have recommended this widget about 5 times .. I would document it here in the HART-Empire blog.

This is really easy to use. Go to the LinkWithinsite, setup your domain, download the plugin, upload the plugin and activate it. That’s it!

You will see it at the bottom of each post now .. I have set it to show up 4 random pictorial thumbnails and related posts on this template.

According to LinkWithin’s FAQ Page, related stories are chosen based on several factors, including title, tags, and content. If you have a lot of content, it may appear that the posts are not that related, but I have noticed on PetLvr blog that as time progress, the related posts in the archived posts are becoming more related to the post each and every day. Quite frankly, I probably couldn’t care less if it was just a random post so people can just surf my archives after reading the content actually ;D but related posts are nice when people come via the search engines and are trying to actually find information, rather than just come to surf the site.

Also, (speaking of my PetLvr site), I occasionally check out my archived posts and if I see a related LinkWithin suggestion without an image (because there is no image on the original post to create a thumbnail) then I will edit it and add something using my Insights plugin!

From: LinkWithin.com Pages ….

Show Related Stories Under Each Post!

LinkWithin is a blog widget that appears under each post, linking to related stories from your blog archive. Don’t Let Your Past Stories Go to Waste!

We retrieve and index all stories from your blog archive, not just recent stories, making them accessible to new or casual readers of your blog who would not otherwise encounter them. Increase Pageviews, Keep Readers Engaged

The widget links to stories that are relevant and interesting to readers of a particular post, keeping them engaged with your blog, and increasing your traffic.
Elegant, Unobtrusive Design

Our widget is minimally styled and blends in with your site design. Free and Easy to Install

The widget is free and ad-free. It takes a minute to get the widget up and running on your blog, no signup required!

FYI .. you don’t have to be married to it – Although I have been switching my related post plugins to the LinkWithin widget on my other blogs, I decided to leave BOTH the LinkWithin widget active along with the WordPress Related Post plugin to see if there are any issues having more than one related type of plugin activated at the same time!

Check it out! What do you think?

I noticed this today, when I was checking out my whos amung us stats .. and thought I would find out by doing!

I have now added TYNT codes to my PetLvr and BattlingForHealth sites, and will probably add it to all my sites by the end of the day, because it’s quite easy to do this:

1) Enter Domain
2) Copy and paste the code just before the [/body] in the footer

Note! Don’t forget to activate the free PRO account, while it’s free to test it out!

What Is TYNT?

Insight into the “copy and paste” phenomenon.

Your content is likely copied far more than you realize.

Depending on the site, up to 6% of page loads results in a user copying content. While this may not sound like much, think of it this way: on a site that has 20 million page views per month, content is copied over one million times during any given month. That’s a lot. How do we know this? Tynt Insight is currently running on hundreds of thousands of web sites and monitors billions of page loads per month.

Since the average content copy is between 200 and 300 words, even a site with only 100,000 page views would have over 3 million words leave the site via copy each month (not to mention all the images!) That’s also a lot.
Why do people copy content?

Tynt Insight anonymously detects when content is copied from your site, and can help determine what they are doing with it. We find that most people copy content innocently because they are your fans. They copy content to either preserve it for themselves or to share it. Half of copied content is still shared by email because it is still the easiest and most familiar way to share content.

Memo – I copied and pasted the above paragraph from their website and when people do that .. it automatically adds the “read more” URL below this blockquote whenever anybody pastes what they just copied!

Read more: Tynt Insight » Why Tynt Insight? www1.tynt.com/why-tynt-insight#ixzz0X9pN5fhg

Don’t Take My Word For It – Watch The Video

I’ve decided to add TweetMeme’s “Retweet Button” to all my sites. I am a fan of twitter, and although I have added the Wp-To-Twitter wordpress plugin which, included with other social media buttons appears at the bottom of each of my posts, I think this is complimentary. I remember looking at this plugin early on, and didn’t want anything to do with it because I never saw the RT’s .. it was all going to @tweetmeme, but they changed that. Also, I was receiving a conflicting cron error message with my other twitter plugins (tweet this and wp-to-twitter) so I assumed having more than one twitter plugin will always conflict. This one doesn’t conflict!

The tweetmeme button shows the number of retweets of the post, so I can see how many people LUV the post 😀 .. plus I have configured it to mention @PetLvr (me!) so I know our posts have been retweeted. It’s easy to install – just like all wordpress plugins .. go into your dashboard, click Plugins, then click Add New .. and search for “Tweetmeme” .. and install, then activate. Simple 😀

A few things of note ..

1)

When I activated the plugin for the first time, the plugin appeared next to every post on the front page. Personally, I think that is overkill, because I am using the “Evermore” plugin to show only a few paragraphs of each post with the [more] link, and the button seemed to overwhelm the front page!

So – this is what I did. I’ve edited the single.php page (or appropriate file where the single post is being displayed) and placed the following code .. just before the content is displayed:


< ?php if (function_exists('tweetmeme')) echo tweetmeme(); ?>
< ?php the_content(); ?>


In the Tweetmeme settings, I ticked “Manual” instead of automatically placing the icon at the top or bottom of the post because I manually added the code to the template. I also added the RT @PetLvr so I receive notice everytime someone retweets one of our posts!

2)

Usually, when people RT one of my posts .. I tend to include that person in my #followfriday posts on twitter! 😀 and, naturally we will become bestest of best friends!

Okay .. maybe “sexy” is a little overdoing it – but, I’ve been blogging since May 2005 and have many blogs and I like to think that I have some experience in selecting the right wordpress plugins for my blogs. Plugins are like the backbbone of your blog, and just like your theme .. determines the functionality and look of your blog. I thought I would share all of the major plugins that I am using around my network of sites.

Here’s how I keep track of all my plugins .. On my local hard drive, I have a folder something like this:
c:\2009-Latest-Wordpress

Whenever I find a plugin I like, I copy it into a folder such as this:
c:\2009-Latest-Wordpress\plugins\

If there are specific plugins – e.g. – my translator plugin configured for the PetLvr blog only .. I would do something like this:
c:\2009-Latest-Wordpress\special\petlvr\plugins\

How To Install WordPress Plugins

If you see something you like, I have linked the name of the wordpress plugin to its author page. Although, I recommend that you try to obtain it through the WordPress Plugin Directory or better yet .. scroll down to the bottom of your PLUGINS page in your dashboard, and use the built-in Plugin Browser/Installer functionality link … you just type the name of the plugin into the search field, and install. This way .. when plugins are outdated or, there is a new version available – you will know because in wordpress, there will be a message below the plugin to warn you. It is very possible that plugins are not updated by the author on major development versions, and if the plugin is private, paid or not in the WordPress Plugin Directory, you many never know if your plugin is out of date or not.

Here They Are – In Alphabetical Order

* AccessQontrol – To make your site private, or not…

* Akismet – Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it.

* All in One SEO Pack – Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog.

* Angsuman’s Translator Plugin Gold – This is NOT a FREE plugin. Translator Plugin Gold translates your blog dynamically to forty-one additional languages – German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Arabic, Dutch, Greek, Russian, Norwegian, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hungarian, Icelandic, Latin American Spanish, Filipino, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Slovenian, Swedish, Welsh, Turkish, Latin. Catalan, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithunian, Slovak, Ukranian, Vietnamese. We support blogs written in forty-two different languages – (English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Arabic, Dutch, Greek, Russian, Norwegian, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hungarian, Icelandic, Latin American Spanish, Filipino, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Slovenian, Swedish, Welsh, Turkish, Latin. Catalan, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithunian, Slovak, Ukranian, Vietnamese) as the base language of the blog. This is an extremely versatile and easy to use tool to instantly increase your pages by a factor of forty-one, all SEO optimized, to make your blog accessible to a much wider audience. The translated pages can be bookmarked for future use.

* Audio player – Highly configurable single track mp3 player.

* Auto-hyperlink URLs – Auto-hyperlink text URLs in post content and comment text to the URL they reference. Does NOT try to hyperlink already hyperlinked URLs. Improves WordPress’s default make_clickable function, along with adding some configuration options.

* Auto Social Poster Gold (aff) – Increasing Your Blog’s Traffic and Authority .. Download a selection of WordPress plugins!

* Bad Behavior – Deny automated spambots access to your PHP-based Web site.

* Clean Archives Reloaded – A slick, Javascript-enhanced post archive list generator for WordPress 2.5+

* Contact Form 7 – Just another contact form plugin. Simple but flexible.

* CommentLuv – Plugin to show a link to the last post from the commenters blog by parsing the feed at their given URL when they leave a comment. Rewards your readers and encourage more comments.

* CyStat – Statistik-Plugin

* Datafeedr (aff) – This is NOT a FREE plugin. You can only get this plugin from Datafeedr.com as part of a Datafeedr.com membership. Never Before Has It Been This Simple To Build Your Own WordPress Affiliate Datafeed Store!

* Datafeedr Random Ads Plugin – The Datafeedr Random Ads plugin is a free plugin which allows you to simply and easily show random ads anywhere in your template files or using widgets.

* Evermore – Abbreviate all posts when viewed on multiple post pages. This makes all posts behave as if there is a “< !–more–>” at an appropriate spot inside the content.

* Exec-PHP – Executes < ?php ?> code in your posts, pages and text widgets.

* Featured Content Gallery – Used to create a customizable rotating image gallery anywhere within your WordPress site.

* FeedBurner FeedSmith – Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. By FeedBurner.

* Full Text Feed – Prevents WordPress 2.1+ from adding a more link to your website’s feed.

* Get Recent Comments – Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar.

* Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.

* Insights – Insights allows you to quickly search and insert information (links, images, videos, maps, news..) into your blog posts.

* Lucia’sLinkLove – Where a commenter has commented at least some number of timeslinks are made “dofollow”. User interface permits blogger to do follow author link or links inside comments.

* OIOpublisher Direct 2.0 (aff) – Control your Ad Space with OIOpublisher.

* phpBay Pro Plugin for WordPress (aff) – This is NOT a FREE plugin. Add eBay auction listings to your WordPress posts.

* Random Redirect – Allows you to create a link to yourblog.example.com/?random which will redirect someone to a random post on your blog, in a StumbleUpon-like fashion.

* Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form – This powerful yet easy-to-install contact form features exceptional accessibility and usability while still providing extensive anti-spam and anti-exploit security features. A marriage of communication and peace-of-mind.

* Sensitive Tag Cloud – This wordpress plugin provides a highly configurable tagcloud that shows tags depending of the current context.

* Simple Forum – Simple:Press is a feature rich forum plugin for WordPress. It fully integrates into your WP based site utilising the same user records and database and displaying on a single WP page. It is fully customisable and comes with a number of skins and sets of icons to get your started. Current users have shown it to be fully scaleable whether your site membership numbers the tens or the thousands.

* StatPress – Real time stats for your blog

* Supr by StumbleUpon – Su.pr is the only URL shortener that gets you more traffic and save time posting to Twitter, Facebook and StumbleUpon.

* Theme Test Drive – Safely test drive any theme while visitors are using the default one. Includes instant theme preview via thumbnail.

* Tweet This – Adds a “Tweet This Post” link to every post and page. Shortens URLs in advance through Th8.us, eating up only 19 of 140 characters.

* Visual Recent Posts – Visually represents your most recent posts by extracting the first image from each post and displaying it along with the post title and excerpt.

* Where did they go from here – Show “Readers who viewed this page, also viewed” links on your page. Much like Amazon.com’s product pages.

* Whydowork Adsense – Insert Adsense code in your pages without modifying the template. Show different ads for articles older than 7 days (or as old as you wish).

* WordPress Database Backup – On-demand backup of your WordPress database.

* WordPress Video Plugin – (for wpMU) – A filter for WordPress that displays videos from myvideo.de, youtube, google video, Brightcove, Aniboom, 123video.nl, MyspaceTV, Yahoo! Video, Veoh, Wandeo, Glumbert, Gametrailers, Gamevideos, LiveLeak, sevenload.de, clipfish.de, break.com, Metacafe, dailymotion.com, Vimeo, videotube, blip.tv, revver, IFILM, Tu.tv, grouper, Cellfish.com, Sumo.tv, Last.fm, Vsocial, teachertube, SlideShare, Jumpcut, MSN, GoalVideoz, Guba, wat.tv, Smotri.Com..and many more.

* WP Admin Bar Reloaded – Adds a small admin bar to the top of every page.

* WP-Cumulus – Flash based Tag Cloud for WordPress

* WP to Twitter – Updates Twitter when you create a new blog post or add to your blogroll using Cli.gs. With a Cli.gs API key, creates a clig in your Cli.gs account with the name of your post as the title.

* WP-PostRatings – Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.

* WP-Print – Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page.

* WP-RSSImport – Import and display Feeds in your blog.

* WP-SpamFree – An extremely powerful anti-spam plugin that virtually eliminates comment spam. Finally, you can enjoy a spam-free WordPress blog! Includes spam-free contact form feature as well.

* WP Super Cache – Very fast caching plugin for WordPress.

Hope you enjoyed this list. If you have any useful wordpress plugins activated in your blog – feel free to list it below in the comments, with a brief description what its purpose is, and how you think it helps with the running of your blog!

Thank-You. // HART

* This is a looooong post! If you prefer to just read the “Short Version” .. click HERE!

I used to have two ISP servers. ISP#1 was a super-mega account, downgraded a few notches to just a mega account. ISP#2 was a reseller account that I used to create and build up sites in the HART-Empire Network. I found both accounts at a reasonably managed level to pay and service was spectacular and I never had any downtime, that I can think of .. or any server crashes or problems. Support and service was exceptional.

But – around the middle of May 2007 .. I found out that I had already exceeded my monthly alotment of bandwidth on the ISP#1 account, and perhaps it was time to upgrade. I decided to slow down on my postings around the network, but by the end of the month I had exceeded my bandwidth limits by over 18 GIG traffic. My ISP#1 wanted me to upgrade to a larger account. However, the bandwidth limits on this larger account would have been that I would have exceeded my bandwidth alotment by 3 GIG if it remained the same. It was obviously not enough.

Dollar-wise .. combining the two servers .. I was paying about $800+taxes per year to host all of my sites. A few years earlier, it was about $960+taxes per year. In June, I was charged $180 for the excess bandwidth usage and if I were to upgrade to the plan that was suggested to me, the annual cost for my ISP#1 would have been about $2,200+taxes (CDN).. plus, $420 USD for my ISP#2.

THAT’s What Prompted Me To Move Servers .. Hosting Fees – I admit that

Overall, if you translate that into a monthly fee, it probably would equate to about $240/month USD equivalent. But, that seemed a lot to me, and in both cases for my ISP#1 and ISP#2 .. the prices were actually discounted, assuming I would pay it in advance in one lump annual sum. That’s a lot to cough up at once – even with planning – and my online revenues were just being eaten (or rather reinvested) back into financing the growth of the HART-Empire Network.

I ended up with two choices of ISP’s to move to:

(1) GLOBAT.com – I actually hosted my curling blog on this server, and by far (in my own humble opinion), this is the best server hosting deal and cheapest price with respect to both hard drive space and bandwidth that is out there. But, I don’t think it would be good enough for a multitude of sites, except perhaps a small handful.

(2) MIDPHASE.com – I personally have never used them, but there are big names out there from my Bloglines and daily reads that I respect and trust their opinions, and in addition to that – all stories, reviews, and research seemed to indicate that this is a reliable company.

I selected MidPhase as my choice for the new server

But, you probably know that already – as I documented earlier … I closed both of my ISP’s and transferred everything into a new Virtual Private Server (VPS). If you are unfamiliar with how hosting plans work, I just quadrupled the length of this post and added some extra information about hosting that I pulled from Wikipedia .. BELOW!

PS: Virtual Private Servers are also shared servers, but in my case and VPS-PRO account that I selected, the bandwidth is unmetered. Unmetered bandwidth appealed to me because it’s unlimited. On my old ISP#2 reseller account, I had to allocate limits for bandwidth on each account. However, if an account got stumbled upon or dugg (which never happened btw – but could have) I could reallocate bandwidth limits among accounts. On this VPS Server, with unmetered traffic, the only limitation is the System resources that it uses. Blogging and accessing MySQL databases access a lot of CPU resources, and my limit of resources available on my VPS is 25% of total available resources.

PPSS: midPhase.com is where the shared hosting is, and Autica.com is where the VPS and dedicated server hosting is. There are a few other sites that are used by them as well.

I have a lot of blogs in my network and domains with non-blog sites .. and bottom line is that when I hit or reach the maximum allowed CPU or System Resources, for server starts to kill systems and resources to keep the server active. Unfortunately for me, this happened to me last Monday July 16, 2007. It was unfortunate for me, because I couldn’t figure out how to reboot the system .. and some of the killed systems and resources ceased access to all my online sites, and emails.

I took only a few screenshots of resources – which, is at a point in time and not a dynamic and changing resource graph. This means that although I might have reached a maximum resource usage, I might refresh 20 seconds later and the usage may be 0%. It’s all relative. Anyway, feel free to click on the thumbnails below, and just hit your BACK key to return to this post.

VPS Resources – Clean Slate – Before I transferred everything over – June 8, 2007

VPS Resources – June 26, 2007

VPS Resources – June 29, 2007

VPS Resources – July 23, 2007

SHORT VERSION

That last screenshot was taken about 2 hours ago .. Today I decided to upgrade from a Virtual Private Server Pro account to a Dedicated Server Pro. The schedule move from the Virtual Private Server to the Dedicated server will take place August 1, 2007 – *knock on wood* – if everything goes according to plan.

~~~~~
HOSTING INFO

Shared Web Hosting Service

A shared web hosting service or virtual hosting service is a form of web hosting service where more than one instance of the same web server is hosted on a single physical server. This is generally the most economical option for hosting as many people share the overall cost of server maintenance. – Wikipedia

Reseller Web Hosting Service

Reseller hosting is a form of web hosting wherein the account owner has the ability to use his/her allotted hard drive space and bandwidth to host websites on behalf of third parties. The typical web hosting reseller might be a web design firm, web developer or systems integrator who offers web hosting as an add-on service. Reseller hosting is also an inexpensive way for web hosting entrepreneurs to start a company. Most reseller hosting plans allow resellers to create their own service plans and choose their own pricing structure. In many cases, resellers are able to establish their own branding via customized control panels and name servers. – Wikipedia

Virtual Private Server

A virtual private server (also referred to as VPS or virtual server, and abbreviated VPS or VDS) is a method of partitioning a physical server computer into multiple servers that each has the appearance and capabilities of running on its own dedicated machine. Each virtual server can run its own full-fledged operating system, and each server can be independently rebooted. – Wikipedia

Dedicated Server

A dedicated hosting service, dedicated server, or managed hosting service is a type of Internet hosting where the client leases an entire server not shared with anyone. This is more flexible than shared hosting, as organizations have full control over the server(s), including choice of operating system, hardware, etc. Server administration can usually be provided by the hosting company as an add-on service. In some cases a dedicated server can offer less overhead and a larger return on investment. Dedicated servers are most often housed in data centers, similar to colocation facilities, providing redundant power sources and HVAC systems. In contrast to colocation, the server hardware is owned by the provider and in some cases they will provide support for your operating system or applications. – Wikipedia

Managed Server versus Non-Managed Server

Dedicated hosting server providers define their level of management based on the services they provide. In comparison, fully managed could equal self managed from provider to provider.

Note: The provider will continue to maintain security on the network regardless of support level.

– Wikipedia

Are you on MyBlogLog? As You may have noticed .. So am I !

HART aka PetLvr
aka HART (1-800-HART)
on MyBlogLog!

This is not a tutorial for MyBlogLog or how to use MyBlogLog or the social benefits of using MyBlogLog .. it is just a detailed summary of how I personally use the service. Feel free to click the above link below my caricature and be transported to my profile in MyBlogLog.

MyBlogLog – My Profile

When you first see my profile, it says that I’ve been a member since November 10, 2006 .. but that’s not true. I’ve been a member since July 28, 2005 .. when I first heard about it on the Problogger site. On July 31, 2005 my “pro” trial was downgraded to the “basic” version .. and although I still maintained all of the required code in my headers of my main two blogs, PetLvr and 1800HART .. I pretty much forgot all about it. It was on November 10, 2006 that I received an email from “Eric Marcoullier, one of MyBlogLog’s founders” to personally thank me for joining the site. I blogged about it in this blog, as the November 11, 2006 Quickie and even noticed I already had 22 communities!

But .. now what?

So – what I have been doing is adding sites that I own and author, but excluding the “shopping type” of sites of mine .. like HART’s Picks, the Medieval Site .. etc etc. because at that time .. I didn’t really know if that was ‘socially acceptable’. At this very moment, I have 16 sites listed out of the 42 blogs/32 domains in my sidebar .. including 1-800-HART on MySpace!

MyBlogLog – My Sidebar

For authors of MyBlogLog .. you can edit your site and put up a picture. Most of the times .. it recognizes your site and pulls in a screenshot – but, I’ve had to upload screenshots on 6 of the blogs for some reason – all of them from the Battling Series. There must be something wrong with the template. When I create or rather .. ADD my site to my author profile, I am required to place code in my template .. just after the BODY tag, often in the header.php file. What this is for – is when someone actually is in MyBlogLog profile and clicks on any of the 16 sites .. at the bottom right side are the top 5 links that people click on .. in my blog). Also to the right side in my profile for each blog .. is the Widget of the top 5 recent readers that have actually visited my blog – in person (not via RSS). I modified it to have 10 people included, and some silly heading usually .. and placed the code in my sidebars.

So .. on my sites .. I can see you – if you have your own MyBlogLog profile – which, by the way – you don’t need to have a website you know .. you can create yourself and upload your image and also enjoy the MyBlogLog experience.

What I do everytime I view my own sites .. are to right click on the names of every viewer and open it into a new window. I do this, and afterwards press refresh to see if there are any new faces .. Unfortunately, I’m not that popular 🙁 and sometimes I see the same faces for a few days at a time. But that’s okay!

What I do with Every Reader That I see On My Blogs

Now .. don’t get creeped out by this – but, what I do after I right click and open your “face” into another tabbed window .. is to look at all of your sites and join each community setup for each of your blogs. While I am doing this, I will click on your link and visit your blog .. for two reasons. Firstly, to get my face in your sidebar and hopefully bring new traffic to my own profile and blogs .. and secondly to look around .. see what your blog is about .. and see if I should be adding it to my BlogLines .. and you know what? I hardly ever remove feeds from my Bloglines!

Why am I doing this? Here’s my reason: To see if you are a new reader or not. I can look at all the stats and all the refers scripts that I have .. but when I right click your face into a new window and see your own MyBlogLog profile .. it will either say “Join Community” or “Leave Community”. It is this way that I know if you’ve been to my site before.

By the way .. the above thing, with the right clickie thing from my own blogs .. is usually when I’m out blogging and in the sites for a reason. Most of the time I first check out the new readers directly from my profile, by clicking on each authored blog and see if there are any new faces. If there are, I might go to the actual website itself to see the full 10 people instead of the last 5. It’s much faster to click and go back etc.

What I do when I go to my own MyBlogLog profile?

As I mentioned earlier .. I join communities. But some other people add contacts instead. I don’t really do that .. but, I will accept any request to be a contact and add that person back. When someone does this – I get a notice via email .. so it’s easy. From now on, I should say that I will also join your communities and check over your site.

But what I’ve been noticing is that .. for some of the people who’s communities that I’ve joined .. they have come back and added me as a contact as well, or instead of joinin my communities or both. When this happens, I do NOT get an email. Instead, I see this in MyBlogLog profile .. in between the Family, Friends and Contacts section and My Profile section. I don’t have any at the moment of writing, but it says something like “admirers” or something. These people have added me as a contact and I feel it’s perfectly okay to add them back as a contact and join their communities – if I haven’t done so already.

MyBlogLog – Other People

This is one of the features that I like best, when I’ve got a little time and surf. Sometimes it is sidebars of people, and other times its in these sections of MyBlogLog profile … and these 3 sections are invaluable for me. The first section, shows me people who have viewed my profile. I’m not sure if they actually have been to any of my sites .. but these people are the ones that must have seen that I do have a bunch of sites, and potential readers. So I join their communities 🙂

The second section has two great links .. one to View All Of My Communities (at time of writing, I’ve joined 190 communities) .. and New Neighbors from My Communities. The new neighbors are people who may or may not know of me, but have joined a community that I have joined. If they looked .. they might have seen my caricature in that other community. I’ve only begun to start surfing the “View All Neighbors” link just recently, in the last 2 weeks. Out of curiousity, I seem to be glued to unusual faces .. like beautiful women with nicknames like Mark, Alvin, Alex etc .. (obviously they are just trying to promote their blog and get people to look at them) .. or of faces that I normally see practically in the sidebars of regulars that I myself go to as a reader. Sometimes I might just work in an “x” across the page, or ones with non-faces. The key goal is that I will visit their website or blog as well – and hope that they too have a widget in their sidebar, see my face .. and come see my sites as well. As well as I am hoping to find new and interesting sites for my bloglines.

On the weekends, I have been going back to the communities that I have joined and just looking around at the faces and reading comments. If I was on the ball and had more time, I would be surfing every face in the same communities that I have.

MyBlogLog – Comments

Uugggh .. can you say .. awkward? If people come to my profile And leave me a message, it stays on my profile page. If I reply to the poster .. my comment goes to their profile. If I was an unrelated reader .. some of these comments and conversations seems senseless, because they are. One side of the conversation is on my blog, and the other half is on the other person’s blog. If someone leaves me a message on my profile, and instead of replying back to the reader .. I could just leave myself a comment and the conversation would “look” better. But, the original commentor will not get a notice that I responded and I’m more afraid how that would look.

So .. as a general guide .. that I myself am following (and hope others catch on too) .. let’s keep the conversations off the profile, and into the communities!

Finally, we get to the third section .. for Family, Friends, and Contacts. These are not just the random readers (which could be search engine related) .. these are people that I know and know me .. that have actually asked me to be their contact in MyBlogLog. I try to make it a point to not just browse their blogs or communities .. but really take a closer look at some of the posts and perhaps even join in the conversation.

MyBlogLog – A Few Things You Might Not Have known

In MyBlogLog profile, beneath my caricature face, you can click links to see view PICS. Here, I can manually upload pictures that I want people to see and is public viewing. I’ve added 2 pictures .. one of all my pets in one pictures on the bed .. it’s like they all have radioactive eyes .. and another is the caricature I used to create medieval flags as a giveaway at our Medieval Wedding on August 31, 2002

I never really uploaded a lot of Flickr pics myself, as I mostly upload them on my blogs themselves. However, I enabled MyBlogLog to access my Flickr account and show everybody any recent pictures that I might have taken. Feel free to “blog this” (if you do that sort of thing). There’s not many anyways. Some people who don’t have blogs might appreciate this more!

In the same section that MyBlogLog users can upload pictures, people can edit their profile. At the bottom, there is an “Automatic Joining” of communities after so-many visits. For myself, I left the default at 10 visits (the shortest) .. but this can be up to 100 visits I believe. I suppose that’s how I got the 22 communities first mentioned back on November 10, 2006 from my “Contact” Eric.

MyBlogLog – Closing Thoughts

I hope – that when people see my caricature .. or the word PetLvr .. or my name as HART (1-800-HART) .. they think of me, and all have the same opinion. I am who I am .. I hope it’s in a favorable light.