I’ve been cautious about upgrading to the latest wordpress version 2.5 because it breaks my new template and causes some of my favorite plugins to not work. I also don’t like the interface – but, I will get used to it. In the meantime, I have converted only 3 blogs in the HART-Empire Network to wordpress 2.5 until I’m sure everything is working fine. And, in my case – finding the time to figure out some of the benefits of this new upgrade.

The New WordPress Picture Gallery

There is a new Flash Uploader now with wordpress 2.5. In the WRITE screen, there is a little icon where you can upload images, and other media. When you click it, a flash window pops up.

Click the button to browse files on your computer

The nice thing about this, is that if all your pictures are sorted in the same folder on your computer, just hold down the CTRL button and click various files to upload multiple files at once.

Now, after I uploaded all of the pictures, there seemed to be a whole lot of error messages received. I think one of them is directly related to my Pmetrics plugin and I haven’t figured out why I get the others – yet. I just know that the pictures are there. Feel free to add any description to the picture. If you notice the one shown above, I added a description – and it appears on the original site as a caption beneath the picture.

Once you have added all of your descriptions and comments – don’t forget to save all changes! This adds the description permanently and associated with the picture in wordpress.

In the Flash Uploader screen .. click the “Gallery” tab. All the picture thumbnails are there now – and all you have to do is scroll down to the bottom and click “Insert Gallery Into Post” button.

What happens, is that it inserts a one-word code into your wordpress post – (excluding the quotations and space) – looks like above .. (so when I upgrade to the 2.5 version it won’t disappear in this post). The image is from my PetLvr blog – before publishing.

“[” gallery “]”

And Voila!

See this in action over at PetLvr Blog

* I’ve been keeping track of my HART-Empire Network Earnings Online ..

Here is the link: HART-Empire Network Earnings Spreadsheet Document

The earnings are on an “Accrual” basis, where I’m documenting what I’ve earned, but monies will usually come in the following month, or (if ever) when I reach the minimum threshold for release of my earnings for payment. The expenditures are on a “Cash” basis, as I pay something related to my online earnings, I just load up the spreadsheet and modify it.

Summary of Gross Earnings 2007/2008

* January 2007 – $344.61
* February 2007 – $372.37
* March 2007 – $492.41
* April 2007 – $491.85
* May 2007 – $620.99
* June 2007 – $632.47
* July 2007 – $672.66
* August 2007 – $701.78
* September 2007 – $706.09
* October 2007 – $801.12
* November 2007 – $859.20
* December 2007 – $863.36

** Year-To-Date Gross Earnings (Jan-Dec/2007) – $7,558.91
* Average (YTD) $20.71 per day or, $629.91 per month

* January 2008 – $981.88
* February 2008 – $1,076.12
* March 2008 – $1,596.30

** Year-To-Date Gross Earnings (Jan-Mar/2008) – $3,657.47
* Average (YTD) $40.19 per day or, $1,219.16 per month

Reflection

March 2008 was a good month for me .. I think I might finally have extra cash left over in my Paypal account after paying all of the bill! Not bad – up 48% over last month!

* This is cool. If you look at the table below, I am $7.53 SHORT of how much I made two years ago for 2006 .. That’s right! I’ve grossed in 3 months this year what I had grossed in 12 months of revenues online in 2006! And, it’s also about half of what I earned for entire year of 2007! That’s pretty amazing to me. So far – my estimates for April may not be 48% growth again, but I see it being a little higher!! Revenues are growing. I just have to keep up the traffic flow as well.

* I picked up a new media sponsor, but will not be getting paid until 100 days (3-1/2 months) later. I am still looking for something/someone new to sponsor the Battling For Health blogs.

* Sitemeter traffic still shows growth in March 2008 over February 2008.

* I did note one thing though – I was prepared to let about 12 domains lapse this month and did NOT renew them when they because do. Unfortunately, my domain registrar certifies guaranteed renewals and I signed up to do that all last winter – and this month about 9 domains automatically renewed themselves.

I am pleased again that March traffic is still on the rise, overall – in the HART-Empire Network.

I was looking around my sites this week – because I had 8 domains that were coming up for renewal and I had to be sure it was okay to let some lapse, or be sure NOT to make some of the domains lapse.

You see .. if you recall, last September/October I consolidated a lot of my network. I had two hosting ISP’s and consolidated them down to just 1 ISP … and I consolidated two of my “series” of blogs and domains to subdomains … where I had 26 domains before, I now have 2 domains with at least 13 subdomains on each (BattlingForHealth.com and the AndYouWill.com sites)

Now – that’s a lot of domains, and I took shortcuts in creating most of them over a Sunday Afternoon. I will give you a real-live example I fixed today.

And You Will Travel

The current URL for this blog is … travel.AndYouWill.com ..
The old URL for this blog was … AndYouWillTravel.com

the MySQL database was created under the AndYouWillTravel domain (I’ll call it “travel”) and associated with the “AndYouWillTravel.com” domain. However, it can be used with any of my accounts, and that’s what I did. I created a new blog in a subdomain of AndYouWill.com (I’ll call it “andyou”) and just linked the config.php file of “andyou” to the “travel” mysql database. Because that database had lots of references to the “AndYouWillTravel.com” domain and URL, I had setup a 301 redirect .. and nobody would know the difference. You would go on the “AndYou” domain and access the blog which referred to “travel” URL domain, but the 301 would send people back to the “AndYou” domain without them even knowing it.

But – there was a catch. You see, this “travel” MySQL database is associated with that “travel” account which is associated with the domain. If I were to let go of this domain, the association with the MySQL database would be broken, and I would never be able to access that database again on the current configuration blog!

What I had to do, was take a proper backup of the existing blog at this point in time on the old MySQL database associated with the old domain, then create a new database and restore the database and associate it with the new domain/subdomain.

So – I did this yesterday, and it took me about 15 minutes .. as I also had to rename all the source content that linked to the old domain URL. I have the instructions all documented in THIS POST. And, I believe 5 of those 8 domains that were due today has lapsed. No regrets.

My OnLine ToDo List

Well .. Speaking of above .. I have about 15 more blogs to convert .. Most of these blogs relate to the “AndYouWill.com” series .. and I do not want to keep the old domains. I will let them expire. I know for the “BattlingForHealth.com” series of blogs, I have decided that (for now anyway) I am keeping them and not letting them expire. The old domains are too similar to the name of the blog (e.g. Battling-Cancer.com for the Battling Cancer blog) and I think I want to keep that ‘in the family’ … so-to-speak. At least for now.

* #1 – Catch Up And Make Sure All MySQL Databases are Local To Each Domain/Subdomain (takes about 15 minutes each blog, plus checking time)

UPDATE #1 – (Assessment) – After review of all my configurations, it appears that I have 13 MySQL databases to convert still .. 7 on the BattlingForHealth domain and 6 on the AndYouWill domain

The rest of my todo list is something that I’ve been working on for months, over time – but it seems that time is getting scarcer and scarcer and hardly any advancement has been made on my next few tasks ..

* #2 – Finish upgrading all the remaining blogs from WordPress v2.2 to v2.3+ (takes about an hour each blog with proper backups)

* #3 – Finish installing network template on remaining blogs (takes about 2-3 hours per blog, with all right codes and setup e.g. analytics, social sites, google adsense channels, etc)

My goal is to complete this all by March 31st. I have many domains coming up for renewal in April and, that is quite a busy month for me.

* I’ve been keeping track of my HART-Empire Network Earnings Online ..

Here is the link: HART-Empire Network Earnings Spreadsheet Document

The earnings are on an “Accrual” basis, where I’m documenting what I’ve earned, but monies will usually come in the following month, or (if ever) when I reach the minimum threshold for release of my earnings for payment. The expenditures are on a “Cash” basis, as I pay something related to my online earnings, I just load up the spreadsheet and modify it.

Summary of Gross Earnings 2007/2008

* January 2007 – $344.61
* February 2007 – $372.37
* March 2007 – $492.41
* April 2007 – $491.85
* May 2007 – $620.99
* June 2007 – $632.47
* July 2007 – $672.66
* August 2007 – $701.78
* September 2007 – $706.09
* October 2007 – $801.12
* November 2007 – $859.20
* December 2007 – $863.36

** Year-To-Date Gross Earnings (Jan-Dec/2007) – $7,558.91
* Average (YTD) $20.71 per day or, $629.91 per month

* January 2008 – $981.88
* February 2008 – $1,076.12

** Year-To-Date Gross Earnings (Jan-Feb/2008) – $2,058.01
* Average (YTD) $34.30 per day or, $1,029.01 per month

Reflection

February 2008 will be remembered doubly for me

* The first month I broke $1,000 gross revenues. Adsense revenues have only picked up slightly although traffic has been increasing each month.

* The first month my sitemeter overall statistics exceeded 100,000 page views traffic. 100k! WooHoo!

I am pleased again that February traffic is still on the rise, overall – in the HART-Empire Network. There are a few sites that I still am neglecting, as my busy “offline” work is starting to interfere with my time availability. My pre-posting sheets help me visually watch out for things that gets too far out of hand, however .. and – YES – I’m aware that these 100k statistics represents traffic on about 30-50 blog or however many I have currently~ So, it’s not great when you look at the individual stats. I do look at them by the way.

Analysis Of Revenues

I thought I would keep up the side-by-side comparison to see how many months it takes me to exceed 2007 year-to-date revenues 🙂

As I have been saying each and every month so far .. Where is the money?

Analysis of Expenditures

I will not be publicly analyzing my expenditures in 2008, although if you look at the public google document you will be able to see where my profits are shrinking to .. 🙂 And, in February 2008 a little had to do with me catching up and paying my EVDO (laptop PC card hi-speed internet access) 4 months at once. Me bad.

That time of year again … for what seems like a day or two (to me) seems to have somehow mysteriously stretch out to a week – or longer!

The problem with having these “stress release” moments (between jobs, while new coffee pots are brewing, while printing, while multitasking, etc) is that there is not enough time to do the actual work. I surf a little, read a little, socialize a little, and so on and so on .. and then have to get back to work. I completely forget to actually do blogging work!

So – I guess it’s time to start this use spreadsheet again!

* 1800HART.com/stuff/1800HART_preposting_blogging_schedule-WITH_NAMES.xls

By the way – that’s a free excel template from 1800HART.com/blog/ for the taking, if you want it – help yourself. Just delete my own blogs and add your own. Just add to the first date, and the rest increments to the next day. It’s just a simple template.

I have finally signed up to Pubmatic.com .. at least for the beta period .. to test.

I have currently selected only 1 blog to test because I think it is a lot of work to switch the code all around. The blog that I have selected … is 1-8-0-0-H-A-R-T .. and I have only setup my Google Adsense account with Pubmatic. The theory, is that *before* .. I only made $15.34 in adsense in the month of January 2008 on this blog .. and hopefully *after* the test period is over .. it will be – more.

The problem with testing things is, that things need to be tested and worked out. There will probably be a lot of crappy looking ads on 1800HART blog for a while, as Pubmatic is in learning mode .. and it is trying new things automatically. I mean – that’s its job, right? To try things and test things out to maximize the monetization.

Well .. at least I believe that’s what it is supposed to be. So, for now – I will just let it sit on auto-pilot.

Yes.. I remember this post:
Mar/2007 – I have no intention of twittering thank-you very much!

Okay. It’s Feb/2008 and I have resurrected my twitter account “PetLvr” and trying it seriously for at least the month of February 2008. I am using an application called Twhril v0.6 which required me to also install Adobe “AIR” (which I hear can be a memory hog)… but, so far so good.

So – if you feel like watching me virtually “pee” or “eating” or “posting ridiculous stuff” on twitter – feel free to follow me along 🙂 I’ll probably include new posts from around our network as well 🙂

Apparently .. betweem 3:45pm CST and 4:26pm CST our sites were offline today, because we apparently reached 150% of our CPU usage. I wouldn’t have noticed, if it hadn’t been for my alerts from Montastic.com – the free internet monitoring service.

I just set up a whole bunch of alerts and have them email them to my Gmail account when my sites are down. I contacted my host provider – determined what the cause was – and reboot was up shortly.

I highly recommend you try that service out!

Now comes the future questions for the HART-Empire Network … It looks like I will have to be upgrading our RAM on the dedicated server from 2GIG up to 4GIG … but then the question becomes – What next?

* I’ve been keeping track of my HART-Empire Network Earnings Online ..

Here is the link: HART-Empire Network Earnings Spreadsheet Document

The earnings are on an “Accrual” basis, where I’m documenting what I’ve earned, but monies will usually come in the following month, or (if ever) when I reach the minimum threshold for release of my earnings for payment. The expenditures are on a “Cash” basis, as I pay something related to my online earnings, I just load up the spreadsheet and modify it.

Summary of Gross Earnings 2007/2008

* January 2007 – $344.61
* February 2007 – $372.37
* March 2007 – $492.41
* April 2007 – $491.85
* May 2007 – $620.99
* June 2007 – $632.47
* July 2007 – $672.66
* August 2007 – $701.78
* September 2007 – $706.09
* October 2007 – $801.12
* November 2007 – $859.20
* December 2007 – $863.36

** Year-To-Date Gross Earnings (Jan-Dec/2007) – $7,558.91
* Average (YTD) $20.71 per day or, $629.91 per month

* January 2008 – $981.88

** Year-To-Date Gross Earnings (Jan-Jan/2008) – $981.88
* Average (YTD) $31.67 per day or, $981.88 per month

Reflection

A good start for 2008 .. 981.88/863.36=118.52/863.36 = 13.7% increase over December revenues. I thought I would break $1,000 in January but “oh well”. I have found out that my adsense earnings are finally kicking in .. and I really haven’t been promoting the new template except on the “Battling For Health” series of blogs.

I think there is great potential for increase once the template is finally distributed to more sites over the next few months .. starting with the “And You Will” series of blogs.

Analysis Of Revenues

I thought I would keep up the side-by-side comparison to see how many months it takes me to exceed 2007 year-to-date revenues 🙂

As I have been saying each and every month so far .. Where is the money?

Analysis of Expenditures

I will not be publicly analyzing my expenditures in 2008, although if you look at the public google document you will be able to see where my profits are shrinking to .. 🙂

It’s good to see my friend Thord Daniel Hedengren back with a new template and energy on Bloggertalks …

Well, it’s just nice to read interviews about really interesting people once again.. like:

Skellie, a successful freelancer on freelancing

PS:

BloggerTalks.com is more than just interviews in 2008. It’s …

* INTERVIEWS – Talking to bloggers that matter
* THE RAG – Daily news from the Blogosphere
* PAGE TWO – Flip it for some blogging resources