Caution: Your Hungry Subscribers Might Not Be Getting Fed…

One of the most popular services out there for bloggers is Feedburner for a multitude of reasons, the biggest is the ability to track how many subscribers they have and the ability to offer their feed as an email subscription.

Chances are, if a person has subscribed to your feed, they WANT to hear (or see, rather) what you have to say.  They were interested in your content enough, to take the time to subscribe to your feed for updates on demand.

But some of your subscribers might not be receiving your content.  Unless you’re fortunate enough to have a subscriber base who will email you and let you know that it’s not working, you have no way of knowing that it’s not working.

Your subscribers think that you’re on hiatus or, worse, that you’ve abandoned your blog and if they are anything like me, if they see a blog that’s not updated regularly, they’ll unsubscribe to your feed the next time they clean out their reader.

Please don’t think that you’re exempt.  You’re not.  This could very well be happening to you.  It was happening to me.  And I didn’t even know it.

I had heard from two clients that their feeds weren’t working properly.  Because we just moved all of our hosted sites from the hosting company that must not be named to HostGator, I assumed that was part of the problem.  I uninstalled and reinstalled the FeedBurner plugin and checked the actual feeds but couldn’t find anything wrong with them.  I was baffled.  I didn’t know what the problem was, or how to fix it.

It wasn’t until yesterday, when I received an email from a friend, directing me to her blog that I determined the problem.

Were you aware that Google acquired Feedburner?

No?  Neither was I until yesterday.

And I ONLY knew because I read Connie’s blog post.

Like Connie stated in her post, I never received word from Feedburner that things were changing, but when I went to log into Feedburner, sure enough, I was greeted with this screen.  What’s ironic though is that Google acquired Feedburner in June of 2007.  I guess my question now is why are we now merging and why didn’t anyone email me to tell me that this change was taking place?

(graphic courtesy of SignatureWorx)

When I linked it with my Google account, my feeds were transferred but in the process, they were given a new URL as well.  They are supposed to redirect so that you don’t lose subscribers, however, before taking this action step, the feeds were, as Connie stated, going wild.

I’ve spent the morning fixing the feeds for my blogs, and those that I was aware of on the client front and I’m off to alert those that I know will have the same problem.

So hop to it, go check your feeds.  Make sure that you login to Feedburner and link your feedburner account to a Google account.  Then go and change your feed URLS to the new feed URL.  (Basically, they are adding a 2 to the URL… it will now look like this http://feeds2.feedburner.com/DesperatelySeekingWordPress)

And you should be good to go (and your subscribers will be happy again… )

Until next time…

Filed under announcements | Comments (4)

How to add pictures to your sidebar

This is one of the only areas in which you CAN mess up your website:  TEXT widgets.  Some of you lovely ladies are quite risk friendly and love to play with your websites.  This message is for you:  be careful! For our readers who are scared to touch their blogs for fear of breaking something, this message is for you:  this is one of the ONLY ways you can mess up your blog. 

Using text widgets gives you great  flexibility with your sidebar.  You can punch whatever code in there, or images, or text.  And up it will pop - in your sidebar.  EXCEPT, please be careful with putting code in here.  Unless you are quite familiar with html or php, you can mess up the entire look of your blog.  Approximately 40% of the troubleshooting jobs that I complete, are caused by incomplete code put into a text widget.  I strongly recommend copying and pasting the code that you want in your text widgets.  And here’s how you do that:

1.  Find that cute button or image that you want.  (I’ve used this image before, but really, can it ever be too much?) 

2.  Upload that image to photobucket or another photo hosting service.  For our example, I’ll use Photobucket.  Click on “Share”.  Click on “MySpace”.  Copy the link at the bottom of the screen.  It will look like this:

<a href=”http://s284.photobucket.com/albums/ll40/o2cathy/?action=view&current=reg3.jpg” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/ll40/o2cathy/reg3.jpg” border=”0″ alt=”Photobucket”></a>

3.  Replace the greyed out link above, with the link you want.  Be sure to include “http://”  in your link.  So if this picture was to be linked to the “How to Hire a Gardener” blog, the code would look like this:

<a href=”http://myblog.com/how-to-hire-gardener” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/ll40/o2cathy/reg3.jpg” border=”0″ alt=”Photobucket”></a>

4.  Now paste the above code into a text widget.  You can give it a title if you want:  How to Hire a Gardener.  Save the widget.  Don’t forget to save the sidebar (button at the bottom of the widget list).

That’s it!  You should have one of those cute badges on your sidebar, with a link to the blog or article of your choosing.

Filed under a light brush of code | Comment (1)

Introducing: A New (Again) Hosting Service!

We’ve actually sold hosting for a while to our clients in our packages. You’ve come to us to get a website - and that’s what we provide, from buying your name, moving your site, and makin’ it pretty!

Now, you can host with us separately from any of our packages!  We are using the HostGator servers, and here are some of the awards they’ve won:

Our Basic Package includes:

• 400 mb of storage
• 3000 mb monthly bandwidth
• unlimited subdomains
• unlimited ftp accounts
• cpanel access with x3 theme ability
• 5 databases and phpmyadmin
• email, and
• our fantastic DSW service! 

Basic Pkg Price:  $20/year

Premium Pkg

• unlimited everything.  The only restrictions are 1 gb storage, 30gb bandwidth
• please email to see if we have space for your premium account.

Price:  $48 annually (only $4 per month)

Need More?

We recommend getting a Personal “Baby” account with Host Gator yourself (starting at $7.95/ month).

Filed under announcements | Comment (0)

More options for styling your posts

This is one of the best plugins I’ve run into in a long time: Tinymce Advanced. Now, I’ve no idea what Tinymce is either -except that techy people say “Tinymce” when they are referring to the text editor that I’m writing this post in right now. (I always pronounce it TinyMice - I’ve no idea if this proves my brilliance or ignorance…)

Have you noticed that button at the top of your post editor with all the colors - the one that says “show/hide the kitchen sink”?  The kids (I still can’t believe he’s only 25…)  who run WordPress just don’t understand us women.  It would take a LOT more buttons than THAT to classify as the “kitchen sink”, no?  So, I have the solution! We need more options for our editor!  Like  making lines bigger, changing the font style here and there. You know what I mean?

This plugin: Tinymce Advanced makes it easy!  Just use your new plugin uploader to get the plugin.   I’ll even walk you through it.

1. Log into your admin panels.
2. click the down-arrow on the “Plugins” panel.
3. Click on “Add New”.
4. Type in the “search” box:  ” Tinymce Advanced”.
5. Click on the word “install” on the right hand side of the plugin line.
6. Click the “install now” red button.
7. When wordpress is done doing its thing, click “Activate plugin”.

Note: there will be NO CHANGES until you go to the “Settings” panel, click “Tinymce Advanced”.  In this screen drag the options from the bottom to the top.  If all the buttons don’t fit (if you are using anything smaller than a 15″ screen) you will need to remove some buttons and move them to another line.   Simple - just drag em around with your mouse.  How amazing is that?

ADVANCED red bordered box:  the only thing to change within this box, is the first box.  Check the box that says, “Import the current theme CSS classes.”.

A little extra: The typing screen may be quite small with all those extra buttons now.  If you wish, you can go into the “Settings” panel, “reading” subpanel, and change the first setting - “Size of the post box.”  Play with whatever size you like.  I recommend using 24 to 30 lines.

Filed under Uncategorized, using themes | Comments (4)

Plugins for your Photos

You’ve been to flickr. You’ve been to or used photobucket and youtube. Now, you can incorporate those things into your blog. And you don’t need to use up your hosting space doing it either - this is available for anyone.

Lorelle covers a giant list of plugins in this article overview of editing your photos for the web, uploading them, storing them, and even displaying them with some very cool effects!

I can’t wait to try this out. Currently, I use Zemanta, user-photo, and flickr for my regular day-to-day post writing.

Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (0)

I heart WordPress “people”

You know what makes WordPress different from other “big” companies? The people are real. You can follow Matt Mullenweg and his family around the world through his blog. The boy just turned 25! You don’t even want to KNOW what I was doing when I was 25.

At this conference today there was an Automatic employee Lloyd who took time to answer questions. At a table were two people with “WordPress Help” scrawled on a paper and taped to the front. From my experience today, I can completely understand why everyone likes Mom Summit, and BlogHer and Blissdom Conferences. The only thing that would make this conference better is if it was full of friends and mommies! At Northern Voice 09, they DO, however, have a giant room put aside to accommodate childcare and encourage a childcare- ad hoc organization between parents. How cool is that?

So I do have a point to make here, WordPress brings to the table so much more than software, free software at that. It brings, at least to me, a human, approachable, entrepreneurial aspect. And I can really get behind that!

I got to discuss some of the world’s top designing firms with Jahzel Misner. She’s going to send me links. I got to get some top level help on our server migration from Lloyd at Automattic. And of course, this is a VERY important site for every. single. reader. 8Chocolate: a local chocolate fiend, and reviewer, and blogger of all things chocolate. You’re welcome.

Filed under Happy WordPress-ers, blog platforms | Comments (3)

Announcements…

Some personal stuff - that I hope will benefit you too: I’m going to another blogging conference tomorrow:

Some business stuff:
In an effort to find balance (whatever that is) I’m establishing some office hours!
Monday: until 2PM
Tuesday: until 2PM
Thursday: from 11AM - 4PM
Saturday: until 2PM
For 24 hour services that we offer, including hosting and domain name registration, I will send my cell phone and IM information. I do check emails often throughout the day too. So it is rare that I miss something for more than a few hours. This is, after all, my hobby too!

I love being able to help Moms(and others) be happy bloggers!

Filed under announcements | Comment (0)

There is a serious side to social media - this isn’t it.

Filed under Using Media | Comments (2)

Hey! There’s ANOTHER new version 2.7.1

Yes, and it is completely safe to press that blue link at the top and complete the auto-upgrade.

FIRST - I have one recommendation. Go to the plugin screen,

2 - Select all plugins using the top checkbox

3.  Use the bulk options from the drop down menu to “deactivate” all the plugins.

4.  Then proceed  to click on the “upgrade” link at the top of your admin panels.

5.  Go ahead and select “upgrade automatically”.

6.  That’s it!  Now you can go back to the post you were working on! 

PS - on backing up your blog:  if we have installed wordpress for you, we have installed a database backup plugin that should be emailing you a weekly backup or saving it to the server.

Backup your Contents Folder: The only thing this does NOT back up are your content folders, including your theme and plugins.  If you have a custom theme installed, you really should go to the theme editor, copy the stylesheet, paste it into a plain text document (from Notepad or Crimson Editor or something similar).  Save as style.css - or whatever the title is.  Go back to the editor and start at the top, selecting each php document, copying all the text, and pasting into a text document.   Go through each page that is marked on the right in your Editor.  Then you should have a copy of most of your theme’s documents on your own hard drive now.

The simpler way is to use an ftp client, if you have ftp access.  Download a copy of the entire “contents” folder for safe keeping.  You should rarely be editing any wordpress files outside the Contents Folder.  And if you are, you need to be working for us! 

Happy Friday 13th! 

Filed under announcements, your questions answered | Comment (0)

On Importing your Old Blog’s Links

Learned this about WordPress.Com sites today:
that there is an opml file/script located at http://myblog.wordpress.com/wp-links-opml.php. SOOOO if you want to import a list of links to your brand new self-hosted WordPress installation, you use the Import>Blogroll screen and type in that URL - voila!!
Source: http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/creating-opml-files-of-posts?replies=9

Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (0)