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I might be looking for a new web host

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I’ve been starting to think about moving my sites to a new webhost. I don’t really want to move, but over the last few months my sites have had a few CPU memory overuse errors that have resulted in my sites being shut down for a few hours and causing me to scramble to try to figure out what wordpress plugin might be causing the problem or what else might be the cause. It’s a pain.

The only saving grace is that with the company that I currently host with they only shut down the affected domain … not every single domain that I own in my account like other companies that I’ve hosted with in the past. That’s helpful.

It might simply be time for me to upgrade my hosting to VPS or to dedicated hosting. I can do that with my current host but in the mean time, while I’ve been holding my breath and crossing my fingers that no more problems occur .. I’ve reading things like this bluehost review so that I can have a new webhost picked out if I do decide I need to move my websites. You know, just in case I need to do it quickly.

Does anyone have some webhosting suggestions?





Our websites should be loading faster now

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In my last post I mentioned that I’ve been spending quite a bit of time this week getting our blogs up to date. I forgot to mention that I also installed a new plugin that should make this page load a little bit faster.

It’s WP Super Cache. I did have an old cache plugin that I’d been using for years, but Super cache allows me to gzip the blog which in turn should really make it load faster. Now, gzip can be a little hard on some shared servers, so I didn’t enable it on all of our blogs (remember we have 17!), but rather I only enabled it on our blogs that get more than 100 page views a day.

I wanted to make my sites faster for my visitors, and I also wanted to make them load faster for Google as it’s rumored that page load speed might be a factor in search engine rankings in the near future. I used a free seo tool or two to check the load speed of a few of our sites before and after enabling super Cache gzip and wow … the pages load a heck of a lot faster!

Do you ever work on your websites to make them load faster for your visitors?

It takes a lot of time to update all our blogs!

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I guess it’s been a little while since I last posted! I’ve been so busy lately with appointments and getting this and all our other blogs up to date!

I can’t believe how much I hate updating the version of WordPress each time it updates as well as all the plugins that update following a major WP version release. Not to mention the plugins that still work, but that for some reason I can’t access from the admin area without getting a “you don’t have permission to access this page” message. LOL So I’ve also been looking for WP plugins to replace the ones I can’t access anymore.

I think I’d rather be reading about adult acne treatments than spending two days or so in a row updating our 17 blogs!

I shouldn’t complain. It’s a lot easier to update all of our blogs now that WordPress has a built in updater, but still it takes time … time I don’t have.

Do you dislike having to update your blog whenever new releases come out?

Busy weekend updating 16 WP blogs!

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You know what I did this weekend?  I updated 116 blogs to either WP version 2.6.1 or the latest version 2.6.2.  That was a huge task!

Luckily I was able to do half of them using my C-panel Fantastico section – those were the blogs that were only updated to 2.6.1 and the rest I updated by using the WordPress Automatic Update plugin.  I used the plugin for the first time … otherwise my updates would have all been manual updates.  Ugh … that would have taken even longer.

Unfortunately I’ve discovered a small problem or two. The blogs that I updated using the Automatic update plugin won’t go into the new Turbo mode using Google Gears. After reading the WordPress.org forums it seems that the update plugin doesn’t update all of the files so I might have a few missing. So it looks like I’ll have to manually update anyway.

I also discovered that one of the blogs that I used the autoupdate plugin on has a widget problem. The site looks fine from the front end, but when I try to edit the widgets in the right column I can only see a few of the widgets. There’s an error message that I’m missing one of the files that one of the codes i have in a text widget calls for (the file is not missing BTW – it’s where it should be).  I can’t see any of the widgets below the one that WP thinks has an error in it.

So I don’t know if that’s an error caused by using the Automatic Upgrade Plugin – if it is, it will soon be corrected when I manually update the iste, or if it’s a problem with either the theme that I’m using and or WP 2.6.2 itself.

I hope that I can fix the problem with a manual update of the WP files.  Otherwise I’m going to have to go searching to see if anyone else has this problem and try to track down a way to fix it.  Or wait until WP updates again so I can see if this problem goes away. Big drag not being able to edit the content of you widgets! Grrrr

Oh I also discovered that when creating a post in WP 2.6.2 that if you accidentally forget to give your post a title there’s no going back!  You used to be able to edit the post slug. The only time I ever did that was on the rare occasion that I posted without a title. I’d just go back, remove the slug and save the post after giving it a title and the post slug would contain the post title as it should.   It seems that there’s no post slug area in the new WP.  So the post I made a mistake on now has a numerical url. Yuck … not good SEO.

Exciting weekend huh?  Now it’s time for me to go and eat dinner. I made homemade spaghetti sauce so we’re having a delicious spaghetti dinner.  We’ll watch House while we eat … can’t wait to see the premiere!

Looking for free WordPress Themes

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I don’t think I’ve mentioned this on this blog, but since January I’ve been on a wordpress Theme hunt. I have several blogs and as I prepared to finally update them to wordpress 2.3.3 I realized that some of the themes needed updating. They needed updating not only because the sites needed a new look, but because the themes I’d been using had flaws like loading the sidebars before the content or comments being way at the bottom of the page after a huge gap when viewed in IE. Plus a few of the themes weren’t widgetized and now that I use widgets for my sidebars I’m in love with them. It certainly makes it easier to switch themes quickly if you are using widgets.

I found a lot of themes that I liked. In fact I have a test blog that’s loaded with about 100 themes as I just couldn’t decide which ones to use for the blogs I was updating. LOL

One of the sites were I found a few themes that I liked was Top WP Themes. If you are looking for themes they have a selection of some of the best wordpress themes around.

The site is updated with a new theme almost daily so if you are looking for the perfect theme for your blog look through their archives and I’m sure you’ll find one that suits your needs. Of course you can also bookmark the site and visit it regularly to see what new themes have been posted too. That’s what I’m going to do as I’m still looking for a new theme for this site.

What I like about this site is that you can also look up themes by category. If you are looking for a two column theme, a three column theme, Adsense ready, fixed width or widget ready theme just click on the appropriate theme category and you’ll find dozens of designs. You can preview the themes before you download them if you want to be sure the theme has all the right features.

I’ve already spent some time browsing the site and I think this Rainbow Garden theme is kind of cute. It would certainly be a different look for this blog!

If you are new to wordpress and aren’t sure how to install new themes there’s a helpful installation guide on the Top WP Themes website. They also offer support for some of the themes listed on their site. That’s always helpful!

So if you’re looking for a new look for your wordpress site be sure to check out Top WP Themes. I’ll bet you find a few themes that you like – maybe you’ll even end up with a collection of themes like I did!

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