Unfortunately, it didn’t work.

It never worked.

It didn’t matter what I tried, I still had to do upgrades manually!

As far as I was concerned, this was just how it had to be and there was clearly a bug or a conflict or something in WordPress.  One day, I even went through the process of uninstalling all my plugins just to see if the WordPress upgrade would run.  It didn’t.

So I’d resigned myself to a life of manual upgrades and decided that I’d only upgrade once every few months.  Then I started running some sites on HostGator.

Imagine my surprise when “just for fun”, I tried to run an automatic upgrade for one of my plugins on this new Hostgator hosted blog, AND IT WORKED!  I hastily went through all of the automatic upgrades that were available and EVERY SINGLE ONE WORKED!!!

Hmmmmm…….

Clearly, the problem was with 1&1.  I validated this by testing a number of other blogs hosted on the same platform and sure enough, the problem only ever manifested on 1&1.  When I finally reached the point of helping a friend with their blog which was also hosted on 1&1 (thanks to MY recommendation!) I decided it was time to find a fix.

It turns out that the fix is really easy, once you understand the problem.

Inside the WordPress admin interface, the upgrade processes take quite a bit of memory.  On Hostgator, the defaults for PHP are set high enough that you shouldn’t encounter a problem, but on 1&1 they’re set too low for our needs.  To fix this, all we need to do is to set a higher memory limit, which we do by creating a php.ini file.  This file needs only one line:

memory=32MB

Once you’ve created the file, upload it to your wp-admin directory and you should find that the problem’s been fixed!

Hope this helps!

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All of these bloggers are making a significant income from the Internet.  Some purely from blogging, and others from related activities.  They will all inspire you and I would suggest that following them is highly desirable!

Please note that these are in no particular order (I don’t want to get on the bad side of any of these guys!) other than the order that appear in my RSS reader!

The Top 7 Most Successful Blogs to Follow

1. ProBlogger – Darren Rowse (a.k.a ProBlogger) has been making a living on the Internet since 2004.  He’s well known in blogging circles as being a 6-figure earner and he has a great writing style.  He’s also written (in conjunction with Chris Garrett) a fantastic book on blogging your way to a 6-figure income, called ProBlogger, which is available on Amazon.com (or Amazon.co.uk).
2. ShoeMoney – Jeremy Schoemaker (a.k.a “ShoeMoney”) is also another big-money earner.  He’s something of a ‘character’, as you’ll see from the Superman-like logo that he uses (even in his swimming pool!).  ShoeMoney is an avid poster and everything he writes will educate and inspire you!
3. John Chow – John Chow is another great ‘character’!  He famously tells people that he “makes money online telling people how much money he makes online!”  He describes himself as a “Dot Com Mogul” and earns BIG money from his blogging!  As well as the great content that John produces, I can also guarantee that you’ll find his blog highly entertaining!
4. Copyblogger – Successful blogging is all about producing great content.  This is an area that I’m constantly working on, and Copyblogger is a great source of inspiration and education for me.  Copywriting is a crucial skill for any Internet Marketer, and Brian Clark (the man behind Copyblogger) is a great teacher!
5. Zac Johnson – This site is a relatively new find for me!  Zac is considered a ‘Super Affiliate’, which pretty much means that he makes great money promoting other people’s products!  He’s got a vast wealth of experience, having done this for over 10 years and I would highly recommend you check him out!
6. Chris Garrett – Chris, with Darren Rowse (ProBlogger) is the co-author of the ProBlogger book (see above).  According to Chris’ blog, he’s a “professional blogger, Internet Marketing Consultant, new media industry commentator, writer, coach, speaker, trainer and web geek”.  He was also one of the founders of Performancing.com (another interesting site for professional bloggers.  Consider it a bonus!!!)
7. Jim Kukral – Jim is an expert at monetizing blogs!  He’s not only an avid blogger himself – he also teaches this stuff!  As well as writing for renowned blogs such as clickz.com, he’s also a respected speaker and authority in Internet Marketing.  If you ever get the chance to hear him speak, don’t miss it!

That’s your 7 recommendations (plus a bonus!).  Check them out and subscribe to their RSS feeds.

You can thank me later!

…and then we change something, and it all falls to pieces!!!

Now, I’ve always used CSS to manage the styles across my sites, but literally just for setting things like colours and fonts – not for layout. I’m now looking to build a few sites where I need to be a little more creative and more flexible and it seems like CSS is the way to go.  However, it does feel like I’m moving from complicated tables, to complicated CSS files!

To help me along the way, I’ve come across a fantastic book by Eric Meyer called CSS Website Design which is probably the best technical book that I’ve ever bought! Rather than being full of reams of reference material, it takes the approach of a training course and walks you step by step through the minefield of CSS.  Like I said, I already knew CSS to a certain extent, but even the early chapters of this book have helped me to understand things at a whole new level.  As I progress, it’s taking me deeper into page layout techniques and into areas that I didn’t even know were possible (did you know that you can create CSS that lays a page out differently for printing???)

However, the question remains: Which is best for today’s internet – Tables or CSS? I already know what my answer is to this (and why) but I’m interested to read your insights!

As for the new sites – watch this space….!

There comes a point where most of us just say “it works for me” and make our sites available to an unsuspecting Internet, but wouldn’t it be far better (not to mention more professional) to test our lovingly developed sites on as many platforms as possible?

Well, it’s surprisingly simple to do that!

The most comprehensive solution is to use is Browsercam, but this costs money!  However, it does provide you with the opportunity to run a huge variety of browsers on their native operating systems which is the ultimate goal for the most thorough testing.

In my opinion though, we’re all better off using Browsershots which is a free service that runs your site against a huge variety of browsers on various platforms and returns a screenshot showing your homepage.  In most instances, this is sufficient to make sure that your site is rendering cleanly for the various platforms that you choose to target.

For example, I now know that this blog displays well on Opera 9.52 on FreeBSD 7.0:

but I can see that the Dillo 0.8.6 browser running under Ubuntu 8.04 LTS OS has a problem with my CSS:

All in all, I can’t recommend this service highly enough!  I would recommend anyone who has their own site to consider using Browsershots to test all their sites.  You know you want to…!

Today though, this all changed! 

One of the things that I’d never checked is exactly HOW the process works.  There’s a setting that allows me to select the role that a new subscriber will take:

Imagine my shock then, when I found a new subscriber this morning, with a role of ‘Administrator’!  Of course, I deleted the user (it was clearly a random email address!) and any content that may have been associated with them, and looked at the settings in order to restrict the roles that a new user could take.

There is NO SUCH SETTING! I can find nothing allowing me to restrict the role through the administration interface!  This is not to say that I couldn’t do it through code, but it seems like a major flaw in the design of WordPress!  My only option given the time that I have available today was to remove the option for users to register.

For the time being, if you want to subscribe to my site, please use my RSS feed.  I’ll also be adding a proper RSS feed link on one of the sidebars to make this easier (which I seem to have overlooked…!!!!)

Also, watch out for my newsletter which should be launching soon.  This will be the best way to keep up to date with the news and reviews as it will contain more in-depth articles than I typically include on the blog!  If you’d be potentially interested in reading a newsletter from me, why not leave a comment below and let me know?

In the meantime, protect your WordPress blog!

You know what it’s like with ANY upgrade – I was understandably nervous.  The reality was that it took me longer to back everything up before I started than it did to actually run the upgrade!

If anyone hit the maintenance page that’s been up for about 10 minutes – I apologise and I hope that you made it back in order to see the new site in all it’s glory!

In fact, the site looks just the same as it did before the upgrade on the front page (so the Semiologic theme IS in fact compatible with 2.5) it’s just the admin interface that’s changed drastically – and for the better, it seems!

As I get more familiar with the changes, I may well post some more info.  For now – now that I know that the “posting” function still works – I can deactivate the maintenance page and get the site back up.

Has anyone else had similar experiences with WordPress 2.5, or was it more challenging for you?

Please leave your comments below….

I’m planning to tackle this before the end of the week, so if you visit my blog during this time and it’s down – please come back again!

For my Entrecard advertisers,  I’m intending to put up a holding/maintenance page (maybe even a duplicate site), but if I DO cause any significant downtime, I’ll reimburse the people affected with double the credits that they originally paid me for the ad space.  That’s fair, isn’t it?

Finally, I’ll post an update here when the upgrade’s in place.

Watch this space……

It covers:

• The best blogging techniques.
• How to get traffic to your blog.
• How to turn your blog into money.

I’ll let you know what I think once I’ve had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it’s still free.

Please take the time to check this out yourself and let me know if you think it’s valuable.

Initially, I was looking to add an additional ad space below the existing Google ads on the left of the page, however AdBrite offers the possibility of including other ad providers (such as Google) and only displaying their own ads if they pay better.  So I signed up for this option, as I’d prefer a single ad space to be honest, selected a whole bunch of technology related categories and keywords, and left all the other settings as default.  Seems reasonable so far, doesn’t it?

To start with, I got a notice displayed telling me that it was assessing my content to find the most suitable ads for my site so I ignored it.  A few hours later, I was telling my wife about it and she asked me to show her.  You can imagine my horror to see a 120×600 pixel skyscraper ad displaying a whole host of very graphic porn images!!!

Stupidly, my first reaction was to go to AdBrite’s control panel and try and fix it – although setting “Family Friendly” made no difference (and I wasn’t prepared to wait to see if it eventually did!).  My second thought (which SHOULD have been my first) was to quickly cut the code from my page!  Of course, I then had to go back to Google and re-create the original ad which had been there in the first place….!

Still, you live and learn – I now understand very well what people mean by “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”!