Wordpress Plugins — Page 2

I had to change web hosts!

July 25, 2007 by Tricia

Well you probably noticed that my sites went down for a few days if you’ve become a regular visitor of The Web Files or any of my other sites.

I ended up changing web hosts after my former web host attempted to change my shared hosting account over to a TWO year Virtual Private Hosting account and charged me $642 in the process. A move and charge that I hadn’t authorized.

I’d been apparently having CPU resource issues on my former host – Lunarpages, and I worked for close to a month to resolve any CPU resource overuse issues by going over everything in my directories with a fine toothed comb, updating all of the programs that I use to run my various sites and any addons or plugins that I used with those sites and still they kept telling me that I had CPU resource over use issues.

They suspended my account on Saturday stating that my account had almost caused a server to crash so I reluctantly agreed to change my account over to VPS for one month. One single month. It took me almost 24 hours to communicate that desire to support since they are very slow to answer support email and do not have telephone support over the weekend.

Once they apparently understood that I was willing to switch over to VPS for one month they told me that it would cost $75 per hour to transfer my account, but if I wanted I could do it myself once the VPS account was set up. At that point I said No way to the $75 charge and in fact said no to the whole deal until they sent me more info about VPS, Plesk and how I might move my account on my own.

Instead of sending me information they went ahead and set up the VPS account and instead of creating a monthly account they charged me for two years of VPS service.

Right … for CPU resource issues that may or may not exist.

I say may or may not exist because after the stunt they pulled charging me for a two year VPS account I’m not all that certain that I ever had CPU resource issues.

So I spent early Monday morning creating a new hosting account at HostGator and worked on moving my domains and sites.

So far things are going well with HostGator and they’ve yet to mention a thing about CPU resource over use. Still – I think I’m going to continue going over my sites and try to lighten their load on the servers. Some of my sites are getting more and more popular so if my traffic is increasing so will my resource usage too.

CPU resource overuse problems continue! Any ideas?

July 5, 2007 by Tricia

Well I’m still trying to figure out my web hosting CPU resource over usage problems. I’ve got a lot of great suggestions from people on forums and via comments on my sites.

One person asked if I’m using WP-Cache on my wordpress blogs and the answer is yes. I’ve been using it since last Friday and I’ve still been getting messages from my web host saying that my cpu resource usage is too high.

This is depressing!

If I ever figure out what caused the problem I’ll be sure to write about it on my sites so that others might be able to get themselves out of this mess a little quicker than I’ve managed.

Well, I’m not out of the mess yet.

I’ve finished updating everything I can think of including a joomla installation that runs one of my other sites. I think the Joomla CMS might be one of the causes of the problem. I guess I’ll find out later today when I hear from my web host. I hope that the resources are back to normal.

I wrote out more details of how I’m using the servers on my other tech blog WebStyle if you’d care to read that post. Perhaps those of you that have been through this before or know a little something about this kind of problem could read that post and offer a few suggestions? I’d really appreciate it if you would.

Also, just in case I do end up having to move to a Virtual Private Server … how difficult is that to work with? I’m pretty good about figuring out stuff but I’d like to know if I’m going to end up with a VPS headache before I make my decision to move off shared hosting.

One way to lessen the spam on your blog

May 21, 2007 by Tricia

I’ve always had Akismet activated on our WordPress blogs, and we do get a fair amount of comments. However, in February I also added Bad Behavior to our sites because the amount of spam Akismet was catching was getting out of hand. I was easily getting 400 spam comments on some sites!

That’s a lot of spam to go through to find a real comment or two!

I still find that anyone who leaves a link or two in their comment often ends up having their comment go to the spam folder. I hate that, you’d think that if I approved their comments once or twice in the past both WordPress and Akismet would learn and not put the post in the spam folder. I even increased the amount of links allowed in a comment on one of my sites because I run several blogrolls out of that site and it still puts the comments with one or two links in it in spam.

As I was saying, in February, I downloaded Bad Behavior, and it actually hides the site from some bad bots so the amount of Spam hitting our sites dropped dramatically.

Yes we still get spam, but it’s down to at most 10 spam per day on the busiest sites, and often only one or none on some days. It’s great … 400 spam a day down to 1 to 10? I love it!

So if you are sick of dealing with spam download the Bad Behavior plugin, install it in your WordPress plugin folder and then activate the plugin. That’s all you have to do. It works along side Akismet without any problems.

Remove the no follow tag and become an I follow Blog

May 1, 2007 by Tricia

I’ve always had some form of linkage on my sites that allowed my commenters to get a real link. By this I mean the links did not have the awful nofollow tag. Instead, the search engines were able to follow the link and index it.

Now, I’ve discovered that there’s a whole movement out there called the I follow movement. It’s caught on like wild lately and I actually started a blogroll on one of my other blogs for people who have removed the nofollow tags from their sites comment area. The blogroll is called the “Do follow blogroll” and anyone with a blog (not a website!) can join if they have removed the nofollow tags from their site, added the blogroll which I will supply the code for once I hear from interested parties, and preferably do not have their comments set to registered members only.

If you want to get rid of the nofollow tags from your blog you can use this WordPress plugin if you have a wordpress blog or this other do follow plugin. If your site is on blogger you can follow these easy step by step directions to remove the nofollow tags from your comment area.

Once you’ve removed those tags, and or comment on a site that has the nofollow tags removed you’ll find that the comment links left get indexed in the search engines, added to technorati thus raising the sites Technorati rank, and once all those links are counted by google as backlinks to your site you might even get higher PR.

Become a follower.

Top 30 plugins

April 9, 2007 by Tricia

There’s a great article over at Staska.net that lists the top 30 WordPress plugins. The list describes each plugin and gives the reason why it made the list. Often it’s place on the list has to do with a poll that was given to readers to find out how many were using each plugin.

I’ve used a number of the plugins that made the list and agree that many should be on the list and should be used by even more WordPress bloggers.

If I were creating this list a few of the plugins that are listed would have been given a much higher spot on the list than they are currently placed.

Go on over and have a peak at the list. I’ll bet that you find a great plugin to use.

I had to change web hosts!

CPU resource overuse problems continue! Any ideas?

One way to lessen the spam on your blog

Top 30 plugins

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