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Site trouble yet again!

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I’m having site problems yet again.

This is really starting to tick me off.

At about 9:30 pm last night the index.php file on my main blog domain Feverishthoughts.com was accessed repeatedly. I received a note from Hostgator shortly after this happened telling me about the problem and also saying that they’d shut down access to that directory.


At least this time round it’s a little better than when I was with Lunarpages. They’ve actually been able to tell me specifically what time the problem occurred and which domain was affected. They also only shut down that domain rather than my whole account. So at least I’ve got two blogs and two websites still functioning.

At this point – 3:30 a.m. I’ve been going back and forth with support. I think we’ve exchanged email three times now. The last one stated that they’d let me back into my directory to add the wp-cache plugin to my site and then monitor my directory after that.

The thing is that I’m already using wp-cache. So I just wrote back to them and told them that. I also told them that all my plugins and blogs are up to date.

Hopefully they’ll activate my directory again and monitor it as they said.

I have no idea what’s going on. I don’t know if the domain was under some kind of attack or if I just had too many visitors all at once. I really don’t know. I suspect a bot attack of some kind as I’ve been getting hit with a lot more spam across all my blogs lately and bad behavior and akismet just aren’t cutting it.

I know that I certainly don’t need to be having site troubles this weekend! It’s a long weekend and I’ve got a family reunion going on with my brothers and sisters. I won’t be home much and when I am home I’ll probably have guests so if my main blog domain isn’t back up soon and or if it runs into trouble over the next four days I just won’t be able to deal with it. Which sucks.

I keep flirting with the issue of possibly having to move my sites to VPS. Hostgator doesn’t offer VPS. They have Semi-dedicated which is still part of their shared account service and then they have dedicated servers. Their semi-dedicated package offers just about everything I have with my current account but I believe it has much higher CPU resource limits. That’s something I have to check on. Semi-dedicated costs $74.95 per month. Big jump from what I’m paying now.

So again. If anyone has any advice for me or can suggest a hosting company that offers VPS, hopefully at a reasonable price I’d appreciate it. I want to deal with this issue before my sites end up being totally shut down like they were in July with that other webhost I was using.

BTW 4 a.m. my feverishthoughts.com domain is back up and running. Fingers crossed that it behaves now.




The War on Comment Spam

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Have you had an increase in general spam on your sites lately?

For some reason all my sites are getting more spam in the akismet spam folder. I’m using the bad behavior plugin, and I’ve been using it since February. The bad behavior plugin greatly reduced the amount of spam that was even reaching my akismet spam folder. Since February I went from having 500 spam a day per site (well my sites with fairly high traffic) to only one to ten spam per day thanks to the bad behavior plugin.

Lately though, I’ve found that I’ve been getting more and more spam in my spam folder and some that’s not even being picked up by akismet. Either akismet isn’t working quite as well as it used to or some thing’s changed out there.

Enough about spam that’s being generated by bots and hopefully being caught by akismet or whatever system we have in place to catch it. The spam that has continued to upset me throughout the summer has been human generated comment spam on my do follow blogs.

The other day I had one persistent comment spammer. This person left very lame comments “nice photo”, “I agree”, “I’m not in AUS” and so on, on two of my blogs. Lame comments are one thing, but this person left about 16 of these comments on the two sites and left links for two different businesses. In one of the SEO type keyword links were the words (use this as much as possible) beside the keyword Teeth Whitener. So the comment looked like this:

Teeth Whitener (use this as much as possible)
Nice photo!

I’m assuming that the line use this as much as possible was instructions to use that keyword as much as possible because in later comments other words were added to the keyword phrase.

I use Lucia’s Linky Love do follow plugin now so people have to leave a certain amount of comments before their links will follow. I love that plugin. Ever since I began using it the human generated comment spam has reduced greatly. I think this person was attempting to leave enough comments to qualify for links that followed.

I was angry at this persons blatant attempt to spam my sites, so you know what I did? I visited the two companies that he or she had attempted to leave links for and found their contact page. I then left them a comment that said something like this:

Have you recently paid a company to leave your links in the comment section of blogs? If you have, this company is doing your business a disservice.

In the last 24 hours someone left 16 comments on two of my blogs with links to your business and another business. The comments were left on fairly lengthy and detailed blog posts yet the comments were most often only two words such as “nice photo” or one line comments that didn’t make much sense.

Here’s an example of the comments that were left on my sites:

Example that includes keyword for link, ip address, commenter’s email address and comment

I’ve deleted all the comments left by this person, so if you’ve paid to have links added to blogs you’ve just wasted your money.

Other bloggers have stated they’ve been receiving these types of comment links as well and they’ve also been deleting them. I think you’d have much more success advertising your company if you approached individual bloggers directly or created an advertising campaign. You’d have links within articles if you did that and links within articles are much more highly regarded by search engines.

Since the comment spammer left their email address I also sent them a note asking them why they were spamming my site and I told them that I’d contacted the companies for which they’d left links. I also warned them that they might soon be out of a job if the companies stopped buying comment links.

So far neither business nor comment spammer have replied.

If you’ve also been getting comment spam similar to the kind that I’ve discussed in this article please feel free to follow my lead by contacting the companies who’s links have been left in your posts comment section. You can copy the letter that I wrote above and simply paste it into a businesses contact form. This should save you some time. Be sure to include an example of the type of lame comment spam you were bombarded with when the spammer hit your site.

Who knows, maybe the company you contact will reply to your note and ask you to write a blog post for them.

Primary domain name in addon urls? Help!

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I’ve had a problem with some of my blogs in the past month and a half or so. When I first set up a few of my blogs on my feverishthoughts.com domain I didn’t create sub-domains. Instead I created the new blogs as directories within the feverishthoughts.com domain.

So instead of my gardening blog being located at garden.feverishthoughts.com it’s located at feverishthoughts.com/garden/. It wasn’t my smartest move, but that’s not my current problem. I’ve purchased new domains for some of the directory blogs and I’ll eventually move those blogs to their own domains once the new domains have gained some page rank.

The problem that I’m having is that about a month and a half ago I noticed that some of my directory domains – not all of them, just half – are acting up. If you visit the site and include the backslash at the end of the address the url works properly, but if you don’t include the slash at the end or if you click on the header or a “home” button the new site url will contain my primary domain url in it as well.

One of the sites that is doing this is my husbands blog Odd Planet. If you visit the site as I’ve just listed the url it looks fine, but click on the Odd Planet logo on the upper left hand side of the page and the url comes up as:

http://feverishthoughts.thewebfiles.com/oddplanet/

Thewebfiles.com is the primary domain on my hosting account. Feverishthoughts.com and my other domains are addon domains.

On my main Feverishthoughts website – Tricia’s Musings, I have a 301 redirect code in my htaccess file that places the www in the url as my site has higher PR if the www is in the url. However, all the rest of the the blogs on that domain have higher PR if there is no www in their url so I’m using a nowww wordpress plugin to redirect those urls.

Trouble is that the plugin doesn’t seem to be working lately. Hmm maybe I should try re-installing that plugin. The current copy might have been damaged in all the server transfers my sites have gone through lately. I doubt that’s the problem, but I’ll give it a try.

The htaccess file on my primary domain Thewebfiles.com only contains the coding that WordPress places in it and nothing else.

The htacess file that I’ve altered in the root of feverishthoughts.com contains:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www\.|$) [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress

The section that I bolded is the portion of the code that redirects to www, the rest of the coding is placed there by WordPress when it is first installed.

I placed that code in the feverishthoughts.com htaccess in mid-May and all my directory related blogs under feverishthoughts.com were working fine.

I believe it was mid-June when I noticed that some of my directory blogs had thewebfiles.com in their urls under certain circumstances. I don’t believe I added any plugins or altered any code during this time period.

The problem might not have occurred in mid-June as I believe it did though, it might have occurred after June 26th when Lunarpages moved my whole account to another server when they stated that I was having CPU resource issues. They then moved my account again temporarily to a VPS server on July 23rd after they’d suspended my shared hosting account. Read my CPU Resource issue problems or my story about changing hosts if you need to catch up on that issue! (I’ll be posting a more detailed story about my issues with Lunarpages tomorrow)

I’ve since moved to HostGator (July 23rd) and they did a full c-panel back up for me of my Lunarpages account so I believe whatever issues I had with my subdomain or directory blog setting on Lunarpages have followed me to Hostgator.

Does anyone have any idea as to how I might resolve this issue? Perhaps a 301 redirect to the proper url for the blog in each directory blogs htaccess file? If so – can you please give me a 301 direct code that might work with a mydomain.com/blog/ blog?

I’ve found that it’s hard to find htaccess codes that work properly with directories. That’s one reason why I’ve ended up using a nowww wordpress plugin on those blogs since I couldn’t find a proper htaccess code to exclude the www from my directory blogs.

Other things that I’ve thought of that could be the cause of the problem:

1. The way my domains were added on to to my account?

2. A problem in the mySQL database for the few sites that are having this peculiar problem.

3. A problem with the themes I’m using? (least likely …)

4. The httaccess code that I’m using in the root of feverishthoughts.com

5. the nowww wordpress plugins that I’m using in the directory blogs to keep www out of the url.

Any ideas? I really need to resolve this issue because the search engines are starting to index my sites with the strange url now too.

I had to change web hosts!

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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?

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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.

Create a second WP blog in a directory or Subdomain

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Want to create another blog on the same domain? Here’s how:

It’s actually very easy to create a new blog as a directory, or as a sub-domain.

My advice to you would be to actually create your new blog as a sub domain if you think there’s any chance that you might use it for pa1d blogging services, or that you might want to monetize it in some other way.

Some affiliate sites only accept new sites that are on their own domain which means blog.mydomain.com and mydomain.com are acceptable, but mydomain.com/blog is not. So, prior to setting up a new blog on a domain that already has a website or blog on it – think about how you will use the site in the future.

So it’s up to you, but if I was doing it all over again I’d create sub-domains. I have a number of blogs on my Feverishthoughts.com domain. I’ve actually purchased new domains that I plan to move the current /blog blogs over to once the new domains have aged and gained some page rank.

So I’ll tell you how to make a blog as a directory, as in mydomain.com/blog first:

Let’s assume that your webhost has c-panel and that you’ll be using C-panel to work with your domain and installations.

So … assuming you have C-panel

1. Log into your web host and get to your C-panel

2. In C-panel you’ll see an icon for Fantatico

3. Click on Fantastico and on the right hand side you’ll see a list of different types of programs that you can automatically install onto your domain.

4. Look for blogs and select WordPress

5. If you have a current installation that you installed through Fantastico that will be listed on the right hand side, just above that you’ll see a link that says new Installation and it will look something like this:

New Installation (2.1.3)
Disk space required: 3.73 MB
Disk space available: 248167.5 MB

6. Click on the new installation link and you’ll be taken to the first of three WP installation pages

7. If you have more than one domain on your account you might see a drop down list – if you have this select which domain you’d like to install a new WordPress blog on. (** if you’ve made a sub-domain for your new blog it will be in this list **)

8. Install in directory

– Leave empty to install in the root directory of the domain (access example: http://domain/).

– Enter only the directory name to install in a directory (for http://domain/name/ enter name only). This directory SHOULD NOT exist, it will be automatically created!

9. Once you’ve selected the domain or sub-domain that you want to install your new blog on you’ll see an empty box beside the words Install Directory – if you want your blog to be in the root of the domain (like your current blog- but you can’t do that with this new one because you have a blog there already!) you’d leave it blank.

Start thinking about the search engines and how the spiders will see your site NOW. Don’t name your new blog’s directory – blog or blog2. Please think of a name for the directory that describes what your site is about. For example for my directory blogs I’ve named the directories Garden for my gardening blog, Celebrity for my celeb blog and so on. Now the search engines know immediately what the posts on the blog will be able because the main keyword for the site will be in every single url.

10. Follow the rest of the directions adding an email address, admin name and password to complete the installation. within minutes you’ll be finished.

Earlier I was suggesting that it might be better to put your new blog on a sub-domain instead of a /directory.

For this you would go into C-panel – assuming that you have C-panel and click on the icon that says Subdomain.

Once you get into the subdomain area you’ll see

_________________ your domain or drop down list of domains ADD

Fill in the blank box with the name of you want to use for your subdomain.

Then select your domain. If you only have one domain you’ll only see mydomain.com in the next box

After that all you have to do is click on the word ADD and you’ll create a subdomain that might be called:

myblog.mydomain.com

Once you’ve created your subdomain go back to the main C-panel page, click on Fantastico and follow the directions that I gave you above but in step 8 you would select your subdomain from the drop-down list and leave the directory name box blank if you want to install into the root directory of your new subdomain so that your blog will work simply as myblog.mydomain.com

Once you get started with this I’m sure you’ll find that it’s all very easy. Especially now that you have some instructions to use.

Google Gears allows internet users to take web based aps offline

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I’m looking forward to Google Gears. It’s a new product that will be coming out shortly that’s been developed by Google that will allow internet users to take there normally web only applications offline.

This will be wonderful for those who are still using dial up connections to connect to the internet and perhaps their blogging platform.

Personally, I’ve been quite frustrated at times when I’ve been trying to work on one of my blogs and my server has gone down or my internet connection (cable) is out or acting up. It’s very hard to write posts or write draft articles on WordPress when you can’t connect to your WP dashboard!

Hopefully Google Gears will work with WP and other blogging platforms too.

What not to do to your Blog design

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There are some things that I just dislike coming across when I visit a blog or website. Does your site have or do any of these things?

  1. Autoplay video
  2. Autoplay music
  3. flashy buttons
  4. too many buttons (put them in a roll up menu if you must have them)
  5. advertisements that take up the whole header area making me scroll to see the actual header and posts below.
  6. Too many advertisements – don’t do the max google adsense – you actually make less money from them if you do too many!!! Plus it turns off your visitors.
  7. Pages with so many plug ins, large file size images, buttons etc that make the page really slow to load- or worse cause it to freeze when loading.
  8. Text that is hard to read – white on black doesn’t work if you are trying to read a long post – light gray text works better … same for florescent coloured text on black or white backgrounds, or neon backgrounds with black or white text.
  9. no paragraphs -makes posts very hard to read
  10. Set your posts so that only 5 or 10 display on the main page!!!! Not everything you’ve ever written on your blog for the last two years!

Tips!

Use roll up menus in your sidebars if you have lots of buttons or blogrolls etc. It really makes the page look so much tidier.

Test your blog design in Firefox, Internet explorer, Opera and Netscape – all easy to download and have on your computer. Make sure your site loads correctly and works well in all the browsers listed above,

Also look at your site on different computers. Text and background colour might look great on your monitor but really really bad on 5 other computer monitors that you test it on.

As I said in the last point- visitors only need to see your last 5 or 10 posts when they load your page. If you have more than that showing your page will load very slowly.

Same with categories and archives. Do your visitors need to see your archives dating back to 2001? That’s a long list taking up valuable blog sidebar real estate. Use a roll up menu or modify the code in your page so that only 5 or 10 archives and or categories are viewed. You could also create a page just for your archives and link to it from the main page of your site.

Every once in a while ask your readers their opinion on your page. Ask for constructive criticism. If the majority of your readers state they don’t like something or that your page loads slowly – do something about it.

One way to lessen the spam on your blog

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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.

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