Problems with the Top Twenty Money Making Feeds?

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I was reinstalling stuff on my reformatted PC with a new motherboard after the thing fritzed itself last week… and I downloaded the OPML feed. I had trouble installing the feed in my chosen Feed reader (FeedDemon 2.7) and wondered if anyone else was having trouble with the feed I had uploaded.

Please drop me a line on this post or the other post about the download or in the contacts form! I’d like to know because I only have got my own experience to compare: I know it works on BlogLines, and on Google Reader. It used to work on FeedDemon but not on the new version. (I actually didn’t like version 2.7 so I removed it pronto!)… where else did you try the feed?

Should I upgrade? Version 2.6 is very seductive!

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Should I upgrade? The past two or three days I opened my own Admin Panel in Wordpress to see the following message:

upgrade image

I’m sitting here wondering about this… It used to be pretty convenient upgrading on Dreamhost, their one-click installs would speed you through the process: without any fussy backing up (all done), the entire install was copied to .old and the new files and files were copied from wp-content. It was an easy and beautiful thing to behold. All you had to do was turn off your plugins!

Now I’m on a manual install, and I have to do the whole thing manually… it’s not that difficult actually, as I’ve done it manually many times in the past. But it’s still a little more difficult. Of course the bigger issue is: Should I upgrade?

The new features are quite attractive: Take a look for yourself!

Click to watch this video.

This is always tricky to answer. If you watch the video, you’ll know that there is versioning of posts, better gallery type functions, gears-type functionality, and better flock-type tools for blogging things you find… If any of these features are necessary or highly desirable for you, then upgrading might be the way to go. Also, if this is your first blog and/or you have JUST started blogging, upgrading should provide you with all these benefits and not much downside.

For larger blogs or more production-sensitive sites, a little tardiness may be in their best interests because usually upgrading provides great new functionality and it can also break things, too. As I found out: version 2.5.1 breaks password recovery and I suspected , too.

I’m not upgrading IMMEDIATELY. Why? Because no matter how many bugs and flaws are removed, there are ALWAYS unexpected developments that need fixing, so it is likely that I will wait for those fixes to be applied and perhaps version 2.6.1 or at least until I know that there aren’t significant issues with this version. It’s very seductive though to try, so I’ll be upgrading some minor blogs and less high profile blogs so at least I will be armed with the knowledge of how things work. In fact, I’m pretty sure most regular bloggers have their play-blogs where they try stuff out first, too!

Getting My Act Together: News Update on InvestorBlogger

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It’s been quite a while since I posted a news type post on this blog. So here goes…

Of Buzzes, Blogs, and Forms

David from eCommerce-Tools spotted an interesting new plugin and sent me news about it – It’s called a Form Builder and allows users to create a wide range of forms that then email content and display a unique message to the respondents. I can imagine a dozen different uses from that on InvestorBlogger – surveys, content submissions, a non-spammable contact form, etc… I might even use it to replace my current contact form.

In fact, David was the blogger who ‘borrowed’ my content and he helped me to see how sometimes people can easily fall into this trap of borrowing content without realizing. In fact, I wonder if I haven’t done it myself when I just started out … Anyway, he’s made good on his promises and actually his blog already has a lot of good content on it that he wrote himself, so I’m looking to see how it matures in six months or so. I’m also nominating him for a BlogBuzz as I have a few of those left as well. If you’d like one, too, just drop on over to my BlogBuzz page.

Spam, Plugins, and Banning IP addresses

In other news, I was getting really annoying and vulgar spam emails from some guys in Africa. The spam were being sent through an insecure contact form called PXSmail and they all came from just one or two IP addresses. Worse, the form though simple and effective allowed HTML to be added to the mix meaning that it was easy to spam me. The mails often had dozens, if not more, of links and keywords. And it hadn’t been obviously updated in nearly 3 years.

So then I tried blocking IP addresses for a while, and that was effective. I used one of Lester Chan’s plugins called WP-Ban. Unfortunately, that’s like treating flu with a gun. Effective, but permanent. Then I tried filtering the mails, but that was unsatisfactory as I would miss important mails. So then I switched to a plugin that excluded any HTML – problem solved. It’s called Contact Form II and it works simply and effectively. There is a simple toggle switch that can be used to exclude URIs in the message. Simply uncheck this. Voila! Problem solved.

Mailing List: Yes, I have one!

Having moved to BlueHost after being on DreamHost for years made me realize that both companies provide quite different ways to achieve the same results. BlueHost uses CPanel and that took a while to get used to, but in fact many hosts use CPanel, so I’m glad that I’m now learning how to use it. I’ve moved my popular sites to three different hosts (2 on Bluehost, one on Hostmonster, and one on BlueFur), and each uses CPanel though their configurations aren’t exactly the same.

Yesterday I was exploring BlueHost’s scripts and I found Dadamail so I experimented by adding a mailing list to the site to see how difficult or easy it was to set up! I didn’t fill in many fields, just enough to get things working. To my surprise I already found I had one or two ‘brave’ guinea pigs sign up! Wow! I’d better sort things out and set it up properly…

Growing UP: Should I move to WordPress MU

InvestorBlogger is approaching two years on this domain and it is growing up. Traffic is double last year’s and still growing, so I’m now thinking of moving the whole blog to WordPress MU. Why? I already experimented with MU on Dreamhost for a while, and I found that it was quite stable and mature. It also enables me to create a lot of sub-blogs, each of which can be managed separately but which draws on just ONE install saving a lot of management time and effort. With over 1000 posts, I am finding that I would like to create new blogs that draw on the content and that are more closely tied to some of the themes I already explore. It would also help me to publicize IB much more, and be listed in more places that so far reject my blog as “off-topic” or as a non-PF blog. So I’m likely to install WordPress MU during some downtime. Since most of IB’s posts are in the ‘archives’ post, nothing will change for the current archives, and perhaps the front page. Eventually, though, I will create a lot more channels, with posts and traffic suited to each. Most of the machinations will be invisible to current readers for the time being.

New Channels: PF, Tech, Investing, Making Money Online, Business

These are the base channels that I will be starting off with, as I break up InvestorBlogger into component parts. This transformation won’t take place overnight, and all posts WILL be visible on the front page. I’m still not sure how I’m going to handle the feeds for each sub-blog, perhaps I’ll have one super-feed with blogfeeds as well. So subscribers will be able to choose which feed to subscribe, too. Obviously I won’t be able to produce daily content for each of these blogs, but I will likely keep up my current rate of one or two posts a day across the mini-empire! Wish me luck.

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