Mishmash Musings

… that there are still so many blogs out there with “autoplay” music that assaults my ears as soon as I click on the site! Don’t people know how utterly annoying that kind of crap is?! That’s something I’d expect from a 13-year-old’s MySpace page, not from a 30-something blogger.

Anyway, whenever I come to a site that has autoplay anything, I leave almost immediately. That’s a great way to drive away traffic, IMO. Why do people think that others want to be subjected to their music choices in the first place? I’ll never understand this!

Ok, I’m getting kind of tired of making all these posts on my blog only to have a handful of people actually read what I’m writing. So I’m going to make a concerted effort to boost my traffic in the coming weeks. My first goal is to try to double the number of hits I currently get on an average day, which shouldn’t be that difficult since I get so few!

How am I going to do this? I will start by visiting other blogs and leaving relevant comments. This is the easiest method, and should get me going on the right path. After that, I’ll have to study up on other blog promotion tricks to boost my traffic.

I’m not looking for thousands of hits here… I just want enough readers to make the whole endeavor feel worthwhile.

I’m finally back online after being out of touch for close to 20 hours (I’m not sure exactly how long it was, but am basing that estimate on what other irate users have said), thanks to some hardware problems over at Dreamhost. I have to admit that I was pretty annoyed by having all my sites down, as I actually did have things to do on them. Fortunately, however, the downtime didn’t end up costing me money — unlike a lot of other customers who had web stores, etc. affected.

I know people complain about Dreamhost frequently, and when they have problems, they have PROBLEMS, but I don’t mind them. Their customer service is super-fast most of the time, their rates are reasonable, and the problems only come up every once in a blue moon for me.

Anyway, my sites are back now, and that’s what matters in the end. Now I can actually get some work done!

As I was looking at my dashboard just now, I noticed that this will be my 1,000th post here at MishmashMusings.com! I can’t believe I reached that number in just 25 months — especially since I run three other blogs that have similar post counts! That’s a lot of blogging in the past two years.

I have to admit that out of all my blogs, this is the one that needs the most work. It’s the only one without a real identity, as my others pretty much have a single niche that the posts fall into. Originally, I wanted this blog to be filled with more personal stuff, like about my family and work, but after a few months, I realized that I simply wasn’t getting enough search engine traffic based on that stuff.

So then I started posting about current events, and got more hits — but lost that personal connection with readers. Very few people leave comments about news stories, unless it’s something highly controversial, like the Victoria Lindsay beating.

Anyway, from this point forward, I think I’m going to try to find more of a balance between the two extremes. I’ll try posting about my home/family life at least a couple times a week and post about current events on the remaining days. Maybe this approach will do the trick of getting more readers involved in the conversation, while not sacrificing search engine traffic in the process.

Ok, after spending the past few days tinkering with this site in order to get it ready for future one-click WordPress updates, I finally had a chance to look at new themes. I chose this one, called “Black n White” because of its simplicity and plainness, and also because it has “Previous” and “Next” buttons at the bottom of each page, which my last theme didn’t. Seems like a basic thing to overlook, but there ya go.

Anyway, I’m glad that all this tweaking and tinkering and FTP-ing is over with. I hate website maintenance almost as much as I hate actual computer maintenance, neither of which I’m particularly good at or vigilant about. Oh, that reminds me: my husband asked me to pick up a new Cat5e patch cable (whatever that is) for his desktop. He gave me the store name and product number, but I still have a feeling I’ll screw up the purchase!

Oh, well… thank goodness this is over! Hopefully there won’t be another WordPress update for another year or so!!

Wow, after being offline for nearly 24 hours, I’m finally back up and running here. Instead of just updating WordPress manually, I wanted to be able to take advantage of one-click upgrades from Dreamhost, so I basically had to delete everything and start over with their one-click install.

I thought it would be a relatively simple matter, but I hit several snags right off the bat, like not being able to completely delete files, not finding hidden files that were preventing the new installation, and then uploading the wrong config.php file, which ended up redirecting this blog to another that I own.

Yikes.

Dreamhost’s support was decent during the process. At first, they answered my questions very quickly — within 30 minutes or so when I ticked the box saying it wasn’t urgent. But then when I had another problem that I rated as being urgent, it took nearly 20 hours for them to get back to me. Hmm, what’s wrong with that picture?

Anyway, I’m glad to be back now. Hopefully all of this trouble will have been worth it in the future when it comes time to upgrade to newer versions of WP. I need to take a break from these upgrades for a few days — then I’ll go ahead and try the same process with my remaining blogs!

I’m planning to do some more tweaking on this site off and on all night, so there might be some downtime….

Go watch early election returns and projections and get back to me later!

If there’s one thing I hate about blogging, it’s having to update WordPress so darn often! It seems that every time I get around to installing the latest version, yet another update comes along. Seriously, do they release a new one every six months or something? It sure feels that way!

I installed 2.6.3 on two of my other sites yesterday, and was disappointed to see that there weren’t any substantial changes. In fact, the only two new features that jumped out at me were the automatic word count that appears below the “Save” and “Publish” buttons in draft mode, and a callout box indicating the number of plugins that are working. No big deal, if you ask me. Maybe there are a bunch of behind-the-scenes fixes that aren’t as readily apparent.

Either way, it took forever to backup my databases and go through the installation, which made me wish I had some home theater seating to lounge in while waiting for the files to transfer!

And while I’m at it, I’ve decided to change my theme as well. I’ve had this current theme for more than a year, and while I like how simple it is, there are a couple of annoyances that I can no longer put up with (including the lack of Back or Forward buttons at the bottom of each page). So this is another task that’s going to take a significant amount of time today.

Ah, the joys of site maintenance…!