As you can see, Blog-Op has finally been graced with a new theme – well, it is nearly a year old!

It’s based on Talian-10, and I’ve just tweaked a few elements here and there, to try and customise it a little. I think all of the features are there, although I can see a couple of widgets need tweaking.  But hopefully it all works OK, and looks all right on various resolutions, set-ups etc.

Obviously if you see any glitches, please let me know.

Those of you who use the excellent WordPress plugin Bad Behavior, should upgrade to version 2.0.11 straightaway.

This is because the author has recently made some changes to his server which means that BB can get a little ‘over-zealous’ and not only prevent anyone from leaving comments on your blog, but can also prevent you from logging on to your admin panel. Simply visit the authors page to read about it and to download the new version.

Of course if you have been locked out, by this or any other plugin in future, connect to your webhost via FTP, delete the offending plugin and everything should be back to normal.

If you don’t use this plugin, but suffer a lot of comment spam, I strongly recommend it. In the two days I had it turned off while the author fixed the issue, my comment spam reaching Akismet more than doubled. Additionally, if PHP based spambots go a little crazy on your blog, it can cause your webhost to take your site down – BB stops them completely in their tracks.

Those time-served readers of mine who have been making the despairing trek to this blog over the last year will be well aware of the problems I had with my previous webhost ANHosting, who are part of MidPhase.

Dreadful downtime, often days at a time, catastrophic hardware failures, ‘upgrades’ to the server which took my site offline, and which they then tried to blame me for, the list goes on. It seemed that everytime I received a Stumble, or a major inbound link they’d fall over for several days until the traffic dried up. Awful, and I wouldn’t touch them with someone elses bargepole.

Well the last week has seen me transfer all of my sites over to Bluehost, and I must say that so far, I’ve been very impressed.

The sign-up process was very quick and simple, and I was uploading my files within 15 minutes of starting to enter my credit card details. All of the server software seems to be the latest versions, with cPanel, PHP, Fantastico, phpMyAdmin all being at least one increment ahead of ANHosting which made setting up the websites very simple.

I needed some subdomains to be setup, so that I could upload some files before changing the nameservers, and after going for the ‘LiveChat’ option, I was connected to an operative in less than 2 minutes who:

a. Had English as their first language. And

b. Knew what they were doing.

As a consequence I was good to go less than 5 minutes after logging on to Live Chat, and if anyone noticed the transfer yesterday, I’ll be surprised. Loading times of all my blogs seems very fast now, and everything’s working as it should. It’s everything ANHosting promised, and more and all for the same money a month.

Time will tell as to reliability of course, but for $6.95 a month it’s proven to be a quality service, with support to match the sales dept. I did a fair bit of searching for customer views on a number of companies, and Bluehost time & again came up with the best reviews. They currently host over 400,000 accounts so they must be doing something right!

If you fancy giving them a go, click the banner below, and I’ll also get a few dollars towards next years hosting.

Did Google get taken over by Microsoft recently or something?

Not content with libelling anyone who has so much as written about PayPerPost (whoops! there I go again!), and hunting down the scourge of paid links to protect the sanctity of the internet…… I see that they’ve now stopped non-Blogger users from leaving any form of URL on a blog when they leave a comment.

In the past, as long as the Blogger user hadn’t chosen to block ‘anonymous’ comments (which were no such thing), you could choose to leave your name and a link back to your blog. Now, if you don’t have a Blogger account, all you can do is leave a ‘nickname’ with no link whatsoever.

Now I’ve never obsessed about leaving comments for SEO purposes, as it seems a little like hard work, but if I’m commenting on a blog for the first time, how are they ever supposed to find me? What about community & building relationships? Of course what happens is that people either start dropping their URL in the comment itself, which looks spammy, or they give up and stop visiting Blogger blogs.

I can’t imagine who thought this was a good idea, but I’ve no doubt it’s linked to the protectionism that’s rife within Google right now, and will be followed shortly by something else linked to driving up their revenues. Imposed adsense anyone? Try and keep everyone on a Blogger blog from going elsewhere, thereby keeping them constantly exposed to more ads, and induce them into more clicks? I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

I’ve seen a few other people comment on this, and lots of people giving tips about installing Haloscan, complaining to Google etc. but I’ve got a far better tip for you than that.

Leave Blogger. Now.

Really, there’s plenty of other free blog platforms out there, but more relevantly the best paid system will cost you around $100 to setup, including a domain name, and if you can’t make that back in a month, let alone a year, just go for a free WordPress.com blog instead.

But Google aren’t worth your time anymore, and speaking as a comment leaver, I’m not sure Blogger blogs are worth my time anymore – and that’s not your fault, it’s Google’s.

I’ve been back in the world of real work a week now, and I’ve not quit yet, so it’s not too bad!

I intend to get back to blogging shortly, but first I shall transfer this blog to my new webhost in the next few days, as I finally escape the dreadful ANHosting. Once this is complete I shall look at freshening the place up with a new theme, and I wouldn’t mind adding a few new authors.

I shall advertise this in more detail later, but I’d love to keep the site regularly updated with some fresh content, and as I now have a fairly substantial ‘offline income’, I’d be happy to let you keep 100% of any income generated by your writings. As I say, more later, but it may be of interest to some of you.

So, there’ll be some small downtime around Wednesday, and then after that a fresh look, a faster, more reliable hosting service & hopefully some new writers.

Thanks for sticking around.

But I do know that ANHosting are complete rubbish and you shouldn’t touch them with somebody else’s bargepole.

Got up this morning to find all of my blogs messed up and ‘off-air’. Eventually got things working by having to place a ‘PHP.ini’ file in just about every directory, although I had to disable Google Sitemaps plugin.

Now I find that Blog-Ops theme won’t work, even when restored from a backup from my PC, hence the standard template you see now. If I try to use my normal template, only the sidebars appear, with no content. I really don’t know what they’ve done here. Their response is to ‘contact my website developer’.

I’ll try and fix things ASAP, but frankly I feel like deleting the whole damn thing…….

Update 25th November: Right, I’ve got the old theme working, but I still can’t use the Google Sitemaps plugin, or now the ExecPHP plugin-my webhost appear to have changed some permissions on the server that mean certain functions of WordPress just don’t work anymore – real useful…..

I don’t know if this is going to be of interest to anyone outside the UK, but if you have a BTInternet account, make sure that you sign in or join using your BT email account, as I have recently been given a free Pro account (worth $24.95 a year) simply for being a BT customer.

Obviously Flickr are owned by Yahoo! who are linked with BT in the UK, but I don’t know if having a Yahoo! account elsewhere will get you the same benefit? Perhaps someone can let us know.

Anyway, I can now publish an unlimited amount of photos to my Flickr account, so I’d better get busy!

Time for some I feel…

For those of you who didn’t know, I have been a ‘stay at home dad’ for the last 2 years, which means that although I’ve had plenty else to occupy me, there’s always been a lot of time available for running my three blogs, writing, reading and promoting etc.

Well from next month I’m heading back to work full time, and as a result I just don’t think I can dedicate the sort of time that this blog needs to it anymore. While engaged in getting my new job over the last month, my posting frequency here has gone out of the window, and from posting 6+ times a week to once every 10 days isn’t really what I wanted for this site.

So, what to do?

I don’t want to just walk away and abandon ship, so to speak, given the time that I’ve put into this blog, so I’d welcome the input of the people who make the effort to come and read my ramblings. Should I:

• Sell up? I’m not averse to the idea, although I wouldn’t know what it’s worth, and as dear Google appear to have given my PR a 2 point penalty this morning (from 5 to 3) it’s probably worth less than last week. I’ve no desire to give the blog away, but I’d entertain a sensible offer.
• Keep it, but only post occasionally.  Would you stay subscribed to a blog that only updates now & then?
• Attempt to recruit some extra writers? I’m not in a position to employ anyone, but if you wanted to write here on a regular basis, I’d be happy to have you monetize your own work etc.

Any others?

I’m not walking away from blogging, as I’d keep my main personal and photo blogs, and I’d definitely remain a reader of everyone I read now, but I don’t think I can maintain Blog-Op, and I’d hate to see it wither away through neglect.

Any opinions gratefully received

Do you know that the first PC I owned had a throbbing 20Mb (that’s megabyte) hard drive? That drive was probably physically bigger than most modern mobile phones, so to this old fogey the news that SanDisk have just released an 8Gb (gigabyte) micro SD High-Capacity flash card is quite amazing.

Given the all round capabilities of the modern mobile, the need for large Mobile Phone Memory has never been greater, and the huge capacity of this tiny card will be most welcome. If your device supports the microSDHC card you can look forward to this high speed SanDisk card, backed by a 5 year warranty which will probably outlast one or more of your phones! More specs in the following SanDisk press release:

SanDisk microSDHC™ 8GB
SDSDQR-8192

SanDisk is proud to announce our newest format and capacity to the SD card family: microSD High Capacity (microSDHC) 8GB flash card. Included as bonus is our new MobileMate™ Micro Reader (SDHC compatible) providing users with a complete and versatile solution for transferring music, video, photos and other files between their mobile devices and computers.

Features:

High storage capacity (8GB) for storing essential digital content such as high quality photos, videos, music and more
Optimal speed and performance for microSDHC compatible devices
Speed performance rating: Class 4 (based on SD 2.00 Specification)
High Quality microSDHC card backed by 5 year limited warranty
Built to last, with an operating shock rating of 2,000Gs, equivalent to a ten-foot drop **
SanDisk microSDHC 8GB card ships with Bonus MobileMate™ Micro Reader
High speed USB 2.0 compatible transfer rates
No additional card adapters required
Compatible with Windows Vista and certified for Windows XP and Mac OS X
Not all devices support microSDHC 8GB cards. Please contact your device manufacturer for details. To ensure compatibility, look for the microSDHC logo on the product or packaging of your new phone or PDA. UK and Ireland customers can pre-order this memory card from www.directsaleschat.co.uk

StumbleUpon is a fantastic tool for blogging – whether for research, inspiration or promotion it’s hard to beat it, but I think if we’re honest it’s number one use is to distract us from what we really should be doing!

Work, writing a new post, interacting with your family, all these things fall by the wayside to the tune of ‘just one more Stumble’, so in order to assist you in your work-dodging endeavours, just check out this list of 40+ tools, scripts and tutorials in The StumbleUpon Toolbox.

Lots to choose from, and here’s three I’ve already made use of:

1. StumbleCrumble: I’ve posted earlier on how to include a list of your recent Stumbles in your sidebar using an RSS feed, but this WordPress plugin makes it even easier, and is fully customisable to stop it spreading long URLs across your page etc. It only takes seconds to install as well. See it in my left sidebar.
2. Quick Tag: Despite knowing that adding tags to your Stumbles gives them greater legs, I’m usually too lazy to add enough. This Greasemonkey script for FireFox enables you to quickly add popular and useful tags.
3. Best Friends: Although only you can see the results of this script, it adds a ‘Best Friends’ section to your Stumble profile, so you can bring all your favourite Stumblers to the top, for easy access.

Lots more to choose from in the toolbox, from the simple to the in-depth. Do you know of any they’ve missed? I’m always interested to hear how I can make my procrastination easier…….