Welcome to the second edition of Weekly WordPress Roundup!

Sorry for the late posting!  I was busy making lemonade from life’s lemons…

What Is It?

Weekly WordPress Roundup is a hybrid between a blog carnival and a weblog.  Every Monday morning the editor of that week’s roundup makes a single post linking to the “best” WordPress articles they’ve come across that week.  The choices are made from their own web surfing and from articles submitted via the Roundup’s blogcarnival.com page.  If you’re interested in hosting the Weekly WordPress Roundup, just drop an email to: philaahzophy@gmail.com

On To The Entries…

General WordPress News-

Our first entry comes from Jackie at Internet Marketing Strategy For Moms and even though it was posted last October, it’s still very relevant today.  The title pretty much tells the story: WordPress.com Deleted All Of My Blogs.  Apparetnly the folks at WordPress.com decided she was a splogger simply because she linked out to her other blogs.  Not good news.  And it’s not a problem that’s going away.  It was a full year ago that I posted Isn’t Freedom Of Expression Worth $5 Per Month? right here at Philaahzophy.

Looking for work?  Well, according to the WordPress Publisher Blog, oDesk Reports “WordPress” Fastest Growing In-Demand Skill in 2008!  So it seems like your blogging skills can pay off in the “real world” as well.

WordPress Plugins-

Madeline Begun Kane submitted her brief article on the wonders of the WP-SpamFree plugin titled Life-Saving, Spam-Fighting WordPress Plugin.  I didn’t investigate WP-SpamFree during my own recent search for a comment spam solution, because it’s listed as only being compatible up to WordPress 2.6.2.  If you know that it’s been upgraded for (or is compatible with) 2.7 then I’d love to hear about it in the comments section below!

WordPress Tips-

As I’ve started exploring the limits of what can be done with WordPress I’ve found myself coming closer and closer to altering the core Wordpress files.  Since any changes to the core will have to be redone manually whenever a new update comes out, this is a very bad thing.  Luckily, the folx over at Cats Who Code have an elegant solution in their How To: Overwrite Core WordPress Functions.

Mike Mueller recently posted a great overview on Setting Up Your WP Blog at his Mike’s Minute Real Estate Blog.

WordPress Themes-

Ever wish you could use more widgets without your blog looking overcrowded?  Well check out last week’s Thursday Themeday review of the Quadruple Blue four column WordPress theme!  Considering many people (myself included much of the time) feel that three column themes are, by their very nature, cluttered, the concept of a four column theme may seem preposterous.  But, somehow, this one pulls it off.

Anthony Delgado’s Free WordPress Themes may not be what you expect.  Instead of listing more free themes he actually discusses how to make a theme “your own” with only minor modifications.

Want to use WordPress as a CMS?  Then you absolutely have to check out the WordPress ReMix Theme I reviewed last week!

—–

That’s wraps up this week’s WordPress Roundup!  Look for next week’s edition over at Gilroy Review on Monday, January 26th!  Submit your WordPress-related article (or someone else’s that you find worthwhile!) to the next edition of Weekly WordPress Roundup using our carnival submission form or by emailing it to philaahzophy@gmail.com.  Future hosts can be found on the Weekly WordPress Roundup homepage.  If you’d like to be added to the list, just drop an email!

As always, comments, links and social bookmarks are very much appreciated!

Post from: Philaahzophy

Weekly WordPress Roundup – Jan 19, 2009

• Victory Over The Comment Spammers - January 14, 2009 - 7 common tags
• Can Your WordPress Blog See The Future? Mine Can! - September 17, 2008 - 6 common tags
• Polite Comment Spammers? - December 1, 2007 - 4 common tags
• Philaahzophy Now In Top 100,000 - November 13, 2007 - 4 common tags
• Introducing The Get Paid To Read / Click / Surf Carnival - August 27, 2007 - 4 common tags

Welcome to the twelfth installment of my Wonderful WordPress Wednesday series.

With more than 20 blogs to watch over, comment spam has become quite the annoying time killer of late.  With more than 200 Akismet entries to sort through each day it became clear that something else had to be done, so I headed into the ether to find a solution.

My first stop was, of course, the WordPress plugin directory.  Unfortunately, searching on “spam” returns 117 of the 3,870 plugins currently listed there.  Not exactly a bullseye solution to the problem.  So I headed into the WordPress Codex ehere I found their Combating Comment Spam page with the following suggestions-

• Akismet – Akismet was already keeping the majority o fthe spam off my blog, but I was still forced to sort through it in search of false positive.
• Settings > Discussion -
  • Here there are multiple options to automatically detect spam: number of links, spam keywords, blacklist.  Alas, when detected, it was just dumped into the Akismet area for me to sort through later.
  • Moderate All Comments – This would create even more work for me, essentially labeling everything as spam.  Not exactly a timesaver and not really user friendly, either, IMO.
  • Pre-approve only “old” commenters- Since I don’t have many ‘regular’ commenters this would still require far too much moderation time.
  • Restrict Comments To Registered Users – not only user-unfriendly, but I really have no desire to have dozens or even hundreds of people with user accounts on my blog(s).
• Delete wp-comments-post.php and/or wp-trackback.php -Again, not exactly user friendly.  I’m trying to encourage more comments, not remove them all.  Besides isn’t this just giving in to the spammers?  I’d rather let them run rampant than shut out my actual readers.
• Use rel=”nofollow” – this has never actually been effective in stopping comment spam.  The bots simply don’t care.
• Deny access with .htaccess – Now that seems interesting!
  • Deny Access to Spammer IPs/Referrer Spammers – Again, too labor intensive what with the need to collate and enter individual IP addresses and referrers.
  • Deny Access to No Referrer Requests – I think we have a winner!

Here’s the relevant section of The Codex-

When your readers comment, the wp-comments-post.php file is accessed, does its thing, and creates the post. The user’s browser will send a “referral” line about this.

When a spam-bot comes in, it hits the file directly and usually does not leave a referrer. This allows for some nifty detection and action direct from the server. If you are not familiar with Apache directives, then write the following in your root directory .htaccess file::

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} POST
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-comments-post\.php*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*yourdomain.com.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$
RewriteRule (.*) ^http://%{REMOTE_ADDR}/$ [R=301,L]

This will:
1. Detect when a POST is being made
2. Check to see if the post is on wp-comments-post.php
3. Check if the referrer is in your domain or if no referrer
4. Send the spam-bot BACK to its originating server’s IP address.

After reading that over it seemed to make perfect sense to me.  A simple but elegant solution t ospambots.  Five minutes later I had added the relevant code to my .htaccess file and expected to never hear from comment spammers again.

However, the next morning, my Akismet spam queue was full of over 100 messages again.  The only thing different was that not a single one of them was a false positive or even questionable.  Every single one of them had been left by a spambot.  Clearly this simple but elegant solution wasn’t working.  So I headed off to find another solution.  The worst part, however, was something I didn’t realize until a full two days later: the .htaccess changes were blocking regular comments!  I think this was because I don’t use the normal comments.php, instead using a custom one from a comment plugin, but regardless, it wasn’t helping block the spambots anyway, so I just wiped it clean out and immediately was able to receive comments again.

My next “great find” was Yet Another WordPress Anti Spam Plugin (YAWASP).  Unlike the vast majority of anti-spam plugins out there, YAWASP did not require Javascript or cookies (which many of my visitors have disabled) or a CAPTCHA (which I and many of my visitors hate), but instead, was entirely transparent to the regular user.  Its primary means of spam detecting is to add a “hidden” field that the bots will see (and complete) but is invisible to the human eye on the rendered page.  I use this same type of anti-apam system to keep spammers from registering on the various forums I’ve over the years and it works great.  So I was exited to see it available for WordPress as well. Unfortunately, i couldn’t get it to work.  No matter what I did it kept insisting that every comment was spam because it’s author had somehow entered data into the “hidden” field.  Exceedingly frustrated at this point I removed it and took a nice long break.

Finally I decided to see what other long term bloggers were doing and with a little poking aruond in Google Blog Search I finally came across several positive article about the Bad Behavior WordPress Plugin.  Like Akismet and YAWASP, Bad Behavior is transparent to my actual readers.  However, unlike them it was as simple as install and activate.  I haven’t received a spambot comment since!  Regular comments still seem to be getting through and spam that is manually left still shows up (though it tends to get caught by Akismet).  Best of all, in the last 24 hours I’ve only had to clear less than a dozen comments from my various Akismet queues.  Now that is protection.

Yeah, I know that was a long way to go for what could have been a simple single paragraph post.  But I wanted y’all to understand that I share your frustrations.  Now, hopefully, you can avoid all of my pitfalls and wasted time and simply install Bad behavior to begin with.  The only question remaining is why is Akismet distributed with WordPress when Bad Behavior is not?

Post from: Philaahzophy

Victory Over The Comment Spammers

• Weekly WordPress Roundup – Jan 19, 2009 - January 19, 2009 - 7 common tags
• Can Your WordPress Blog See The Future? Mine Can! - September 17, 2008 - 6 common tags
• Starting A Blog? Install These 5 WordPress Plugins First! - September 3, 2008 - 5 common tags
• Using A Default Rating With WP-PostRatings Plugin - January 7, 2009 - 4 common tags
• Popularity Protection For Your WordPress Blog - September 10, 2008 - 4 common tags

As usual, I’m a bit slow on the uptake when it comes to Google PageRank updates.  Apparently a major toolbar PR update occurred on New Year’s Eve.  It’s not too surprising that I’m slow to notice these things as Philaahzophy has been condemned to an eternal PR0 status due to my refusal to bow down to the Google Gods.

The good news is that the only websites I manage that dropped in PR were those dedicated to a now dead collectible miniature game, HorrorClix. Their dropping isn’t surprising as the pages that linked to them have all ceased to exist leaving them the sole sites of their kind on the internet. Of course, that also makes them the definitive sites in their niche, but Google doesn’t really care about relevance, they only care about backlinks and following their arbitrary rules.

The wacky part has to do with Zaira’s sites. Her personal blog, Butterfly Diaries, finally managed to score a PR after being around for two years and more than 100 posts. She’s got a shiny new PR of 1.  However, a new site she just started a month ago has a grand total of 6 posts, one backlink (from a PR2 blog carnival), fewer than two dozen unique visitors in its lifetime, and a shiny new PageRank of 3!  Say what?  The site doesn’t even rank in the top 20 for its primary keywords but Google has decided that it’s more trustworthy than the only site linking to it and equally as trustworthy a site as John Chow’s.  Well, at least my little girl has something to brag about

Post from: Philaahzophy

More Google Wackiness With PageRank Update

• Google Adsense and SEO Experiment Concludes - November 3, 2008 - 4 common tags
• Philaahzophy Now In Top 100,000 - November 13, 2007 - 3 common tags
• In Further Google PageRank Weirdness - December 19, 2007 - 3 common tags
• How I Know I’m Still Passing PageRank - December 18, 2007 - 3 common tags
• Actual Proof We’re Still Passing PageRank - January 25, 2008 - 3 common tags

I’ve written about “paid to post” forums before here on Philaahzophy.
I’ve written about couponing and discounts forums before here on Philaahzophy.
I’ve written about Adsense revenue sharing forums before here on Philaahzophy.
But today I finally get the opportunity to write about an online shopping coupons and discounts forum that pays you to post while actively sharing 100% of Adsense revenue with its posters! WooHoo!

The site I’m referring to (www.ExtraDime.com) also happens to have one of the best slogans I’ve come across lately: “an extra million starts from an extra dime“. Brilliant! But let’s get down to brass tacks…

ExtraDime offers-

•  Online shopping bargains, bank sign-up bonuses, credit card cashback offers, 0% credit for purchases, etc.
• Member Activity Appreciation Program that rewards members with cash (via PayPal) for creating new threads, replying to existing threads, recruiting new members, etc.
• AdSense revenue sharing in every post with 80% going to the starter of the thread and 20% going to the person who has made the most recent reply.
• The ability to sort credit card offers by either sign-up bonus or typical cashback bonus
• Powerful seacrh and navigation features that make it quick and easy to find the deal(s) you’re looking for.

Seriously, what more could you want?  You earn money to share and discover ways to save money!  It’s like a mini financial nirvana.

Post from: Philaahzophy

Earn, Save And Increase Adsense All On One Forum!

• September Revenue Report - October 3, 2007 - 3 common tags
• Latest News On NetAudioAds - February 4, 2008 - 3 common tags
• Get Paid For Your Non-Sponsored Blog Posts Too! - November 7, 2007 - 3 common tags
• Category RSS Feeds - October 10, 2007 - 3 common tags
• Are Audio Ads The Way To Monetize Your Website? - January 30, 2008 - 3 common tags

Welcome to the seventh installment of my Wonderful WordPress Wednesday series.

As you may have noticed I haven’t exactly been keeping to a weekly schedule with this series and, unfortunately, I probably won’t be returning to one until 2009. But this little discovery was too great to not share with y’all while it was fresh in my mind.

Last October I ran a review contest to get some quality feedback on Philaahzophy.  The best piece of advice I received  was to add a CSSClass to my in post images so that they looked more uniform.  I did a quick bit of research and learned that I could style all of my pictures by adding

class="pic"

with the IMG tag of my pictures and the following to my style.css file (through Presentation > Theme Editor in my wp-admin)-

.pic {
padding:5px;
background-color:#e1ccac;
border: 1px solid #660000;
margin: 6px;
}

That’s what I’ve done ever since to put that nice little border around all of my images here at Philaahzophy and on my other blogs as well.  However, since I don’t host my own images (which is both a bandwidth saving and revenue generating decision) I don’t insert pictures into my post by way of the image button in the post editor, but rather I copy and paste my image host’s code directly into my post.  I then have to go back into that code and type class=”pic” in the appropriate place.  If (read: when) I forget to include the code my blog images look like crap.  A better way was needed.

Today I found that better way!  Leaving my old code behind I inserted the following line into my style sheet-

#main a img {padding:5px;background-color:#e1ccac;border: 1px
solid #660000;margin: 6px;}

Now the same attributes I was getting with the “class” tag are automatically applied to all images included in my posts!  Woohoo!  Ain’t automation grand?

Now, I know very, very little about CSS, so realizing both that I could do this and exactly where to write the code took me quite some time to realize.  In fact, when I went to my other blogs I couldn’t find anything similar in their theme files.  Again I poked around a bit and eventually discovered that to get the same results on those blogs I needed to use the following code-

.post a img {
	padding:5px;
        background-color:#D7E1FF;
        border: 1px solid #9DB7FF;
        margin: 6px;
}

So you might need to try a couple of different formats to get the results you want. Obviously, you’ll also want to set your own colors, etc. But if you’ve just got plain old regular images sitting on your blog at the moment, this will make everything that much prettier and who can really complain about that? Using CSS also gives the benefit without the need to add yet another pliugin which will slow your blog’s performance.

Post from: Philaahzophy

Pretty Blog Pictures Thanks To CSS!

• Lighten The Load Of Your WordPress Blog – Part Two - August 27, 2008 - 4 common tags
• Victory Over The Comment Spammers - January 14, 2009 - 3 common tags
• Top 10 Improvements for ShareAPic - December 14, 2007 - 3 common tags
• Moving Your WordPress Blog To A New Web Server In 10 Easy Steps - September 24, 2008 - 3 common tags
• Can Your WordPress Blog See The Future? Mine Can! - September 17, 2008 - 3 common tags

Just wanted to take a moment to welcome all of the visitors from the Veteran’s Day edition of the Festival of Frugality!  Although I’m personally so far removed from the American economy that the current credit crunch hasn’t had an immediate impact on my life, I’m well aware of the rises prices and the economic sufferings of those around me.

I’m just getting back to regular frugal blogging, but be sure to check out my Friday Frugality series to see my past tips on saving cash wherever and whenever possible.  And be sure to swing back by this Friday to read how I managed to pay less than $2.0 gallon for gas and don’t expect to fill my 33 gallon tank for less than $1.00 per gallon before the year is out!

Post from: Philaahzophy

Welcome My Frugal Friends!

• Friday Frugality – A New Weekly Feature At Philaahzophy - January 10, 2008 - 3 common tags
• Victory Over The Comment Spammers - January 14, 2009 - 2 common tags
• Smallest Room Gets A Bit Smaller… Again - November 20, 2007 - 2 common tags
• Save Big on Books with PaperBackSwap - November 6, 2008 - 2 common tags
• Moving Your WordPress Blog To A New Web Server In 10 Easy Steps - September 24, 2008 - 2 common tags

Hello again Did you miss me?

If any of y’all have wondered where I’ve been, I’ve been around, just keeping my paws off the site in order to see what would happen.  Specifically, I was curious how my complete absence for a month would effect such things as my standings in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) and my Google Adsense revenue.  Results were both positive and a bit distressing, but I’ll get to my reaction to them in a few moments.

Traffic Results and SERPs-

First, here’s some actual numbers from Clicky Web Analytics-

September Traffic Stats for Philaahzophy.com-

October Traffic Stats for Philaahzophy.com-

To quickly sum up those traffic numbers I had more visitors looking at more pages, but spending less time overall in October as compared to September.  And that’s without really promoting the site or doing so much as visiting, much less adding new content.  Yes, my last post was actually on October 5th, but that post only received 215 views leaving more than 2,500 new views unaccounted for.  And, though it’s not visible in those screenshots I also lost more than 1,500 ’social media’ views by not actively promoting the site through StumbleUpon.  So, where’d that traffic come from?  Well, search traffic more than tripled in October from 2,140 to 6,627!

Google Adsense Revenue-

Unfortunately, Google won’t let me share my Adsense earnings with you, but I do believe I can safely say the following:  In the almost three years I’ve been a member of Google Adsense I’ve earned a grand total of three payments.  I first reached payment threshold in February of this year (about 18 months into my history with the program), my second in August (six months later), and my third at the end of October.  In other words, my revenue has consistently increased as I’ve learned more about how the system works and regardless of my continuing to add new content to this site.

I did manage to earn roughly 15% more from Google Adsense in September than I did in October, but I attribute that more to the Adsense earnings from StumbleUpon visitors that I wrote about previously.  And, even without any new content, October was still my second best month for Google Adsense earnings by more than 25%.

Conclusions-

So what does this all mean?  Unfortunately, I have no idea.  Thus the ‘positive but distressing’ comment in my opening paragraph.  The results are clearly positive – traffic and revenue are both up – but they’re also distressing because this seems to be happening not only outside my control, but apparently also without my input.  It just seems to be an organic occurrence now that I’ve reached some sort of critical mass with this blog.

Yes, it does seem there was a Google PageRank update in October, but Philaahzophy still sits at it’s arbitrarily enforced zero because I dare to state my opinions. This despite the fact Philaahzophy has more backlinks and far more traffic than my PR 2 blog.  So, that couldn’t be the cause of all of this.

I do have numerous pages on the first page of search engine results (in Google, Yahoo! and MSN search), but few, if any, of these just achieved those high results.  And even if my standing has increased in the SERPs, that simply begs the question of why since I’ve been doing nothing to the site.

The number of new links back to Philaahzophy decreased dramatically in October because I was neither out promoting the site nor generating new content to link to.  So that wasn’t it either.

If forced to state a reason behind these increases I’m left with only two options: 1) More people are spending more time searching the internet for topics I’ve written about over the last two years, or 2) Philaahzophy has reached some sort of critical mass.  I’m sorry if that informational isn’t exactly helpful, but one can’t always predict the usefulness of an experiment upon initiating it.

For those who actually missed my ramblings: thank you.  I do have several posts waiting in the wings that should be appearing shortly.

Post from: Philaahzophy

Google Adsense and SEO Experiment Concludes

• Is StumbleUpon Traffic Worthless? Dispelling The Myth - September 27, 2008 - 6 common tags
• Dismissing Google PageRank Rumors - November 2, 2007 - 6 common tags
• The Market Reacts To Google’s Insanity - November 16, 2007 - 5 common tags
• One Decade Of Google - September 7, 2008 - 5 common tags
• In Further Google PageRank Weirdness - December 19, 2007 - 5 common tags

Welcome to the very first edition of Social Saturday here at Philaahzophy. This semi-regular serious will appear whenever I have some new discovery, ide, or news to share about the world of social bookmarking sites: StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, etc.

By far, the most common complaint I see about social bookmarking site StumbleUpon is that the traffic “doesn’t convert”. In this case, “convert” means that the visitors don’t buy the product being advertised and/or click through any of the ads on the page, thus generating revenue for the blogger or webmaster.

I’ve been concentrating on becoming a better member of the StumbleUpon community, learning more about how the service works, and closely watching its effect on my blogs for the last six weeks or so.  I’m certainly not going to claim any sort of “expert” status, but one thing has been made very clear to me – StumbleUpon traffic does convert.

Unfortunately, “convert” for me means “click on my Adsense ads” and Google won’t permit its publishers to share specific numbers.  So, instead of being able to share screenshots y’all are just going to have to trust me on this one.

As I’ve mentioned before, during the first two weeks of September (county fair season in the United States) my Carnival Midway Games Revealed (Part Two) post was receiving 50-100 hits a day coming from StumbleUpon.  That actually climbed as high as 500 visitors a day before finally petering off to the “normal” 10-20 visits a day.  The SU traffic to that post alone was quadrupling my daily unique visitor account.  During those same two weeks, my Google Adsense revenue frmo Philaahzophy tripled, without a single change in anything I was doing with Adsense.  In fact, by the 12th of September I had set my all time record for a full month’s Adsense earning.

Now, you could certainly think that I’m making this all up for some reason.  You might also think that it’s just a coincidence.  But I know that I had a steady $x.xx per day earnings for weeks before that post got hot on StumbleUpon, and that my earnings since the SU traffic dissapated matches the pattern before hand.  If it was coincidence it was the darnedest thing I ever saw.  The only different about Philaahzophy during that time was the amount of traffic coming from StumbleUpon and  going to that single post.  So, if it wasn’t Stumblers checking out those Adsense ads, then who was it?

Post from: Philaahzophy

Is StumbleUpon Traffic Worthless? Dispelling The Myth

• Google Adsense and SEO Experiment Concludes - November 3, 2008 - 6 common tags
• In Further Google PageRank Weirdness - December 19, 2007 - 3 common tags
• Grease For My Squeaky Wheel - September 24, 2008 - 3 common tags
• Get Paid For Your Non-Sponsored Blog Posts Too! - November 7, 2007 - 3 common tags
• Victory Over The Comment Spammers - January 14, 2009 - 2 common tags

Okay, not really, but I kinda feel like one.  And it’s all thanks to my post, I’m Now A Silver AMPlifier For Free Talk Live.  But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself…

Over the weekend I got curious how many people were actually using Google’s new web browser, Chrome.  So, I visited my stats program over at Clicky to see how many visitors were still using it.  There were only a small handful, but one of them had gone directly to my post linked above – no search engine, no stop by the home page.  Curious who even knew about the post, I checked their IP and discovered they were in Keene, NH. Clearly this was Ian from Free Talk Live, whom I’d emailed the link to when signing up as an AMPlifier for the show.  I did a little happy dance and then decided that there were neither enough, nor fewenough Chrome visitors to warrant a post or even a comment, and carried on with whatever the next project on my list was.

Imagine my surprise when yesterday evening I’m ’spying’ on Philaahzophy’s visitors, via Clicky again, and notice that Ian has apparently returned to the post.  And during show time as well!  This could only mean one of two things-

1. He was sharing my post with Mark or one of the other cohosts, or
2. He was going to read it on the air.

Popping in to the live feed my “dream” came true and not only did Ian spend a little more than 5 minutes reading my full post on the air, but both he and Mark seemed genuinely impressed with it as well.  My little blog post had just been read to a live national audience over 20-something radio stations and who knows how many internet connections!  Woohoo!  They even pronounced the name of the blog correctly.  I really just wanted to share my personal excitement with all of you, but I figured I’d address a few of their comments as well…

Mark scoffed at the idea that I wasn’t influenced in my decision by Z’s seeming disapproval.  He may well be right, but it lead to a great comment from Ian: “I love this, people’s kids are guilt tripping them for us.”

Mark also asked how someone can be between the two of them on th epolitical spectrum, a statement I made in the post.  In fact, I phrased that poorly.  It’s more that I’m torn between the two of them.  My brain is firmly in Ian’s camp – freedom in our lifetimes is the top priority- while my heart tends to agree with Mark’s stance – some things are more important than freedom – in my case, that’s Z.

When Ian got to my Free State Project plug, he presumed that I’ve already signed up.  Actually, I haven’t, but not because I’m not a 100% supporter in what they’re doing.  It’s because I take my word very seriously (as I think most anarchists/freedom lovers do) and I can’t make the promise today that I will fulfill part of the pledge-

 Once 20,000 people have signed the Statement, participants in the FSP shall move to the state decided upon as expeditiously as possible and absolutely within five years of the crossing of the 20,000-signer threshold.

You see, I can’t promise to move to New Hampshire in five years.  When Z came back into my life three years ago I made her (and myself) a vow that I wouldn’t leave her until she turned 18 and headed out into the world on her own.  Since her mother (a nanny statist through and through) has primary physical custody I’m somewhat limited to where I can choose to reside.  With Z still a few months shy of her 13th birthday, my presence is already committed elsewhere for the next 5+ years.

Now, there are currently only 8,680 signers to the Free State Project, so it’s doubtful that they’ll be hitting the magic 20,000 mark that starts the 5 year clock before my current commitment has decreased to that length of time.  But, as I said above, I take my word very  seriously.  I fully intend to become a full member of the Free State Project on Z’s 13th birthday.  That will leave both commitments running concurrently and give me a bit of hedge room while the remaining FSP members sign up.

I have, however, become a Friend of the Free State Project, and am already working on plans for moving to New Hampshire, as a Free Stater, in the summer or fall of 2014, regardless of the number of existing Free State Project members.  So that’s my story, what’s yours?  Why haven’t you signed up yet, or why haven’t you moved? Or have you?  Leave a comment and let me know!

Post from: Philaahzophy

I’m A Liberty Lovin’ Celebrity!

• I’m Now A Silver AMPlifier for Free Talk Live! - September 19, 2008 - 8 common tags
• 9/11 – 3,000 People Killed By 300,000,000 Americans - September 11, 2008 - 6 common tags
• Victory For Liberty Or Typical Bureaucratic BS? - April 8, 2008 - 5 common tags
• Applied Anarchy – Make Freedom A Bestseller - January 5, 2009 - 5 common tags
• Ask An Anarchist: Cheat Out Of A Ticket - December 22, 2008 - 4 common tags

As y’all know, my squabble with my webhosting company blew up over the last few days. It flowed not only into email but on to two other blogs in addition to this one as well.  End results – one guy, John Raul, apparently lost the sponsorship of his blog (or possibly his job, or possibly nothing at all); Top Hosting Center’s CEO, Eric Vanier, is really pissed off at me; although the WebHostDir.com badge is still on the THC homepage it no longer links to the website; and my websites have been moved to a new THC server that not only has fewer other domains on it (which should increase stability), but also has the PHP 5 necessary for my “Email This Post” functionality to work properly.  I was under the impression I had PHP 5 on my servers all along since that what was advertised for the Rudolph hosting plan that I purchased.  Apparently, that functionality must be requested.  Who knew?

Regardless, I now have the functionality that I both desire and paid for.  That’s the important result.  At least one other THC customer is now getting better service as well, so I’m not the only one to benefit from this spat.  Only one thing continues to bother me and remain unresolved (at least in my mind).  Both John Raul in his original attack post and, later, Eric Vanier claim that the whole reason I started ranting against THC was to increase traffic to Philaahzophy.  Let me put that to rest with a little evidence.

• My post,  StumbleUpon Highlights Top Hosting Center’s Weakness, posted September 7 after a slight bump of StumbleUpon traffic crashed my server, is currently the number four result on Google when searching “Top Hosting Center” (with or without quotes), and the number nine result on Yahoo! for the same search.
• I have never had a single visitor come to my site as a result of searching for Top Hosting Center on any search engine.
• According to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, the “approximate average monthly number of search queries matching” Top Hosting Center is 110 and there was not enough data to determine the number of searches on that phrase in August.  Feel free to follow the link and check it yourself!

My point?  If I’m targeting THC in order to generate traffic I’m neither very bright, nor very effective.  Despite the egos involved, there just aren’t that many people using the search engines to locate THC.  I do, however, find it rather curious that the THC CEO came to the same conclusion as a (supposedly) former employee of his whom Eric has previously helped disguise himself as merely a satisfied customer.

There’s definitely some fishy stuff going on over at THC, but they still offer some of the best web hosting deals on the web.  You can decide for yourself whether or not the financial savings is worth dealing with some of the oddities I’ve encountered of late.

Post from: Philaahzophy

Grease For My Squeaky Wheel

• Top Hosting Center Attacks Web Hosting Customer - September 22, 2008 - 7 common tags
• Top Hosting Center Rudolph Lifetime Web Hosting Scam Returns - January 5, 2009 - 5 common tags
• Moving Your WordPress Blog To A New Web Server In 10 Easy Steps - September 24, 2008 - 5 common tags
• Well THAT Sucked! - January 13, 2008 - 4 common tags
• Top Hosting Center STILL Can’t Keep Their Home Page Online! - September 25, 2008 - 4 common tags