Recently in Blogging and Bloggers Category

My web host has suggested that I move to a new server they have online. That will be nice as it should make things a bit faster. I received this email earlier:

Hello,

Richard, after our monthly server evaluation we've identified that your account is one of the top 10 in terms of traffic, and hence server usage. To offset some of the load on the server we would like to move your account to our newest server called Chanel. There will be no planned downtime during the move, and you'll benefit from the speed the new server has to offer.

Please let me know when you'd like us to schedule the move to the new Chanel server.

Thank you

That will be pretty darned nice. I have had to disable 90% of the plugins and addons for MT due to CPU usage and the fact that I couldn't even log in. I even had to disable my server stats plugin, MT-VisitorStats because the MT dashboard refused to load even after upgrading to the newest release. It will be nice to be able to use some of them again.

I have to start getting ready to head in to Atlanta. There are a few bloggers meeting up around Centennial park someplace and I plan to be there. I am running way behind today because of my stupid cell phone dying a painful death. It's been acting up quite a bit lately and just turns itself off, drains the battery or reboots randomly in the middle of a call. I bought a brand new battery for it yesterday and the damn thing was drained by today and wouldn't turn back on.

I went to Verizon this morning and ended up getting a Moto Q 9m, not exactly the phone that I wanted but it is pretty cool thus far. I have 30 days I think if I want to switch so if the XV6800 comes out before then I may just have to get it instead.

The main thing I don't like about it is that it is somewhat laggy and slow to respond. Haven't tried it blogging yet but I did take a photo and try to send it to Flickr unsuccessfully. Maybe I will have more time to play with it later and see what the problem is.

Thanks to Owen I found out about another offline blog publishing platform that I wanted to check out. Windows Live Writer is what I am using to type this up. I have a few different sites and sometimes it's hard to keep in my head which ones I am posting to.

I don't think that this will particularly solve that problem because mine is more related to the fact that sometimes I will post to several different sites at the same time and that is what confuses me.

So far I like the setup and the options. This is the only blog I have added to it thus far but I will add the rest shortly.

There are options to add ping servers, which are a must and buttons to insert hyperlinks, photos, tables, maps, tags and videos. I will post more about it and maybe a review on my tech site once I have used it for awhile.

I'm in the process of moving one of my blogs over to Bluehost to try them out. I haven't heard anything but good references for them so far, they are a fifth of what I am currently paying for hosting and offer more bandwidth. I figure I can try them out for awhile and see if the issues I am having are ironed out over there. If not then I will stay where I am at right now and be out $6.95. It's worth $7 if my sites load faster and the commenting stops taking freaking 60+ seconds.

All I know is that there are plenty of blogs out there with more content and more comments and it takes 10% of the time to post a comment than it does here. I can't have screwed up my installation so much that it is all of my sites.

I will ask a few folks to check it out if they get time once the DNS servers have propagated and I move everything over. It will probably be Saturday or so before I do that.

Have you signed up to win $50 in my post contest yet?

OK, the wife just asked why the hell I have 100+ new posts showing up in Google Reader. oops. I have disabled Now Playing from sending tweets on everything that gets played. I will just have it update an xml file via ftp server and put it in a sidebar widget or something. I am surprised nobody has beaten the hell out of me for it yet.

This way the only ones that should start showing up are the actual tweets that I send from my cell phone or IM.

It is brand new and I still need to edit the default template but I have set up a links directory at www.shadowscope.com/links, if you are interested in being added it is free, just requires a reciprocal link on your main page. As it is a new installation if you have any problems or issues just let me know.

I set up an account with Odiogo quite some time ago, but even though they transpose all of my entries into audio I have never been able to find a way to integrate that into the site. It took me a little while this afternoon but I finally figured out to to do it.

1. Set up an account with Odiogo


2. Edit your MT template to include the following line <a href="http://podcasts.odiogo.com/get_mp3.mp3?f=/shadowscope/Shadowscope-<$MTEntryBasename separator="_"$>.mp3">Listen to Audio Version</a>


3. Replace Shadowscope with whatever blogname you have set up with the service. You can figure out the URL by going to your podcast page at http://podcasts.odiogo.com and just look at some of the file names on the page if you already have a couple of posts.

That's about it I think. Very simple, but it was hard to figure out at first. Odiogo seems to be kind of dragging today so nothing is playing very well. It may be because it is dragging at my bandwidth. There are a couple of plugins for wordpress and some javascript for blogger at http://blog.odiogo.com that I am going to look at on Monday. I may be able to figure out something that's not quite so kludgey to play them. The wordpress plugin uses flash and is pretty cool as is the one for the Blogger platform.

Technorati : Movabletype, Odiogo

I just upgraded the site to the latest beta version, so if everything is hosed up that's why :)

Crossposted to all the sites.

With it being my day off I probably would have gotten started much earlier with my posting and some of the yard work I wanted to do, but when I got up this morning my connection was down. Once I got home from the doctor I fooled with it for a couple of hours, got frustrated and took a nap.

I finally got my connection going about three this afternoon and have been fairly busy ever since. Oh well. Hopefully tomorrow will be a fairly short day. I have a ton of stuff to do around the house to prepare for the party this weekend, and I also need to get my site fixed.