Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

How I Upgraded To WordPress 2.5.1 Manually!

Monday, April 28th, 2008

Praise God! I successfully upgraded at last. This morning, I decided to upgrade to WordPress 2.5.1 since I was advised by friends that it was necessary for security reason (that got me scared enough to change my prior decision. I do not want my blog hacked!).

Unfortunately, unlike my prior experience when upgrading from WordPress 2.3 to 2.5, the Automatic Upgrade Plug-in got stuck midway during the upgrading process ( I tried several time but got the same result). It gave the following error

“Could Not Initiate Maintenance Mode”

and then politely gave the following message

“Some problems did not allow us to upgrade your blog. You can email me the logs so that I can help debug your problem……”

That was it. I panicked and started Googling up and down to find possible solution to the error. Well, nothing positive turned up (it could be that I was entering wrong information into Google anyway, I was too tensed up). After wasting about 1hour 30minutes, I told myself it is time to try the manual upgrading that I have been dodging from. So I went back to wordpress.org and also read some posts by other bloggers on how to upgrade manually.

Eventually, I followed the following steps to upgrade manually.

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WordPress 2.5.1 Released! WordPress 2.5.2 Almost Ready!

Saturday, April 26th, 2008

I noticed the announcement of the release of WordPress 2.5.1 in my admin dashboard late in the evening yesterday. I was still contemplating if I should go ahead and upgrade or wait for a little while before upgrading when I stumbled upon a post at xfep, you can read the post here.

My last upgrade from WordPress 2.3 was dramatic enough, read the post Upgrade Your WordPress Site Automatically . I am not willing to do two upgrade in quick succession. I am thinking of waiting for the WordPress 2.5.2 before upgrading. However, I am open to suggestion and technical advice. If you have any, do not hesitate to drop a comment. Thanks in advance. Cheers. 😉

Blog Comments – To Follow Or Not To Follow?

Friday, April 18th, 2008

I have been a bit confused on which side to be in the controversial “DoFollow” and “NoFollow” debate. Each proponents have cogent reasons why their idea is the best for a blogger.

The term “nofollow” is an instruction to search engines such as Google that a hyperlink should not influence the link owner’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to discourage spammers, thereby improving the quality of search engine results. Unfortunately, it makes nonsense of the potential benefit that bloggers who drop comments on a site would have had since the links to their site adds no value to the popularity of their sites.
I read convincing points in the post of Mehul, I encourage you to read the full post (I do not want to reproduce the whole article here).

However, today after reading Jeff and Hardley Jane’s arguments, I have decided to join the “DoFollow” group.
In order to still take advantage of some of the points listed by the “NoFollow” group, I installed a plugin NoFollow Free that gives me some control on who I will allow to have a “DoFollow” and those I will deny. I will be experimenting with this decision for a month. If the result is undesirable, I will change and make an update to this post.

I sure will love to learn from your experience via your comments 😉 . Thanks for visiting. Cheers.

New Alexa Rankings System

Thursday, April 17th, 2008

I got online this morning and I was greeted with a drastic drop in my Alexa ranking. Yesterday it was reading 315,865 but this morning I saw 102,798 that was too drastic a drop and I was wondering what happened overnight. Is there a sudden surge in traffic to my site (I wish that was the case)? When I visited the Alexa site, I was greeted with a banner announcing that the Ranking System has been changed.

Yesterday, a blogger, A Nairobian’s Perspective!, blogged about my ranking being 88 for Nigeria. I was excited then, but when I checked my ranking for Nigeria today, I discovered that it has dropped from 88 down to 157. So I guess the new system has modify the old algorithm that was being used for calculating site rankings. The Alexa team explained that the new Ranking System is more reflective of the popularity of the sites being ranked. Also the ranking is not restricted to the Alexa Users Community. I believe this is a welcome idea. You can read more about the new system on their website here.

The Million Blog List & Wiki Blog Directory

Wednesday, April 16th, 2008

I have often wondered how many blogs actually exist online (just curious). Some claim there are over 70million (that sounds like a very huge figure). While surfing today, I discovered that I am not alone. Some people have decided to find out how long it will take to get 1,000,000 blogs to list themselves on their site, Million Blog List. That to me is a herculean task.

Well, since it cost me nothing to get listed, I hopped in and listed NaijaEcash, it is number 390. From there I also visited their wiki site Wiki Blog Directory and listed NaijaEcash for free. If you are a newbie looking for traffic, I will suggest you try this out. I am positive that it will do no harm. It might possibly do some good. Remember it is free.

When you are through checking it out, I will like to hear your view. Who knows you may teach me something I never knew. Thanks in advance!