But why spend the money when you can get no money solution that does the job just as a well? And how do we do that? By using Google Drive.

What you will need

A Google email address.
A product you will give away.

What you will do in this process.

1.) Upload your product.
2.) Create a form.
3.) Make your product shareable through a Google link.
4.) Insert link in the form.
5.) Get completed form link to display to direct people to your free product.

From these two things, you can develop your email list.

1.) You start by either opening or creating a Gmail account which begins with creating the email address. This will give you access to a host of free Google applications. The one we will use today is Google Drive.

2.) Open the Google drive icon. Create a new folder. Upload your file. You can upload any type of file, but just for ease, I suggest you upload a pdf file. Open your file. See the web address at the top of the file. This is the address you will use to direct the download. But before we do that we need to create the vehicle to gather email addresses. We will create a Google Form.

3.) To create your Google form create new Google Sheets files. (Click on create new file. Choose Google Sheet Open the file.)

a.)Rename it in the type left-hand corner. (Yes, it is much easier in a Google Sheet or Doc to change the name than Excel.

b.) Click on edit and then choose form.

c.) Two blocks will come on your screen with the name of your file. The top one will have the name of your spreadsheet. In this block, you can enter a description of the form. The send one is a question block. Click on the top six gray dots and chose “Short Answer.” Enter your question such as “What is your email address?” Google will automatically pop-up asking you if you want to enable email collection. Press yes.

d.) Collect name. What Google will do is use your sheet file to record responses. If you intend on using this for an email list I suggest putting first and last names in separate boxes just because Google sheets capture this information in different columns and it makes it easier to mail merge a personalized letter by having first and last names in separate columns. Start by pressing the plus sign in a circle on the right side. Make the first name box, then the last name box.

There. Now you have your form. But how about making it pretty? We can do that. Go to the palette icon at the very top of the form and click onto it. You have options. You can upload your own header (800 x 200 px) or choose one of the ones that Google provides. When you choose a header Google will automatically provide a color palette but you can override it just by clicking on the plus sign in the Theme Color section and choose your color.

Now your form is complete. You do not need to add a submit form button. Google does that automatically. You don’t see it yet but don’t worry it’s there. You can check it out by pressing the eye icon at the top.

You aren’t quite done yet. Go to your download page. You will see icons on the right. Click on the three dots, then click on Sharing.

This will take you to sharing permissions. Click Shareable Link and choose “Anyone with the link can edit.” This gives the person the ability to print your file as the pdf. Or download from the page, but that will require a Gmail address to do.

Now copy the shareable link. You’re almost finished!

Now to get to the download part.

a.) Go to settings. Click on Presentation. At the bottom is a line called Confirmation Message. Put in your message and your shareable link and hit save.

Use a message like this:

The last piece is to get the link you can display to direct people to your form. And that’s easy. Hit the eye icon and copy the link. The end should be “view form.” Insert it on the webpage you want to promote your download.

Here is mine for The Best of Astrology Explored: Yods by yours truly.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfjjP-dTZgOUqsthnwgAF3yU8JEGTxZXv4S_8NvvW1FTKDifw/viewform

From now on you can check out the progress of your list gathering by going to the form in your Google Drive folder and click on the green square. This will open your Google spreadsheet with the information you collected.

Happy list building!

Image Credit: <a href=”https://flickr.com/photos/cardkarma/5990183098/in/photolist-a8kfJW-2ifC8X-6WLDvi-YvygKn-d93UjS-gdUZAa-jf3oXA-6bWHFG-aRkaw8-6XBRSM-8hayM1-bSFeeM-yiG2b-mGguUg-6iVUQm-CDEV-dDzuf9-7uaSK3-APX7L-QQWHdf-EaU2gp-NSkVFD-3vVdx-aT5hRK-PxUGc-fsJU9-2cJpBZk-4ohvpo-pYFWrb-urabZ-jwEtC9-zftuG-6TBak-TSbxaH-8z74KC-syJw-5KtcQr-5fEBGo-266RSdq-6oVHH2-EB4XL-Q7Bgw9-5QV6Xo-5sgZib-djj9xd-8vTt3U-aaNphc-7GHyUu-Gjej-255V9sB”>Image published under a Creative Commons License issued by Flickr user Card Karma</a>

It was a mistake.

I should have known disaster was about to unfold when the pop up flashed “welcome to the wonderful of blocks.”

What?

Initially, your screen looks like you have a permanent visual editor, but no, it is more insidious. You use blocks for each little and separate thing you post. In the end, you have something that looks more orderly than a Jenga game but much more unruly.

This article explains all the drawbacks of Gutenberg nicely:

Editor Review: Please Don’t Include This In The WordPress Core

People have complained :

And this screenshot from the WordPress review page tells it:

1600 out of 2400 reviews one star?

But yet there were a few people who loved it, which probably gives the warm and fuzzies to the managers at WordPress, but for the rest of us who despise the thing? It’s just a darn good thing that enterprising developers developed different plug-ins to disable Gutenburg. And you can find it it here:

Disable Gutenberg

With over 100,000 installs and 306 out of 306 five star ratings, this seems the best solution to get rid of the headache that is Gutenberg. Jeff Star, the man who wrote Disable Gutenberg is my hero.

And WordPress Developers? I stopped playing with blocks at 3 years of age. I don’t need to play with them now that I’m in my 60’s.

Image published under a Creative Commons license granted by Flickr user Petr Sejba

Instagram users have shared over 30 billion photos to date, and now share an average of 70 million photos per day

And:

Instagram’s per-follower engagement rate for top brands is 58 times higher than on Facebook and 120 times higher than on Twitter

But despite all this sharing there is one thing that Instagram does not do. While posting a photo from your smart phone or tablet Instagram app is very easy, you cannot post from anywhere else. You cannot use the Instagram app from your laptop, where you’ve gathered all your wonderful astrology graphics. And you can’t “share” your blog post to Instagram through a third party application like you can for Facebook and Twitter. Why?

Instagram doesn’t want you too. And here is their rationale:

According to Instagram:

At this time, uploading via the API is not possible. We made a conscious choice not to add this for the following reasons:

Instagram is about your life on the go – we hope to encourage photos from within the app. However, in the future we may give whitelist access to individual apps on a case by case basis.

We want to fight spam & low quality photos. Once we allow uploading from other sources, it’s harder to control what comes into the Instagram ecosystem. All this being said, we’re working on ways to ensure users have a consistent and high-quality experience on our platform.

Therefore, currently you cannot upload photos from your wordpress site into your instagram account.

Nope. Instagram does not make it easy for a blogger to use their app to spread the word about their bloggerly goodness. But since Instagram is such a potent marketing tool, you’d be missing out on opportunities to bring new followers to your blog if you didn’t.

It can be done and I’ll tell you how. But first lets gather the tools of the trade.

a.) Your smart phone
b.) list of 30 pre-prepared instagram tags on word processing app on your cell phone. I use Google docs.
c.) your Facebook account

You’ll need to have or add these apps on your smartphone:

Instagram
Google Docs
Documents by Readdle

You’ll also need a Dropbox and Google Docs account you can access from your computer.

Creating Your Instagram Hashtags

What a luxury! With Instagram you can use thirty hashtags, all pre-selected (once you do the work) and ready to go when you post.

So let’s put that list together. Go to Gramfeed and enter your keyword to search. In this case let’s choose astrology and see what we get. What returns is a list of hashtags and the number of photographs on instagram with that hash mark. Copy and paste that list into a word processing program like Word numbers and all.

You can run one than one list and you should. Run one for each of your prime keywords. Copy and paste each list into your word processing program. Now having your lists you can edit them to choose the ones with the highest numbers, or even for particular niches you want to reach.Delete the ones you don’t want. Also edit out the numbers making sure you have a hashtag mark at the beginning of each word or word group. Example: #astrology #zodiac, etc.

Save your list and upload it to your Google Docs account.

Ready to post?

Well, not just yet. The idea of Instagram is to share photos, not content, so the next step is to get your image ready.

1.) Put your image into some photo image processing program like Photoshop (unless it is a video) and change its proportions through enlarging and cropping to 1084 pixels to 1084 pixels. Save your image and then put it in Dropbox file on your computer.

2.) Import photo to your smartphone. Go to your smartphone and open your Documents by Readdle file and click on Dropbox, which will open your Dropbox file. Choose the image you to upload to your photo files on your smart phone. Click on it once, then drag it up to the top bar where it says Downloads to the section that says “drag here.” Doing this will drag the photo into your smartphone phone storage. It can be a little tricky to do this maneuver, so keep trying until you get the hang of it. It does work.

Can I Post Yet?

Not just yet. You have another decision to make. Instagram does not let you link to an outside link like your blog. Yet, you want people to migrate there to look at your post. Decide how you want to do this. Either you hand type in the link to your blog, or you can use a link shortener like tinyurl.com or bitly.com. I like bitly because you can not only customize your shortened link but bitly will track the number of time people click on that link. Whatever you do, you have to make it short and memorable as people are going to have to type in the link to get there.

Okay, Can I Post Now?

Yes.

1.) Go to Google Docs on your smart phone and copy the hashtag tag cluster you created.
2.) Open your Instagram app on your smart phone and hit the photo tab, the square thing in the middle with the circle in the center. The last picture you uploaded should be in the square on the left. Click onto it. Go through the different prompts until you get to “Enter caption.”
3.) Enter your caption or blog post title.
4.) Enter the url for your blog post
5.) Hit paste to past your hashtags.
6.) Hit post.

There it is. Your blog post on Instagram.

Instagram Logo published under the Fair Use provision of U.S. Copyright Law.

(Astroblogging) The temptation is there. I get it. I really do. You’re an astrologer, either full or part-time. Like most astrologers you are not earning six figures. Heck, if you are earning high 30’s you are doing good. So when it comes to managing your business costs, the one thing you do skimp on is promotion. And you know you need a some sort of web presence to spotlight your talents, and you’ve decided to start a blog. It’s easy right? There’s a whole host (pun intended) of “free” websites that you can use. Free is good right?

Well, maybe not so much.

Most astrology bloggers use sites like wordpress.com, or blogspot or some other incarnation like LiveJournal. Some of you, (puts hands in front of eyes, cringing) use Facebook for your blogging efforts.

If you are going to blog on these types of sites, blog safely. By this I mean protect as many of your rights as possible as the author of your blog without spending an unreasonable amount of money.

First, read through terms of service. Make sure your content stays yours; that your copyright remains with you. Some of these sites claim whatever you post belongs to them. Some of them will automatically assign “Creative Commons Licenses” to your work.

Understand that when you use one of these sites, the URL they assign you belongs to them, not you. You won’t be able to port this URL to another server should they go out of business, or if you decided to leave them. This means that should something happen you’ll lose all the links from other sites that help to give you pagerank, and you’ll have to start from scratch again.

Make sure you have a full range of functions. Some won’t allow you to advertise your services, like wordpress.com, or have any advertising at all. Others will limit what functionality you can put on your site. You may not care about this now, but one day you might.

Check to see if you have the capacity built in to back up and transfer your site files. You may want to use another platform someday, and there is nothing suckier than trying to rebuild your site from scratch.

Do not pay out fees for extra functions, like shopping carts, or “premium” templates. You can get all that for free other places.

Weigh the pros and cons of going with a website provider rather than hosting your own site and buying your own domain name. Again, the possibility of them shuttering their business and leaving you in the cold is very real. (It happened to me twice.)

Since buying your own domain name and going with a ISP like Hostgator is so reasonable in price, so that even a starving artist like me can afford it, my best recommendation is going with that option. Directions on how to do this are on my bethturnage blog.

But if you are an astrology blogger, and you have your heart set on a free blog, then write me at starrynightastro@aol.com and I’ll set you up on Astrology Media Press on a wordpress blog for free. Yes, totally free. If I approve your blog, you can do anything you like, just so long as you don’t upset the smooth efficiency of the Astrology Media Press network. And if you have a blog on WordPress.com or blogspot, and you want to switch over we can do that do and import everything over to the new blog. Except for identifying your blog as part of the Astrology Media Press Network, there are no strings attached. What’s my evil plan? It is to build a network of quality astrology blogs that promotes astrology. Yes, I know, truly evil.

If you have any questions about the above offer write me at starrynightastro@aol.com and put in the heading “free astro blog.”

Photo modified and published under a Creative Commons License issued by Flickr user mkhmarketing.

___________________________________________________________________
Beth Turnage authors Astrology Explored as well as publishes Astrology Media Press. Beth is available for private consultations. You can contact Beth at starrynightastro@aol.com.
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]]> http://astroblogging.net/main/?feed=rss2&p=861 5 http://astroblogging.net/main/?p=854 http://astroblogging.net/main/?p=854#respond Thu, 05 Mar 2015 14:11:52 +0000 http://astroblogging.net/main/?p=854 Continue reading →]]> https://www.flickr.com/photos/deks/711658920/in/photolist-25Trpo-7i2HP-aWczjR-pWq4CG-bxNhgC-8MyW8x-8Znbh5-aU9rh2-aYRvpz-7rsxru-aYP8jv-esNqMM-mVSjUZ-b36QGg-d2hLbs-cDam23-aYrjDg-fELDyS-5W7RLV-6HLe-fLvbYZ-7EmsEb-6HKC-6HKL-6HL4-6HKm-6HL6-8gLFg5-nA4nP4-5DQ4og-bm2PNd-bxHK7n-aWSkCT-aZTQVp-nvY8-dyYc1J-diFMjA-diFKC5-7pwHkU-6irDGF-aoKpQ3-aVVSJv-9EFHjS-aTgvhD-5dY8db-68xiEk-DaJL-b4Pa4a-9iUESD-4oLTFL/player/width=240height=160frameborder=0allowfullscreenwebkitallowfullscreenmozallowfullscreenoallowfullscreenmsallowfullscreen

(Astroblogging) Your headline is the point where you convert a person browsing the internet into your reader. But what is a good headline? What is going to grab the attention of both search engine and reader to drive traffic?

After the AMI headline analyzer stopped working for multiple searches, I’ve been looking for a replacement. Today I found it in CoScheduler’s headline analyzer. This baby is full of useful metrics and helpful suggestions.

Again the emphasis is on emotionally evocative words. Emotional and power words top the list of items to include in your headline, but they also point out the necessity of common and uncommon words. Your headline is judged against an optimal mix of these words, with the goal of getting over a score of 70. Sounds easy right? Hah! I had to work this title several times before I settled on the above. CoSchedule’s blog also has useful information on constructing blog headlines. I recommend you read it.

A caution though. You are writing headlines for astrology readers, so don’t forget to put in your astrology keywords into your headline. Sometimes what makes for a strong headline for other types of blogs doesn’t for astrology blogs. For instance my title:

The Astrology of Relationships-Fated, the Yod in the Composite Chart

only scores a 60 in CoScheduler’s analysis, but it is, by far the most popular post I’ve ever written.

If you give these suggestions a try, keep an eye on your traffic to see if you move the needle. And then let me know in a comment below.

Photo published under a Creative Commons License issue by Flickr user Christopher Woo

___________________________________________________________________
Beth Turnage authors Astrology Explored as well as publishes Astrology Media Press. Beth is available for private consultations. You can contact Beth at starrynightastro@aol.com.
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]]> http://astroblogging.net/main/?feed=rss2&p=854 0 http://astroblogging.net/main/?p=818 http://astroblogging.net/main/?p=818#respond Tue, 13 Nov 2012 16:11:35 +0000 http://astroblogging.net/main/?p=818 Continue reading →]]> (Astroblogging) TD Ameritrade’s commercial on the supposed Maya end time prediction has nothing on the impact of Google’s announcement that they shut down the Feedburner API on October 20, 2012.

Nor does Google’s announcement mean the end of Feedburner services . . .yet.

But the writing is on the wall.

Feedburner was and still is a lovely free service to bloggers that kept track of your posts, distributes them in the individual feed readers of your subscribers and/or sends the posts to the inboxes of your readers. Some services like Invesp use Feedburner stats in their evaluation of your website.

To entice you to use this service, Feedburner developed an impressive array of services, from keeping track of the number of subscribers who looked at your post to giving you little widgets to display your numbers.

And while Google, the owner of Feedburner since 2009, hasn’t spoken publicly about its strategy for Feedburner, why it is phasing out Adsense for Feedburner or ending the API access to programmers, one can only assume that Feedburner is not making enough money to keep its corporate masters happy.

Fortunately for you, while its the end of the Feedburner world as we know it, there are relatively painless ways to keep the same flow of information to your subscribers, especially if you are a WordPress user.

As Leo Dimilo said in his post

if you are using WordPress, you really don’t need a service. WordPress automatically generates feeds for everything from comments to pages to posts . . .

To make use of WordPress’s built in capabilities you need only look at one of my favorite plug-ins, Jetpack. This perennially useful collection of services for WordPress has a subscription widget in its arsenal. All you need to do is to upload the Jetpack plug-in, and drag it to an appropriate widget space. You can change the text messages of this widget, but unfortunately it is a little plain with no way (except through the php sections of your WordPress template) to insert an image. If you don’t want to fiddle with php then you can put a html widget and place it above the Jetpack widget. Upload a graphic to an image server like Photobucket or Flickr. Then you take the image code and plop it into html widget. If you look to the right hand side of the blog you will see I’ve done just that.

For other people who self host without WordPress, you’ll have to do a little more work, like subscribe and pay for a mail service. Plenty of blogs made lists about these services. You can check out the blog twentytwenty for some suggestions.

Start looking around and making your plans, since Google is not known for giving tons of advance time before it pulls the plug. As for me, it may be the end of the Feedburner world as we know it, but I feel fine.

___________________________________________________________________

Beth Turnage authors Astrology Explored as well as being publisher of Astrology Media Press. Beth is available for private consultations. You can contact Beth at starrynightastro@aol.com.
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Is My Message Getting Across?

Wonder no longer. If you haven’t stumbled across it yet, Klout is a free online service that measures your online social influence. Scaled from 1 to 100, the Klout score measures not just your number of connections (followers) but your influence on them. Drawing from your social media accounts, responses by others to your posts, tweets, retweets, FB likes and comments, Google plus interactions and more, Klout calculates how people respond to you. Klout scores are supplemented with three nominally more specific measures, which Klout calls “true reach,” “amplification,” and “network impact.”

Not that Klout isn’t without its detractors. Wikipedia tells us:

Critics have pointed out that Klout scores are not representative of the influence a person really has, highlighted by Barack Obama, President of the United States, having a lower influence score than a number of bloggers.[11] Other social critics argue that the Klout score devalues authentic online communication and promotes social ranking and stratification by trying to quantify human interaction.[12] Such criticism may become quickly outdated due to the dynamic nature of the moving target “social influence”: a recent update to Klout’s algorithms does now rank the importance of Barack Obama in a way that more reflects our perception.[13]

The site has been criticized for violating the privacy of minors, and for exploiting users for its own profit.[14]

John Scalzi has described the principle behind Klout’s operation as “socially evil” in its exploitation of its users’ status anxiety.[15] Charles Stross has described the service as “the Internet equivalent of herpes,” blogging that his analysis of Klout’s terms and conditions reveals that the company’s business model is illegal in the United Kingdom, where it conflicts with the Data Protection Act 1998; Stross advises readers to delete their Klout accounts and opt out of Klout services.[16]

A social evil? Maybe or maybe not. But as blogger Molly McHugh observed:

First accepting that we are being measured by our social influence was a tough pill to swallow – an accurate one (it’s happening whether we like it or not), but a tough one. And then the idea that a Web app could be the deciding factor in all this proved even more difficult to accept,

What You Can Learn from Klout

Aside from scoring your interactions, you can see from your dashboard your top social interactions. Not only do you see the posts and responses, you see, among other things, who re-tweeted your content. The My Score Summary tab displays which social networks your spread your influence. Klout’s easily accessible interface is a one stop shopping for gathering intel on your activities. With this data you can make decisions on where to put or expand your social networking and promoting energies.

How Do You Stack Up?

Klout isn’t especially vocal about measuring one person against another. Nor does it provide segmented demographics, which would be interesting to see. In the FAQ’s tab it does say that the average Klout score is 40. Obama’s Klout score is 99. If you are somewhere between those two numbers you are above average.

And Then There Are Perks

Advertisers contract with Klout to distribute Perks such as giveaways or special discounts in the hopes that recipients promote their products. You can accept or decline a perk. Some things are cool, others not so much but its always worth it to check in to see for what you qualify.

Should You Use Klout?

You may not be copasetic with measuring your social influence. You may not be comfortable with the lack of privacy that Klout implies. But, hey, its an online world out there and we are being measured whether we like it or not. At least with Klout you get to see yourself as the social media world sees you. Isn’t that worth a look?

___________________________________________________________________

Beth Turnage authors Astrology Explored as well as being publisher of Astrology Media Press. Beth is available for private consultations. You can contact Beth at starrynightastro@aol.com.
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But Social Media does not do the entire job to organize what you want to know. Long before social media cropped up as information disseminators, the folks at Netscape created a feed aggregator that individuals could use personally, that would bring content to them as the content was produced. Called at first the RDF site summary, then later RSS, which some people say stands for “really simple syndication” RSS caught on like wildfire sparking competition and no end of controversy as to who owned the RSS concept. Nontheless, RSS continues to play a role in helping readers create their individual news and information streams. If you don’t love your RSS Feed, its time time learn!

What RSS Does for You

The number of your RSS subscribers gives you a piece of information that looking at other web analytics does not. It tells you the number of actual people who finds your content interesting or valuable enough to make part of their regular reading. If you want to know how you stack up compared to other astrology blogs you can go to FeedCompare and punch in your and up to three competing blogs to check out the numbers. This kind of information is also used by other sites as well in gauging how popular your site is. Both Invesp and and Hub Grader use RSS numbers in the ranking of your site. In addition news aggregators such as Astrodispatch and Astrology Blogger use RSS feeds to automatically update your content on their sites.

Its up to you where you want to syndicate your site. Google’s Feedburner is popular, though others are popular too.

When you create your feed, your syndicator should produce a piece of code for you to insert in your website that will lead your loyal reader to the syndication site. Your fan will then choose the “reader” they use to view content and add your site. Nothing is simpler.

Standard RSS Icon

Wikipedia tells us:

In December 2005, the Microsoft Internet Explorer team[18] and Microsoft Outlook team[19] announced on their blogs that they were adopting the feed icon first used in the Mozilla Firefox browser. In February 2006, Opera Software followed suit.[20] This effectively made the orange square with white radio waves the industry standard for RSS and Atom feeds, replacing the large variety of icons and text that had been used previously to identify syndication data.

Around for six plus years, the problem for many bloggers is that the icon for the RSS reader has become so familiar that many people ignore it. If you are a seasoned blogger like me seeing little increase in your RSS numbers, or you just want to start off right, its time to up your game and get a unique design for your RSS invitation. I created the one on top in Photoshop and put it on my Astrology Explored page. In less than a week my RSS subscriptions shot up 25%.

Oh Beth! You Make it Sound So Simple

Some of my astrology blogger friends are web page designers, so they know what I’m talking about. But many of you aren’t photo shoppers. If you want if you use WordPress you can use the RSS Star I created.

a.) Copy this web address:

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7141/6775995869_ed49c1b923_m.jpg
b.) Open the widget with your RSS code. Look for piece of code that says:

c.) insert the web address just after the first ” and before the second ” so it looks like this:

d.) Leave the rest of the code just as it is.

e.) Type in a snappy invitation at in your widget title bar.

You can see how it looks at the top of my right side bar. See, easy! Click on it and you will see it goes right to where your readers can subscribe.

Question: What have you done to increase your RSS readership?
_________________________________________________________________

Beth Turnage authors Astrology Explored as well as being publisher of Astrology Media Press. Beth is available for private consultations. You can contact Beth at starrynightastro@aol.com.
____________________________________________________________________

Those for non-astrologers that are a little lost with the first paragraph, Mercury is the planet of communication. It rules anything that has to do with communications, including the written word and computer code. Two to three times a year Mercury appears to travel backward in its orbit when the Earth overtakes speedy Mercury’s position in the solar system. During this time, all sorts of communications go wonky, email messages disappear, travel gets delayed, cars breakdown and computers go caput. Astrologers breathe a sign of relief when Mercury goes direct again, but we also know that we aren’t out of the woods yet. Only until Mercury the point in the zodiac where it originally turned backward on its course, when it is out of the shadow period, is communications harmony restored in the heavens.

So it was when 3.3 was released on the very day Mercury went direct, but still in the shadow period astrology bloggers everywhere who use WordPress drew in a sharp intake of breath. Jeffrey Kishner advised us in our astrology bloggers facebook group:

WordPress 3.3 upgrade is available today, right when Mercury stations direct. This is a conspiracy by Matt Mullenweg to destroy your blog. OK I’m kidding, but I think it would be wise to wait a few days, do some testing, before you hit “update.”

Chris Brennan added that we should back up our databases.

Of course, me being a rash Aquarian didn’t take Jeffrey seriously and dashed off:

I updated Astrology Explored and it works just fine. But then again I bought my new used car when Mercury stationed, so I’m waiting for the shoe to drop on that one.

But in the end I encountered a small glitch which I’ll tell you about in a minute but other people weren’t so lucky.

Paul at ineedhelpwithwordpress.com reported that the plug-ins WP SEO Pix and Popup Domination didn’t play welll with the new version of wordpress.

Others reported problems with the Visual and HTML tabs disappearing or just plain problems with upgrading through the admin panel.

Moderator Ipstenu at WordPress.Org Support printed this master list of plugins with problems:

* Reports on twitter that the Postie plugin breaks 3.3 admin.

* Popup Domination (a plugin NOT available on the WordPress repository) is breaking 3.3. There is an update, but as this is a premium (i.e. you buy it) plugin, you’re not going to get a lot of support here.

* IntenseDebate is showing a miss-match of comments pending.

* Count Per Day breaks the Media Uploader.

* Advanced Access Manager causes a white screen of death.

* TubePress interferes with drag’n’drop in the Admin area.

* White Label CMS breaks image insertion.

* All In One SEO reported to lose all custom menu label tags.
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/menu-label-issue-in-wp33-upgrade

* Improved Page Permalinks reported to cause newly published Pages to produce 404s.

* Ad blocker plugins may conflict with the visual editor.

* Viperbar may become de-enabled and lose all settings.
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-viperbar-plug-in-deactivateds-itself-and-loses-data-on-upgrade-to-wp-33

* Google XML Sitemaps 4.0Beta7 has blank line
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-google-xml-sitemaps-beta-7-broken-on-wordpress-33?replies=1

* WordPress MU Domain Mapping doesn’t let you change settings. The dev version fixes this.

* WordPress MU Sitewide Tags Plugin also has issues, please try the dev version of that plugin too.

And reports these theme conflicts:

WooThemes framework breaks the upload/insert media link. Per their site, refreshing your cache will fix this (props Drew!)

Atuhualpa has some issues with plugins that use the updated jQuery (reported Dec 10th)

For a more complete list check out his trouble shootings posts at wordpress.org.

The Code Ninjas at WordPress recommend as first fixes:

– flushing any caching plugins you might be running, as well as server and/or browser caches.

– deactivating all plugins (yes, all) to see if this resolves the problem. If this works, re-activate the plugins one by one until you find the problematic plugin(s). If you can’t get into your admin dashboard, try resetting the plugins folder by FTP or PhpMyAdmin. Sometimes, an apparently inactive plugin can still cause problems. Also remember to deactivate any plugins in the mu-plugins folder. The easiest way is to rename that folder to mu-plugins-old

– switching to the Twenty Eleven theme to rule out any theme-specific problems. If you can’t log in to change themes, you can remove the theme folders via FTP so the only one is twentyeleven. That will force your site to use it.

– manually upgrading. When all else fails, download a fresh copy of the latest.zip file of 3.3 (top right on this page) to your computer, and use that to copy up. You may need to delete the wp-admin and wp-includes folders on your server. Read the Manual Update directions first!

My little problem was that I couldn’t update my posts after publishing. After swearing, I got to work finding documentation and found others had the problem too. For me however, the fix was a simple as updating my Jetpack plug-in which includes a proofreader. Others have not been so lucky.

As we wait for the Coding Ninjas to work out the bugs this astrologer has a little piece of advice:

Ask the astrologers when is a good time to put out a new release!

Image published under a Creative Commons license from Flickr.

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Beth Turnage authors Astrology Explored as well as being publisher of Astrology Media Press. Beth is available for private consultations. You can contact Beth at starrynightastro@aol.com.
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Of course AE has taken some hits since 451 Press shuttered. I created Astrology Media Press on the now defunct BlogsMu platform before I finally took the plunge into self hosting my modest astrology network. All that moving around, losing content and links took its toll. Where once proud Astrology Explored was the 6th ranking blog on Invesp, now it is only 65th. And once Jamie Darkstar decided to use only Alexa rankings for his Best Astrology Blogs page I dropped off that radar all together.

So being the competitive sort, and not the kind of the person to stay down for the count I decided today to get serious about my Alexa rank.

What is the Alexa Rank?

For those that don’t know Wikipedia tells us this about Alexa:

Alexa ranks sites based on tracking information of users of its Alexa Toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox and from their extension for Chrome.

There is some controversy over how representative Alexa’s user base is of typical Internet behavior,[17] especially for less trafficked sites.[15] In 2007 Michael Arrington provided a few examples of relative Alexa ranking known to contradict data from comScore, including ranking YouTube ahead of Google.[18]

On April 16, 2008, many users reported dramatic shifts in their Alexa rankings. Alexa confirmed this later in the day with an announcement that they had released the new Alexa ranking system, claiming that they now take into account more data sources “beyond Alexa Toolbar users”.[19]

Based on page views, whether or not you agree with how Alexa tracks web pages, it still is one measurement of how well your blog is doing in the blog-o-sphere.

Here is one blogger’s recommendations increasing Alexa rank:

1. Download a Alexa Toolbar;Download Alexa toolbar for your browser and Set your website or blog as a home page in your browser. You can also encourage your friends to install alexa toolbar and make your site as a homepage.This will increase your page views and will also give good ranking to your site.

2. Put an Alexa rank widget on your blog or site.
Each click by visitor in widget will be counted as visit.

3.Get your blog listed in any high PR directories.
Your site should have backlinks from high PR sites,forums. Post your site links in high PR do follow forums.

Counting your own page views seems like cheating to me, so no, I’m not going to do that. However, I’m all for installing a widget. Nothing is simpler. But wait, there’s a catch. You need to claim your blog before you collect your Alexa widget and this is a little bit of a headache.

What to do? (Instructions and illustrations follow)

Alexa gives you several ways to claim your blog, but they all involve installing their verification code for your blog somewhere on your website. The simplest way is to put the verification code in a comment, but that didn’t work for me, so I was instructed to install the verification code in my template.

Not being a programmer, and knowing just enough html to be dangerous, though not necessarily effective, this last instruction caused beads of sweat to form on my brow much like the time I had to replace the power board on my old Mac.

So after reading the Alex faqs on installing this code, I opened my template in my WordPress theme and went to the section marked header and looked down the code until I saw the head tag and scrolled down until I saw the /head tag. I put the little piece of code between the /script tag and the /head tag so not as to disturb any of the script, like so.

I then hit the “Verify Blog” button and received this happy little message:

Yes. The rest was just adding following the prompts, adding some info to my “profile” and gathering and placing the Alexa widget. See, that was easy, wasn’t it?

As for having getting your blog listed on high PR sites, that is a post for another day.

Alexa illustration courtesy of a Creative Coomons license issued thi by user dallco_photo on Photobucket

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Beth Turnage authors Astrology Explored as well as being publisher of Astrology Media Press. Beth is available for private consultations. You can contact Beth at starrynightastro@aol.com.
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