My wife and I have had a blog site for awhile but just recently we’ve started actually blogging on it. So quickly one night I added a new theme, updated the old version of wordpress that was on the site and added a few plugins for lightbox images and flickr images. Tested it, all was working so like the cobblers kids and their shoes, I would post sometimes but never gave the sites structure a second thought, till this week. I was showing a co-worker our site and realized it was taking awhile to load, it was my own site and I was ready to head to another site just to stop the loading.

It was time to figure out why my site was slow. There can be many reasons why the site is slow, a couple of the things to check are: Your Web Host, I’ve been with ours a long time and knew it wasn’t them. Routing over the Internet, this is usually when you notice your site is slow just one day, but usually is fast. By going to the run command in windows, typing in CMD and then in the command window type: tracert www.yourwebsite.com you will see the hops it takes to get to your site and the time it takes to get there. The lower the number the better, numbers above 100 maybe a problem. There isn’t anything you can do about this, but these problems are usually fixed in a day or two. This again was not my problem.

How to tell what is running slow on your site

To find out why my site was slow I needed a way to see each item loading on my site and the time it takes for them to load. The tool I chose was Firebug. Firebug is a plugin for Firefox (which you’d better be using by now!!) Download Firebug and install it into firefox, after restarting Firefox, you’ll see a small image of a roach in the bottom status bar of FF.

Using Firebug to test your site

Using Firefox, go to your website, once there, click the roach and go to the net tab. The net tab will have check boxes, check them and hit the enable button. your webpage will start to reload, as it’s loading you’ll see status bars showing how long it takes each item to load (see the header image). My problems were all  in red, not because they took so long to load but there were files missing, the slow site was caused by when the site would load, it couldn’t find important files for a couple of the plugins, so it would keep searching till it timed out. You may not have this problem, but you’ll be able to see if images are to large, javascripts are having problems or if you’re just loading to many objects.

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This week I started using Zemanta, a firefox plugin that boast:

Simple point & click enrichment of your blog posts (and emails). In real-time, while you type. We suggest tags, links, photos, and related articles. You save time and aspirin

At first glance, my thoughts were that this was just another way for a company to give me a small amount of help for adding a list of links for their benefit to my blog, but being the trusting soul I am, I decided to give it a try.

My first blog post with Zemanta, I wasn’t completely impressed, since I know html and always create all my post in html instead of visual mode, I thought adding an images to my post wasn’t that big of a deal, but as I started typing more to the post, even more relevant images started to show.. ok 1 point for Z!

Next adding related articles to my post is a plus, I had wanted to do this long ago with another service that had come out but they were (at that time) only offering this to larger blogs. Yes, I could do a search and find related articles but this saves a lot of time..  2 points!

At this point I saved and posted the post, thinking the plugin was ok, but not sure I’d use it a lot, but that would soon change. As I was editing my post I noticed the Links section of Zemanta, talk about a time saver, it finds keywords within your post and gives you choices of different links to point those keywords to. All these links and related articles links can be opened in a new window so you know exactly where you’re pointing your visitors.

The last part of Zemanta that I use are the tags, I had been tagging my post but noticed the tags weren’t showing on my new theme. I realized that my theme didn’t show tags, but by adding the wordpress plugin “WP tags to Technorati” the plugin auto showed all the tags on my site without me changing code within my theme.

With the above listed content, options of adding your own images and related articles from friends rss feeds and all the upcoming options (like Zemanta in email) that they are adding, I see Zemanta as a useful tool for any blogger no matter the size of their blog.

(BTW, last i checked there is a difference between the firefox plugin and the wordpress plugin, The Firefox plugin has more options and Links, I disabled the wordpress plugin)

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Find your audience…

With most blogs you write about certain things, your site may be about a special sport, cakes or what ever, you have your niche. (This step doesn’t work on sites like mine since it’s topics are so broad, which also doesn’t translate into great traffic, but that’s for a different post). Once you know your niche, join a couple groups and websites that discuss your niche or have a forums. This is probably where I should add, DO NOT spam these boards, if you write a blog about something it better be something you love, so it should be easy for you to join in real conversations with people on a forum and if allowed add your site link to your signature.

Another way of finding your audience is use twitter, using a site that does Twitter Alerts like http://tweetbeep.com/ you can watch the twitterverce for words like cupcakes or Mustangs, once you get an alert that someone used that term, follow their twitter. They will probably talk about the term again, in which you can chime in, or at the least they’ll visit your twitter page to see who you are, there they’ll see your link to your site about CupCakes and either follow your twitter or visit your site, maybe both.

Research your post…

Some may call it long tail, I just call it doing what other aren’t. Before you even write your post, you usually have an idea of what it’s going to be about, so do a couple searches on your topic. If you find that there are millions of hits for your topic, change it a little.. If you want to write a story about making cupcakes, you’ll see by doing a search there are tons of those post, but if your story is about creating giant birthday cherry cupcakes, you may not only get hits for cupcakes but also birthday cupcakes and giant cupcakes. (don’t ask why i’m on the cupcake kick tonight) Adding that extra little detail never hurts. Searching will also give you an idea if your post is something that is popular now or not, http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends will tell you what the hot searches for the day are, this is also a good place to look if you have writers block, you can search through the popular searches and find something in your niche.

Watch for more information like the above, subscribe to my RSS feed

For a couple months now I’ve been testing new software called Boxee. Boxee allows me to watch many of the online video sites on my television. As of now there are different versions for different OS’s, some allow Netflix while orhers have ABC, still lacking behind is the Apple TV setup, but they are slowly working on it (it’s the hardwares problem not Boxee’s).

Right now I have the appleTV setup, I use it mostly to watch shows on hulu and Joost, but I have also installed a 2 TB server that I can copy all my movies to off of DVD. Boxee will then list all my movies with info on each, I choose what i’d like to watch and the movie starts, no worrying about finding the dvd, scratching it and I always have a backup.

As boxee adds more and more resources, I can see in the near future that I can drop cable and watch the shows i want when i want. Too bad i still will have to pay the cable company for internet. I setup 2 AppleTV’s with boxee, one for myself and another for Scott Janz.

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First off, if you’re not using firefox for internet browsing, get your butt over to firefox.com and download it. Firefox allows you to have addons or plugins that help you with daily task, One of my favorite is Diigo. Diigo allows me to share bookmarks with others or just myself. While I don’t care about sharing with others, I’ve installed Diigo on my work computer, home computer and both laptops. This allows me to always have my all my bookmarks on all machines and they are also searchable, using your tags that you added when you saved the bookmark. There are other pluging that do the same thing and i’ve used those in the past but with diigo I can also leave myself notes on each page and highlight areas, for when I return.

Last night some friends called and told me they were having problems installing Intuit’s TurboTax, every time they tried to install it Turbo Tax would have an error that BootStrapper Setup Failed and asked if i’d come check it out.
On Intuit’s web site the make it clear that if you get this error you need to uninstall .net framework 2.0 Link. What they don’t tell you is what to do if you can not uninstall .net framework 2.0.
Going into the control panel and clicking remove on a program doesn’t always work. This is what happened in the problem last night. With .net Framework, many programs use it in the background of your system, so it could have either been corrupt or windows just didn’t want to let it go, if some other program was using it.
Searching for a way to uninstall .net framework 2.0 manually pointed me to this site Aaron Stebner’s Blog where he’s written a program that will completely uninstall all the .net frameworks that you choose. The .NET Framework Cleanup Tool worked perfectly, one thing you may notice is that since many programs use the .net framework in their background, once you reboot some programs like at&t firewall and other things may not work, BUT once you download this .net framework 2.0 SP1, install it and reboot all programs should start to work once more.

If this post helped you please leave a comment, thank you

On another one of my sites, celebrating the coming soon of my first son, I wanted to add a twitter update on the side bar, not unlike the one I use here on Tek-Works.com, but since it’s mostly family and they’d have no idea how to use Twitter. I wanted a wordpress twitter plugin that allowed them to reply to my tweets and it would show on the site but also send to my twitter on my phone. After alot of searching, I found one plugin that worked like this. The downside is that it used your username and password to send those tweets and others were complaining of Spammers hitting it over and over. The owner did add a moderation to it, but this function wouldn’t allow me to easily moderate from my phone and it wouldn’t be hands off. I still like the idea but I can’t think of a way around the spammers.

This got me thinking about other things spammers have ruined, the big one that everyone could guess is Email, no need to get into that one. One thing that you may not know is bandwidth, Spammers will hack a site or even create paid for or free hosting services and setup a bot. This bot will instantly start to send out millions of email, many times the hosting company will be monitoring this and catch it, but then not only is your and the worlds connection just a bit slower but now your account is shut down or site deleted to stop the bot. Take that and multiply it time thousands, you start to see the problem, you also see why Spammers make money, from a recent study: from http://tinyurl.com/56uhl4

“After 26 days, and almost 350 million email messages, only 28 sales resulted,” says the research paper.

Yet even with this apparently abysmal response rate of less than 0.00001 per cent, the researchers still estimate that the controllers of a network the size of Storm are still bringing in about $7,000 (£4,430) a day or $3.5m (£2.21m) over a year.

Spammers also ruin blogs, even with many anti-spam tools, spammers still get a post or 2 on many sites, if you take the time you have to read through the spam, monitoring your own site and the time it took the programmers to create the anti-spam tool, Spammers also are stealing our time. Next time you get an email asking you to buy something, even if it’s the coolest thing in the world, don’t buy it from them, do a Google search and buy it from a real company. If we can stop that 0.00001% of buyers maybe we can starve the Spammers out of business (yeah right!)

What are your thoughts? about magazines going online? would you complain if your favorite magazine suddenly went cheap on you?

–EDIT UPDATE–
I just found some info on Pink Magazines site about this, they only mention one of the changes but they also do mention they’ve started Pink Magazine Online.. So I guess i’m a bit behind on this..
Read about it here

Wireless
Since this is an after the house was built security system, it will work on a wireless signal, Or your going to pay thousands to have your complete house wired. Without doing deep digging I’m sure the system runs on either 2.4gh, 5.8 or 900mh. My problem with that is that I already have a 2.4gh wireless system in the house and I’m getting ready to add baby monitors that also run on 2.4gh, yes 2.4gh has different channels but I’ve seen them easily bleed over to the other channels, I also have a 5 foot antenna that I do testing with that i’m sure would totally disrupt anything on 2.4gh. If the system is 900mh, what about the cellular amp antenna I have on top of my house, what’s hat gonna do to it? But my biggest problem with wireless is that I can build a unit that will disrupt and disconnect any wireless within a range while I have that unit on, so this would either stop the signal from going off or it would set off the alarm (i’m guessing it would stop it), I don’t see this as that secure..

But the reason I say they are living in the late 90’s is because to have ADT they want you to either have a telephone line or a digital phone line through VoIP. Have you looked at the numbers, More Americans snipping landlines in favor of cell phones, daily, people are dropping their phone lines for cell phones, yes the older crowds still have phone lines, they can sell to them. To summarize, almost one in six households (15.8 percent) are wireless-only, this is from last year.
They need to get with multiple cell carriers, for 5.00 a month extra, you get a SIM card for the ADT unit that either can only call ADT or it’s a copy of your cell phones and it’s just added to your phone bill. Adding a land line or digital line is 25 more a month and when you never use it, it’s a waste. But again I can build a device that will jam all cellular signals in a range so i guess it doesn’t matter.. (yeh but phone lines can be cut, but I bet they have someone check on the house if one house in the neighborhood looses it’s phone line.

I figure if I want a security system I’m going to have to wire it up myself, connect it through a PC to call me if I’m not home or some junk like that… nevermind, just come in my house and take my stuff, most electronics are out of date a year later anyway, this will give me a chance to get new sh*t!