I, like a gadjillion other bloggers, have a feedreader account. I collect the feeds of the blogs I love and put them there, and I try each morning to read everyone. I try. I even attempt to click through and leave a comment when I’m inclined to do so or I just want to remind that person that I’m still reading them even though I appear to have completely vanished off the face of the blogosphere.

I work here, people. :eyebrows:

So, you can imagine and may even be familiar with the frustration of those [clipped feeds] where you MUST click through if you would like to continue reading. I love you. I do. But I have 100+ blogs in my reader – I know I am not alone when I say if you’ve clipped your feed, you are skipped with intents to return that don’t/can’t follow through. You are losing more readership than you are gaining, in my own humble opinion. Good intentions don’t make for an increase in stats, I say.

Personally, I would rather have you reading my whole post in a reader than skipping what I have to say because I’ve cut it short. I know you have other stuff to do. I can relate! I provide my readers a full feed UNLESS my post is very long and I use the < — read more –> option, those are the only posts that require continued reading on site (for everyone, not just feedreaders).

This is a plea, on behalf of everyone using a feedreader for everyone who has set their feeds to show a short excerpt – please show the full content. Pretty please with splenda on top?

::returns to bloglines with froo froo latte in hand::

For about a week, my page rank has shown a question mark. I’m not sure why, although I do know that Google recently updated page rank across the board. Mine increased (yay!) and now disappeared (boo! not really the fault of Google though, I’m still a 6, it’s just not showing on the little icon thingie, though I got sidetracked at Google.).

In an effort to find a support contact, I went to Google.com. I looked around. I found a support link, and clicked it. No contact form, although I thought that by clicking this cute little text at the bottom that reads “site map” I might just find what I was looking for.

This is Google’s site map.

Pfft….

I just find that amusing. It’s GOOGLE. Google’s site map.

Anyone know how to really get in touch with support at Google?

I hereby stomp my feet, give you puppy dog eyes as well as my bestest pouty face ever, and demand that you install and activate this plugin right away.

Thank you.

(P.S. It allows you to not only reply to a comment in the comment form, but it sends a notification to your guest via e-mail. Double coverage so no-one feels forgotten. Go now. Do as I say. Test here if you’d like, I will reply to you so you can see how it works.)

I ran through several of my blogs yesterday and upgraded them the latest version of WordPress. (Hey, I was waiting for a client to get back to me. I had to do something.) I get asked a lot about upgrading people, and it seems the majority of folks are afraid of messing things up. I’m here to tell you – that’s hard to do. Really. If you can install a plugin, you can upgrade your blog.

I’m giving you a step-by-step tutorial so that you can upgrade yourself. Really, there’s no reason to not be using the most current version, except that it costs money unless you’re willing to do it yourself.

For versions previous to 2.7: There’s a plugin for this, as well. WordPress Automatic Upgrade is available here. Be sure to read through all of the instructions before use. This plugin DOES THE BACKUP FOR YOU. I recommend you proceed with “manual” steps in the plugin so that you can download the backup to your own computer. 🙂

Without further blab, here’s how you do it (manually):

It all started Friday night, when I tried to open a program that decided it didn’t want to work anymore. It was time. I had everything – except my bookmarks and favorites ($%!@$!! :duh: ) backed up to my new Maxtor 300GB external hard drive.

I started to sweat. I got the jitters from my elbows down to the tips of my fingers, my head swam a little bit and my heart was racing. I slowly inserted the pretty fuchsia colored Operating System Reinstallation CD. I closed the CD drive. I shut down my computer, and I rebooted. I closed my eyes and said a little prayer, then I hit F12, and I proceed to reformat my entire hard drive, completely wiping it clean and starting over.

Three hours after I got off the phone with the Dell Guy in India, I was feeling a bit euphoric. It was like I just bought a new wicked fast computer. The hard part was getting everything reinstalled – all the programs I use, and have bought online and downloaded with activation keys that were lost in my primary e-mail account (woops, didn’t back that one up) – restoring my major e-mail backup files in Outlook – it all went surprisingly well. Seriously. I’m waiting for that big dingy .wav file to tell me my new installation is corrupt. Expecting my CD drives to open and close on their own and for windows to go nuts on my monitor.

For now, I’m a happy girl with a lot of space available on my hard drive. I have my email. I have my programs back. I did not lose all of my data, and I’m grateful it didn’t come to that.

Now I just need a nap, and I’ll be ready to get back to work on my new improved fully functioning 4 year old Dell!

I’ve also replied to many of you via e-mail. If I missed anyone, I do apologize. I was trying to stay current through webmail until I had my outlook configured again. Drop me another mail if you haven’t heard back from me by now. Thank you!

Sometimes, I really do wonder who I got this retarded gene from, because I’d like to poke them in the eye with a big pointy stick.

I’m sitting here, my yahoo launchcast is cranked up and I’m coding away like a mad woman, trying not to play with the bunnies. Yes, I’m working on a new design for Icklebug, but at the moment, I’m wondering where I put my brain.

I have spent the last 20 minutes trying to figure out why my footer won’t display right.

Why on earth can I position the thing, set the parameters, but it will NOT show up?! I’m on the verge of requesting assistance (read: crying like a big baby) when I think maybe I should check to see if I uploaded the background images. I. did. NOT.

My feed was broken. It’s been broken for over a week.

I finally took a few minutes to deactivate and reactivate all of my plugins, and sho’nuff, Related entries for feeds broke my feed. So, if your feed is broken and you’re getting an error like this:

XML document structures must start and end within the same entity

And you’re seeing CDATA is open and won’t close, then you need to deactivate your WordPress plugins and reactivate them one by one, validating your feed until you figure out what broke it.

Life Lesson #5,247 brought to you by the letters R and S.

In this case, being number two out of 1,070,000 ain’t all that bad. heh.

check it out.

That was a search term someone used today to land here, I didn’t make that up. And if you take the quotes out, I’m not even close to being in the top ten. So do me a favor? Leave the quotes alone, thankyouverymuch. I don’t know many people who search using quote marks, but whoever you are?