WordPress 2.5 launched
WordpressFinally wordpress 2.5 was launched. I haven’t made the upgrade yet, since i’m not in the mood for upgrading 12 blog’s but i will do it tomorrow for sure. I think the most interesting features of the new wordpress are : the dashboard widgets, the multi-file upload with progress bar and the few click plugin upgrades. Ofcourse all the new features are cool, but we will have to see if they prove useful or not. As i wrote in my previous post, you have to be careful when making the upgrade because you can’t revert it with a simple rewrite of the files. So make sure you backup before you start.
Today I ended my Servage problems
HostingI will start by saying a few words about the problems i had with Servage then i will continue with the solving of the problems. I signed up with Servage about 4 months ago after reading some reviews on various forums/blogs. The first impression was very good, the support was excellent, they answered my question real quick and i had no problems with the hosting whatsoever. This happiness lasted for about 1 and a half maybe 2 months.
Then my problems started to appear, the FTP was responding really hard, the transfers were getting lost, then the website started to have increased loading times on some periods of the day. Don’t get me wrong the problems were not present everyday or on every website i had hosted with them, it was today a site with problems, tomorrow another one, and i guess this happened because of their clustered structure. Mostly the loading problems were cause by the DB`s.
Then after the loading problems, the injection of malicious code problem came, which could of been handled better by them. For example they could of admitted that their server got hacked, but no… they had to tell the users who reported the hack that the problem is caused by the scripts and the file permissions that the users host. Also when i asked if this problem happened to anyone else, they told me that this did not happened to other users, which is a big lie, proven by the fact that users who also got hacked commented on my articles and confirmed their accounts got hacked too.
After the hacking problem i was going to switch to another hosting company, but because i paid for a 6 month hosting pack i decided to wait, and see how things evolve. Maybe everything was going to be ok. But guess what ? i was wrong, Loading problems with my websites again. So finally i decided to switch hosting. I was thinking at hostgator for some time because a friend of mine already was using hosting from them and he told me he never had any problems.
I ordered the “baby” plan from them which features unlimited domains allowed. My account was activate in about 20 minutes. The Servage control panel was pretty straight-forward so when i switched to CpanelX from hostgator i had some trouble setting everything up. I will do some short tutorials on the things that i had trouble with so others can learn from my experience.
I hope i don’t have anymore hosting issues, and everything will run smooth. If any problem comes up, i will blog about it.
later edit: just when i tried to publish this article, loading problems again 
later edit: i forget to tell you, i left this blog hosted here at Servage because i still have a month or two of hosting, and i would like to see how things evolve here, when my hosting plan will expire, i will also move this blog to hostgator.
third later edit: i think they’re trying to sabotage me :)) i know this sound strange and so unlikely but how can you explain that my blog is so unavailable, now after i published this article ?
Change your permalink structure and keep the old one too
Wordpress
After researching a bit i made up my mind to change the permalinks structure on my Electronics Blog. I ran the blog for about 8 months with the default permalinks structure which is /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ . The reason i wanted to change the permalinks structure is pure SEO. I noticed that many other blogs are using only the /%postname%/ as permalinks structure, so i figured they must know why, and as a plus it also looks nicer, i don’t really like long URLs, they are better shorter.
But as i was thinking at making the change a problem appeared in my mind: Google has all my pages indexed with the old permalinks structure which means when someone will try to access a result page from Google they will get a “not found” page on my blog, not to mention the loss of all my back-links on the articles, this will be like killing my blog, if I’d do this my traffic will go down with about 80 %. Not a good idea indeed.
So i did a little research on Google about permalinks migration, and i found a great plugin, The Permalinks Migration Plugin. The plugin makes use of a directive named the “301 Redirect”. This redirect is acknowledged by all the search engines including Google, and what it does, is to redirect search engines and any user trying to access the old structure link to the new structure. And you wont loose a visitor, not even one.
You can download The Permalinks Migration Plugin from here. After unzipping you upload the files to your Wordpress plugins directory and then you activate the plugin trough the admin panel. After you activated the plugin you need to go to Options > PermalinksMigration : and set your old permalinks structure or it should be already set. Next you have to go to Options > Permalinks and make the change to your new desired permalinks structure, i recommend the /%postname%/ as structure or /%category%/%postname%/ , apply the new settings and its done, your post will now show with the new permalinks, but every old link will be redirected to the new one. Isn’t this great ?
After seeing how easy it was to change the permalinks structure i also did it here, on this blog.
Google Ads on Youtube
GoogleIs it just me ? i mean i went on youtube today looking for some video’s and it banged my eyes when i saw google ads just on top of movie description the section on the right of the movie. I don’t remember seeing Google Ads on youtube , do you ?
Firefox 3 beta 4 launched
Mozilla, News
Mozilla, launched the beta4 version of Firefox 3, they say its the most stable browser until now. Some of the new features include less memory usage, increased stability and a new look. Although until now Mozilla has discouraged typical internet users to download and use beta versions of their software the situation changed (its developers said on Thursday that the situation has changed and that they will be revising their Web site.) As of Thursday afternoon, the Web site still stated: “We do not recommend that anyone other than developers and testers download the Firefox 3 beta 4 milestone release. It is intended for testing purposes only.”
Firefox 3 beta 4 launched: [Source: Reuters]