You have until tomorrow to cast your votes in the 2010 Bloggies competition.  Even if you don’t vote, you’ll want to check it out.  You’ll get ideas for your own blog and find some terrific sites.

Many of the nominated blogs relate to food or cooking.  While there is a special category for food blogs, they’re also featured in other categories.  They’re represented in  the Best Asian, Best European, Best Latin American and Best Canadian blog groups.   And that’s just some of the places you’ll find food blogs.

I was happy to see a few of my old favorites.  Cake Wrecks is always a hoot and I visit Pioneer Woman every day.  I also found new blogs that I enjoyed.  Frog Ponds Rock has beautiful photos and I may have actually drooled while looking at Everybody Likes Sandwiches.

So check out the 2010 bloggies.  It’ll be fun maybe one day your blog will be among the chosen.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Have you been watching the news from Haiti?  It’s heart breaking.

If you have a WordPress blog  you can add links to aid organizations (via the text widget) to the sidebar of your blog.  I’ve added one to the right side of this page.

To find the code to add, find your favorite charity site.  In this case I used Mercy Corps.  Then I looked for a page that told how to link to their site.  The page I found had many ad sizes to chose from.

Sometimes the pages are more difficult to find.  I found a similar page for the American Red Cross by looking through their media resources area.

Having a website or a blog gives us alternate ways to make contact with the rest of the world.  It also gives us alternate ways to lend a hand.

Popularity: 1% [?]

I finally had the opportunity to take the new WordPress photo editor for a spin.  For those of you that haven’t heard, the built-in photo editor was one of the new features in WordPress 2.9.

I was most interested in its resizing capability.  I see a lot of people uploading huge photos that make their sites painfully slow to load.  Even if they’re able to make the photo appear small, the download time is still way, way long.

To resize a photo simply upload a photo like normal.

You’ll notice a new “Edit image” button.

Click on “Edit image” and then click “Scale Image”.

That section will expand and you’ll be able to resize the image.  Enter the desired width in the first box.  WordPress will fill in the second box with the appropriate height for that width.

If you don’t know how wide your images should be, you may need to experiment.  To give you some idea of the sizing, all the images in this post are 450 pixels wide.

From there you insert the image into the post just like normal.  Here is the photo that I resized.  If you’re concerned about image quality click here to see the original (way too big) image.

Popularity: 1% [?]

If you have a Twitter page, there’s no reason why it can’t be personalized to match your website.  Yes, there are design constraints but it’s still possible to make a Twitter page that stands out from the crowd.

Here’s an example.  LitQuotes is a quotations website.  Their website looks like this:

The new LitQuotes Twitter page shares the look and feel of the main website.  It also gives followers more information about LitQuotes.

Contact us if you need help making your Twitter page stand out from the crowd.

Happy tweeting!

Popularity: 1% [?]

WordPress 2.9.1 has been released.  It fixes the RSS widget issue that I was concerned about.  So for any of my customers that have been holding off updating until that issue was resolved . . .  update away.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Popularity: 2% [?]

I recently moved a customer’s PHPlist installation to BlueHost. As you may know, BlueHost (along with Hosting.com) is one of my preferred hosting providers.

The move itself went well.  I installed PHPlist via the Simple Scripts installation process.  I exported the list from the old system and imported it into the new system.  I copied and pasted templates and the like.  We were ready to go!

Of course, that’s when everything fell apart.

The customer’s mailing list has about 550 names.  When I sent the newsletter everything looked normal.  Then I noticed the system saying that it had NOT sent emails to 415 members of the list.  I called BlueHost to ask about it.  The technical support person was pleasant, but not helpful.  I did some more investigation and called a second time.  Again, this person was pleasant, but didn’t have any answers.

In the meantime I tried sending the email again.  The system said it sent 150 emails, but 265 emails could not be sent.  Hmmm . . . 150 seemed like a pretty round number.  I looked in the BlueHost knowledge base for “150″.  Guess what I found:

There is a default limit on all hosting accounts of 150 email messages sent per hour. This is a policy to help control spam on the Internet and does not apply to your inbound email. You can receive as many emails as will fit in the email account’s quota.

I called BlueHost a third time and my customer’s limit was immediately raised to 750.  So the problem is solved, but I am very disappointed with BlueHost.  The first technical support person I called should have been able to solve this problem.

Popularity: 1% [?]

I was happily working away on a new WordPress 2.9 install when I ran into a problem.  The RSS widget threw an error that broke the whole site.  The error message starts out:

RSS Error: The data could not be converted to UTF-8

The site I was working on is highly depenant on the RSS feed widget so I needed a fix ASAP.   I downloaded the patch from Semiologic and it works fine.  Usually I wouldn’t be talking about a third party patch, but I was in a jam and it worked like a charm.

If you’re using the RSS widget, my advice is to wait for 2.9.1.  Hopefully this bug will be fixed in that version.

Popularity: 1% [?]

WordPress 2.90 was released yesterday.  I’m very excited about the built-in image editor.  I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve taken it for a spin.  There are other great features too!  Check out this list of new features and fixes in 2.9 or watch the following video.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Last week I learned about a new Internet scam.  This one involves domain name registration.  It all started when I received an email from an Asian domain name registration service.   I’ve  altered the domain name in question, but basically it went like this:

Dear CEO,

We are the department of Asian Domain registration service in China, have something need to confirm with you. we formally received an application on December 2, one company which called “Urbai Trading Co.,LTD.” are applying to register ” YourDomainNameHere” as brand name and following Domains:

YourDomainNameHere.cn
YourDomainNameHere.com.cn
YourDomainNameHere.net.cn
YourDomainNameHere.org.cn
YourDomainNameHere.tw
YourDomainNameHere.com.tw
YourDomainNameHere.hk
YourDomainNameHere.com.hk
YourDomainNameHere.asia
YourDomainNameHere.in

After our initial examination, we found that the brand name  applied for registration are as same as your company using name and brand. these days we are dealing with it, hope to get the affirmation from your company. if your company did not authorize the aforesaid company to register these, please contact us as soon as possible.

In addition, we hereby affirm that our time limit is 7workdays. if your company files no reply within the time limit, we will unconditionally approve the application submitted by ” Urbai Trading Co.,LTD.”.

Best Regards,

What’s their objective?  They’re trying to make some money by registering domain names.   It’s an international version of GoDaddy asking you if you’re sure that you don’t want to register the .org and .net versions of your domain name.  However this is a scam because I’m sure no one else was trying to register any domain names like mine.  How can I be so sure?   There is no research like this done to register domain names.  If a name is available, anyone can regester it.

I just deleted the email while I wondered about putting that “CEO” title on my business cards.  Hmmm . . . .

Popularity: 2% [?]