I should say, almost always approve all comments carefully. Today, I was racing through 28 comments to be approved and a legitimate comment from Romelo I-tong slipped through. Hopefully, this post will make up for my mistake.

Romelo had made a comment on my Wordpress host transfer post stating the following: “10 hours is not that long, how many blogs did you move?” This is going from memory so I may have a word or two wrong, but you get the point. To answer his question, I moved 3 blogs to the new webhost. The first blog took the longest at a whopping 8 hours. Once I found the easy way in the Wordpress Codex things were a lot easier. My mistake was made when I tried to install WP 2.5 on the new server, but the old blog was only running 2.3 so I’m pretty sure the database tables were incompatible. Once I trashed this idea and decided to upgrade to 2.5 after transferring all was good.

Has anyone else noticed an uptick in spam over the last week? How do you handle it?

1. Your friends on Facebook know more about you than your spouse.
2. You have found 7,000 people to follow on Twitter, but haven’t called your mother in over 2 weeks.
3. You haven’t seen the light of day besides going to work in over a week.
4. You have dropped 600 Entrecards every day for the last month; the old fashioned way.
5. You’re best material is left in comments.
6. You check Twitter every 5 minutes because you’re afraid of missing something.
7. You can’t remember the PIN for your debit card, but you know the passwords for all 200 sites that you belong to by heart. FYI, I do not belong to 200 Social Networking Sites. Only 100; JK I really only use about 10 or less regularly. I’m not sure where I’d find time for more than that.
8. Joe Schmo from New Mexico giving your Stumble home page a “thumbs down” throws you into a deep depression for over a month.
9. Sex, what’s that? I might miss a Tweet.
10. I have a blog? What’s the URL again?

This post is not really meant to be serious, but it could be a heads up to those of you trying to make money blogging or running any other type of online business.

What are some other good signs of social networking addiction that you can think of?

At my old webhost (GoDaddy) I was still running my blog on Wordpress 2.3 and I wanted to upgrade to 2.5 when I transferred the blog. So I started with installing WP 2.5 on the new server and thought that I could just import the PHP tables. Boy was I wrong, I ran into errors all over the place, I think because the tables were set up a little differently in the two versions. I also ran into a problem with the permalinks not working correctly which I fixed with the .htaccess file, but by then it was too late. About 8 hours into the process I found this Moving Wordpress tutorial in the Wordpress Codex. Due to my frustration with dinking around for 8 hours, this really irritated me; why didn’t I look for this sooner?

So, it was back to square one. First of all, I deleted everything I installed originally except for the database, which I emptied the entire contents of. Then I FTP’ed everything from the GoDaddy server onto my own computer in the same file structure that existed. Once that was done and the nameservers were changed over, I was able to FTP all of the same existing files onto the new webhost. This took care of two problems, installing wordpress and keeping the same custom settings.

So, with the file transfer complete I was then able to go to the PHPMyAdmin at GoDaddy and export the entire contents of my database. A simple copy and paste into Notepad with a SaveAs .sql file and the export was done. Then I logged into PHPMyAdmin of the new server and imported the database. Down On Our Luck and One Million Pet Pics were still running on SQL 4.0 or 4.1 so upon importing, I made sure to choose the SQL40 format. I don’t know if this was necessary, but I did it anyways. Everything imported great and here we are. I did need to update the database the first time I tried to access the admin section, but with a click of the mouse, this step was complete.

Even though this took longer than I wanted it to, it was a great learning experience. PHP tables have kind of been mysterious to me up until going through this process, but I am now starting to understand them which will come in real handy for future projects. I also learned that when in doubt with Wordpress (or not), check the Codex and I should save myself quite a bit of time.

Since I got a little long winded here, next time I’ll tell you about the upgrade to 2.5 and how my future upgrades will be a lot easier with a plug-in that I found for upgrading Wordpress.

So, it dawned on me that I want to get my blogs transferred as soon as possible; to make for an extremely busy weekend. However, I need to keep true to the conscious decisions I made this week to keep myself sane.
more cat pictures

1. Even though my dream is to be working for myself (soon I hope) I cannot sacrifice relationships and quiet time; this doesn’t help myself or Q in his recovery process. Coming home and just crashing on the couch is not the way I want to spend my life; besides, it’s not productive. I think Josh stated it best in his post: How to Make the Switch to Working Online – Part 1, “Start small and allow yourself to have a life outside of the Internet and your work.” Allowing a life outside of the Internet is my biggest battle. Tomorrow Q is going to help some friends out, I’m going to make sure to make some “me” time, do some rummaging, take a dip in the hot tub, and rest outside in the shade. There’s only about 4 months in Wisconsin that can really be spent outdoors and I need to start taking advantage of them. While resting, I’ll be writing ideas and blog posts down so I can take advantage of the quiet time and fresh air.
2. On the other hand, the weekends are my productive times where I get the most done. I read a post the other day (I can’t remember where) that pretty much stated, “You’re not going to make any money just sitting on your butt doing nothing, so get to work”.

Finding a middle road between relaxation and working to the point of exhaustion is a difficult position to find. Once I find it, I’m sure it will be my happy place.

Which end of the spectrum are you on?

This may not look like it’s complete, but it is as good as it gets for right now. I have a couple of pieces of paper and software to put away yet, but that’s it folks.

Goal number two was to get through the RSS feeds I’ve been subscribing to and clear out the ones that I don’t read or get any valuable information out of. Some that I kept have been borderline, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt for a little while longer. I kept way too many to list in one blog post, so I’ll give links to 5 of the blogs I will keep subscribing to today and on a slow day (IE, I can’t think of what to write) I’ll continue the list.

I Can Has Cheezburger – I love LOL cats and this blog brings me a great dose of them every day. We all need some time to laugh; the adorable cats and animals here do just the trick. I only spend about 5 minutes here; everything doesn’t have to be all business all of the time, does it?

Blog Badly – I like the sarcastic viewpoint that this blog takes. 9 Common Newbie Blogger Misconceptions is a great example of the writers sarcastic side. Any newb should poke around this blog for a short time to get a good idea of what NOT to do. Do I always listen? Peak around here for yourself and you’ll know the answer.

Mr. Javo – I was borderline with keeping Mr. Javo because for a while I felt that he was trying to be a John Cow wannabe. After reading his more recent posts, like 6 Useful Tips to Build Relationships With Your Readers, I have decided to keep subscribing for a little while longer and give him a chance.