I’m a Red Hot Blog of the Day

January 30, 2009 by Paul Spoerry Leave a Comment

redOrbit Blog of the Day I just received word that I’ve been chosen as one of redOrdbit’s Red Hot Blogs of the Day! Sweet!

RedOrbit, Inc., headquartered in Texas, was founded in November 2002. The web site, RedOrbit.com, was launched in May 2003, with the goal of creating the largest, most unique internet community, with the strongest consumer brand, in the most underserved niche on the Web. RedOrbit.com has since become the premier internet destination for space, science, health, and technology enthusiasts around the globe.

RedOrbit.com is committed to providing stimulating, original content and presentation, with over 1,500,000 pages covering the vast ideological spectrums of space, science, health, and technology. The beautiful and engaging forum created at RedOrbit.com promotes a friendly and open environment, enhancing user loyalty and community, while advancing RedOrbit’s goal of providing the world with a virtual Utopia for intelligent, curious minds.

RedOrbit.com averages over 5 million unique visitors per month. With subject matter a bit more intellectually oriented than most, the average RedOrbit.com visitors tend to be well educated, between the ages of 25 – 55, with a median income significantly higher than that of Internet users as a whole.

RedOrbit has positioned itself perfectly to excel in the current Internet climate and well into the 21st Century.

Visit redOrbit!

WP Super Cache – 500 error on BlueHost

June 13, 2008 by Paul Spoerry Leave a Comment

So I installed the WP Super Cache plugin. Seemed simple enough, I’d been using WP-Cache for a long time and was pretty please with it. WP Super Cache is based on the excellent WP-Cache plugin and therefore brings all the benefits of that plugin to WordPress. On top of that it creates copies of every page that is accessed on a blog in a form that is quickly served by the web server. It’s almost as quick as if the you had saved a page in your browser and uploaded it to replace your homepage.

So that sounds good, except that I followed all the steps, let the plugin to it’s automagic stuff and then I got a 500 error when attempting to hit my site. OUCH! No good.

Turns out the issue was the way my .htaccess file was written (it did this automatically, no clue why it didn’t work out correctly. Anyway, what ended up in my htaccess was:

Options All -Indexes# BEGIN WPSuperCache
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

What it SHOULD be is this:

Options All -Indexes
# BEGIN WPSuperCache
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

Make that simple update to the first line, ensuring that the #BEGIN WPSuperCache is on it’s own line and everything started working as expected.

New Server

March 8, 2008 by Paul Spoerry Leave a Comment

Test post!

WordPress stats plugin release for all WordPress users

May 6, 2007 by Paul Spoerry Leave a Comment

WordPress.com hosted sites have a stats plugin that most people find instantly useful. One of the biggest complaints heard is that once you take WordPress to your own host… you lose the stats system. There is of course Google Analytics, and Shortstats… each are good in their own right. One of the problems with these systems is that they can slow down your site because theyâ€™re writing to a database.

Automattic created its own stats system, to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface.

Installing this stats plugin is much like installing Akismet, all you need is to put in your API Key and the rest is automatic. You can find your API key on your WordPress.com’s profile page.

Once it’s running it’ll begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page. Less is more.

Finally, because all of the processing and collection runs on our servers and not yours, it doesn’t cause any additional load on your hosting account. In fact, it’s one of the fastest stats system, hosted or not hosted, that you can use.