Today is an anniversary of sorts.

LPGen was brought out to the world 4 years ago today, November 1 2007.

It’s tough to imagine that it’s been 4 years!  Time certainly does fly.

So I had intended to release WPGen finally, on this very day.  The timing just appeared to be coinciding that way so I thought it would be sorta cool.

Unfortunately as often happens, events have conspired against me and I’m not quite going to make it.  Plenty of odds & ends with the authorization system, shopping cart, and all that happy stuff.

But on the bright side, it’s REALLY close!  I’m still intending to get all this done today and roll out tomorrow.  Regardless of the exact day, it’s going to be very, very soon so… stay tuned everyone! 

JVC

Often when transferring a domain to another server, or when having just purchased a domain, you aren’t totally sure if the DNS is actually ready yet (referred to “propagated”) and would really like to be certain.

I was told about this site a week or two ago, which is a very handy way to look up your DNS status from different parts of the world.  So, never be uncertain again… don’t guess that your domain is probably ready – KNOW for sure!

Jonathan

I just read this article and thought it was a very good reminder of the basic principles needed for an effective landing page.

Check it out and see how many of these things you are, or are not, doing yourself!

Jonathan

Have a look at this.

A friend of mine and fellow marketer, is putting together an “opportunity listing site” and wants to get some feedback on the general concept, before he dives into the deep end on developing it.

I think it’s a pretty cool idea… I know quite often I’ve considered renting a mailing list, or otherwise wanting to gain exposure for something, but I’m not crazy about networks & brokers as they never know the whole story on the real sources of the data, etc.  I want to talk DIRECTLY to list owners, site owners, etc.  The REAL movers & shakers!

Opptly would give me the ability to do exactly that.  I personally think it’s a great idea and would certainly use it… what do you think?

JVC

I’m in the final stages of preparation for releasing WPGen, and I just finished this overview video as part of the tutorials.  I thought I’d put this one up publicly since it will probably help a lot of people to better understand what WPGen is and what it will do for them!

I can’t tell you how often people ask me about (or relay horror stories to me about) technical things that have gone wrong on their server, that they need help with.  Depending on who your host is, they might already have awesome support… for example I have servers with both LiquidWeb and Rackspace and both have tremendous 24/7 telephone support.  I’ve called both many times at 3am my time and gotten immediate help with whatever was wrong.

But in some cases, I need separate server management.  For instance with Rackspace’s Cloud Servers, they are totally unmanaged and you’re “on your own” for everything from initial server setup, to server security, configuring Apache, PHP, and EVERYTHING else!  I’m no Linux/server whiz, so I turn elsewhere for this kind of thing.

For years now I’ve used a company that frankly is SO cheap for what you get, I think any serious online marketer is doing themselves a big dis-service not subscribing to their services.  They’re called Platinum Server Management and they are a HUGE help when I need them.

Their services are a whopping $30/month with no contract.  I even recommend (and so do they actually) signing up for them just for one-off help when you need it.  Can always sign up, get help, cancel, and sign up again if you need them again.  But personally I choose just to subscribe and stay subscribed.

If they make just one little tweak of some obscure server setting for me in any given month, it was worth $30.  Let alone the occasions a few times a year when I throw some really BIG problem at them, that requires research and lots of experimenting on their part.  Sometimes my issues have taken many hours spread over several days and yet I still only paid $30.  CAN’T beat it!

The only catch of sorts is that they strictly support servers with “root” access (typically VPS and dedicated only) and are configured with WHM/CPanel.  But if that describes you, these guys can be a lifesaver.

One other thing to point out – technically they are NOT “emergency support” i.e. they promise responses within 24 hours I believe.  I can’t think of a ticket that has EVER taken them 24 hours to respond to, but that’s what they guarantee.  You can list a problem as an emergency and it will get priority status, but they won’t promise to drop everything right then and jump on your issue.  For that, you really have to hire a full-time sysadmin and a good one is not gonna come cheap, even though you’ll only need them once in a while.

I hope this helps some people out.  Again this won’t do anything for you if you’re on a cheap Hostgator or Godaddy shared plan, but if you’re at the level of having your own VPS or dedicated server and you’ve got WHM/CPanel, absolutely check them out.

Jonathan

Putting this down both for posterity for myself, as well as to help anyone else who may be wrestling with the same thing.

When developing plugins/themes for WordPress, it’s often vital to figure out what hook is calling the current function, because hooks don’t take the passing of specific additional parameters.

So how do you do that?  Absurdly simple actually…

global $wp_current_filter;
print_r($wp_current_filter);

Of course, $wp_current_filter[0] will actually hold the string of the name of the current hook, such as the_content, init, etc.

Jonathan

OK so is it just me or is the new Firefox 7 seriously screwed up?

I’ve had loads of issues with Firefox for years, in particular around memory usage.  I’m an admitted “tab whore” and so I’ll easily have 4 or 5 windows open each with 10 to 20 tabs in them at any given time.  But my machine is running 64bit Windows and has 4 cores with 6gigs of RAM so I don’t really see that as too much to ask.  Yet FF has constant problems once the memory usage climbs over the 1gig mark (which doesn’t take long).

But Firefox 7 takes this to a whole new level of suck.  At least twice per day, sometimes more, it will just completely freeze.  Nothing will load, and you’ll never even get a 404 or any other timeout type error message.  It just locks up and the CPU usage for it climbs to 15 to 20% and stays there indefinitely.  You can select tabs and do anything you want with the program, you just can’t reach any websites.  IE and Chrome are just fine.

The only remedy seems to be quitting & restarting the browser, but then it just happens again after a few hours.  Total madness!

For the moment I’ve gone back to Firefox 6 as I found other complaints of this issue and they said downgrading was the only solution.  I can’t switch to Chrome as my primary browser because of all the development related adons I use in FF.  I do tend to use Chrome a lot more now though for general web surfing.

Firefox team – I understand you’re on a new kick with this “major version number updates every few weeks” thing, but they’d better be STABLE!

JVC

Gauher shared some awesome stuff on today’s webinar, in particular an entire new traffic source that he’s making 300% to 400% returns on!  I’d never heard of this one prior to the call, and he gave it away for free.

Check this out, listen carefully and see if you can’t make use of some of the advice given here!

Jonathan

If you’ve ever wished you had a crystal ball that would tell you exactly what was working in PPC marketing right now, well you’re not alone.

Unfortunately, mine doesn’t seem to work.  So I’ve got the next best thing!

Come join me and Gauher Chaudhry for a casual but very insightful discussion about what he’s doing in his PPC business right now, today, in September 2011 as well as what he thinks you should be doing into the future.

A few things he’s already shared with me, but there’s so much more that he hasn’t and I can’t wait to ask him about it all.

Naturally he’ll be talking about material that’s in his new PPCFormula 3 course, but whether you’re in the market for that or not this promises to be a very revealing conversation.

Make sure you’re there to eavesdrop! 

I look forward to “seeing” you there!

Jonathan