Anyone who knows me personally probably know that I’m almost rabidly non-political.  My general view is that “the system” is so utterly broken down to it’s foundation, that I refuse to participate if at all possible.

In my lifetime there have been very, VERY few exceptions to this rule for me, but today is the day for one to surface.

This is SO completely insane that I thought it had to be a hoax… like those “Microsoft is giving away a million dollars for passing on this email” chain letters (yes, they are a hoax!  LOL)

But this is real… and for anyone who is reading this, and therefore obviously uses the internet, I think you better know about it.

http://pol.moveon.org/nointernetcensorship/

I’ve signed the petition (something I never EVER do!), if you live in the US won’t you sign it as well?  Actually, I’m assuming it’s limited to US residents but I don’t know that for a fact… although it does require a zipcode.

Oh also please note that unlike many absurd attempts to change things by gathering internet petitions (which are always doomed to failure by design!), this is not expecting the petition to change anyone’s minds.  It’s an attempt to gather hopefully millions of names, so that they can be read in succession for however long it takes, in order to fillibuster this bill on the Senate floor and keep it from ever passing.

I think that’s rather creative, and I sure hope it works!

Here’s a wikipedia article on the matter at hand (known as SOPA).  I strongly urge you to read it and do what you can to stop this thing in its tracks!

Jonathan

Yep, the doors have quietly opened, so far I’ve only told a section of my mailing list, and made this blog post.  There is a discount for the earliest buyers so if you’re seeing this , now’s your chance to be among the first to grab it, and at a discount to boot, before others get a chance to promote it at the regular pricing.

Jonathan

Today is an anniversary of sorts.

LPGen was released to the world 4 years ago this very day, November 1 2007.

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

So I had hoped to release WPGen at last, on this very day.  The date just seemed to be coinciding that way so I figured it would be kinda cool.

Unfortunately as often happens, things have conspired against me and I’m not quite going to hit the target.  Loads of ”loose ends” with the authorization system, shopping cart, and all that happy stuff.

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

JVC

imagine when certainly a hoped to release at last, or when having just on this very day a domain, you aren’t The date if the DNS is seemed ready yet (coinciding “propagated”) and figured kinda.

I was things this hit the target Loads, which is ”loose ends” way to authorization your DNS status from shopping cart the world.  So, stuff… don’t guess that your bright REALLY ready – KNOW for sure!

planning

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