I'm a geek working as a distance learning specialist for a large corporation.
My "radio station"
(Unfortunately, only works in IE.)
Loading ...This time I followed the directions to delete (almost) all the WordPress files on the server before uploading the new versions. That seems to work much better than overwriting them.
So far I haven’t seen any errors (though the database upgrade page was filled with errors, it also said it was successful at the end). Here’s to nothing cropping up moving forward.
And it even looks like I might be able to keep my theme. Still haven’t messed with the sidebars yet. That’s next.
Argh.
Well, I finally upgraded WordPress to 2.3.3. I’d been putting it off because I was afraid it would break things. It ended up being worse than I thought.
I’m still finding errors in the upgrade itself! I had to pull old versions of files just to get it complete the upgrade procedure. Who knows what I’m going to find when I finally get through all this.
Most of the plugins I use actually work fine. That’s nice. The one exception is the polls, which I just have to upgrade, but holy cow, that one’s a pain in the neck to upgrade. From the instructions, it looks harder than upgrading WP itself.
And the biggest disappointment…. my theme, Tiga, died. It was already having problems with the previous upgrade but I was able to get past that issue. This time, it’s too much for me to figure out. Seems to be a sidebar widget problem, mostly, but that’s beyond me. It’s a shame, ’cause I really like this theme. Guess I gotta go out on a search. If anyone has suggestions for a nice 3 column theme, I’m all ears. (If I get the polls working, maybe I’ll put up a poll on it… ).
Anyway… lots of transition around here for the foreseeable future. Don’t be surprised if things break, get fixed, go away, come back, and just look plain different.
[Update: HA! At least three hours invested in this so far, and I finally got to the point where I had to restore my previous version. Too much was broken. I couldn't even edit posts. Cut my losses and run. Maybe I'll try again tomorrow night.]
Argh. I mentioned before that my site theme settings suddenly changed. Today I tried to fix it by upgrading to the latest version of WordPress. I was pretty sure that wasn’t the problem, but figured it might help if there was hacking involved. It didn’t. In fact, you may notice that my Blogroll is now broken. On the admin side, I’m also seeing weird things with my “Categories” (Blogroll categories and Posting categories are mixing up).
On the plus side, there seem to be a few cool features in this new version that I’ll have to check out later.
For now, I’m too tired to keep investigating either the good or the bad. All I can do now is repeat myself….. Argh.
Alright, I’m confused. How could my theme CSS have been reverted back to default? Does that mean someone hacked my site? If so, I guess I’m fortunate that only my theme was reset. Or maybe something weird happened in the DB? I don’t get it.
I’m kinda disappointed. My theme customizations were no work of art, but they were mine, and it took me hours to come up with that look. Now I gotta go through all that trial and error again, because I didn’t separately record the settings. Stupid me.
Argh.
Some of you know about the other site I had up, caddickscabin.com, that housed all my family pictures and some other stuff that less than nobody ever looked at. Well, the domain came up for renewal, and I just couldn’t justify keeping it, so it’s gone.
Instead, I moved the content over to cabin.caddicks.com, at least temporarily, until I can sort through it and figure out what’s worth keeping. Don’t get too excited… if you go there now all you’ll see is the former home page and one active link. The other two links are dead, including the link to the gallery.
The gallery is the first thing I’m planning on evaluating, and I think instead of migrating it en masse, I’m going to pick and choose from the hundreds of pictures and try them in some new gallery software: Coppermine.
So if virtually nothing is working, why bother posting about it? On the off-chance that someone looking for the gallery knows about this blog, at least they will know the pictures aren’t gone.
Set up your own free storefront (referral included)
It seems like there has to be a catch to this, but I haven’t found it yet. Zlio.com is a service that allows you to set up an online store and choose from “millions” of products. That’s it. You get paid a (small) percentage of whatever gets sold through your store.
While it may not technically be the case, it looks like what’s really going on here is that Zlio acts as a proxy for various affiliate programs (e.g., Amazon.com, Buy.com, Roxio.com, Skype.com, TigerDirect.com, or Petsmart.com, to name a few of the 19 currently listed) and provides you the front end and some personalization features. As is typical with affiliate programs, you get a small percentage (frequently around 3-4%) of sales through your links. The nice thing about Zlio is that sign-up is incredibly easy and you really don’t have to do anything else but add products.
The aggregation of products from varied and diverse merchants makes the breadth of your product choices pretty impressive.
There are some nice personalization features for those who want to go further, but it’s not quite as user friendly as I’d like overall. There are certainly plenty of development areas that they could concentrate on (and unfortunately product search is one of them), but the site is functional and easy enough for those less demanding souls among you.
One further nice feature is that you also make a smaller percentage of sales on sites of people whom you’ve referred. That’s a nice incentive to try to get other people involved (note to Dave: they have comics).
You do have to have a PayPal account to get paid. I suppose that could be considered a “catch” for some.
In case you missed it, I signed up myself and decided to add a few products/shows/movies that I’ve reviewed previously here in the blog, as well as some items that I’m planning to review. The result is a new sidebar “widget” and a new static page (listed across the top of the blog).
This was mostly an exercise just to try out Zlio. I have no delusions that I will net any more than $0.50 per year doing this, if I’m lucky, but it may get me a free soda or something. Plus, I can get that same 4% back (on Amazon) on things I buy myself, so it’s like having my own extra discount card, which is kinda nice. That feature alone makes it worth the small effort to sign up, in my opinion.
If anyone does want to sign up, though, I certainly wouldn’t object if you used my referral link. Feel free, also, to buy anything you want, that you would normally buy through Amazon or similar stores. If you don’t see what you want on the product list, do a search to search the whole of Zlio’s product offering.
I’ll let you know if I run up against anything troubling, but for now, it seems to work as advertised. I was able to create the store, do some basic personalization, and add 17 items in under 1-1/2 hours, and I could have done it much faster if I wasn’t experimenting so much.
Technorati Tags: Zlio, online stores, affiliate programs, product reviews, sales, movies, amazon.com, e-commerce
If the adage “Two heads are better than one” is true, then it follows that “two stores are better than one” also, right? Well, for now, that’s what I’m choosing to believe.
The newest Caddickisms Store is an Amazon.com “a-store”. I’ve got it concentrated on comic books, fantasy books, and DVDs for now. I periodically change the lineup a bit so check back. (for items directly related to stuff I’ve covered in the blog, check out the Handpicked Favorites category).
Sorry, all, for the lack of posts lately. There were some delays as Caddickisms moved to a new server, and I didn’t want to lose anything here or on my other site by having an outdated backup.
And while I’m talking about the “man behind the curtain,” I thought I’d take a second to plug my hosting service. HostPC.com does a wonderful, reliable, and professional job for incredibly low prices. I heartily recommend them if you’re looking for LAMP hosting.
Apparently I suck at CSS. After two days of not being able to get the layout to flex correctly, I went in search of other examples to help me figure it out, and instead found a theme that was almost what I was shooting for to begin with.
SO… not being a complete idiot, I gave up my own theme project and will use Tiga from now on (though I will customize it a bit in the coming days).
Sorry to anyone who stopped by lately and had their eyes hurt!
Don’t be alarmed if this page looks horrible.
I’m currently learning how to create my own theme, and I’m too lazy to create a development site for myself, so this is going to jump around between established themes and a crazy, completely broken one.
I’ll put everything back in working order before the night is out.
Sorry for any inconvenience.
Caddickisms is powered by WordPress | Using Tiga theme with a bit of Ozh + WP 2.2 / 2.3 Tiga Upgrade
