Wow, time flies so fast! I never realized ’til a few days ago that I haven’t published a blog update for more than a year already. My last blog update was done on November 2009. For those who are new here and aren’t familiar with my blog updates, these posts are done not only to share with the readers the plugins/tools I use and site improvements/changes, but it also serves as a “note” for myself so I have a record of the stuff that I’ve installed/uninstalled and the changes I’ve made to the site.

Below are the plugins and other stuff that I’ve installed/uninstalled, added/removed or changed since my last update.

Uninstalled Plugins

• Comment Info Detector – plugin that detects and displays the commenter’s country, web browser and operating system.
• CommentLuv – plugin that displays the commenter’s latest blog post based on their RSS feed.
• Wibiya Toolbar – official Wibiya Toolbar plugin that integrates different social networking features, apps, widgets and other tools.

These plugins all work fine and are pretty nifty plugins but the reason I uninstalled all three plugins was to cut down the “fat” on this blog. I’m working on lessening the resources used on the server and lessening page load times. Less plugins = less resources used. Although they provided neat features, the blog could run without them.

Installed Plugins

• Dashboard Notepad – plugin that adds a simple notepad widget within the WordPress dashboard. You can read the review I made for this plugin here.
• PubSubHubbub – plugin that enables a blog to let other parties know in real-time when there are new updates.
• W3 Total Cache – performance optimization (caching) plugin that improves server performance, improves page load times and user experience.

Installed the Dashboard Notepad plugin so I could write down notes (drafts, to-do lists, etc.) on my WordPress dashboard. I installed PubSubHubbub to enable real-time updates to Google Reader, FriendFeed, etc. Last time, I was using WP Super Cache and then I came across the W3 Total Cache plugin. Tried it and never looked back as it provided more features, did the job better (page load times were better with W3TC than WP Super Cache) and it was compatible with other plugins I used.

Other Changes

• Reinvigorate – I previously had a premium account on Reinvigorate which cost $5/month (stats and analytics service). I love Reinvigorate and have been using it the past few years but I decided to cancel the premium account and just rely on Google Analytics to cut down on my expenses. I still recommend them and you can get a free account if your monthly traffic is less than 100,000.
• Infolinks – added Infolinks, an in-text advertising program as an additional revenue source. Those are the red, double underlined links found throughout the site. Btw, I’d like to know from the regular readers if the Infolinks ads bother you or not. Thanks!
• CDN – If you might’ve noticed, the posts, pages and the site as a whole loads faster. That’s because aside from using the W3 Total Cache plugin, JaypeeOnline has been using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) the past few months. I’ll publish a more detailed post about this soon.

If any of you guys have comments, feedback or suggestions to make JaypeeOnline better, please don’t hesitate to share it with me via the comments section or if you want to remain anonymous, you can send me a message via the contact page. Thank you and have a nice day!

I’ve been having problems with my blog recently. If you’ve visited and tried to access JaypeeOnline the past few days, it’s most likely that you experienced some problems viewing the blog. Unlike previous events where the downtime were due to my hosting provider’s incompetence, blog migration or a WordPress plugin conflict, this time the problems were caused by a high volume of traffic. Like many bloggers, I work on increasing my blog traffic and here I am, having problems because of it. Ironic isn’t it?

Because of the efforts and a little bit of SEO work that I put on my blog, the volume of traffic jumped in the last few months and went from double to triple the amount of traffic I had in the first few months of last year. The last couple of months didn’t show any signs of slowing down and the volume of traffic has just kept increasing. It got to the point where my blog is using up more resources and running out of the alloted memory. I’m not complaining at all but I didn’t expect that it would cause me these problems. Btw, having WP Super Cache installed on my blog didn’t help or was not enough to handle the situation.

Anyways, I’ve been busy working on this issues the past few days trying to figure out what’s causing the problem, what I could do to fix it and trying to find alternative solutions. I also contacted my hosting provider and asked for some help. I’m very fortunate to have a very good hosting provider – ServInt, who’ve been very helpful and have provided all the assistance I needed the past few days. Right now, my blog is on a 7-day trial upgrade to a higher VPS account with double the amount of resources. I’m also running a new WordPress caching plugin which is supposedly better than WP Super Cache and is used by a lot of big-time, high-traffic blogs like mashable.com, noupe.com, webdesignerdepot.com, freelanceswitch.com and tutsplus.com just to mention a few. I’m still working on it and will have to fix some of the settings to maximize the caching plugin capabilities and optimize blog performance.

Although I’ve been able to address the issues and have been able to minimize the server load, it’s still a work in progress. Me and my hosting provider will continue to monitor the performance of JaypeeOnline and try to make it work better. If you experience any problems or notice some errors on the blog or any part of the blog, please do notify me via the contact page or send me an email at jphabaradas [at] gmail [dot] com.

I apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced during the past few days and I hope that you won’t get tired of supporting JaypeeOnline. Thank you and hope you all have a nice day!

Did my last blog update post about a couple months back and I’ve done some changes to the blog so I decided to do another blog update post. These blog update posts have become a “regular” habit of mine here on JaypeeOnline and I consider it as some kind of “checkpoint” to help me remember the plugins I installed/uninstalled on the period of time. Its also a way for me to inform my readers of the changes I’ve made to the blog especially the changes I’ve made front-end wise, changes in the blog theme, design, layout, etc.

The changes I’ve listed below are the changes I’ve made since my previous blog update.

Uninstalled Plugins

• LinkWithin – Displays recommended stories and associated thumbnails from your blog.
• Most Commented – Retrieves a list of the posts with the most comments.
• Popularity Contest – keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses them to determine which of your posts are most popular.
• Global Translator – automatically translates your blog in the following 41 different languages.

I removed LinkWithin because based on my observation, visitors weren’t using it that much and it uses up too much space and makes the overall post page layout more cluttered. Uninstalled the Most Commented and Popularity Contest plugins because my theme has built-in functions that make both plugins redundant. Removed the Global Translator plugin because of security issues and I will discuss more about it in an upcoming post.

Installed Plugins

• Where did they go from here – Show “Readers Also Viewed” links on your page.
• Theme Authenticity Checker – scans theme files for potentially malicious or unwanted code.
• TweetMeme Button – Adds a button which easily lets you retweet your blog posts.
• WP Super Cache – Very fast caching plugin for WordPress.
• Yoast Breadcrumbs – Outputs a fully customizable breadcrumb path.

Installed the Where did they go from here plugin and placed it beside the Related Posts to display posts that readers visited after viewing/reading that current post. This is very useful because it lists some posts that aren’t displayed in the Related Posts and lists posts that may also be of interest to the new reader. I installed the Theme Authenticity Checker to help me verify the themes that I review in my WordPress Theme reviews. The TweetMeme button is the small graphic displayed on the upper left portion of each post and displays the number of times the post was RT’d (retweeted) and enables the reader to easily RT the post.

I installed WP Super Cache in the efforts of solving the problems I had with my previous web host. It didn’t work because the problem was not with my blog but with my web host its just that they didn’t want to admit it and they were trying to put the blame on my blog.

I’ve been planning on implementing breadcrumb navigation on my blog for a long time now but didn’t get to do it. I finally found time to install Yoast’s Breadcrumbs plugin. This plugin displays the path and location of the post/page that the reader is currently viewing. Helps users to easily navigate through the blog/website. The breadcrumb path is the text displayed at the top most part of each post and page (Home > Post).

Other Changes

I didn’t do much changes to the blog theme and layout except for some minor tweaks on the sidebar.

• Added the JaypeeOnline Facebook Fan Page at the sidebar.
• Removed the Entrecard widget. Still thinking about whether I should put it back or not.
• Moved the Trackbacks/Pingbacks section below the Comment form.

I think thats it, I mean that’s all the changes I’ve done since my last blog update. Sometimes my memory fails me so I might have missed one or two changes and if I did, I’ll update the post later.

If any of you guys have comments, ideas or suggestions to make JaypeeOnline better, please don’t hesitate to share it with me via the comments section or if you want to remain anonymous, you can send me a message via the contact page. Thanks and you all have a great weekend!

If you noticed that this blog was inaccessible in the past 24 hours, its because I’ve migrated it to my new web host. DNS propagation usually takes about 24 hours to take effect, depending on your location. Just wanted to update you guys about that so you know what happened and I’m also sharing with you my recent experience with web hosting issues.

This month of October has been the worst month for me and my blog in terms of web hosting. Would you believe that I’ve migrated my blog at least 6 times just this month? In my effort to find a new webhost, I opened an account with 2 other web hosts but for some certain reasons, it didn’t work out so I had to migrate back to my previous host. Anyways, what prompted me to go and find a different web host was the “issues” I had with my previous hosting provider.

Most of you guys know that my blog’s hosting account got suspended several times due to “high cpu usage”. I tried installing WP Super Cache and other plugins that will help minimize the load on my server, decreased the search engine crawl rate on my blog and tweaked my robots.txt file all in the effort of avoiding using up my server’s cpu resources. Unfortunately all of those efforts were in vain because I still got my account suspended not once, twice but three times! When I asked my web host for the reason why they suspended my account, they gave the same answer – “high cpu usage“. This time, I asked them what could be causing the high cpu usage and the Level 2 Tech Support people gave me these lame answers/excuses.

This is because the site is open for anyone to search for whatever they want, and this can cause malicious users to abuse this, which in this case it appears they have. The easiest fix for this is to make a log in and for anyone to search, perform a GET search, they must be logged in.

It looks like you have your website setup with a forum script or members site that is publicly accessable. youll need to adjust your website so that only members who are logged in can view pages / posts / profiles / images. This should resolve the issue. I am unsuspending the account. Please make the changes.

A blog is a forum, its a specific form of forum, however it is based on the same software. One page, that holds several posts. i do not know if the site has profiles or not. I got the information because i work at a hosting company and do this work every day all day and happen to know that when ever a site is suspended and in the abuse report it contains several hundred apache get requests to random files and directories, such as 3fb5c0424e085100d6b88904b308d6b0.css?t=1027215365 the problem is that the site / profiles/ forum/ blog/ community/ what ever it is, is configured to be openly accessible to the internet and because of this someone or some group of people are access the site in an abusive way, often times looking for exploits. These requests overload the server. The fix is to disable the site so it is not open accessible to anyone who is not logged in with a correct username and password.

Btw, my blog was hosted on a reseller account and because of these “high cpu usage” issues, they were trying to get me to upgrade to a VPS account. With that and these lame answers, I knew that they were just trying to make money and get me to upgrade my account. It was at this time that I decided to move out and find a new web host.

After checking out my options, I finally decided to go with ServInt who I found via BloggingTips.com and purchased a VPS account. My blog has only been with them for a day but I’ve opened my account about 2 days ago and since then I’ve been dealing with their customer support. Based on my experience with their support, all I can say that their customer support and service is AWESOME! They have 24/7 support and free phone support. Not only did they help me with the setup and answered my questions but support was replying to my tickets even at 1 AM! Their sales and tech support aren’t only friendly and helpful but also very knowledgeable.

I tried migrating the other day but had some issues because of an old version of MySQL so I had to wait until support upgraded it before I was able to restore my WordPress database backup. Now that I’ve successfully migrated my blog to its new home on the web, I can now get back to blogging and focus on more important stuff like my upcoming blog contest.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed and hoping that I won’t have any major web hosting issues again and that everything would work out with my new web host – ServInt.

NOTE: Just to be clear, my previous web host/hosting provider was NOT TechHive. TechHive was just using a reseller account from another hosting company. All of the problems/issues I had was with the other hosting company, not TechHive.