For instance, let’s assume you have taken pictures at your family’s last Christmas get-together….and so did several other family members. You can create a photo album and let all your family know where the pictures can be viewed. They can easily contribute their pictures to that album, and there’s just no hassle what so ever. You can password protect the album so just anyone can’t add to the album, but you don’t have to. There’s a minimum amount of buttons you have to push, and the fact they don’t have to create an account to take part makes it as easy as pie! Check it out….it’s free.

When the issue first came to my attention, there were plenty of people telling me “not to back down”, and that I “should speak to a lawyer”, etc. I realize now that I got way too caught up in this.

When I first spoke to Dave from NMM, I felt like he patronized me, and didn’t hardly give me an opportunity to speak. It made me mad. Maybe I took him wrong, maybe I didn’t. Either way, I should have left the issue alone, because in the grand scheme of things, it’s just a WordPress theme, which honestly, are a dime a dozen.

To Dave: I’m publicly apologizing for the part I took in this. My pride is not worth trying to make you look bad. You told me what happened, and I wish I had just taken your word for it. I don’t need to examine the code to say that.

Someone left a comment that they thought I was trying to milk this for all it’s worth. I can see how it looks that way, but that’s not what I want, and I don’t want to try and get attention by making someone else look bad. So Dave, staff of NMM, and people of the blogosphere, I hope you will overlook my prideful behavior.

One of my most popular articles on this site, as well as one of the articles that brings in the most search engine visitors, is my How to Install WordPress with 1and1 Hosting article. I believe the reason for this is because there are many people who’ve run into the same problem trying to get WordPress to connect to the database on 1and1′s servers. 1and1 doesn’t like to play by the standard rules.

1and1 is not only the most well-known web host, but they’ve also served my website quite well. As my site has grown, not to mention the fact that I now have multiple websites, my needs are changing. This post is not to bash 1and1, because they have provided me with good service. But I believe Hostgator has a set-up that will better meet my needs. Read on to find out why.

Why Hostgator?

I’ve chosen to go with Hostgator for several reasons. At the top of that list, is the great reputation they’ve built for themselves. Unlike 1and1, I’ve found much more praise of Hostgator on the net than bashing. Another reason is that I found their reseller accounts very attractive. These accounts cost a little more than your run of the mill hosting plans, but I think this is the perfect set-up for someone with multiple websites. Having a different account for each site should eliminate all my sites going down if only one site were to take more than it’s share of bandwidth. Unlimited MySQL databases is also a big factor in my decision, as my 1and1 plan limited me to 50 databases. Unlimited databases will allow me to continue building BANS sites, as well as any other type of database-driven sites I want to build in the future.

Hostgator Points to Consider

• Great Reputation
• Great Customer Service
• Affordable Reseller Accounts
• Unlimited Databases
• Uses standard C Panel admin

Support

I’ve seen a lot of 1and1 bashing on the net, and apparently that is due to their “horrible customer service”, which I don’t have any experience with personally. I’ve been with 1and1 for over two years, and have never had to contact their tech support. So, that could either mean that I’ve been lucky, or that there hosting service works like it’s supposed to. As Forrest Gump would say, “that’s all I have to say ’bout that”.

My initial impression of support from Hostgator has been well beyond my expectations. They will move up to 30 websites for you from your previous web host to the Hostgator servers. I understood this to be somewhat automated between web host’s using C Panel. 1and1 has their own non-standard control panel, so I didn’t think this would apply to me. Boy, was I wrong! They manually moved close to twenty websites for me(databases included), and it didn’t cost me any extra! I’m truly impressed with the level of customer service that I’ve received so far. Great communication and great service.

The transition went really smooth. I think I may have lost a couple of new comments between the two servers during the change, so for that I apologize.

Since the changes I recently made to this site(new design, ads, etc.), I’ve decided that the only affiliate ads that I will have on this site, are products that I use myself, and that I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to anyone. It’s all too easy to throw ads up based on the amount of the payout, but I’m not going to do this…there are plenty of people who already do.

Here are my current plans. I’m going to keep spots for four 125×125 ads in the sidebar. For now, I’m going to keep two of those as affiliate ads for products that I use and would recommend. The other two spots, I will offer to you.

These 125×125 ad spots will rent out by the month. I will have to approve the ad of course, because I’m not going to advertise for something that I have moral objections to. The advertiser will be responsible for supplying the graphic for the ad.

Those of you who’ve been reading Antbag.com for a while know that I’ve changed up my design quite a bit in the past. Out of the designs I’ve had in the past, the current design is my favorite. I plan to keep this as the design of this site for a long time. If you’re an advertiser on Antbag.com, I will always give you advance notice of any major changes to the site, such as the design.

I’m sort of jumping out on a limb here! I have no idea how this will be received. Look here for my official advertise page.

Though I sold a few spots, I’ve since decided to go back to my original position on this…..and not sell ads.

Moving Away from Free Themes

Honestly, I don’t want to come across the wrong way when I say this, but providing support has worn me down. I get emails everyday for theme support, and I try my best to anwer them all and provide good support. But this has taken my focus off of things that I want to do, and it’s kept me from updating this blog as much as I would like. Let me point out that I really don’t mind answering questions about the themes, and providing fixes if something is working right, but those are only a small percentage of the support questions I get. The far majority are one of the following…

• Something isn’t working, and it’s usually the result of an ad, javascript, plugin, or some other changes that have been made in attempt to modify the design. It just surprises me that folks expect me to fix something that was working before they started making changes.
• I read your tutorial on…..and it doesn’t work for me. This is usually because the instructions were not followed closely.
• How do I……..? No, I don’t want you to do it, just tell me what to do, and I’ll do the work. ~ Honestly, it takes me much longer to explain how to do something, as opposed to doing it myself. So why would I do that, when you could pay me a few bucks to take care of it for you?

Aside from the inbox overload, I’ve had a lot of fun building themes. The various reasons I’ve done so include:

1. To feel like I was giving something back to the WordPress community(afterall, WP is free and awesome).
2. I wanted to learn an enjoyable skill I could use to make money at some point.
3. And originally, I wanted to get links back to this website as quickly as I could.

I would say I’ve accomplished each of those objectives. I think now is the time to tweak my goals and look at other things I’d like to do online. Whatever direction I go, I will still provide support for my themes. As for building free themes, I may provide one occasionally, but not very often. There are plenty of designers who put out free themes and there are thousands of themes available.

Personal blog?

So the next thing on my mind is this: Should I make Antbag.com a personal blog, as it was originally intended to be? You know, one of those blogs where I write about my weekend, home-ownership, car trouble, grilled steaks, guitar playing, and whatever else happens to be going on in my life at the moment? I would enjoy this kind of blog, because it would be all about me And you know people like to talk about themselves. The only problem is, everybody else would get bored quick, because I’m pretty plain and un-exciting. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with personal blogs, I’m just not sure that would be right for Antbag.com. I don’t want to completely change everything I’ve tried to do, and run off the couple of hundred subscribers that I have. As a result of the links pointing back to this site I’ve gotten from the themes, my Technorati rank looks strong, and the front page of this site is now appearing to be a PR6. These things lead me to believe that I should use this platform to try and provide something that would be valuable to someone.

Marketing

One thing I’ve not been very good at is marketing. I think I have a somewhat decent understanding of how to market a website online, it’s just something I’ve never been motivated to do in terms of adwords, learning SEO, social media, etc. One idea I”m considering at this point, is trying to make this website profitable. The changes would probably include advertising, as well as articles related to affiliate marketing, online business ventures, etc.

In the past, I’ve been hesitant about advertising here. From the designer part of my mind, ads just ruin a good design(not that my design is that great, haha), and it’s much harder to get a website to validate when you have ads. I’ve also never thought I had enough traffic to justify advertising. But my interest in building an online stream of income is becoming more prevalent. Not so much from being a web designer or freelancer, but more in building websites, and hopefully profitable ones. More on that later.

Conclusion

So, that’s what’s going on here. If I do decide to include advertising, that will give me a good excuse reason to build a new design for the site. I always enjoy that. Thanks for being a reader of Antbag.com.

First of all, I’ve had an on-going problem with this connection. 95% of the time, everything’s great. But everytime it rains or the sky gets cloudy, I lose the connection. I’ve had multiple AT&T technicians here at different times, and none of them can figure out why. And the worst part is, calling “tech support”. After holding forEVER, you finally get someone who speaks very broken English. I’m all for diversity, but heck, if I call tech support, I’m already frustrated. Connecting me to someone I can’t understand doesn’t help the situation. Then, you have to go through the same old song and dance everytime. I don’t need to check to make sure my ethernet line is plugged in to the wall. Their tech support apparently have no special skills. They are obviously reading what they are telling you, some sort of flow chart I suppose. If you try to ask a question, they are completely lost.

After calling and going through the whole phone episode, the technician came by when I wasn’t home. He left a message that he couldn’t find any problem with it. REALLY? Then why is the connection still down? Why is the little light on the modem red instead of green? Of course, he didn’t leave a way for me to call him. The only way to contact AT&T is through their help desk.

Today, my connection seems to be staying up for the first time in 3 or 4 days. However, I’ve gotten zero emails. I generally get quite a few everyday, and have gotten nothing for several days, so I know there’s still a problem. If you’ve tried to contact me in the past 4/5 days, please forgive me for not responding. I’m not bothering with AT&T tech support again. I’m not wasting 30 minutes waiting to talk to someone who is clueless. I believe my time with AT&T is quickly coming to a close.

Moving on to a New Broadband Provider

Choosing a new provider is not something I’m really looking forward to. However, the experience with AT&T has given me a new understanding of just what I’m looking for in an internet provider. Some of the questions I’ll ask before signing up for a new service might be…

• If a problem arises, who can I call for help?
• Do they speak fluent English?
• How much is the service, with all the gimmicks aside?(I’m not so concerned with the introductory rate for the first 3 months)
• If I need a technician to come to my house, how fast can I expect that to happen?

I’m done now. Thanks for reading

It’s strange, I’ve posted here on Antbag.com a lot less over the past two months or so as I’ve picked up more work, but my blog seems to be picking up a little steam. My subscriber count is higher than it’s ever been, my daily unique visitor count is up. I’ve had some much larger days than I’m having right now(days I’ve launched a new WP Theme, with it’s subsequent announcement on Weblog Tools Collection), but not on a consistent basis.

Another neat thing, due to backlinks from my WP Themes, is that I’ve been listed this week in Technoratti’s Top 100 popular blogs at #99. I seriously would have expected this to bring in a rush of traffic, but truth is, it hasn’t. According to my stats, I’ve not had even one referrel this week from Technoratti….strange.

As for being in the Top 100, I know there are quite a few designers out there who have WAY more back-links than me, but are not listed in the Top 100 popular blogs. My assumption is that once they figure out the reason I have all those back-links(WordPress Themes), I’ll be off the list. Anyway, kinda nice to see my blog listed.

The apparent reason the Page Rank of so many sites took a turn for the worse, is based on the sites having paid links. Not sure how this will affect services like Text Link Ads, but I’m sure it’s not good news for them.

I’ve never had paid links here before, mainly because I didn’t qualify back when I applied for TLA. At the time, my blog had a Page Rank of 3, and I think a PR4 was required before your site was considered established enough to be profitable. With this update, seems I’m a PR5 now. Although I’ve placed ads on this site from time to time, I’ve never really set out to directly monetize it. What money I have made from it has been in more of an indirect way(WP design/customization), not through ads.

Why does it matter?

So the golden question is, how important is the Page Rank of your site? Maki, from popular money-making blog, Dosh Dosh, says it doesn’t matter. He makes the point that that what Google does is completely out of anyones control, and bloggers/siteowners don’t need systems that use Page Rank as a metric for measuring comparative value.

If your ad revenue is affected just because PageRank changes, then you’re not doing something right. Not exploring the right monetization options. Not having a long term business plan. Not making full use of the traffic you have. Not getting the right advertisers who know the value of your site.

While I agree with him, I must admit that I get a big chunk of the traffic on this site through Google. Ad revenue aside, if Page Rank determines how high on the list your site is, then you can’t deny it’s somewhat important. Especially when you consider that Google is seemingly taking over the world…

While checking out an incoming link the other day, it turned out to be from a friend of mine with a Tumblr tumblelog. So I decided to sign up, and check it out.

Of course, the first thing I did to mine, before even thinking about posting, was to start manipulating the template. I ended up making it look like a mini version of this site…..which only took about 20 minutes. Tumblr is like a super mini version of WordPress, without so many options. You have no sidebar. Basically, you have four six ways that you can post:

1. text
2. video
3. quote
4. link
5. chat
6. photo

It’s that simple. It’s actually fun.

So, what’s it actually good for?

For me, the value is creating a cool place to bookmark places on the web I run across, and to post things I want to remember. Does anyone actually read these things? I really don’t know. Whether they read mine or not, it doesn’t really matter to me. I like it because it’s extremely easy to use, and it’s easy to change the design however you want. If you want to see what I find interesting, you can check mine out at antbag.tumblr.com.

Why in the world have I never tried out Skype? I’ve been aware of it for a long time, but tonight I plugged in for the first time and talked to someone on the other side of the world.

For some reason, I was under the impression that there was a special phone you had to have to use the service. I think I saw a phone with a Skype logo on the shelf at Wal-Mart in the computer accessories, and just assumed that you had to have that…..as embarrassing as it is. Well, I found out tonight that all you need is a mic and speakers, and you’re good to go. I had an old pair of headphones in one of my closets with an attached microphone, and it worked perfectly. I was amazed. The headset I have probably isn’t worth a couple of bucks. So I’ve found one of my new favorite web apps!