I guess you just can’t stop free hosting. Folks don’t realize, but it snuck in through the back door once again.

Years ago, there were services that hosted adult content for free. Some might remember the likes of Porncity and others I can’t remember right now, it’s been awhile.

It was a hell of a deal, you could host all your adult pictures movies and sites for free, no cost. Well the cost of having their ads on your pages, stealing the prime real estate on your pages. Which in reality was a much higher cost than hosting, but the herd followed.

It didn’t take long to realize, free hosts sucked. For one, all the ads, second many free hosting services did not play nice. Some would sneak in 404 errors when there was none, 404 pages with of course, their ads. Or redirects when their was no need. All this causing far to many problems for directories and link lists who ended up with far too many bad, dead or redirected links.

The biggest problem with the free host model is that it left out accountability. When your actually paying out your hard earned dollars you tend to take your business seriously. with free hosting there is little incentive to keep up your business, you had nothing to lose.

Sure webmasters who put up the cash disappear as well, but when the money is on the table, it’s usually a different mind set to begin with.

But alas…

Even with all it’s inherent problems, free hosting is back, now disguised as free blog hosting. Guess they must have some new tricks up their sleeves, ones we can’t see, to make it all better?

It’s no better and no different. It’s still free hosting and it will still be a problem.

It’s even more of a problem today because of all the software development and high speed internet access. Now days you can purchase software to automate the process or building and updating blogs. Basically churning out millions of bytes of crap.

Who’s losing out?

The poor guy trying to do it right by creating content by hand, real and unique content. He loses out because he doesn’t mass produce. Since he doesn’t mass produce he doesn’t have hundreds of listings that clog up the directories with useless garbage, garbage the search engines don’t even want because they know better. Yet blog directories seem to list any ole crap, day in and day out.

Sad it’s come to this where the crap rises to the top. It should be the other way around.

It comes down to this…

If you can’t come up with $20 a month for hosting and $10 a year for a domain name, you don’t need to deserve to be in this business. Your not taking the business serious enough, so why should any one take you seriously. That is unless you want to do blogs.

One use to be able to say, you’ll do much better with your own hosting, but it’s not exactly true right now.

It will be again… mark my words. It will come. Let’s just hope it will be sooner than later.

So yesterday and today I took the plunge. I updated all 15 blogs to the newest WordPress, 2.5.1. Wasn’t as bad as I thought, I had been putting it off.

In reality, if you want to be one of those that finds the good in everything, which I try my best, this exploit problem was a good thing.

• I was forced to back up my databases, something I don’t do often enough.
• I upgraded to the latest and more secure WordPress version.
• Now I have the cool new version with all the new extras. (still getting use to it).
• Was able to clean up, un-used theme’s, un-used plug-ins, ect.

It wasn’t a bad thing after all.

Did you upgrade yours? I found the current exploit on every one of my blogs, every one.

Funny thing is, with all the talk about finding a new free site model, most people still don’t seem to be getting the point, or seeing the big picture. It’s also funny that with all the “problems” with the current free site model, that some people are not saying.. duh.

I think most would agree or have agreed that one major problem with free sites is that they do not update. It’s a problem to the free site because the SE’s won’t stay long. It hurts the Links Lists because basically they are linking to dead wood.

Surprising, a webmaster recently asked about updating free sites and at least two webmasters pretty much said it was a waste, or not how free sites were done. They still believed and passed on the “Set it and forget it” attitude. Talk about backward thinking.

Come on, it’s 2008. Free sites might have worked 5 years ago or more, but it’s pretty self evident, they are not fairing so well these day, haven’t for some time.

While I might be overzealous or high on the coolness of blogging, thats not really the big picture. The reality is that I am creating sites that are updating on a regular basis. hhhmm…. where have we heard that word before?

Are the thinking caps on? Powered up? Or has the battery gone dead?

Seems the RSS feed plug-in I was using was not all that hot. Funny it was the one that comes with newer WordPress versions. It does not work that well.

The good news is, I found a much better plug-in that works much better with sponsor provided feeds, guess they are not all that bad..:)

The new plug-in is,  KB Advanced RSS Widget. Yes it’s a widget, if your not using them, your missing out.

Couple things I like about the plug-in; You can set it NOT to link to the feed title, a number of sponsor feeds do not have the title encoded for affiliates. You can also set the plug-in to hide the widget if the feed is down, no nasty feed not working messages. There are also a number of formatting options available, to make the feed show as you want.

So far I love the plug-in. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

The logs show me it indeed pings future posts, that was my main concern. Just wanted to update the previous post and plugin in question.

Now get to work!

Use all or some, it’s your empire. Once again, this is for WordPress blogs and they work on version 2.3.3.

AddThisSocial Bookmarkting – I use to use a social bookmarking plug-in called sociable. I might even have told folks it was the best. Well, as some times happens, I might have been wrong. One day I started to think about the code this little number put on my pages. You could set it up to bookmark for like 30 some sites, each getting coded to your page. See where I am going with this? It was putting a TON of extra code on my page, not exactly helping my SEO. So the switch to the Add This, as it’s a small line of JS.

Google XML Sitemaps – Think this one pretty much explains itself. It creates a XML sitemap of your blog. Even alerts some search engines when your blog changes.

Math Comment Spam Protection – This is just one part of spam protection for your blog. Bewared, with some theme’s you may need to copy and paste some code, not really a big deal. This plug-in adds an extra field in your comment form, a math question like what is 5 + 6?. Can’t say it won’t be beat, but it’s working good so far.

Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form – Here’s a heavy duty contact form for you, with built in spam protection. I can tell you there are bots out there just looking for forms to fill in. It even comes with a large number of theme’s.

Trackback Validator – It helps eliminate trackback spam by checking for a linkback.

Ultimate Plugins Smart Update Pinger – First off, the jury is still out on this one. It completely replaces the one built into WordPress, which is kind of good. The main idea is that it only pings when needed. When you edit a post, there shouldn’t be a ping, for example, same for posts in the future. It makes sense as too much pinging can get you banned. The reason I say the jury is out is because I’m not sure it works all that well. For one thing, for those posts that are future, does it ping them when they post? Also I noticed on one blog, I forgot a title and the pinger warned me ( good feature), and it did not ping (another god thing), but after fixing the post, it said it was an edit and from what I saw it never got it’s pings. So use this one at your own risk. I told you so.

Last but not least…

WP 2.3 Related Posts – Sure you can guess this one. It puts related posts/articles under your posts, on the single page that is. On some theme’s you’ll have to add the php code yourself

You now have my kingdom. Have anything to add? I’m sure no expert.

This is my checklist, sure you’ll find your own process.

1. Upload WordPress files. Make sure you have the very latest version from none other than WordPress.org. I usually upload my plug-ins at the same time.

2. Setup up Database for blog. Your host can do this if your not sure. If they can’t or won’t , find another host. You’ll need the database name, user name and password.

3. Put all the database information into the wp-config-sample.php file. Renamed and save file as wp-config.php. Upload file.

4. Run install file. Talk about fast set up.

5. Pick my theme. I can be anal, so this one might take me some time. Install theme.

6. Activate plug-ins. Do any plug-in configuration.

7. If you plan on putting any images on your blog, you’ll need to create directory called “uploads” within your wp-content directory. You will also need to set the permissions for that directory to 777.

8. Posts 10-15 new posts.

9. Promote.

Thats about it. Tomorrow I’ll go over the plug-ins I use. Now get to work!