Leah’s Cafe

With a few blogs running on several hosting plans, the cost of maintaining this blogs can add up to be quite a bit. However, it has not been costing me anything more than the domain registration in the last one year. I am able to host the blogs for free or almost free by taking advantage of the promotional offers of many of the hosting companies.

I just signed up for a first year free or almost free package. When the one year is up, I just move to another host. Since I have done the migrating a couple of times now, I have even learned to do it in a few simple steps, without involving the MySQL or any scripting whatsoever.

But, there are two lessons learned along the process. First, never take the “free” domain offered by this hosting companies if you plan to move out after a year. The “free” domain doesn’t register under your name and you need the permission of the hosting company that provides the “free” domain (the current registrar) to transfer the domain. Generally, they would lock the transfer of your domain one month before it expires and that would cause much delay when you try to transfer the domain and move your blog to another hosting company. It took seven days for me to be able to successfully transfer a “free” domain out.

The second lesson is: make sure the hosting company allows shell access. You cannot do a direct import of the posts, comments and categories from your old host if you do not have access to the root directory. This hosting company doesn’t allow access to their root directory for security reason. What lame excuse, don’t they heard of unix security software ? Luckily it is free for the first year, so I am still thinking should I get a new domain and start a new blog there, or just abandon it totally?

With pains of the wounds after surgery and the uncertainty of this cancer scare, my blogging mojo have been misplaced in the last week or so. Hope to be back in the swing, with deadlines approaching and pocket emptied by medical bills, sooner …:-)

Have been resting and taking it easy in the last few days, after the heroic act of driving around town to run some errands. Hey, even a simple movement like shifting the gears actually used a lot of the muscles around the abdomen, where the wounds are. Have to take care of the diet too, no Kim Chi and kava kava for now, as they both can potentially cause obstruction in me. The pelvic pain is killing me right now.

If you were here visiting my blog yesterday and you saw the whole blog disappeared, that’s because I was migrating the content of the whole blog to a new host. It takes a few hours for it to propagate. The transfer did go on smoothly, though I forgot to backup the widgets, now have to put them back in.

Will continue to migrate the other blogs to a different host in the coming week. It’s not that difficult to migrate a wordpress blog to a new host. One service provider actually charge $99.90 for the task, what a rip off! Anyone wants to change host? I can do the migration for $29.90. :-)

Looks like they are many people googled for the same question that I asked in my previous post “Why was Prince Charles wearing a spring onion on his lepel?”

And suddenly this blog is getting all this hits from people who are searching for answer to the significance of the green onion on Prince Charles’ lepel.:-)

I took a look at the stats and realised that this post ranked first for this keywords!

And this same post also ranked at second and third for a few other similar keywords. Wow!

The packings and running errands have kept me quite busy since December. Haven’t have much time to go blog-hopping. Went out whole morning and came back to see 200 over posts unread in the Google reader.

I actually read all of them in one sitting, of course skipped some of the paid ones. Most of the comment posts are read in a click, thank goodness for “mark all as read” button. ;-)

Even though I try to keep up with most of your posts, I would not be hopping over to your blog to comment most of the time as time is scarce. It has to wait till the mountain that I am packing shrink in size a little bit.

Have decided to divorce the Montessori Blog from TigaP and asked for pardon from our granny G. Submitted a reconsideration request yesterday. Elaine, ParisB and many others got back their PR after doing that, so crossing my fingers and waiting to see what will happen!

Anyway, after segmented out by region, domain, page rank and traffic, there are not many opportunities for a Blogspot with PR0 on the TigaP. Whatever available to PR0 will be grabbed before you can blink your eyes. Actually have not gotten any opps since January! So, decided to part with TigaP even though it’s one of the blogs that gets the most traffics from search engine and has better Real Rank.

A blog is a journal or an open diary, and a blogger is someone who owns a blog. A journalist may be a blogger, but it seems like every Tom, Dick and Harry who owns a blog and writes about social political issues start to act like they are the journalists. This people need some sort of solution to shrink the swelling head, don’t you think?

People don’t blog about political and social issues doesn’t mean they don’t care a little lesser than you do. Blog about social political issues and rant about the government do not make you more altruistic than us.

Just learned that Elaine gained back the PR of her blog after submitting a reconsideration request to granny G a week ago. I am considering whether to clean up my Montessori blog on blogspot and ask for a reconsideration.

Since it has been smacked to PR0 and being on a subdomain, there is really no much opportunity to write paid posts on it. The blog has hit quite a few keywords in its niche and rank high in the SERP for this keywords. It gets a lot of search engine traffics and has been doing quite well with Adsense recently.

Should I?