The constant pursuit of writing excellence can be enhanced with certain tools for writers. Some of these writing tools are technologies or gadgets that can help do some aspect of the writing business better, faster, easier, or cheaper. Other writing tools are old standbys that have helped writers for many years. The latter includes writing books like the AP Stylebook, The Chicago Manual of Style, a good dictionary, a good thesaurus, and a good old notebook and pen.

When it comes to technology based writing tools, finding great tools for writers can be hit or miss. The grammar-checker in Microsoft Word can be customized to be a powerful writing tool, but by default is very annoying, for example. Many things that sound like they would be enormously helpful end up being only moderately helpful, or not helpful at all. Other things that sound like they would be wasteful gadgets end up being a writer’s best friend. Determining which is which in advance is tricky.

Acer Netbook Aspire One D250

For quite some time, I’ve given a lot of thought to purchasing a netbook. A netbook, is an inexpensive and highly portable computer. The trade off is, of course speed. A powerful sub-three pound notebook will run you a $1,000, while these 2 lb. and change netbooks can cost much less than $300, a much smaller investment.

If you looked at netbooks when they first came out like I did, you probably came to the conclusion that they were not usable for serious writers. You were not wrong.

Things like improperly placed SHIFT keys and tiny non-tactile keys made them impossible to touch-type on, which makes it worthless for most pro writers. Ironically, such things were ignore by the click-and-browse crowd. On one forum, a poster actually commented that they didn’t use the Right-Shift key all that much anyway! (What, you don’t capitalize any words that start with s, t, a… ?)

However, technology moves fast, especially in competitive arenas like computer hardware and laptops. Newer netbooks come with keyboards that have most of the keys in the right places. When a solid Acer Netbook hit the one-deal-a-day website Woot.com, I jumped on it. I’m glad I did.

What finally tipped the balance in favor of buying a netbook?

Basically, while at a Starbucks with my car parked 5 blocks away, my laptop locked securely in the trunk because this was a food, drink, and shopping excursion downtown, an idea that I had been fumbling around with the wording on gelled in my mind as I was waiting for my latte. Fortunately, I have a notebook and a pen for just this sort of occurrence, but this particular instance called for pulling up some previous research, doing a little bit of current events research and incorporating it all.

On my laptop, this is not a problem as I just keep opening windows and programs as the ideas flow, giving each one its start and then returning to the original document, or moving on to the next thought. Unfortunately, with a notebook, all you can do is jot down each of these items, and as you do, you lose momentum, and that train of thought becomes a train wreck of notes that you will be lucky to decipher with any meaning later.

I tried to use my mobile phone’s Internet connection, which is fine under normal usage, but it withers under pressure. I can’t open more than one window (even with a tabbed mobile browser like Opera, more than 2 or 3 is suicide) and I can’t type fast enough. I ruefully wished that I could have something like my phone that I could carry around everywhere but that would have enough power to run a real web browser and that would have a keyboard I could touch-type on. It occurred to me that a netbook is the closest thing out there. Nothing smaller is really possible because then you would lose the touch-type possibility.

I didn’t have much hope of it working out when I re-examined some netbooks. The keyboards are tight, but workable. The screens are small, but perfectly fine for typing and basic research, and the Wi-Fi offers close-enough to anywhere connectivity.

Netbook Keyboard Comparison

How does a netbook keyboard compare to a regular keyboard? It is smaller. Duh! We all knew that. How MUCH smaller? That’s a trickier question to answer. Many netbooks report their keyboard size based on how much it is compared to a full-size keyboard, as in 94% of full-sized keyboard.

Here is my Acer D250 netbook lined up against my full-size desktop keyboard, a Logitech MX3200.

There are two big problems with this measurement. First, I have yet to be able to find exactly what constitutes a full-sized keyboard, so for all we know that is 94% of something that none of us use.

The second issue, is that percentages can be deceptive. Consider this. My Logitech MX3200 wireless keyboard is 11 1/4 inches across from the left-most edge of the CAPS LOCK key to the right-most edge of the ENTER key. That means that 90% of my keyboard would be 10 1/8" or one and an eighth inches smaller. That doesn’t sound like much except that each of the letter keys is 5/8" wide, meaning that in a keyboard that is just 10% smaller than full sized, is the equivalent of 2 whole letters narrower. In other words, one percent matters a lot when you are talking about keyboard size. Don’t let that 94% number fool you, the difference is HUGE.

However, based on standing there typing on the demo netbooks, it seemed like I could make it work, although, the only way to know for sure is to use one in the real world the way a freelance writer uses a laptop or other computer. Unfortunately, that can be a pricy experiment.

Luckily, with the Woot deal, I got an Acer Aspire D250 netbook with the 160 GB Hard Drive and the 1 GB of RAM (this one can be upgraded to 2 GB supposedly) and most importantly, with the bigger battery (what’s the point of getting a sub 3 lb. notebook if you’re just going to add 1/2 lb. of weight and a bunch more bulk to carry around a charger) for just over $200 including shipping.

It is refurbished and a far cry from the best of the best netbooks out there from what I understand, but in the handful of days I have owned it, it has proved that the netbook can be a valuable edition to an author’s collection of writer’s tools. I’ll update in the coming days and weeks as I get a better feel for what it can and cannot do. Hopefully, this will allow other writers to find netbooks that fit their needs.

Plagiarism is ugly. The people who commit plagiarism are thieves. They are unethical, and they don’t care about anyone but themselves. If you do business with someone who steals from other people, you should be smart enough to know that given the chance they will rob you, deceive you, and lie to your face. I would strongly advise you to never do business with anyone you know to be a thief.

Unfortunately, most thieves don’t care if what they are doing is wrong. Plagiarists are just as likely to ignore any warnings or messages as video pirates are to ignore those warnings on DVDs that the disc won’t allow you to fast forward through. (”Hey, DVD player, I am the HUMAN! Listen to me, not to the piece of plastic inside you.”) That is why when you find out someone is stealing your content from a website, it can be so frustrating.

They say that no lock or alarm will stop anyone who is determined enough to get inside. All you can do is make it hard enough that most bad guys will move on to an easier target. The same is true about plagiarism. Nothing short of not publishing your work will stop a determined thief from stealing your work. That being, said, the vast majority of plagiarism that occurs on the Internet is not done by determined, hard-working individuals. After all, if they were willing to work hard, they could build their website ethically instead of stealing from others.

Most website content theft is done via automation. A scumbag sets up a website and then either copies and pastes your content directly, or sets up an automated way to rip your content and publish it on their website. A common method is known as “feed scraping” and it is when someone scrapes your RSS feed to fill up their own site.

Generally, this kind of content theft is a volume game. If something interrupts or otherwise disturbs their automatic stealing procedure, they will either never notice, or move on and steal from another site. Obviously, if your content is particularly valuable, or otherwise important, the thieves will be back to try and fix their routine. Again, as a freelance writer, all you can do is try and make it too hard to be worth their while.

How To Stop Online Theft by Plagiarism Websites

With the above facts in mind, here are the top five ways to stop content theft and website fraud

Top 5 Ways To Stop Online Content Theft and Website Fraud

1. Report The Website – Maybe it won’t help, and maybe it will, but reporting the website for plagiarism is the first step. If it works, it is also the most powerful because it is the only way you can get the content taken down. Report the site to their webhost, then to any and all ad networks with ads on the site, then to all the search engines, and finally to the BBB and FTC if possible.
2. Use Full URLs in Links – Usually I find out someone is stealing my websites when I notice the incoming links to my real website. Content thieves literally take an exact copy and post it many times, links and all. At least if anyone clicks on a link, they’ll come to the real website. Maybe that will even clue them in to the fact that they have been visiting a bad website.
3. Switch to Partial Feeds – Generally, I like the idea of publishing full feeds, but when someone is using your RSS feed to steal your content, nothing puts a cramp in their style like a partial feed which makes it obvious that these are not full articles. Even better, use Feedburner’s summary feed section to add a line at the bottom of each partial feed that says, “Exclusively at www.yoursite.com” to drive the point home.
4. Use .htaccess to Protect Your Feed – Check out this post at Cats Who Code Top 10 Ways to Stop Spam in WordPress for details. It is #9. Basically, you use .htaccess to block the IP of the site scraping your feed. That won’t work if they have a dynamic IP or they notice what you are doing, but otherwise, it is a good lockout.
5. Use .htaccess to Replace Linked Images – This is the one I LOVE. From the same post in #4, comes this little trick. It is # 10. By using your .htaccess file to replace the images that are linked from somewhere else with a different image, you can have a graphical Stop Thief on the plagiarized website every time you have a picture in your post. Be sure to use Tip #2 from this list to make this really effective. In order to keep stealing your content, the thief will have to copy your images to a new server, change the HTML code in your post to point to the right images. This is starting to really make it not worth the thief’s time and effort to rip off your site.

The code to implement #5 looks like this. Just change the yourdomain to be the name of your website and then set the last line to point at your replacement image. The original article suggests an ad for your website. I don’t want to associate with the thieving website, so I prefer an image that makes it clear everything is stolen, like a skull and crossbones with the words STOLEN CONTENT from www.MYSITE.com or something like that.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?yourdomain.com/.*$ [NC]
#RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ - [F]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/advert.jpg [R,L]

Remember, nothing will stop every attempt to steal your content, but at least this way, you can feel like you are fighting back a little bit. Besides, who knows, maybe it will make your site just tough enough to scrape that the scumbags will move on and leave your content alone.

Good Luck.

HostGator web hosting comes recommended highly from A TON of different WordPress bloggers as not just a great web host, but a good WordPress web host.

Only, here is the thing. It is now WAY after midnight and I have just found out that the way HostGator’s servers are setup, any WordPress theme using an open source image resizing script called TimThumb will not work. HostGator apparently blocks the method TimThumb uses to display the resized images. The ONLY fix for the problem is to contact HostGator support and read them precise instructions and and programming language code from some website so that they can allow TimThumb to work.

Before you decide this is no big deal, just realize that almost EVERY theme out there that automatically generates thumbnails uses TimThumb either directly, or by calling it from inside of its own code. Either way, if you want automatic thumbnail generation for your WordPress blog, find another host, because this is really annoying.

On the other hand, if you love talking to customer service or cutting and pasting code that you don’t understand in order to blindly ask HostGator to open up some sort of security in your hosting account, be my guest. Otherwise, it looks like I’m off to find another web host to try out.

Ok, that’s not weighty enough.

How about, ArcticLlama.com, the official website of top professional freelance writers will be undergoing a major site redesign starting today? I think that sounds solemn enough.

Back when we first launched Arctic Llama we had a vision, a vision of a large freelance writing firm staffed by high-level professionals with years of experience in virtually any field or subject matter. Businesses and corporations ranging from IBM and GE all the way to the small mom-and-pop business run out of a home office would come to us and find exactly what they were looking for, for all of their copywriting and publishing needs. (AP Stylebook, where were you on mom-and-pop? I think we could use some clarification on that one.)

It was a bold vision and one we took very seriously. The original Arctic Llama home page was crafted around that grand business plan, but then something happened.

Freelancing Experience Gives Life Lessons

While the original business plan for a grand ArcticLlama freelancing conglomerate remains a valid concept, and one that could be pulled off quite profitably for the right entrepreneurial writers, it is no longer our vision.

What happened?

It turns out that we love what we do; what we do, right now. Not what we might do if we grew the business in this direction, and what we would do if laid out a strategy for expansion, and certainly not what we would do if a dozen Fortune 500 Companies were banging down our doors looking for writing from our two-dozen writers. In other words, we don’t want to be businessmen, managers, and CEOs, and contractors with sub-contractors. We want to be writers, plain and simple. Writing is what we love, and it is what we do. Add in the joys of family, friends, and each other, and you’ve got a recipe that you don’t want to take away from to build another segment of a business.

Don’t get me wrong, I still relish the idea of consulting with small business and large corporations while standing on the back of solid ground-breaking research and analysis that we provide, but I don’t have any interest in building up that business. I don’t want to schmooze, and take executives out to dinner, and worry about whether or not kids play on soccer teams with kids whose parents might be useful connections to have.

What we do want, is to sit in our home offices, brew up our coffee, take turns writing and playing with our two kids, and then shutting down for the day at 3:00 PM to go to the zoo, or on a bike ride, or just to the nearby playground. In other words, we want the sweet life, not the power life.

New Web Design New SEO New Mobile Website

When we first built the ArcticLlama website, we did so with a keen eye for search engine optimization AND user readability. We must have done something right, the ArcticLlama homepage carries a PageRank 4, and we have never asked anyone for a single link. In fact, most of the links come from us. I guess content does matter.

What we did not design for were mobile users. The ArcticLlama header graphic is deliberately long and repeating, so as to fill up the widest computer monitor screen. Of course, this makes it nearly useless to anyone on a mobile device. At the time, we weren’t really concerned about it. I, myself, am an unreformed techie who was once a high-level systems engineer with a handful of computer certifications including an MCSE (before there were more than 50,000 of them) and some Netware certs as well. The point is not what my computing credentials were, but rather that I am not someone who shies away from technology, indeed, quite the opposite. Yet, it was my opinion at the time that the only people looking at websites on tiny little mobile phone screens were bit-twiddlers who preferred computer screens to sunshine.

Today, I can’t get enough of the Internet on my cellphone, and I dread the day my $30 a month employee referral unlimited Internet data plan with 500 minutes included from Sprint expires, because there is no way I’m going to pay $100, $70, or even $60 per month just for a data plan. Hopefully, sometime in the next year a serious competitor emerges (Google?) or government regulators get tired of the most powerful country in the world lagging seriously behind every other first-world nation in mobile technology and networks (as well as broadband deployment).

The new site will obviously be more mobile friendly. It will also make better use of newer developments technologies including CSS and HTML

In other words, the new writing business website will be different, but really great. We’ll keep you posted on the progress and any snags, gotchas, or hiccups we stumble upon along the way, as well as all the great tips and advice we learn about while making the move.

To all of our great clients, rest assured that we will always be here for anything you need, including the services that will be disappearing from our website. To all of our future clients, never hesitate to ask if there is something else we can do for you. The inside look we continuously get at businesses big and small gives us a constant stream of ideas that we’d love to put to work for you. We just won’t be aggressively marketing those additional services.

I often sign off my posts by wishing you luck. Perhaps this time, you can do the same for us.

- Brian Nelson – Co-founder ArcticLlama, LLC – a.k.a. Brian Llama

Update: For those of you following along, I have moved one of my blogs to HostGator, and I have setup two others over there as well. So far, so good. Of course, none of my sites have been down since then on Dreamhost either, so no conclusions yet.

Today, I stumbled across this post about how much memory WordPress uses now. Apparently, a "regular" WordPress blog installation now uses 32 MB of RAM. The most disconcerting part of the post is where he says that 32 MB is more than most shared hosting providers allow. That is big news, if true. All of these web hosting companies out there selling their shared hosting solutions as good enough for a handful of WordPress blogs when, in fact, they may not be truly capable of running even a single WordPress blog at full strength.

I haven’t had a chance to look into this any further, but it might explain my issues at Dreamhost. I was hosting 6 WordPress blogs on my Dreamhost shared hosting account. None of them gets much in the way of traffic and they aren’t exactly high-end JavaScript loaded power websites. Check out my make money from website writing blog for an example. They are mostly just text and pictures with a couple of plug-ins to make things run smoother. But, if each one is using 32 MB of RAM, that adds up to 192 MB of memory.

The weird part is that I can’t even find how much memory someone gets when running on the shared Dreamhost hosting option. I haven’t searched really hard yet, but I shouldn’t really have to should I? I mean if the memory limitation is going to be what restricts my ability to host websites with Dreamhost shouldn’t that be a big front-and-center number that gets publicized right up front?

In all fairness, I don’t see that number widely publicized on other hosts either.

Maybe this is the dirty little secret of the whole webhosting industry.

*

That being said, as a skilled writer, and very fast typist, I can crank out articles, posts, publications, and other writings faster than I can sell them, especially if I am interested in the topic. Paradoxically, this does not necessarily mean that I can take on more new clients. To understand, you need to understand a little bit about what a freelance writer does.

Paying Freelance Writing Clients

Typically, a client looking to hire a freelance writer has something specific in mind. Whether it is a single piece of work, or an ongoing project, the client will have certain parameters that are necessary for a successful project. Some of the most common freelance writing project goals are:

• Specific Topic(s)
• Defined Length
• Target Audience
• Writing Style (AP Style, MLA Style, conversational…)
• Number of writings to be produced
• Deadlines

It is the last one that makes it difficult to fill up a professional writer’s full bandwidth.

Scheduling Writing Gigs

In order to be a successful freelance writer it is necessary to consistently meet or exceed all of the client’s goals. Doing so requires not only writing well, but also delivering quality writing on time; in other words, always meeting deadlines.

A freelance writer with a project due every day for an entire month has no room for error. More importantly, the writer has no room for illness, emergencies, or just life’s unplanned events. Assuming the writer left weekends open, there is some ability to catch up, but that won’t help if a crazy Wednesday gets in the way of a project due on Thursday.

The writer then has an unpleasant choice to make, either complete the project due on Thursday on the weekend, thereby not submitting the completed work until Monday, or complete Thursday’s project by bumping the project due Friday, thereby missing the deadline on two projects instead of just one. Neither scenario is very pleasant.

To avoid these issues, an experience professional writer will fill their freelancing schedule up in such a way as to minimize the chances of such scenarios occurring. Sometimes, this will simply be impossible, like when two important clients need major projects completed on back to back days, or worse, on the same day. For the most part, however, a reasonable freelancing calendar may be constructed simply by creating the proper spacing between deadlines.

To do this, the freelancer cultivates several different types of clients.

• Ad hoc clients – Clients who have specific projects from time to time
• Consistent clients – Those who regularly bring the freelancer work
• Scheduled clients – Those whose projects are repeating, such as a white paper every month
• On-Demand clients – Those clients who will take writing from the freelancer whenever they produce it

Ideal Freelance Writing Schedule

The writer then constructs a monthly planning schedule keeping adequate space between Scheduled Client due dates and then agreeing to due dates for each incoming project from Consistent Clients that provide a bit of spacing between already determined due dates. This part is simple enough.

The complication arises from Ad Hoc clients. Quite often, Ad Hoc clients are the best paying. Their projects are typically important enough that they can’t take a chance on them, which is why they come to a professional that has done quality work in the past. They are more interested in seeing their projects done right by a freelancer they trust than shopping around for a cheaper provider.

However, ad hoc projects are often inflexible on their deadlines, often because the client themselves have a deadline as well. That means that a pro freelancer must choose between completely filling their schedule to the possible exclusion of additional ad hoc projects, or leaving some space in their planning calendar in case such a project comes up. This decision is generally made by how frequently ad hoc projects arise for the particular freelancer.

When they are common enough, and valuable enough, the freelance writer will leave the necessary room in their business plan. But, no matter how in demand a freelancer is, the nature of freelancing means that eventually there will be times when the freelancer has the ability to produce additional work, but no projects requiring it. This is why cultivating paying On-Demand clients is critical to freelancing success.

On-demand clients are willing to accept the writers work whenever it is available. Typically, these are large producers. The most common On Demand clients are online. Websites that generate large amounts of content as part of their business model will gladly accept quality writing whenever it is available. That makes them a perfect way to fill-in any holes in the business pipeline.

Additionally, they provide writers with an outlet for those middle of the night sessions where the writer just feels like writing, or for unexpected blocks for free time. They also provide a great way to handle any unanticipated expenses. If the printer breaks down, most small business owners must find a way to replace or repair it out of their on going cash flow. A freelance writer, by contrast, could skip Guys/Girls Night Out and instead crank out some new articles to help finance the new printer.

The main drawback to On Demand clients is that they typically pay much lower rates than other clients. When volume is your primary concern, there is little incentive to pay for consistent quality. However, they generally make up for it by accepting (mostly) unlimited product and by needing smaller, easier to write pieces.

There are several well-know freelance writing clients who accept whenever, wherever, writing submissions. Demand Studios is one of the ones that I frequently use. Not only do they accept writing submissions at 3:30 AM, they have an established pay structure and they even provide the topics. If you are wondering if writing for Demand Studios is worth it you can check out the series I wrote about writing for Demand Studios.

Recently, I have begun to experiment with doing some writing for non-paying content generation sites like HubPages, Squidoo, and Ezine Articles. The value in writing for them comes not in what they pay, but rather in the possibility of extending the reach of a portfolio of writing and from the backlinks they provide to a writer’s websites whether they are the writer’s homepage, business website, or other profitable writing ventures.

Do you have any experience writing for these websites? Are there others you recommend? Let me know, and I’ll keep you posted on my experiences with them. Just grab the ArcticLlama Feed to stay up to date automatically.

In a desperation move, I used the Dreamhost control panel to restore the mySQL database that powers the WordPress installation on one of my websites.  When that worked, I did the same thing for all six sites and was able to get them back online.

Tech support responded to my ticket by saying that they “suspected that the database permissions needed to be reset.” It went on to say that restoring the databases does that, and since I already did that it looked like everything was fine.

This is pretty poor support to say the least.

First, I specifically noted in my ticket that this was not the first time this had happened. Apparently, no one cares that I KEEP having problems, all they care about is that it is up for right now. That isn’t good enough.

Second, this is the third different answer I have gotten to the exact same issue, namely that my WordPress blogs seem to be going offline for no real reason. So far, I’ve been told that someone else was using too much resources and that took my sites down. Then, I was told that I was using too much resources and that is what took my sites down. And, now, I’ve been told that my database permissions probably needed reset. No word on how all six of my sites got junked up permissions in the first place.

I’m now officially very unhappy. I have signed up for Dreamhost’s Private Server offering, which is an extra upgrade to the regular highly advertised price that their site claims is good enough for most websites except those that get high traffic, which mine do not. This is not really acceptable, because I should not have to sign up for Dreamhost PS based upon my sites and their traffic, but it is better than losing my Pagerank, or new visitors, or losing more money.

The Private Server cost is variable depending upon how much resources like RAM, or memory, you use and how much processor you use. I am most definitely NOT a Dreamhost customer for long, depending upon how my evaluation of other webhosting services goes. As soon as I find a better home, I am gone.

I only signed up with the Private Server plan because it is free for the first week, and because as a PS customer I get access to a graph with my memory and processor usage so that I can see if tech support is just feeding me a line when they say it is my fault that my sites are going down. More specifically, I bet that the first thing that Dreamhost technical support checks is what kind of hosting plan you have. With Private Server, they can’t blame me, because I am allowed to use up to 2300 MB of RAM during my trial period, which I know I will never hit, so that excuse is out.

Now, they will either have to keep my websites up and running, or at least come up with better excuses. If I get really lucky, maybe one of their administrators will actually do their job and look into my issues instead of just clearing my ticket as quickly as possible, but I’m not holding my breath.

I’m trying out HostGator right now. It comes recommended from several in the blogging community, so we’ll see how it goes. Right now, I’m setting up a couple of new sites and will be moving one of my Dreamhost sites today. If things run better, faster, or smoother over there, that will be ONE of my new hosts.

I’m getting ready to launch a major web development and site creation project that I hope to use to build up some pretty solid income, and I know better than to put all my eggs in one basket. No matter how this move goes, I will have at least two web hosts, and maybe more soon.

Thankfully, I was smart and did not register my domain names with the same company that does my webhosting (except for the free domain name they gave me when I signed up). That makes transferring to a new host so much easier.

If any of you have suggestions for web hosts that you like, I would love to hear them. But, please don’t just put I use So-and-So and have been happy with them. I’ve already read that a thousand times about a hundred different webhosting companies. If you can say WHY you like them, or what they give you that you don’t get elsewhere, that would be helpful.

Wish me luck.

ArcticLlama, and some of my other websites including a parenting skills by Dad site are hosted with Dreamhost on one of their basic types of accounts.

Recently, all of my sites were down. This is a big problem, and a good way to see how good of a host Dreamhost really is.

I filled out a support ticket as soon as I noticed the problem and got a response within a couple of hours.

That first response said that someone else was doing something that was eating up a bunch of memory and that the admin had killed those processes and laid some smack down on the other user. The response also said to contact him if I had any further trouble. However, there was no email address or other contact method provided.

Whatever was done fixed all but two of my websites. Having no other way to contact the same tech support person, I submitted another ticket. This time, I was told that it was MY processes that were causing the problem and that they were being automatically killed because they were using too much RAM. He then provided a couple of links to help ME figure out what the problems were.  These links involved running some unfamiliar shell commands to see if I could eventually spot what the trouble was. He also recommended that I keep my WordPress installs and plug-ins upgraded to their latest versions.

He also said that perhaps I should upgrade to a Dreamhost Private Server account.

Here is why I am now cannot recommend using Dreamhost for a professional writer website, although I don’t feel ready to recommend against anyone using them yet either.

1. I asked in a follow up message if there was a monitor I could set up to notify me if there were problems like these on my sites again. I was told no. That doesn’t seem right.
2. The “solution” to figure out what the problem processes were involves a whole layer of stuff I know nothing about, including setting up shell access, running Unix commands, and then sorting through a bunch of gibberish looking for the trouble process. The kicker is that according to the article, I may or may not see what the problem is right away, so I’ll have to keep looking. If the server is killing my processes, shouldn’t it log what it is killing and shouldn’t I be able to see that log? Then I wouldn’t have to jump through all these other hoops.
3. The recommendation for a Private Server upgrade really rubs me the wrong way. Read through every word of Dreamhost’s site about what you get with their regular web hosting, and I dare you to point out even one sentence that suggests that a couple of small-time websites will be too much for regular hosting. I run just 6 WordPress blogs, none of which gets even a thousand hits. The plug-ins I run are all well known, widely used plug-ins.  I didn’t find any unusual WordPress plug-ins on my own. Every single one of the plug-ins I’m running I found recommended by a large, well respected WordPress site. So, I’m not sure just how little power I am actually allowed to use on my account.
4. For all the talk about disk space, transfer rate, bandwidth, and so on, I never once have seen anything about what my memory limit is. In fact, no one has still told me what my maximum memory usage is. Is it so low that it would be embarrassing, or does no one know? Based on which sites I have hosted on Dreamhost, it would seem that the limiting factor in their plan is the maximum amount of allowable memory usage, and there is no way to monitor it. Not that it would matter, since they don’t tell you what the amount is you have to stay beneath.

It all adds up to me wondering if I am not getting good hosting from Dreamhost.  However, without trying another web hosting provider, I don’t feel right about condemning Dreamhost for what might just be standard business practices and my own ignorance.

I have signed up with another web host provider and will be moving some of my sites there to see what it is like. If they play nicer and provide more, or better service, then I will switch away and let you know who to avoid and who to try out for the best writer website web hosts.

If you are getting an error in Windows Live Writer when trying to publish a post with pictures that says something like "The following pictures cannot be published because the blog does not support picture publishing." you aren’t alone.

I’ve been using Windows Live Writer for a long time now to help publish posts to many of my own blogs and to the blogs of my freelance writing clients.  Until very recently, I never had any trouble publishing graphics by using Windows Live Writer.  But, all of the sudden, it says it can’t publish my pictures and that I should configure an FTP account for picture publishing.  What the –?

I’m not 100% sure what happened, but the issue raised its head shortly after WordPress upgraded to version 2.8.  Ever since then, I have had strange issues here and there with my WordPress blogs.  All of these issues relate to WordPress path errors that are set for everything from plug-ins to backup your WordPress database, to anything else that requires a path, including – you guessed it, uploading pictures.

On your WordPress blog’s control panel, under Settings is the menu item, Miscellaneous.  Click on it and you will see that there is a field there that defines the path that pictures are uploaded to for your blog.  If you are hosted on certain types of UNIX servers, like those on Dreamhost, that path may include a directory name that starts with a period. That is the problem

I don’t know whether the WordPress code has been changed such that it can no longer recognize directories that have a period at the beginning of their name, or if the code was changed so that it got more details regarding the paths so that now it sees the .whatever directories where it didn’t before.  All I know, is that I have run a dozen or more blogs the same way for over a year without ever running into this issue, and now, I’m troubleshooting all kinds of little problems that all come down to having that directory with the dot in front as part of the path somewhere.

To fix the problem with Windows Live Writer uploading pictures to your WordPress blog, delete the directory with the period, or just use a relative path instead.  In other words, if the path listed is /server/.weasels/home/blog/wp-content/uploads/ then change it to just /wp-content/uploads/

With the offending dot-whatever named directory gone, Windows Live Writer should start working like its old self again, and you won’t have to configure an FTP account for picture publishing.

One of the most important things about social marketing is to participate regularly on all of the social media, or Web 2.0 sites that you are a member of.  It is the same thing with regular offline networking.  Being a member of Rotary doesn’t help your business.  Being a regular, respected member of Rotary who actually knows and and is known by the other members is what helps your business.  Social media works the same way.

I realized this when I went looking for more people to follow on Twitter.  I was looking for other people who might be posting interesting or useful information that might be of use to me in my business, social, or personal life.  Basically, I was looking for other entrepreneurs, other work-at-home dads, other people who lived in Denver, and so on.

This was about a year ago, but even then, Twitter was already so huge that the lists generated by characteristics like those were huge.  One of the first things I started using as a filter was how long it had been since the user’s last Tweet. After all, what is point of following someone who only uses Twitter every six months?  As it turns out, a lot of Twitter users don’t use Twitter very often.

How a Writing Small Business Can Use Twitter

In order for your small business to benefit from Twitter, you need to have some followers.  Not just any followers, but good followers who are actually interested in your posts as opposed to a you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours kind of arrangement.  (Just like in real life!)  But, before you can worry about good followers, you just need any followers at all, and I’m not the first guy, nor will I be the last, to not bother with people who don’t tweet on Twitter very often.

As a freelance writer, the best way to ensure frequent updates on Twitter is to auto tweet your blog posts.  As a blogger I post on one of my blogs pretty much every day.  Sometimes, I post on several blogs each day.  But, with a busy freelancing schedule and as a father of two young children, finding the extra time to manually go over to Twitter, and post a tweet, with a link through a link shortening service, isn’t easy.  But, if I can automatically tweet whenever I post an article, that would be both productive, and simple.

I’ve played around with several WordPress plugins to generate automatic tweets, but its been tough to get it just right.

I started with TweetSuite, then Twitter Tools, and then tried Shorten2Ping, and a couple of others, but each one seemed to have some shortcoming that made it not quite right for me and my WordPress blogs.

Auto Tweets TwitterFeed Review

Recently, I’ve started trying out TwitterFeed.  TwitterFeed is different than automatic tweet WordPress plugins because it isn’t a plugin.  Instead, it is an online web service that uses your WordPress RSS feeds to automatically generate tweets on Twitter for you.

To use TwitterFeed, you create an account and then link it to your Twitter account.  Then, you enter your RSS feed address for each blog or website that you want to make automatic tweets for.  Every hour, by default, but up to every half hour, or slower like every 4 hours, the TwitterFeed service checks your RSS feed to see if there is a new item.  If there is, it generates a tweet and posts it to Twitter for you.  It even creates a short link for you from link shortening service bit.ly.

The pros and cons of Twitterfeed comes down to whether or not you want the control for your automatic tweeting to be on your WordPress blog, or at an online service.

The only real negative of TwitterFeed is that unlike a WordPress twitter plugin which sends a tweet almost instantly once you upload a post, TwitterFeed only looks to see if there should be a new tweet sent to Twitter every hour (or whatever you set it for.)  Obviously, if you are breaking news, this is not the route to go.  When you are writing content that hopefully has a shelf life longer than 30 minutes, it doesn’t seem like it would be a very big deal.

Once it is setup, you can stop worrying about it.  And, with TwitterFeed, you get one less WordPress plugin to upgrade each time WordPress releases a new version.