Finally!
After more than 10 days of god-awful downtime, I’m finally back on my feet again. No it wasn’t laziness or sloth on my part this time. I wasn’t able to update this blog because of a little something called php memory. I’m sure one of you may have chanced on this blog when it was only showing a couple of sentences saying fatal error. It was in fact a fatal error. I couldn’t log-in to my wordpress dashboard and it’s all because of that frigging php memory thing. It’s a painful lesson in small print that every self-hosted blogger should know about, especially when one is using that absolutely fantastic Wordpress blogging platform.
Being a non-techie person like most bloggers, when I decided to go for a hosting plan, I only looked at two things(aside from the cost of course); storage capacity, and monthly bandwidth allocation. Who the heck cares about php memory right? Well apparently, php memory is way more important. You see, even cheap hosting offers a lot of storage and bandwidth to convince the newbie blogger. Php memory however, is one of those things that are usually left unsaid, but when you least expect it, this thing turns around and bites you in the butt.
According to the technical person I talked to, when I was getting all those fatal error messages from my blog, every hosting account they sell is only allocated a maximum of 10Mb’s worth of memory. Enough to make your eyes bulge right? But of course at this point you still don’t know what eats up that memory, so enough with the pretension. J/K. Well as explained very thoroughly to me, Wordpress is very php heavy. A lot of its themes and plugins are developed using this programming language. So for guys like me who likes to keep a mountain of themes stashed in my WP-themes folder, 10Mb gets consumed really, really fast. Couple that with at least 30 plugins (all written in php) installed, what we have is a recipe for disaster. The technician was even so bold as to tell me that I was actually consuming 3x that memory limit!
The lesson here is that we need to be really cognizant of these little things. I believe I can be forgiven for not knowing this beforehand and luckily on a good day this blog only earns around $0.01 from all the advertising I put in here. Just imagine if this were a really profitable blog with hundreds of dollars a day in earnings! The several days worth of downtime could have really cost me some serious dollar. Perhaps it’s also a wake up call for me not to be too trigger happy when I see new themes and plug-ins. Sure, having nice zings and dings for our blog is awesome, but it shouldn’t be a blog-breaker. It’s very important to do some housekeeping every once in a while just to ensure that there’s no unused php hogs just lying around.
Other than that, it’s happy blogging all around.
Google’s Page Rank (PR) Scheduled Update
After three months lurking in the zeroes, this blog finally got ranked by Google. It’s not much but a PR3 is a PR 3. Prior to migrating from blogger beta to wordpress, this blog had a PR4. I lost all of that when I migrated but I didn’t worry, I knew it would come back sooner or later.
My other blogs also had a little PR movement. Again not much but enough to make me glad.
However the real question is, now that we all have the PR, what the heck do we do with it?
The Cure For Blogging Burnout
Blogger Conversations
As my interest in updating this blog started to wane, I had the good fortune of talking to two fellow bloggers who so unselfishly shared their blogging experiences with me. Over cups of the usual overpriced coffee, we talked about our attempts at making money (in my case, not making money) online. Bloggista is very excited about a couple of products that he will be launching soon. I can’t be very specific about these products at the moment but once he’s released those, I will be one of his rahrah guys and will blog about them here. Ceblogger is unflappable as usual, but as we go back a long time, we exchanged a few war stories (before Bloggista joined us) which only served to remind both of us how mellowed we have become over time.
I must say that talking to these two outstanding bloggers have, in a way, reinvigorated my waning desire to regularly update my site. Bloggista’s enthusiasm is just contagious! This post is a testament to that.
Small World
Who would have thought that Bloggista would turn out to be an old mate? One that I haven’t seen for ages! I couldn’t believe my eyes when he approached our table and introduced himself. I didn’t realize that he’s into blogging as well and that he’s actually the guy behind that very catchy domain name. What was supposed to be a first time meet-up with him turned out to be a reunion instead.
Cure For Burnout
I believe that having a conversation with our fellow bloggers is a salve to the blogging burnout that eventually every blogger will experience—considering that blogging is such a solitary activity. Conversing live in a language that every party to the conversation understands is very refreshing, a far cry from dialogues with non-blogger friends whose jaws tend to drop when you mention words such as dofollow, or phrases like ‘link baiting’.
If you’re in the same situation as I am, and you feel the strains of a burnout creeping in your blogging psyche, I would suggest that you schedule a meet-up with some of your blogger friends. After all, we are still human beings, and as social animals we have a primal need to connect with other human beings.
Sure, we talk to our cyberfriends and blog visitors all the time, but if you pause and think about it, all our instant messages and tweets and comments– these activities are poor excuses for actual dialogues where you can exchange smiles (not smileys) and laughter(not just typing lol). Remember, communications over the internet will always and forever be, just a conversation between you and your computer.
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