To live and explore

Decided to purchase five new domains last week. It was a bulk purchase that comes with free privacy registrations. After using a discount coupon, paid only the full price of two domains when bought separately.

Since won’t be working outside the home temporarily, might as well make full use of the time to setup more blogs and work on some of the existing ones. Have also been checking out web hosting blog to look for the right hosting package.

I would need a multiple domains web hosting package because my plan is to host all five of the newly purchased domains with one hosting plan to save cost. I am looking for a hosting company who is reputable to have negligible downtime and is fast to recover from it. Jilted the last web host because they took too long to solve the overloading problems that my blogs were experiencing. The current one is doing good, but I would prefer not to put all the eggs in one basket.

Have been browsing the web for unbiased user reviews of the web hosting companies before purchasing a hosting plan. I have never paid full price for a hosting package, always look for discount coupons, promotional code before getting one!! In fact, I have gotten a few hosting packages for less than $10 in the past two years!

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?

Just done moving this blog from the old host to a new host. It’s not a big deal, I have done this a couple of times with other blogs. But, this time I encounter some hiccups along the way as the new host that I signed up for doesn’t allow access to the main directory. That posed a little problem for me to do a direct import of posts and comments using the “import” function in Wordpress.
Too much hassle to ask the support to do it, so I just switched to another host that I know for sure will allow this kind of migration ! Have to do the DNS thingy twice and this blog was down for two days because of that!

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.

During my trip to PJ, while my sisters and friends were at work and nobody to meet in the morning, I decided to go to the Starbucks coffee place to get online. I borrowed my sister’s laptop and took a cab to the nearest Starbucks. I have never tried the WiFi service at a public area like this. So I wasn’t sure how to do it.

I ordered a cup of Cappuccino and some sandwiches, found out from the waitress what service provider is providing the WiFi available at the store. It took me a while to figure out how to connect to the network. The connection was good and fast. I think I may try that again one of this days when I get bored working at home.

Imagine sipping a cup of drink at a cozy corner of a coffee place, checking out the travel guides for an upcoming vacation or booking the air ticket. Not a bad idea at all!!

I took quite a lot of photos over the last few days! It was taking a while to transfer the photos from dad’s computer to my computer. I have earlier store all the photos in the flash memory and just spent the whole morning working on the computer and doing other things, like catching up on blog posts, uploading some photos that I would like to blog about to the flickr account.

I have started using flickr to store photos so that they do not take up space on the hosting account. It’s easier that way especially when next time try to transfer from one host to another.

Do you upload your photos to a free hosting account? What photo hosting service do you use so that you can share them or use them in your blog posts?

I have updated the WP of this blog to version 2.3.1. There are some plugin incompatibility issues still lurking around, haven’t have time to troubleshoot yet.

I have deactivate most of the plugins, only the bare minimum are running now. Yt, I keep getting error messages saying the database is corrupted. Got to figure out how it can be repaired this weekend.

Should I write paid posts on this blog? I have applied to a few networks and this blog has been approved by a few. But, I haven’t started accepting assignments for this blog yet. I am still deciding whether I should monetized this blog with paid post as well.

I see the way to avoid spamming one site with many paid posts is to have many blogs, so that the paid posts can be spread out. Especially the highest PR of all the blogs that I have is only PR2, not many higher paid posts are available, so I would probably need to write more paid posts to make up for the lack of PR.

This blog sounds so gloomy and sad all the time, today I have decided that it’s time for me to cheer up and start to live up to the name of the blog - to live and to explore. How can I be such a gloomy explorer? LOL

Come on, cheer up! Do not let things or people affect your cheerfulness !