Hey guys I realized today that this website was down for a week or something and I’m really sorry.  I don’t check the front end every day, so I didn’t notice until I went to login today and it was broken.  My host made some kind of mistake with the curl library and I spent an hour on the phone with tech support.  At the end of the call they blamed me, but my site was mysteriously working again, so I’m happy about that.

Things have been super hectic as I have been really focused on building my business and learning more and more about improving my online presence.  I am hoping to release a new product in the very near future, because pickup is where my heart is.  It’s funny how there is always something more to work on.

So for a few hours last week this whole site crashed.  I woke up Thursday morning and there was NOTHING here.  I can tell you that I was more than a little freaked out.

I have been using the same orange template for this website for over 2 years now.  In that time the software I have been running in the background has been updated from version 2 to version 9.  Needless to say the older software just stopped working with the new software.  So I had to spend an entire day re-programming the entire website.  It is still not 100% perfect but I have to say that I am pretty pleased with how nice it looks now. 

Any feedback and opinions are appreciated.  Since going back is simply not an option let's look to the future.  The new site is more SEO friendly and runs a lot faster and smoother, so expect there to be a lot more traffic on here in the future. 

So I decided to run a test to see how smart people have to be to read my blog.  This is more than a little fascinating.  According to this, you need between a 3rd and 7th grade education to read my blog.  Since my target audience is guys with good normal intelligence, I think this is acceptable.  I am going to run my blog through a ton of tests to get this sorted.  I want to really make sure everything is great for you guys out there.

I encourage you to run this test on your blog too!

http://juicystudio.com/services/readability.php

Check it out and post your results in the comments.

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2nd test – Can http://bookblog.net/gender/genie.php tell what gender I am?

I submitted my last article and the results……I am FEMALE

ahahaah. Apparently I write with a feminine style.  Since I am in the middle of writing a paper on gender and language, I find this very interesting.  Submit some of your writing and see what it says.

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3rd test – How good is the HTML on my blog.

I ran my blog through http://validator.w3.org/

It validates and scans my xhtml.  I have been trying to fix this one for two weeks actually.  There was a major error last week but now I’m down to just 24 small errors.  I started using this site in the hopes of getting Technorati to approve my site.  Now most of the errors coming up are actually from the link technorati makes me post on the site.  Irony!!!  Hopefully I can eventually get Technorati to approve me…and GOOD NEWS!  I just finally got approved.  I am so wicked happy.  Trying to get on technorati is part of why my site was down for 2 hours Saturday night.  So soon my traffic should be up even more than the 20% it is this week.  Happy Days!

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4th Test – The Great Firewall of China – http://www.websitepulse.com/help/testtools.china-test.html

Can my blog be seen from behind the wall?  Let’s check.

GOOD NEWS – I am available in Shanhai and Beijing!!  Actually I am probably just small potatoes to them.  They will get to blocking me soon enough I am sure!

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Next I am running WAVE to see how accessible my site is. http://www.websitepulse.com/help/testtools.china-test.html

It hates some stuff all over my page.  You can see the results here http://wave.webaim.org/report?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.smellmyblog.com%2F

I am not really sure what this means though.  It has some html complaints that are beyond my understanding.

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The iphone test.  Now I have a plugin that is supposed to make my site look perfect on iphones.  I actually also have a pluging that is supposed to make the RSS appear for any mobile device.  So I hope this test works out.  I have no iphone myself so I have been operating on faith for a while now. and CRAP – the normal site just appears.  That is no good.  Guess that iphone plugin don’t work!  I just spent 30 minutes trying to grind through this.  Next time I’m with someone with an iphone I will check properly.  I just reactivated wp-cache but i got some other stuff to mess with.  I will try and sort this in the next week.

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How much commercial intention does my blog have?  According to http://adlab.microsoft.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/ I have non-commercial intentions by this blog.  Glad to know that my information is still pure!!!

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Now I am checking how many visitors a day http://www.statbrain.com/ thinks I get.  I know the answer from my google tools but good to know what the net thinks.  I will use this to check my competition more in the future.  It thinks I get 136 a day.  Interesting…

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I just checked http://www.copyscape.com/ to see if anyone is stealing my content.  It turns out nobody is.  A little insulting really.

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I found these tests useful.  I have more work to do to perfect my blog.  I want to really take it to the next level, but so far I’m pretty happy.  I will keep working to make my blog more readable and interesting!  Love you!!

So after more than 24 hours of coding, 5 emails to tech support and 10 minutes on the phone to India I have finally sorted out my new blog.  I entered one wrong line of code last night and when I tried to fix it I made a mistake that deleted all my posts and photos from the last 24 hours.  What a treat!  So I am finally settled here.  As you can tell if you visit Soul’s Blog that we have entered a little blog arms race.  We are each determined to have the hottest looking blog in pickup.  Right now I am ahead, but that could change at any moment.

Anyways, I am in love with WordPress now.  The templates here are so much hotter!!!  I can’t wait to really make this place sexy and hot.