Talk about a cobweb, I checked on my Wordpress version info and this site was running WP 2.0.4 (or some crap like that). I use Hostgator and I figured I would just allow the Fantastico Deluxe module do the upgrade. Yeah, that worked…NOT.

The upgrade said it worked and when I viewed the site, it was porked. I got a few upgrade.php errors and finally realized I needed to start from scratch to rescue the site.

How did I fix it? Easy.

1. Download WP 2.8.5
2. Extract to my hard drive
3. Start my FTP program
4. Upload the WP-Admin, WP-Content, and WP-Includes folders from my hard drive to my hosting folders
5. Try to log-in (wp-admin.php)
6. When prompted to upgrade the database, do it.
7. Upgrade completes, site back online

Easy enough eh?

Murphy’s Law of Upgrading — any automatic upgrade won’t

I slapped up a new theme. Kinda cool. The biggest laugh is that the site is NOT #1 for the term nextebizguy.com or nextebizguy.

Love it.

It’s that time of the year. The thirty day challenge is starting and I’m going to be part of it. I’ll be reporting back on what our team is doing and how successful we are. If you want to participate, check out the link below. If you haven’t tried doing some ebiz stuff and you’ve always wanted to, this would be a great opportunity!

30 Day Challenge Blog

All of us trying to work at making money online have to work with Google. They are the main search engine today and if you can’t rank well there, you’re relegated to buying traffic in one form or another.

I just read an excellent and simplified version of what Google does from Peter Norvig, Google’s director of research. Peter sums it all up saying:

Mostly we look at what the user types in, treat the input as individual words, and count them up on pages and weigh those pages with different kinds of evidence. But we don’t look only at words they type in. We also look at spelling variants, and if a user types in a long query, we break it into pieces. Maybe a user meant some words, but didn’t really mean others.

Let’s break it down:

1. Read user input
2. Put user input into individual words
3. Count the words on pages
4. Weigh those pages with different kinds of evidence.

So it’s about the words and the weight assigned to your web page. I know from experience that a site doesn’t have to “weigh” much as long as the words match and their is low competition. The place where all the voodoo comes is getting Google to assign more weight to your site for competitive words.