Traveling Thoughts

Yes, you’re viewing a change in the tag line. Yes, you’re seeing a different colors. Yes, that’s not a bike to your left, it’s vanilla.

Vanilla, when I was a student, that word had bad connotations, it was usually used in reference to a powerpoint presentation that was lame. “your speech was good but you had a vanilla presentation” That wasn’t ever something anyone wanted to hear. As I was putting together this color scheme and the images I could hear Professor Harris telling us students about our vanilla presentations.

The reason behind the “vanilla” layout has a bit more history than a college professor, at the root of it, a line that spawned from a rant I was on.

“This isn’t imitation vanilla people, it’s the real thing with me…”

In a way, I owe a thanks to BrokenPerfection, the blogger that decided to take what I had written and turn it into her own, because it forced me into a fit of anger that caused me to spurt out that line, and, as Cass so nicely put it “Oh snap, that is good”.

And then of course, since Cass said it was good it reinforced the tirade I was already on and I had to run with it, and thus, we have ourselves a pretty new layout.

The biggest importance among all the changes around here though is that people realize and that it gets ingrained into certain people’s heads that what I write is
1) my very own
and
2) should not be imitated.

Our blogs do not exist so that other people can copy what we write and call it their own. I’m not out stealing the content that’s placed on this site and I fully expect to be respected and not have my content stolen. With that said, changes made, and a tag line that screams how I currently feel, I’m going to put this to rest and thank all the support that I had in this matter, especially that of Teleolurian, who in his own special way supported me in a manner that no one else could have.

I’m still not sure what the problem is with BBPress. The problem that was causing me to not feel the love with BBPress last night. So I hacked it. (Well, if commenting out some code can be called hacking.)

You may remember that my problem last night involved a fatal error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: __() in /home/2816/domains/ridetoremedy.com/html/community/bb-includes/default-filters.php on line 81

So this morning after being very pissed off because I had wanted to work on my community at Ride to Remedy.

So I took things into my own hands. I opened up bb-includes/default-filters.php, I went to line 81 and I found this:

bb_register_view(’no-replies’, __(’Topics with no replies’), array(’post_count’=>1));

Then I had to hack Windows XP so that windows search could look for “bb_register_view” because there’s a search bug in windows xp and it won’t search files with extensions that it’s not familiar with, i.e. php.

Then after searching I discovered that there were 3 files that contained “bb_register_view” and that they were all on my server:
default-filters.php
functions.php
template-functions.php

So because I couldn’t figure out the problem, and the peeps over at the bbPress support forums were slower to respond than I liked, I commented out the lines and BAM! I now have bbPress running on Ride to Remedy.

Status: 90% Complete

I’ve been sitting on a design for months, a from scratch design all css (pain in my butt), nothing from the already made wordpress themes. It got scratched because I was too lazy to put work the wordpress code into it (I started to but it looked like a wreck and I didn’t want to make it good looking again). So today, I decided I was in desparate need of a new layout and I dug into the wordpress themes and found Beauty Bling 1.0.

Beauty Bling 1.0 wasn’t in my colors and the images were all wrong but I’ve made it match the colors of the layout I scrapped and it’s got my images almost all the way across the board.

There’s still a few things that need to be changed, but we’re well on our way to a good lookin site here (not that it didn’t look good before, it was just more minimalistic previously).

Even though the layout isn’t completely done, I’m going to leave it up as an inspiration to get it finished here in the near future. Until then, everything is operational…as usual.

Just the other night I was raving about how great the PPP Blog Battle Royale contest was because of the peak in traffic I got to my site. And that if for no other reason than the spike in traffic was I going to continue writing for the monthly Blog Battle Royale competition.

And now, to feed my sweet addiction, Ted is calling me. Well, Ok, he’s actually Calling All PPP Blog Battle Royale I Participants. But he might as well be calling me. I’m only in analytics every single day looking at my traffic and my key words. It truely is an addiciton, it’s the first thing I do when I turn the computer on in the morning. Look at analytics. It’s a beautiful thing analytics is.

I saw traffic from the PPP site:

I had a nice Peak in overall visitors

And of course, my entry got a fair amount of traffic thanks to the PPP site

click on images if you want to see them larger

Entering into the PPP Blog Battle Royale contest did wonderful things for my site. Even now that it’s over I’m still getting a decent flow of traffic. About 20 more visitors a day than usual.

I just love when I do stuff that’s good that drives traffic to my site. That’s truely what makes Google Analytics such a beautiful thing.

One of the things that I’ve been pondering deeply since the inception of RidetoRemedy.com is how to properly funnel traffic to it. There are many different things that I’ve been looking into: SEO (search engine optimization), website validation, PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising, keyword analysis…I can sit here and go on and one, but the one that I’m really interested in is PPC and do I really want to drive traffic to my website by buying it?

I’ve been struggling with the concept of PPC for sometime now simply because I know it works. I’ve seen it in action on business websites and personal websites. But I’ve also watched as they go and update their bids on the keywords that they want their websites to pop up under. It’s not an easy task having your website rise to the top of search listings. And it’s definitely not easy when you’re relying on certain phrases within your content and battling against all the other websites in the world that may contain those phrases for the top spot.

What I’ve come to realize is that PPC is an art and there are “artists” out there that know what they’re doing and they can help me. So when it comes time, the professionals are out there. But I still have to ponder the benefit of me doing this, simply because I’m not selling anything, when people visit my site, I’m asking them to help support me in finding a cure, they get nothing immediately, no immediate gratification of a huge purchase, no immediate gratification that some loved one is going to love what they’ve bought. Needless to say, I’m not done pondering my needs, but when I am and I go to make a move, and if PPC advertising is in my future, I can go to the paid search management professionals to help me out.

I’ve been waiting for this for quite some time, I’ve been periodically checking my PR. I’ve almost been obsessive about it in the recent months checking it at least once a week and now it’s happened. Google has made the update. Or they’re in the process of making it.

I won’t sit here and boast about my pr because that’s just not the type of person that I am lately and maybe my recent obsession has been due to the fact that I knew that with a higher pagerank I’d be eligible for more opps on PayPerPost, yes, another obsession of mine.

Whatever the reasoning behind my obsession, I don’t have to obsess anymore, the update has been made and I can go on for another couple of months not worrying about my PR and just blogging.

And re-designing, yes that’s right, it’s time for a redesign, and i’m shooting for a fully validated design. We’ll see what I can conjure up. I’d say the redesign is coming soon, but I change my mind so often these days that it just might be a while before anyone sees anything…

I finally relented the other night and got a flickr pro account. Ever since I managed to get my gallery up on Ride to Remedy I’ve had troubles not breaking down and purchasing flickr pro. For so long there was no need to. I never really was religious about using my flickr account but now I’ve got good reason too.

It will only be time before a photo gallery shows up here. Who knows, maybe a daily picture is in the future of traveling thoughts.

I’m almost obsessive about my checks into my Google Analytics account.  I check at least once daily to see what brought people into my websites (be it this one or RideToRemedy.com my newest site that’s about me riding to cure diabetes).  But usually I do my checks in the morning; how many people visited yesterday, what websites are they coming from, what search terms sent them to me.  While I’m all about numbers and very excited that people are coming into my website my most recent facination has been with the keyterms.  It’s really funny to see what people are searching for and what’s bringing them here to Traveling Thoughts. 

Just to name a few:

“manipulate your parents”
riding slave
claustrophobic shoes
glow-in-the-dark seaweed
“half prostitute”

 It’s just incredibly funny to me what’s coming in.  Some of these I’ve googled and I’m on the front page, in some cases near the bottom of the search results but people are clicking, but my stories behind these terms that they’re searching are probably not what they were looking for.

I  figured out that I could manipulate my parents into letting me do something by saying I wanted to do something worse than what I originally wanted to do.  In one of my recent posts made while I was training for the SoCal Tour de Cure there was a comment made about me being a slave driver.  I can’t help that when I set out to do something that we’re going to do it.  Claustrophobic shoes, yeah, my riding shoes (clipless shoes) are very claustrophobic, they fit my foot like shoes should.  I am half prostitute, in terms of work.  Glow in the dark seaweed, it sends the person to my archives because I’ve written about glow in the dark and about seaweed.

So people show up to my site for a lot of different search terms including p0rn but there’s nothing of that sort here, it’s just a mesh of words that I’ve written.  But it does provide me with a great source of entertainment to know that people stumbled across my site while looking for something dirty and then the frustration they must have had when they got there and were like, “What the hell?”

So yeah, Google Analytics, I totally <3 it. 

So over the past couple of days, I’ve been talking about using WordPress to completely power Ride to Remedy, And over the past couple of days I’ve been up until all hours of the night working on the separate pages to get it all into WordPress so that everything is centrally managed. I’ve done it. Tonight (almost the next morning) I got my one last page into WordPress. This one was hard because I needed it to reference a previously made post. But now it’s coded and it’s up. And all that’s left to do to the site is small stuff.  It’s a beautiful feeling.  I’ve got WordPress running as a fully functional CMS.  It just doesn’t get any better than that.

And with that said, I’m going to bed and I’m going to get some very much needed sleep.  Tomorrow night I’ll spend the time working on the small stuff, I’ve got an entire list, but I’m entirely way to tired to type it all up.

I’ve been fighting with WordPress all night trying to make it so that I could have a custom field on the Write Page page that would populate from the db. It’s been a royal pain in the ass. Luckily for me, it wasn’t as painful as it could’ve been thanks to Joshua and his Custom Field GUI. What took so much work was that he didn’t have the capability for me to pull my data from the database which is really what I needed. Someone had commented on how they had made that adjustment but their code wasn’t posted anywhere and that was a huge bummer.

In the process of doing what I needed to do, I learned how much I really don’t know about WordPress and all the functions that it makes available to us. I eventually (after a whole lot of searching on the web) ended up in the post-template file to learn about the_title() and get_the_ID(). I was having so many problems because the functions I was calling were echoing out what I really needed to throw into a variable.

I finally got my drop down to populate from the database which is great because the final page that I have left to incorporate into WordPress needs the custom field. What I’m doing is with this final page is 2 things:

1) I’m pulling in a single post (the post chosen from this custom drop down list that has been a royal pain in the behind.

2) I’m pulling in additional data from an xml file that I’ve generated that is also referenced by the post chosen from the custom drop down list.

what this allows me to do is make a ride synopsis page available for each tour de cure I do and have a permalink for it instead of the page.php?p=# syntax.

I’m probably making no sense at this point, but it’s beautiful, you’ll see when it’s done.