I’m not sure if FatCow arm-twisted us and forced us into an upsell or was it a genuine problem. Should I pay SiteLock Rs.15,000/- every year to keep my server clean or are there other options? Let me explain…

I’ve been away from the blog for 10 days now. It started with me being unable to write one day. I figured I’d get the post done the day after and then all would be back on schedule.

But there were other plans underfoot. The next day when I tried opening the blog dashboard I was told, it was down and that I should contact FatCow to find out why.

Initially I thought it was an outage that would resolve itself in a few hours but 5 hours later the situation was still the same.

Time for Che’s entry. Che checked other blogs of friends that shared server space with my blog and they were all down. A FatCow ticket was raised.

The FatCow guys came back saying there were malicious files on the server and until it was all cleaned up they would not take anything back online.

Rewind 6 months. My blog went down 6months ago and FatCow said there was malicious code. They recommended SiteLock as a service to monitor and remove malicious code. I didn’t have much of a choice or rather I didn’t know enough about wordpress coding so we hired SiteLock at around Rs.5000/- a year.

Now 6 months later all blogs on the server went down and FatCow said my site is fine because of SiteLock but the other two sites have malware. They said the easiest way to get all sites back online was to get SiteLock subscription for the other two sites too.

Again, not knowing what else to do, we paid an additional Rs.10,000/- (approx.) and got SiteLock on the job for the other sites as well. Within 24 hours all blogs were back online.

In the situation it felt like we were against the wall, our arms twisted by a giant like FatCow – ‘Pay us or else…’. We were fighting what felt like a losing battle, not knowing if there was another way out. We gave in.

Did we do the right thing? Is it worth paying SiteLock Rs.15,000/- every year? (Along with server space, domain, etc. this makes blogging expensive).

What can I do about this? How can I avoid this in future?

P.S. – Thanks to all this my 30 Day Blogging Challenge got left incomplete again. 🙁 .

UPDATE 16.12.2016 – I’ve moved to GoDaddy and completely disconnected from FatCow. But I don’t know if GoDaddy would do something similar and if yes, what other options do I have.

Photo Credit: IndiBlogger

One of the highlights of this week was the Indiblogger meet on Friday. I first heard about it in an email from them and as always promptly called Vidya to ask if she was going too.

There was a requirement to write a post that compared the latest Asus ebook and ET PC that had me wondering. I don’t like doing promo posts on my blog unless it ties-in in some way with the objective of my blog. So…

Vids and I talked and grudgingly agreed to write posts so we could get an excuse to meet-up. Then 5 days before the event, as I struggled to get myself to sit down and write, I find an email invite to the event. You should have seen me air punch with glee.

A quick call confirmed Vids had got a mail too. Now, the plan was on and without writing a promotional post. Yippee… 😀

Friday couldn’t come fast enough and the week slowly rolled past. Creeping and crawling along, Friday did get here and I headed out on my long cross-country trip to ITC Gardenia.

This time the Indiblogger Team was authenticating people with ID proof! That was a new one, I’d never had to do that until now and I wonder why it was required this time.

Photo Credit: IndiBlogger

Registration complete we headed in and settled down around tables. I don’t know why this happens but almost always there will be women tables and mens tables. It just happens and it’s just weird!

The event started with a performance from the Indiblogger Team. And it was fun I say! Here’s a glimpse.

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This was followed by an icebreaker in which each person had to convince people to give them something personal. The objective was to get as many articles as possible. The results were fascinating – some people got over 20 items, some managed to collect so rather expensive articles and some collected smart things like autographs and selfies.

This was followed by a presentation by the Asus guys on the Asus EeeBook X205 and the All-in-One PC ET 2040, which are the latest products from the Asus stable.

Considering that I have used an Asus laptop for the last two years, this is a brand I like. The EeeBook was light and felt nice on the fingers but I overheard the tech bloggers saying that it’s memory specs were not great.

The PC looked really interesting in the presentation but the real thing turned out to be too big for my liking, almost as big as a TV. But that said it did have this rather cool feature of reading gestures.

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This activity was followed by the group being broken up into 4 teams. Each team was given a theme and we had to do a skit on blogging based on the theme.

Team 2 according to me was the best. When came up with their own blogging related lyrics and danced to Gangam Style. I was in Team 2 and our topic was Pirates of the Caribbean. I was water girl as you can see. 😛

Photo Credit: IndiBlogger

By the time all this got done, we were running a bit late, so Anup announced that all winners would be announced in a couple of days, the group photo got taken and everyone charged towards the dinner counters.

Photo Credit: IndiBlogger

The rest you know. I dabowed and ate. There was a large spread but the Dum Biryani was the hero for me and I even ate seconds. Desserts were so-so, the mud pie and Mysore Pak were the only ones I enjoyed. Eating complete, the race was on again to get home.

I have two reasons for attending a blogger meet. 1. It’s a chance to meet blogger friends who you won’t landup meeting otherwise. 2. There’s lots of freebies to be won.

This time I caught with friends and we talked dime a dozen trying to catchup with all that had happened in almost a year. But the event lacked freebies. For the first time in over 4 blogger meets I came back home empty-handed.

Greedy me but I hope IndiBlogger has more prizes next time. 😮 And more events too since there hasn’t been one in a long time and this was the first one of 2015.

Overall a good evening spent with friends. May this year have many more of those. 🙂

I’ve been on a break from the blog in the last few weeks. What started with missing one blog post rolled on into missing many posts. Everyday I thought of writing and then told myself ‘Not right now, later’ and later never happened.

I felt guilty but it’s usually easy to convince yourself and let things slip. But blogging regularly is important. Every time you miss a post you lose readers and traffic – you lose a bit of your voice. I should have known better and I plead guilty.

So what am I going to do about it and how am I going to make sure I get with the program – here’s what I plan to do.

The Buddy System
This works and this post vouches for it. Find a friend to make yourself accountable to, tell him/her what you plan to do and give them the right to question you. Evading yourself is easy but it’s difficult to escape another’s queries. Being accountant helps you stick with the program.

Plan a Schedule
Plan the week out and decide what you will be posting each day. That will help you plan ahead. I think, thinking of what to write is one of the most difficult parts of blogging and a plan helps in this. When you know what you are going to write about, half the job is done. After that all you have to do is sit down and write.

Schedule Ahead
Publishing a post everyday does not mean writing it everyday. Yes, you want to write some posts on that day so you can share what is happening in your life. But if you are writing on a topic or doing a review, you can do this earlier and schedule it for publication. Then if you want to on the day you can add a paragraph of the latest news.

These are three things I intend to do to stay on track and blog regularly. What do you do to make sure your blog posts go out on time? Do you have any recommendations that will help me stick with the program?

I’ve completed a month of blog posts today and its a milestone for me. I been blogging since 2004 but sporadically. I’ve not been constant and regular ever. This time I’m proud to have stuck it out for a month. 🙂

2004 – 12
2005 – 42
2006 – 39
2007 – 6
2008 – 0
2009 – 18
2010 – 20
2011 – 12

Looking at the number of posts I’ve done over the years was nostalgic. I hadn’t realised I’ve been blogging for 8 years now. I started blogging in 2004, the same year I started seriously touring on bikes. My introduction to blogging was travel logs; blogging was a good way to remember and share my travel stories.

2005 and 2006 were rantly years 😀 I wasn’t happy in life (well, so I think) and I found so much to rant about or even whine. But 2006 also saw me quit my job and travel across India for 8 months. 2008 was year without the internet. I spent 5 months of the year in Spiti and the rest I just stayed away. It felt nice to not be connected for a while.

The last couple of years I’ve been blogging whenever I felt like writing but this year I wanted to try out blogging regularly – a year of posts to look back at to document the year. And thats 1 month down and 11 to go…

Over the last two years I’ve collected (that’s a good word :D) 490 blog subscriptions but haven’t managed to read even 1/10 of them. So, this year one of my resolutions is to clean up my RSS reader on Google.

And how am I doing this? Well, I’m starting from zilch, scratch. Since I don’t want to lose all I have yet, I decided to ignore all that was before and create a few new folders based on my interests. Now I’m going to add blogs slowly through the year making sure to stick to the habit of reading all that I subscribe to 😀 and removing feeds that I don’t read over time.

Here are blogs that I’ve founded until now categorized by interest. If you have a blog recommendation in these areas, do let me know. I’m looking out for some interesting blogs. 🙂

Travel
BreathDreamGo by Mariellen

Craft (Fully DIY)
All Things Paper by Ann Martin

Crafting Queen by Karuna

Book Blogs (Reviews and more)
Chrisbookarama by Chris

Reading Romances by Nat

Of Books and Reading

Behind the Book (All about writing, publishing and marketing books)
A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing by J.A. Konrath

No Publisher Needed by Jim. F. Kukral

The Creative Penn by Joanna Penn

The Book Designer by Joel Friedlander

Have any recommendations? Please leave them in comments 🙂

GoodReads has some neat book reader widgets for blogs. You can share information about the books you are reading, books on your shelf, your updates, your reading challenge and more.

To check out what widgets are available for your blog, click on the Edit Profile option in the drop-down next to your Profile Photo.

On your My Account Page select the Widgets tab.

You can now choose the widget you want. You can also specify which shelf would be shown in the widget and other details.

1. If the Preview shown matches what you want for your blog, copy the code.

2. Now go to the Widgets section in your WordPress blog. The Widgets option is in the Left Column under Appearance on your WordPress Dashboard.

3. Based on your Blog Template you will see your Sidebars listed on the right of the page. I have three hence they are listed as Sidebar 1, Sidebar 2 and Sidebar 3.

4. Choose which sidebar you want the badge to show in.

5. Now drag the TEXT widget into the Sidebar and paste the code into the TEXT dropdown. (You can use a few HTML codes to create space between plugins and to add comments). If you already have the TEXT widget in the sidebar you can go ahead and add the code. List the blocks of code based on the order you want the widgets shown on your blog.

6. Click the Save option in the Dropdown and you’re done. Now check the widget on your blog to make sure it’s showing as you’d like it to, else change the options you selected and replace the code with the new code generated.

And voila, you have a badge on your blog. I’ve added two GoodReads widgets to my blog – The 2012 Reading Challenge and The Most Reacent Books I’ve Read. Like them? Are you using a GoodReads widget? Which one did you like most?

Update (16/Jun/’13): WordPress usually gives trouble with javascript and flash and that’s what the GoodReads widgets are based on. I don’t remember clearly now but I do remember having some trouble when setting up my widgets. My Challenge widget doesn’t update for days sometimes, even now. So if you have trouble you could maybe just try another widget?
I came across this alternative way to set-up a Goodreads widget as a wordpress plugin. Maybe this will work for you. You could also complaint and ask for more help on the Bugs group discussion on Goodreads. It seems to be an active discussion with the guys at Goodreads helping out. You’d have to join the group first though.
Thanks to Gail Armstrong for sparking off this extra research with her question 🙂