Ever have one of those days when just about everything seems to go wrong? Well, I’ve pretty much had a week of that. Some things went well, most didn’t.

So what did go right (I’m starting with this list because it’s much shorter than the things that went wrong!)?

1. I released the latest edition of my SiteBuilder Elite software. That had been on the back burner somewhat, because I’ve been dedicating time to following Alex Jeffreys in his coaching program.

2. I released the latest edition of my LunarPhase Pro software. This has absolutely nothing to do with internet/affiliate marketing – it’s a software tool for amateur astronomers that predicts various lunar phenomena, contains an interactive Moon atlas and other stuff.

3. I got my most recent blog post written up and published (My Article Marketing Strategy).

4. I managed to get a Squidoo lens set up for my training with Alex Jeffreys.

Now for what’s gone wrong…

If you read my earlier post about my Missed Schedule post problems in WordPress, you’ll know I’ve had some difficulties in resolving this thorny issue. While the solution that worked for me was to move to a different webhost, I still have blogs on my old webhost. Migrating them isn’t the easiest thing to do as some of them are huge (we’re talking 10,000+ posts on some blogs).

Well, one of them decided to go postal last week. It started chewing up the server resources up to the point where the server simply fell over. All websites on that server (including this blog) then ceased to work. I didn’t know anything about it as it happened overnight, my time, and the tech guys got everything restarted pretty quickly.

Three days later, the same thing happened – server crash and all sites down. Again, this was overnight, so I didn’t notice any problem but checking my Analytics stats the next day (yes, I know I don’t recommend using Analytics but Alex Jeffreys requires his students use it on their blogs so students’ traffic can be compared and this is my only blog that uses it), I found a dip in visitor numbers, so the server down time did affect me.

Then, to cap it off, two nights ago, a blog decided to go down in a blaze of glory, taking the server with it and, this time, causing corruption. Apparently, it was pretty disastrous. Files and sites had to be retrieved from backup and it took the best part of 12 hours to get everything up and running again. The good new is that the miscreant site has been identified and I’ve now taken it offline. The bad news is that it’s built the same was as my other autoblogs so I’m now left wondering if one of those will lose its marbles sometime in the future.

My webhost has been very understanding and helpful during these episodes and rather than shouting at me for getting something wrong, has worked with me to identify and fix the problem. But, as you can imagine, a fair amount of time that I could have devoted to pursuing Alex Jeffreys training in the last week had to be devoted elsewhere. So these server crashes have cost me both time and lost visitors (with the site being down).

So my lesson of the week is to not put important blogs on the same hosting account as other “test” blogs. Keep important sites segregated from everything else.

So what else has gone wrong?

Well, the cat’s developed asthma! Yes, apparently they can get it just like humans. Environmental factors and all that. Sounds pretty bad when he has an attack – a combined wheeze and cough. It looks like he’s trying to cough up a hairball but nothing comes up. So I whisked him off to the vet who prescribed him some anti-inflammatories. The problem is that the drugs are also used by humans and they come in sizeable capsules. The dosage is too high for cats so I have to cut the tablets in two.

The cat won’t touch any food that has medicine in it so I have to drop tablets down his throat. These tablets are full of powder which immediately spills out in his throat. It immediately foams up and he ends up retching. Not good. So now I plug the open end of the tablet with some cat food. At least that gets the tablet into his stomach intact. Half the time they seem to make him quesy, and he barfs up the tablet and whatever food is in his stomach, always on a carpet and never on a tile or wooden floor.

This cat is no stranger to barfing. He once blew up one of my TVs by barfing into the back of it!

Still, he’s a great cat, very entertaining and I don’t want him to be unhealthy.

Then the car packed up (I told you it was one of those weeks). The alternator’s knackered. What gets me is that I left the car in for a service a week or so ago and told them the alternator needed to be checked. They assured me they looked it over and it was fine. Obviously it wasn’t. After a bit of a shouting match in front of other customers, they agreed they’d made a mistake and they’d replace it free of charge.

I cracked a tooth too! Biting down on a burger, I hit a bit of bone it it and part of one of my teeth gave. Since all I have is a chipped tooth with no nerve exposed, it’s not considered worthy of emergency treatment and I have to wait 3 weeks before the dentist has a slot available to fix it.

Oh yes, I almost forgot, my broadband connection went down over the weekend. I thought my router had died after trying a few tests and I was all set to dash out and buy a replacement. Then I thought the problem might be the phone line. After calling my phone company, they confirmed there was a broadband outage but couldn’t say when it would be fixed as it was a weekend. The line was down 10 hours. Since then, I get several dropouts a day, so whatever they’re doing, they’re making a mess if things for their subscribers.

So here I am on a Thursday morning, revisiting the last 7-10 days wondering if the worst is now over, or there’s yet more to come…

[Update: June 4: No, there was more to come. I migrated this blog from my Webhost4SEO hosting account to my LiquidWeb VPS hosting account. It’s the first time I’ve moved a blog between webhosts. All seemed to go well but when I tried links on the blog, I got 404 errors. Turns out I needed to save the settings on the Permalinks tab again (don’t know why). The blog was now up and running…except it wasn’t quite. I tried to update this post and nothing happened. WordPress just sat there. Checking the home page (to see the page load time), I couldn’t get the site to load. Seems the post update had caused some kind of hang on the blog.

So I put in a support call to ask what was happening. Mod_Security rules had prevented the site from operating correctly. I’m waiting to hear if that’s because the WordPress files were moved from another webhost and not created natively in my hosting account through Fantastico, or because of some other reason. Anyway, support whitelisted the domain and all appears to be working now.

I’d appreciate, however, if you’d let me know if you come across any peculiarities or non-working areas of the blog.]

All the best,

Gary Nugent

P.S.: Don't forget, if you want to create an internet income of your own, here's one of my recommended ways to do that:

 

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