This post is for Thesis theme for WordPress users.

There were few minor bugs with Thesis theme on the latest version of WordPress, 3.2. Thesis 1.8.2 release will fix the bugs, such as missing category page SEO controls. It also comes with a new feature: a dashboard news widget which will display the latest posts from the thesis blog.

If you are a Thesis owner, you can download the latest version here.

If you are NOT a Thesis user yet and would like to learn more about it, click here to check it out.

I’m excited about WordPress 3.2. I’ve been waiting for this version because of its new dashboard design and the full-screen editing mode.

WordPress 3.2 Full Screen Mode

There’s no doubt that WordPress 3.2.1 will be rolled out in just few weeks with some bug patches. You can wait until at least 3.2.1 comes out for a less-buggy WordPress, but I don’t care much.

This version is supposed to be faster and lighter, and it comes with few upgrades, such as multiple rotating header images and HTML5 ready Twenty Eleven theme. For more information about the changes and updates, visit :

http://wordpress.org/news/2011/07/gershwin/

Or Download WordPress 3.2

Some people argue that relying too much on Google for generating traffic to your site can hurt your business if not prepared.  Because I run hundreds of niche sites, I really didn’t care much about it.  When some sites lose SERP rank others would gain.  They usually balanced it out.  But for some reason, one of my biggest income earner lost 4 postions on the first page.  My site ranked either #3 or #4 for over 5 years.  I don’t think it was because of the Panda update, but I’ve never seen such a drop on any of my sites.

SERP Rank Changes

But that isn’t my point here.  I just want you to see the power of SERP rank.  How much difference there is between SERP rank 4 and 8 in terms of organic traffic.  As you can see from the screenshot above, I’ve lost almost half the traffic I used to get. My niche keyword ranks at #8 position on the first page. It is highly visible, and yet people still click way less. Since the drop in traffic, my advertising revenue was hit also. It is generating about 70% less than what it used to generate. Yes, 70%!

If you think about that, it’s little bit strange. I just lost 40% of the traffic, and yet, it caused my ad revenue to drop by 70%. I honestly don’t know what could be the reason behind this other than either Google serving more premium ads on top ranking sites or advertisers lifting site targeted ads from mine.

Either way, we can learn that maintaining your SERP is something that you can’t ignore even if you don’t believe in SEO and search engine traffics. Lessons learned.

I’ve been using Rack0 hosting for few of my niche websites on a popular reseller package for some time.  Last week their servers were hacked and everything got wiped out including all of my sites and databases.  I couldn’t retrieve anything.  They didn’t even have  a backup.  I really liked Rack0 because of their fast customer service, but I’ve decided to take my business else where. SingleHop hosting has been great for my business for many many years. They are getting another account from me this week. :) I left SingleHop, although they’ve been great without any problem, because my server was getting old. I now have all my sites hosted at ServInt just because I got a better deal there.

Because my sites were built with WordPress, I didn’t have backups of the databases on my PC.  It was a great reminder to regularly backup your WordPress databases for events like this.

I just noticed Aweber.com is down.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen it go down without any kind of notice to its users.  I’m little frustrated because I need to schedule an email which has to go out in 3 hours.  I can’t stay awake all night long!  My friend just told me that GetReponse.com is also down.  ….. what’s going on here?

If anyone knows anything about Aweber.com, please let us know.

RSS2HTML has been one of my most favorite free scripts for very long time. I used to use the script on many of our sites to display RSS feeds using keywords. Just recently, I noticed that one of my sites was doing 5-7 sec loading time on average. First I thought the site was slow due to heavy traffic, because I get about 4,000 uniques a day on that site. But it was hosted on a robust dedicated server and it shouldn’t be like that.

Here are the things I tried to track down the problem.
1) I removed Adsense ads one by one to see if one of the ads was causing the problem
2) I removed Analytics code to see if it was causing the problem
3) I installed WP Cache plugin to see if it helped – it did, but I didn’t like the idea
4) Finally I removed RSS2HTML code from the site – now my site’s loading time is less than 0.5 seconds.

Yes, it was RSS2HTML script that was slowing down my website. Now I have no choice but to remove it. I’m sure there’s a way to optimize how the script is called to my website and stuff, but I don’t feel like going through all that. I just simply removed the entire script and replaced it with a WP_Query statement. It works just fine for that particular site because it was not feeding from outside source.

So if your site is slow and happen to be using RSS2HTML, now you know why. :)

After installing WP Thread Comment plugin on this blog my previous blog, but it wasn’t working properly. Whenever I clicked “reply” it popped up an error message saying “Can’t find the ‘commentformid’ div.

What the hell?

So I played with the plugin setting for about 5 minutes and found an easy solution. Here is how I fixed the error.

1. Open your comments.php from your theme folder and search for “form action“. At the end of that line, you will see id=”something” or if you don’t see id, just type in id=”commentform”
2. Go to “WP Thread Comment” settings
3. Under “Edit Comment Form ID” type in “something” or “commentform” if you just typed that in.
4. Press “Update Options” and you will be all set.

If you have any questions, just leave a comment. I will help you out.

In today’s post, I’d like to introduce to you Dynadot, a domain registration company that offers $1 hosting. I’ve been using Dynadot for many many years for all of my domain registrations. Now I get bulk domain pricing because I spend so much money there.

But that’s not the point of this post. I want to tell you little bit about their $1 hosting plan. You can host only 1 domain with this hosting plan and it doesn’t come with any MySQL databases. This hosting plan is not for you if you are thinking about hosting a blog or other scripts.

Dynadot’s $1 hosting plan is perfect if you are thinking about hosting a traditional html niche sites. For $11.99 per year, I can host a mini-niche site that runs on a separate IP address. Rather then getting a reseller account to host 25 websites on a single IP address, I’d get a $1 hosting for each domain to get a different IP address.

I’m not recommending you that you should use Dynadot’s $1 hosting plan for all of your niche sites since you might end up with same IP addresses, but add Dynadot’s hosting plan to your bookmarks of cheap web hosting companies for your mini niche sites. I highly recommend Dynadot for your basic web hosting and all of your domain registrations.

Get your $1 hosting here