The Lady Programmer

I have not been updating my blogs for a while. That was not laziness: like many bloggers my excuse is just I was so busy. I had been hopping into one freelance work after another. In between that I try to manage a few hours finding new jobs for my team members who are doing freelance jobs part time while learning all I can about WordPress blogs.

That freelance experience those past few weeks was a race against time. That had really put my time management skills to test. I had to make the best use of my time. I had finally reached the point where I have a constant stream of clients both old and new ones. When my long term projects  runs dry, new opportunities keep coming up. It’s a fact that full time freelancers don’t just work with one client – they have to very good masters of their time to be able to work and earn from different projects coming from different clients.

During that time I was semi-active in social networks, Plurk and Twitter. Since both networks allow only 140 characters, it was easy for me to get interactive without the need to write a full well-researched or well-thought out blog post.

For those very hectic days I just get down to do my freelance work. At the end of the day, I find myself mentally tired to compose a well-researched blog post on any of my blogs.
This next week is yet another busy week for me.

I will not say anymore that I am back to blogging, as other do. I am always here. If you don’t find me on blogs, you could always contact me through other social networks, or through my email. Some of you are even in my chat. If you don’t find my updates here, you can always interact with me in Plurk or Twitter.

Some of you may have passed by and noticed the huge “Under Maintenance” sign that I had put up on this blog yesterday. I decided to ditch the old template and use the new release that Flexibility Themes had made for WordPress 2.7!

blog's upgraded look

My primary goal for putting down the blog was to troubleshoot the cause of this blog’s slowdown even if I have those WP Super Cache and WP Widget Cache installed. It turned out that the problem was on one or more of those activated plugins. I was not able to pinpoint which plugins caused the slowdown: what I did was to deactivate those unused ones.

continue reading »

After I had responded to comments left in my blog, I get to see a list of spam. Spam is really something that I don’t want to have. I’ve experienced this when I still have that old blog in WordPress.com.

Unlike the spam that I’ve been receiving before, these spam comments really sound funny. I decided to get snapshots of those images days ago so that I can share them with you. I find them personally amusing. I just don’t know if you had been receiving similar messages.

(click each of the images to view the original size)

super site?

Did not understand what I’ve been saying

Sukrat huh?

This is my favorite of all!

I just finished working on this piano music site just the other day:

It is actually a WordPress blog that is made to look like a website. The blog is just a subset of the design:

The site is not exactly new. This was its past design.

The site owner, Michelle, decided to host this site on Bluehost to save on paying for the $20 per month. The Bluehost package that she had taken allowed her to create as many blogs as she like to have. She included this one with her existing set of blogs in Bluehost to take advantage of the deal.

Since this site advertises professional piano services, I had decided to adapt a clean classy look for it. At one point I had considered black or even a combination of red and gray, but I decided to settle on browns and yellows.

The template was customized from the header to the background. I had also changed the RSS icons and the individual “bullet” icons at the sidebar. I’ve configured this one so that the sidebar appears only when the blog section is clicked by the visitor.

Under its hood, I had added a number of WordPress plugins for the site, such as the sideblog, Google sitemap generator and a number of useful plugins to catch spam and allow cache on the site.

Here is the working site: http://www.strictlypiano.com

I suddenly remembered my new good-looking online friend, Jaypee. I was busy these past few days because I had some outsourcing job to do.  As I had announced in my previous post entry, Jaypee provided me the hosting space for this blog. He also made it easier for me to learn WordPress by sharing what he already knows about this stuff.

He had been a lot of help and yet he was still inviting me to his Christmas Giveaway contest – well this is my first time ever to join a blog contest, really!

Although the contest had been announced last November, I was able to blog about it this very last day. As I’ve said, I got knocked off from the net, then I had to catch up on everyone. Just recently, I had accepted an outsourcing job that would make up for the lost money-making opportunity when I was offline.

I am particularly interested in any of the prizes that are offered – really. I’m falling in love with self-hosted WordPress and all the power that comes with it. Sadly, Jaypee doesn’t want to give all the prizes for one person. Well, I still hope luck smiles on me on this New Year.

• 3 Revolution Two Pro Plus Memberships (each worth $149.95) – courtesy of Brian Gardner
• 2 Mimbo Pro Single-License Copies (each worth $89.99) – courtesy of Darren Hoyt
• 2 FlexxTheme Single-Use Copies (each worth $79.95) – courtesy of Cory Miller
• 1 WP-Member Plugin Ten-Site License (worth $67.87) – courtesy of WP-Member.com
• 3 WP-Member Plugin Five-Site Licenses (each worth $44.78) – courtesy of WP-Member.com
• 5 WP-Member Plugin Single-Site Licenses (each worth $27.13) – courtesy of WP-Member.com
• 2 Elegant Themes Membership Licenses (each worth $19.95) – courtesy of Nick Roach

As I am writing this, I am three hours  hours from the contest deadline which is December 30, 2008 midnight US Pacific time. If you happen to read this post, have a self-Wordpress blog and want a chance to upgrade to a new look this New Year, then hurry up (like me) and join this one!

Let’s not also forget the sponsors of this wonderful contest:

1. Revolution Two WordPress Themes
2. Pro Theme Design
3. iThemes Premium WordPress Themes
4. WP Member – Advanced WordPress Membership Plugin
5. Elegant Themes – Premium WordPress Themes