The short story: I accidentally let some processes get out of hand during some cloak and dagger testing and my host didn’t like it.  They shut me off, no warning whatsoever.  Getting access to my files was next to impossible and took nearly 24 hours of phone calls.  Finally, they gave me a bare-bones VPS with SSH access to a directory of my files.  Gosh, I must be more dangerous than I thought.

Anyway, despite being a customer of VPSLink since 2006, I jumped ship and after a quick search, found VPSLatch.  Despite the odd name, they’ve proven extremely competitive.  For $35 a month, you can get a MANAGED VPS with 1024MB guaranteed RAM, 750GB transfer, 60GB disk space with cPanel thrown in for good measure.  Even better, you can use coupon code 25managedoff for 25% off for the lifetime of your account. Niiiiice.

I’m still working out bugs here and there, so if you see anything let me know please.  Most everything *should* work, but it’s never easy to switch an entire network of sites from one server to another.

So I’ve had a couple of people email me in the past few days asking why I’ve pulled CC from the market. I was flabbergasted.

Yes, as my newsletter subscribers can tell you, there have been a couple of administration problems that are being addressed and slowly worked through, but Caffeinated Content is still for sale for your content creation enjoyment, and remains the premier system for WordPress bloggers. It’s not server-limited like the nearest competition, and there is no monthly fee.  Check it out at http://kansieo.com/members/buynow.

Anyway, hopefully everyone can see through the BS, and hopefully others will stop the defamation without me having to resort to threats.

Just ran out of the office to get a bite to eat.  Innocent, yes…this time!

The limo was trying to make a turn into the wall of tourists crossing the street and I just happened to be at the end of a good portion of them.  Luckily, I walk fast and he was going slow, so I was just brushed by his front bumper, and his tire grazed my heel, taking off my shoe and leaving a black streak down my jeans.

He stopped the car, rolled down the window and said, “Sorry man, I didn’t see you there.”  Sauntering up to his window, shoe in hand, I said, “Dude, I’m wearing a bright red jacket…”  I took his plate number but since nothing is bleeding or broken so I probably not going to report him…but tomorrow I’m locking myself in the house in front of the computer!

I come from the midwest.  You know, Wisconsin.  There aren’t many chopsticks in the state of Wisconsin.  Don’t need ‘em to eat cheese, y’know.  Sticks are for roasting marshmallows.  And building fires, houses and barns.  Or to steady yourself while walking through the woods.  Also, the pointy end is a good thing to poke in your brother’s eye, like ma always said.  Whatever. Point is, I’ve never bothered to learn how to use them to eat with.

So anyway, instead of running to the kitchen to find some proper utensils, to defy my germanic roots I decided to use these strange sticks to somehow funnel salmon teriyaki and rice into my mouth.  It wasn’t pretty, and more rice ended up on my desk and lap than in my mouth, but I did eventually finish.  It didn’t take all that much longer than normal, either.  Still, they don’t really make all that much sense to me (kinda like the scales that were left on one side of the fish, or when they leave the legs and shell on shrimp–bleh) but I suppose they do work…inefficiently!  Perhaps an adept at chopsticks can improve on the efficiency, but I can’t imagine them ever holding a candle to the fork which pierces and holds food securely.

Before we start on that old line about chopsticks improving authenticity of the food if you’re eating Chinese, Japanese, Thai or whatever…that’s just silly talk.  In essence, that is the equivalent of saying using a straw improves the authenticity of drinking milk.

Well, it could have been a horrible disaster of a lunch, but turned out okay.  Plus I accomplished something I may have never done on my own.  And yes, there is a moral, but you have to figure that out on your own.

One of the trends I’ve been seeing lately, however, is responses back to my confirmation emails from third-party spam-blocking services such as Spam Arrest (no link for you, pain in the tush).  For those not aware, these services typically require manual intervention on the sender’s behalf, usually in the form of a captcha.  The last thing I want to be doing to get you my software, demos and freebies is to fill out a captcha on your behalf.  Sorry, but the customer experience has to end somewhere.

I’ve been working on integrating a newsletter/mailing list system, but it’s extremely frustrating and offputting to automatically be thrown into the spam folder of Yahoo and Hotmail accounts–for no reason, even…my mail server isn’t blacklisted anywhere.  Typically when I communicate with customers, I use my gmail account since it’s just easier than having to worry about whether my email is gonna make it or not.

Oh well, tis the life, I guess!

Since I started selling my plugin, I’ve been noticing my stuff on a couple of warez boards. On top of that, I get daily searches landing on my site looking for caffeinated content registration key, caffeinated content keygen, “caffeinated content” key, etc. My first instinct, and I think first instinct for any new software author is to get mad, upset and try to report these websites and/or the links on the software sharing portals like RapidShare…it’s either that or quit trying to make a living by providing top-notch money-making software.

Thankfully, I’m not going to do either. It’s not worth my time, and well, it’s good free advertising.

This is not an open invitation to warez out my software. Obviously I’d prefer that you paid for it, if you don’t do PayPal we can work something out (slave labor or something). In reality though, I accept the fact that whatever protections I use will be broken (except for the super-duper anti-cracker BFG I installed under the hood–that will break you!). I also accept that most people who receive it through less-than-savory means are also not exactly the type of people that will whip out their PayPal account and give me cash. They, in turn, have to accept the fact that they probably won’t be receiving the latest software updates, cool new money-making features, and my personal support (:)).

This is a new role for me…up to this point I’ve used my software only for personal gain in the search engine marketing world. This next step, allowing others to purchase my software, enabling others to do things they wouldn’t be able to do otherwise was a big one for me. There is a lot of stuff that goes hand in hand with online-marketing that I wasn’t exposed to before releasing Caffeinated Content for WordPress to the public. Customer service, warez, hackers, etc. Before, it was just a matter of putting up sites and waiting for the paycheck. Now, I must be constantly vigilant with updates–if WordPress or Yahoo or Google changes a bit of code, everything could stop working.

In retrospect, if you’re looking to pirate my software, email me first…we might be able to come to terms, and your server’s kneecaps won’t need to be broken.

I’m without a keyboard until I make it to the electronics store.  As much as I like the Asus Eee PC and spelling with flickr, they aren’t exactly put together for PHP development or web design.

So far, with the Caffeinated Content for WordPress plugin, the majority of bug reports have come from people using one of two things:

1. Outdated versions of WordPress (right now, I have things compatible with WP2.1 and above, and have decided to draw the line there–I can’t be expected to support every single bit of outdated software, right?)
2. WordPress installed by Fantastico.

For those of you who don’t know, Fantastico is a bit of software that usually goes hand in hand with cpanel and offers up fairly simple installations of a ton of different scripts. While the idea is a good one, the implementation leaves much to be desired.

Installs can be lame. Uninstalls can be incomplete. The biggest issue however? Installs tend to lag waaay behind the latest released version of the software. Since Fantastico needs to update their software and the host running Fantastico needs to update Fantastico it can become a very significant gap. This will lead to security problems for obvious reasons.

I recommend that anyone using shared hosting NOT use Fantastico installed scripts. It’s usually not a difficult process to install most of the big scripts (like WordPress) and it’s in your best interest to get your hands a little dirty under the hood.

It’s all fixed now, anyway…all post-purchase processes should carry on automatically.

Anyway, to encourage commenting, I picked up the “dofollow” plugin. It removes all instances of ‘rel=nofollow’ so you’ll get link credit from the big ol’ G for any comments you leave here.

Ain’t I nice?