Month: February 2025 (Page 3 of 3)

–Took Grace to Green Acres Folsom for plants, then Brainy Zoo for Amelia gifts.

–Played with OceanWP and Astra WordPress themes. Impressive, but 100 times more functionality than I’ll ever need, and expensive ($280). Might keep looking at cheaper ones. I mainly just want easy placement of menus and links in header and footer. We’ll see.

–Pizza for dinner.

–Got turned down by Adsense again. Finally dawning on me that I’m unlikely to ever get a site approved: original content, lots of traffic, etc. etc. The irony is that I finally got icsb-2006 up and running at Spaceship. Lotta good it’ll do me. My best bet, if I were a completely different person, would be to get the transmission/limescale sites going with a couple of youtube videos. Right. More likely, I suppose I should try and do something with Plan Retirement. Still the traffic issue will plague me. I don’t need to spend $5k to have some know-nothing SEO shop wave their magic wand and say their magic buzzwords to get visitors. I don’t know…

–It gets worse: after doing some reading, I learned that most Adsense requests are turned down, and that the the bar is set extremely high for certain areas like health (Dizziness and Nausea) and finance (Plan Retirement). These are known as YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) areas, and unless you’re a physician or Vanguard employee, your blog just won’t make it. FML, as they say.

–Sun came out; nice day.

–But not for me: played with hosts and websites all day. Found what I thought was a total winner i hosting: Porkbun. As it turns out, they have their own quirks: forcing all prefixes (FTP, DB, etc.) to some bizarre thing like llldxcdffftymn. They also haven’t responded after 6 hours to a query asking them to use a simpler name for DB prefixes. Soooo, looks like I’m moving everything back to iWebFusion for now. They’re cheap, fast, no quirks–it’s just that dang whois privacy thing that grates on me. Oh, and further: I finally got FTP set up at Porkbun and Spaceship. The directory they point to is empty; putting a file in it doesn’t show up in the hosts’ file manager; trying to move up or down a level in FTP goes nowhere. I have no idea what those cPanel-generated FTP sites are. If I can’t access public_html etc., what’s the point?

–Finally got some real rain today.

–Went to Costco for dessert (muffins), toilet paper, pizza.

–Registered the icsb-2006.org domain at Spaceship; it’s in the process of transferring.

–Messed up my WordPress journal trying to clean it up (changing database wpnq prefixes to wp). It looked good, but blew up when I tried to add a new post. So I used the WP installer at elidol.com to create a new blog, then moved the old posts into it. All seems good.

–Gave up trying to get Plesk to work at Hustly, so closed the account and got a refund. Will use iWebFusion (for a while, anyway) for the WordPress moneymakers (Dizziness and Nausea, Plan Retirement, Limescale, maybe Drywall (though it screams for a youtube implementation)) and Spaceship for registering/installing the link juice sites (icsb-2006.org, maybe waterseer.com, etc.) so the links come from a different IP. Might like to move away from iWebFusion at some point, as they are the only hosting provider I’ve seen that DOES NOT provide a free whois privacy service–resulting in many phone calls, emails and texts from wannabe site designers.

–Spent all day trying to get Journal and Dizziness working at Hustly. Unbelievably frustrating. Gave up and went back to elidol.com. Don’t know what I’ll do about Hustly.

–Picked up a couple nice fidget spinners at UPS, then milk and cream and pizza at Bel Air (Grace burned her dinner to a crisp).

–Gray day, but dry.

–Vacuumed my bedroom.

–Looked into web stuff. Seems I could move my sites from iWebFusion to Hustly (say) now, and later (after the IRTP block has lifted) change registrars from iWebFusion to Hustly. Don’t know if it’s worth it–as opposed to waiting two months then moving everything to Hustly (including registration).

–Another drizzly day–way less rain than was predicted.

–Took Grace shopping at Bel Air.

–Graffeo coffee from San Francisco came in. Dark like Peet’s. Not bad, but not a long-term brew.

–Negotiating with a guy from Georgia (USSR) on purchase of icsb-2006.org. Asshole wants way more than is reasonable.

–Drizzly day.

–Picked up Zeiss/Contax 50/1.4 at UPS. Nice example of the lens, but (N of 1) not too different ffrom 50/1.7 or Summicron 50/2.

–Renewed UPS box.

–Made pizza for dinner on pan, not in Erie skillet. Store-bought sauce, mozzarella, wilted basil leaves. Pretty good.