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Kickstart Today
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Friday September 26th 2008: Issue #963
Kickstart Today is published three times each week for opted-in
subscribers only. Publisher: Martin Avis. Your comments are
always welcome – to respond to anything you read here, please
click ‘Reply’
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Greetings !
It is so easy to take your eye off the ball – especially when, as
most Internet marketers will tell you – there are so many balls
in the air at the same time.
A good example of that is my kickstartdaily.com site.
A month or so ago the blog there (Kickstart Meanderings) stopped
working. All it produced were server error messages. I looked at
the files and they all looked okay to me – no sign of hacking and
no reason I could think of why the pages wouldn’t open.
Other pages on the domain still worked, although I noticed that
some of them looked a bit odd. But with a lot of other things
going on, I put it all down to odd server behaviours that would
probably sort itself out in time.
I knew I hadn’t changed anything on the site or the domain, so it
had to be something that my host was doing. At least, that’s what
I figured.
Yesterday, however, I decided at long last to take a closer look.
What I found was most disturbing. The problem appears to be that
the site was completely ignoring anything that was in PHP. Pages
that were basically HTML with a bit of PHP included in them
displayed the HTML parts, but ignored the PHP sections.
And and pages that were pure PHP threw up server errors.
I contacted my host, who naturally denied any involvement. They
suggested I have changed something and should sort it out for
myself.
This is a hosting company that I have been with for seven years
and who I pay $19.95 a month to!
If I can sum them up in one word it would be ‘useless’.
Today I’m doing what I should have done a very long time ago. I’m
transferring the entire site to a different host. There is a lot
of stuff on there, so it may take a while, and I cannot transfer
the old blog, so sadly that will be lost (although I have saved
the database, so I may be able to reconstruct something in the
future).
And when it is all transferred, and working fine on my new
hosting, guess what my very next action is going to be? You are
right – I’ll be cancelling my deal with the useless host and
saving myself $19.95 a month.
What is particularly annoying is the huge amount of traffic I’ve
wasted – I took a peek at the stats for people who have been
shown 404 and 500 error pages while all this has been happening.
It was enough to bring tears to my eyes!
I’m not going to name and shame the useless company – they were
pretty cutting edge 7 years ago, but they have fallen way behind
the market now. But I will tell you the new host: HostGator.
#~#~#
Oddly enough, another lapse on my part came to light while I was
trying to find out what was going wrong with kickstartdaily.com.
I went to my domain registrar to see about resetting the DNS to
the new host, and found that my domain had technically expired a
week ago.
I would be really upset to lose kickstartdaily.com and couldn’t
understand why the registrar hadn’t sent me a reminder.
Fortunately a quick phone call to their support team got it
sorted out and renewed, but if I hadn’t have happened to visit
their site by coincidence, I would definitely have lost my
domain.
Considering that this is a registrar who is excruciatingly
expensive (nearly $50 to renew) because they are based in the UK,
I would have hoped for better service.
So guess what – as soon as it is practical, my domain is going to
be transferred to a different registrar – one who isn’t in the
business to make my eyes water, and one who sends out timely
reminders.
GoDaddy or Namecheap will do just fine.
#~#~#
There is a lot of scurrying around here today as we get ready to
send our daughter Lauren off to university tomorrow. I’ve been
happy to keep my head down here in my office while everyone
around me descends into panic, but I guess I’d better start
getting involved.
Of course, I’m wrong if I don’t, and even more wrong if I do
because I’ll be bound to be accused of either interfering or
getting in the way.
Such is the position we dads usually find ourselves in!
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Don’t keep it to yourself – send them to
http://www.kickstartdaily.com today!
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The Quote of the Day
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Norman G. Shidle said,
‘We can’t always control what happens to us. But we can control
what we think about what happens … and what we are thinking IS
our life at any particular moment.’
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Today’s Power Thought
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Isn’t the world of self-improvement a humorless place?
Have you noticed?
All those books and tapes that tell you to do this and write that
and plan the other – well, they tend to be rather dry.
And if the writer dares to inject a little fun, then the book
ends up becoming a kind of parody of itself.
I’m a great believer in smiling at people. You can often get away
with murder if you speak with a smile on your lips and a twinkle
in your eye.
Right beside me as I type this, I have four large bookcases full
of business and self development books (okay I admit it, I
collect the things!)
I just spend some time looking up the word humor (humour) in the
indexes.
Two things stood out:
1, 75% of this kind of book don’t have indexes. What is that all
about? Don’t the writers want their information to be easily
accessed? Or are they afraid that an index would show how little
real information they have managed to pack into two or three
hundred pages?
2. I found a reference to ‘humour/humor’ on just three books.
Dale Carnegie’s ‘How to Enjoy Your Life and Your Job’ has one
page about the importance of laughing off adversity.
David Thielen’s ‘The 12 Simple Secrets of Microsoft Management’
has a short section (two and a half pages) about how essential it
is to create a workplace where humor has a place.
Last but not least, one of my favorite books: Fish!
Fish is the story of how dull businesses and dull jobs can be
turned around by the injection of fun. It tells about the world
famous Seattle fish market, Pike Place Fish, where the mongers
have turned having fun into an art form – and how the lessons
they demonstrate every day can have incredible results in the
lives of people and businesses.
Incidentally, if you haven’t read this little book, and the
others in its series, then you’ve missed a real treat. They are
classics.
I know that there is a time and a place for everything, but come
on! Let’s all lighten up a little bit. There are funny things
happening everywhere. Appreciate them! Enjoy them! Relish them!
And most of all, learn from them!
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The Foolproof, No-Nonsense,
Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online
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*** Catch up with parts 1-26 of the Foolproof, No-Nonsense,
Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online at http://imkickstart.com
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Fascinating Facts
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Look up on a starry night and if you are lucky you may be able to
see about 3000 stars. It is an awesome sight.
But then be prepared to be truly AMAzed.
Because for every star that you can see, our galaxy is estimated
to contain over 3 BILLION that are invisible to the naked eye.