Freaky WordPress catastrophes and site crashes, and how to prevent them
You should pay attention to this post. It may be a little drier than I sometimes am, but I’m going to tell you how to cover your ass in the event of a website mishap. I learned through experience and figured I’d share.
So here’s what happened.
Last Wednesday, I decided to sleep in (which is rare), and Robin came into the bedroom after I’d laid around enough and said, “Apparently your site is down. You’ve got all these emails like, ‘Dude, what’s wrong with your site?’”
Now, I’m not prone to freakouts, so I took my time getting in to the office, turned on my screen, and went to my inbox. And it was indeed filled with “Dude, what’s wrong with your site?” emails.
So I went to my site. Which looked great, except that I got that “404 – Page not found” error on the front page, and didn’t see any posts, or any of my sidebar stuff. I logged in and saw that I currently had zero posts, zero pages, and zero comments.
As of the time I’m writing this, I actually have 131 posts, 90 pages, and 2145 comments. Those stats have changed some since last week, but even back then, I was able to notice that zero posts/pages/comments left a discrepancy.
(I should pause here to describe the sinking, panicked…
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Zombies, Pole Dancers, and Videotape
NOTE: This is a guest post by Elizabeth Potts-Weinstein. I know, I know… I don’t really accept guest posts. But this is Elizabeth we’re talking about here. She’s like the female me. So I figure it’s essentially like me writing the post, except that I get to play Rock Band while “I” am writing. Now that’s leverage!
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“Go ahead and come up with a topic” sounds like this really cool and awesome thing when you’re guest posting.
Until you’re cuddled up in bed with your laptop. Thighs sweating from the heat of the battery radiating into your lap. Your 5 year old whining from being forced (?!) to watch SpongeBob on Netflix streaming, yet again. The deadline is 87 minutes away.
And your eyes are watering from squinting at the blazingly white, blank, TextEdit screen.
Yep. That’s me. A few seconds ago.
Right before I asked myself various lingo-filled classic marketing questions: “Okay EPW (yes I call myself that when I’m alone. Yes, I understand this is weird.), what is the Johnny B. Truant brand?”
What topic would resonate with his audience? What’s his target market? What are the JBT unique selling points?
And one word came to mind.
Zombies.
Not brilliant yet witty tag lines full of internet marketing profoundity. Not wordpress sites, not questioning the rules,…
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We’re all inferior (or maybe none of us are)
Filed under: Inspiration & motivation, Life of Johnny, Online biz
The other day, I got an email that really bummed me out.
Just recently, I was part of an affiliate promotion. I did pretty well with it. It was a really cool program and I was proud to spread the word, and I was pleasantly surprised that a fair number of my people agreed that it was cool and signed up, despite it being very different from anything I’d been a part of before. It was nice. I’d again used that win/win/win principle I talk about so often, and everyone was benefitting, and I’d made some nice coin without a ton of effort, and all was well with the world.
Except that I wasn’t good enough. I was good, but not good enough. This email proved it.
The email I’m talking about ranked the top affiliates for the promotion, and I came in seventh overall. The first place person referred almost four times as many as I did. I stopped thinking about win/win/win and pleasant surprise and started thinking about seventh place. Suddenly, I didn’t feel all that successful.
Right now, nobody is feeling sorry for me. In fact, probably some of you or most of you are all angry at me, thinking, “Boo fucking hoo — Johnny only made X amount of money and not four times X, whereas I’m still struggling to make…
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My So-Called Rock Star Life
When Lee Stranahan and I were recording our course Question the Rules, Lee pulled out this concept of his “Celebrity Mansion Life.” And it was brilliant.
(NOTE: Because I’ve been carrying this concept around in my head for the past two weeks as the “Rock Star Life,” I’ll bastardize Lee’s phrasing and use that instead. I can do these things because this is my blog.)
Basically, the idea is to imagine what life would be like if you were a celebrity or a rock star. Leave out the drugs and illicit sex, and think of the day-to-day stuff. What do you imagine life under those circumstances to be like?
Some people will imagine racing Maseratis off of cliffs, but most of us will think of more basic things. Rock stars live in awesome houses in awesome locales. They can sleep in as long as they’d like. Then you see magazine articles about how they have all this time to work out, and they’ve got a private gym, so they do that for a long time. They eat some fancy food and do what they want with their time, and so forth.
Boil that down: Nice house. Nice locale. Nice home gym. Lots of time to work out. Eat well. Do what you want. All just for example, but you get the idea.
Once…
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