Over the past couple of weeks, my email inbox has been screaming uncle. I keep telling him (yes, my inbox is male) to just man up already, but he’s gotten kind of whiny in his old age. This morning, he reminded me that a lot of people have been asking about this Gold-Digging Excursion thing we’re doing. How they really, really want to go, but either:

• They have no website

or…

• Their site design entirely sucketh

Combine this with the fact that I’m currently booked for design work until May 31st, and you’ve got a humdinger of a problem. But I’m not a problem kinda gal. I’m a solution kinda gal. So here’s what I did.

I designed this beautiful, gorgeous, oh-wow-I-wish-I-had-this-site kind of site. I built it on Headway, a WordPress framework that gives the non-techy person drag ‘n drop superpowers (even techy people will love it). And I decided to give it away to all of my Gold-Digger participants.

Go ahead, you can dance if you want to. (I am.)

So here’s the plan. If you have no website (or if your site design entirely sucketh), come with us. I designed this site for you and will show you how to get it going and customize it in the most strategic way possible. And you’ll get to do all of the other fun, empowering stuff that will help you find your website’s untapped cash potential (read more about the excursion here).

Wanna take a look?

I’m calling it Vega (click on the image for the full version).

Vega is a clean, customizable design that says “I am awesome!” without even trying. It’s WordPress-built, which means it’s easy for you to handle your content yourself, and even more than that, it’s Headway-built, which means it’s easy for you to customize the design yourself (if there’s something easier than drag ‘n drop, let me know…but I’m pretty sure that’s as simple as it gets). And it’s only available to Gold-Digging participants.

And with that…a shocking announcement

Well, sort of shocking. And kind of hard for me to say, actually. LiteSites are going on a vacation. (To Maui, I think. Someplace tropical.) I’m going to be focusing on my from-the-ground-up work and the Gold-Digging Excursion for a while.

If you’re already booked for a LiteSite, don’t fret! You’re still booked. And you are more than welcome to switch over to the Gold-Digging Excursion if you’re drooling over the Vega design and want to do in-depth profit-discovering activities with us.

And finally…

Early-bird registration is ending Wednesday. As in, tomorrow. And unless you’re signed up for yummies, you won’t be getting a reminder.

Bon voyage, LiteSites. Have fun in Maui. Bring me back something.

Apparently, WordPress versions earlier than 2.8.4 are under attack. Upgrade today, folks.

If you’ve got a pretty recent version of WordPress, login to your admin panel and expand the “Tools” section. Click on “Upgrade.” That should clue you in on whether or not you are using the most recent version. Recent versions have a one-click upgrade option, but it doesn’t work with all hosting configurations. If yours doesn’t, you’ll have to go through the whole fun-tastic upgrade process.

Lorelle’s covering the issue more thoroughly, and she’s got a list of other articles referencing it, in case you’re interested. (And thanks to cj Madigan for alerting me over the weekend. This definitely isn’t breaking news, so if you haven’t upgraded yet, it should be a priority.)

Heading to Boulder for some high-style fun

I’ll be traveling on Wednesday and Friday, so it’ll be quiet here this week. However, traveling always inspires lots of profound tweeting, so we can keep in touch there. If you happen to be in Boulder, don’t forget to let me know so that we can hang out at the clothing swap. I’ll be in Nashville when I get back from Boulder, so…Nashville friends? We should hang, too.

See you guys back here next Monday! In the meantime, upgrade and be happy.

So your site is down. That sucks, man. Let’s just take a moment and breathe deeply. Big, calming belly breaths. Maybe do the Dance of Shiva. (I have no clue what that is, but the picture has a girl with a lot of arms. I think having lots of arms must be calming.)

Now, let’s work on this for a moment.

First, you need to figure out if your site is down for everyone or if it’s just you. Enter your site’s address into downforeveryoneorjustme.com, and you’ll get the answer lickety-split.

If it’s just you…

Have you been working on your site in the last 15 minutes?
Yeah? Lucky you. You have one of those sensitive hosting companies that bans you from your own site for refreshing it too many times. (I have one of these companies, too. The thrill!)

It’s actually a nice feature so that spam-bots can’t crash your site by continually refreshing it and/or leaving comments or submitting forms. It’s protective, really. But also annoying.

You can try asking your hosting people if they can add your computer’s IP address to a “do not block” list. Your IP address is simply a number that is assigned to your computer and your computer only. It’s like a web address for your computer (click that link up there to find yours). My people wouldn’t (or couldn’t) unblock mine. But I can’t see why it would be a huge deal.

OR you can wait 15 minutes to get back on your site. That seems to be the going timeframe for being blocked.

OR (if you don’t mind the annoying, sometimes disgusting ads), you can access your site through an internet proxy. These sites are designed to keep your IP address private while you’re browsing, so they’re useful for getting into a site that is blocking your IP address. The ads are questionable, but sometimes you’ve just gotta get to your site.

Oh. You haven’t been working on your site?

It’s probably:

1. Your connection at home. Re-start your modem. Re-start your wireless router. Try getting to your site on another computer if you have one.
2. Your internet service company. Call ‘em up and tell them what you told me. Your site is down, it’s down only for you, and your modem and wireless router are not the problem. Enjoy the (not) calming elevator music while you wait.

If it’s down for everyone…

Now you can start thinking bad thoughts about your hosting company. (!@#$!@#$!) But first, let’s take a minute to assess the situation.

First, try logging in to your hosting control panel. Sometimes your host will leave messages for you about your site’s status if they know about an issue.

Next, if you use Wordpress, log in to your administration area. Go to your plug-ins section. Do you have 15 or more plug-ins activated? De-activate whichever ones you are not using. Your host is probably going to blame your plug-ins and/or the inefficiency of your database.

Finally, call your host and ask them what’s going on with your site. You are now armed with enough information so they can actually give good service. Usually, hosting providers aren’t the enemy. It’s just hard to communicate with them if you don’t know what the heck they’re talking about.

(And side note? You do NOT have unlimited bandwidth or unlimited server space. No matter how hosting companies advertise it, there are limits. And believe me, you’ll know when you’ve hit them.)

If you know HTML/XHTML, skip this post. Just pass go and head directly to Big Shot City. We’ll wave as you pass.

If you use the Visual Editor in WordPress to write your blog posts (as opposed to the HTML Editor), then it’s pretty simple. The world is at your fingertips. You can highlight something, press “i”, and it italicizes. Brilliant. You can highlight something else, press the chain-looking button, and create a link. Easiest thing in the world. What you see is what you get.

Pretty much.

But have you ever tried creating an extra space between two paragraphs? You push “return” and then “return” and then “return” again. In Word, it would show up as a big extra space. WordPress ignores it. (There’s a good reason for that, but you don’t need to fill your brain with such nonsense. Suffice it to say, it doesn’t work.)

The easiest way to insert a blank space is to switch over to the HTML editor (I promise…it’s not that bad). Put your cursor at the end of the paragraph that will be before the extra space. Hit return twice (as if you are starting a new paragraph). Then enter the following:

<p> &nbsp; </p>

Basically, what you’re doing is starting a new paragraph (<p>), putting a space in that paragraph so that it’s not empty and WordPress doesn’t ignore it (&nbsp;), and then ending the paragraph (</p>). Here’s an example of what it will look like in the HTML editor.

One time, I wrote a whole paragraph about how awesome I was. It was a short paragraph.

<p> &nbsp; </p>

Oh look, when I publish this post, there’s going to be a bunch of extra space above me! Yippee!

When you publish it, it will look like this:

One time, I wrote a whole paragraph about how awesome I was. It was a short paragraph.

 

Oh look, when I publish this post, there’s going to be a bunch of extra space above me! Yippee!

Easy. And you can add in as many of these bad boys as you like.

By the way, if you Big Shots stuck around and are now thinking “But THAT’S not semantically correct!” then here’s your cookie.

Image by Tomi Tapio

Oh crap. The squirrel got it. Well there you go.