The blog had 77 posts in the first year, 187 in the second one and 237 on the 3rd and 218 this year for a total of 719 posts!!

While keeping a blog up and running (and growing) for 4 years is quite a milestone, you have know it’s not easy to make 719 posts easily searchable and accessible to readers.

I am thinking about some kind of redesign but I’m in a little trouble because at the moment I can’t figure out how to list all interesting posts in a sidebar, or somewhere around the site, in a clear way. Also I would like to put emphasys on series, with all steps listed in sequence.

Any clue?

In this photo, my travelmates

Let’s see them:

1) An iPhone, with some interesting apps to kill some time during a 11 hours flight

2) Sony Bloggie camera. High definition MP4 video, 5-megapixel still photos, USB arm, 270-degree swivel lens. Apart from that, decent videos with a pocket camera

3) Electric plug adapters… because sometimes batteries need to be recharged

4) Olympus TOUGH-3000… 12 Megapixels, waterproof to 3m, shockproof to 1.5m and freezeproof to -10°C (quite useless in Cuba anyway…)

5) Sony Handycam full HD with 40Gb hard disk… bigger than the Bloggie but with a lot better video quality… for the “really interesting events”

6) Nintendo Dsi + Zelda Spirit Tracks… you know… an 11 hours flight…. back and forth…

7) 16Gb USB Key… with all my stuff

8) Internet key… because I hate to wait at the airport (and no, no free WiFi in Italy)

9) Entry level MacBook Pro… I still don’t love Macs… but I don’t hate them anymore

10) The camera used to take this shot… a Sony Cybershot

11) A Lonsdale backpack to make all this stuff fit without problems

These are my travelmates. I would like to know yours

One of the new features is Personas, which allows you to instantly change the look of your Firefox with thousands of easy-to-install themes.

There are thousands of Personas to choose from, with more added every day, because users can upload their own, in a growing library with more 35,000 submissions.

Personas work with any type of computer that has Firefox installed. This includes Mac, Linux and Windows platforms.

This means if you design a popular theme, thousands (if not millions) of Firefox users will have your Persona theme installed. Creating a Personas theme can be a fun way to promote your brand. It’s easy, free and won’t take you more than a couple of minutes.

Probably you won’t become famous with your Personas theme, but it’s something you should create, especially if you are a graphic artist. Creating various personas with your artwork can attract visitors to you site. Basically the process would be something like this:

People browse Personas to custom their Firefox, they see you awesome skins and become fan of yours.

Let’s create a custom Firefox Persona!

To create your Firefox Persona you will need:

* Firefox 3.6
* The Persona Plus plugin
* An header image, 3000×200 pixels, jpg or png and lighter than 300k
* A footer image, 3000×100 pixels, jpg or png and lighter than 300k (only the size changes)

The header will be aligned to the right, so right-hand side of the image should have the most important information – as a user increases the width of the browser window, the browser reveals more of the left-hand side of the image, and the footer will be aligned to the left… so left-hand side of the image should have the most important information – as a user increases the width of the browser window, the browser reveals more of the right-hand side of the image.

Save your images with the highest quality possible, while keeping them under 300k (I couldn’t manage to save mines as png, so I save them as jpg 95%)

These are details of the header and footer I used for my Persona skin:

Once you created the images, this page allows you to test and submit it.

Now, if you have Firefox 3.6, go and check my Persona!!

My old server, aruba.it, simply had too much problems to host a blog with high traffic, and as you probably experienced during the last days, the blog was hacked too much times.

The funny thing is every time I reported the problem to the customer care, they replied (normally after 24 hours, from monday to friday) it was my fault.

If I have a fault, is waiting that long before migrating (but I prefer to say “running away”)

Now I am hosted on HostGator and finally I am back to life!!!

Since moving more than 6,000 files and about 25,000 queries can lead to some errors, I would like you to report any missing file or strange behavior to info[at]emanueleferonato.com

That’s a really important achievement for such a niche blog.

Thank you!!

That’s an awesome result for a niche blog like this one, and obviously this motivates me to continue posting more and more stuff.

The blog had 77 posts in the first year, 187 in the second one and 237 this year for a total of 501 posts (and none of them is off-topic… no “got a new sofa” post in this blog).

More than 2,000,000 people visited the blog during the last year.

Now, let’s jump into the 4th year… I am open to any kind of suggestion.

And, last but not least…

THANK YOU

I didn’t plan to give up blogging, and I didn’t run out of inspiration… I have a lots of things to write, but lately I find the blog to be too slow, so I thought it would be due to a server upgrade and waited a couple of days.

Yesterday I was writing an interesting article about a new project I started with an important partner (you will find it tomorrow) when I got the 500 internal server error.

Never mind, let me close the page and open it again. 500 again.

Ok, so I deleted the entire site and uploaded the backup.

500…

Ok, maybe something happened to the database, let me check it and back it up.

I wasn’t able to back up the database… I was only able to perform select queries… update, delete, insert and other writing queries gave me errors… and still, of course…

500…

At that time, having a backup was not enough. What’s the point in having a backup if you can’t back it up?

While I was thinking, and the site was softly displaying

500…

Never mind, I was lucky enough to have another database on the same server, so I switched the databases and the site was up and running again.

But the administration panel was still in 500 error. Probably the same issue that screwed the database caused problem to the disk.

I had to delete all files once again and upload them, and finally the site is running.

But I am a quite afraid at the moment, so I am writing this post using the notepad

Obviously I opened a ticket to the customer care, and they answered this way (translated from italian)

we found your DB (dbname) having a table (tablename) with some spam records [so what?]. This causes problems when making queries on such tables [really?].
So we renamed (tablename) to (new tablename)… you are invited to clean the DB blah blah blah

So, forget what probloggers say. Having a backup is not enough.

During your life as a blogger, you will have to face weird errors and stange support teams.

Did it happened to you once or twice?

Now I pasted the post in WP dashboard… 3… 2… 1… Publish (pray)

In my opinion bloggers understimate the power of a rich header, and in most cases you will see only the blog title and description.

I am going to show you what I did on my header, why I did it and how can you do it on your own.

Pages first

The first thing included in the header is the navbar with blog pages. Having the pages in the very top of your blog will give it a more “corporate” look.

To list your pages, use wp_list_pages WP function.

You can find a brief explaination about it in Customizing WordPress header or in the official docs.

Logo

Now that I have a logo, it’s time to use it…

Categories

Then I wanted to display categories in the header, and I used Multi Column Category List Plugin for WordPress to split them into three columns.

I also modified a bit the plugin to show how many posts have been written for each category.

Gallery

The last thing I added was a slideshow showing my latest projects. I used SlideShowPro that isn’t free but has a lot of features and is made with Flash, that means no frameworks/complex javascripts required.

It’s also fully XML driven, that means it’s easy to configure.

If you are looking for a good free alternative, check JonDesign’s SmoothGallery, that uses MooTools.

And this is the result…

… an header that’s not the “image-title-description” you are used to see in WP themes.

During the next days I will redesign the rest of the blog, to make its contents as much accessible as I can.

As I said in the post New look for www.emanueleferonato.com, I am on top 50,000 sites according to Alexa.

It’s not so bad for a niche blog, so let’s go to the pub and have a drink, tell the bartender I will go there and pay tomorrow.