The Blog Peoria Network

… but we folks here at the Blog Peoria Network strongly suspect that the blog recently started here under that name is a splog. Sorry. It’s going inactive, along with a few others (”Travel A Little Bit Each Day” and “Business Management.” If the creators object, they can email me.

Here’s the secret to blogging here. When you get your Welcome email, email me back and introduce yourself. This way, I know you didn’t start a blog just to be able to dump some spam links in here. If you want to play around with a WordPress Mu site, go to wordpress.com and create away.

I’ve found a new host for Blog Peoria (which includes Peoria Pundit, Peoria Illinoisan, Knight in Dragonland, etc). The new site will cost roughly the same as the one I’m using now, but will be better able to handle the the stresses this site places on the current server, causing the database to become unavailable multiple times during the day.

The drawback? I need to pay a year upfront. This will mean a bit of a discount, but I’m gonna need about $160 to do it.

So, I’m putting out the begging bowl, in the form of the PayPal button at the top of the front page to Peoria Pundit AND Blog Peoria. If 16 folks contribute $10 each, I’ll have what I need to open the account. I’m taking the down the “donate directly to my hosting account” link in the sidebars because it no longer applies. Of course, if 8 people donate $20, it will happen even sooner.

I don’t rewrite posts or legitimate comments. But I will delete obvious spam comments on ANY Blog Peoria site. Also, I see that there’s a particular post that seems to attract spam comments, I’ll close comments on that post. And as a matter of policy, I’ll activate Akismet if I don’t see it activated on any member blog. It’s necessary to keep the server load down.

While waiting for information needed to solve the server load issues, I went ahead and activated the menu bar. Signed-in users will see links to various members-only dashboard options. Non-registered readers will see links to the front page and an option to register.

 Coming soon: A “random blog” link in the admin bar, which will generate hits for everyone.

At about this time last night, I tried to install a script that was designed to reduce the load to the server created by the increased number of blogs running on the Blog Peoria Project. That increased sever load was knocking offline all sites using this shared server.

Unfortunately, as soon as I installed the script and activated it, my site became completely unusable. I manually deleted the files I had uploaded and removed any changes made to filed that already existed. The problem only got worse.

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I’ve been spending a lot of time the past two days making a pest out of myself on the WordPress MU user board trying to solutions to various issues, including missing pics, the mysterious script that causing a redirect on any site using Widgets, and dreaded splogs.

The re-direct script will probably vanish when I upgrade the site on Tuesday (be warned).

After the upgrade, I’ll be hacking some files to stop the creation of spam blogs (thanks Andrea).

The missing pics issue continues to vex me.

UPDATE: It is looking like BuddyPress won’t work well on sites that already have a bunch of blogs running.

Askewed News is coming back. I swear. I needed to find some software to open a “zipped” database. I’ll get her posts loaded back up sometimes tonight hopefully. I thought the backup database was corrupted (which would be BAD). It turns out it was my compression software. I’ll have it uploaded as soon as I can find some time. I planned to do it today, but there was breaking political news.

UPDATE: The upload was a success and everything is working fine as far as I can see. Again, my apologies.

Instead of a static blogroll that required your hard-working admin to manually add new members, this site now lists the top 50 active blogs, in order of their most recent update. I hesitated to do this before, because spam blog creation was so heavy, such a list would be almost exclusively spam blogs.

Contact me, and I’ll tell you how to do this on your Blog Peoria site, provided it uses Sidebar Widgets.

Yep. There are some big changes going on around here. More to follow.

Henceforth, anyone who wants to sign up for a blog or just register as a user will have to get past a simple verfication system. It’s designed to keep spambots from creating fake blogs.

I’ve tested it and it works. If you have trouble creating a blog or registering, just let me know by replying to this post.

I cannot call up any page associated with Peoria Pundit blog withotu getting a white screen. I can get to the control panel just fine. In the past, the host has been able to fix the problem. No new plugins are being used, in fact, I’m running about one/third of the plugins I once ran. A trouble ticket has been sent. It’s 1:30 in the morning. I’m going to bed. I’ll see if it’s fixed by the time I wake up.

I’ll be posting periodis updates on my Twitter site, which is designed for this sort of thing.

UPDATE: Nevermind. Went back up after server people cleaned out some things.