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.

I’ve been braining storming with my advisers, and a solution should be coming soon on what do do about the frequent outages. The change will probably be somewhat less drastic than I earlier thought. I need to wait to hear from some local folks, then I’ll make an announcement.

It’s essential that a change be made, because the current situation isn’t working for my host, it’s not working for me and not for readers and fellow bloggers. I want to grow this site, and it can’t happen when I can’t even open admin pages every time I try.

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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As some of you may have noticed, I’ve added some content to the sidebars of most member blogs. These additions include:

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