i was stumbling late tonight on stumbleUpon and came across a neat blog for those of us using the phpBay pro plugin for wordpress.

Click image for larger view.

it's the blog of melissa eaton and her site is dedicated to talking about the eBay affiliate network program and the phpBay pro plugin.

so the cool thing about this plugin is that once it is installed (in the usual manner) all you have to do is activate it and it will start tracking all of the search terms used in your blog's search box.

you just click to get the report, which tells you which terms were searched for, how many hits each term got and even if terms were losers and got no results.

the losers might be telling you what users expected to find and did not on your site, so maybe it's time to start blogging about those topics too.

the search meter plugin's author is bennett mcElwee and can be found here at wordpress for download.

i came across a great new (and i mean very new) course on how to harness the power of stumbleUpon to increase traffic to your blog or web site.

Click here to view more details

it is a free course if you want it a chapter at a time, paid if you just want to zip through all 20 chapters at once without waiting.

the course is called stumble rush and is offered by caroline middlebrook. you can sign up directly for stumbleRush here and/or go to caroline's excellent blog.

i'm already up to lesson #2!

after many long months of avoiding upgrading my wordpress blog i finally decided to take the plunge and upgrade from wordpress 2.0.5 to wordpress 2.5.1

i was really worried that my site would break or that many of my plugins would not work anymore. well, guess what? i'm still here and so is my blog.

i decided to download and install the wordpress automatic upgrade plugin and see if an automated solution would work easier than me trying to update all the files manually.

wow, this plugin works great. i have a self hosted wordpress blog and the only thing that did not work correctly was the re-activation phase of the plugins. i had to go in and spend 15 minutes activating the plugins i wanted to use.

here is what they say it will actually do...

Wordpress automatic upgrade upgrades your wordpress installation by doing the following steps.

1. Backs up the files and makes available a link to download it.
2. Backs up the database and makes available a link to download it.
3. Downloads the latest files from http://wordpress.org/latest.zip and unzips it.
4. Puts the site in maintenance mode.
5. De-activates all active plugins and remembers it.
6. Upgrades wordpress files.
7. Gives you a link that will open in a new window to upgrade installation.
8. Re-activates the plugins.

It did all this with no hitches except for number 8, where i had to do my manual bit.

I'm going to use this plugin on all my wordpress blogs! thanks keithdsouza and ronalfy.

well, on june 20th, 2008 i was laid off from my e-commerce position with hitchfinder.com.

my family has been wonderful and supportive. i have not been depressed at all due to the upbeat attitude of my lovely wife.

i have no regrets. it was a very good learning experience and i took a lot of knowledge away from the job, plus a really cool 24" iMac computer and the adobe creative suite cs3!

what have i been doing since june 20th you might ask.

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well, i have finished my freelance web site gushindesigns.com and am almost finished with my new business card. i have designed and opened a brand new web site called appleproductsdepot.com, which combines web design, affilliate marketing and eBay.

there is also a second one of these eBay affiliate marketing web sites that i am currently building that is centered around old and new cameras, both film and digital. i am still into photography and i want this one to be a bit more interactive and it will probably concentrate more on vintage camera gear than newer stuff.

and i have been going to a number of meetup.com meetings on subjects like joomla (a content management system for web sites), wordpress, eBay and various internet entrepreneur groups.

i have also been more active selling products on eBay than i have in the past, with 30 current auctions running. i am trying to liquidate a comic book collection i bought many year ago for a good price and have already made my original investment back so the rest is gravy as far as the comic books go.

there are a few opportunities i am checking into for web design work full time as well, but more about those if anything happens with them.

lately i have been trying out a few new affiliate marketing ideas to see if i can increase my income online.

in the past i did get an affiliate payback for getting a new customer to sign up for web site hosting with my hosting company, 1and1.com.

click image for larger view of the 1and1.com web site.

it was a customer that i was (and still am) working on their web site. they are a married couple that have the site joiededeux.com and they were looking for a hosting company with a better deal than the one they were using.

i have been using them for years since i was in college, in fact, i got my first 3 years totally free on a special deal a fellow student turned me on to.

my banner on the right will take you to them and i will get an affiliate payout for being the one that sent you to them. no cost to you. they also have some of the least expensive domain name prices of the big name services at $6.99/yr.

i am also starting up the eBay affiliate program too.