Handy Tools

WordPress Plugin Upgrade Failed? Here’s How to Fix It

by Melvin · Jan 8, 2011

Updating your plugins from your admin panel in WordPress is very handy. That’s why when this feature went broke here in this blog, I went crazy finding for solutions on how I can solve it.

If you search Google on some solutions for it, you can find a lot but the problem is it can just confuse you to death. I myself was stucked with this problem for weeks, if not months. I know its funny but I became really frustrated because I couldn’t find the solution that would work for me.

So in this blog posts I am going to list different ways on how to fix it so that if a blogger or whoever gets stucked with this problem too, he can get to try the following.

WordPress Plugin Upgrade Failed

This problem is basically when you cannot update your plugins using your admin panel in WordPress. Unfortunately you can also not install new plugins using the admin. Here’s the typical look of it:

Here are the following solutions for it:

Solution 1. Chmod the upgrade directory to 777

You can do this either using file manager in CPanel or using your FTP access. Basically you have to go to the upgrades directory inside wp-content, and then change its permission from 644 to 777. What this means is that you’re permitting the upgrade directory to read write and execute without any restrictions. This have seemed to be working solution for most people.

Solution 2. Delete upgrade directory and recreate it.

If the first one doesn’t work, then try to do this one. Basically you just have to delete the upgrade directory and then recreate it.

Solution 3. Edit class-wp-filesystem-direct.php

This one came from this blog although this solution is quite a bit complicated and scary so you may want to make sure you have performed your backups just in case something wrong happens.

Basically it involves adding this line into the mentioned file above:

function mkdir($path, $chmod = false, $chown = false, $chgrp = false) {

// safe mode fails with a trailing slash under certain PHP versions.

$path = untrailingslashit($path);

if ( empty($path) )

$path = ‘/’;
   if ( ! $chmod )
      $chmod = FS_CHMOD_DIR;

Solution 4. Disabling Ask Apache Password Protect Plugin

This was the solution that worked for me. Oddly enough there weren’t that many people who talk about this so if the three solutions above didn’t work for you, then I’m pretty sure this fourth solution will, just like how it worked for me.

So if you have this plugin, all you have to do is disable (or delete it) and then update your plugins. I don’t know why but I just cannot afford to use a plugin that will bring me a problem like this so I don’t think I will ever use it again.

That’s it. You can try each solutions one at a time and hopefully one of them can help you solve this wordpress plugin upgrade problem. If you have questions then feel free to ask in the comment section.

OnlineProfits.com Reopened its door, for FREE! (wtf?)

by Melvin · Jun 10, 2010

Internet marketing is a very broad topic. In fact, some school are either having an exclusive course on this subject or integrating it to their marketing course. The internet has been around for quite some time so expect it to have more and more impact to our offline ways.

Anyways, if you can remember Daniel Scocco last year launched his own internet marketing course called OnlineProfits. For those of you who are not familiar with it, it’s basically like a university course on the subject of internet marketing. It contains 24 huge modules which would take you from the start up to the advanced modules. Those modules are the main core of the program.

OnlineProfits.com Relaunched, now for FREE

Yes, thats not a typo or whatsoever. I actually had to refresh Daniel’s announcement to make sure I’m reading it right. His main reason is that he wants to have as much people as possible to gain access to his membership program. Whether that’s true or there’s something fishy remains to be seen. 😉

There’s actually a catch though. In order to get lifetime access to the OnlineProfits Membership area, one must sign up either to the hosting plan of his partners for this program. The partners I’m referring to are Hostgator and Hostnine. The deal is that if you sign up to them via Daniel’s affiliate link, you can get the whole membership site for free.

Now I understand that each and everyone of you already have your own hosting but as Daniel said “sparing an extra $10 to get a $325 membership program” is the best deal and if you don’t find it lucrative enough, then the program may not be for you. To be honest, I didn’t mind paying $10 to get this membership site that is this good. Actually if you use the code “onlineprofits” you will get your hosting almost free ($0.01) but then you have to sign under Daniel’s link. So it’s definitely a no-brainer.

OnlineProfit Overview and Comprehensive Review

From a hindsight, Daniel Scocco’s membership program claims to be the most complete internet marketing resource on the web. It contains all strategies that you will need to do to anything you desire, may it be blogging, affiliate marketing, information marketing and etc.

So as I’ve said, the program contains 24 content-packed modules, from the rudimentary history of internet marketing up to advanced tactics like link building and social media.

Each lessons consist of 500-1000 word article specifically targeted to the certain topic. Another good thing for me is that there is this handy “play now” buttons on most lessons. This is also downloadable so just in case you want to listen to the mp3 while on the go or whatever, you can. Btw, my computer resolution wasn’t able to capture all the modules through the print-screen function so to see all the modules and the topics inside them visit onlineprofits site below:

www.onlineprofits.com/

Altogether the lessons are so-packed in meaty content that I don’t have an idea how Daniel was able to produce all of this. It can be a bit overwhelming for you to look at it, but since its presented in modules, its good to take the lessons one at a time.

All Star Faculty Mentors

One unique feature OnlineProfits.com features is their All-star cast faculty. Again I don’t have any idea on how Daniel pulled this people as mentors for his membership program. Some of the lessons inside the program were produced by them depending on their expertise. For instance, Zac Johnson on Affiliate marketing topics while Hamlet on SEO related ones. I never had seen any other membership sites that have experienced people like them on board as mentors

Live Case Studies & Several Add ons

What’s unique with OnlineProfits.com recently is the addition of live case studies. This case study is produced by Daniel himself so this is one exciting way to really understand how the lessons should be applied. It contains exactly the steps as well as the monthly stats that Daniel would be providing as well.

Like any other program, this does also have several addons to inflate the value more. One of which is the tools section. If you’re not new with internet marketing then most of the tools here are probably not new to you but still there are some nice ones like domain name ideas generator and stuffs like that.

One of my favorite place aside from the lessons in there is the Resources Page. In that page one can find all the resource free exclusively for OnlineProfits students. It contains useful stuffs like list of free and paid web directories, list of dofollow blogs, list of dofollow social media networks and etc. I also like the free premium wordpress themes that are given away. These aren’t just your cookie-cutter free template. In fact, the premium ones you see on WooThemes and iThemes are given away here for free w/c is pretty amazing.

Lastly are the library and social clubs. The library is just basically a compilation of all useful (or useless) articles on any niche. It also comes with a MRR rights so just in case you want to resell them, then you can totally do it. The social clubs on the other hand is just simply a club for promotion. Just like a community for retweeting articles, digging, sending it to stumbleupon and etc.

How to Avail the FREE access

The entire program costs $392 before and I’m sure those who joined the program before will be ‘not-so happy’ with the fact that its offered for free now.

Again you have to sign up to Daniel’s partners which are HostGator and HostNine and you have to do under his affiliate link. After signing up all you have to do is email him you’re invoice number and in less than 5 minutes you can immediately access the program.

Verdict & am I recommending it?

Internet Marketing is a big part of online business. Actually for some people, it’s all what online business is all about. I was fortunate enough that I had experience and that I started young. But even with that, I still took the course.

I know most of you here are bloggers and there’s a good chance that since you’re reading my blog, you’re serious with what you’re doing. You hear me preach a lot that blogging alone is not enough, if you don’t have enough knowledge on internet marketing and you’re not a competent marketer, chance is you’ll not succeed.

I rarely promote info products and membership sites here in my blog and even though I consume a lot over the past few years, I made a point that I wouldn’t promote it here if it’s not possible for my readers to avail it or study it. With OnlineProfits, not only you can get it for free. But it also gives you a good and organized lessons on how things work and why they work. I’m sure most of us here learned internet marketing through experience and with this program, it only aims to sharpen up those previous learnings and organize them in such a strategic manner that we can use them immediately.

Be a part now of the highly-touted OnlineProfits membership program for FREE and start learning internet marketing from people who actually do it and not just teach it. Let me know!

Bloggers, Its Time To Forget those Metrics

by Melvin · Jun 3, 2010

Each and every blogger who is just getting started is usually being taught about the different metrics and how each of those play a certain role on their blog. The metrics I’m pertaining to are: the Google Pagerank, the Alexa rank, the Technorati authority, the feed subscriber count, and even being included in those top 100 lists. From a hindsight, isn’t it exciting to witness each metric of your blog improve and attribute it to your blog’s growth?

Well, we cannot dismiss the fact that these metrics change as our blog’s popularity change but we should always not be too concerned with that or else we are going to harm our blog. I remember when my blog was just getting started. In 2 months I received a pr2 ranking and was like jumping up and down with excitement. I was really really ecstatic back then and thought I was hardcore.

Not too long after that, the blog was slapped back to pr0. I remember I even did a rant post claiming that Google was making a mistake of slapping my rankings. Funny enough the reasoning behind that was simple. I was selling links, doing black hat type of stuffs and just being bad. In short, I was not complying with Google”s guidelines.

Today I no longer care with Metrics

I bet that even people tell they don’t care that much with those ranking stuffs, they are still baffled. That was what I was like back then. I mean I was puzzled why these blogs have good Alexa rank yet they receive very few to no comments at all. Why is mine just in the 200k?

The main reason I actually stopped caring about those things is that its not helping me and my blog at all! I mean instead of focusing on producing good content to my readers, I would instead search ways on how to game Alexa or instead of marketing my blog more, I would research on why my blog is pr0.

Eventually I said “buggy this, I would stop being concerned with all these stuffs, instead I would just do what I would need to do”. And that was like the turning point for me from being an overly-conscious metric guy to being a real blogger.

If you’re still unaware, it’s about building relationships.

I always like to tell newcomers in blogging that its about connecting to your readers, building that relationship. It doesn’t happen overnight but instead on focusing on useless things, we as bloggers have to focus more on making that bond with other bloggers.

The thing about blogging is that it is such a friendly atmosphere. In fact we treat other bloggers as peers when in fact they are our competitors. That doesn’t happen in real world businesses.

So that’s the main point of this post. the metrics are good, sure it can feed our ego well, we can boast it in forums claiming ‘hey I have a better pr than you” or whatever. But at the end of the day, blogging is a person-to person relationship, not technology and script driven activity.

Can you sell your own product just because you have a high Alexa and pagerank? Does it mean you’re credible just because you’re in the top 500 list of some random guy? Naah! But when you build those relationships with your readers w/c are your potential customers, you don’t even need a thousand of people a day. All you need is a fraction of that. Believe me.

Enhance Your Search Functionalities With Lijit

by Melvin · May 7, 2010

One thing a lot of my readers notice since the start of this year was the different looks of the search functionality here in my blog. It’s not the built-in WordPress Search nor is it the one from Google, it is from a third party website called Lijit

What is Lijit?

First and foremost I’d like to clear that this is no way a sponsored review. In fact this post was in my drafts for like four months already so i might as well just work on this one.

Anyways one problem always with the search is that the built-in WordPress search isn’t as comprehensive and accurate as many of us want. Top bloggers like Darren Rowse and Jeremy Schoemaker agreed that it’s not really the best blog search engine available. On the other side of the fence, Google’s Search for blog may be a perfect alternative but making it work perfectly is quite a challenge since you need to tweak a lot of the algorithms and do all those geeky stuffs.

Lijit is MY best solution since its been very newbie-friendly while still having that robust functionality. It sports that web 2.0ish look while really not cluttering nor slowing down your blog.

You can get started by heading up to lijit website and basically signing up, its free anyways! Once done you’d do all the basic stuffs like putting up your blog’s name, feed and etc. The one unique feature with Lijit though is they incorporate your other social media accounts within their social platform. For instance, the search could return any article I’ve submitted through digg or stumbleupon etc. It can also fetch some of the posts from the blogs in the blogroll. Overall the add-on features are just exceptional.

Personalization is also as easy as hell. You can basically match the color schemes of the widget to your blog, modify the elements, use your own size and etc. There’s also an option wherein you could make your search results either on a light-box effect or have it on a different page instead.

Overall I really like Lijit and heck I wouldn’t write this long ass post if Im not recommending this one for you. 🙂 It’s not the perfect search but absolutely the ideal one for bloggers. It’s widely used by popular websites like the lolcats network and other famous sites like Problogger, Lamebook and etc. How about you? What do you think about Lijit? Have you had any bad experience with them?

Widget Logic Plugin, Strategize Your Sidebar Widgets

by Melvin · Apr 10, 2010

All bloggers make good use of the sidebar in their template. Whether it is 2-column, 3 column-sidebar or just multiple sidebars, our aim as a blogger is to make good use of them all. Thankfully for us, WordPress has made it so much easy with the use of widgets wherein all we have to do is drag and drop things.

Of course just like anything, people sometimes abuse the use of widgets and sidebar elements. How many bloggers have you seen cluttering their sidebar too much? Or how many useless widgets usually do appear on most sidebars? The ease of using widgets have enabled bloggers to become a bit trigger-happy with putting so much at the same time.

Widget Logic WordPress Plugin

The topic above leads us to the widget logic plugin. What widget-logic does is basically lets user use conditional tags to control the pages where a certain widget will appear on. It sounds a bit basic but trust me this one is a helpful plugin.

Looking at my blog you would see that some widgets that appear on home don’t necessarily appear on the other pages and vice versa. If you’re more technically literate, you could actually play more with the conditional tags to achieve your desired result.con

For example here in my blog, I don’t display the top commentator widget anywhere outside the home page basically because the home page is the strongest page in my blog. Another is my “Blog Marketing for Fame” eBook widget wherein I don’t display it in the index page primarily because I already have it in the middle sidebar part. But when you go to the posts and pages, you could see it at the top most part of the sidebar. You can do your own variations depending on how you prefer it.

Its all about maximizing each and every part of your blog

When I went with the blog’s redesign, my aim is to maximize every space without annoying/cluttering my readers’ mind. So with widget logic plugin, I was able to really implement things that I want. It gave me the flexibility of mixing and matching different elements in the sidebar.

How about you, have you used this widget already? If yes, maybe you can tell me some of your implementation techniques and tips. If not, I would highly recommend using it. Check out the widget logic plugin page.