Beatportal.com, the daily blog journal run by the folks at Beatport.com, where kind enough to run my latest Netmix Global House Podcast in the Community feed section. You can check out the posting here.

Many companies are now looking to users to generate content for their blogs. Hiring bloggers is an expensive proposition against revenues. If you’re traffic doesn’t cover the cost of the hosting and content production, then it’s smart to look to the user community to develop content for a web site. We may be doing that ourselves very soon!

On another note, we’re moving away from Podpress for Wordpress as a Podcasting plug-in. It seems the developer is no longer supporting the application since 2007. As far as we can tell, Podpress has become extremely problematic, conflicting with more recent plug-ins, to the point that it breaks the plug-in repository in your Wordpress admin. We found the new Podcasting plug-in. When used in conjunction with a Feedburner_Feedsmith plug-in, we think it works quite nicely.

Podcasting supports iTunes, but it does not have links to the other podcasting web site featured through Podpress. It also does not host a download link with its player, nor does its player show the number of downloads. A bit disappointing, yes, but do I really need to tell people how many podcasts have been downloaded? Or, is that just a bit of ego on my part? I’ll go with the ego and forgo displaying the number for now. As long as I know what it is and that number is in overall subscriptions, I’m going to say that’s more important to Netmix growth over the long term.

That being said, my workaround was to simple. I added a text link under the Podcasting player provided by Feedburner to allow anyone to subscribe to my podcast feed. That way, it will ping users who have subscribed to the podcast with updates, in the same way that Podpress functions.

In a nutshell, I think we’ll be better off for the time being. Feedburner is quite a powerful way to organize and distribute feeds. For Netmix, that’s another great analytics tool, which compliments our Google Analtyics and GetClicky accounts.

If you’ve stumbled across this post, Netmix Media is the parent of Netmix.com. The company consults to media & entertainment organizations on web strategy, including blog and site development, rich media application development, Internet marketing and promotion and a host of other services. Contact Netmix Media if you need help with your web site or blog.

Many of you may be wondering why I’ve been so quiet over the last few weeks? The answer: lot’s of reasons!

Okay, let’s start with the fact that my Wordpress blog broke. That’s right, it broke after I tried using a plug-in from a 3rd party developer to backup my blog’s database. After I ran the backup program, I couldn’t (for the life of me) login to the admin to post anything new. Oh, I tried upgrading again. When that didn’t work, I started my online search for an answer. One I actually never found.

I spoke to php/mysql guy and he wasn’t sure why I was getting “500 Internal Server Error” warning from my server. He suggested I simply add an asterisk after the file name of a plug-in in the plug-in folder to see if one was breaking the site. Sure enough, the first one I changed, “database backup,” was the culprit. Well, at least I thought so. It did allow me to finally log into the administration tool to look around and see what else was wrong.

I went to check the plug-in administration tool, which quickly returned another 500 Server Error. “Huh?”, I thought. Maybe there was another plug-in acting up. I perused the window of my Fetch FTP client to see which one would I choose in the hopes that it would bring everything back to life. I added an asterisk at the end of the filename for the Podpress folder and voila, entry was granted! Podpres is an important plug-in that handles podcasting on the site. I’d received a recent email from someone on Going.com looking for a mix, which said that they couldn’t download from the URL. Now I know why.

While I was trying to fix the issue, my 2 GHZ MacBook Pro–the one StarStyle kindly gave me as a parting gift when they LAID OFF OUR ENTIRE MUSIC DIVISION in December (we’ll get to that later)–went on the fritz after installing OS X 10.5, also known as Leopard. Over the course of the last three weeks, I installed Leopard approximately 10 times after experiencing delays, crashes and other problems. I backed up (very important) and wiped my drive to reinstall. I tried archive and install. I tried everything! You can’t even imagine the frustration. So much lost productivity, especially in the middle of a job search and working on my school projects.

In the middle of the last install, the computer froze at 19 minutes remaining. I shut it down, which was a no no. When I booted it up, the screen showed me the dreaded flashing question mark and folder. A few choice words later, I finally gave up, jumped in my girlfriend’s Honda Accord, and rushed it down to the Genius Bar at the Apple store in the Westchester Mall. Passing off my problems to one of geniuses, I was hoping they’d have some magical solution, but that was too ambitious. I had to settle for sending the computer to Cuptertino for an Apple Care tech to have a look-see. They may have to swap out the the drive he told me.

My optical drive was on the fritz anyway, so I agreed to have that replaced at the same time. Fortunately, to do so is about $300, which is far cheaper than purchasing a new computer altogether. I’m also hoping they grant me some kind of credit for having this problem occur AFTER I installed Leopard, which I’d purchased only three weeks earlier. And, after I called into Apple Tech support and NEVER received a return call from Reggie (ext. 7390). Reggie told me he’d call me back as he’d heard there was an issue with MacBook Pro 2Ghz machines. He said he needed to check in with the engineers to find out more. After four phone calls and left messages, I gave up on Reggie and decided the store might be a better option. Reggie, if you’re reading this, thanks for your excellent customer support.

Now, I have my fingers crossed that I’ll get my work machine back and leave my music computer, which is running absolutely fine on Leopard (it’s a 2.16 Ghz) to my mix show production. Being a technology enthusiast has its ups and downs. Believe me, I’m well aware. Especially, after purchasing Adobe CS3 Design Premium so I could start on building out my new consulting site, Netmix Media. I don’t want that package or Office 2008 on the same machine as my music apps, so I’m biding my time until everything is back to normal.

As for the blog issues with Wordpress plugins, I’ve figured that out too. I learned that there are a few plug-ins that are not playing nice with the latest Wordpress upgrade. Those plug-ins are as follows:

• WP Stats
• WP Stats Widget
• Adsense Manager
• Wordpress Database Backup
• AMM - Amazon Media Management Extension
• All in One SEO Pack
• WP Ajax Edit Comments

Now, these plug-ins may be working for others, but they’re not working for me. I’m going to try to delete and reinstall each to find out which ones have serious issues. For the time being, I’m going to steer clear of these plug-ins, unless someone has any information to the contrary.

With things finally getting back to normal, I can start blogging freely again without worrying about “500 Internal Server Error” issues and the like. Stay tuned for more.