The above title sums it up for me. I have not written a single post since the beginning of May here on Sage Blogger. I have fallen behind on many other projects I was passionate about.

While I can write long post describing my agony, you will probably get way much better gist of things from other bloggers who wrote about my situation in the recent weeks and months: Trace Richardson, Andy Beard and Greg Swann just to name a few.

Internet and the blogosphere in particular had brought me new friendships and opened new opportunities. Some of my new friends I look forward to meet for the first time in Boston at the Affiliate Summit. While others I may never meet in person. My life has been truly enriched by these friends.

I have also learned that the Internet and the blogosphere can be easily used to damage the reputation of others. No I am not trying to compare myself to Sam, Scott, Gary, Shawn or Jim and to say that my situation is far worse.

The remarkable part of their situation and mine is that perpetrators thought they can fool everyone. The truth is once you begin to engage in stupid activity, you tend to make stupid mistakes.

I think every one who plans to ever succeed on the Internet should take Gary’s advise to heart. Be real, interact with people and most of all do not lie to yourself. But you better hear it from Gary himself:

Before I get to the subject of this post, I have to tell you what is my impression of Matthew Mullenweg, aka the #1 Matt on the internet. Matt is either extremely busy or extremely arrogant man. How can I say this without meeting him in person? Well… I have been trying to get in touch with Matt in regard of an urgent matter without success since Monday. I used the contact form, e-mail, commented on his post in hope of getting his attention and finally called his number (877.273.8550). I was not able to reach him, and I am starting to suspect his ignoring my attempts to communicate. Hopefully Matt will prove me wrong. I understand a man can be very busy to run Automatic the company behind WordPress. For goodness sake, get yourself a secretary if you can’t take care of “communication department” on your own.

No I am not trying to stalk Matt. All I want is for him to take a look at http://vladzablotskyy.wordpress.com – which by the way does not belong to me. Then I want him to take a look what sort of Yahoo! Answers the above blog refers to. Yahoo! removed the offensive material and it is obvious that the creep found a new heaven at WordPress.com.

Matt, I hope you will make the right decision. And for goodness sake, hire a secretary! I don not believe you are an arrogant man, but if you do not answer valid e-mails and do not return calls, it’s an impression some of us can get. Oh and pleeeaaassseee do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.

Evidently StumbleUpon has been doing some heavy duty spring cleaning, banning some users from the system. I would generally pass this kind of news without paying too much attention to it. However, there is one thing puzzled me a bit. Namely their PPC advertising. I advertised using this option a little. I don’t remember spending more that $200 on their ads due to the low conversion rates.

So StumbleUpon wants their users to submit pages about dogs and cats and and then they offer you to create a PPC campaign to drive traffic to those pages. But if you submit a page that actually is made to make you money, you are braking their TOS? Are you kidding me? I don’t understand the logic. If you do please enlighten me.

Here is one more account for you to ban http://vladtheaffiliate.stumbleupon.com – I probably have broken your TOS, besides I don’t need your traffic. You can have it all.

I lately have come to realize that all the posts about StumbleUpons quality of traffic are bunch of BS. If their traffic was so good people would exit AdWords in thousands. The truth is StumbleUpon’s traffic does not convert and can actually hurt your AdSense earnings. I also have not seen a single conversion from their PPC. I don’t even know why do people even bother using their PPC. Spend that money in AdWords at least the traffic from Google converts better.

I guess you can call it a rant day???

The snapshot to the right should speak for it self. That’s right I have updated my WordPress installation to the latest version. While several plugins are not compatible yet with the latest version of WordPress, Semiologic Extract Terms Plugin being one of them, I am still glad I went ahead through this upgrade.

This is the first time ever that I have upgraded the WordPress to the latest version long before it became available via Fantastico. In fact I said goodbye to Fnatastico for good. Unless you are hosting your blog with Bluehost, Hostmonster or FastDomain, you probably have not heard about Simple Scripts. You can on my other blog about initial impression Simple Script made on me.

I have to say that ability to upgrade your scripts within hours of them being available on the Internet sounds like a sweet idea.

Just a quick tip. If you decide to test the Simple Script, before doing anything else back up your databases as well as your current installations. If upgrading a installation made by Fantastico, do not opt to create new administrator and new database. Just fire up the script and at the end replace the new wp-config.php with the one you backed up, or enter the information needed to connect to your database in wp-config.php file.

On a personal note. I do hope many other web hosting providers will integrate Simple Scripts into their control panels. Feel free to point your own web hosting provider to Simple Scripts. I can’t praise enough Simple Scripts. This new way of installing and upgrading self-hosted platforms like WordPress will come very handy around the times when “crucial security updates” will be implemented. Unlike Fantastico, Simple Scripts will have the latest versions available for installation within hours, not weeks.

And of course as always, since this upgrade took place less than an hour ago I ask you to please report to me any bugs you may encounter.

I have always been a big fan of Hittail. Hittail saved me thousands of dollars, not only by brining my websites to the top 10 position on the search engines for some quiet competitive keywords but also by helping to optimize my PPC campaigns. PPC campings really was a “side effect” for me. I noticed that if I optimized a page to Hittail’s suggestion, I could then maintain very low bids on the same suggestion without compromising the quality score. Not so long ago I signed up for a paid account with Hittail, at $90 a year I believe it is a steal.

When Darren from Problogger mentioned 103bees.com in one of his recent videos, I was immediately reminded of Hittail. I knew that I had to try this site. I have only been testing 103bees.com since yesterday, but I can see some very promising features. It offers a particular report called “top questions”. In essence this report provides you with information on how the keywords used to find your website are also used in the question queries. I have no idea how do they hey do it, but this information can be very useful if you write a lot of “how to” articles. In fact 103bees.com has already provided me with an idea for a “how to” article.

I am not ready to give up Hittail just yet. It has a proven record as far as I am concerned. 103bees.com will have to prove it’s effectiveness.