Today’s post is all about the mysterious business of SEO.  If you’re new to blogging then you’ve probably seen the term floating around the Internet and wondered what the heck the fuss is all about and whether or not you need it in order to survive online as a blogger.

Let me start by saying that the term SEO stands for search engine optimization.  What this means is every time you search for something for example “red tennis shoes” on Google, any webmasters who run sites that match your search words “red tennis shoes” want to be as close to the top of the first page of results that Google or any other search engine comes back with.

Have you ever had a look when you’re searching in Google at just how many sites are returned for your keywords? It can be an enormous amount of websites that often number in the millions. Since the Internet has been around since the early 90’s, there are literally millions of websites out there that span all kinds of topics and interests but they can’t all be the number one search result right at the top of Google’s results page.

So how do webmasters get to the top of Google?  That’s where the optimization part of SEO comes in.  Webmasters who run sites or blogs that match the keywords you type in to search engines will optimize their sites to ensure that they are right there at number one.  Why do webmasters use SEO techniques?  The bottom line: money and sales.  If you’re a webmaster with a product to sell, then you will be extremely motivated to optimize your website or blog to fit somewhere on the first page of search engine results.  But what if you’re a blogger who just writes for yourself or your friends?  Or even just a hobby blogger not interested in money?  Then learning search engine optimization techniques is probably not a huge concern for you as the financial aspect of blogging most likely doesn’t concern you. However, if you are looking to supplement your income through your website, then you should really know the basics of search engine optimization even before you put up your first site or blog.

The topic of SEO is a very broad one and encompasses more than just a few tips and tricks.  There are even folks who have written whole books on the subject of search engine optimization and courses available online.  If you’re serious about getting to the top of Google, it’s worth investing in a good seo book or online course to help your site reach the top of Google and stay there.

This graphic was made using some very cool old horror movie brushes for Photoshop. The original brushes are just black stencils but with a little tweaking I made my graphic look like an old celluloid magazine cover complete with bar code, which turned out pretty neat if I do say so myself (and I do lol). Unfortunately I haven’t really had the opportunity to use this graphic yet so it’s yours. Here is the psd file for Note: There is a file embedded within this post, please visit this post to download the file. so you can play with the different layers of the image including changing the text. All text for this image is on separate layers so you can turn them all on or off in Photoshop as you see fit.

This next graphic is a silhouette of a woman in meditation and it’s pretty simple in it’s design. I also have a psd file of Note: There is a file embedded within this post, please visit this post to download the file. that has an extra layer of neon lighting that you can mess around with.

I also have a nice little lime and tangerine colored ad space graphic that is perfect for implementing in web templates where the affiliate ads should go and it’s perfectly sized already at 120px by 90px.

Lastly, I have a website header graphic that is 1005px by 353px. It’s golden yellow, it’s flowery, it’s got a nice-looking egg right in the center of it, and an rss feed graphic in the corner. Sorry I can’t find the psd file for this one so it’s not layered but maybe someone out there can make something out of it anyways.

All these graphics are yours to do what you want with and if you subscribe to my feed you will be notified the next time I release some free website graphics into the wild. Enjoy the graphics and until next time, stay cool people…

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When I upgraded my Wordpress version to 2.7, the ability to schedule posts in Wordpress 2.7 no longer worked. I could still schedule a post but the scheduled time would come and go with no future post being published. All that I could see in the Wordpress dashboard was “Missed Schedule” no matter what I tried to fix this problem.

The Missed Scheduled Wordpress Posts Problem

After searching for a solution to Wordpress missed schedule problems it was clear that no-one seemed to know exactly why it was happening and how to fix it. The problem of future posts not working in Wordpress happened to some folks who upgraded from version 2.6.5 and not to others, and it happened to some folks who changed web hosts and again not to others. The Wordpress missed schedule error has also been known to happen to folks on one or two of their blogs and not on their other blogs. So clearly this issue needs to be resolved in future versions of Wordpress but for now there are a few suggestions that have been offered on the Internet.

Some fixes that were suggested for the scheduled Wordpress posts not working problem:

You can see details of what some other fixes others have suggested as well as my fix in the Wordpress support forum in regards to this issue here

Here’s My Wordpress Missed Scheduled Posts Fix:

I’m a simple kind of chick and as such I downloaded Wordpress version 2.6.5 and had a look at the wp-cron.php file in the root directory as well as the cron.php file that resides inside the “wp-includes” folder. The code inside both files is quite different from the the Wordpress 2.7 file versions. In Wordpress 2.7 wp-cron.php there are references to “local-time” and the doing_cron option is set to zero. This is not present in the 2.6.5 versions of these files. So I decided that it might be possible that if your web server time is off by even a few seconds from the Wordpress official time the scheduled post may not go through. This is because the doin_cron argument is set to zero making it absolutely necessary that your web server and your Wordpress time match up pretty much exactly. Now I could have changed something in the code of these files but since I didn’t want to mess with variables I am unfamiliar with, so here’s what I did:

While this fix may not be for everyone and “Frankensteining” (yes I just made that word up) your Wordpress installation is not the best solution, it is a temporary fix until the next version of Wordpress is released and the issue is hopefully resolved.

I have included for download the two Wordpress files needed to fix the missed scheduled post issue in this post. Click on the download button, unzip the files and follow the directions in this post or the readme file that is included with the two files. Please note that these two files were obtained directly from the official Wordpress repository and are guaranteed virus-free.