After a bout of panic that I had lost an hour of writing, I hit the back button and discovered that, thankfully, my post was still there. But how was I supposed to get it published?

The biggest problem at this point was my own technical prowess. I know that may sound backwards, but it’s true.

The fact that I have an engineering and programming background led me to believe that I could solved it.

“Honey, I Think You Should Pull Over”

It’s kind of like when you know in the back of your mind that you’re lost, but you don’t want to admit it. Your spouse prods you to pull over and ask for directions, but you just know that you’ll find your way again any second so you pridefully continue wandering.

After a couple hours of pure frustration I finally turned to Google. A simple search for 404 error WordPress publish immediately revealed the answer. To sum up the rather geeky explanation, a security setting on the server was causing my post to be scanned for threats before publishing. Believe it or not, the word “from” in my post was what was causing all the havok.

Apparently that is used a lot in database commands and so my post was being blocked just in case it was actually someone that was up to shenanigans with the site.

Heroic Support

At that point I had learned my lesson. I didn’t want to mess with the technicalities of the issue. I brought up a live chat window with the self-proclaimed “heroic support” team at Liquid Web where I host this site.

In less than five minutes, they had it solved. I have to say, Liquid Web‘s support is indeed heroic. I highly recommend their services. (And yes that is an affiliate link to their site, but I would recommend their services even without the commission.)

The Moral of This Story

What’s the moral of this story? There are a few.

1. I need to get out of my own way so I can create more content for this blog.
2. If you run into the mysterious ’404 not found’ error when trying to publish a post with WordPress, contact your support and direct them to this article.
3. You should have a host with great service that you can depend on (and that won’t just point the finger back at you when there’s a problem).
4. Before you hit Publish, always select your entire post and hit Ctrl-C (Command-C on Mac) just in case. That way you’ll have your work saved if things go awry.

Over on my Podcasting Underground I’m dealing with this ongoing frustration and I just learned other bloggers are faced with it as well. I go back into my WordPress admin and change back to my chosen theme, but then sometimes a soon as one day later it reverts to the default.

For the last several weeks I assumed it was a problem with my host (that I’m in the middle of changing now anyway), but now I’ve had confirmation of two others on two different hosts that are having the same problem.

I’m planning to look into this some more. Has anyone else experienced this? Anyone have a solution? Perhaps WordPress 2.5 will solve it.

In my case I have done both. I have this blog on one site and then I have The Podcasting Underground podcast on another site. In the case of the PodCamp NYC site that I set up, it’s all on one site and blog. Same with Internet Business Mastery. Leesa and I both do this by using a category in WordPress to separate out your podcast episodes.

I’m not sure there is a definite right answer. Right now I take the stance that it depends, neither answer is ideal.

Leesa takes the stance that you should use two separate blogs (I should point out that this could also mean two different blog installations on the same site/domain). She points out that if you put them both on the same blog:

1. You have too many chiclets/links in the sidebar offering all the subscription options (e.g. podcast only feed & text posts feed)
2. The podcast posts become hard to find since they get buried in all the blog posts
3. Even if you use a “podcast” category, not everyone is savvy enough to click on that to get the audio content

The problem of too many chiclets/badges for subscription (#1) is one that I have run into myself. I don’t think that I have solved it, but I have tried to simplify it. If you look at the PodCamp NYC site you will see that I have two set of copy and links to get people to subscribe. It’s not ideal, but it’s not horrible.

I have another idea that I have not tried yet, but it would be to use a cool widget that you can see on the TopRankBlog in the upper-right hand corner. When you mouse over the feed icon it gives you all the options. You could have one of these for the blog feed and one for the podcast feed.

The problem of your podcast getting buried in the blog posts so people can’t find them (#2 and #3) can be solved by using a navigation bar link labeled Podcast. You can link this to the podcast category.

I did this on the PodCamp NYC site. Go there to give it a try and see how I handled that. The user doesn’t need to know that this is just a category within your blog, they know that when it’s clicked they see the list of podcast episodes.

The reason I hesitate to take a solid stance on splitting the two up is that I see advantages to consolidating them when it comes to branding and traffic generation. Sure you can simplify the use of site real estate by putting them in two different places, but now you have two different places to generate traffic for and send people to. This may or may not be a good thing depending on your goals and branding strategy.

I’m glad Leesa brought this up. Does anyone else have thoughts on this matter? What are you doing to handle a blog AND a podcast? Do you have them in the same place or do you use separate blogs? I want to here your experience and insights.

If you’ve ever used the Amazon Associate Program to create affiliate links on your site, you know that it’s not the quickest process. Well the process just got a lot easier for WordPress users.

I’ve been using a WordPress plugin for awhile called WP-Amazon. It definitely speeds up the process of finding products and grabbing an affiliate link to include in your posts. You can do it all from within your WordPress admin screen while you are writing. The WP-Admin plugin just got a lot better with the release of version 2.0. Now it has a slick Ajax interface.

The Amazon Associate Program isn’t going to make you rich anytime soon, but when it’s this easy to insert affiliate links into your show notes and blog posts, you may as well pepper some in for books and other products that you talk about.

The nice thing is, even if someone goes to Amazon from your link and buys something other than the product you recommend (even in the future), you still make a commission. I’ve made money from selling electric razors….go figure.
Go here to download WP-Admin and to watch a screencast demo of it in action.