My microwave gave me a nice error today.

So I decided it is time to finally implement the Ultimate Tag Warrior. I am not a php wizard, but I am patient and eager to learn new stuff, both of which help a lot when installing Wordpress plug-ins. Although all the plug-ins come with instructions I am often experiencing difficulties.

Adding tags to my posts was easy, but creating a tagcloud wasn’t. I was able to create a tag archive page which would display a tagcloud (following the instructions), but that wasn’t quite what I was looking for. I wanted to display my tagcloud in my dynamic sidebar which uses widgets. So I put the php code in the (empty) Text1 widget, but it turned up empty. So I tried adding list HTML tags, which didn’t help either. After some googling it turns out that you cannot put php code in your widgets. But of course there is a widget to help me fix this widget problem.

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I have tons of blogs and sites that I read on a daily basis. So a few years ago I started using Feedreader, a nice free RSS-reader, but I am not totally satisfied with it. It doesn’t allow any control over how often it updates my feeds, some posts are not displayed right and it has this annoying tendency to stay minimalized.

Since Firefox 2 came out I started using their new option the Firefox Live Bookmark. Instead of static bookmarks you can now subscribe to pages with dynamic content such as blogs. However, I don’t like the display, look, feel and handle of the Live Bookmarks e.g. it just displays the header title.

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After I added all my papers and pictures again I decided to make a backup. For some odd reason something went wrong during the backup. Don’t ask my how, why or when. Suddenly my site didn’t show up at all. Nothing. After resetting reading permissions on my server things seemed to be working again but with a default Wordpress theme. How odd is that? I changed back to the nice CoffeeSpot theme and reactivated my plug-ins. So now I am crossing my fingers.

I am actually kind of scared of making another backup but I am going to be brave and try again. I am planning on adding some new plugins and features such as the Ultimate Tag Warrior.

Yesterday I noticed that some of my pictures were gone. Everything seemed to be alright on the front page, but there were no pictures in the post pages. I think this happened after I installed the WPG2 plug in which “seamlessly” integrates Gallery2 into Wordpress.

Wether WPG2 is “responsible” or not my whole Wordpress upload directory is gone! So bare with me while I upload all my photos and papers again…

Note to self: BACKUPS are IMPORTANT!

• Lorelle on Wordpress: Backing Up Wordpress
• Wordpress: Backing Up Your Database

Google is still maintaining it’s strong number one position in the search engine landscape. Microsoft is trying to get back by launching it’s new Live Search service, but are they strong enough to overthrow the almighty Google? This is one of the questions I asked myself for my BA thesis. And of course there are still Ask.com and Yahoo! (which is focusing more on social search).

These big media conglomerates are dominating the search engine landscape and there seems to be an endless media concentration going on. What is the impact on the access to information when only a few players dominate the market?

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