We really should check our blog stats like we check our ATM balances. Since I participated in the Blog Challenge for this month I thought it would be good to share some of the stats from my host. As you know, yesterday I shared how the stats look on one of myWordpress.com sites. But tonight venture with me for a quick , I mean really quick look at some stats on this WordPress.org site hosted by Bluehost.

Now, I am not going to share ALL  of the categories but the few I do share can tell me where I need to improve. Of course after you stop looking I will be looking at all the stats.

Direct address/Bookmark?link in email?Links from an Internet Search Engine

What Search Engines are connecting to this site?

My revelations and future actions

Yes, it is true that most of my action came from Google. But some action also came form 9 different search engines. Two folks used a Social Bookmark! In this case I was Stumbledupon. Actually someone contacted me on Facebook to let me know they Stumbled me. MY ACTIONS? I am going to get busier in those bookmarking sites!!!

Finks from an external page(other web sites except search engines)

external links

My revelations and future actions

I noticed that there is one site that I joined that serves the highest number of links. Here is a little more about them

Tamazu is a categorized collection of blogs. This site is split up into niches so you can find your need in a click! Tamazu has many types of blogs, and we accept blogs in all languages, so don’t miss all last news of the world. For each niche we have top list. Come see Blogger services blogs and discuss!

This site allows you 2 blog submissions per day. But you must do reciprocal linking.

The next highest is Twitter. This is the place that all the BLOG CHALLENGE folks had to hang out to tweet their posts. Now, I am going to sneak over to the month of May to see how it was different. Ha it was only 5 and Stumbleupon was higher at 6 so my action is to keep hanging out in Twitter and submit my sites to more directories.

Finally I will share a f ew of the top posts for this month. Or rather those with the most views. Are you ready?

post with highest views

My revelations and future actions

The post, 10 Top Reasons Why Baby Boomers Should NOT Use Social Bookmarking had the highest views as of the 29th of this month with 360. My decison?

Do more posts with Numbers in the title.

Ok, that is enough for tonight.  This baby boomer must get rest and be up early to walk and prepare for a workshop plus attend a meeting. I hope this motivates you to check out your stats and make some decisons. Of course there is much more so take your time. Have fun!

Baby Boomer hubby and I upgraded nine sites yesterday but crased one. How? We used two separate, but effective methods. One method was using two great plug-ins.

WordPress Database Backup Plugin

This is an excellent, uncomplicated,on-demand backup of your WordPress database. Navigate to Manage ? Backup to get started. By Austin Matzko.

WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin

This plugin allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the
latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions.
Go to WordPress Automatic Upgrade to upgrade your installation Thanks to Ronald Huereca for making the plugin run in automatic mode. By Keith Dsouza.

Bluehost Support

We also used something called Simple Scripts on one of our hosts, Bluehost.   All of our site were installed using Fantastico but we converted to simple scripts because it was current with version 2.7.

It was really easy to convert and then upgrade to version 2.7. But how did we crash one of our sites?

Well it was easy. We neglected to deactivate one of the plugins. In this case, it was the Podpress plugin. One of my hubby’s site’s Crumbsnatcher.com just showed strange, I mean really strange error codes when we tried to go to the site.

Well, rather than panic, cry or take a pill we decided to call Bluehost.   The delivered support at it’s finest. They analyzed the situation and explained what happened. The also corrected it for us. How cool. Now it is true that most hosts don’t support WordPress but Bluehost gives a lot of handholding to help you find the solution.

Of course the other reason I like them is because I can call then if I am at this computer at strange hours.

So, We only have one additional site to upgrade. I saved it , just in case, I wanted to demonstrate how we used Simple Scripts on Bluehost.

Meanwhile, be sure to visit The Word Press Wizard because she did a simply outstanding teleseminar on how to upgrade your site. She reminded us of the things to do to insure our themes, widgets and plugins survive the process.

So happy upgrading!