In the Fall of 2008 I launched my Menifee Homes blog, a real estate focused companion to my Menifee 24/7 blog. I was hoping to develop a blog that could attract more traffic from the Internet that was interested in buying and selling homes in Menifee, and in turn, introduce them to my Menifee 24/7 blog.

I recruited some local real estate agents to write the blog for me, and in return, give them links to their respective websites, and promote themselves on my blog.

It hasn't really worked. The real estate agents have not contributed enough content on a regular basis to get Google to bring in more traffic. While the Menifee Homes blog is moving up in Google for phrases like "menifee homes" and "menifee real estate", I need more content to generate more keyword variation on Google.

I managed to find another local real estate agent, Cynthia, who might work out for me. She's really turned on to the Internet, and seems determined to make it work for her. Hopefully, the blog will generate more traffic as a result, and build a larger audience-base for her.  

I'm having frustrations with my web host provider, IX Webhosting.

Every so often, something happens over there causing FTP to fail. FTP will connect, but my FTP client is unable to "retrieve remote folder information". In other words, it can't read the files and folders on the FTP site.

This only happens with Passive Mode FTP turned on. And of course, Blogger uses passive mode with its FTP blogs.

I call up IX Webhosting, describe the problem, and they say they can't duplicate it. Of course, I have accounts with other web hosting providers, and I don't get this problem with them. So they tell me there's nothing they can do. Meanwhile, I can't blog on any of the sites hosted by them.

So, I decided to try out Blogger's custom domains.

I moved this domain, "In Your Web" to Blogger's server. I had to delete the CNAME records on my domain registrar, and create a new one that pointed to Blogger.

Everything works good, except that Blogger won't host any of the images associated with my blog template! In addition, it won't host the CSS file.

What I ended up doing is modifying my blog template to pull images and graphics off of the IX Webhosting account, by linking to the IP address. I did the same with the CSS file.

Everything looked good now.

Except however, Mozilla Firefox didn't want to display any images referenced in the CSS File. So, I tried embedding the CSS into the blog template, instead of having the template grab the CSS from a file. Now, it works in Firefox. Weird huh?

I don't like Blogger's blue navigation bar at the top. There's no way to get rid of it. It makes my blog look less professional. So, I'm thinking of redesigning this template in such a way to make the navigation bar display more seamlessly with the template.

So while I have overcome the problems with IX Webhosting, it turns out I still need them to host the blog template images.

Ok, I actually tried uploading the blog template images to Picasa, thinking I could modify the template to pull the images from there. But no! Picasa won't allow me to upload several of the images. Go figure!!

I know I could probably upload those images to Flickr, or Photobucket, but my sense is that even those photo-sites will eventually figure out that I'm abusing their bandwidth.

You can never achieve a perfect world.