Twitter Problems, Internet Frustrations

Let’s start with technical difficulties.

As much as I love the Internet, the technical side of things really freaks me out sometimes.

You put a lot of work into networking a marketing and really you have no control over anything.  We have worked hard on establishing ourselves on Twitter and to have to start all over so close to leaving for Asia would be a real bummer.  We had decided to focus on Twitter as our main form of networking. We thought that it would be the best and easiest way for us to connect with other travelers and Bloggers while we are traveling.  We did a good job too.  We have developed great friendships, Topsy lists us as “highly influential” we have gained a nice amount of followers quickly and frankly, we love Twitter.

Last week we noticed that someone posted an ad from our profile on Twitter.  It said something like…”I just signed up for a rewards program” and it had a link to website.  We quickly deleted it because first of all we didn’t post it and second we didn’t want someone clicking through to a malicious site from our name @theplanetd.  We were nervous that someone had hacked our account so we quickly changed our password and deleted any third party applications that we didn’t recognize in our connections.

Everything was fine and we felt better…

but here is where we think that troubles began.

We didn’t change our password with the 3rd party applications that we left on our Twitter account and one or more of them was obviously trying to gain access.  These third party sites are Tweetdeck, wefollow, twit this etc.  If they keep trying to access your account without the valid password too many times, Twitter will lock your account.

So here is what we did…

1. We could not sign in from the twitter home page.  But when we clicked on the “forgot password” icon we could access Twitter through the link that they sent to our email.  However, once we logged out, we were locked out again.
2. If we went to Twitter help we stayed signed in so we could access our account for some reason, so we did that.
3. We could not find anywhere on the support page where we could let Twitter know that we were having problems.  We had read that you could send them a ticket, but we could not find a way to contact them anywhere.  And we went of the support section with a magnifying glass.  There is just no way to contact them. We clicked on every link from that page and even if your click on contact us at the bottom of the Twitter feed, it just goes right back to the help page when you click on support.  If anyone knows how to get a hold of them, I would love to hear it.
4. We went into our connections settings and revoked access to all 3rd party applications for now.
5. We signed back in after waiting an hour and everything worked fine.

So we are back on Twitter.  However, we have Tweetdeck etc. disabled for now. I don’t want to sign back into them yet. I think that I will just give it a few days.

I will keep you posted if it happens again.

Other Frustrations

Does anyone else have a problem with Throttling on their site?  We have points where people throttle our account to the point that it freezes our site.  We use Bluehost and at times we have spammers hit our site hundreds of times in a minute causing the site to slow down or stop.

Once our site was down for quite a while so Dave went online with Bluehost.  They told him that certain sites were basically attacking ours and that we have to block them.  What we do is go into our Bluehost Control panel and click on CPU Throttling.  Sometimes it is through the roof.  They told us that we have to block those ip addresses that are hitting us.  Man, that is a lot of work.

Just to clarify…it is not the usual spam that Askimet catches, this doesn’t affect us at all,  it is bandwidth throttling. Which I still don’t really understand.

Do other people have this problem with different providers? Are we just having bad luck this month?

I must admit, that Bluehost’s customer care is excellent however.  Whenever we have an issue and contact them, they are right there to help us out.

Speeding up our site

I also really need to work on making our site faster.  People could say that it is the featured video in the side bar, but many people have video streaming from youtube and it doesn’t slow them down.  We have thought that maybe it is because of the featured content slider on the home page, but a lot of people have that as well and their sites are fast.

We have cleaned up errors and we have installed super cache but that hasn’t sped up the site.  We are definitely needing to solve this little mystery.  I don’t like waiting for a blog to load, so I definitely don’t want people to have to wait for our blog.

So anyway, that is our week in review this week.  Just annoying technical difficulties.

Outside of the blog things are moving along well.

• We have been moving our contents to storage and have made quite the dent in our apartment.  It looks like moving day is going to be pretty manageable.
• We are bringing in our Visa Application for India tomorrow
• Doctors visits are done.
• Optomitrist – ?
• We have bought our new camera and camcorder – That is a post for Dave to write about in the near future
• We are all packed. I know it is early, but we don’t use anything that we are bringing with us.
• All medications and first aid – ?

For some reason I am getting busier at work as time gets closer.  On one hand I enjoy making the extra money, on the other, I have a lot to do and work is really getting in my way. Dave is busy as usual, so time is just flying by.  We are both feeling a little anxious.  No excitement brewing yet. We are too busy checking off the to do list.

So that is what we have done this week.