Funny how Murphy´s Law is getting in the way this week, planning a more intense promotional project to go “public” with and the exact same week I am experiencing major problems with my computer and especially accessing my squidoo account.

No Dennis… not being hit here with the “worm” (wasn´t that an April Fools Day joke??) and no Alex, I didn´t end up putting my laptop in the fridge. I wish solving this would have been as easy as just cooling my laptop off (note: I am not suggesting anybody should put their laptop in the fridge!!!!!!!)

So what have I done these past days, apart from starting up my squidoo lens project according to the One Week Marketing Plan and submitting articles left and right to different directories and what not?

I have spent 5 hours chatting with firefox tech support, going through the normal turmoil of trying all the “basic moves” to “de-bug” firefox, then trying to actually have the support guy understand what my real problem was and finally the last 2 hours of my chat doing all sort of maneouvres to locate if my problem had anything to do with firefox.

Well… 5 hours to figure out that firefox wasn´t at the base of me not being able to log in to my squidoo account, which I really needed to do to in order to follow all the OWM steps completely.

Plus being an aries (count down has started for my birthday wheehaaa) and vary hard headed, whenever something is not working I just can´t stop before I have figured out exactly what is going wrong. So, I could load the initial squidoo home page, even could get as far as the login page and then when putting my login details and wanting to enter my dashboard … nothing happened … all I got was a blank page …

First day this happened I just thought, oh well, I just keep working doing off page SEO for the lenses which should really be the biggest focus anyways, so I kept writing and writing. Second day though (yesterday, I still couldn´t log in and it started bugging me because there were still things I had to do on my lenses. I figured I´d better do article marketing first, but when finishing that part of my day I really felt I had to find a solution, resulting in all sorts of maneouvres on my laptop, my browsers, my internet connection, the lot.

Then I spent 5 hours with the FF support, so at least ruled that out, and another 2 hours on the phone with my internet provider… that always stresses me because it seems they don´t have a clue what they are talking about anyways so I was about ready to either throw my laptop against the wall or in fact follow Alex suggestion and cool it off …and I still could not enter.

By this time I had asked several friends to check if my lenses were still “alive” which they are, but I couldn´t even send a bug feedback message to squidoo because even that page showed me nothing but a blank page..

This situation does make me think though about a lot of issues I will be writing about in the near future and hopefully find out what the real cause is.

So far it seems though that I have figured out what is going on, but until I know for sure I better shut up LOL

By mid-day today I was so stressed out about it, that I completely turned off my laptop and close the door behind me, not doing anything but enjoying the Spanish spring sun and just relaxing to cool down and put things in perspective.

For those following this case study, you might have noticed a new button on the top of this page, “Case Study”. At present it is still pass word protected, sorry for that, but the work I have put into this project will be laid out over there, plus hopefully the number of sales it generates and the protection will come off in a few weeks time, but I will update you guys on that of course.

That´s about it for now, you win some battles and this week I´ve been losing some from technology, but the fight isn´t over till you-know-who sings.

I must admit, I love the use of plugins because they just make life and blogging a lot easier and I am using quite a lot of them (maybe too many).

The only down side is to find the one doing exactly what you want or figuring out a way to make them do so anyways. The latter is not really my strenght resulting in having played around with quite an extensive list of plugins.

Yesterday, when doing some decluttering of my computer I came across the huge collection of plugins that I have tried and tested, and decided to post on the ones that I use here, giving some linklove and credit to their designers.

Add Sig by Dagon Design
I am using this plugin at the moment to add my signature to the bottom of all of my posts but there are of course other things you can do with this plugin without having to change things in the core code. It supports up to three different signature templates at the moment and eventhough it just might not be all that useful, I like the personal touch it adds to my posts.

Akismet by Matt Mullenweg
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments” and make sure you do this once in a while since not all posts Akismet filters out is spam. It isn´t 100% bullitproof, especially not since spammers are becoming more sophisticated these days, but it sure helps!

All in One SEO Pack by Uberdose
This one automatically optimizes titles for search engines, generates Meta tags and avoids duplicate content found on wordpress blogs. If you are running wordpress 2.3 you don´t even have to look at the options, but you can of course override and title and set any meta description and keywords you want.

Anti-Sociable by Andy Beard
Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites so make it easier to be bookmarked in case a post was really enjoyed. I am actually using the hacked version called Antisocial as to not lose too much linkjuice on each post.
Commentluv by Andy Bailey
Plugin to show a link to the last post from the commentator’s blog in their comment. Just activate and it’s ready. Currently parses with wordpress, blogspot, typepad and blogs that have a feed link in the head section of their page. I like this plugin a lot; it has already leaded me to many interesting blogs I would not have found otherwise.

Contextual Related Posts by Mark Ghosh
Show last 5 contextually related posts on single blog posts, making it easier for visitors to find related material if they liked the one they just read, but it will also bring forward older posts.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator by Dagon Design
This plugin generates a fully customizable sitemap for your WordPress powered site. This is not just another XML sitemap plugin, but rather a true sitemap generator that is highly customizable from its own options page in the WordPress admin panel.
To see this plugin in action, visit my sitemap page.

Dofollow by Denis de Bernardy
Disables the rel=nofollow attribute in comments. Now, I have been running this plugin on my blog for a while and almost changed to another plugin that will disable the nofollow attribute only after a commentator has already made some more post. But I have not decided about it just yet,…

Enhanced WP-ContactForm by Joost Valk
WP Contact Form is a drop in form for users to contact you. In the message it sends to you it gives the page the user visited before the contact page, as well as the original outside referrer. It can be implemented on a page or a post. It currently works with WordPress 2.0+ and you can see it in action here.

Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold
This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog that is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer
Save your wordpress blog from getting tagged as ping spammer by installing this plugin. Now the cool thing about this one is that you can actually date posts that you have written and only ping once they are published online. Plus, you can edit your post without the danger of continuously pinging every time you change something in an already existing post. Make sure you register the plugin in order for it to work and start avoiding spamming pingers and getting blocked from their services.

Subscribe To Comments By Mark Jaquith
This plugin allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry, making it easier to keep track of certain comments and dialogues.

Top Commentators Widget by Lorna Timbah
Adds a sidebar widget to show the top commentators in your WP site, another way to show I appreciate active commentators. Adapted from Show Top Commentators plugin.

Top Posts By Category by M&M
I am using this plugin to easily show the posts that were most commented all together on one page, but you can also set it to show the most visited posts in your blog. You can see it in action here.

WordPress Database Backup by Austin Matzko
After having had a problem with another blog, losing all content because of my own stupidity, I have this plugin installed to make sure I get a database backup emailed to me weekly so I won´t have to worry about that anymore.

WWW Redirect by Justin Shattuck
Redirects variations of identical domain requests to a consistent uri to ensure www.memyselfandiblog.com and memyselfandiblog.com are not regarded as two different domains by the search engines.

YATCP by Joachim Praetorius
This plugin allows for the ability to comment on a comment, making it easier to respond to different comments and start dialogue.

So, there you have it… 17 plugins I use, seems like quite a lot to me so I was wondering, how many is “normal”? Any plugin I really should not be living without that I don´t know of?