I rarely post items of a personal nature on this blog, but it's been a super tough day here with the blog! It started at 11:30 pm last night with the installation of a new package to help the blog run smoother and load faster. The installation worked perfectly, but unfortunately the WordPress plug-ins I had working hard behind the scenes to keep 900+ posts functioning didn't like the installation. So at about midnight, this blog died, and hopes of returning it without having to manually rebuild 900+ posts and pages began to dim.

Thankfully, my "day job" requires me to work all nighters every so often, so I was used to problem solving in the early hours of the morning. By 5 am, I had Find Cheap Bargains back online and ready to help you guys find a few bargains!

In between, I realized that some of the plug-ins I had were actually harming the blog's speed, so those are now gone. Some plug-ins failed to work after I restored the blog back into submission, and are still gone. But I think that might be for the better too, because I've found newer plug-ins that seem to produce better results for you, our visitor.

I learned a few lessons in between my heart attack at midnight when I thought my site would be down for a couple of days: #1 is to not install packages on "day job" work nights! So, any updates to this or any other blog I own will on Friday or Saturday night (but not this week, I'm too tired). The #2 thing I learned is that no matter how many plug-ins I throw at a problem (in this case the slowness of this site), the problem might just lie in the plug-ins themselves. And #3 is to try and remember to deactivate the plug-ins one by one to see if any are the culprit before going nuts, and attempting restores. I could have saved myself a lot of time.

For those of you wondering what the problem WordPress plug-ins were, they were YARPP (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin) and W3 Total Cache. YARPP is honestly a good plug-in for small sites. However, with my multitude of categories, posts, and tags, it just can't keep up, and started hampering my ability to use this site. I'm sure it hampered many users as well.

W3 Total Cache is not a bad plug-in at all, and in fact the problems I had with it were of my own making. If I had deactivated it prior to installing opCode, then I believe everything would have been fine. So don't take my word for it on whether these plug-ins will or won't work for you because your setup could be completely different than mine (VPS, CDN, and the new opCode cache module).

At this point, I've still got a bit of work to do because the change over seems to have broken the front page to where I can only show 1 new post at a time. The search is also a little bit messed up. I had posts that I had written at the top so you could browse the reviews, but I can only show one post at a time, and it breaks the rest of the page. So I moved the eBay and Amazon links up to give you something to see in your searches. I hope to have these fixed tomorrow...

...but for today on an hour and half of sleep in the last 38 hours, I think I'll go take a nap. I'll be back with reviews again on Sunday morning.

P.S. I know I have some faithful subscribers to this blog, so I want to just say THANK YOU! for reading this rambling post!

B. Daniels is the lead review expert with Find Cheap Bargains. B. was more than likely the person responsible for the hands-on review of every product on the site. He also spends time searching for sale bargains when not conducting and writing the reviews.