If you’re seeing this error, I’ve hopefully got a solution for you!

Over the last 4-5 days, I’ve been literally locked out of my WordPress admin because of this “fatal error”.

After launching my Rockstar Marketing Series, this of course would need happen. If you’ve been following my series on SEO & now PPC, I’m sorry I haven’t posted in bit but I have a good reason!

When I upgraded my version of WordPress to 2.8.2 I received this fatal error message. I was able to see the frontend homepage, posts & pages but whenever I tried to login to dashboard or to even edit a post I got an error like this:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 71 bytes) in /home/theblogb/public_html/jrfarr/wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 824

I of course started Googling on how to fix the error. I tried and tried to get into the database and find the bug. Based of other peoples experiences there were a few solutions but nothing was working for me.

What’s the Solution?

Step 1: Find wp-settings.php and at line 13, increase the memory limit from 32M to 96M. Or whatever number suits your fancy. You’ll be looking for the memory limit section of this file like this:

if ( !defined('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT') )
 define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '32M');

Again on line 13, change it from 32M to 64M or 96M, etc.

Immediately after increasing the memory limit I was able to login without any errors. You can of course, leave your memory limit that high and you most likely won’t have anymore issues. But then you’ll find that  your site will start chugging pretty slow as it’s trying to allow too much memory at once.

Step 2: Deactive ALL plugins  & Re-Activate.

As you begin re-activating each plugin, change the memory limit back to the original 32M and see if the error comes back. Eventually, I found that the “Lifestream” plugin was causing the error after I had upgraded to WordPress 2.8.2.

After deleting the Lifesream plugin and setting my memory back to 32M, I was good to go.

Now what?

One thing to always remember with WordPress, is you can’t trust all the plugins that are available. Use them at your own risk.

And Finally, I can get back to the new Rockstar PPC Series and the rest of the Rockstar Marketing installments. Hopefully, if anyone else has the same problem, they’ll find my solution useful.

Stay tuned as I get back on track with the Rockstar PPC Series.

Short Snack Version: Don’t want to read through the whole post? You’ve got 2 options then. Watch the video below or scroll to the end & read my 3 points on why MailChimp has got it going on.

Over the past 3 1/2 years I’ve been using WordPress as my CMS. I think I can honestly say I love WordPress more than a friend. Is that weird to say? On top of that, I’ve been using Google Analytics as long as I can remember.

Anyway, today I found a brand new WordPress plugin built by Crowd Favorite for MailChimp. The WordPress plugin is called Analytics 360 WordPress Plugin. They just made it possible to manage WordPress, Google Analytics & your email marketing campaigns all in one central location. Yeah I know, it got my attention too!

What’s MailChimp?

Essentially, MailChimp is another email marketing service. You can send newsletters, manage your subscribers, track campaigns etc.

For the past 2 years I’ve been using Aweber and been totally satisfied but over the past few months I’ve been been following MailChimp and their clever marketing campaigns. I’m always impressed and intrigued with the company as a whole.

I had an account setup with MailChimp but just didn’t want to spend the time switching my email marketing services.

MailChimp’s Analytics 360 WordPress Plugin changed that.

Got a few minutes? Here’s why I made the jump.

If you didn’t feel like watching, that’s cool. Let me break it down real quick why I switched and you should seriously consider testing MailChimp out.

1. All-In-One Place: My favorite thing about the WordPress plugin is I can access my Google Analytics & my email subscribers, all while being logged into my WordPress admin. That’s just plain dirtyness right there.
2. Value: Is your list 0-100 subscribers and you only send out a few emails a month? Awesome, then MailChimp is $Free.99 If you need more, then checkout MailChimps pricing here. It’s pretty dang cheap. Like dirt cheap.
   
3. Are People Listening? Best part of the plugin hands down. On the days you send out a newsletter or publish a blog post, it syncs it to your Google Anaytics so you can see if your traffic was increased. It’s a good way to see if the content your pushing out is really grabbing peoples attention.

Download & Install the plugin from WordPress

Download Analytics 360 WordPress Plugin: Click Here

It seems like since tag clouds are getting more and more popular with WordPress blogs everyone is getting those mixed up with their categories.

You should choose your blogs categories carefully.  Not that I am some self-proclaimed “blogging pro” (haha) but I do know a bit about site functionality and allowing your visitors an easy way to navigate your site.

I don’t know… maybe I shouldn’t jump the gun like that but don’t you agree with me?  I mean some blogs are just getting ridiculous with their category list.

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Top 5 WordPress Plugins Ya’ll!

I thought it would be helpful for people to have something like this if you’re using WordPress.

These plugins are more for SEO, functionallity and usability of your site.  Having these wordpress plugins will help with SEO efforts, spam and of course the “end user’s” experience.

Obviously the Top 5 are my opinion but I would love to hear any feedback or suggestions on other wordpress plugins that should be in the list. Maybe I can post another one that is the “Top 10 WordPress Plugins”

Here we go… Top 5 WordPress Plugins.

1. Ah yes, the All in One SEO Pack. Love this plugin.

Some features:

• Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
• Generates META tags automatically
• Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs
• For WordPress 2.3 you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
• You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.

Download the All in One SEO Pack.

2. Google XML Sitemaps – Easy 1 Click Sitemap Installation.

This is a very important wordpress plugin for any blog.  This should just be required for crying out loud!  It gives your site the ability to display a nice little road map for the search spiders to crawl through your whole site.

This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

Download the Google XML Sitemaps

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I was on WordPress.org today asking a question on a forum about the Audio Player plugin.  Of course I got side tracked and started snooping around the site right.  We all do it.  Anyway, I found an interesting post on the development section of WordPress.org.

It looks like the Theme Directory is going to be revamped here, wordpress.org/extend/themes/

It’s been a long time since themes.wordpress.net stopped accepting new themes. Since then most theme authors have been distributing their themes from their own sites, without a good centralized place for people to browse, search, comment on, and rate themes. With the success of the plugins directory, we’ve wanted to have those same benefits in a theme directory. Today is the day we start making that happen, with the introduction of wordpress.org/extend/themes/.

I thought this was cool enough to let all of you know.  It will be nice to have one structured, legit wordpress theme destination.

I will still be featuring WordPress Themes on my site to help you all from having to digging through the masses of WordPress Themes they have on there.

Good luck finding your Themizzle!