If you are new to the internet ("newbie") and considering paying the ridiculously priced Semiologic Reloaded, then my advice is don't do it. Contrary to the developers sales blurb, Semiologic is certainly not for newbies and cannot be setup in a few clicks. My recommendation is to use WordPress and become comfortable with it, before even considering using Semiologic. I would also recommend people wanting  to purchase Semiologic, to reconsider their decision, considering it's exorbitant price, lack of support and it's constant upgrade and software problems.

Semiologic dances to the constant upgrades of  WordPress and when you have a few sites, upgrading all the time is a real pain. Learning HTML, XHTML and CSS is a much better option, where you can develop your own sites and not worrying about upgrading every time the WordPress developers have a brainwave, and who notoriously release the upgrades too early, and customers are left to deal with the problems of that too early upgrade.

I have left this site and Semiologic Reloaded Skins open for members to access the tutorial videos and Semiologic Reloaded skins. I am no longer taking members and will close down when this domain name expires. You can check on any latest updates through my own personal site Maxx Kremer dot com.

Now that we have changed the URL the meta tag is now gone (surprise, surprise). But let's wait and see how long before it returns. I have disabled membership, as we have more than enough members for Semiologic Video Tutorials. We have incorporated Semiologic Reloaded Skins into this site, so they are both under the same roof. We have permanently lowered the prices of all skins to $39.95!

This is THE reason we started Semiologic Video Tutorials, to provide Semiologic users with useful and indepth information about how to use Semiologic Reloaded and get the most benefit from it's SEO power. To stress the point, we noticed a long time Semiologic forum user complaining about the lack of basic information. Here is a screenshot of the thread (click the image to enlarge).

Not a member of Semiologic Video Tutorials?? Sign up now and get ALL the information on Semiologic Reloaded you require, when you want it and in large video format.

It is a fairly simple process, that can be accomplished in 5 minutes or so.

Bookmark Me Plugin:

Open the Bookmark Me plugin, under wp-content/plugins/sem-bookmark-me/sem-bookmark-me.php in a good editor and go to line 405. Delete line 405 through to and including line 408. That's it! Close and save.

Subscribe Me:

To remove the "what's this" link in the RSS subscription plugin, go wp-content/plugins/sem-subscribe-me/sem-subscribe-me.php. Delete from and including line 302 to 305.

I hope that helps those who have asked how to get rid of that link.

I will be splitting the videos into two, whereas there will be a newbies and advanced section. I will also be including a lot of SEO videos to help people understand how to get good SEO benefits from Semiologic and their website.

This upgrade will take about a week to 10 days to complete, so please be patient. If you have any suggestions for videos that you would like to see, please let us know.

I have updated this site, with apprehension, and it took me nearly all day to complete. If you have an established site, then please be careful when upgrading and DO NOT use the installer, just use SFTP, to uploaded the files. Problems I experienced with upgrading were:

• stripped some images (not all, thank goodness), which I needed to replace
• the new SEO plugin would not allow me to alter titles, keywords or descriptions in posts or pages (reinstalled the previous version as a temporary workaround)
• Can't move widgets around (example, menu items cannot be relocated)
• Mediacaster has no dimension capabilities (cannot be re-sized), nor any idea how to include into a post, page or sidebar

These are just some of things that I have experienced. But I am sure the developers will get things sorted in the next week or so.

Conclusion: There seems to be only cosmetic changes, where the widgets panel has changed for the better. I know the developer has basically rewritten everything, but I was expecting more. It has been a lack luster event, considering the rants and raves about its release. It has been a long wait that has been marred by bugs and problems from both camps of  WordPress and Semiologic.

Because of the bugs and the long wait for 2.8.1 to be released, Semiologic Reloaded v6 beta and Semiologic Pro will not be released until 2.8.1 is released. PLEASE DO NOT upgrade your version of WordPress now, as it will create problems, and more than likely, erase some files and folders.

The question is not, will you be hacked, but, when will I be hacked! If you haven't secured your site, then you will be hacked, it is just a matter of time. Hackers use many methods to break into your site and these areas need to be secured. Having security on your site is imperative. Secure it or lose it!

I have written an article about securing your sites, that is a must read. Read the full article…

Their are a lot of different ways to protect a directory, using .htaccess rules, but are pretty messy, especially if you don't know what you are doing. But there is a simple way to protect any directory. You just need to create a blank index.html file and drop it into that directory. That is it! Try it and see.

To create a index.html file, open notepad, go to File>save as and save it as >index.html and save as type>All Files. Upload it to your directory. A simple solution that fixes a security issue.