Archive for the ‘Insider View’ Category

Why WordPress Plugins Make It the Most Popular Blog Software

Saturday, March 20th, 2010

As the most popular blogging software, especially open source software, in the world today, WordPress stands head and shoulders above the rest. While there are plenty of reasons that WordPress is so popular, it is the simple customization factor that a great many bloggers appreciate. While you may not know how to customize WordPress, you really don’t have to be a coding expert in order to change even the most basic WordPress blog into what you want. The community centered around WordPress is vast and many of them offer free plugins that take the hassle out of having to code one yourself. Since they are free, you can use them even if you are an amateur blogger, but if you are trying to earn money with your blog then you will like some of the plugins designed to help you do exactly that – rake in the big bucks.

Whether you want a WordPress photo gallery plugin or a way to quicktag, WordPress has it all. Let’s take a look at a handful of great plugins you can get started using today:

Google Sitemap – This is a super handy plugin because it allows you to create a map of your site, like the name suggests. What good is that? Well, it makes it simple for your users to navigate your entire blog, but even more importantly it lets search engines like Google know where all your posts are so they get indexed more quickly. That means more traffic for your blog.

MobilePress – This helps you get your blog mobile friendly, a very important aspect to have in this day and age of smartphones. The ever popular iPhone visitors will have a much easier time checking out what you offer this way.

WordPress Backup – This is a plugin you are not going to want to miss because it really is important to back up your site – regularly! After running a few blogs, you will learn why you need backups, but hopefully not the hard way.

Shylock Adsense – For those that want to earn some easy money on their blogs to help cover costs or even earn a profit, this free Adsense plugin is an absolute must. It makes putting Google’s income earning opportunity onto your website a whole lot easier.

RS Discuss – This powerful plugin lets you add a forum to your WordPress blog. Of course, commenting is great but forums give a lot more versatility and encourage people to stick around longer, interact and of course, tell their friends about your blog.

Popularity Contest – This handy plugin will report the most popular posts to your sidebar so that visitors can instantly find the best of your blog. It’s a great way to make sure your star posts are really highlighted. A lot of times that leads to more commenting, always a good thing for any blog.

All in One SEO Pack – This is a definite must if you want to SEO your blog. SEO or search engine optimization, is a term that means streamlining your blog in such a way that the search engines know what it is about and which posts are going to be most relevant to their searchers. Basically, this means you will get more traffic that is already interested in what you blog about.

These are just a few of the best WordPress plugins, but there are thousands more for those who want a truly optimized blog. Keep in mind that if you don’t know how to make a WordPress theme, you can actually buy a premium WP theme, as well. All the more reason to love the world’s most popular blogging platform!

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Tags: how to customize wordpress, how to make a wordpress theme, premium wp theme, wordpress photo gallery plugin
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5 Signs Your Web Provider May Not Care About Your Business

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

In our age of digital opportunities there are a wide array of choices when it comes to not only information, but businesses we can work with. Due to the ease of setting up an online business, the doors have been swung open not only for entrepreneurs with good intentions who really do want to provide the best products and services that they can, but those who are out to score a quick buck with little regard for their customers. It is crucial that you be able to determine the difference between fly by night companies and those that have been established to provide the best quality hosting they can.

Here are five quick signs you can check for when you want to find a web host solution that’s worth your time, effort and the money you have put into your website:

5) Sluggish Communications – This can be one of the most frustrating aspects of a poor web host. The fact is, when you run a website, you need quality customer interaction in a short amount of time. Waiting a few hours or even a day for a response from a particularly large web hosting firm might make sense during certain parts of the year, but if you find that all of your emails end up coming back to only after several days of waiting? Then it is time to move on. As a webmaster, you deserve tech support, customer care and billing help that is rapid. There is no excuse for hosts that need to take up days of your life waiting for solutions. An automated receipt of your email is not real help so don’t be fooled into thinking that the “We have received your email and are looking into your problem” replies are anything other than a machine generated response.

4) Offering Discounts Only for First Time Customers – Any business worth its salt knows that long term, loyal customers are the heart of their business enterprise. This is especially true in the website hosting industry. The true professionals realize that their competition is only a click away and that when you want to leave them, all you have to do is sign up for one of their many competitors. If your web host only offers discounts to get people to sign up and then never rewards them with financial incentives to stay on board? Once again, it is time to take your business elsewhere. After being with any host for a year or more, you should receive at least a nominal discount that is proof the company appreciates your business. If you can’t find information on their site, why not send them an email asking if they offer discounts for long time customers? It never hurts to ask!

3) A Lack of Easy to Follow Online Help – Many webmasters prefer to at least try things on their own before they engage technical support. If you want to be able to set up your site with new software packages, particularly those that are industry standards, then you ought to be able to get custom help documents online in the form of guides or FAQs. Your web host wants your business, normally, so they should provide you with the help you need to get the most from the service they provide. They know that when you succeed with your website, you will be pleased with their performance. If they don’t offer you plenty of self help opportunities then you definitely need to find a host that is willing to put in the work to get these created for its user base.

2) Careless Billing Practices – Mistakes are bound to happen from time to time in any business. A small overcharge is not generally something nefarious and even double billing errors happen from time to time. However, if you continually get billing mistakes or wind up being charged huge amounts of money in bandwidth fees after having no warning from your web host? You guessed it! This is a sign your web host wants to gather the gold at all cost and isn’t concerned about driving you into debt through their efforts to maximize their own profits. You definitely need to jump ship and find a new host – quickly.

1) An Online Reputation in Shambles – This is the number one sign that your web hosting service doesn’t care about your business and it’s also the easiest thing to check before you ever sign up with a company. Do a quick search over the most popular search engines for the company’s name. If you find forum post after forum post, blogs posts and even tweets about the company doing bad business then stay away! A company that doesn’t research its own reputation online or does nothing to satisfy infuriated customers who take the time to complain about it in forums across the web is definitely a company you want to run from just as quickly as you can. Don’t be lured into thinking that you will be the exception to the rule because chances are good you’ll be joining those folks in outrage if you sign up for a company that cultivates an image of apathy.

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Need to Limit PHPlist Outgoing Emails? Here’s How to Do It

Monday, March 8th, 2010

Have you been looking for a way to build a newsletter or other email marketing campaign, but you want to stay within the rules so that you don’t get flagged as a spammer? This is very intelligent thinking and you will find that there are a lot of reasons why the PHPlist alternative works for many people who want to communicate with a large base of customers by email. As large as your email base may get, you don’t want to offend folks by overdoing things and that’s why an important PHPlist attribute ends up being the ability to throttle (or limit) your email sending so that you don’t get yourself banned either from your webhost or anyone else on the internet in this day and age when many are so quick to call an email marketer a spammer.

If other emailing scripts have given you grief, why not let PHPlist import your existing customers and handle the work for you? The wide variety of options you have with the PHPlist attributes available to you are going to allow you a much finer level of control than you will find with other scripts and that is safe for you, plus it’s less obnoxious for your web host and customers, too. Always check with your host for their rules on mass emails to make sure you never violate any rules.

Let’s take a look at how you can limit the rate of speed at which your emails are sent out.

First, find this block of code within the config.php file of your PHPlist installation, using a text editor such as Notepad2:

# batch processing
# if you are on a shared host, it will probably be appreciated if you don’t send
# out loads of emails in one go. To do this, you can configure batch processing.
# Please note, the following two values can be overridden by your ISP by using
# a server wide configuration. So if you notice these values to be different
# in reality, that may be the case

# define the amount of emails you want to send per period. If 0, batch processing
# is disabled and messages are sent out as fast as possible
define(”MAILQUEUE_BATCH_SIZE”,0);

# define the length of one batch processing period, in seconds (3600 is an hour)
define(”MAILQUEUE_BATCH_PERIOD”,3600);

# to avoid overloading the server that sends your email, you can add a little delay
# between messages that will spread the load of sending
# you will need to find a good value for your own server
# value is in seconds (or you can play with the autothrottle below)
define(’MAILQUEUE_THROTTLE’,0);

Here you can see how easy it is to set up your limitations. All you need to do is consider what a respectful size of your MAILQUEUE BATCH SIZE might be and change that zero to a number such as 100 or even 500. Again, your web hosting provider will have solid advice for you in this regard so always ask them first.

When you define MAILQUEUE BATCH PERIOD, keep in mind that this is in seconds. The default is 3,600 seconds (ie, an hour) so that means one batch will get sent out each hour until all batches have been sent. Your batch size was configured in the section we just covered.

Finally, MAILQUEUE THROTTLE should be set to a number above zero. If you put 20 in this section, it means emails will be sent out at 20 second intervals. Check with your host and remember, the reason why you are trying to remain respectful is that you do not want to bog down the server for other people’s accounts that might be on the same server as you are.

This is all you need to do to get PHPlist to work for you at the rate you desire!

Popularity: 1% [?]

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Tags: phplist alternative, phplist attribute, phplist attributes, phplist import
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Want to Create an Image Gallery in Siteframe?

Saturday, March 6th, 2010

If you have been thinking of setting up a website and really wanted to be able to have a more community driven site, then Siteframe is definitely a choice you need to look into. The Siteframe CMS (Content Management System) is much more heavily geared to sites with a lot of users who want to set up their own blogs, send e-mails to each other within the system, and have their own mini sites within your website. It’s a truly light weight CMS that allows you, as administrator, to create the kind of experiences for your users that is going to seriously increase the size of your web community. With Siteframe templates, website owners can customize their sites to look any way they please.

Of course, an image gallery is another important bit for any serious web community and you can do this easily with Siteframe. They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, so this is a great way to get people interested in your site.

The process of setting up an image gallery in this CMS is extremely simple. Let’s take a look at how it’s done:

First things first, meaning you need to log into your Siteframe admin panel using your customary password. Once you’re in, click on the ‘New Folder’ link in the navigation panel. Use that handy drop down box to select ‘Image Gallery’. Once you’ve got that, click ‘Submit’.

Once you’ve submitted your choice, you’ll be taken to a page listing the options that you have when it comes to an image gallery done Siteframe style. As mentioned earlier in this article, this is a very light weight CMS and as such, it is extremely simple to create your gallery, but at the same time you have plenty of options. You can even have these galleries set up in such a way that each of the users on your site can create their own to share with others.

Here is a rundown of the basic options you have when it comes to a Siteframe image gallery:

Folder Name – As you would expect, this is where you name your image gallery. Try for something descriptive that explains what the gallery’s images should be organized around, such as a theme or a specific type of photo.

Description – This is where you describe the gallery and keep in mind that search engines are going to be reading this text so if you have a certain type of viewer you want to interest, cater to the way they would search for your images. Be sure this description clearly states the sort of images you want uploaded to this gallery if you plan to allow users to submit their own images.

Sort Documents – You’ve got a lot of options here in how the images get sorted. The drop down box will let you sort them by date they were uploaded (so you could, for example, display the newest first) or by their titles, etc.

Group Items – This option allows you to have your images grouped according to the way you’ve set them to be sorted. Handy for creating categories of images.

Folder Pages – With this, you can show your folders’ contents as pages.

Public Folder – This is where you decide if you are going to allow your site’s users to upload their own images to this particular gallery.

Max Submissions Per User – You simply enter the number of the maximum images you’ll allow any given user to submit. This helps you avoid getting your gallery stuffed by a trouble making user before you have a chance to sort things out.

Allow Rating – Users can rate this particular gallery if you check this option.

Allow Comments – Do you want users to be able to comment on this gallery? If so, then check this option.

So now you know how to set up your own image gallery using the ever flexible community building CMS, Siteframe!

Popularity: 1% [?]

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Tags: siteframe cms, siteframe templates
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Mission Critical: Backup and Restore CubeCart

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

These days, many online entrepreneurs are finding a huge level of success with the right kind of online retail shop. Since there are so many different shopping cart solutions online, it can get a little bit tricky deciding which one is best for you, but once you begin to look around and see the amount of CubeCart templates available, you might just be convinced that this powerful open source shopping cart solution is for you. Why? Because with you can customize it with a CubeCart skin freely available or even have your own created. This goes a long way towards establishing your store as a real force in the industry that you have chosen to enter.

This crafting of the right brand means you are looking for longevity in your market. Those who take the time to create a solid brand are the stores that stay in business for decades. With CubeCart mods you can expand your product selection and get a very nice list of extended features you can easily plug into your store. This ease of use is what makes the shop system so attractive for those entering the retail sector. The fact that a CubeCart template can be fully customized to suit your exact store image within a few hours makes this shopping cart script a premiere choice for those who want a well made and exceptionally attractive option by which they can sell their products or even services, if they so desire.

One of the main concerns with any website, but especially an online store, is making sure that you have done what is necessary to back up your shop. Downtime means loss of business and no one can afford that. Here’s what you will need to do to back up your CubeCart shop:

1) Log into your web host panel, select your CubeCart database and click on the export option.

2) Select ‘all tables’ and the SQL option. Beneath the SQL Options section, check to make sure that every option selected in the ‘Structure and Data’ section is also selected for SQL Options. Save the file and proceed to the next step [note: this sometimes means hitting 'Go']

3) Be sure to make a note of the name under which you saved your file. It should be a .sql file and you will need this later when you want to restore the database once again. Be sure you select ‘Save to Disk’ before clicking OK. Now your database is backed up in that .sql file you just downloaded.

When you are ready to restore the backup you made (which hopefully you will never need to do this), all you need to do is follow these steps:

1) Choose the data base of your CubeCart installation [note: this method of 'restoring' will also work if you want to reload your store onto a new server] and click the SQL tab, then select the ‘Browse..’ option.

2) Find the .sql file you saved to your hard drive, select it and choose Open.

3) Make sure you have selected the proper file and then click ‘Go’.

4) Now, let’s be absolutely certain this restoration worked by clicking on the left hand side’s ‘CubeCart_Inventory’ table. Then, click ‘Browse…’

5) Finally, you should see all of your products exactly as you had them listed prior to your backup of CubeCart.

There you go! Now you know how to protect your CubeCart store by doing a full back up and emergency restoration!

Popularity: 1% [?]

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Tags: cubecart mods, cubecart skin, cubecart template, cubecart templates
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Archive for the ‘Insider View’ Category

Why WordPress Plugins Make It the Most Popular Blog Software

5 Signs Your Web Provider May Not Care About Your Business

Need to Limit PHPlist Outgoing Emails? Here’s How to Do It

Want to Create an Image Gallery in Siteframe?

Mission Critical: Backup and Restore CubeCart

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