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Blog Updates February 2010

February 17, 2010 By Jeff Leave a Comment

One of the things that I am going to be doing on this site is monthly updates on the backend of the blog.  It is in these posts that I will be talking about the plugins that I have installed, explain why I have each installed, any tweaks to the site that I may make.

I have a rather selfish reason to be doing this.  I have a habit of continously tweaking a site and not really keeping track.  By documenting everything that I do it will both slow me down, and teach you on what works and what doesn’t and more importantly why.

Since I just completed a major overhaul of the site and have moved hosts this post will not cover everything.  In subsequent Blog Updates I will do reviews of the plugins and talk about the advantages and disadvantages of them.

I am also thinking about a permanent blog brand that I will be developing over the next 6 months.  At the end of this time I will have a new theme designed that will work on top of the framework theme that I have installed now.

The Host:

Well I moved the site from my old host to ThisWebHost. I yelled out to Twitter and a couple of my followers suggested them. I have read as much as I could online about them and they seem to be an up and comer that is either going to grow huge or get bought up by one of the current big players.

I bought the smallest account that they have for this blog for now.  It is just a tester and if I like what I see then I will be buying larger accounts from them and moving my other sites.  This is not an insignifcant task, so I want to be sure that it is the right move so that I won’t have to do it again for a long while.

The Plugins:

  • Akismet
  • Google Sitemaps
  • WordPress Mobile Edition
  • WP Super Cache
  • OIOpublisher Direct 2.0
  • Pretty Link
  • Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form
  • Feedburner Feed Replacement
  • Google Analytics for WordPress
  • Twitter Widget Pro

So these are the plugins that I have installed and activated right now, a lot of them are self-explanatory for anyone that has been around Wordpress for a while, but they are all very basic and with the exception of OIOPublisher and WP Super Cache.  However not all of them need to be installed on every blog, in fact the only plugins that I install on all of my sites are the first 4.  These I will give a little more explanation.

Akismet:

Akismet is a comment spam plugin that comes right from the makers of Wordpress.  When it is installed it takes a look at every comment that someone makes on your site, compares it to a hug DB of comments, IPs, emails, etc and decides whether or not that comment is worthy on your site.

This plugin will save you hours of maintainence on your blog when you are approving comments.

Google Sitemaps:

This plugin is relatively self explanatory, what it does is create a Google friendly sitemap of your site that you can submit to Google using their webmaster tools.  It helps Google with finding the relevant information on your site and indexing what you want.

WordPress Mobile Edition:

This is a newish one to me that I have been using a lot more.  It takes your site and if it notices that your visitor is on a mobile phone it will output a page that is very light and vry easy to use on a mobile.

The importance that I see in it is that it allows the use of social networks to link your site that people may be using on their mobile.  All the major social networks have mobile programs and this allows your friends, follows, etc to click through to your site and not feel sorry about it.

WP Super Cache

This one may not seem that important to the small blog, but you never know when you are going to “go viral” and you want to make sure that your site can handle the load for as long as possible.  There was a couple of times over the years that I either got Stumbled hard or was linked to on Fark that my site died after a couple of hours.  Who knows how large of a lost opportunity that was now.  But I do know you don’t want that to happen to you.

I will review/explain the other plugins in future posts.  Keep reading here, add the site to your RSS reader, or follow me on Twitter to stay current on everything Bluenoser.

Cheers,

Jeff M

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Choosing a Hosting Company

January 11, 2009 By Jeff Leave a Comment

1390670-small Choosing the company that will be hosting your website is one of the most important decisions that you will make regarding your web property.  If you are building the site for a business, whether the online presence of your brick and mortar business, or  a completely online business, then you want to make sure that your website is available when your customers want to use it.

There are some things that you should look for in a host.  I am going to list my preferences as as it goes with control panels as such as I feel that they make the running of a website site easy enough for any one to do.

Customer Service

The hosting company should have multiple ways for their customers to contact the people that they need to.  The company should have a phone number, online "chat" support and a ticketing system as a minimum. 

I suggest trying to chat with the "live chat" a few times to ensure that there is someone there.  It is not acceptable if your site is down by no fault of your own and there is no one online to chat with you in real time.

Uptime

The host should ensure 99.9% uptime as a minimum, and there should be refunds given when this is not reached. 

Before you just take that number you see on the homepage for granted, read the fine print.  If the hosting company measures the uptime over the past year, then your site could be down for 8 hours continuously and as long as the host had a good record up till that point then you are not going to get any refund.  If the uptime is measured monthly you have a better idea on the consistent integrity of the host.

What HAS to be included

There are some things that HAVE to be included in the hosting package before you get started, and this doesn’t matter what the price point is.

  • Disk Space:    At least 1gig

  • Bandwidth:    100 gigs

  • FTP Accounts: Unlimited

  • Email Accounts: Unlimited

  • MySQL Databases: Unlimited

  • Website / Ftp Statistics

  • And CPanel for the backend control panel

    • What you should look for

    Above I mentioned some items that you should have no matter what hosting company which you decide to partner with.  Below are some additional options that all good hosting companies offer with their packages.

    • Addon Domains – This is one way to have multiple websites with one hosting account.  You can add a domain within the control panel and it will be completely separate from the way it looks from the outside world.

    • Fantastico – This is an amazing tool.  It really simplifies the installation of some of the most popular scripts that you will want to have installed on your site, including Wordpress, Drupal, phpBB, etc.  You can install the scripts with 3 clicks of the mouse and then upgrade them with a single click when updates become available and highly recommend it.

    • phpMyAdmin – This is another tool that I don’t think that I could live without.  phpMyAdmin is a user interface for working with mySQL databases.  If you ever have to dig into the database that drives your site then this is something that you need.

    • No Contract – There should not be a minimum time period that you are going to be with the hosting company

    • Money Back Guarantee – There should be a limited time money back guarantee for the service that you are subscribing to. This is important because you want the chance to test the waters without committing.

    • NO SET UP FEES – For a shared hosting account the company should not charge setup fees.  I have run a reseller host in the past and know that there is only 5 minutes of time to set up a new account, and that is if it is done manually.  There is many tools available to automate this, therefore you should not have to pay extra to have the privilege of using someone’s service.

      • Conclusion

      So what does all this mean? 

      It does seem to be a lot of information, but it is usually easy to tell a good hosting company from a fly by night.  One is the too good to be true promises.  These are teasers and are there to get you to sign up and hope to get some money out of you before you wise up and move on.  Early in my online career I was caught in these promises and moved hosts a lot.  It is not fun moving your website, and if you don’t do it just right there is going to be some downtime associated with the move.

      If you want my recommendation, I use Hostgator.  I have used them for the last couple of years and they meet all of my recommendations and a lot more.  They are a large hosting company with a lot of servers that are spread over multiple datacentres.  And there CEO is still very involved with their customer service, and not just the big accounts, all of them.

      Your comments

      So for those that have been around for the last while, what do you think?  Who do you use and why?  Is there anything that I missed that you think is required?

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      Self Hosted or Hosted

      January 4, 2009 By Jeff Leave a Comment

      One of the first things that have to be decided when you are getting ready to start a website, whether if it is for a personal site, business site, or a hobby site is whether you are going to host the site yourself and or a hosted service.

      If you are building a blog type site this is not as critical at the start.  You can easily start your site on a free hosted blog site and then if you feel it necessary you can more to a hoste solution with minimal headache.  Just make sure that you have your own domain so that you don’t lose too many links that you have built.

      Difference between the two. Hosted like going with a host like Hostgator and between a hosted, wordpress.com, blogger, etc

      blogger logo 

      Advantages of the hosted service.

      • Don’t need to have any programming experience
      • Don’t need to worry about keeping the programs up-to-date
      • Minimal backend work needed
      • Usually lots of easy to installed themes, and styles
      • Security, hosted services are typically very secure.

      Disadvantages of hosted service

      • You don’t have control of what is used for the site
      • You can’t customize certain aspects of the site
      • Even though there are plugins and extensions available what you can do with the site is limited.

      hostgator_logo

      Advantages of using a host

      • You can pretty much put anything that you want online
      • You have much great control of the way the site looks and interacts with your audience
      • You can use the host for your FTP, email, and many other services that the hosted version does not have
      • There are many “unlimited” hosts that allow you to store large amounts of data at no extra cost.

      Disadvantages of using a host

      • If you are not careful, you may find that the site is down more than it is up.
      • Customer service may be a nightmare (Although Hostgator is an exception to this.  They have done everything they can to make my life on their servers enjoyable) .
      • There may be bandwidth limitations.
      • The cost can be huge if you have a popular site with little revenue as the bandwidth charges can get expensive.
      • You are responsible for ensuring that your site is secure.

      Conclusions
      It really depends on what you are planning on using the site for.  If you are only interested in a content site or a personal site that you can communicate with family etc.  They a hosted service, or using many different hosted services to serve the purposes that you need for them. 

      This can include services like Wordpress.com, Flickr.com blogger.com, etc.  If you are interested in having a custom site programmed, want to have a email address with your domain or want to have the choice of how the site works.  If you want to have full control over the type of content, visitors, the script on the site etc then you are going to be looking for something that is hosted.  The other thing that you have to remember is that if you want to ensure that you have FULL control over the content of the site then you want to fully control the host.  The hosted services typically have a TOS stating that they do not assume any risk if you lose everything.

      Thoughts?

      So you know what I think, what do you think?  Let me know in the comments below. 

      Cheers, JM

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