Web Development Blog » Reviews

How-to choose a WordPress Hosting Provider

Olaf — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 20:58:02 +0000

If you’re using the popular blog tool WordPress, you’re probably looking for th best possible Wordpress hosting provider. Choosing a host might be hard becaise the are a lot of them. I advise you to take your time and make sure you’re choosing the best option. WordPress doesn’t require a lot of “special” server features, one reason more why most hosting provider will offer to host your blog. You don’t need one at the top-of-the-line and don’t go for the cheapest plan you can find.

For the beginning blog a shared hosting plan should be enough, be sure an account upgrade is possible at any time. This is because you never know how fast your site is going to grow or how big it is going to get, and it’s always better to be well prepared. Check also the possibilities to move your account from a shared hosting plan to a VPS or dedicated server. You also want to avoid the smaller, lesser-known hosts. Go for the companies where a lot of people talk about, don’t host by some new company from a guy you met on forum for example.

Don’t forget, if you blog has frequent reader and traffic a hosting failure can ruin your blog site.

User and file permissions

Wordpress has great features to maintain the core system, any plugins and your Wordpress themes. While for the download and update from external files an build-in FTP function act as a kind of fall-back feature, you need the ability to edit your files right on the server. The last one requires some permissions to edit files thought the Wordpress backend. A normal webserver is configured that files have a 0644 permission and directories have a 0755 permission. Most PHP/Apache powered webserver using one user ID to process the PHP files. This permission is okay for most PHP functions but not for file based functions used to edit template or plugin files. A few hosting provider offer services where PHP scripts are executed with user ID from the web hosting account. Providing hosting accounts this way is more secure than raising the values for the file/directory permissions to 666/777. If the PHP scripts are executed by the host account user Wordpress doesn’t need the FTP fallback feature and all updates and downloads are served much faster. The file upload tool from Wordpress back-end works without any problems if PHP scripts are executed with user permissions.

Important features you need

Your host has to provide daily backups, ask them how long each backup is stored (several days are a must to have feature, more than a week is nice)
Host your blog in the country where you except to have the most visitors. This way most of your visitors will see your site very fast.
Check if the database and mail service is not hosted on the same machine as the website service. Most of the the mail server can slow down a server if mail related service have to fight back a lot of spam.

More PHP related requirements

These features are not required by the Wordpress core system but many plugins: cURL, safe_mode=off, simpleXML, Socket support

WebFaction, smarter web hosting

Now that you know what to look for in a host, it shouldn’t be too hard to make a decision. If you’d like to go the fast way and skip researching, I recommend webfaction.com hosting, we use it for this blog site. WebFaction fits all of the discussed requirements, and it’s very affordable overall. It’s literally perfect for hosting WordPress sites, and if you know for a fact you are going to be a webmaster for a while, you can save a significant amount of money by pre-paying for 2-5 years. WebFaction has hosting plans ranging from 10GB to 60GB, and from $5.50 to $34.50 per month. There’s a great selection, so you can find a plan that’s perfect for your budget and your wallet.Similar Posts:

Website Monitoring Services: Reviews and Facts

finalwebsites.com — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 21:42:52 +0000

There are so many possibilities why a website went off-line, all of them have one in common: Your visitors can’t access your site and maybe they will never come back!

Possible problems why a website might be off-line:

Web server or network is down – A very common problem, there is so much computer technology used…
Some web service has stopped working – It might be just one of them; MySQL, Apache or Named/Bind and your website doesn’t function for 100%
Too much traffic on your site – Most web servers doesn’t have the capacity for a high traffic website. 500 visitors at the same time might be enough to make your site slow or that a web server crashes.
External serving problems; a name server or DNS server is down – this one is nasty; if your DNS zone is down, it’s possible that you see the problem a day later, while others see your site down since hours.
A script stopped working properly – If a script is written and tested everything looks fine, but what if you get some external content via RSS or by user input? Sometimes a simple, but not standard, text character can break your website.
At last but not least “the hacker” – there are so many people on the web trying to bring a website down.

Even if you try to do anything to protect your website or application against all the trouble above, you’re not safe for a failure. You have to monitor your website and hopefully a problem is notified fast enough before you loose a lot of visitors.

Some of you will say:

“I don’t need to pay for a service, because my hosting provider is doing this for free!”

That’s right many good providers will monitor the server you’re hosting on and/or they provide tools which will monitor your server or website. If you use them, check if these tests are done by a server outside from the network where your website or server is hosted. If there is a problem in the rack or router where the monitoring server and your website is located, you will never get a message about the down-time.

Some other important feature for international websites, is the ability to do test from different locations around the world. A problem might exist for only people from some continent, if your business has to take care about this, you should know about problems happen far away from your websites location.

Website monitoring is not a protection against failures but the following features will help you to “tackle” problems very fast:

Monitor from different locations – if one fails the bot has to use the next one
Multiple notification options – SMS/text messages and email are required, if you can send a downtime message to more than one person, do this!
Tests for specific content – Just a ping or HTTP header is often not enough, test for specific text on your site
Adjustable values for a timeout – Some websites need more time than others to get loaded.

(Screenshot response times Site24×7)

If your website and server is working fine, the number of downtime messages should be very low. If you need to spend several dollars a month for SMS/text messages, it might be usefull to spend this money for better hosting. Website monitoring is to get warned if something went wrong.

Website Monitoring Service Provider

In this article we review three website monitoring service provider, all of them offer a great service product and you find them in a lower price segment. That will say, these services are acceptable for most of the websites on the Internet.

I used Site24×7 since they started offering services a few years ago. They offer anything you need to monitor your server or website; Tests on websites or server ports (you can monitor every server port) are only a view options. Visit their website for all the features they offer. They offer a free account and 15day trials for their paid services, if you use the standard or premium service you pay for each single test period and location. If you need multiple test locations, you should use the premium plan because this plan includes 6 free locations for each test. If you need more than one website tested from multiple locations, than is this provider more expansive than others.

Hyperspin is monitoring provider who offers a lot of features and also a great reseller program. If you’re looking for a way to monetize your websites traffic, by offering your own monitoring service, you should try them. All test features are available and they have multiple locations and you can setup four of them as a global setting for all your tests. They don’t charge you for using all the locations. They offer discounts if you buy more or if you pay in upfront for a whole year. I stopped using them because their control panel was several times not accessible from my laptop (using different IP addresses).

Pingdom is the current servuice I’m using to monitor all my websites. Their control panel and website looks very modern and they offering a great plan with five tests for only $9.95/month. They offer e-mail, SMS/text message notifications and a some great integration with Twitter. Multiple test locations are included without any additional charge. I like the fast and clear interface and off course the price. I’m sure I will keep using them the next years.

While most of the features for these three website monitoring service providers are the same, is the pricing very different. I’m sure all three working great, just try them.Similar Posts:

Adsense for WordPress – 5 Plugins reviewed

finalwebsites.com — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 05:41:41 +0000

If you try to monetize your blog with Google Adsense you might have noticed that this is not an easy job. Blog reader are very focused on reading the content and writing comments. Many readers will not visit your site since they read your blogs in a RSS reader. That will say that we need a very flexible Adsense plugin to place our ads on the right place in our blogs articles. Some of you will say “I place them always on place A, B and C”, but I’m sure that this will not work all the time.

We need a plugin that has the following features:

Single blog post placements
Unlimited number of ad layouts
Easy to integrate with each blog post using tags
NO revenue share with the plugin author!

Additionally we like to see features like:

IP-based filter functions
Alternative ads for the IP filter
Using ad code from other networks than Google Adsense

For this review we selected the 5 WordPress plugins because they have recent updates (active projects) and many features:

Adsense Daemon

This plugin supports three different Adsense layouts. All configured ads are placed on all your blog pages (single view). For each layout you have the control (7 options) where each ad will show up. The plugin has basic features and acts very static. A good plugin if you don’t need so much functions.

AdSense Integrator

If you need a more flexible plugin, you should check this Adsense plugin for WordPress. It has all the features we mentioned above and more: Default settings for automatic placement, full control about which pages have to show the automatic placed ads and a CSS margin for some better ad placement. Revenue share is enabled by default, but you can change this setting (if you don’t like to support the developer with 4% of all your ad impressions).

Everything seems working, except the single ad placement
With every placement the “initial” ad is placed too, maybe a recent bug? I posted this to the WordPress forum and will post the result here. Anyway a good plugin if this bug is fixed.

All in One Adsense and YPN!

Great plugin idea on how to configure your blog using Google Adsense or YPN (Yahoo Network). While the configuration options are very comfortable is this plugin less flexible. All settings are site-wide and valid for all ad formats.

The plugin offers an option to use multiple ad formats, a random function will show them all. I don’t think that this really works (maybe for different colors?). There is an option to disable ads for single pages, but this will disable all ads on that single page. While this plugin looks really good, I will not use it.

Easy AdSense

If you check the WordPress plugin page you should think that this is a great plugin, but I deactivated the plugin very quickly. At the moment that the plugin was activated, it shows already the Adsense ads from the plugin author and also at least one link to his website on each of your blog pages. I need to mention that I choose the plugin because according the author, is this version more advanced and doesn’t include a revenue share. The plugin has a lot of functions to configure the different products like Adsense for search and feeds and of course the content and link units. I’m sure you can treat the setting that way to get a static ad setup for your site, but I don’t like a plugin that includes code in my site without permission and that’s the reason why my advice is to NOT using this plugin. You never know what a future version will do with your website!

Quick Adsense

Finally a plugin that has all important features and works for 100%! Using this plugin you have all the options you need for your blog site: Static placements for your whole website, custom placements for your posts using simple snippets or just disable ads for a single post. This plugin has more features:

Add your Adsense code to your blog posts and your sidebar widgets, all settings are controlled through a single settings page.
You don’t need to remember the tag names, just place them using quick tags in the HTML mode of your editor.
There is space for 10 different ad layouts for the blog pages and 3 in your sidebar.
There are no strings attached will say no revenue share or unwanted links, the only thing the author asks is to place a link or button.

There is one feature missing; the IP filter with the option to show alternative ads. Since this feature is very special and should work together with a GEO location script, I think I can miss this feature for now.

At the end I must say I go for the Quick Adsense plugin, because I need a plugin that makes it possible to place the ads on locations I choose while writing a blog post. The Adsense Integrator is also a good plugin, but because of the bug in the current version it’s not useful for my website.Similar Posts:

Top your sales with Google Commerce Search

Olaf — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 18:39:07 +0000

As a web shop owner you like to make your shop as popular and successful as possible. If you like to take your business to the next level, you should take a look at the Google Commerce Search. This hosted e-commerce search solution will allow your customers to have a much more pleasant and better shopping experience. The easier your e-commerce website for your customers, the better the chances are that they will buy your product and maybe will become a loyal customer.

Why Google Commerce Search?

Google Commerce Search is a scalable hosted e-commerce search solution. Using this Google service it’s possible to present your products online with a “special” type of Google site search.
But there is more:

Don’t worry about pikes of high traffic, Google Commerce Search will serve results for all your customers.
Your shop data become available in Google Merchant Center and inside the Google Product Search.
Synchronize or upload your data using the Google XML API.
Customize your on-site search engine so that it has the appearance of your website.
Manage all your products via the easy to use administrative console.
Analyze your statistics and use Google Analytics for details you might have never seen before; Follow reports on such items as top queries, special features usage, and much more.
Google Commerce Search makes the product search user-friendly. Provide for your products alternative spelling options or common synonyms. Your customer will see how easy it is to find a product, with the result of a higher conversion rate and a big chance that the customer will buy again.
Promote certain products and add them to related search results. This way you’re give more attention to specific products and maybe you can raise the purchase amount as well.
There is no waiting time, after your products are available in the Google Merchant center, they are available inside the search results.
Integrate Google Checkout and create a standalone shopping cart system (option)

Is my old shop or website not needed anymore?

Sure of course not! The checkout process and all detailed product information stays on your current website. Even if you use Google Checkout as payment solution you should use your own website for detailed product information and reviews. Your main website is the key to get products into the results of the “regular” Google Search engine. Add the search engine form to all pages of your own site for your customers convenience.

Is this a great solution or not?

There is one point which makes this service only attractive for established online shops: The Google Commerce Search is not free, but it is well worth the cost.

Google Commerce Search will help your customers to find what product it is they are looking for quick and easy. They will be able to filter the product results they are looking for according to the price of the product, the brand, the category, or many other ways. This helps to cut down on the chances of your potential customers locating the products on another page first. When people can’t find exactly what they are looking for on one page, they will pull up a second page and begin looking at different options. With the help of Google Commerce Search you can avoid this happening to you.

Google Commerce Search is and easy and effective way to handle your online sale. The product search makes everything simple and you don’t need to use your own shopping cart software anymore

Promote your products on your website, they way you did before and make more sales using Google Commerce Search!

Google Wave – Invitations and YouTube Gadget

Olaf — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 21:21:50 +0000

Finally I’m in, I got my invitation for Google Wave! After creating the first Wave pages I can say that the system looks really cool and I’m very happy that it’s browser based and not some Windows desktop application.

Why should I use Google Wave?

First what people asked me after I told them about Google Wave was: “Why should I use it and what is so special?” If the same people are already on Twitter and/or Facebook it’s easy to explain; It’s like Facebook, Twitter or MSN. Google Wave is a tool to share your content with other friends in real time and also private communication tool. Currently is Google Wave a preview release and I’m sure we will see much more features before the system is out of a future Beta period. I think a lot of people are missing the function to publish their content to others users without adding them to a conversation and you can’t discover stuff or profiles from others. On the other site there are already features like real time content updates and adding content is very easy and powerful. Adding content is like creating a word document with abilities to add images, links, gadgets and attachments.

Gadgets are allowed but there is no function for YouTube videos

As I said before, its possible to add gadgets to your Wave. Add Google maps, simple polls and many gadgets from the google gadget gallery. Since Google Wave is in an early state, not every 3rd party gadget works and adding gadgets is limited. The first thing I noticed is that there is no standard function to add YouTube videos to your Wave. We (finalwebsites.com) created a small YouTube Gadget Generator to create your custom YouTube Video object. Using this generator it’s possible to create a gadget from every YouTube Video URL.

Google Wave Invitations available

We like to share 10 Google Wave Invitations with our blog reader. If you like have one, post some nice comment why you deserve one of the invitations. We publish the most creative responses in the comment list below and we give away the invitations in a random order.

Invitations for Google Wave are send via the interface from Google wave. There is no code or something we can send via email or this website. If you like to get invited, provide your e-mail address which is connected with a Google account or your Gmail address. Post this e-mail address with your comment and mark this address: “My Google account is …”

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Is the Amazon Kindle a book replacement?

finalwebsites.com — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 22:27:25 +0000

If you are looking for the best software and hardware platform on the market for reading e-books and other digital media, then you will want to take a look at Amazon Kindle. More and more people are turning to it each day because of everything that it has to offer. There are three different hardware devices which support this platform. These devices are Kindle, Kindle 2, and Kindle DX. Kindle devices make use of electronic paper called E Ink for their displays. A person is able to download the content directly over Amazon Whispernet by using the Sprint EVDO network. This allows a person to get what they want hassle free.

Another great feature of Amazon Kindle is you don’t need a computer to gain Internet access. All kindle books are delivered via the fast 3G network. There are no contracts and no fees; except the purchase price for your favorite books. Amazon Kindle has all of the features that users have been waiting for. This is one reason why the original Amazon Kindle sold out in just a little over five hours and was not back in stock until five months later. This product has an impressive number of fans that will praise its features loyally.

Plenty of storage for your Kindle books

When a person takes their first glance at the Amazon Kindle, they may not be impressed right away. It isn’t the best looking product and it appears to have far too many buttons making it look confusing and awkward. However, most people that have a chance to use it become an instant fan. It makes up for its clustered looks with everything else that it offers. It has a 2 GB hard drive which allows the user to store as many as 1500 e-books. This is just the thing for anyone that wants to carry a library of books with them and make sure that they have access to those books whenever they want. A lot of Amazon Kindle users also appreciate that they can read their books without fighting pages or carrying around a large and bulky book.

Amazon Kindle has a full keyboard which makes it easy for you to annotating books or to search for something. It also has an impressive speed, a person won’t have to wait for the Amazon Kindle, it gets to those pages in a hurry. Many people find the Amazon Kindle much easier to read than a traditional book. It’s easier to hold in just about any situation. Whether someone is trying to rock a fussy baby, or trying to read outside on a windy day, this is one way of reading without fighting all of those pages. They won’t have to worry about losing their spot in a book ever again. Read before you buy, get the first chapters for free before you decide to buy a book. Not reason enough to read books via the Kindle? Many Kindle books are priced 50% lower than the printed edition.

One device for International usage

Amazon Kindle comes with its own dictionary, this is one feature that many users really appreciate. The dictionary feature is very easy to use. All the user has to do is highlight the words that they want to look up and the definitions of those words will appear right on the screen. It even keeps track and lets the user know how much of the book they have read. Another nice thing is that the battery uses minimal power until you turn the pages. This helps the battery to last for a long time before it needs to be charged. The International coverage allows users to enjoy 3G wireless coverage in more than 100 countries.

Many people are turning to the Amazon Kindle as a much more convenient way of reading their books. With the use of this convenient item, they can read anytime and anywhere. It’s also just as easy to get more books. All someone has to do is go to the Amazon store right from the Amazon Kindle and add the books that they want within mere seconds. It also handles such things as music, web browsing, and video. Many people make it a point of never leaving their home without having their Amazon Kindle on them. They find that they don’t feel like themselves if they leave it behind.

Amazon Kindle is ideal for anyone. College students, professionals, homemakers, or any avid reader is sure to love this product. The cost is another impressive aspect, it can be purchased for as little as just a couple hundred dollars. When a person considers how easy it can make their life when it comes to reading and getting the books they want, it’s easy to see why that is an impressive price.

Kindle books for web developer

There are kindle books for every genre, even for people like us “Web developer”. There are currently more than 15,000 books in the category “Computers & Internet”. I have selected a few interesting book titles for your shopping list. ~~Psst! If you buy the Kindle before Christmas, your love ones will have plenty of books they can buy for you. This maybe the first year that you will have a longer wish-list.~~
Edit: Since all kindle books are delivered online via the G3 network, you can put them under your Christmas tree, but there are a few kindle accessories.

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Create custom website backups using CRON

Olaf — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 13:09:54 +0000

Several weeks ago I was looking for some alternative hosting for Media Temple and found WebFaction. While searching the net I found a few reviews and all of them are very good. Because their shared hosting package look different from others, I took an account.

Why Webfaction?

Webfaction is a 100% web hosting provider offering shared hosting plans and managed dedicated servers. Very special is that a shared hosting account has advanced features you didn’t find by other providers. The most important feature is that you get full SSH access to your Linux user directory and processes like PHP and HTTPD are executed as the same user. Having that kind of user accounts gives you much more possibilities like using a reserved amount of memory for a single process or the ability to setup new stuff in the user directory. I think WebFaction doesn’t provide a shared hosting account for a beginning webmaster, because their control panel is very basic and is mostly used to create new website, applications, email and database accounts. That will say that other functions like protecting directories or creating CRON jobs must be set via SSH and the command line. They create backups for all your website accounts and all databases. That is for the most users enough, but I like to have real time access to a copy to all my files.

Creating backups for your websites and applications

While this tutorial is based on my experience with the hosting account by WebFaction, it should work for most other Linux accounts or servers. All you need is full access to the user’s home directory. In the past I used the backup function provided by the DirectAdmin control panel for all my hosting. Those backup function (similar to other control-panel types) creates one zipped file from all the user data which is stored on a local or remote location. This type of backup will generate a huge server load if sites becoming bigger. In this tutorial we backup our databases to a local location and we are using rsync to backup our websites and databases.

Creating backups from your database

First we need one database user which has at least the rights to select an lock tables.

GRANT SELECT, LOCK TABLES ON database.* TO 'yourdumpuser'@'localhost'

If you like to have a single user with full rights for easier database access, you can use this query as an alternative:

GRANT ALL ON database.* TO 'yourdumpuser'@'localhost'

Using the rights for the dump user we’re able to create database backups from the command line like:

mysqldump -uyourdumpuser -hlocalhost -pyourdumppassword database | gzip --best > yourmysqlbackup.gz

This command creates an already gzip compressed database backup file. If you have have many databases you need a lot of commands it would be easier to run a bash script like this one:

#!/bin/sh
DBUSER="yourdumpuser"
DBHOST="localhost"
DBPASS="yourdumppassword"
BACKUPDIR="dbbackup"
DBS=`mysql -u$DBUSER -h$DBHOST -p$DBPASS -e"show databases"`
for DATABASE in $DBS
do
if [ $DATABASE != "Database" ]; then
FILENAME=$DATABASE.gz
mysqldump -u$DBUSER -h$DBHOST -p$DBPASS $DATABASE | gzip --best > $BACKUPDIR/$FILENAME
fi
done

This small script will read all database names (where the user has access to) and creates files for all of them. Add this code into a file and save it under the name dbbackup.sh in your Linux home directory and create also the directory dbbackup for the files. The new script need to be executable, use chmod 775 to do that. Test the script with the following command within the directory where the script is located.

./dbbackup.sh

Backup your files using rsync

Next we need a remote backup location to store our data on a safe place. This can be a second server you own or an external service. Important is that you can access that location via SSH. I’m using EVBackup from ExaVault. They are not very expensive and they offer a great service. They have also a great tutorial on how-to configure your account to access their servers using rsync via SSH. There is also Ubuntu One, they offering free accounts for the first 2GB.

After you setup you SSH connection between you server and your backup server we can start using rsync.

Note! We followed the instructions on from the EVBackup site and created a SSL key to access the remote location without providing a password. It’s strongly advised to do the same, otherwise the next steps will not work for you. You can use the instructions from their website for your own server if you change some parameters and values.

The following example will copy all files within the webapps directory from your local server to the remote location (directory backup-1):

rsync -avz --delete -e "ssh -i /home/username/backup/ssh_key" "/home/username/webapps" someuser@someuser.exavault.com:backup-1

/home/username/backup/ssh_key is the location of the ssh key you have created before
/home/username/webapps is the directory with files you want to backup
someuser@someuser.exavault.com:backup-1 is the remote location (in this example an account at exavault.com/EVBackup) where all files are stored

Note the parameter –delete will delete files on remote if the didn’t exist on the local location and -i will create a incremental backup. For additional information about the parameters used with rsync run this command via the command line: rsync --help.

Run backups using CRON

If you have multiple directories to backup you should group them in one bash script:

#!/bin/sh
rsync -avz --delete -e "ssh -i /home/username/backup/ssh_key" "/home/username/webapps" someuser@someuser.exavault.com:backup-1
rsync -avz --delete -e "ssh -i /home/username/backup/ssh_key" "/home/username/dbbackup" someuser@someuser.exavault.com:backup-1

You can add as many rsync commands you need in that script, save it in the user’s home directory with the name data-backup.ssh.

We need to run the database backup script to store the current data into the dbbackup directory
If this backup is finished we start the rsync backup script ( give the first CRON job enough time)

An alternative is to merge both bash scripts, but this is not part of this tutorial. Our entries for the crontab file are (use this command: EDITOR=nano crontab -e)

0 10 * * * /home/username/dbbackup.sh
0 11 * * * /home/username/data-backup.sh

These CRON jobs will run the first script at 10:00AM and the second at 11:00AM.

That’s all to backup your websites and databases using rsync and CRON. If you like to try Webfaction use finalwebsites as promo code, they offer a 60 days money-back guarantee.Similar Posts:

Premium Flash templates – Coupon offer!

finalwebsites.com — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:24:53 +0000

The guys at ZeroIX have done it again.

The ZeroIX Flash template is one of the most unique and impressive premium flash templates around. This aesthetically jarring, yet startlingly realistic site, instantly transports you into a matrix-like world of futuristic horror and intrigue.

The attention to detail is unparalleled, and the design can only be described as beautiful, in a gloomy futuristic kind of way. The effects used are cinematic in quality, and the seamless transitions, animation and backgrounds all help to create the feeling that you’re entering in to a new world, not just another boring old website. The ZeroIX Flash template has a life of its own, with its very own reality… it’s like a living thing that moves, and reacts differently to each and every user.

The Adobe Flash animation artists have managed to capture the scary realism with visually appealing design, and high quality sounds effects, which all work together to create the sites unique ambience.

The interactivity of this flash template is astonishing, and integrates 3D graphics, with video and audio, giving the visitor interactive multimedia experience. The opening game is not only fun, but it’ll give the site visitors a reason to come back time and time again.

Flash templates are becoming more and more in demand, and the ZeroIX template is great example of why these sites are getting more popular by the day. Site visitors don’t want to more see boring pages on-line, as they are bombarded with stale blog pages day in, day out. Instead, site owners are now have to make their sites stand out from the crowd with unique flash designs.

With years of combined experience, the ZeroIX team knows exactly what you and your visitors are looking for. The template is fully customisable and flexible enough to use with any site. They layout is totally user friendly, and easy to navigate your way around. The page is the perfect starting point for your site, and more and more can be added to suit your individual site needs. No matter how your site grows, or develops, this template will always be able to fit your needs.

The bad news is that this template is not for sale (anymore)!

Instead we have selected some other cool and dynamic Flash templates:

Use this COUPON “9Gt078urDOcXMGt0oGdd” while buying one of our flash templates and safe 5% on your template purchase. This offer is not limited to number of purchases and is valid the for next 10 days!Similar Posts:

Social media services are more efficient these days

Olaf — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 08:17:57 +0000

I remember me the time that using social media for website promotion means to submit your blog or article to services like StumbleUpon, DIGG and del.icio.us. Many people posted their articles to so much sites that the promotion was often more work than the writing an article. I you wanted to have a lot of traffic from a social media site, you needed a lot of votes to reach the front page of a service. To get the most important “initial” votes sharing those social link with friends or network was more than important.

These days the idea of social media is not changed, but we have much more fancy tools to share our articles. The most important factor for a big success is the number of members in your social network. If you network is to small you can share whatever you want, no one will notice your activities.

Quality above quantity

To build a social network with members related to your blogs or maybe services and products you offer on your website, follow the following rules:

Be selective with your friends, don’t send requests to everyone and don’t accept any friendship request. Connect with friends where the profile is complete and where you can see enough activity. Don’t connect to people with non related interests.
Build your network slowly. It makes no sense to invest all your time in building the network. Sharing your experience, thoughts and links is important too.
Don’t join too much social network sites. Start with the biggest sites like Twitter, Facebook and maybe MySpace. Select social sites where you find enough people intrested in the same topic you do.
Don’t forget the day has only 24 hours.

You need to be an “interesting” person or other network member will not request you as a friend. Take care that your profile is active and has a lot interesting comments and links.

In this this article we don’t want to explain how great Twitter or facebook is, but we want to showcase some great services which have very nice features and are great time saver.

No Blog without RSS

If your site is a blog you need subscriber! Burn your RSS feed with feedburner to get an idea how many subscriber you. Note each new feed URL is a new start, you don’t loose your subscribers if you create a new one but you should inform your reader. Create a redirect to the new URL. After you get your first stats from feedburner you will notice that a lot of your readership is using the Google Reader to read your blogs. Google Reader has a lot of features to share content in your network: A user can comment articles share them with other readers and you can send links to other social sites like facebook or Twitter. In the current Reader it’s not easy to make friends, but you can use this tool for your own subscriptions. If your shared articles are interesting enough you will get “Follower” very soon. Use also the Bookmarklet from Google reader to share new stories in Google Reader.

Share you blog comments within your network

There are many blogs offering the possibility to authorize with Facebook Connect. Use this option, most blogs doesn’t provide direct links for the URL entered with each comment, so it’s more effective better to share your comment on your facebook’s wall. Other people will visit your facebook profile if they like your comments and maybe the will ask your to become a friend. Another great comment service is Disqus, a comment platform and community.
Disqus Pofile – As a Disqus profile member, each posted comment is stored on your profile page. People can reach your profile with each comment you have posted by a Disqus comment form used by the blog owner. This way people can read all your other comments and if they like your writings the will subscribe.
Disqus Comments – If you install the Disqus comment tool on your own blog, people people get connected with your blog with every comments they posted. This could be another source for traffic. A single comment on your blog from one “popular” Disqus member might have a reach to thousands of other Disqus members. All comments are stored in your own blog database as well.

Share interesting articles in your network

In the RSS part we talked already about sharing content using the Google Reader. If you like to use a tool that makes your shared content more interactive, you should try Posterous. According the developer of this “light blog service” is the service very powerful because a member is able to send very advanced blog posts by email. Sending an email is the way how you join! I like Posterous because I’m able to share my comment about existing articles and blogs via Google Reader and using their Bookmarklet. I’m able to “autopost” my comment to facebook, twitter and many more networks. There are many more features like: Use your own domain, tagging, comments, custom themes, statistics and much more. If you visit the Posterous site it looks like a blog site, but as the owner has much more functions.

Spread the word on Twitter

If you like to get your article mentioned on twitter you need some tool to keep it on top at twitter. Because your network members getting so much tweets on their twitter list it’s almost impossible to reach them with your new article. The solution is Tweetmeme, a link community which looks like Digg, but has more the function to repost a tweet by other twitter members. The rankings on their homepage are a welcome additional feature. If you write blogs, use their Plugin or button even for your older posts. Just imagine to get new traffic for older articles! A reTweet is not like a duplication on digg.com but more like an update.

While using all these social media services and communities it’s important to keep your social media sites unique. Don’t post the same article or link twice or more. If you discover somthing interesting, think about how to share it. If you have the time post/comment it on posterous otherwise share the link on twitter, facebook or Google reader. To reach new follower or friends, you should add a feed of latest tweets or shared items to your blog or website. As always, build an online personality and don’t spam.

If you like check my profile pages and maybe we get connected:
finalwebsites @ twitter – finalwebsites @ posterous – finalwebsites @ facebook – My Shared Items @ Google Reader – My Profile @ Disqus or maybe you like to subscribe to my Friendfeed
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Useful Plugins for your bbpress Forum

Olaf — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 14:01:17 +0000

To support our php script users at finalwebsites.com, we’re using bbpress for more than a year now. bbpress is a great peace of software and is based on Wordpress, that will say if you’re able to write code for Wordpress you can code the same way for bbpress. There are several Wordpress plugins which work with bbpress out of the box! Since the release of version 1.0 we have integrated bbpress into our own layout to make it a 100% part of our PHP resource site.

Why a forum and not just email support and why bbpress?

As a software developer you get most common support questions more than once. Sharing information is useful for others and a forum is a great platform for user support. bbpress is a very basic forum without heavy stuff like personal messaging and is very fast even with lots of users / posts. We like the Wordpress/bbpress API very much and it’s quite easy to add extra functionality. Sure there are still lot of features missing like merging topics or other important moderator stuff, but I’m sure the developers of bbress are on the right way. There is one more thing with bbpress, the system is able to work with the same user base as Wordpress. That will say you can connect your blog with your forum site, a great feature for communities.

Optimizing bbpress using plugins

bbpress SEO Tools
One of the most important requirements for our forum was search engine optimization (SEO). Great search engine positions in Google are great for all websites and for a support forum it’s more than important. Using this plugin it’s possible to index only the topic (sub)pages and the main page of course. All other views are for Google (and others) just content duplication and get marked by the plugin as “NoIndex”.

Moderator Notification
bbpress is using Akismet to protect your forum against spam, but for new forums it’s very important to know all new activities. This plugin sends an email message about new posts to all forum moderators.

Auto Add Favorites
bbpress has a different “Post subscribe” function, a user has to add a topic to his favorites for further watching. This plugin is the missing function to add favorites automatically. Check also this article on how-to subscribe to a bbpress forum.

Google Sitemap Generator
A Sitemap for Google is an important feature for SEO, you need to tell search engines about your sites content. This plugin is a great addition if you use the bbpress SEO tools, the plugin creates the same URLs as the pages marked for “Index” by the SEO plugin. If you need a more “general” sitemap plugin, check this one.

If you have questions about the plugins above, please post to our bbpress forum.

More bbpress plugins (3rd party)

Comment Quicktags for bbPress
The core version of bbpress has no extra options in their reply/post box, it’s just a textarea. A lot of html markup is allowed and this plugin will add some buttons to the form which helps users writing “nice” postings. This plugin is very old, but it works for the current version (1.02).

Human Test for bbPress
There are several plugins to limit registrations by bots and spammer. I like this one because it’s better integrated than others and it’s easier to handle by new members than ReCaptcha validation for example.

Related Topics
We know the related blog post plugins from wordpress, this one works the same way and for a forum it’s very useful. It is great for inter-linking (SEO) and it helps members to find related topics very fast. This plugin works much better if your forum has enough tags set for each topic.

EDIT: I disabled the related topics plugin yesterday for my forum because it stopped working. I will post an update if found a solution.

SMTP mailer for bbPress
The email function used by the core version is already based on phpmailer, but is still using PHP’s mail() function. It seems that many passwords send after registration, never reached the inbox from the new member. Many bbpress users solved this while using this plugin to send mail messages via SMTP.

Social It
These days social sites are a great way to share content with others. This plugin is also based on a Wordpress plugin and is a great addition for your forum.

We use these plugins at finalwebsites.com together with the recent version of bbpress. They are compatible even with our custom template for bbpress. Some of them need tiny modifications in the template files. If you like to see more custom bbpress modifications check our bbpress forum section and find much more bbpress plugins on the bbpress site.
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