Blogging – Page 2

June 14, 2009

Choosing Your Web Host

I recently moved my blog from blogger to WordPress my own hosting. Choosing a web host was a major step in the process. I used a web hosting ratings and awards site called Web Hosting Geeks to make my choice of web host. First of all you should ask yourself a few questions- What do you intend to host? How many sites do you need to host? How big are the sites you want to host? If you ask yourself these questions, you’ll get an idea of what type of hosting plans you need and the amount of bandwidth you require. Then check up Web Hosting Geeks’ web hosting awards and ratings. According to your needs, select a host and have a look at a few reviews.

Web Hosting Geeks’ blog has some good articles too. These will help you answer the questions you need to ask yourself. For instance, you should read the article on The Pros and Cons of Web Hosting Platforms. Depending upon your needs and the CMS you want to use, you should select your hosting platform.

Hosting provider websites often phrase features differently and tend to mislead you with words like ‘unlimited’. You need to understand the TOS and the real meaning of the word unlimited. Nobody can literally provide you unlimited bandwidth or disk space. Web Hosting Geeks can help you escape such traps as it lists all features in an easy to understand tabular form. If you are looking for a web host, Web Hosting Geeks can definitely help you make your choice.

Dreamhost Contest Winner

The Dreamhost contest on my blog has come to a premature end. Actually, I’m going to Udaipur tomorrow so I’ve decided to end the contest at 2359 hours on 3rd June 2009.

The contest was a big success with participants from all parts of the world became a part of it. I had publicized about this contest on SocialSpark through a Cost per click opportunity (Review coming soon). It helped to spread the buzz about the contest and extended the contest participation beyond my friends.

I had a tough time deciding a random method to chose the winner of the contest. In the end I decided to use the good old lucky draw method. I decided to write the names of all participants on paper chits. The number of chits for each participants was decided on the basis of the number of times they tweeted the message. If a participant tweeted once, he had 1 chit with his name written on it. If the participant tweeted 2 to 5 times, he gets 2 chits and if a participant had tweeted more than 5 times, he gets 3 chits.

It was time for the lucky draw. I randomly picked up a chit and the winner is [drumroll]-

Indigoanalysis

Anupum Pant known as indigoanalysis on twitter has won the Dreamhost contest. Congratulations!

For the rest of the participants, thank you for participating in the contest and making it a big success. There had to be just one winner so better luck next time. Sooner or later you will manage to get web hosting.

PS- Bits of information that don’t deserve a separate post-
Just Host, rated as the best blog host by many rating sites is offering an unlimited hosting plan at just $2.95/month. Just use the coupon code “50OFF” to avail the price. Personally, I prefer world’s largest host- GoDaddy which has moderately priced hosting plans.

May 18, 2009May 18, 2009

Twitter Friendly Links

URL shortening services like tr.im, bit.ly and TinyURL face downtime very often and the short URLs look ugly. Ever wondered how good it could be to have a URL shortening service using your own domain? The Twitter Friendly Links Plugin does exactly that. It creates short URLs for your posts which you can fully customize according to your preferences. It is also compatible with the Twitter Tools plugin which you can use to integrate your blog with twitter.

I’m yet to test the Twitter Friendly Links integration with Twitter Tools. Once I publish this post, I’ll confirm if it works.

PS-It works! I’m switching from Twitme to Twitter Tools just because it has support for Twitter Friendly Links.

May 17, 2009

Quickpress 1.5.1

Recently my theme Quickpress 1.4.1 got upgraded to version 1.5.1. I decided to upgrade my theme. I tried using the automatic upgrade feature but the install failed due to some reason. I used one-click install to install the new version of the theme. I made all the custom additions and activated the new version of the theme.

The new theme is much better than the last version. It has a green navbar at the top(as you can see if you are reading this on my blog) which adds to the colors. The sidebars also have bits of green added. Also, a background has been added to the posts. There’s a different background color for sticky posts. It is fully wordpress 2.7 compatible. The theme looks more complete now.

One thing I love about the theme is the RSS feed icon on the top left. I had to do a bit of editing with it as its position was fixed and it made navigation very slow on my blog. I edited the CSS stylesheet and changed the position to absolute. Navigation was much better now. But I needed the RSS icon to stay on the top left and move with scrolling. I used the Floating Menu javascript to give it its current form. There are no problems with the theme now. The floating RSS icon not only looks much better than an icon fixed at the top left of the page but also performs better.