Have a question for Ask The Geek? Send it to me.
Dear Ask the Geek,
I see you are moving your blogs over to wp.com: does it work like an hosting service? I mean, if I move everything there I can stop using [hosting service]? What are the pros & cons of using WordPress.com?
Sincerely,
Platform-challenged
Dear Platform-challenged,
Have a question for Ask The Geek? Send it to me.
Dear Ask The Geek,
I’ve been blogging for seven years and I have a lot of popular content I’d like to republish in an ebook. Should I do this? Are there any tips you can give me for preparing my content?
Thanks,
Budding eAuthor
Hi Budding eAuthor, Continue reading
The liveblog of my panel at BlogHer ’11: Social Media Geek | Adding Community Features to Your Blog is now online. I talked about BuddyPress and bbPress as ways to extend your WordPress site into a community and I definitely recommend checking it out.
The liveblog is about 90% accurate, which is amazing since we were talking so fast, so if you see particular sentences with a few words missing you should know that the point being made was brilliant and we were coherent the entire time. 
Podcast (audio recordings) of all sessions will become available soon, as well as videos of select sessions (it’s not clear if my session will be included or not) and will be available at BlogHer ’11 VirtualCon. And all of those materials are free!
I have been working for Automattic, who offer a free, hosted version of WordPress at WordPress.com, for several months now. I’ve been a WordPress.org (self-hosted) user for years (I have 9 WordPress sites now), and I wasn’t as familiar with the free, hosted service and all the features that it offers (including the excellent support by my colleagues, ahem).
Often when I recommend to friends that they get started on WordPress, I suggest they sign up for a site at WordPress.com so they can see how they like the interface and the features of the WordPress software.
One of the first things I hear is this myth: on WordPress.com, I can’t have a custom theme, so I can’t have a beautiful website.
Besides the fact that there are 100+ themes to choose from (and I’ll do a post on my favorite themes in the future), many with customizable backgrounds and headers, you can have a beautiful website on WordPress.com. I wanted to showcase some of the websites I’ve seen on WordPress.com that have made their sites beautiful using one of the default themes as a base and customizing the site with just the Custom CSS upgrade (currently $15/year) – so that’s free, unlimited hosting (!) plus a beautiful site for $15/year. Pretty cool.
I don’t want to convince you that WordPress.com is the best home for your new site (I have several .org sites that I love) but I definitely want to disspell the rumor that you can’t have a beautiful site on WordPress.com.
Read my article on Infinite Styles with Custom CSS on the WordPress.com News blog.
You have a great idea for a website or your business. Perhaps you’ve even already registered your own domain name (if you haven’t, you should read When I Have Time article How to Buy a Domain Name and what to do with it first).
Now that you’re ready to start creating that website you’ve been dreaming about, you’ll need to get web hosting: a place where you can store and modify your website’s content and make it accessible online.
The choice of a web hosting provider is a very personal one. I say this because, for every person who has had a good experience with a provider, you will find one or five or ten who have utter loathing for that exact provider.
I would evaluate a potential web hosting provider based on the following considerations:
Here’s some more detail about what to consider for each one:
The ease-of-use of incorporating the blogging platform with your provider is what makes the difference when going to purchase web hosting. Even if you don’t intend to open a blog, many blog/CMS software can be used for static websites as well (like WordPress, which I love). Each blog or CMS software has operating system and/or software components required to run, so check with your intended provider before buying hosting and/or the software.
Some providers will give you a “push-button” or “1-click” installation which will automate the installation of blogging platforms. Other providers will provide a hosting solution that gives you access to the more technical side of your hosting environment like executing scripts, setting up databases and modifying your file system permissions. Check to see if the hosting provider lists which blogging software can run on their servers. If you cannot find this information, I strongly suggest writing an email to their tech support with a list of your blog software’s technical requirements to get confirmation before purchasing a hosting agreement (or blogging software). Here’s WordPress’ list of requirements.
As mentioned above, if you are not particularly tech-savvy, it’s important that you understand how much the provider can integrate blog or other 3rd-party software into your web hosting. Even if you’re not interested in hosting a blog, you may need a forum, a photo gallery, a wiki or e-commerce software for your site, and many hosting providers can offer these software integrations or at least support their installation.
Many providers will specify how much control you have over your hosting environment and how much you can put your hands on it (if you can run PHP scripts, install a database, modify the .htaccess file, etc.) but the final compatibility, installation and upkeep of the 3rd-party software will be your responsibility. Some providers will even provide a list of which popular 3rd party software is compatible or is available for push-button installation.
When I first started hosting with a certain hosting provider, they made it very difficult to contact them directly with problems, and I often had to do a down-the-rabbit-hole chase to find the support email address on their web site. Now, they provide an 800 number to talk with a real person.
Other hosting providers will not give you a direct contact, but they may give you a guaranteed response time or an option to escalate and therefore you know how long it might take to get resolution to your problem.
Before it’s really a necessity, you should identify the support methods in case of an emergency: contact email address / website / telephone, and other information needed to contact them like your username or account information. Other important limits to keep in mind are if the provider limits your technical support to a certain number of questions or if they provide a guaranteed response time or service level agreement on resolution of problems.
If you require a certain level of support, investigate first, and also be prepared to pay extra to ensure you can get it.
If you’ve read the Long Tail by Chris Anderson (great book!) you know that disk space is quickly becoming a commodity and most providers will now offer huge amounts of disk space for a low cost. You probably won’t come near to using all of it.
Data transfer is related to the transfer and viewing of the information on your website. When a visitor opens a page on your website, your hosting provider must deliver the text and images on that page to their computer. Multiply that for each visitor, and data transfer may become important to your site if you’re having people download a lot of content (like high resolution images, music files or large PDFs) or if you have enormous amounts of traffic.
Most providers will provide you with such a large amount of data transfer that you can monitor in case you experience a jump in traffic, or upgrade if necessary. Investigate how much is provided with each plan, and in case your website gets linked from Digg or CNN, how you can temporarily meet that demand or upgrade
Most videos embedded in blogs can be hosted externally to the blog (on YouTube or Vimeo, for example), but if you are planning on having a lot of video content and would like complete control over the delivery and look & feel of that content, check with your hosting provider if video streaming from their servers is included in the hosting plan you’re considering. This may also figure into calculating the data transfer they provide – the more videos you are streaming, the more data transfer you’ll need.
Backup is one of the most important things to your online presence. How often does your host back up your data? Daily, hourly? How far back can you get get copies of your data and files, and with which methods can you access your files? Do you need to submit a request to the provider’s Support, or can you be autonomous and access it directly from your administration panel?
If you’re generating a lot of content and/or you have a very active community generating content and comments, you will need to be more sensitive about how often that content is backed up.
Note that with many blog/CMS software, the backup of the database may not be done by the hosting provider but must be done directly by the user and the hosting provider may provide backups of the content that is not in the database (i.e., image and downloadable files).
By default, most basic web hosting plans will be considered shared hosting, which means that other websites and domains will be hosted on the same server as your site. You’ll be sharing resources like the server’s disk space, processor, and RAM. For most site or blog needs, shared hosting will be sufficient, but if your site is very popular, you may need a step up from shared hosting like a virtual server or a dedicated server.
Of course, you probably won’t know you need a more robust solution when you first start your website, but it’s a good idea to see if the host has other options available and what you’d need to do to upgrade when the time comes.
Pay close attention to the refund policy of the providers. Some offer money-back guarantees if you are interested in doing a trial of their services for a few days or weeks so you can get a feel for the service and the administration panel.
Choosing Web Hosting Providers
I don’t want to make this article about endorsement, though I use both Dreamhost and Yahoo for my hosting needs, as I mentioned above – for every person who has a good experience, there will be 10 more with a negative one. I suggest you Google “web hosting providers,”, read some ratings’ sites, ask your friends with successful sites who they use, and evaluate your own site’s needs before buying hosting.
From Lifehacker’s readers: Most Popular Reliable and Affordable Web Hosts
Image by Donovan Henneberg-Verity
I wrote a guest post at Food Blog Alliance, a place to exchange tips, tutorials, and observations about food blogging; on How to Use Google Alerts – 5 Quick Ways to Get News About You & Your Blog
In it, I explain the basics of how Google Alerts work and give you 5 quick ways to get started on Google Alerts like:
Click through to the Food Blog Alliance article to read more…
Image by monoglot
If you’ve never used WordPress or even the free / hosted version on WordPress.com, you might have no idea what it really means to “be on WordPress” – how the interface works, what you’ll need to do with your server, and if you’re really going to like it.
You might not understand what all the fuss is about – global WordCamps, plugins, themes?
Luckily, there’s a way you can play with WordPress on your own computer, without having to buy or commit to anything!
In a few steps, you can install this software that will simulate a web server on your computer, and you’ll have WordPress up and running. You can install this software package on a Windows, Linux or Mac computer and then install WordPress.
Why should you install WordPress on your home computer? After you’ve installed WordPress, then you can:
Setting it up on your home computer means you can experiment, make mistakes and stop work whenever you want because the site is accessible only to you on your personal computer.
Not only is it free, it’s really easy to use and install.
Since WordPress is Open Source and free, it relies on several other open source and free software components to run. So that means it’s completely free for you to try out WordPress. On a more technical note, you just have to remember that there are four main components to get WordPress working: the web server software, the database engine and the programming language engine(s).
There’s an installation package that will give you all four of them called XAMPP. XAMPP has these four components: Apache HTTPD (web server), MySQL (database engine) and PHP and Perl (programming language engines). Each of these can be downloaded and installed separately, but the XAMPP package does it all in one go so you’re sure to have the right versions. Note: for the purposes of this article, I am assuming you will installing this for use on your personal computer, to be accessed only by you on that same computer for testing reasons. This is not an article about setting up a web server on your computer to be accessed externally.
In simple terms, Apache HTTPD is the software that turns your computer into a web server and to allow it to “serve” content in the form of web pages, images, and other content you’d find on a website when you use – it’s what happens when you insert “http://” in your web browser address bar.
MySQL is the database server. Years ago a web page consisted of actual files for each page of the site like index.html, contact.html, etc. Each of these files was sitting in your webserver’s hard drive and had be downloaded individually. Now with more modern sites, and especially with WordPress, each page is created more dynamically because the majority of the content is actually stored in a database. When someone wants to see “Sara’s Page” WordPress will put the pieces together dynamically, from the header to the footer with the blog’s theme, sidebars and formatting.
PHP and Perl are two programming languages that WordPress needs. PHP is the language that WordPress is written in and a language that was made for scripting web pages. Perl is a very succinct and powerful programming language and is often included in WordPress code (that you won’t have to worry about). You need to install these two engines so that when the PHP / Perl code is run, it can be interpreted and executed on your local computer.
In order to get WordPress running on your computer, here is the overview of the steps to do it – make sure you’re referencing the manuals for each installation to have detailed steps.
C:/yourxamppinstallationdirectory/htdocs – in the above example: C:/xampp/htdocs/mywordpressfolderFor multiple instances of WordPress, i.e., to experiment with more than one blog at the same time, just repeat steps 3 and 4 in another subdirectory of your web directory folder.
Now you’re read to experiment with WordPress with no hassle or commitment!
If you need a more detailed explanation, here’s screenshots of all the steps for installing WordPress on Windows XP thanks to sp-arun
Installing WordPress Locally in Windows Xp Using WampServer http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=20309755&access_key=key-1mqdiwczayor83igvzyn&page=1&version=1&viewMode=
Photo by ericmmartin
If you’ve ever thought about creating your own website or buying a domain, getting started is much easier than you think.
The three basic steps are:
Find an Available Domain Name
For the purposes of this article, I use the term “buy a domain” interchangeably with “register a domain,” but a domain is something that can be assigned to you but is not technically your property: you must continue to pay the registration fee for as long as you want it to be registered to you.
Though people have been buying domain names for almost 20 years, there are still many names that aren’t taken. You’ll need to see if your domain name or a variation of it is available before you can start building grandiose dreams of your future site.
There are many tools you can use to find available domain names without having to buy the domain in that instance. Keep in mind that if your domain is available at the time of searching, but you decide to buy it later, it may not still be available.
The most popular domain extension (the last part of the domain after the “dot”) is .com, but it’s not a requirement or necessity to buy a .com domain for every website. Some specific extensions may require proof of residency or tax ID for some country extensions, and some extensions are limited to certain types of organizations: for example, only accredited schools can use .edu and non-profit organizations can use .org. Here’s a list of Internet top-level domain extensions that you can consider for your domain.
Here are some tools you can use to find domain names. Note that most are linked to domain provider / buying services but I am not endorsing any of them, and you are not required to buy the domain while searching for an available name.
Decide what to Do with the Domain
Once you buy a domain, you’ll have to decide where to address or point it, and change the DNS if you desire. {Read WHT article : What is DNS? DNS in Plain English} So take a moment to think about your options before you actually start the process of buying the domain. There are several things you can do: Domain Hosting, Domain Redirecting / Forwarding, Domain Mirroring / Masking, Domain Cloaking, and Domain Parking.
Some of these terms are explained in more detail in specific articles on When You Have Time, but they are briefly explained below:
Hosting implies that you buy space and bandwidth from a provider to store and serve your site’s files and images. Most likely, your domain name will simply be used for a new site you have in mind and hosted. You can also buy your domain from a domain registrar but host it with a different provider altogether, or you can buy and host the domain with the same provider (i.e., Yahoo, Dreamhost).
The domain is forwarded or re-directed to another existing domain. The user will type in http://www.yourdomain.com and the browser will forward them to http://www.otherdomain.com To effectively use domain redirecting, a 301 redirect should be utilized.
Domain mirroring is a way to map/point more than one domain to the same content / files hosted somewhere. http://www.yourdomain.com is actually showing the homepage and contents of http://www.otherdomain.com, for example. Make sure you read the article linked above to know why I do not recommend using domain masking.
Similar to domain mirroring or masking, usually domain cloaking is different in the technical method it uses to seem like another site. Cloaking uses an iframe or embedded frameset in the HTML to show the content of another website. I also do not recommend using domain cloaking.
The domain is not utilized immediately, and is “parked” which means the user usually accepts a default page furnished by the domain provider of ads or a “coming soon.” Domains are often parked by people who want to sell the domain for a higher price to an interested party or are still developing the website to be put online and don’t want to pay for hosting until they are ready to go live. To park a domain, there is usually no additional cost above the registration price of the domain.
Register Your Domain
Now that you’ve decided what to do with the domain, you can decide where to buy it and if it makes sense to buy with a certain provider rather than another.
For purposes of this article, I’m going to assume that you’ll want to buy web hosting, as many of the other services provided above are included in the base price of registering domain. Note: Each domain registrar offers different services, so if you’ll need a specific service, it’s best to check before registering your domain.
Now you’re ready!
This list is the top 15 domain registrars in July 2009, according to RegistrarStats and listed on Wikipedia.
Next, read about How to Choose a Web Hosting Provider for your Site or Blog!
image by oberazzi
How often are you updating your blog? If you can’t work on it daily or even weekly, here’s a handy maintenance checklist for your blog or website for some tasks to do every month.
If your website has a visual banner at the top of the page, consider refreshing it monthly to keep the site looking new for visitors. Studies have shown that people will pay more attention to the site itself if they are able to perceive the site is different.
The sites you link to on your sidebar should stay fresh and relevant – make sure the sites you link to stay current, and still provide content that you support. If you have a blogroll on your blog, add new blogs you’ve recently discovered and remove blogs that are no longer updating or have gotten off-topic. Create a new subcategory on your sidebar if you’ve discovered a new interest or resource.
If you’re linking out to charities, blog events or news stories, make sure they are current or switch them out to rotate exposure to your favorites and keep your sidebar less cluttered.
If you’re not tracking visits to your website, it’s something you need to do immediately. Check your referring sites to see if any particular new site is sending you traffic, and to which page. If the traffic is significant, you may want to add a little welcome paragraph to the page welcoming readers from that particular site.
If it’s a blog that’s new to you, go comment on the post linking to you or send a note to the author thanking them for the trackback.
Your “Pages” are going to be the pillars of your website and therefore should be constantly updated with new material, making them even more robust and valuable to your readers.
Is there a paragraph you can expand on, or a bullet point that you left off in a hurry? Has someone left a comment that can be expanded on and answered in the page?
If you’ve created a landing page for new visitors and readers to get to know your site quickly, make sure that the posts and pages you highlight reflect your current traffic numbers and interest. If your content is season-dependent, you may want to rotate some of the posts you highlight based on the time of year and/or relevance.
Have you recently changed jobs, written a guest post, moved to a different country, changed email addresses, or realized you need to update your advertising policy? This is the time to do it. Make sure that your profile picture is the most current one available so that when you meet people offline, they instantly recognize you.
Use Google Webmaster tools to check for links in your own content that are no longer valid. This is easy to do under Diagnostics – Web Crawl to see if there are any 404 or errors for your outgoing links.
If you don’t use Google Webmaster Tools, pick 2-3 of your most link-intensive posts each month and review the outgoing links. If you use Flickr or another similar service to include Creative Commons photos, make sure that all your embedded photos are still active and not missing or broken.
If you’re using installed blogging software like WordPress, make sure you’ve upgraded your version to the most current stable version. If you’re using plugins or widgets developed by someone else, first check that you are using the most recent version, and then test to make sure the widget still works correctly and adds value.
If you’ve bookmarked a few plugins you’ve seen on others’ websites, this is the time to install them and test their functionality in the new month.
A blog is a living document. Check your traffic for the top 5 posts of that month and look for inconsistencies or outdated information, questions or suggestions from the comments that can be answered in your content, and additional resource links to include for more reading.
If you have ads or other revenue generation on your website, update your accounting spreadsheet to track any trends and your total revenue. If you’re keeping track of blog expenses for tax deductions, quickly scan through the month’s post to jog your memory for any travel, research, or other expenses you incurred for those posts.
What would you add to this Monthly Blog Maintenance Checklist?
