myhosting.com Blog

Better Blogging: Interview with Jeremy Wright at SXSWI

Melissa Smich — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 20:27:43 +0000

myhosting.com got a chance to sit down in the blogger’s lounge with Jeremy Wright, co-founder of B5 Media, one of the largest blog networks in history. In less than 95 seconds, Jeremy shares his tips on how to blog better.

Permalinks – Understanding Them and the Important Role They Play

myhosting.com Blog Admin — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 22:10:25 +0000

Permalinks is the abbreviated form of “permanent links.” These are critical for blogs which are susceptible to change too often. The blog entries are published using websites which are database driven and are dynamic in nature because of which permalinks are needed to access them.

Permalinks are the links which will be used by other bloggers to refer to your blog post or establish a link to it. When a particular blog entry is posted on to your blog, the link for it should be permanent and should not vary even when it moves from being on the home page to the archives. This is where these links play a critical role. Permalinks ensure that the link for a particular entry does not change even when it gets archived. If this is absent, then it will be tough to access one of your older blogs.

The concept of permalinks is relatively new and did not exist until recently. With the advent of dynamic web pages, the need for this type of link arose in order to overcome the “link rot” problem. A lot of software for content syndication and web blog support for permalinks then followed.

These links come in handy in case of blogs where visitors can post their views. When a visitor posts his views, it can be viewed in the front page of the blog. However, with the passage of time and addition of new content, this post will move into the background and the next time he visits the blog, he will not be able to view it on the home page. However, thanks to these links, the entry will not be lost. It can be easily accessed even after a long span of time.

Most permalinks constitute various characters that denote the time and date when the blog was created. While there are pre-set options, you can also customize these links to suit your convenience and help in search engine optimization. The name of the author also is shown in this link. Irrespective of whether the entry is altered, moved or renamed, permalinks can easily help retrieve it. It is this feature of these links which help in backtracking links and link tracing.

Installing Themes for Your Blog – Pep Up the Look of Your Simple Blog

Melissa Smich — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:28:36 +0000

Creating a blog is just one small step you take towards establishing your identity online. There are a number of blogs that have flooded the internet today, with each talking about a different subject. Most bloggers are bending over backwards to ensure that their blog gets the visibility they are looking for. While a few blogs with not much good information are able to hog the limelight, there are a few information rich blogs that disappear into the oblivion. So, why do some blogs get recognition while the others falter?

Well, the answer to this is relatively straightforward. It is not just the content of the blog that matters. The look of your blog also counts to a great degree. While information is what makes the blog stand out, people look for visual appeal in order to stay glued to the blog to read the entire content. This is where themes for blogs come into play. Today, there are innumerable themes available for bloggers, such as Wordpress themes, to choose from in order to make their blog space look lively and peppy. Obviously, the next question is how to go about installing themes for your blogs.

The good news is that the process of installing themes for most blogs is very simple and involves a quick step by step procedure. Ensuring you know the steps involved will help you accomplish the process in a jiffy. So, let us take a quick look at how you can succeed in installing themes for your blogs.

First of all, you have to choose the kind of theme you want to use for your blog. This is a crucial task and though it seems pretty simple, it involves a lot of thinking. It is recommended that you choose the theme that goes hand in hand with the content of the blog. If you are blogging about something lively and peppy, then, opting for themes that have dark background shades is not a good idea. Choose a theme that can enhance the content of the blog. Once you choose a particular theme, visualize it to see if it is giving you the desired output. Have two to three options handy so you can choose the other if the current one does not blend well.

Once you have chosen the theme, you will have to download the zipped file onto your computer. This will enable you to go through the ‘Read Me’ file and also give you information about the license for the theme chosen.

Upload the contents of the zipped folder onto the blog. While you can use file manager and FTP to upload the contents, it is recommended you use the latter since it is faster.

Once this is complete, all you need to do is activate the theme you have uploaded. You can usually do this through your blog administration panel. With Wordpress hosting, this is located in the “Appearance” section.

Installing themes for your blog hosting is easy and does not require a lot of technical skills. Keep these simple steps in mind and give it the face-lift it has been waiting for all along.

SPAM Guide: Identifying and Eliminating Unnecessary Emails

Melissa Smich — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:50:05 +0000

We all have experienced the concept of spam at some point in our life. The only difference might be that, at that time, you may not have known the term for describing emails of this kind. However, now that you are familiar with what is called spam, you might be curious to know more about it and how you can successfully get rid of it. There are quite a lot of techniques which you can use in order to win the battle over spam. Fortunately, many of these techniques are quite easy to implement. Some of the techniques are listed below in this email anti-spam guide.

The simplest step is to learn to open emails only from trusted senders. This is the fundamental rule that is applicable to a lot of other things in your life as well. You should know that without this rule, the world would have been quite a chaotic place filled with a lot of dangers and pitfalls that might constantly be making life miserable for you. Avoid opening emails from unknown senders. Keep your inquisitiveness in check when you receive suspicious emails.

Just like how you wouldn’t want to open the email that has been sent from unknown entities, you should also avoid giving out your email address to anyone who requests for it. Remember that your email address is an important piece of information that can be misused if it falls in the wrong hands. Hence, make sure that this doesn’t happen. Divulge this information only to credible sources who can assure you of sufficient protection. If you are ever in doubt, always double check before handing out your address.

While one can take all the necessary precautions to stay safe, it is still possible that you might end up receiving Spam mail from senders that look familiar to you. Just to be on the safe side, you should avoid opening up these emails and stick to using software that can successfully help you identify good emails from the bad ones. Hackers are known to abuse contact lists and send emails that appear to be from from accounts that you trust, without the knowledge of the account holder. Hence, staying on guard with a smart spam filter can help avoid some untoward incident.

Simple things like these can help you go a long way in keeping spam emails at bay and your system risk free! And if you don’t already have one, make sure your email hosting provider has a reliable and accurate spam filtering and anti-virus service. This will help keep your inbox clean from some of the worst offenders.

myhosting.com Does SXSWI

Melissa Smich — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:51:33 +0000

It’s that time of year again when all the tech nerds, music snobs and film buffs from around the world gather together to geek out at South By South West (SXSW). SXSWI is the interactive portion, bringing you all the latest toys, trends and talks about all things cutting edge and utterly geeky.

This year we are letting the terrible twosome Software Developer, Music Blogger and SXSW veteran, Ricky Lam, as well as our resident Twitter chick and all around trouble maker, Melissa Smich, go wild at the conference.

About SXSW
The South by Southwest (SXSW) Conferences & Festivals offer the unique convergence of original music, independent films, and emerging technologies. Fostering creative and professional growth alike, SXSW is the premier destination for discovery. Conference registrants also partake in a full agenda of provocative, informative panel discussions and celebrity interviews featuring hundreds of speakers of international stature.

About the SXSWI (where our team will be)
An incubator of cutting-edge technologies, the SXSW Interactive Festival brings together the world’s most creative web developers, designers, bloggers, wireless innovators, content producers, programmers, widget inventors and new media entrepreneurs. Five days of captivating keynote presentations and provocative panel sessions provide hands-on training as well as big-picture analysis of the future of this industry.

Have any tips for where these two should go? Places to go? Sessions to attend? Food worth trying? Things you want covered on here?? Drop us a line and let us know!

Don’t forget to follow Ricky Lam and Melissa Smich’s antics on twitter with the #myhostingsxsw hash

For our SXSWI blog coverage, pictures, videos and other random maddness, click here.

For our official myhosting.com SXSW page and info, click here.

Blogging via Smartphone

myhosting.com Blog Admin — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:37:53 +0000

What do you do if a great blogging idea hits you when you are on the go? You can’t run around to find a computer every time you have a bright idea. The solution to this problem is using phones to blog. Several blogging services allow people to post blogs via their cell phones. However, to do so, you need the services and features of a smart phone.

Several text-based blogs allow you to send entries via emails to specific addresses about which only you have knowledge. The advantage of posting your blog entries through email is that this method is very smart phone friendly. If you have installed the settings for sending out an email using your smart phone, you don’t need to be online to create a blog entry. You can do this using the messaging feature. Once your entry is ready, you can send it to your blog using the GPRS connection of your phone. The process will cost you only a few cents.

Here’s a look at how you adjust the settings of your blog service to be able to blog via your smart phone:

Go to the Settings option of your blogging services provider and click on the email tab. Here you can enter an email address where you want your blog posts to be directed to when you email your entries. Add this email address as a contact on your smart phone. Next, go to write “New Message” and in that go to “Email”. Select your blog email address as the recipient and type in your blog post on the phone. The “subject” of the email becomes the title of the post automatically and the rest of the text is the body of the post. When you press the send button, your blog entry move to your outbox. Go to your outbox and press the send button again. Your blog entry is now online on your blog!

Most popular mobile blogging tools allow you to send blog posts as texts or pictures through email, SMS or MMS. New posts can also be merged with existing entries. The Wordpress Mobile Edition allows you to install a plug-in that detects mobile visitors automatically, and show you the list of visitors who visit your website.

By D’transcriptors

Social Media and SEO

myhosting.com Blog Admin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:37:22 +0000

The evolution of internet into Web 2.0 gave birth to another term, social media. So, what exactly is social media? It is media that is capable of dissemination through social interaction between its users, wherein the content is created by using freely accessible and highly scalable techniques of publication. The Internet and numerous web based technologies transform the communication on internet from mere interaction between two individuals into a widespread social occurrence, a media dialogue. It is essentially the “democratization” of information and knowledge on the internet, and transforms consumers of content into producers of content.

Social media devices and techniques can take various forms, such as blogs, forums, microblogging sites (Twitter, Jaiku), social networking sites (Facebook, LinkdIn), social bookmarking websites (StumbleUpon, Delicious), wikis (Wikipedia), photography sharing website (Flickr), video sharing websites (YouTube)

Another recent development has been the increasing use of social media for search engine optimization. In fact, the two terms – social media and search engine optimization – have been combined to produce an entirely new term in the marketing lexicon – social media optimization. This new discipline, social media optimization, or SMO in short, seeks to achieve the benefits through social media. Indeed, SMO is the bridge between SEO and social media.

Just as SEO takes into consideration both on-site (internal) factors and off-site (external) factors, social media optimization (SMO) also has two different components – In-content SMO and Off-Content SMO. In-content SMO constitutes the social media features that are embedded in the content itself. These include features like RRS feeds, polls, images and videos from third parties and ‘Share This’ buttons. Off-site SMO includes features such as blogging and commenting on blogs, participating in forums and discussions and use of social networking sites. The term ‘viral marketing’, which has gained such a currency in the field of internet marketing, is nothing but a form of SMO.

How to do SMO For Your Website

SMO, as a matter of fact, shares many of the characteristics of the SEO process. In many cases, what you need to do for good SEO for your website is also what you need to get good fair SMO results. In brief, to get get SMO benefits for your website, you need to take the following steps -

Add more and more fresh, unique and compelling content, which a lot of people and websites will like to link to. Many gurus like to call this ‘linkbaiting’.
Create content in different formats – blog posts, podcasts, videos, e-books, white papers.
Add “Share This’” buttons to your website and/or blog.
Provide more visibility to blogs/websites that link to your website and content. This is like rewarding those websites that link to you, thus encouraging more inbound links to your website.
Try to gain a complete understanding of your target audience. This will help you to produce suitable content, which will encourage your target audience to share your ideas.
Participate actively in the conversations that your content generates.
Keep it up.

SMO is a a rather new concept, as is social media. The concept will continue to keep evolving over the future, and it will indeed be interesting to monitor its future progress. Whatever may be its outcome, one thing is fairly certain – SMO is an invaluable tool for increasing the visibility and ranking of your website.

Cross Browser Compatibility and Web Design

myhosting.com Blog Admin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:32:39 +0000

The internet uses a wide variety of browsers, such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Opera, etc for browsing the internet. Cross browser compatibility, or the adaptability of the website to different browsers that are used, is an important issue in website design. It is a known issue that most of the websites do not resolve well in all the different browsers that are available and used by the internet users. Not only does the website have to adapt to different varieties of different browsers, it has also to adapt to the different versions of the same browser that may have been introduced at different points of time.

An average internet user is not aware of the limits of the websites to adapt to all types of browsers, and it is expected that the website will look good in any browser, when it is clearly not the case. In other words, web users are expecting that websites will be compatible with their browser. This makes it all the more important to design cross browser compatible websites. This issue can be resolved by integrating the following web design elements in the construction of the website:

Simplicity – Keeping the website design as simple as possible is the best way to deal with multi-browser compatibility issue. This will mean using one or two columns, and simple header and footer designs. The excessive use of nested elements in the markup should be avoided. Visual formatting should be done with CSS, while the use of HTML should be limited to content (and not styling).
Code Validation – Running your code through validators will help to weed out invalid codes, which in turn will help in ironing out many problems in browser compatibility. There are a number of online services that can be used to validate the codes, such as W3C Validator. The HTML Validator add-on in Firefox can also be used.
DOCTYPE – Including a valid DOCTYPE (document type declaration) in your webpages will prevent many browsers from switching to the so called “quirks mode”, which essentially renders your page in a non-standard manner, thus causing compatibility issues.
Test Your Website in Different Browsers – Web developers adopt a simple approach – they develop a website completely in one browser, e.g., Firefox, and then test it across other browsers such as Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari etc. This helps to fix any compatibility issues that crop up.
Use Website Analytics – The website analytics data can be used to analyze the trend of visitors and which browsers they have been using. This will give a fair idea of the most important browsers for which the website should be optimized, and the rest can be simply ignored. This will help to save a lot of costs and efforts.

What would you add to the list? What are your biggest web design pet peeves? Let us know!

What is DNS Flush

myhosting.com Blog Admin — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:59:11 +0000

The majority of the clients cache the results of the requests of the name resolution. This explains that the clients of DNS will store temporarily the names of the websites that has been visited by you lately.

This procedure speeds up name resolution as the various look-ups are done to similar addresses as the ones you’ve searched for in the past while browsing the web. That means that while visiting a site a second time, the client of DNS will have already the name mapped and will quickly retrieve the mapping.
At times, a bad entry of DNS will be cached and you will require either flushing of DNS cache for getting rid of it or waiting until 24hrs for it to be automatically dropped from the cache. There are various benefits of flushing the DNS.
DNS flush resets the content of the client of DNS resolver cache. While the troubleshooting of DNS, the process can be used for discarding entries of negative cache from the cache, and any other entries that have been dynamically added. The command of flushdns/ipconfig offers the means to flush.
The cache resetting does not get rid of entries that are being preloaded from the Hosts file that is local. From the cache, to get rid of those entries, it should be removed from this file. The other benefit is that though the command ipconfig is offered for Windows earlier version, the option of /flushdns is obtainable for use on computers that run Windows XP, Windows 2000 or Windows Server 2003 operating systems.
To flush DNS cache in Linux:
- Restart the nscd daemon
- Type /etc/rc.d/ init.d/nscd restart in terminal
- Run the command
To flush DNS cache in Microsoft Windows
-Start->Run->type cmd
-Type ipconfig/flushdns
To flush DNS cache in Mac OS X:
- Type in your terminal dscaheutil-flushache for flushing the DNS resolver cache
- Run the command
To flush DNS cache in Mac OS X Leopard
-Type in your terminal lookupd-flushache
- Run the command
On local system the caching of DNS makes sure for the fastest speed for resolving any domain name and reduces hits then, load directly and burn the servers of DNS name. Yet, this creates few issues like few web pages and website not connected or contacted or loaded when browsing, caused by changing of nameservers or IP address that has not been refreshed and reflected on local copy. It is more obvious when the web browser is set by the user to use proxy for surfing the internet and these sites can be loaded, correctly now.
When coming across any not accessible or not able to load the issue of web page, the best solution is to try to flush DNS cache on the system.

Submitted by:
Pallavi Kant

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How Proxy Servers Work

myhosting.com Blog Admin — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:49:30 +0000

On your local network, one internet connection is shared by the proxy server with all the computers or it is computer that provides the service of computer network to permit clients for making indirect network connections to other network services.

Hence, a proxy server is a server acting as a mediator between the server (the computer on which the information is being requested by the user displays) and the client (user’s computer).

When the data are requested by the clients from a resource of internet, traffic goes from the web application/browser first via the proxy before reaching the sources of request and back via the proxy and finally the data are transmitted to you by the proxy.
A proxy server stands between a real server and a client application like Web browser. It catches requests of all to the real server to check whether the requests can be fulfilled by it. In case, it does not the request is being forwarded to the real server.
The work of proxy server is actually to connect, respond and receive traffic from the internet. The proxy server acts on behalf of the computer of the client. It works on the higher of the OSI (Open System Interconnection) mode or the transport layer (layer 4.)
The work of proxy server

On the internet when the request is made by the computer out to the internet like as retrieving a Web page from a Web Server- the computer internally contacts the proxy server that in return contact the server of the internet. The Web page is sent by the internet to the proxy server that on the internet forwards the page to the computer.
All traffic is being logged by the proxy servers between the intranet and the internet. It can log each IP address, time and date of access, number of bytes downloaded, URL, and so on. Such information can be used against the network, for analyzing attacks launched. It can help the administrators of intranet build good services and access for employees as well.
Few of the proxy servers should work with proxy clients that are special. The best approach is using clients that are off-the-shelf with proxy servers. When used this way, it should be particularly configured for working with proxy servers from a configuration menu. Then, as usual the client software is used by the intranet employee. To achieve the data, the client software goes out to a proxy server, rather than going to intranet.
Proxy servers can do much between an internet and the intranet. Security schemes can also be implemented. They can be used for speeding up few of the performances of the services of the internet as well by catching the copies of data-keeping of the requested data.
Proxy server can be divided into two sections:
1) transparent: It tells the IP address of your computer to the remote computer. These offer no privacy.
2) Anonymous: It is used to block the remote computer from knowing the computer’s identity using the proxy server for making requests. This is further divided into a disguised proxy server and an elite proxy server.

Submitted by:
Pallavi Kant