In my previous post, I talked about the cost of running a small website. The cost calculated in that post is for small e-commerce site that accepts online payments and for website owners who don’t have any technical knowledge in building a website. This post will focus about the cost of running a blog. Then you may ask, “What is a blog? Isn’t that a blog is a website?”. This post is not about blog and blogging, this is about the cost of running one, so here is a link to Wikipedia if you want to know what is a blog.

The real cost of running a blog, specially if the blog is at its early age, is NOT money. In fact, many bloggers invest money only if they start earning money. This actually means that you can earn money through blogging, how to earn money through blogging is worth another post. The real cost of running a blog is your time, knowledge, effort, and heart.

It takes time to build a blog, not one month not three months but year, and if not years. In order for you to establish a blog, you should do regular blogging. Make it so regular that it will become a part of your routine. A blog that grows overtime will grow its reputation along the way. A blog that is populated with tons of contents overnight by a single user cannot be trusted, and a blog that contains 5 posts in its 1 year of existence is a dead blog.

Writing is the primary activity in blogging and writing demands knowledge. Video and audio podcasting are increasingly popular, these two are considered as blogs; yet it demands knowledge to produce such podcasts and the contents of those podcasts. Written blog demands two things: what to write and how to write it. It takes knowledge to know what to write and another form of knowledge on how to write it.

You will surely burn hours in front of your computer when you do blogging. It takes considerable effort in your part if you want to run a blog. You need to think more than you used to, you need to read other blog posts, you need to establish online and offline relationship among other bloggers. A blog cannot be materialized without any single effort from your part. At least you need to raise your finger to press a key in your keyboard.

Your heart, your stubborn heart to be more precise, is the most important investment in your blog. It is the power that will keep you going, losing your heart to write a blogpost will make blogging so tiring, so boring, and a waste of time and energy. Many are lost in the blogosphere because they don’t have the heart of doing it. It doesn’t matter what is your motive in doing a blog, you must have a heart of it. To sustain your blog in the long run needs an unyielding heart, if the heart will quit, the blog will eventually die.

Monetary cost of running a blog

If you run your blog in free services like WordPress.com and Bloggers.com then your blog will cost you nothing. Serious bloggers however invest minimal amount from web hosting and domain name. Most serious bloggers are earning serious money from their blog. Web hosting will cost you about $4 a month and $13 a year for domain name. If you need help on how to setup a blog and register a domain, feel free to contact me. I will be glad to help you setup your blog and register your domain. If you ask how much, no, its free, just say thank you in the comment form below, if you like doing it.

One of my previous post discuss on how to start your own website. This post will give you an idea on how much a website will cost you.

Small business owners realize the importance of putting up a website for better exposure of their product and/or service. Those who successfully staged their online presence enjoys the many benefits of having a website. Still, many are not doing websites; one of the factors is the cost, not because they can’t afford it, but because they don’t have any idea on how much it cost. This post will focus on costs in running small websites suited for small businesses.

The cost of running a website can be categorized into two; setup cost and ongoing cost. Setup cost is the initial cost of having a website. It includes domain name registration, acquiring a web host, script installation, page design, and SSL certificate for e-commerce site. The actual amount of the setup cost depends on several factors. One example is whether you write your own script from scratch or use a pre-written script. Another is the type of website you need to run; is it an e-commerce site that will accept online transactions, a registration site that accepts membership, a blog or online journal, or simply a presentation of your products and services. Setting up a website needs some technical knowledge but if this is not your stuff, you can always hire someone to set it up for you. The cost of hiring a professional developer cannot be quantified easily. In this case, you may talk to someone who are offering website development services. The setup cost is usually equivalent to several years of ongoing cost.

Ongoing cost can be break further into two parts; maintenance cost and promotional cost. Maintenance includes your domain name renewal, web hosting renewal, SSL certificate renewal for websites that accepts online payments, and script upgrade. The minimum period for domain name and SSL certificate renewal is yearly, web hosting is monthly, and script upgrade depends on security level of your website. We can easily quantify maintenance cost, a rough estimate of ±$50 a month will do for e-commerce website. Promotional cost has two faces: time and money. If you don’t want to spend any single cent in promoting your website, you can optimize your pages for search engine and wait for the search engine to index your pages. Once your pages are indexed by search engines, if somebody searching for a keyword you used in your page, the searcher may land to your website. You can also join social sites like FaceBook and Twitter to promote your website. Social sites are very popular nowadays that you lose many potential costumers if you continue to ignore them. Another is by spending money to promote your website through online advertisement. You can use the most popular Google Adwords in promoting your website.

Updating your website in regular basis is a critical part of website promotion. Your website will be as good as dead if after 1 year of existence, you only have 5 pages online. I recommend you update it once a week, if your time cannot afford it, you can do that once a month. To update a website means to add another page of information to your existing website. You may announce your new product, the new security officer of your building, your discount rates, anything that will make your website alive and fresh. But of course, make it more relevant to what you offer. You can also hire writers to write an update for your website. There are many options to promote your website, and this topic is worth another blog post.

If you really need the amount of how much it cost to run a website, here is my very rough estimate. The cost may go up or down depending on the type of website you are going to run. In my rough estimate $350 initial cost may do. In this amount, you can simply talk to a web developer tell him what you want and if the $350 is reasonable for both of you, then you can set back, relax, and wait for the outcome. The monthly cost maybe around $50. Note however that the above costs are very rough estimates. You may be surprised with the difference from actual cost of running a website.

You may also like this post: Cost of running a blog

Drupal is a complete CMS, you can turn it into any website you want. With the vast modules available for download, you can create a very powerful website without writing any single line of code. This post however will only focus on how to create a single user blog using Drupal.

Core Modules

A single user blog is one of the easiest website to setup using Drupal. All you need is a handful of core modules and some add on modules from Drupal.org. I suggest you enable the following core modules for the single-user blog:

Comment

Allows your reader to comment on your blog. If you you don’t want anybody to comment on your blog, turn this off.

Contact

Enables the use of both personal contact form. If you you don’t want anybody to contact you via your blog, leave this button unchecked.

Menu

For you to setup the site menu.

Ping

This module will alert other sites about your new blog post.

If you notice, the Blog module is not in the list. I suggest you use the content type Story for your blog. This is more convenient for a single-user blog than the Blog module itself. It will work better compared to content type Blog created by the Blog module. Using Story or Blog has been a question to many in Drupal community. Per experience, I found Story more appropriate for a single-user blog.

Add-on Modules

The following add on modules are optional. Its purpose is to make your Drupal blog to behave like the rest of blogging software in the internet. Though it is not necessary for a blog to behave in such a way, one may not be at peace looking at their blog to work differently. So here are my few suggestion.

Gravatar integration

Integrate Gravatar pictures registered at Gravatar.com in Drupal sites

Comment subjects

Provides a default comment subject: ‘Re: [parent comment/node title]‘.

Custom Pagers

Allows administrators to define custom pagers for navigation in lists of nodes.

AddThis

Creates AddThis button as a block, to be used in themes and to node links.

Of course, you need to enable other modules that will automate your task in any Drupal site and other core modules to monitor the activities of your site. You also need to install modules that will make your Drupal site friendly to search engines. All of these will be discussed in my next posts. You may subscribe to my feeds if you want to receive my next posts right to your inbox.

Choosing which Content Management System (CMS) to use is as daunting as choosing which web hosting to go. Taking a pause and think for a while will pay off in the future. If you are going to search the web, this issue is almost as old as dot com era. Web developers, web designers, and online business owners, will need to choose for a platform to run a particular website. There are many discussion out there talking about this issue, and here am I adding a page in the web, hoping someone will be rightly directed.

To open source or to commercial CMS

This is the first question to ask especially to company that is serious about developing their website. Some companies are thinking that you get what you paid for, and that free CMS is not suitable for them. Small businesses and individuals has no issue about this, open source is easy to embrace because of zero cost. But the fact is, either free or not, both has its strength and flaws. In developer’s perspective, open source is more favorable because of the global collaboration among developers. In my case, I will go with free CMS.

Which one among many

There are thousands of posts about this; Drupal vs Joomla, Joomla vs WordPress; WordPress vs Drupal; WordPress vs Drupal vs Joomla; phpBB vs SMF, vBulletin vs FusionBB vs InvisionPB, blah blah blah. Again, here am I creating my own page, and making my own blah blah blah.

Thousands of free CMS are waiting for you to download and use. Its free of charge, and the support from the community is great. Which one to use depends on what you want to achieve and how much time and money you want to spend in attaining your goal. Are you making a discussion board, or simply a presentation of your masterpieces? Are you going to do some information campaign, create an online journal, a magazine website, online newspaper, community portal? Your answer to these questions will dictate which CMS to go.

Another factor to consider is the level of skill the end user have in loading contents to the site. Are your users savvy enough to understand HTML tags; many are really get confused to see something like <strong>bold text</strong>. Consider the end user of the website, and build a site appropriate for them. If your users are young ones, it is not much of an issue showing them HTML tags, most of them are fast learners.

Look and feel of the website dictates sales. If you are selling something, see to it that the website can be easily configured in making sales. Some CMS are hard in selling multiple products but good in selling single items while other works the other way around. Consider what you are going to sell and to whom. I will not discuss here what particular CMS to use, google the web and you will find in depth discussions of each CMS.

The last and very important thing to consider is your expertise and familiarity over a given CMS. Yes every CMS can be learned, but it will make you work faster and better if you are working in a familiar environment. Master, if not familiarize, two or three widely used CMS. With these, you can build any website you can imagine.

Secure site is mandatory not an option. Keeping your Drupal web site up-to-date is the best way to secure it. Periodically, Drupal.org will release a new upgrade, most of the time, it is a security update. Once a new release is announced, you need to upgrade immediately to avoid some serious trouble.

Upgrading a Drupal website is simple, but you need to backup everything, specially your database, before going with any upgrade. There is one very important thing I want you to note in upgrading your Drupal website.

I made this mistake one time and it is truly a real pain. Luckily, I have a backup that was one week old so the loss is not that big. But reworking a one week update is still a pain, and pain hurts. But how about if my backup is a month old, or much worse, no backup at all?

What’s the big deal with the “sites” folder

The “sites” is the default container of folders containing images, themes, and modules. Re-uploading modules is a time consuming process and you will most probably lost your own unique theme. Much worse if you are running a community website and files of your users are under a sub-directory of this folder. Be careful not to delete this folder when you do the upgrade.

Quick steps in upgrading your Drupal web site

Note that the instruction below is for upgrade in the same release (example: from Drupal 6.13 to Drupal 6.14) NOT for different releases of Drupal (example: from Drupal 5.x to Drupal 6.x).

1. Backup everything, most specially your database and download it to your machine.
2. Create a zip file of the “sites” folder and download it to your computer.
3. Put your site “Off Line” for maintenance.
4. Switch the theme to Garland.
5. Turn off all contributed modules (no need to off the core modules). Note: do not uninstall the modules, only tuned them off.
6. Delete all Drupal files and folders except for the following: .htaccess file, robots.txt file, sites directory, and Any other file and folder that is not of Drupal.
7. Upload all Drupal files and folders except for the files and folder listed in number 6.
8. Re-enable all contributed modules you turned off in number 5.
9. Run updates
10. Switch back the theme from Garland to your theme.
11. Put your site back “On Line”.

That’s it, very simple.

Web badge is useful in link building specially if you are running a community website. Let your community copy a code and post it anywhere. The code is of course contains link back to your site. You also need to create web badges if you are going to do traffic campaign. Your badge will make it easy for others to link to your site. The process of creating a badge are as follows: (1) create an image and upload the image to your server, and (2) create a code that your readers may copy. As an example, I created a 125px × 125px badge that will link back to this blog. The result of the code is as shown by the image to the right.

Link to us, copy the code below and paste it to your website:
<a href="http://www.rtfverterra.com/" title="... wala lang"><img src="http://www.rtfverterra.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/rtfverterra-badge.gif" alt="RTFVerterra - Weaving websites from scratch" width="125" height="125" /></a>

Step 1: Create an Image Badge
Define the size of the image. Some of the standard size for advertisement campaigns are as follows: 125 × 125 pixels, 728 × 90 pixels, 250 × 250 pixels, 300 × 250 pixels, 468 × 60 pixels, 234 × 60 pixels, 160 × 600 pixels, and 120 × 600 pixels. Any size as you wish will do.

You can use any image editing software but if you have Photoshop, much better. Online badge generator like http://www.web20badges.com/ will greatly help. With your image ready, you can now promote your website using your badge.

Step 2: Upload Your Image and Create a Code
The next thing you need to do is to upload your image to your server and note for its absolute path. Create the following code:

<textarea cols="specify width" rows="specify height" readonly="readonly"><a href="http://www.yourwebsite.com/" title="this is a tool tip"><img src="absolute path to the image" alt="describe your website here" width="width of image" height="height of image"/></a></textarea>

Make sure to change the values as indicated above. Post your code anywhere in your website and let your readers copy it.

Step 3: Read Below
You’re done. There is no step number 3.

Sample Badges
I created a page that contains badges so that it will not be hard for me to retrieve my code whenever I need it. Here is a sample of a page loaded with badges.

If you want to have a space in the internet but you don’t know how or where to start, then this post is for you. There are many ways to start your own website and I understand that it is overwhelming at the start. Now let’s make it very simple. I am confident that you will learn how to run a website after you finish reading this post. So let’s start.

Web host and domain

There are only two things you need in order to run a website: a host and a domain. A host is a computer where you save all your images, files, folders, and web pages. The host must be always ON so that it can serve request/s at any time of the day and night. The host computer is called server. Domain is the web address of your site, anybody can open your website by writing its domain at the browser’s address bar. Example of a domain is rtfverterra.com, when you type rtfverterra.com at the address bar, the browser will land at the front page of this blog.

Finding your web host

The first thing to do in running a website is to find a web host. There are two types of web host: free and paid. You can select any of the two, both can serve web pages to your readers. Note however that in web hosting, you will get what you paid for, if you go with free web hosting, you will get a service that is equivalent to free and if you go with paid web hosting you will get far better than the free hosting can offer.

Getting your domain

Domain name can also be free or paid, but it is not wise to start with free domain. Going with paid domain is highly recommended. Domain is your brand and it is not wise to entrust your brand into free services. Many web hosting companies offer a free web address in the form of a subdomain. A subdomain is a web address that looks like your_name.website_name.com. One example is Mathalino.net, it offers free subdomain in the form your_name.mathalino.org. Subdomain however will only work in the web host’s server and cannot be used to another web server. Switching from domain to subdomain is easy at the time you have your own domain available.

Where to get a free web host and a free domain

Important: Go only with free web host if you can afford to lose all your work for most free web hosts are fly by night. Some are legitimate but take note that even the big Yahoo! was not able to sustain the Geocities because of the nature of free web hosting. Free web hosting however is a good place for the beginners and for testing your codes.

Personally, I was using Bravenet when I first entered into website development. I still have two websites running until now: MathematASIAN and GERTCTacloban. You can order your free hosting at Bravenet here. I was also using Yahoo! Geocities but unfortunately Geocities is now close. I will not recommend free web hosting that I did not use but if you want more information, you can find it here.

Free domain name is very rare, you can get it mostly if you buy a long term hosting service. But there is one company I know that allow you to register a free domain. Visit http://www.co.cc/ and find your luck in finding a new domain with an extension of .co.cc.

Where to get a paid web host and a paid domain

Because I am in the business of web hosting and domain registration, this last part will obviously mention my business and will not mention any competitor. If you need information about different companies offering the same service, sorry to say that I cannot mention it here. I hope you understand.

You can get a professional web hosting from Mathalino.net starting from $3.95 a month. You can get 1 year free domain or lifetime free domain if you chose to pay annually depending on which package you choose. You can compare our web hosting plans here: http://mathalino.net/content/compare-web-hosting-plans. Feel free to contact me if you have some questions. You can chat with me if I am online or leave me a message if offline. My status is as indicated in the button below.

I hate email spam and I have a habit of deleting contents in spam folder periodically. But before I will do the deletion, I will browse through the files looking for some legitimate email being caught by spam assasin. Now I found Google’s own mail caught by gMail as spam. This world is crazy, hehehe.

Click the image to enlarge

I took the screen shot above for the record. Did you guys experience similar thing? Weird huh!

I really don’t care how my site is ranking in Alexa, not until my site with fairly good traffic (not this blog) was disapproved by an income generating program, solely because it did not rank well in Alexa. I was really disappointed and contacted them that I will share to them my Google Analytics to prove to them that the site surpass their minimum requirements of 100,000 pageviews a month. I will not mention here what program or company is that, but many webmasters are aware and taking care of their Alexa ranking because of the additional income opportunities. If this is your first time to know this, then you start now doing something for your Alexa ranking, a good additional income will knock at your door if your site rank high in Alexa.

Many understands that Alexa is not an accurate gauge of web traffic, specially if your site is not inclined for audience like webmasters and bloggers. People just don’t care about Alexa toolbar unless you have web pages to promote. According to Alexa, hits are recorded from browsers with Alexa toolbar installed. Personally, I hate many toolbar installed in the browser, that’s why I am a fan of Google Chrome. I don’t want my browser window be clattered with some toolbar in which most functionality I don’t actually use.

Now that I want my site to rank higher in Alexa, I installed a widget of it in all the pages. Alexa widget will help record the hit even if the visitor don’t have Alexa toolbar installed in their browser.

I am now hoping for the best, I hope my Alexa rank will sky rocket. Wish me good luck .

What is Linux?

Linux is an operating system (OS) developed by Linus Torvalds at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Linus released his source code under GNU General Public License (GNU GPL). The source code can be freely modified and redistributed commercially and non-commercially by anyone under the GNU GPL. Then what is an OS and how it works? So many questions, huh… When you turned on your computer, the processor will trigger the Basic Input Output System (BIOS), the BIOS will then look for the the boot device (it can be your CD/DVD, floppy disk, flash drive, but mostly hard disk). An OS must be in the boot device and when it loads you can see that the computer opens. In simple terms, OS is the one that will make your computer open. This statement however underestimates OS, and unacceptable in real sense. I recommend the following articles for more information: (a) Operating system (b) Windows Bootup Process

Why should I install Linux?

If you are a Windows user, and all your computing needs are met by Windows then you don’t need to install Linux. Most Windows users do not need Linux and can go on without Linux. If you’re a heavy user of Microsoft Office products, you don’t need to install Linux.

You should install Linux if…

• You want a free of charge OS. Yes most Linux are free of charge, but take note that not all Linux are free of charge.
• You are so disturbed when you heard somebody said that Linux is better than Windows, and you want to verify their statement.
• You are super-duper curios about Linux
• You want to feel geeky and techie
• You want your classmates to be awed by your OS
• You are so concerned with virus, spyware, malware, etcetera
• You want to experience the security of Linux OS
• You want to become a member of Linux fanatics and partials

Installing Linux

There are many ways to run Linux in your windows machine, but I will only highly recommend one. And that one is in the last part: Install Linux in a Separate Hard Disk. The following are some of the many ways to run Linux.

Using Live CD

Using Live CD is the best way to look what’s inside Linux without installing it to your system. This will allow you to try Linux and evaluate the system if it really fits for you. The disadvantage however is that this will run fairly slow and everything will be erased after you close the system as it runs only from CD. Every Linux distribution has a Live CD available free of charge. You can request a CD or download an image file to burn to CD or DVD. Among the many choices, the following are most popular: Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva

Install Linux in Virtual PC

Make sure you have a copy of one of the Linux distributions listed above. Install Microsoft Virtual PC, you can download it here. Install the Virtual PC software and follow the onscreen instruction. Install Linux in your Virtual PC by using the wizard. A complete instruction on how to do it can be found here.

Install Ubuntu using Wubi

Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux distribution, above all, it is free of charge. You can install Ubuntu using Wubi, a program specifically designed to install Ubuntu to Windows machine. It is easy and safe. You can download Wubi here.

Install Linux in a Separate Partition

In my previous post, I discuss how to partition the hard disk within Windows Vista, you can install your preferred Linux distribution into a new partition. Run the Linux installer and install it to the new partition you just created. Most Linux distribution can detect that you have a Windows system installed so it will allow you to dual boot your computer. When your computer boot up, a boot menu will let you select which OS to run, Windows or Linux.

Install Linux in a Separate Hard Disk

Among the different ways to install Linux in your machine, this is the one I highly recommend. Your data is safe and Linux and Windows will not share the same hard disk, so all your files are safe. The only disadvantage to this is that you need to shed some $$ for another hard disk. Install a second hard disk into your computer. You need to open your computer using a screw driver to accomplish this. If you don’t know how to do it, ask an assistance from a computer technician or from the store where you buy the hard disk, let them install the hard disk for you.

With your extra hard disk ready, boot up your computer and enter the BIOS setup. To enter the BIOS setup, most computer ask you to hit delete or F2. In the BIOS, change the first boot device to CD or DVD and the second boot device to the new hard disk you just installed. Insert the CD/DVD installer of Linux and restart the computer. When the Linux installer is loaded, make sure to install all its files to the new hard disk.

That’s it, you have Windows and Linux totally separated in one computer. if you want to use Windows again, simply select the priority boot device, I mean go back to BIOS setup and select the hard disk containing Windows as the first boot device.

If you need more assistance, you can contact me, just drop your message.