Wednesday 20 March 2013

Basic guide on choosing web hosting for successful WordPress blog

Before we start over with the first installation of WordPress we need a web space.
Now of course is a requirement that it should not be too expensive and server uptime is over 99% with a decent speed. You are just starting this blog project and it is not sure if it ever really end on a success. Therefore, there should be a good quality and expenditure balance. Also it does matter if the costs are minimal, but your website is painfully slow and every now and again not available. What is the problem of such web host? spider simply can not index your pages faster. Yes, speed of crawl is directly related to the speed and uptime of your web server. You can the data from your webmaster crawl and downloaded graphs.
Of course there are many cheap providers, where you can save even one or two Dollars per month. But with mass host people complains in different blogs about their bad experiences. The performance deteriorates sooner or later, and just to move to from one server another is not so simple.

Server requirement for WordPress installation

There are a few requirements that have to meet the needs web server to easily run to WordPress:

  • As a minimum prerequisite, the current version is 5.3.6 but you should ideally have PHP 5.2 or higher enabled, for the upcoming version of WordPress 3.2 is supposedly need PHP 5+ You can always check which version of PHP is now in use from official PHP web portal.
  • MySQL
    A similar situation arises when the database is needed. WordPress currently runs with MySQL version 4.1.2, but WordPress 3.2 is require at least version 5.0.15. Here is the official website of MySQL.
  • mod_rewrite
    The Apache module “mod_rewrite” is responsible for ensuring that WordPress can be equipped with nice looking URLs. It should therefore be present. Here is the official website of Apache.
  • Memory Limit
    First of all, the reason for having a memory limit is to prevent poorly written scripts for eating up all available memory on a server (from the PHP Manual). So the original idea of this setting is to set the memory limit in the servers configuration. That is normally the job of the administrator and an application should not deal with it on it is own. Otherwise there would be no need to have such a limit.
The conditions are so straightforward, but the above points should be fulfilled. If the host is not indicates these details on the order page, then just write an email and ask for it. This has the additional advantage that one can thus test the same time support.
PHP, MySQL, Apache and WordPress: all are open source (and free), unlike closed source (for example Microsoft Windows). You must understand that, for these open source platforms, today we can create a website: otherwise it would be very costly for us. Read more on Wikipedia on open source.

Server location

This is important. You can test our website from Webpagetest website; change the location from U.S. (where our server is located) to India (where I live and writing this!): you will see the difference. More the geographical distance from  the visitor’s location; the page load time will be more. It is simple logic and needs no explanation.
What is the importance of this information? If your target visitors are from India, obviously you should choose a server that is located in India. On the other hand, if your visitors are from U.S. , definitely you will choose a server located in U.S.
We previously wrote about page loading speed and its impact on SEO.

WordPress installation

The WordPress installation itself is done quickly and easily.

Option 1 :  Pre-installed by Hosting service provider

Some providers offer the option to install with a few clicks with several well-known open source software solutions.

Option 2 : Manual Installation

You need some FTP tool ( FileZilla is recommended) together with FTP .
In addition, you must first create a new database in the web space and admin password which are then required for installation. WordPress itself has written five minutes very nicely.

Other information

If you need faster website, you have to think of dedicated server, cost will be definitely high. CDN (Content Delivery Network) is also needed along with a dedicated server for better performance. If you are thinking of dedicated server and CDN, it is better to consult with professional, because it will be a mess and only loss of money without fruitful result if the right combination is not chosen.
We prefer Linux server (over Windows server) which are cheaper and more reliable (above 98% servers uses Linux). servers are said to be great with very low downtime, but the cost is very high.
We are using NameCheap hosting service’s Business plan; which as you can see, almost works as good as dedicated server at a lesser cost.
To know more, please visit our website : http://thecustomizewindows.com/

Moving WordPress Blog or Website : Full Guide For Every Situation

Moving Blog or Website can be one of the toughest job, if you think it is quite popular blog, that has been hacked, database corrupted, the server which are you in is worst than a hell, is giving legal threatening to save delicate Microsoft Windows users in SERP – “This Website can harm your computer”. We had to move this WordPress blog such dangerous situation and after that excellent experience of moving WordPress. So, in this article we will guide you for moving WordPress.
Before Moving WordPress
Before Moving WordPress it is important to evaluate the current situation. If you are moving WordPress from one host to another good one, then it is very important to do the work using either a fresh formatted computer with some Linux distro or from someone’s Linux or Mac computer. There is every possibility of having malwares on Windows and Shell commands are easy to run by default from UNIX based system.
Next evaluation is how much you know or rather how much you can learn in the process of Moving WordPress. Marriage, typically happens once in life, so is about Moving WordPress. If you are Moving WordPress for 5th or nth times – you will admit that your host was never good and it was the sole reason for Moving WordPress – you must not get the pain of moving WordPress again by selecting a good host.
Probably you are moving WordPress from a bad server to a good server.

Things to understand Before Moving WordPress

The basic logics for Moving WordPress :
  • You need to download the full FTP content before Moving WordPress. Its quite time taking process. If you are great in using UNIX commands and have the shell access, simply tar it and download on your hard disk.
  • The next step for moving wordpress is to get the MySQL backup. Best is to use PHPMyAdmin and select all the tables and compress it to download.
  • So you got everything ready for Moving WordPress. Ideally this is the proper full backup that should be taken not only for  Moving WordPress, but for regular safeguard too.
But in case you can not access the PHPMyAdmin :
  • Then use some plugin to get the MySQL data needed for Moving WordPress. Search in WordPress repository for such plugins.
  • You need to download the full FTP content as usually.
In situation where you have no access neither FTP nor PHPMyAdmin :
  • In this case there is nice plugin named PressBackup. it, it will make the whole thing in to a single compress file.
WordPress default export function for Moving WordPress :
  • Practically useless for bigger websites as there is restriction in size, but yes this is a method to restore the MySQL database.
  • FTP content as usually will have to be downloaded for this method of Moving WordPress.

WordPress is not a Suitcase to move

The biggest point is, Moving WordPress is basically not an ‘by default’ feature. Quite obviously with any CMS this is true. Best method for Moving WordPress in complex type of case is to use PressBackup plugin. Simply it will recognize which folder and database is of whom. These bad habits of improper setup are usually due to cPanel. With cPanel everyone is WordPress expert now. They run those nasty scripts to install WordPress. Basically they are careless about the FTP or MySQL database hierarchy. If you are thinking if you ask them for such Moving WordPress which they themselves made – they will simply blame the innocent user for nothing or delete many important things to ease their process for Moving WordPress.

Final Steps for Moving WordPress

So you got the backups of the full website. The final steps for Moving WordPress are :
  • Change the Name-Server to point to new server
  • Add the old domain to new server
  • Install a fresh WordPress on it
  • Restore the FTP content
  • Restore the MySQL content

Making moving WordPress easy with shell commands

We use easy methods for moving WordPress for our Managed WordPress service. If you know UNIX commands, its practically becomes very easy. Easy does not means it has no risks – at any time if a backup fails in this process to move, you have to cry. That is why, we usually either use a test domain or use offline Installation to test the backups whether working or not, before moving WordPress.
To know more, please visit our website : http://thecustomizewindows.com/

HTML Pages Generated from WordPress : Implications and Usages

Pages Generated from WordPress has the advantage of being delivered from any server or can be distributed via CDN easily at less cost in some situations. This is very tricky way and safe way for the commercial websites with webpages practically never changes.
HTML Pages Generated from WordPress : Implications and Limitations
We are pointing to use the HTML output from WordPress for following the method to serve HTML Pages Generated from WordPress, just like we described in an tutorial Creating a WordPress Generated Website on Rackspace Cloud Files.
So basically you will have :
HTML Pages Generated from WordPress
  • The slimmed down version of WordPress without any PHP file
  • There is no question of any MySQL database
  • There is no question of getting hacked via SQL injection
  • PHP still can be executed within the HTML pages, if the server supports PHP
  • Simple Apache server is enough
  • No caching is required
  • Page loading Speed will be faster
  • URL can be controlled by .htaccess
  • Easy to add conversion tracking codes
  • Costs less as simply a CDN and domain name can be used for hosting
 Limitations :
However, this method has limitations for using HTML Pages Generated from WordPress for a complete website too :
  • Impractical for blogs or where the dynamic PHP is required too much
  • Technically difficult to implement
  • Demands some PHP to be retained for full potentiality of WordPress
  • Every time FTP access / CDN access is required

HTML Pages Generated from WordPress : More Tips

Now you know how to create virtual appliance on your computer. That knowledge can be combined to make the more versatile. At least some of our websites, which we use WordPress, but need not to change any thing regularly, are quite good candidate to use this method as it preserves the URLs.
To know more, please visit our website : http://thecustomizewindows.com/

Wednesday 27 February 2013

All About Virtualization

All About Virtualization is a comprehensive article on various aspects of Virtualization, be it server or desktop as well as the associated terminologies. Unlike traditional systems, Server Virtualization directly related to the physical processor and the main memory of the host hardware. Simply video card, network adapter, hard disk controller and peripheral being emulated. There are some manufacturers can create the software to connect hardware directly to the virtual machine. In this case, users lose the mobility of the VM. This means that they are no longer in a position to move a VM to the current operation to a different host.Through the use of logical devices, a hardware independence is achieved.…

Read more: All About Virtualization

Working With WordPress MySQL through PHPMyAdmin Video Guide

Working With MySQL through PHPMyAdmin Guide is created for any level of users for power usage for optimization, backup and how it works. In this guide article on Working With WordPress MySQL through PHPMyAdmin, we are giving you the example with , where PHPMyAdmin can be accessed separately and it uses a Fully Qualified Domain Name in case of Rackspace Cloud Sites.
To read more-  http://thecustomizewindows.com/

Tuesday 11 September 2012

Why We Will Opt for Developing a WordPress Plugin of Our Own ?

Developing a WordPress Plugin is very easy. It does not need any special knowledge. Follow our guide and by using simple HTML,CSS, PHP you can develop a plugin. This guide on Developing a WordPress Plugin should have been published before our guide for Publishing WordPress Plugin, but still late is better than never.

First is, those who have many websites or run a service for WordPress, needs custom WordPress Plugins. Second, many WordPress Plugin has the side effect of giving backlinks, like Sitemap Plugins. Other than that, Developing a WordPress Plugin means, you are doing a good work for the Open Source and also it can promote your website.

Read more: Developing a WordPress Plugin : The Most Easy Guide

Wednesday 22 August 2012

100 Tips for Building and Maintaining a Successful Blog

100 Tips for Building and Maintaining a Successful Blog is the 2500th article published on this website.Free Infographic is also included so that you print it. 100 Tips for Building and Maintaining a Successful Blog is not any Blockbaster name, but it will be really for the beginners and will work as a reminder for to do list for the experts.
Are You Celebrating with this 100 Tips for Building post ?
I am quite professional about blog and its not really any celebration. This 100 Tips for Building and Maintaining a Successful Blog is a post with a free Infographic. There will be a small e-book with the same name 100 Tips for Building and Maintaining a Successful Blog, that will be more detailed, there will be SEO tips, Link building tips, will be marketed and published by a standard publishing company and will cost really less. The profit will not go to my wallet. I hope that e-book on 100 Tips for Building and Maintaining a Successful Blog will be available around September 2012.
Lets Start 100 Tips for Building and Maintaining a Successful Blog
Building a website means buying a .com domain, a good webhost like Rackspace and WordPress with Genesis Framework. I am a consumer of all but not an affiliate of any.
1. Use WordPress as CMS be it a personal, Money making through Google AdSense or an Enterprise Blog. From Yahoo to Rackspace all uses WordPress for blogging purpose.
2. Buy a .com domain with intended keywords in the URL and Install WordPress on a good webhost which provides white lebelled IP.
3. Sign up for Google Services including Google Analytics, Google Plus, Webmaster Tools, Adwords and Feedburner. Other includes Technorati, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook (Page and App), Stumble Upon, Digg, Delicious. These are minimum.
4. To be technically right, always make an arrangement for automated and manual Full Backup including MySQL and FTP contents.
6. Always check whether your Blog is displayed properly in all major browsers: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari. This is very important if you are using a Cache Plugin.
7. Optimize the page loading Speed by revision of your Theme, using a CDN and cache plugins with manual tweaks.
8. The logo is very important part. May be spending money by hiring a pro will help you to get a good logo.
9. Always be enthusiastic, informative, honest and positive. I specified few brands, none of them pays me or will pay. But they seems to me the best.
10. Sometimes success is incredibly fast, sometimes it takes more time. The key is to stay active and never to feel discouraged.
11. Rediscover new sub categories where you can write.
12. Never allow spams, troll on comments. Delete option is always there.
13. Your personality is also relevant to readers. Many a times, I critisized Google very badly. They are among my most popular posts. I have passed it rightly does not mean you can even try it. It is my practical life’s charector. It never means I hate Google. Criticizing is an art and it requires high level of normal legal knowledge – what you are saying should remain up to a limit and convey your depth of thought.
14. Celebrate your success with your readers bur on a professional blog never tell your sad stories and hardships.
15. Unlike print media, blog entries can be edited within a snap. This is a big advantage.
16. Read the blogs of your niche and try to understand why the hell the blogger wrote the post. May be the Keyword or Keyphrase is important, may be something other. When Ads are used, no one writes without a proper reason.
17. Analyze your statistics from Google Analytics regularly to identify top landing pages that bring you the most traffic and find out your niche of success. My niche is to write about core articles and Guides on Computing.
18. Nowadays many professional web blogs uses hired writers to write. As these writers never has the degree or knowledge like you, their quality will always be bad. Just find such blogs and get the keywords.
19. Read authoritative text books to develop your expertise in your niche.
20. What the Newspapers are writing are important. Often you will get clues on ongoing trend as they are written by very efficient journalists.
21. Make a a to do list. Right now, on my to do list is to write more articles on Digital Photography.
22. Never try to repeat posts. It happens knowingly or unknowingly.
23. Hire a professional for getting more ideas.
24. Never write posts or create blogs on hot trending topics only. This will give instant traffic boost and sudden fall. In front of my eyes, a blog on Windows 8 went to sky and its condition is very poor now. Two years ago I estimated, in 2012 the trend will be towards smaller devices and Linux. Today it appears to me I was right. A successful Windows Vista blog is no where in search result today despite it writes about latest version of Windows now.
25. Never try to immediate bigger News websites like CNN. Journalists writes the posts. They are trained how to ignite and how to control it.
26. Try to write on varied topics within a limit of niche, more is the chance that you have to be mentioned on the web. Limit means, on this website I can not write on a Cars automatic transmission. Its a separate niche.
27. Boring theories can be delivered in digested way. This makes a blog evergreen.
28. Quality and quantity both are important. Logically 30 thousands of original posts will bring at least 30 thousands visitors per day.
29. Write drafts of articles in advance, it is very important.
30. Whether you will write the title first or body first, totally depends on you. In print media, body is written first when a compelling title is written. But on Internet, the Keyword is a big factor.
31. Make your articles attractive and neat by the usage of pictures, lists and sub headers. Number of sub headers should be limited, otherwise it will loss its merit.
32. Relinking your old posts needs a bit perfection. Never push an old article, if only needed manually link it. WordPress Plugins are quite great to do some autolinking.
33. Write in a way so that you never have to revise it 4-5 times to correct it.
34. Related posts are best listed under the post. YERPP is a very effective plugin for this purpose.
35. Submit your articles to all the social websites I mentioned above, manually.
36. Understand yourself. One keyword might have big value but you are not really right to write it – I mean to say – Engine differs.
37. Talk with mass audience in real life to get what actually people wants to know.
38. Giving an option for Downloading the post as pdf is becoming a norm. If possible, create the pdfs manually and link them instead of using plugins.
39. Offer evergreen download-able resources : for example wallpapers.
40. Facilitate submission to online bookmarks by the visitors by using Socialize like Plugins.
41. Never offer influential bloggers to post on your blog. You are yourself an institution.
42. Rel Tags are becoming more and more important. Give importance on this fact.
43. Use original headshot of you in Author Biography.
44. In the same way, use an original avatar in other areas.
45. Logo and your pictures – both are icons. Its very important to understand where to use which one.
46. Use Google Double Click to deliver Ads instead of using Google AdSense codes directly. It has many advantages – faster page loading, possible high revenue and you can set to open the Ad website in new Window when clicked by a visitor.
47. Install newest good Google XML Sitemap Generator plugin to facilitate the work of indexing search engines. Today, the norm has been to use a sitemap index.
48. Permalinks are very important part. thecustomizewindows.com/my-article/ is memorable and optimized, thecustomizewindows.com/my-article1267 is more optimized but difficult to remember, thecustomizewindows.com/index.php?my-article is none.
49. Use Adwords to get traffic, increase SERP (yes, good webpages gets good SERP if promoted through Adwords) and use the Keywords tool.
50. Optimize the keywords of your webpages.
51. Use keywords in alt tags of your images and file names. This is very old trick.
52. Give importance to only one blog, then choose the second one carefully. You might have to buy several domains to test. Reject bad growing, select good going. Darwin said it many years ago.
53. Write in a calm room.
54. Content is the king. Create textual content to get traffic.
55. Fighting with normal life might become difficult as others will not understand how much time is needed for keyword research. Its you who can refer them to a Psychiatrist as its your website which brings the AdSense cheque every month.
56. Create a plan for future development of design, promotion etc.
57. Organize server directories properly for backup storage, download resources etc.
58. Never try to imitate the Design oriented blogs – Smashing is a Design oriented blog for example. These setup is not for an individual but for a bigger team.
59. Create a checklist of things to think about when you post an article.
60. Do not waste time in searching, commenting, reading emails, playing on Internet.
61. Instead of getting stuck on a problem, ask for professional assistance.
62. So to stand out, design of a blog is important.
63. Highlight content in a polite and neutral way – if I put a flickering button here, it will disturb you to read the list.
64. Avoid false promises.
65. Navigation menus must be clear, bigger, attractive and Search Engine Optimized.
66. Wikipedia and WordPress are perfect examples how websites should be.
67. Do not overload your pages with your 125 x 125 ads. The Ads really disturbs.
68. Learn from other blogs to get succes.
69. Study the usability of your site through the web tools.
70. If your website’s name is a bit difficult to remember, like ours – TheCustomizeWindows.com, try to help users to remember it. Even, use a different domain and 301 redirect it for using it offline. Anyhow give clues so that the visitors at least can search on Google to get the full url. I often forget the url of quite good websites.
71. Experiment with business after a level of success on blogging.
72. Advertise on this website shows the advertisers that you are open to partnerships.
73. Reinvest a portion of your income to buy links, put 125 x 125 Ads on others websites.
74. Use YouTube Videos to promote your website. The casting females can be found on all over the Internet.
75. Create a forum, if possible a premium forum without Ads.
76. Create an effective slogan. Its a difficult step.
77. Take proper Copyright of your own trademarks.
78. Stay consistent in your articles. Every regular reader knows, one Wallpaper will be posted everyday among 4-5 posts / day on this blog.
79. Promote your RSS feeds like doing a war. RSS feed is so effective tool to spread your honey (or poison) that your backlinks might be increased automatically by the scrappers.
80. Give visitors the option to subscribe via email.
81. Show the number of your subscribers.
82. Do not publish your full articles in RSS feeds, it will attract scappers.
83. Sign up for your own RSS feed and check them religiously.
84. Publish regularly. The standard for highly completive niche now is around 4 articles per day. People advised two per day before.
85. Some people likes to divide the article in to 1, 2, 3, 4… numbered subpages. It can be pathetic to the visitor.
86. Advertise your future projects.
87. Reply to important comments.
88. Send emails to your readers using Mail Chimp like services.
89. Avoid link exchange on sidebars towards poor quality blogs or websites.
90. Promote Open Source, Help Open Source by funding and get promoted.
91. Never Spam with comments on other blogs.
92. Help other bloggers.
93. Website’s rank increases and decreases. Try to find out why it was increased.
94. We wrote about the four important static pages before.
95. Ask readers to suggest ideas for tips and topics.
96. Encourage readers to comment at the end of each article. Closing comments is not what today’s readers like much.
97. Moderate the comments and Optimize your database.
98. Create surveys, questions to readers using PollDaddy.
99. Install subscribe to comments plugin for WordPress. Its a missile plugin to retain visitors.
100. A good blog is an asset, not only for you, but for all. In distress, ask others to help.

To know more, please visit our website: http://thecustomizewindows.com/