Appliedi.net Windows Web Hosting Blog

The Applied Innovations team would like to take a moment to extend to all of our friends, partners and customers best wishes for Happy Holidays and a Prosperous New Year.   It’s thanks to all of you that our company continues to prosper and grow and we’re truly thankful.

This year we’ve decided that instead of sending greeting cards or marketing gifts that it would be better to donate the money we would have spent to those less fortunate than ourselves. So this year we’re cutting back on those activities and instead donating to the Toys for Tots program.   Toys for Tots is administered by the Marine Reserves and collects new, unwrapped toys during October, November and December each year and distributes these toys as Christmas gifts to needy children.  We believe today, more than ever, that this will make a greater impact than a greeting card ever would.

Best Wishes for a Joyous Holiday Season and we look forward to working with you even more in 2009!

The Applied Innovations team.

Popularity: unranked [?]

On Wednesday Microsoft released a security update for Internet Explorer, outside of their normal release schedule. This update addresses a remote code execution vulnerability that was publically disclosed. The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted web page using Internet Explorer.

You can learn more about the security update on Technet but everyone is encouraged to install the new update ASAP, typically this is done via Windows Update.

Popularity: 1% [?]

It has been widely observed that Google likes domains that are aged. You might have heard the term, ‘Google Sandbox’ thrown around in marketing and SEO forums. This term refers to the amount of time it takes from when a site goes live to when it begins to receive Google rankings. Wikipedia has a great explanation of this.

Here’s the Hot Tip!

Do you own domain names that are just sitting and not being hosted? Have you been wondering what to do with them? Maybe you’re currently building out a site for them? Maybe you’re waiting to build them out?  These domains are the perfect opportunity to utilize a blog!

By putting a blog on your domain while you are in the process of building out your site, you will cut down on the time you spend in the ‘Google Sandbox’. Then when your site goes live, you will be ready for ranking.

It is also a good idea to put up a splash page on your main domain, www.domain.com. You can say ‘Coming Soon’ or ‘About Us’ and add a link to your blog. (Don’t forget, be sure to place your blog in a subfolder with a keyword like: /keyword-blog/).

Remember, you must use the blog and post to it regularly. At first, the content does not matter so much as you are really using it to escape the dreaded ‘Sandbox’. This is a great way to use those domains that you have thought about but haven’t decided what to do with yet.

It’s Simple but Effective.

This tip is simple but it can make the difference between launching a successful site that starts to rank in organic searches or one that waits months for FREE traffic.

Where to go now?

In Conclusion, If you have a domain not being hosted it is not benefiting you in any way. Hosting the domain and putting up a blog adds value to the domain and gets it ready for when you want to use it. You can also monetize off this domain immediately. By implementing something like Google Adsense on your blog.  By building traffic, this also makes it much more desirable if you are thinking about selling the domain down the road as you can show revenue and traffic. We will take about buying/selling domains and monetizing your blog in future articles.

So what are you waiting for? Dust of those domains that are just sitting dormant and get them hosted! For the small investment in a shared hosting account will give you big returns in the future. Best of all your shared hosting account probably includes support for multiple domains already.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Applied Innovations sponsors many events around the globe related to .NET and web development. These range from developer conferences and meetings to user groups. Recently at the Tampa area code camp, the developers there decided to say thanks to Applied Innovations in a unique way:

There were roughly 200 good looking .NET developers in the room holding up a copy of the recent CODE magazine advertisement we ran.

Thanks goes out to all involved for this great picture and to Joe and John for coordinating the picture.

Popularity: unranked [?]

The first series of Rapid Domination videos and articles is covering the installation and configuration of WordPress as a blogging tool. WordPress will provide the framework we’ll use to leverage Social Networks and Search Engines to gain exposure for our websites through RSS feeds, Syndication, Podcasting and even viral video distribution.

In this next video we discuss the basic configuration of WordPress and provide a basic overview of some of the settings in WordPress.

[flv]http://www.appliedi.net/blog/uploads/basic-wordpress-config.flv[/flv]

Step 1. Defining the URL.

The first thing we learned was that when installing a blog on your website for Rapid Domination it’s advised to publish the blog to a subfolder with a name of “keyword-blog”.  For example, on the acme-hosting.net blog, we would want to target the keyword “web hosting” we should use one of the following possible URLs:

http://www.acme-hosting.net/webhosting-blog/
http://www.acme-hosting.net/web-hosting-blog/

By building the URL in this fashion we’re positioning our most important search engine keyword “Web hosting” to the left most position of our address bar letting the search engines know that this folder is about “web hosting” first and foremost.  We also used dashes “-“ to separate words. There are many different recommendations on whether to seperate words or not separate words in this manner. Some recommend a structure like this in fact:

http://www.acme-hosting.net/WebHostingBlog/

We prefer to use dashes because we feel it makes it easier to read for your visitors.  When optimizing your site for search engines it’s important to also remember you’re ultimately developing your site for humans and although the search engines are important, you want to make your easy to navigate and accessible for your visitors so they buy your products or services.

Step 2. General WordPress Settings

When you log into the WordPress Dashboard and access the Settings tab you’ll find a few General Settings you’ll want to adjust:

Blog Title: You’ll want to set this to the title of your blog.

Blog Tagline: Just a short description about your blog. Something like “Web Hosting and Web Application Technologies Discussions and News” would be fitting for the acme hosting blog.

WordPress Address and Blog Address: should already be set for you.

E-mail Address: This is the email address you’ll get notifications from.

Membership: This is important and will help protect against blog spam. We recommend Users be required to register and be logged in to comment.

The other settings relate to localization, date, time, etc and can be set to what’s most comfortable for you (usually the defaults are fine).

Step 3: Writing Settings

These settings are typically set already be default. There are two things we’ll want to adjust though but that can be done now or later. One is the default post category. Once you’ve started adding blogs you’ll want to categorize them. As you publish articles you can save a little time by setting the default post category to the category you find yourself using the most (Web Hosting News, General Items, etc).  The other setting we want to go ahead and change now is to enable XML-RPC. This will allow us later to publish to our blog using remote post editors like Windows Live Writer.

Step 4: Discussion Settings

One of the things you may want to adjust in the Discussion Settings is how Avatars appear next to comments. Each comment can have a custom icon next to it. These used to be seperate plugins for wordpress but are now built into the core system:

Step 5: Privacy Settings

It’s really important you make sure your blog is visible to engines:

Step 6: Miscellaneous Settings

We’re stepping a bit out of order here but the Miscellaneous settings we typically don’t change but as each website is unique you may find you want to change settings here at some point.

Step 7: Permalinks Settings

Configuring Permalinks is really the key concept in this article in the first Series. A permalink is a permanent URL that your users will reference to get to your blog article.

The settings we’re going to recommend you use for permalinks are in the image below:

The Custom Structure we’re using:

/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

Will give us a URL like:

http://www.acme-hosting.net/webhosting-blog/2008/12/02/sample-post/

Once you’ve set your permalinks settings here and saved the changes. There’s one other step we need to take and that’s to configure/enable Isapi-Rewrite 3.0 from HeliconTech.com.  Isapi-Rewrite is included free in all shared hosting plans at Applied Innovations so it’s something you already have included in your hosting account at no additional cost.

In order to configure isapi-rewrite you’ll create a blank text document called htaccess.txt and in that file you’ll put the following lines:

You’ll want to change the highlighted area to reflect your blog’s URL. You’ll then use an FTP client to upload this file to the folder your blog resides in (keyword-blog) and rename the file from htaccess.txt to .htaccess.  Once you’ve done this your permalinks will work. Please note it’s VERY IMPORTANT to upload this file to your site or permalinks will not work correctly and your blog may become inaccessible until you disable permalinks.  For more detailed instructions on this step please watch the video at the beginning of this article.

Upcoming Videos & Tutorials

In our next videos in this tutorial series we’ll discuss the blog theme and how to change it, how to enable plugins and finally how to publish to your blog remotely.

Popularity: 16% [?]