Appliedi.net Windows Web Hosting Blog

We pride ourselves on bringing cutting edge and innovative technologies to our customers in a way that’s easy to understand and easy to utilize. One offering we’ve been promoting quite well has been our Windows 2003 VPS hosting offering.  Late last year we started working on our Windows 2008 VPS Hosting offering around Hyper-V. As a Microsoft Gold Certified partner and leading Windows hosting provider we were privileged to be able to work along side Microsoft to roll out this new platform that they’ve labeled as the Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit.  Below is a video Microsoft put together of a few members of the Applied Innovations senior management team discussing our new Windows 2008 VPS Hosting offering and how it will allow us to move from VPS hosting to cloud hosting. 

Applied Innovations Innovates with Cloud Offering

As the saying goes “Rome was not built in a day” and neither is our new offering that continues to be developed and refined and we believe over the coming weeks will help define the future of Windows Web Hosting.

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Each year, asp.netPRO hosts it’s renowned Reader’s Choice Awards, which give credit to the best in class enterprises in various categories including Web Hosting. This year was our first year being included among the 16 nominated web hosts and we are very excited to announce that this year, we were selected as the runner up in that category.  asp.netPRO needs no introduction to anyone involved with .NET. For years, they have been an invaluable resource to developers, users, and buyers looking for anything related to their favorite platform.  The Readers’s Choice Award is selected by over 8,000 of their members, and reflects the public’s true opinion about our services. These members are not only those who visit asp.netPRO’s website, but also those who subscribe to their monthly print magazine.

All too often, ivory tower editors and judges decide what the best products are, but in this case, the vox populi has clearly spoken. This testifies to our product’s ease of use and the great value that regular customers find in it. We owe it to you – our clients – for this show of faith.  For Applied Innovations, we were pleased to be nominated for this prestigious user based award and to place so well is a fantastic testament to our commitment to providing best in class ASP.NET web hosting and the good job we’re doing and we’re extremely happy to do so well.

For us, the journey doesn’t end here of course. There is much more to be done and many more customers to satisfy! We will continue to increase the value of our offerings, and provide even better support to those who are most important to our business. We take great pride in being selected by the voters, and we hope that by next year, we create an even better impression. Yes, we aim for the top spot next year, and with your help, we will achieve it!

To learn more about the asp.netPRO Reader’s Choice Awards you can visit their site.

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Applied Innovations is among only 16 hosters recently nominated for the asp.netPRO Magazine Reader’s Choice awards. The voting ends 4/25 (just days away!).

If you’re an appliedi fan and haven’t voted already we recommend you head over and cast your vote.

You can vote today by clicking on the image in this post or visiting:

http://www.aspnetpro.com/awards/default.asp

You’ll find the hosting category on the second page of the survey/poll and you don’t have to vote for items in every category.

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In our earlier videos in this series we’ve covered the follow topics.

• Install WordPress with just one click via the control panel.
• How to configure the basic settings for wordpress, including Search Engine Friendly URLS.
• How to upgrade WordPress to the latest version manually
• How to automatically upgrade WordPress if you’re running 2.6 or later.
• Most Recently, How to change your theme in WordPress.

In this video we’re going to install some core plug-ins to extend our blog and make it a more powerful Search Engine Optimization and Marketing tool.

Plugins are a powerful way to add additional functionality and features to your blog. They include everything from protecting your blog from spammers, changing the way your headers and meta tags display, to even embedding videos or widgets into your blog.

The Plugins We’ll Cover

In this tutorial we’re going to cover the following plugins:

1. Akismet: to keep those pesky spammers at bay
2. Sociable: for making your blog social website friendly and making it easier for your visitors to tag your blog
3. All in One SEO Pack: to make your blog standout in the search engines and tweak your settings and features to make them more search engine spider friendly.

The Video

The video steps you through the process of installing Akismet, Sociable and the “All in One SEO Pack”. Once installed you’re able to extend your blog and these topics will be covered in depth in Rapid Domination.

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

Getting Started

The first step in this process will be to access our site via the WordPress Dashboard. This is usually found by going to your site at http://www.domain.com/blog/wp-admin/ where domain.com your domain name and blog is the folder you’ve installed wordpress in. The WordPress Dashboard looks like the image below:

Once inside your dashboard, you’ll click on the Plugins option in the left column menu and this will bring up the Plugins Manager screen:

Finding plugins to install.

If you scroll down your screen you’ll see a link for the new “Plug-in Browser/Installer” using this tool we’ll be able review available plugins on the wordpress site and install the plugins we’d like to use. We’ll click that link and soon our blog will look similar to the below image:

Once we’re on this screen, we know the plugins we want to install so in the search box we’ll enter:  “Sociable” and when the listing comes up we’ll select the install link under Actions for the plug-in we want:

The screen will change like below and we’ll select the option “Install Update Now”

The program will start automatically installing your plug-in for you and after a few minutes you’ll see a screen like below:

You can now activate the plug-in or find another plug-in to install. Go ahead and repeat this process now to install “All in one SEO Pack” but putting in the search terms “SEO Pack” and following the above process for this plug-in.

The other plug-in we’re installing is Akismet and it’s installed by default.

Activating your plugins.

Once your plugins are installed, it’s really easy to activate them.  You’ll navigate back to the plugins page and click the activate link next to each plug-in you want to activate:

If you find things go wrong with one of these plugins you deactivate it by clicking the deactivate link:

If after activating a plug-in you find wordpress won’t load and you’re not able to deactivate the plug-in. Just FTP into your site and navigate to the folder wp-content/plugins under your blog folder and delete the folder for the plug-in in question.

Keeping your plugins up to date

From time to time you’ll log into your blog and find that you have a little number next to the plugins. in the left. This means there’s that many plugins that need to be updated:

Clicking on the plugins link will take you to the plugins manager and you’ll be able to see exactly which plugins need to be updated:

Just like installing plugins automatically we can also upgrade automatically. Simply click on the upgrade automatically link and the plug-in will be downloaded, upgraded and reactivated automatically:

and if all goes well you’ll see the plug-in was reactivated successfully as highlighted above.

Conclusion

In a later installment on this blog we’ll cover how to get the most benefit out of these plugins. In the meantime I’d encourage you to check out some of the other plugins available for your wordpress installation. Some of my favorites are:

• headspace
• odiogo
• Wassup
• fickrRSS
• StatPress
• NextGEN Gallery (great for creating family photo galleries).

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In our earlier WordPress tutorials we covered how to:

• Install WordPress with just one click via the control panel.
• How to configure the basic settings for wordpress, including Search Engine Friendly URLS.
• How to upgrade WordPress to the latest version manually
• How to automatically upgrade WordPress if you’re running 2.6 or later.

In this video we’ll cover how to update your WordPress blog with one of the million+ custom themes available from the WordPress website.

The Video

Here’s a video that you’ll be able to use to watch as I install and configure a couple themes in our fictional/development blog at acme-hosting.net.

[flv]http://www.appliedi.net/blog/uploads/themes-final.flv[/flv]

Getting Started

To get started you’re going to want to log into your WordPress dashboard, this is the area you’ll use to administer your blog. It’s found at www.domain.com/wp-admin where www.domain.com is your actual domain name and it usually looks something like the below picture:

After you’ve logged in you’ll click on ‘Appearance’ in the left hand column which will bring up the Manage Themes options:

Testing & Activating a new theme

By default you’ll only see two themes in your installation the Classic theme and the Default theme. But these are good enough to demonstrate how to test and then activate your theme. In my image above I have two themes you probably don’t have japan-style and Pixeled, I’ll explain how to get these themes in the next step, for the time being though we’ll try to activate the Pixeled theme.

To select a new theme design just click on it’s thumbnail image and you’ll get a popup window showing you what your blog will now look like with the new theme applied:

To accept the new design, just click on the Activate “Theme Name” in the top right corner:

If you prefer not to use this theme design, then click on the ”x” in the top left corner:

and select another Theme.

Once you’ve activated your theme you’ll now have a fresh new look for your blog and can begin experimenting and tweaking it as you please.

Getting More Themes

WordPress has over a million FREE themes available in their repository and many more available across the Internet as premium/paid themes for a small fee. You can access the theme directory at: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/.  You’ll want to find a theme you like and then click the download link to download that theme to your local computer as a compressed ZIP file. You’ll then extract that folder to your hard drive and upload it to your website.

You’ll upload the theme to the wp-content/themes folder under your blog folder. For my blog site at acme-hosting.net this folder is shown here:

As you can see I FTP’d into my site, navigated to the wp-content/themes folder and then copied over my theme folders (japan-style, pixeled and ZZZZ). Once I’ve uploaded my themes to my wordpress site I can then go back to the wordpress dashboard and refresh the Appearance option and should see my themes appear for use on my blog.

Conclusion

I hope you have found this tutorial useful. There’s millions of great themes out there for your wordpress blog and with just a little web experience they are extremely easy to publish and use on your wordpress blog.

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In a recent blog post I discussed how to upgrade WordPress to version 2.7 which was a manual process. Recently WordPress updated to Version 2.7.1 (which means we need to upgrade .. AGAIN).  But there’s good news..

WordPress Automatic Upgrade Has ARRIVED

When you first log into your WordPress dashboard you’ll see a link at the top like below:

If you click on that link you’ll be taken to the Upgrade WordPress wizard and can either upgrade WordPress automatically or download WordPress and upgrade manually.

I’m going to go ahead and click the Upgrade Automatically button.

NOTE: Before ever updating WordPress it’s always good to take a backup of the database so you can restore if necessary (this was covered in the earlier demo video).

After clicking the Upgrade Automatically button and waiting about 90 seconds I get the confirmation screen:

And my WordPress install is now updated to the latest build and I can go in and verify my plugins, theme and all my functionality still works flawlessly.

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Applied Innovations is in the process of a website redesign and part of that process will involve revising our customer testimonials page. We’re changing the testimonials page by converting the testimonials into case studies where we’ll feature different hosting customers each month.

Every day we’re asked how to get a listing on the AppliedI.net website and a link. It’s no secret that the AppliedI.net website has a high ranking with the search engines and that a link from an established, trusted and high ranking website like www.appliedi.net will help your own search engine rankings. In addition, many of our clients offer services and products that our other clients would find useful and beneficial. These services include: web development, graphic design, marketing advice and services and various software offerings to just name a few. So here’s your opportunity to get featured and expose your company and resources to over 25,000 other websites and online businesses.  For your efforts we’ll not only feature you on our website but we’ll credit your hosting account with $25!.

What’s Required To Be Featured?

The requirements are pretty simple but here they are:

1. You need to be an active customer with Applied Innovations. 
2. We’ll ask that you submit a video testimonial. If you don’t have a digital video camera or don’t know how to take your video and put it online to send to us, NO PROBLEM! We have a few pocket video cameras and we’ll send one out to you to create your video with and then mail back to us (all postage paid by AppliedI).  
3. We’ll send you an email interview. We’ll have our writers take your answers and write a compelling article around it and then send it back to you for your approval before posting it.
4. We’ll ask that you send us a high resolution picture of yourself or your business. You don’t have to run out and hire a professional photographer, we’re all real people and we want real people photographs. It should just be a picture of you enjoying what you do.

That’s it. From there our experts will take that content create a new case study page around it and post it with your video testimonial and feature it throughout our site.

An Interview What Kind of Questions?

Everyone always worry about what they’re going to say or what they’re going to be asked. In this case, it’s quite simple. We want to tell your story. We want to know what brought you to Applied Innovations, how Applied Innovations has made a difference for your company and what is it that we do that you love the most about Applied Innovations. 

Video? What would I say?

Just like the Email Interview this would be your opportunity to tell your story about your company, how you came to find Applied Innovations and what impact Applied Innovations has had on your company. The great thing about video is now it’s personalized and it allows everyone to see a real person telling their own story.

Why are we doing all this?

Applied Innovation in a few weeks will turn 10 years old and we want to spotlight our customers and let them tell their story. Applied Innovations has already been about the customer and helping the customer solve their problems and then grow their business online. We think this is a great way to get this message out there and at the same time a great way to promote and say thanks to the people that have also helped us grow.

What do I do next? How do I get started?

Ready to get involved? Great! send us an email at sales@appliedi.net and we’ll get started immediately and in a few days your video testimonial will be online and live.

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In this video we’ll walk you through upgrading your WordPress installation from the 2.6 version to the newer 2.7 version.  As with any web application it’s important to keep the software up to date and free of any software defects (bugs) or security vulnerabilities.  WordPress is in wide use and actively developed against and as such this is a process you’ll find yourself doing from time to time.

This video is a demonstration of one method to upgrade your WordPress installation.

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

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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.

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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.

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