Appliedi.net Windows Web Hosting Blog

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]

Popularity: 3% [?]

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% [?]

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% [?]

Community Server 2008 Express is now available for FREE to Appliedi Innovation’s web hosting customers in a few easy clicks from the control panel. Community Server 2008 is a premium content management system (CMS) and Social Networking application from Telligent, the people who made the application that powers myspace, Microsoft’s xbox website and other major sites. Some of the major built-in features include blogs & forums (with integrated Search), photo, file, and media galleries, and a control panel. There is also a built-in email server that can make the forums work more like an email discussion where email replies are automatically generated on the forum. Community Server 2008 is a CMS similar to Dotnetnuke, Kentico, or Joomla, etc.

Our Community Server 2008 application pack has been custom coded into the control panel to make the process as painless as possible. It literally takes less than 5 minutes to install. Please see our support article that explains the process. This express edition can also easily be upgraded to other versions of Community Server 2008.

Popularity: 3% [?]

The social software experts from Telligent released a new CMS officially yesterday, Graffiti CMS version 1.0. As a Telligent Partner, we’re pleased to be among the first hosts to announce support for Graffiti Hosting. All of our shared hosting plans are compatible with Graffiti CMS and provide all the features you should need to get up and running with a new Graffiti CMS based website.

Not Just Another Blog Engine!

When you first look at Graffiti you’re probably going to think “oh great, another blog engine… Just what we needed … NOT!”. However, truth be told, Graffiti is a great blogging engine, if that’s what you need. But Graffiti offers so much more than just a blogging engine.  Graffiti was actually developed to be a full content management system with even support for workflows, search engine optimized urls and content and built-in versioning (surprisingly, something many CMS’s lack today). In fact, the Graffiti website is built using Graffiti (dogfooding at it’s finest).

The image above is that of a test blog I was working on to make sure Windows Live Writer was fully supported (and it is) and to see just how easy it is to setup a new graffiti based site.

Getting Started with Graffiti at AppliedI.net

If you’re ready to take the plunge into Graffiti and test it out for your own website or blog here’s what you’ll need to make sure you have enabled on your site:

1. Support for ASP.NET 2.0 or later (remember, if your current website runs in ASP.NET 1.1, you’ll need to create a new website to run ASP.NET 2.0 you can only run one or the other on a particular site).

2. Virtual Directory Settings – If you plan to run Graffiti on a subfolder (perhaps for a blog) then you’ll want to set the folder it’s running in as an application using the virtual directory tool in the control panel. If you get stuck just email support and they’ll help you out.

That’s it! Graffiti doesn’t need any more than that to get up and running immediately, but as always if you get stuck, email our support team and they’re familiar with the application already and should be able to help you out of a jam pretty quickly.

Great Features in Graffiti

1. Optional support for MS SQL2005 or MySQL - By default Graffiti uses the VistaDB engine which a lightweight alternative to SQL server 2005 that you can just upload and run.  If you prefer to use MSSQL or MySQL though it’s fully supported and you can easily update your web.config to support either.

2. Search Engine URLS built-in - If you’re going to build a website today or write a blog you have to have search engine ready URLs. Graffiti makes it easy to enable this right from the start.

3. Ability to support 3rd party templates & plug-ins - Today applications need to be extendable, Graffiti is! There’s already a Graffiti Marketplace and it won’t be long before we start seeing more 3rd party plugins. I can’t wait to see some of my favorite wordpress themes migrated over (like Cutline, nudge, nudge)

4. Support for Windows Live Writer - Yes I love WLW, it’s the best blog editor I’ve used to date and it’s supported in Graffiti

5. Support for BlogML - All the top blog engines today are supporting BlogML either built-in or through 3rd party plugins. BlogML provides an XML markup for Blogs. This allows you to easily backup and restore your blog but even better it allows you an easy way to export and import your blog between different blog engines! Looking to switch from WordPress to Graffiti? No Problem, use BlogML. Looking to go from BlogEngine.Net to Graffiti, Not a problem, BlogML!

6. It’s made by Telligent - These guys are simply awesome. Community server (their flagship product) powers some of the most popular and busy sites on the Internet, MySpace, Xbox.com, asp.net to name a few.  They understand social media, ASP.NET and Web 2.0 and know how to code for it.

7. There’s a free version! - Everyone wants to test the waters so Telligent is providing an Express version of Graffiti CMS for you to experiment with or run on your personal site. If you run a commercial site then they ask you to license it and licenses start at just $399 and comes with support from Telligent.

8. Block spam with Akismet - Today comment spam runs rampant on the Internet and all the best engines support Akismet. On our own blog it’s blocked over 20,000 spam messages since we launched the blog just a few months ago.

9. It’s not just for blogs.  With the proper templates it can be used for any type of site and there’s rumors of some e-commerce support? Very exciting stuff.

10. It can be hosted at AppliedI.net – Not only do we support it but to celebrate the launch, we’re offer 25% off your initial term with any shared hosting account. Just use the coupon code: graffiti and get 25% off your initial hosting term (sign up for a month get 25% off that first month, signup for a year get 25% off that first year!). I’d recommend starting with the VS-1 small business hosting plan but the ValuePlus Personal Hosting Plan works just as well when you’re just getting started.

Where to go next?

Sound good? Ready to kick the tires? Head over to www.graffiticms.com and download the express version of Graffiti. All of our plans support multiple websites so you can create a new site for it and publish it there or you can publish it to a subweb of your existing site. If you’re hosted somewhere else or want to start a new account, use the coupon code: graffiti and signup for new hosting here at www.appliedi.net. As I mentioned, if you get stuck getting started with Graffiti, just email support and we’ll help you get it running.

Oh, and we’d love to hear your feedback on this application.

Popularity: 4% [?]

The Internet has had a profound affect on how we communicate as a society. Today, everyone agrees that e-mail is not just a clever novelty but has become a major component into our livelihoods, both on a professional and a personal level. Much like e-mail developed over the years blogging is also developing and becoming a staple in our daily lives. We hope the AppliedI blog follows along the path of the other great blogs on the Internet and creates a new channel of communication, education and sharing between you, our e-business partner and us, your webhosting provider.

What is a blog?

From wikipedia:

A blog (a portmanteau of web log) is a website where entries are written in chronological order and displayed in reverse chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (artlog), photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), or audio (podcasting), and are part of a wider network of social media.

What will I find here?

We hope the AppliedI.net blog will become a new source of information for you to learn about the latest news and happenings within Applied Innovations. This blog will be used to announce new services, new features and enhancements to your hosting services. The blog will be used to provide you cutting edge information on the latest web technologies.

[tags] appliedi.net, blog, appliedi blog[/tags]

Popularity: -0% [?]