Discount coupon for WPEngine hosting

We have talked about WPEngine before. WPEngine is one of the better shared hosting providers for Wordpress, which takes care of all Wordpress management while you can focus on the content. Managing hosting in general (and WPEngine falls in this category) takes a lot of load off your shoulders for upgrades, fixes and resolution of performance issues. All these are done in the backend easily and more efficiently.

WPEngine provides reliable fast servers with CDN for Wordpress hosting. As part of Thanksgiving, and Black Friday, WPEngine is offering an additional 2 months free period. Combined with the 2 month trial period they had earlier, this provides a 4 month free period to check out WP Engine.

Use coupon code: cyberhostspecial13. This will be gone in a couple of days. If you were thinking of trying out managed Wordpress hosting, this is the right time people.

Get beautiful fonts, or weird fonts. Make your work stand out

Typography makes your work stand-out – this is as sad as beauty defines character, but that is true in most cases. Making your website/blog functional and full of useful content is important, but also important is how professional, funny, good-looking the content is. The content should also be easy to read on multiple devices with varying real-estate.

Typecast does all this and more. Typecast provides thousands of fonts that can be used across your website or just for sections that need highlighting.

Since the real power of fonts is only visible in sentences and paragraphs, Typecast also has options to type in the required content and see how beautiful or ugly your content looks in 1,2 or 3 columns with an option to change line heights, text size, text color and background. You can also edit the CSS and see the results instantly.

After doing all this hard work it is easy to put this to work. You can:

1. Get code that can be directly embedded in your website
2. Save CSS and HTML
3. Export as a graphic file (PNG)
4. Publish a style guide with the chosen colors, size, spacing

The only sad thing – this comes at a cost, starts at $14.50/month for personal plans. You can get a 15 day trial by just providing your email id (no confirmation email!).

If you are not in a position to spend hard cash, don’t get disappointed yet. Head towards Google Fonts.

There are hundreds of web fonts that are free to use, and you by how much the fonts impact page load times. One of the other good things about this - you can click on “Popout” window for any of the fonts, and get to try how they look in Typecast.

Host your blog for free using Blogger platform

Hosting providers are not always reliable, and easy to deal with.

• Hosting directly determines the space available for the website
• Hosting speed directly makes or breaks the website. The amount of memory and CPU, when restricted or throttled, is a bad thing for the website
• Hosting costs money. Not all blogs make money from day one, and if you don't have a solid business plan on how your website/blog is going to earn you money, you are going to spend that from your pocket for quite sometime (or for all times)

Here comes Google to the rescue. Blogspot/Blogger platform are not known as the best blogging platforms out there, but it has many advantages:

1. Space: A lot of space if you are not into uploading a lot of pictures or videos (there are work around solutions for that - some other post, some other time). Pictures get 1 GB of space, which is also shared with your Picasa web albums
2. Supported by Google infrastructure: Blogs are fast. Chances are they are also nearer to you than your standard hosting provider (technosanct.blogspot.com gets redirected to technosanct.blogspot.in if you are in India, treatment is same with other countries with sizable users). I have never really worried about CPU/memory utilization for my email, document editing or for blogs

Setup

The setup is fairly easy. Refer to instructions provided by Google. The instructions are specific in some places to a few domain registrars (like Godaddy, 1and1). Below are a few additional tips.

1. If your registrar allows it, import the DNS file provided by Google. This will merge all the required records in the DNS file maintained by your registrar. You can skip to the last step from here.
2. If the above is not the case, go to 'Domain Manager' in your registrar site (e.g. godaddy.com > Login > Domains > DNS Zone File). You should see a section called "CNAME". Create two records here:
• Add new. Enter 'www' against 'Name' and 'ghs.google.com' as destination. If there is already a record with 'www' as Name, you would have to edit it
• Add new. Enter your unique code against 'Name' (for e.g. abcdefgh) and applicable server against 'Destination' (e.g. xxxx.dv.googlehosted.com). This is provided by Google in the Settings page of your blog
3. Locate 'A' section/name after you have entered CNAMES. Create four records here for the below IP addresses in the 'Destination' field. 'Name' will have '@', leave that default value be. These values help redirect to WWW URLs. For e.g. http://technosanct.com will redirect to http://www.technosanct.com
• 216.239.32.21
• 216.239.34.21
• 216.239.36.21
• 216.239.38.21
4. Once you have setup the domain successfully, wait for sometime (10 minutes to an entire day ) for the DNS name change to get propagated. Go back to Settings page of your blog. Enter custom domain information, and save. If there is any problem with any of the above steps or if you have not allowed for domain names to get propagated as relevant, Google will show an error. Otherwise you are all set!

Limitations

Well, there are going to be limitations here as is the case of anything in life. Google is no hosting nirvana.

• First and foremost, the platform is not known to be beautiful or powerful. Dead links are not inherently detected, there is not much freedom with how the layout and UI look and behave, not many tools to help you with tasks like SEO
• The max. size of a page is restricted to 1 MB. Although there is no size or post limit right now, there is no guarantee that it is supported for life
• Google can change policies or discontinue tools (I still miss Google Reader!)

See a complete list of what can or cannot be be done on Blogger.

Automatically publish content from blogs to social media

We have seen one of the easier content publishing ways before in the form of HootSuite. No matter how easy that is, it will still require to log in and post posts and comments. Now, I am not saying it is a bad thing - humans are an integral part of being social. Also, shouting a few words other than the standard meta tags is going to connect you better with the users. But what if you want to just publish the content to *start* a conversation? There are tools to do that in Wordpress, Drupal and other CMS platforms. We are here to talk about something as easier -http://dlvr.it.

drlvr.it automatically checks your blog or website feed to determine new content and publishes that to the specified accounts. Both the sources and "routes" to deliver will be specified by you. There on the tool simply checks for new feed items, and routes it in batches (you can also vary the delivery timings).

Apart from the above task, you can also maintain separate "queues" that feed in to your social media sites. You just update the queues, and have it delivered in increments to the sites specified.

While the free version gives you "5 Feeds, 3 Social Profiles, one Q, and your feed is updated every 30 minutes", for anything more or for connecting to specific social media sites (like Google+) you need to have a paid plan (starts at $10 per month that allows 50 social profiles).

Hueman is a beautiful Wordpress theme suitable to newbies and power-users alike

I have a Wordpress site that had been sitting quietly on one of the older themes. It was not a looker but could satisfy my need for simplicity, no-code approach for customization, and did not get in my way most of the times. But as it stands it was not exciting. I had been on the look out for options to change the look and feel of the website to not only improve the popularity rating a bit (well, that comes by content), but also to get inspired. Wordpress themes are not hard to come by. In fact we have talked about some of the better known themes before. But I have not been having a lot of spare cash recently, so my plan had been to use a free base theme and customize that. Of course that takes a long time. And, of course Hueman came along and spoiled that plan.

Hueman is a beautiful theme by Alexander Agnarson. Even though there are two themes on the Alexander's site right now, those just rock. I am deeply appreciative of the fact that Alexander spent a lot of time on this theme and gave it away for not money, but hugs! 

Hueman is simple to configure and use, but really powerful.

• The theme is responsive
• Layouts and other UI customization options are fantastic
• Enables following your blog, or sharing of posts on social media with mere clicks
• Hueman is fast. With this theme and a couple of other improvements, my website is hovering around a yslow score of 88-90 

A more comprehensive list of features are at http://alxmedia.se/themes/hueman/.

I used Hueman on my aforesaid site, and so far it has been a thorough refresh of  how it looked before and how it is now.

Go ahead, see a demo and check whether it works for you. You can download Hueman for free.

Drag and drop away to create beautiful sites in Wordpress

Wordpress is one of the easiest platforms to configure among the big three PHP-based software (Drupal and Joomla being the other two). Wordpress architecture is flexible, and enables you to build blogs easily, and you might even succeed building smaller websites (like these) without any trouble. Anything beyond that, or if you want to change something that is not customizable on Wordpress UI, you would need to get your hands dirty and code away.

There is a way out, if you look around well enough. One of these ways is using themes that enable additional features - Thesis is a good example of that.

Thesis is a theme, a theme framework, a strong community behind an excellent product, and, in general, a good example of what themes can really do to Wordpress. Once installed through the 'normal' means through Wordpress themes, Thesis can effectively take over customization of website. Extensive drag and drop customization, with ability to change layouts, colours, typography at the click of a mouse is going to delight the newbies.

Older hands will appreciate the fact that Thesis is standards compliant, clean and is easily customizable too. The only problem? - well, there isn't any free edition. The price starts at $87, though you may find occasional deals that bring down this cost. Go ahead, try the demo, try it on your website and get your money back if you are not satisfied!

Make content curation more visual using PearlTrees

In one of the previous posts, we talked about tools to curate content from internet and make your own life easier. They provided a good way to get inspired, create more content and maintain references to the source. PearlTrees is a super-charged, completely online version of linking the content together as you see fit. This not only gets you to the details of the collected information, but also help you make sense of information at a macro level.

Starting with PearlTrees is free. Once you login, you get to create Pearls and link online or offline content. This implies you can link websites/posts that are of interest, and also group them. The mind-map visualization of the content, bookmarks, your files, photos and more will enable a nice way to see how all the information comes together to form a useful whole.

Go ahead, try PearlTrees and see whether it works for you. 

Get more indexing and pingbacks for better SEO

This blog is a classic example of what can happen when there is very little marketing, slower development of content, and with no references from other websites. With lesser people visiting the blog, and almost no one sharing it, search engines rank the website lower. This is natural way of things - whatever is popular gets more popular :). So what do you do if you are in the same situation - wait for a few hundred articles to be published before you get famous (and probably rich), or do something about it *now*?

Search engine traffic requires discipline to succeed in the way the content is created and marketed. But, there are a couple of things to provide an accelerated path to glory in addition to the content itself:

1. Create good articles that relate back to the topic of the blog in a structured manner
2. Share links of the post/blog on social media sites, get other sites of the same niche link to you

Both are easier said than done. But there are tools to help out and make your life easier. One such tool is Content Notifier.

With Content Notifier, you get to collate all the links of interest, and get the newly published content indexed and pinged back at the same time. This will help boost the popularity of the website so that you get noticed as compared to the competition. There on, your content will drive the results. Content Notifier will just boost the initial window, and open a window of opportunity large enough!

Download and try the software if you are building something new. You can always end the trial of 60 days without worrying about loosing any money.

Build a Drupal site fast, with a good hosting option

By now you must have seen the previously posted deal on Go Daddy, and probably even tried your hand at Weebly. Fear not if both did not suite you well. For here is another go at getting yourself online real quick.

InMotion hosting specialises in not only providing hosting services for a resonable rate, but also provides simpler setup of Drupal and Wordpress in the form of a one-click installer.

The advantage that inmotion hosting off is the flexibility to start slow and small, while keeping the options open for a significant growth in the future. This can mean either VPS or dedicated hosting.

Circulate your posts faster in facebook, twitter and other sites

So, here I am with this blog. I have put away a few useful posts, a few tips and tricks and waiting for the blog to explode on the scene. And, it may never happen (not as soon as you wish anyway). This is due to the simple fact that users are certainly looking for information, where as they are not finding you. Search engines are intelligent enough to figure out what posts are popular and show the results to other users. That makes the popular posts more popular (hopefully), while others get sidelined or backbench'd on a remote corner.

There are a couple of ways to get out of that situation.

1. Be active on the blog circuit. Post comments, leave your blog address lying around. This will encourage at least a few to visit your site. If they really like the content, they play their part in spreading the message
2. Broadcast your post on multiple social media channels to gain attention. This will mean you would have to visit a popular social site like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and so on, and point your post. This will make it easier for friends and your circles to find content that you published. And, it should take off from there

As you would have figured out by now, both are cumbersome to do and take time. But time is better spent creating content rather than circulating it for popularity. So, I started looking for tools that can solve this little problem. 

(1) is not easy to solve - unless I trust dubious sites promising back links (references to your posts from somewhere else). So I have to grin and bear it.

(2) was frustrating as well, but the solution was elegant. That is HootSuite.

By using HootSuite, I now can easily publish my posts to multiple social media sites - all in one click, all in one go.

All I need to do is connect to all my social media sites. In the above example, I am connected to Google+, Facebook and Twitter. Enter something that you have to say, provide the link, and click once to post in all sites at once.
Of course you can do more than publish the posts. You can monitor multiple social media sites in one window, start or respond to conversations, and get really good graphs on how popular you are.

You can start in HootSuite for free. The free version allows you to connect to up to 5 social media profiles - that implies that you have covered two ids each for Facebook, and one id each for Google+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

For more options, connecting to more social profiles, you would need the paid version. You can also do a trial for one month to see whether the tool indeed saves time (and adds value) to your internet life.

Get your website done in minutes

One of the advisories I have previously given out here and elsewhere is that website building is a technically challenging job. Many people like me stick to platforms like blogger, or Wordpress. Nothing wrong in itself, but there is a dependency on policy changes or restrictions introduced by Google or any other third party. This is pretty serious for people who make some serious money out of their sites, or planning to do that in the future.

The easy way out - Weebly.




Weebly allows you not only to create websites easily, but will make it a fun activity. The development of website is a largely drag and drop activity, and done easily enough. You can select the finer details of the look & feel of the website including font colours, standard colours, images, the placement of text and images on the web page and so on.


The site contains hundreds of themes that provide differing layouts, colours, fonts in all pre-built goodness. This makes the website look cool, professional, but at the same time does not involve technology challenges.

The final website that you develop is automatically enabled for desktops, and mobile devices. This makes it really easy to develop without worrying on the development complexity arising out of the need to support various device layouts, but also simplifies the ongoing maintenance process.

Weebly continues to be the host once you have developed the website using their tools. You can start on Weebly for free, but anything more than the basic features will require one or the other paid packages.

Looking for more fine-grained control on the website? You always have the option of using a content management system like Drupal or Wordpress. Although the drag and drop functionalities are not that advanced, those platforms do provide a lot of powerful features.

What is your point of view? Have you used Weebly and found it useful?

Discounted Go Daddy hosting plans

Go Daddy has been one of the reliable hosting providers that also produces quirky ads. I have been using their DNS for sometime now, but the hosting has remained far out of reach due to their pricing. That is going to change now.

Go Daddy has been one in the top 10 hosting sites for a long time now. They have proven themselves as a reliable hosting provider more than once, and I believe that is not going to change in the near future.

Go Daddy is also rapidly expanding in newer countries and regions. All this makes it one of the better hosting providers to choose today.

The best part is of course the discount. For a limited time avail this 32% discount on new plans. 

[link may earn me money at no cost to you]

Easily create your own iPhone or Android app

Mobile applications are in. With the proliferation of internet on mobile devices, and the availability of modern technologies there is a deluge of mobile apps that make you stay productive or entertained, either connected to the network or otherwise. At the same time, the economy of mobile devices is set to grow leaps and bounds - thanks to a market that is yet to cover vast parts of the world. There are large swaths of functionality, productivity or entertainment that is waiting to be provided through mobile devices. There also are specific needs of the mobile-using population that can be addressed better, or needs that are yet to be identified in this young mobile world. This market is also very dynamic, and the technology needed to address a problem can change pretty quick. Developers need to constantly improve, be on the ready to apply their skills and turn-around within weeks instead of months. Others are left behind in this market which cannot be a good thing with opportunities lying around. So what can an entrepreneur, or a smart person without can do?

This need is being addressed in innovative ways today.

MIT App Inventor is one of those ways for Android devices. Using the platform, anyone can create an app and distribute it for others to use - no coding knowledge required. The platform is not an answer to all problems though, and can be limiting for someone who can pickup coding skills fast.

This gets us to another innovative and more comprehensive platform provided by MyAppBuilder. This easy to use system provides an easy to use, easy to code approach to creating Android and iOS (for iPhone, iPad etc.) applications. It does not stop there though - the tool also helps you publish the created app.

The app building platform in MyAppBuilder uses PhoneGap framework that enables you to build apps using HTML, JavaScript and CSS. A simple back-end enables you to customize the user interface and functionality. The content for the app is dynamically pulled from the MyAppBuilder platform itself.

The newer app development technologies not only allow you to quickly get your app out there in the market, but also to maintain it easily and free you up to focus on creating better content.

Have you done anything similar? Which platforms have you used to get your own app?

Why use blogger?

You may be wondering if you have seen the general direction of the blog so far. The topics center around Wordpress, Drupal, Hosting, while I have every intent of continuing to blog here. So, what's the deal?

• I like blogger - it was the very first platform that I used for blogging, and returning here has been a great and simple experience so far
• I will again stress 'simple'. All it took me to get something running was to decide a name, login to my google account and voila, I start writing. This is a welcome change to what I do to maintain other sites. Simplicity is sometimes good. (or always good, as you look at it)
• I maintain other websites. Though I do like that, I do not want to continue doing that for every site. This will continue to be a mix of personal interests on the internet, software, and other related bits and pieces. However, for a change there is no specific brand building and will continue on blogger until I become tired of it or exhaust Google's allocated space!

Try Managed Hosting (recommendations included!)

Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla will need maintenance, period. It is possible that you struggle and get the site online and running. Now you start focusing on content, which is what you should do for the website. What next? You have updates coming in for the software systems, you will have to deal with some updates that may break the site, or nagging performance issues that drive away your users. If you don't have enough time or energy to chase these issues away, you should consider hosting with a twist - managed hosting.

Managed hosting providers provide specialized services to maintain your software system, so that you can concentrate on content generation. Not all hosting providers are born (or maintained) equal. Be careful in choosing a provider. It may be more difficult to switch one year down the line, when there is a possibility that you have forgotten some basics of Wordpress! Two options below..

WP Engine

 wp-engine provides fast servers, good up-time and CDN. But as the name suggests, this is limited to Wordpress.

You can opt for the two months trial, or get two additional months when you prepay for 12 months!

InMotion Hosting

InMotion hosting is more diverse, and can host your Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla or other sites. They also provide shared or dedicated hosting.

Get exciting Wordpress templates that are just right for 2014!

Yes, we are talking about the present and the future. Wordpress is great, so are the artifacts on wordpress.org. But, one of the things that will be least controversial even amongst Wordpress developers is the difficulty in customizing anything that is more complex than changing layouts and fonts. This is done in Wordpress using themes. There are a lot of them on the Wordpress site, and on millions of other sites. The problem, however is two fold:

1. Many themes have encrypted code, which can track your site or worse, cause unintended harm to your visitors. Themes can cause severe security issues
2. It is really difficult to find a trusted theme creator who has the required breadth and depth of options. You want themes to be good, beautiful and functional
3. Themes may end up providing basic functionality, and expect you to customize
4. It is really difficult to find a theme of your choice in the millions available

So, what do you do? The easiest option is to find someone who has been in Wordpress community for a while and ask for guidance. The other way (especially if you have money to spend) is to choose a Wordpress theme provider and stick with them for sometime. This ensures that you have a theme that is useful to you, and you will have support to fall back on when things go wrong. Below are a few theme-providers who are worth a second look:

• Rocket themes - collection of fine themes and plugins
  
• Click, Easy - imPower WordPress Themes 
• Get Thesis - the theme equivalent to many themes :)

If you are looking at specifics, do not like lot of options on the table but like to solve problems instead, take a look at the below sites:

• wp-buddy: wp-buddy is one of the trusted theme and module provider for quite sometime. You will find just enough themes and modules that you can comfortably handle
• If you have Genesys or Thesis themes already, and have deeper pockets you should look at the themes and plugins provided by Themedy

Though the above provide really good options, if you are into specialized sites, you can narrow down your choices and arrive at a quicker customization decision through the below means.

• Niche Site Templates: Specializes in mini sites. At $29 you get a template that is clean and functional. It is good that the author wants to stick to something that is a niche (yes, I got that), but there are not many options.
• Impact Page Builder does not really provide you any themes, but provides a means to make changes on your existing site and customize site quickly

If you don't like to pay for themes at all, you should start with wordpress.org. There are lot of help available in form of documentation and forums to help you if you are stuck. For more structured learning, you can consider Wordpress Graphics and Theme Secrets.

Do you have any other helpful suggestions for Wordpress themes?

A Quick Guide to Learn Wordpress

There are a few things that you learn by maintaining your own websites:

1. Hosting is a pain, and requires cash
2. There are no easy answers for newbies to do the 'that cool thing'

I have used Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal for building personal websites, and find Wordpress to be the best among the three. It may have to do with the fact that I don't associate myself with web development a lot. But if there is one thing that I can say with confidence - it is that "Wordpress is easy". It is easy to setup, develop and deploy. So easy, that it makes it a joy to work on. The community is thriving and you generally do not get stuck in a big issue unless you are doing something crazy. Wordpress is the software for newbie web development

But again, not quite. Wordpress can be a pain sometimes. If not, why do you think I am writing this on Blogger? It starts with simple things like getting the appropriate modules and themes, and goes through various levels of frustration on not getting the site to work as you want it. Although the forums are helpful, you may not end up finding all answers at your convenience. Fortunately, there are many very well-written Wordpress books and some video help at hand.

WordPress : Visual QuickStart Guide

With rich screenshots, and a highly immersive visual tutorial this book will certainly appeal to a - 'surprise' - a visual audience. However this quickly get you through what you want to know and the core aspects that will make you comfortable with Wordpress.

WP Starter Guide

This is not a well known book, but a good place to start. The book is not as substantial as other well-known books, but is clear on the beginning concepts and what you need to do to get a site up and running on Wordpress. If you don't like the cost, you can also consider getting the book for free by paying a sponsoring web host company. 

Wordpress video tutorials

If you are more a audio/video person, you may like watching the lessons fly by instead of the tedious page turning. Entertainment + learning anyone?

Professional Wordpress: Design and Development

Start from basics and go through advanced topics. This book is best suited for developers.

wordpress.org

You always have the option of using the best resource of all times - product documentation and beginner lessons.

[disclosure: contains links that may result in monetary benefit to me at no cost to you]

Write content easily, Enjoy Blogging

I have more than one blog, and one of the most demanding things of maintaining a blog is - yes, you got it right, to create new content. Creating content is not an easy task by any estimate. The sheer number of tasks that you do to get interesting stuff that interests you and the audience can unnerve many a mortal. But, again wonderful people who are a tad smarter, do come up with interesting tools to make my life easier.

One such tool that is useful is for content curation. The process itself is simple. While browsing or when I search for terms that have caught my fancy at some point in time, one of the things I do is to get the links, copy some interesting tidbits and share that with rest of the people who sometimes trust me more than necessary. This is a painful process to say the least. While Facebook provides a way to add links, shows previews and let users click on the shared links, there is no such joy for the people who maintain their own website or their own blog - no easy way to put it more precisely. Until now.

Enter CurationSoft.

The software is easy to setup (point, click and install), easy to use (drag and drop content from the world of internet to your site), and did I mention, easy to use? Although this is far from solving the creativity issue or the writer's block, it does solve all the crazy tasks that I do on a regular basis.


Using CurationSoft:

1. No copy/paste to notepad and then to my blog/site
2. I do not worry about how best to optimize pictures
3. I do not delve into formatting, and getting the site look professional
4. I do not worry about how I need to change the source to get it right on my Drupal, Wordpress or Blogger platforms

All this is enabled through simple drag and drop.

Still confused? Here's a video..

Here are a few more for the reviews.

So, what prevents everyone from using it? You may like more control for one, you may also not like the cost of the product. Yes, there is certainly a cost. But you could always start with the free version, and buy only if you like what you see.

What are the tools that you use to simplify work? Has CurationSoft worked for you?