The first section will display information about the blog’s responses. This includes checking the web server’s IP, RSS feed, robots.txt file, web caching and search engine indexation in Google and Bing. The second section will display technical details about the blog which are mostly interesting to the webmaster of the website.

The technical details will display page generation and fetch times, transfer speeds, information about compression as well as the version of the blog software and the theme used.

The site links to three additional services that can be used to check out a website or blog. This includes HTML verification at W3c, feed validation at Feedvalidator and HTTP header checks at redbot.com.Is My Blog Working is a great way to quickly check various technical details of a blog. A bookmarklet is provided that can might also come in handy.

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1. Comment moderation and spam

Comment moderation and spam are two of the most time consuming aspects of a webmaster’s workday. A high profile blog can get thousands of spam comments a day which are then queued up in a spam folder somewhere. Even the best antispam tools do not offer a 100% protection against spam. Another trade-off is that false positives tend to increase with every new antispam plugin and script installed which can frustrate visitors so that they either stop posting comments or leave the site to never come back.

2. Email Support

Most websites have a contact form or other means of contacting the webmaster or a person responsible by email. These emails can contain tech support topics, requests (either for new articles, help, guest blogging or advertising), comments, spam or rude remarks. Tech support questions are usually the most time consuming to answer especially if it is not possible to test the problem locally. Webmasters obviously do not have to answer emails but it is good behavior if they do in a timely manner (except for spam and the rude remark emails). It is still a time consuming process especially on high traffic websites.

3. Updates and Security

It is of uttermost importance to run the latest version of scripts and software on a website. Old versions can contain security or memory holes, incompatibilities or missing features. Many hackers wait for security releases and start searching for websites that still run an older version on the day the new releases get announced. Updates on the other hand are only one part of the security concept. Scripts on the server side can improve security by preventing brute force attacks or notifying tech support. Webmasters do not necessarily have access to these features especially on shared hosting but some security add-ons and features can be installed by them as well. This includes setting the right access rights for directories, making sure to use non-standard usernames, directories and database prefixes or installing scripts and plugins that increase a website’s security.

4. Features and Plugins

Webmasters have to keep an eye on the development of new plugins and features. Wordpress webmasters for example have thousands of plugins at their disposal that get constantly updated. Additions are posted in the dozens daily and it can be quite hard to keep up with them. There is however always the possibility to find a plugin or script that adds a new interesting feature to a website or is able to replace an existing script by providing an increase in performance or functionality. One of the main reasons why many webmasters stick with one content management system is that it is easier to keep an overview of the advancements (and other things including security) that are made.

5. Design

Not all webmasters have to be design-aces. It is perfectly possible to download templates and themes for many different types of content management systems or websites and use these with little modification. Another option is to order a custom theme from a designer. Small changes on the other hand are usually performed by the webmaster. This includes changing a logo, adding a graphic or other elements.

6. Performance

A slow loading website does not necessarily mean that the server the website is hosted is not capable of delivering the performance the website needs. Other things can play a role here including scripts and plugins installed. External scripts, like advertisement or third party widgets, can slow down a website tremendously. Even more so if the domain the data is loaded from is experiencing technical problems as well. A webmaster needs to make sure that the website can be loaded as fast as possible. While third party scripts are usually in the top list of elements that slow down a website the problems can also be caused by large multimedia contents like unoptimized images, broken scripts, not optimized loading sequences or not making use of compression techniques or image concatenation.

Many tools can help in the analysis including the XHTML Validator over at W3C, Firebug or YSLOW.

7. Testing and Compatibility

A website has to be tested with various web browsers to ensure that the user experience is similar in all cases and that it is possible to connect to the website with all popular web browsers. Webmasters also do a lot of testing that include testing advertisement, plugins, scripts or element positions on their website. A classical example is to test various advertisement positions on a website to find the one that is yielding the highest earnings for the webmaster. Other possibilities include testing various positions for content to increase pageviews or decrease the number of visitors who leave a website on the first page without visiting a second one.

8. Advertising

Not all websites and blogs run advertisements. Webmasters who do place ads on their websites open a new can of worms. Statistics have to be checked regularly to make sure that the ads perform well. Ads need to be tested (if possible) in various ways including different positions, color schemes and even different advertisers. Monitoring various webmaster forums and blogs for new advertising opportunities and tips is a must do.

9. Hosting, Domain and Billing

Webmasters using free webhosts do not have to worry about these. But webmasters with their own domain name and web hosting account need to keep an eye on a few things including expiration dates and paying subscriptions in time. This is usually not a big issue and not that time consuming unless hundreds or thousands of domains are hosted at dozens of different web hosters or web servers.

10. Networking

Networking is probably the most important aspect of being a webmaster. You tend to get the best tips from a network of webmasters who work in the same niche. I consider the day I met Everton from Connected Internet one of my luckiest days in my life. Not only have we exchanged information that helped us get rich (haha) and improve our websites; No, we also decided to run a joint project which turned out to be very profitable.

Not everything is about being profitable of course. Some tips are only passed around in close circles because many webmasters do not post their findings and experiences on forums or websites. This can be a better way of placing ads on a blog, a new plugin or script that a website benefits from or general tips.

Verdict:

I’m not sure if this article covered all the aspects. There are probably more including tax reports, law suites and the like. Please post a comment if you have something to add or would like to voice your opinion on the subject. Being a webmaster is more than meets the eye.

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It is still possible to create shortcuts by dragging and dropping the favicon to an empty space on the computer desktop or one of the folders on the computer. A more versatile option is the Deskcut add-on for the Firefox web browser which adds a right-click option to the browser that allows a user to create a shortcut on the computer that points to the selected website.

Deskcut comes exactly with the set of features that one would expect from an add-on like this. It adds the option to create a website shortcut to the right-click menu which will create a shortcut of the website in the active tab. The user can either manually select the name and location that shortcut should be saved in or edit the options once to set a permanent location and name for the shortcuts.

The add-on can generate the filename of the shortcut from the page title, page url or prompt the user to enter a name. It is furthermore possible to add data or time to the filename and strip, encode or replace invalid characters from the shortcut name. A path can be set once so that all shortcuts are automatically saved in that location.

The main advantage of using the Deskcut add-on over the manual drag and drop solution is that the add-on works in fullscreen mode as well. It is more comfortable to create the shortcut from the right-click menu than to resize the Firefox window to be able to drag and drop the favicon to the computer desktop. It would even be more complicate if the shortcut should be saved in another folder on the computer’s hard drive.

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Warrick is a Perl script that tries to restore websites from various Internet sources including Archive.org and the three popular search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing. Installation is a bit more complex than running an executable but still doable even for inexperienced users. The computer program is provided as a version for the Windows and Linux / Unix operating system. Windows users need to install a Perl interpreter such as Active Perl before they can run the script from the command line.

The developers have created a step by step guide for Windows users on how to install and use the script on the operating system. The Warrick website contains examples on how to use the script to restore single pages and entire web projects.

The command “warrick.pl -r -wr ia -c http://yourwebsite.com/” will reconstruct all pages of the website that are stored in at least one of the online sources used in the recovery process.

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More recently, shared hosting has evolved into what is called “virtual dedicated hosting.” This treats every sector of the server as if it was an entire, standalone piece of hardware, so that if one site crashes, the others are unaffected.

For those sites that do need an entire server, dedicated hosting is available. This means that an entire server is devoted to one website and all its sub domains. If you are just starting out with your website, even if you plan to have e-commerce features, shared hosting, or virtual dedicated hosting will probably be your best bet, mainly because true dedicated hosting is more expensive. The average web site does just fine with 1 to 3 GB disk space, which is well within the capabilities of shared hosting setups.

The main reason a site might need more is because it offers downloading services of audio or video, or if a site regularly receives over 5,000 visitors per day. Those situations require plenty of disk space and bandwidth. Otherwise, a typical shared hosting package will almost certainly be sufficient and cost effective for you.

You need to know what type of server operating system will work with your site. Don’t panic. You don’t need to know how to program the servers. There are people who do that for you. What you need to know is what kinds of software you will be using, and if that software has to be run on Windows or on Linux, or if it will work on either. The operating system you use for your own personal computer has little to do with whether your site will require Linux or Windows hosting. All you have to be able to do is use your web publishing software.

Linux is widely considered to be the best operating system for web servers. It is reliable, efficient, and stable. If your website is hosted on a Linux system, it will likely have very high uptime, which is crucial for any e-commerce sites.

If you plan to use Microsoft proprietary software such as FrontPage, Windows Streaming Media, or MSSQL, then you will probably require a Windows based host. Most anything else will work with either Windows or Linux platforms. Unless you will be using features that require either Linux or Windows servers, you can most likely worry about other things, like making sure you find a good hosting service with the technical support you need.

Most hosting packages come with email addresses on your own domain in the format you@yourdomain.com. A “catch-all” email, such as mail@yourdomain.com, is a good thing to have, as are a generous number of other email accounts for your employees. Often, hosting providers throw in things like auto responders for when you’re out of pocket, and the ability to access your mail over the Internet, so that you or your employees can check it when they’re away from the office. These are fairly standard features these days, and with the web hosting industry as competitive as it is, you should have no trouble getting decent email service as part of your hosting package.

Uptime and downtime are two words you hope you don’t ever have to use when talking about your business website. Hosting providers have a number of contingency plans up their sleeves to eliminate downtime or at least keep it as brief as possible. They have the ability to distribute the traffic to your site over more than one server if it should reach a level where it’s overwhelming the hardware. If one piece of equipment has a problem, they can begin using a backup server almost immediately. The good web hosting providers can offer you at least 99.8% uptime, and you should accept no less. If they back that with a guarantee, so much the better.

You can check out what others are saying about a hosting company by simply typing the name of the company into a search engine. You sometimes find a treasure trove of information that you couldn’t get otherwise about the company. One word of caution, though: every hosting company that’s been around for any length of time will have a few bad reviews. Sometimes it’s the fault of the company, and sometimes it’s the fault of the client for expecting something different from what was negotiated. The point is, don’t let one or two scathing rants cause you to cross a company off your list. What you should look for is a pattern of complaints over time. Also, if you see nothing but glowing reviews, perhaps you should be a little suspicious. No web hosting service is perfect, and less than scrupulous companies have been known to overload customer feedback sites with planted positive reviews. Most companies are more honest than that, however.

Of course, price is a major consideration. If you’re starting a new business, you definitely don’t want to waste money, either for substandard service or for fancy features you’ll never use. A rule of thumb is to weed out the hosting companies that are very high priced and the ones that are very low priced (or free), and work with the ones that don’t seem too extreme pricewise. Cheap or free hosting isn’t always a good choice for a business site (though they can work fine for personal or hobby sites), and expensive hosting doesn’t always mean you get the best of everything. It may just mean that you’re buying a lot of stuff you don’t need.

Finally, perhaps the most important consideration when choosing a web hosting company is their level of customer and technical support. You should expect real 24/7/365 support from a hosting company that has experience hosting e-commerce sites. This doesn’t mean that they have a voice mail tree that you have to navigate through before having any hope of talking to an actual person. It also doesn’t mean that messages are taken during non-business hours, but addressed during business hours. If you’re the owner of a business website, there are no such things as “business hours.”
The kind of support you should expect is from a real human who is either physically at the server farm or who can hook you up with someone who is. And it shouldn’t matter if you’re calling on a weekend or a holiday: somewhere on the planet, a person may be trying to get on your site and having difficulty, and that needs to be fixed no matter where they are and no matter what time it is. Downtime is money out of your pocket, and you need to work with your hosting provider to eliminate or nearly eliminate it.

Don’t be intimidated at the thought of choosing an Internet hosting provider. They all want your business, so you’re in a relative position of power. Just be aware of those that promise what sounds like too much (such as “unlimited” bandwidth), and steer clear of sites that have histories of poor service or support. That’s the great thing about the Internet: if enough people have trouble with any company, whether it’s a car rental company or an Internet hosting provider, they will talk and put the information out there, hopefully saving you some trouble, too.

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Once you have a written business plan, it’s time to do some research on which hosting firm is most suitable for your website. You will need to know, obviously, if you plan to sell products from your site, or if it will be strictly promotional. Do you plan to have video? Elaborate graphics? Or just text? Will your chosen host provider help you set up your web site? How many email accounts will you need?

There are a number of things you need to know about the hosting companies you choose among. Perhaps the main thing is how reliable their service is. If you have a business website, you can’t afford for it to have downtime. After all, it’s always normal business hours somewhere. Closely tied to the need for reliability is the need for technical support. Many hosting services say that they have so-called 24/7/365 tech support, but their definition of what that comprises may be different from yours. You don’t want to find out the hard way that calling tech support late at night or on a holiday only gets you to an answering machine and that you’ll have to wait for regular business to resume before getting any actual help.

Of course you should ask your candidate hosting companies directly about these things, but you should do something else too. There are forums all over the Internet where people will meet online to talk about such issues. Read these discussion threads. Ask questions. You should be able to get a more objective assessment of an Internet hosting provider than you would from the company itself.
There are, however, two things you should be aware of. The first thing is that every web hosting company that’s been around for any length of time will have some negative feedback. One or two rants about a certain hosting company shouldn’t put you off. It is possible that the user was the one with the problem, and it is also possible that the company has fixed the problem.

The other thing you should know when reading forums is that sometimes hosting companies plant people on them to say good things about them. The rule of thumb should be: discount the overly positive posts on a company, and discount the overly negative, too. Any post filled with capital letters and exclamation marks is suspect. Take your information from the saner posts you come across, and if you’re allowed to join a forum, don’t hesitate to ask questions, particularly about free web hosting companies.

The reason these companies are able to offer free hosting is that they will run ads on your site. These might be unobtrusive ad links, or they may be pop-ups, or they may be the really annoying ads that follow the reader as he or she scrolls down the page. You have to decide if you can live with the annoyance, and if you think your customers will stick around long enough to buy something.
The obvious advantage of free web hosting services is price. You won’t have to register a domain name or pay for hosting. A free web page can serve as a training site for you as you learn how you want your site to look, or test out new promotions. There are free services like sitemeter.com that will gather basic statistics on your site that can give you valuable information on your visitors. You can find out where most of your visitors come from, what time of day they visit, and how many page views they amass.

You could, if you had the time and motivation, use multiple free hosting providers to set up your site, and then monitor all of them to see if one outperforms the rest. You will likely see differences in the different hosts, and quickly learn which ones are the easiest to work with. You may find that one hosting company gets your site indexed by search engines sooner, and therefore drives more traffic to your site.

Or you may decide that free web hosting just isn’t going to be good enough. All you will have lost is time.

The biggest disadvantage to free web hosting is the ads cluttering up the site. Many visitors are turned off by pop-ups that suddenly materialize as they try to enter or leave your site. And a few will click on those ads and leave your site without looking at anything at all.

Even if you eventually choose paid web hosting for the control it gives you over your site, the free websites you set up may still work to your advantage. You never know where your web traffic will come from. Some of it might come through an old free site you set up when you were just starting out. So, while free website hosting may serve you well as you learn how to be a webmaster, if you have any kind of e-commerce function, you’ll almost certainly want to switch to paid hosting at some point.

But if you’re broke and just starting out, or just learning the basics of having your own web site, then free hosting providers may be exactly the right thing for you.

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Not everyone wants to pay to monitor websites though. The free portable software program SiteMonitor provides a local solution for the Windows operating system. It requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0 and can be configured to monitor selected websites and notify the user if they become unreachable. It is a good alternative as long as it is run on a computer system that is online 24/7.

New urls can be added easily to SiteMonitor. All that it takes is to add a descriptive name, an url and HTML to match which is simply content that should appear on the website. The website monitoring software will check every 30 minutes by default; To much for important websites. The interval can be changed in the options. The options are also the place where the notification preferences can be edited. The website monitor provides two different types of reactions to website connection problems:

• Run a script or executable, e.g. a script that will restart a server or service
• Send email to notify a user about the connection problem

The amount of failures before either one of the reactions will be initiated can be configured in the same menu as well.

Below is the small php script that we use to check if the database is up and running on Ghacks:

<?php
$dbhost = 'localhost';
$dbuser = 'username';
$dbpass = 'password';

?>

replace username with the database username, password with the password of the username and databasename with the name of the database. Save it as database.php, upload it to your website and load the new file. It should display ok if the database is up and error if it is down. The url that points to the script can then be added to the website monitoring software to check if it returns ok. If it does the website is up, if it does not it is down.

Alternatives are the Website Monitor and Downloader Wysigot, Montastic or the Server Monitor Observu.

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The message “The XML page cannot be displayed. Cannot view XML input using XSL style sheet. Please correct the error and then click the Refresh button, or try again later.” was displayed instead. The feed did however work fine in other web browsers that we tested immediately including Mozilla Firefox.

This led to the conclusion that the error had to be Internet Explorer specific. It could have been a plugin that was running on the website itself, some incompatible code in the theme that was causing Internet Explorer 8 to throw that error message or a problem at the hoster of the feed Feedburner.

The first thing that came to my mind was to validate the feed using an official resource like the Feed Validation Service at W3C. This service validates a feed and displays validation errors and warnings including their location in the code. One error was displayed: Your feed is not well formed according to the XML specification

It turned out that one of the articles published lately contained the char & which was responsible for the feed validation error and the error in Internet Explorer 8.

Escaping that character with & a m p ; (remove the spaces) was the solution that fixed the error. The feed did validate correctly afterwards (after the new article had been cached by the feed hosting service) and Internet Explorer 8 was displaying the feed correctly.

This does mean however that webmasters have to always escape certain characters in the articles that they publish on their websites if they want their feed to be working in Internet Explorer 8.

This is actually not the fault of Internet Explorer 8. The web browser is strictly following the rules in this case. It’s time to look for a plugin that will automatically escape those chars so that the feed will validate and display correctly in Internet Explorer 8.

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We would like to ask you to comment on the new theme and especially notify us if you encounter problems of any kind including page load errors, display errors and any other kind of error that is dampening your user experience. And we would of course like to listen to your opinion about the new theme.

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Performing that task manually can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days depending on the type of website or project. Hundreds of factors can play a role in determining the real value of a website.

There is another solution albeit less accurate and not suitable for serious business. Website value calculators will analyze and calculate a value of a website in seconds. Stimator is one of those websites and it provides one of the slickest professional interfaces in the niche.

The value of a website is analyzed and calculated as soon as the user enters the domain name in the form on the page. Several different values like backlinks, traffic levels, social and inlinking scores, web recognition and linking data are computed and part of the calculation of the final value.

The site seems to be more accurate than most comparable sites as it lists $1,349,935 as the value of ghacks.net, hehe.

A report can be opened that is displaying several of the scores of the analyzed website. These scores are explained in the about page. The page does not say how they are computed but it lists factors that influence the score.

No value calculator will ever be dead on but there are some that can provide a first impression of a websites value. Serious website buyers on the other hand will never rely on these tools alone but perform a manual analysis before they consider bidding or buying a website.

Are you a webmaster? What is the value of your website according to the tool? Do you think it is dead on or way off?

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Any Client is one of those secure ftp clients that supports the ftp, sftp, webdav and ftps protocol. It runs remotely using Java and webmasters can use it to connect to their web servers to perform all the operations a ftp client offers them including file transfers and manipulations. The use of protocols that use encryption such as sftp or ftps ensure data safety during transfer. All settings and parameters are stored on the local computer system.

Cautious users might want to consider installing a secure ftp server directly on their web server that can be accessed using a web browser to avoid any security risks or complications that exist while trusting third party websites with your ftp data.

Any Client will load the Java Applet in the web browser and display the contents of the local computer system on the left. A click on the Connect button will open a new smaller window allowing the user to configure and add ftp servers. The ftp client configuration menu contains similar options than local ftp clients offer. Users can add and store multiple ftp servers, select the protocol, add sftp / ssh authentication and specify a starting local and remote directory.

The only difference is the absence of options that configure the ftp client itself, for example the number of simultaneous connections or file transfer limitations.

Once the ftp server has been added the ftp client can be used to connect to it. Users can now download, edit, rename or delete files while connected to the ftp server. A feature that is missing is chmod which can be used to configure access rights for files.

Any Client offers a quick and easy way to connect to ftp servers. It provides access to the basic feature set of ftp clients but lacks several advanced features that webmasters might need every now and then. Security sensitive users and those with important data on their servers might want to consider using a self hosted ftp server script instead of a third party service to reduce the security risks.

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One of the simplest installation is on a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) server. Before you go on, however, I will highly suggest you install PhpMyAdmin so the database creation is simple. For more information take a look at my Install PhpMyAdmin for easy MySQL Administration article. Once you have PhpMyAdmin installed you will want to create a database for your installation. You can name the database whatever you want, just make sure you remember the name. With your LAMP server up and running you have the most difficult aspect of the installation out of the way. All that is left is the actual installation of Drupal.

Your first step is to download the latest release of Drupal from the Drupal download page. Once you have that file downloaded move it to your web servers’ document root. You will need root access to undertake these steps so you will with su to root or use sudo.

Unpack the Drupal file. This will most likely be done with the tar xvzf drupal-XXX.tar.gz command (Where XXX is the actual realease number). This will create a new directory called drupal-XXX (Where XXX is the release number). Now, I always change the name of this directory for simplicity. I will either rename this directory to main or something easy to remember. You can also move the entire contents of the directory into the document root. The only issue this can cause is if you are installing multiple sites on the same server. For that reason I tend to keep the Drupal install in its very own directory.

Once you have this file unpacked and the directory renamed, the fun begins. Fire up your browser and point it to http://path/to/installation/ (Where path/to/installation is the entire path to the Drupal installation. For example http://192.168.1.10/main/.) This will automatically start up the installation process.

Step 1

The first step in the installation is to select your language. The default will be English. If you need to install Drupal in another language select the obvious link. Once you click the appropriate link you will be taken to the next step.

Step 2

Step 2 requires that you change the name of the default.settings.php to settings.php. This file will be found in the /var/www/html/main/sites/default/ directory (This will depend upon your installation of course.) You also need to change the permissions of this file so it is writable by the web server. You can do this with the command chmod g+w settings.php. One last step is to create the directory sites/default/files with the command (from within your web servers’ document root) mkdir sites/default/files. You may get another error when you click try again. If you do this is a permissions error. Enter the command chmod -R g+w sites/default/files which should solve the problem.

Step 3

Now it is time to set up your database. Remember the database you created with PhpMyAdmin? This is where that information goes.

Once you fill out this information click Save and Continue to move on. You’re almost done.

Step 4

Just a couple more steps. Now you can remove write permissions on the settings.php file (chmod o-w settings.php) and enter the configuration information for your site. The information you need to provide is self explanitory. Once you have finished save the information and you’re done. You will be greeted with the “Installation Complete” page!

Installation Complete

Final Thoughts

You can now log in with your administrator name (you will have created that in the site configuration page above) and start building your site. Drupal is an outstanding Content Management System you will quickly come to depend upon for many of your website rollouts.

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I quickly contacted Sarah Perez who is in charge of the website and she told me the following. Her websites are all hosted at Dreamhost who closed down the account because of disputing credit card charges which Sarah had nothing to do with.

Now the funny thing is that you can only get the Dreamhost account access back if you send them a money order or check by postal mail for the amount of the chargebacks. The mail goes to a postbox address that Dreamhost seems to check twice a week.

Imagine that. You are a business owner and need your website and they check the frigging postbox twice week adding to the waiting time.

Support is unreachable it seems. She put in four support tickets and one complaint and tried to phone them but is only receiving voicemail. She cannot reach them no matter what she tries.

I hope everything sorts out soon. Things like that can throw a business back several months.

I wonder why all those companies shoot first. It would be so much better if they at least tried to contact the owner of the account before going on a rampage.

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This means any result or value that they compute has to be taken with a grain of salt in the eye. Still, there are relatively good website value calculators and those that are way off and Cubestat is one of the good ones.

The process is fairly simple for the webmaster who wants to calculate the value of a website or the user who wants to know about the value of his favorite place on the Internet. Only the url of the website in question has to be entered, the rest is computed in the background by the Cubestat script.

Computation takes roughly 30 seconds. It depends if the website is already in the cache. If it is the results are displayed faster.

Cubestat is showing three website traffic graphs taken from Alexa, Compete and Quantcast, the Meta Info of the website and Index Data. Meta Info are the page title, the keywords and description.

The Index Data category is more interesting. It displays the number of backlinks in Google, Live and Yahoo, if the site is listed in DMOZ, the name of the owner and where the site and domain are hosted. All of that is factual data that is pulled from various services throughout the Internet.

Cubestat takes all these information into account and computes the website worth, the daily pageviews and the daily ad revenue of a website. I checked a few websites and it is definitely more accurate than most other services that I have used in the past. It is not dead on but the error margin is low.

No serious buyer would rely solely on tools like Cubestat especially if the price is a five-digit plus value but it can give a good indication without having to research all the figures personally.

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Over 60 fixes have been introduced in the new Wordpress version, several of them critical and some security related. You can check out the complete list of fixes in Wordpress 2.6.1 by following the link to Wordpress Trac.

I’m usually not that interested in what has been fixed than to apply the updates to all of my blogs immediately. It does not look like as if new features have been introduced in Wordpress 2.6.1, more of a bug fix release it seems.

The next big release will be Wordpress 2.7 which will introduce several new features and options to Wordpress. Looking forward to that. It is however recommended to update the blog as soon as possible.

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Zoundry Raven is a portable blog editor that I discovered yesterday at the Download Squad (Welcome Back, btw). It’s compatible to multiple blog plattforms including Wordpress, Typepad but also Blogger and LiveJournal. A total of 24 different blog plattforms are supported currently and chance is that yours is included.

Zoundry Raven asks during installation if it should be installed as a portable blog editor. This would mean that you could install it on a removable drive, for example an USB stick, and use it from there no matter where you go.

Before you can start using it you need to add at least one account to the application. All that needs to be done is to enter a url which will automatically be analyzed by the software. It will detect the blogging plattform that is being used and request login credentials.

After that all (!) posts, images, links and tags get downloaded and it is possible to look through them and open them online. Each post can be edited using the available WYSIWYG editor. One thing that I think is missing is the ability to check all links for broken links, that would be a very valuable feature.

The editor creates a tag cloud that displays all the tags used. A click on a tag loads the articles related to it which can be edited. It is for instance possible to add or remove tags that way as well. (removing tags is not really recommended because the search engines will have a broken link in their index)

The most important part of a blog editor is obviously writing and publishing new blog entries. That’s pretty comfortable as well. You click on the Write button, pick a website, categories, type in title, tags and start writing the article.

Writing an article that way is pretty comfortable and has the advantage that it can be done offline. Publishing the article on the other hand lacks the feature of scheduling that article which is a pretty important feature in my opinion.

Several media storage providers can be added to use additional space for files and images that are embedded in the article. They range from custom ftp accounts to Picasa and Flickr.

Zoundry Raven is a nice and clean blog editor. If you just publish and edit articles you will probably like it. I already mentioned the features that are really missing (link checker and scheduler) which keep me from using it. The link checker would be a huge selling point in my opinion and I believe that many bloggers would install the software program just for that feature alone.

There is no information about compatibility. It runs fine on Windows XP Service Pack 3.

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So far so good. Several issues appeared over time that I would like to address in this short article. I tried to fix them before but I failed to really find solutions for them. I did post a few help requests at the official Wordpress forum which remained unanswered even after pushing them a few times and a search on Google did not return the desired results as well.

So, here we start with my personal Wordpress issues that other webmasters might also experience:

• Akismet is not perfect: Akismet is the default Wordpress anti-spam plugin which is delivered with the default installation of Wordpress. That puts it in an unfair advantage over other spam plugins like Spam Karma which is in many aspects a better plugin. But I do not want to talk about politics here. Akismet comes with no configuration options at all. The only things that can be added are the Wordpress Api Key which is mandatory and a checkbox to delete spam that is older than a year.

  If you compare it to Spam Karma you are comparing Notepad to Notepad++. That’s the difference in usability. Akismet divides spam into user comments, trackback and pingback spam but it is not possible to delete only one category. The delete all button always deletes all spam.

  Akismet does have a search field but that search field is global, there is no way to only search the author name, email or filter by other parameters like only showing posts with one link or less in the body.

  It does catch quite a few valid comments which are then lost forever because it is impossible to work with Akisment on websites that get 1000+ spam comments a day unless you do that full time.

• Spammers can still register accounts although registration has been turned off: When I turn off registration to my website in the settings of Wordpress I expect to see no new users in the future unless I add them manually. The option however does not really help because even though it has been turned off spammers can still register accounts on my blog.
• There is no history: – The admin cannot see what authors or subscribed users of the blog have been doing. He cannot see if an author deleted an article that he wrote earlier, he cannot see if a user edited or removed a comment.
• Publishing an pending article: When someone else with not enough user rights is writing an article that article gets added to the Pending Articles and an user with enough rights can publish it after reviewing it. The problem that I face is that I have a hard time figuring out how to publish the article so that it is published in that instance and not in the past. If I just hit publish the article is published when the author of it saved the final version. This can be a few hours or even a few days in the past.

  I have not investigated that matter further but I suppose it could be problematic for RSS Feeds and even the site itself. I tried to change the date to the current one and publish it but it still felt like I missed something here. It’s definitely a strange behavior in my opinion.

Those are my issues with Wordpress and I always cross my fingers and hope that they get fixed in one of the next updates.

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It usually comes down to Asian languages like Chinese or Japanese that are not displayed properly on Western computers. The easiest way to install support for those languages is to go into the Windows Control Panel and activate the East Asian language options.

To do that you click on Regional and Language Options in the Control Panel, switch to the Languages tab and check the Install files for East Asian languages option under Supplemental language support there. This requires some files that need to be installed from the Windows installation CD.

Before:

After:

Looks better don’t you think ? If you are having troubles with a website in a different language you should first check the charset that is defined in the website’s meta tags and research that charset.

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The basic service is provided free of charge and aimed at the new webmaster who wants to run his own blog. It includes blog and theme installation, first time configuration and plugin advice. If you are new you are most likely overwhelmed by the sheer mass of plugins that are available for Wordpress. It basically means that the Blogtastique crew is setting up and configuring the blog for you.

The pro service is a service for webmasters who need a little bit more than just the installation of a new blog. It includes theme modifications like adding buttons or advertisement, content and theme synchronization.

It furthermore contains all the features of the basic service. The price for the pro service varies between $10-100 depending on the complexity of the request.

The management service finally provides the blogger or company with a way to concentrate on the writing and marketing of the blog. Everything else can be handled by the Blogtastique team. This can include comment and spam management, monitoring and maintenance, and system administration.

Individual packages are available that fit the needs of the blogger or company perfectly. If you don’t want to backup your blog regularly and hate comment spam then this can be done for you by the team.

Daniel put it this way in a email that he send me.

• Basic features are really very basic and free stuff, like a quick blog install with theme recommendation.
• Pro features cover everything that is a one-time action, like creating a new design, modifying a header, embedding a 3rd party widget and so on.
• Management features are things we do on an ongoing basis. This can be anything from helping you fight spam, to moderating your comments, synchronizing guest posts and so on.

I think the idea has a lot of potential. Especially the free service which offers a great start to new bloggers. Happy customers will come back and that’s probably the reasoning behind offering a free service. The process to order a package should be easier though. A contact form on the website would be a very good idea. Maybe a forum for support requests would be another good option. Lastly some testimonials would be nice.

Blogtastique is a very promising service for new and established bloggers.

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I use it mainly to secure certain directories on my websites from being accessed without the proper authorization. This is the admin directory in the case of Wordpress for instance but could also be used to secure a directory that hosts some valuable files.

I would like to point out two possibilities that secure a directory with .htacess. The first is to protect the directory by only allowing users with a certain IP or IP range access to it. Everyone else would receive an access denied error message.

The second possibility would be to create usernames and passwords that have to be supplied before accessing the content.

IP Protection:

Create a .htaccess file and add the following code to it:

AuthName "Protected Content"
AuthType Basic

order deny,allow
deny from all
#Comment
allow from 255.255.255.255


Change the IP address in the last line to the one used by the user / users. You can use wildcards * if the user is receiving dynamic IPs from his ISP. It is possible to add as many allow from lines to the .htaccess file as you want. Place that htaccess file in the directory that you want to protect. (all subdirectories are affected as well.

The problem with this kind of protection is twofold. If your IP changes, say you are on holiday or accessing from a different location, you need to add or change the IPs in the htaccess code. Users who happen to have a IP of that range can access the content without problems. This is usually a user from the same ISP.

A more secure protection is the basic auth protection.

Password Protection:

Whenever a user tries to access a directory or file a popup will appear asking the user for a username and password. This method requires two files, a htaccess file and a htpasswd file. The htpasswd file stores the usernames and encrypted passwords and should be placed outside of the root directory of the website.

AuthName "Restricted Area"
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile /path/to/.htpasswd
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
require valid-user

Since the passwords are encrypted you need to use a script to do that. A working one is the htpasswd Content Generator. Just enter a username and password and click on encrypt. Paste the line on the results page into the htpasswd file and place it exactly in the path that you specified in AuthUserFile.

It is possible to combine both protections for added security. I would begin by evaluating if your webhost is allowing those kind of files.

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