The Web Files » How To

What Is RSS?

Tricia — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 08:08:52 +0000

Do You Understand What RSS Is?

RSS can have more than one meaning behind it. Usually, RSS stands for “really simple syndication” but it can also mean “rich site summary” or “RDF site summary”.

The meaning behind, ’RDF’ is resource description framework. That should help explaining the meaning associated with RSS, now let’s look at what it can do.

Exactly what is RSS in the realm of really simple syndication? It is a tool that allows sites to give a quick summary of important links and descriptions in XML format. This essentially allows them to syndicate their content by allowing other blog owners and webmasters to use this summary as part of a list of summaries on a specific topic.

Webmasters and blogmasters will gather a number of these summaries using a feed aggregator or feed reader. Rather than asking, “what is RSS”, this tool will ask “where is RSS” and then find it.

The aggregator tool will locate RSS feeds and collect them from various sites such as, Yahoo and MSN, and will select smaller sites like a personal blog or a news sites.

The blogmasters and webmasters then take the script generated from the aggregator and insert it into their blogs. The RSS feed is then created in this way and will automatically start pulling news items and blog posts each time they come up. Whenever the blog or site page is refreshed, it will display the latest items.

Taking advantage of this tool is good for two reasons. By using your own RSS feed, you will be able to have your content distributed across the internet without having to pay each time you submit a press release, or contact other blog owners and webmasters.

If you have your own personal blog page, then by using an RSS feed you can add fresh content to it much easier and faster. This will allow you to constantly put new content links and summaries on your blog without spending the time to hunt around for related information. You just need to choose a feed aggregator to select the potential feeds you can use and these can be found on a list of news sites and authority blogs. Plus, you can create your own custom feeds by adding any of your own selections that you find.

Do you now understand the basics behind RSS? Simply put, using RSS is a very easy way to generate traffic to your blog and to display additional summaries you find on other blogs.

DTI Data offers hard drive recovery services and software

Tricia — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 21:09:47 +0000

I’ve you’ve never been unlucky enough to have gone through a hard drive crash and major loss of data I envy you. I might be luckier than some as I’ve only experienced complete hard drive failure once and that was due to a computer virus.

All I can say is that if you’ve never experienced this you’re lucky and whether you have or haven’t had a hard drive failure you should take some basic steps to prevent hard drive failure or to make recovering your data a fairly easy task.

Some obvious ways of protecting your computer and your data are:

1. Keep your software up to date by upgrading using the latest stable release.

2. Use an anti-virus program to protect your computer.

3. Never open a file that arrives in your email if it’s from someone that you don’t know, if you weren’t expecting the attachment or if it seems suspicious in any way.

4. Backup your data to another hard drive, server, external drive, CD or DVD regularly.

There are many reasons why your hard drive might fail. Power failure is another reason, as is visiting a website that infects your computer with malicious code. However, in my opinion, failing to do some or all of the above mentioned suggestions are probably the number one reasons that lead to hard drive failure.

I don’t know how many times I’ve talked to friends, relatives, coworkers or web friends and they’ve told me that their hard drive crashed or some of the programs that they rely on most won’t work anymore. When I ask them if they have a recent backup or if they use an anti virus program more often than not they say no.

Hard drive failure is bad enough for the home computer user, but if the hard drive failure occurs on a business computer or servers hard drive it could mean downtime, loss of income and loss of valuable company data.

For those who’s hard drives have failed and they are unfortunate enough not to have a backup of their data, or perhaps had a backup failure as well as a crashed hard drive there are companies such as DTI Data that specialize in hard drive recovery. Not only is DTI DATA the only manufacturer authorized data recovery company to provide flat rate pricing for hard drive recovery, but they also have a fantastic data guarantee:

If DTI DATA fails to recover your data you don’t pay!

That claim does come with an exception. If your hard drive was opened elsewhere the guarantee doesn’t apply.

DTI Data can perform hard drive repair on many types of hard drives and servers. For example they offer services for SCSI Hard Drive repair and recovery, Exchange Server Recovery, RAID Data Recovery, laptop hard drive recovery, Western Digital hard drive recovery and even adaptive logic hard drive recovery for those who sent their hard drive to another company for repair before trying DTI Data.

Data recovery and hard drive repair takes place in a class 100 clean room.

DTI Data also offers a number of Data Recovery Resources such as do it yourself recovery software that has been developed in house.

You’ll find software that can be purchased on their website that will help you recover all of the data on your hard drive, assist in recovering lost digital pictures, CD/CDRW DVD/DVDRW drive data recovery, fast file undelete, e-Recovery for Outlook Express and Outlook as well as other forms of data recovery software.

If you’ve been unfortunate enough to have a hard drive failure visit the site and fill out their online quote form or call their toll free number to talk with one of their hard drive recovery specialists.

How to use an FTP program

Tricia — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 00:30:18 +0000

I spend time on a variety of blogging and webmaster related forums and quite often, when someone switches from a free blogging platform such as blogger to hosting their own website they are confused by … well, a lot of things since everything is new to them, but FTP seems to one major source of confusion.

If you are new to using an FTP program in order to upload files to your server I would suggest that you use the free program FileZilla. While it’s true that some hosting programs have created a simplified version of FTP that is very easy to use directly from your hosting account (I believe) most do not provide this service and you must use external FTP programs to move large files.

You might be asking yourself “why would you need an FTP program in the first place?” Well, if you are a blogger you might want to find new themes or plugins to use on your blog. Most themes and plugins have a number of files packaged together in a folder. While it’s true that you could upload the zipped file into your Wordpress -> Content -> themes or Plugin folder on your server using the c-panel File manage it is often much faster and easier to use an external FTP program.

As I said I would recommend download the easy to use FileZilla as your FTP progam.

Go to the site and click on “Download FileZilla Client – all programs” button.

Once you do that you’ll be presented with a few choices. If you are using Windows as your computers operating system you might want to download the setup.exe file.

Once you’ve download the program to your computer you’ll need to unzip the file if you download the zipped version or if you download the exe version simply double click on the file once you’ve located it.

You will probably use this program quite often once you get used to it, so you might want to select the option to have a desktop icon during the installation process.

Once the program is installed you can click on the icon to open the program and set it up so that it will connect with your web hosting account.

You may have to refer back to your hosting account or perhaps the email that your web host sent you when they first set up your account. They should have provided some information as to what you should use as a FTP address for your domain.

The FTP address will be something like ftp.mydomain.com

To set up your FileZilla so that it connects with your hosting server you’ll have to click on FILE -> Site Manager when the FileZilla program is open.

Click on New Site on the left side of the box that pops up.

Then begin filling out the requested information on the right:

Host – ftp.mydomain.com (your FTP address)

LogonType – select Normal

Username – fill in the user name that you use to log on to your hosting account

Password – fill in the password you use when you log on to your hosting account

Click on the OK button to save your information.

Now, you should have the main FileZilla program open in front of you.

To connect to your hosting site you should be able to click on the first icon to the left. This will open the Site Manager again and from there you can click on the new site that you just created. This might literally be named “new site”. You might want to take the time to give it a real name, perhaps your domain name.

Click Connect at the bottom of the box. If all goes well Filezilla will begin to connect to your hosting account.

Now to make things really simple you might want to go into the advanced tab in the Site Manager.

There you can specify a location on your computer that will always open up and show the files within that area when you use FileZilla. I usually select my computers desktop as that is where I download new themes and plugins for my blogs.

You can also specify the default remote directory that should always open when FileZilla connects with your hosting server. You usually want to be in your Public_Html directory on your host. You might try simply typing in – /public_html/ and see if that works the next time you connect. Your web host might have sent you information about which directory you should connect to via your FTP program. The path /public_html/ which works for me may not be the correct one that you should use on your hosting account.

If you have any trouble connecting or staying connected you might want to go back to site manager and look at the properties that you’ve set up for your FTP domain. Some web hosts prefer that we use passive transfer settings when we connect to their servers. To change from the default transfer mode simply click on the tab that says Transfer Settings and select Passive, then OK. Now try connecting and see if that works better for you.

Once you are connected, all your server files are on the right. You can get to the directory on your server that you need to upload files to simply by double clicking the folders until you’ve opened the one you want.

For example:

If you want to upload a new theme for your wordpress blog you’d find the Wp-Content directory for that blog, then double click Wp-content to open that folder, then double click on the Themes folder.

Once that’s open you can locate the new theme on your computer that you’d like to upload to your hosting account, right click while holding your mouse over the file and the files will begin to transfer over to the folder on your hosting account that you’ve selected.

This also works in reverse.

If you wanted to modify a file on your server you first might want to save the unmodified version onto your desktop just in case something goes wrong. Call it insurance! Click on file or folder in your hosting account and select download. The file will be transfered to whatever file or folder is open on the “my computer” side of filezilla so make sure you have the right folder open! Again – the desktop is always good for downloads. You can move files to the area you really want to save them to once they are on your computer.

There, now you know something about FTP if you were a total FTP virgin before reading this.

Good Luck!

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Have you monetized your blog?

Tricia — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 06:56:25 +0000

Over the last year I’ve been experimenting with various ways to monetize my websites and blogs. Some affiliate programs have worked well and others have only netted me no more than a few cents! I’m sure you’ve had the same experiences and what works for one website owner might not work for another because it all depends upon our blog category and audience.

I’ve written about some of the programs I’ve tried on this site, WebStyle and of course my main blog Tricia’s Musings either as I’ve added them to one or many sites or after I’d been using them for a while.

I’ve been using Amazon on my main website for a number of years. I can’t remember exactly when Amazon started up it’s affiliate program but I’ve been using since the late 90’s I believe! In those early years I made quite a bit of money with Amazon and it was in fact the only way I monetized my website. These days I still make money with Amazon, but no where near as much as I used to due to changes in the program and I suppose a huge increase in the overall amount of affiliates!

I added the WP-Amazon wordpress plugin to my blogs a couple of months ago, but I’ve yet to really get going with using it. I think I’ve only created two affiliate links within my posts so far! Shame on me. Part of making money with affiliate programs is using them when appropriate. Of course I can still go over my old posts and add some Amazon links to them.

Text Link Ads has also been a very successful program for me. I joined a couple of years ago when I only had one HTML based website. I could never figure out how to get Text link ads to work on that site though! (if anyone can help me with this I’d really appreciate it! I know there’s a way to do it.) So I didn’t earn anything on my account until I got around to starting some blogs in 2006.

Google Adsense has worked out fairly well for me too. I don’t earn anywhere near as much as I think I could be making with the program, but I earn more than enough to get paid every month by Google. Again, I only had Google Adsense on my two websites for the longest time. Then sometime last year I put it on a couple of blogs but not my busiest ones. I’ve now rectified that mistake and I use Google Adsense and the utilize the Adsense Deluxe plugin on all of my blogs.

I only added Google Adsense to my busiest blogs about a month ago and I’ve already almost doubled my income. Hopefully once the Google Media bot fully indexes those sites I’ll really start to do well with Google Adsense. I’m still of course going over old posts and using the Adsense Deluxe plugin to add ad blocks to older posts. I don’t like to use them in my newest posts. Perhaps I’d earn more if I did, but I prefer not to irritate my regular readers with too many ads. Those coming in from search engines to the older posts will get the full extent of the advertising on my sites.

This actually brings up a good point.

When you monetize your sites do you consider how it might appear to your visitors? We’ve all seen sites with far too much advertising and for me it’s a total turn off. Links everywhere, advertising to the full extent, all kinds of different affiliate program banners and so on … I try not to do that. As I’ve just said I’ve been going back to older posts and adding in a bit more advertising, but I still try to keep it as tasteful as possible.

Everyone’s got to find their own balance between developing content, advertising and continuing to build traffic. Too much advertising can make people close your site and never return.

It’s fine to experiment with different affiliate programs. Even trying different badges and products to advertise on your site with each company. Just don’t try everything at once. If you overwhelm your visitors they won’t click on your ads. They’ll just click over to another persons website.

How do you monetize your sites? Do you think you’ve accomplished that fine balance that allows you to successfully monetize your site while keeping your visitors happy?

What programs do you use to monetize your site? I’ll discuss other programs that I’ve been using successfully in future posts.

How to remove nofollow tags in a Typepad blog

Tricia — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 21:25:06 +0000

Karen from a strange life was kind enough to write out instructions on how to remove the nofollow tags from a Typepad pro template.

Note that I do not, nor never have had a Typepad blog. These are the steps that Karen took when changing her blog over to a do follow blog and they worked for her.

Karen in her own words:

Converting a TypePad Blog Pro Level to a Do Follow Blog for a Total Neophyte Like Me

Set up your blog with all the modules you plan to use, and no widgets, because the widgets won’t make the transition. Now you’re ready.
Go to the ‘Weblogs’ Tab on the TypePad Page.
Choose the ‘Design’ tab in the ‘Weblogs’ page.
Go to ‘Saved Designs’ in the ‘Design’ page.
1. WARNING: ONCE YOU CONVERT TO ADVANCED TEMPLATE (IF YOU ARE ME) THERE IS NO GOING BACK. NOTHING WILL EVER WORK RIGHT IN YOUR BASIC TEMPLATE AGAIN.
Check the box next to your Current Design and click on the button ‘Convert to Advanced’. The program will clone your design and make one of them ‘Advanced’.
Go to ‘Current Design’ and you will see a list of Advanced Templates in 3 boxes: Index Templates, Archive Templates, and Template Modules.
Open a new window and in TypePad Help search for Advanced Templates: Individual Archives Template.
Open the Advanced Templates: Individual Archives Template and scroll down to Individual Archives Modules.
1. There are 3 boxes of code under this title:
2. Individual Entry (Module Name: entry-individual),
3. Comment Listing (Module Name: comment-list), and
4. Comment Form (Module Name: comment-form).
Now in Current Design click on ‘Create new template module’. Click the top box of the form that comes up to ‘Individual Archives’ then type in the exact module name from the Advanced Templates help page. Now, copy all the code in the help module’s box and paste it into the new module’s box. Click ‘Save’. Do this same sequence of actions for all three of the modules shown in the help boxes. So now, under Template Modules you should have:
1. comment-form
2. comment-list
3. entry-individual
Now the guy who did the REAL fix comes to the rescue!
Mike from the ConverStations blog wrote a post about removing nofollow from Typepad comment sections.
1. go to this website and copy the code he has in the ‘new comment-list module’ code box. Take it to your box in Template Modules labeled comment-list and, after removing the old code, paste it in.
2. now go to the entry-individual Template Module and find the phrase he tells you to change, and change it.

If you are persistent and pigheaded as I am, you will eventually make this into a do-follow blog!

There you have it. Between Karen’s written instructions and Mikes comment code you should be able to get your typepad blog to become a do follow blog and reward your visitors with back links whenever they comment on a post.

I had to change web hosts!

Tricia — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 03:07:52 +0000

Well you probably noticed that my sites went down for a few days if you’ve become a regular visitor of The Web Files or any of my other sites.

I ended up changing web hosts after my former web host attempted to change my shared hosting account over to a TWO year Virtual Private Hosting account and charged me $642 in the process. A move and charge that I hadn’t authorized.

I’d been apparently having CPU resource issues on my former host – Lunarpages, and I worked for close to a month to resolve any CPU resource overuse issues by going over everything in my directories with a fine toothed comb, updating all of the programs that I use to run my various sites and any addons or plugins that I used with those sites and still they kept telling me that I had CPU resource over use issues.

They suspended my account on Saturday stating that my account had almost caused a server to crash so I reluctantly agreed to change my account over to VPS for one month. One single month. It took me almost 24 hours to communicate that desire to support since they are very slow to answer support email and do not have telephone support over the weekend.

Once they apparently understood that I was willing to switch over to VPS for one month they told me that it would cost $75 per hour to transfer my account, but if I wanted I could do it myself once the VPS account was set up. At that point I said No way to the $75 charge and in fact said no to the whole deal until they sent me more info about VPS, Plesk and how I might move my account on my own.

Instead of sending me information they went ahead and set up the VPS account and instead of creating a monthly account they charged me for two years of VPS service.

Right … for CPU resource issues that may or may not exist.

I say may or may not exist because after the stunt they pulled charging me for a two year VPS account I’m not all that certain that I ever had CPU resource issues.

So I spent early Monday morning creating a new hosting account at HostGator and worked on moving my domains and sites.

So far things are going well with HostGator and they’ve yet to mention a thing about CPU resource over use. Still – I think I’m going to continue going over my sites and try to lighten their load on the servers. Some of my sites are getting more and more popular so if my traffic is increasing so will my resource usage too.

Ever wondered how a computer virus spreads?

Tricia — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 21:42:44 +0000

If you’ve always wonder just how a computer virus works and or spreads you should take a look at this video.

Not surprisingly, computer virus work in a similar manner to that of human virus in that it just takes one virus to infect something and it spreads from there.

Check out this video from “How things Work”:

As the video says, if you don’t have anti-virus protection on your computer you are just asking for a big problem. I use Norton Anti-virus because it comes free with my ISP, but there are some very good free antivirus programs out there such as AVG.

CPU resource overuse problems continue! Any ideas?

Tricia — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 06:40:37 +0000

Well I’m still trying to figure out my web hosting CPU resource over usage problems. I’ve got a lot of great suggestions from people on forums and via comments on my sites.

One person asked if I’m using WP-Cache on my wordpress blogs and the answer is yes. I’ve been using it since last Friday and I’ve still been getting messages from my web host saying that my cpu resource usage is too high.

This is depressing!

If I ever figure out what caused the problem I’ll be sure to write about it on my sites so that others might be able to get themselves out of this mess a little quicker than I’ve managed.

Well, I’m not out of the mess yet.

I’ve finished updating everything I can think of including a joomla installation that runs one of my other sites. I think the Joomla CMS might be one of the causes of the problem. I guess I’ll find out later today when I hear from my web host. I hope that the resources are back to normal.

I wrote out more details of how I’m using the servers on my other tech blog WebStyle if you’d care to read that post. Perhaps those of you that have been through this before or know a little something about this kind of problem could read that post and offer a few suggestions? I’d really appreciate it if you would.

Also, just in case I do end up having to move to a Virtual Private Server … how difficult is that to work with? I’m pretty good about figuring out stuff but I’d like to know if I’m going to end up with a VPS headache before I make my decision to move off shared hosting.

Overuse of CPU on my web host – Help!

Tricia — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 07:57:55 +0000

I got a note yesterday evening from my webhost stating that my sites were using too much of their resources. Most of our sites are fairly well visited but I don’t believe they are so well visited that they would begin causing CPU problems on my web host just yet.

So, I’ve been going over all our sites for the last few hours turning off any plugins that aren’t vital and ones that I think might use CPU. For example I had viewcounter and postrater activated on two of our sites and since they store info in the database I thought that they might be using the hosts CPU so it was worth turning them off.

I’ve also downloaded a copy of WP-Cache that I’m going to be installing in a few minutes. This caches a page when it’s first viewed and then presents the cached copy the next time it’s viewed and doesn’t create a new cache copy of the page until data on the page changes or I think until a certain amount of time has passed. If this works properly it should cut down on the amount of resources that my sites are using.

I’m also going to update my Google Sitemaps plugin as the latest Beta version has been optimized to use fewer CPU resources.

I’m crossing my fingers that this works.

In the meantime my host has moved my sites to a different server on their network. I’m not sure the move went well because once I got to this blog I noticed that when I tried to click on the titles of the posts I got an error message. I hope they didn’t mess up my database!

That’s one reason why I’m writing a post now. I’m hoping the new post will update my database and fix whatever’s going on with the rest of the posts. I sure hope it does, and I also hope that this posts when I publish it!

If anyone has been put on notice by their webhost that their site is overusing CPU resources how did you resolve the problem? Any suggestions?

What to do with old computers?

Tricia — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 01:03:06 +0000

Do you have some old computers sitting around your home or office that you’re not sure what to do with? Have you thought of recycling them or using them in a creative way?

They say that the average lifespan of a computer is 3 to 5 years. So that means that on average every four years those of us with computers are going to be looking for a way to get rid of ours.

I’ll bet that one of the ways you’ve gotten rid of old computers in the past was to give the computer to someone that didn’t have one or to a kid. Am I right? Don’t be ashamed. I’ve done it too. Of course all we’re doing is getting the next generation hooked on technology aren’t we?

Here in Canada almost two million computers end up in landfills each year. Isn’t that a shame?

I don’t know if other countries have really good recycling programs but we do recycle here in Canada which makes it so much sadder to hear that some many computers don’t end up getting recycled and are placed in landfills instead.

As I already mentioned computers can be donated. This is a great way to make room for your new computer yet do something good for someone else at the same time.

Here in Toronto Little Geeks, a non-profit organization that refurbishes unwanted computers and gives them to underprivileged children. Look for a company such as this in your area.

There’s also a program called Computers for Schools. They accept donations of computers at drop off centers throughout Canada. They then refurbish the machines and distribute them to needy schools. They’ll also accept old computer accessories. Check for a school computer donation program in your country.

Then there’s Reboot Canada. There are eight drop off locations in Canada. They’ll accept computers of any age or condition.

Charitable organizations such as The Salvation Army and Good will are always great places to donate computers and peripherals. Just be sure that these products actually work when you drop them off as they are usually sold in their stores as is.

Computer manufacturers such as Dell, HP and IBM have launched donation campaigns. Donate your old computer through the companies website. Your old computer is then donated to those in need.

HP apparently began it’s recycling program way back in 1987, long before household computers were as common as house phones. They’ve estimated that they have collected and recycled more than 600 million pounds of used computer products.

If you choose to go the recycling route because your computer is hopelessly old or damaged you can drop your computer and or monitor off at a recycling plant. The computer and monitor will be stripped of any hazardous materials, and reusable parts will also be removed. The computers and monitors or what’s left of them will then be shredded and sorted into base materials such as metal, plastic and glass.

Recycling trucks won’t pick up computers or monitors that are left by the side of the road. As I said they have hazardous, or potentially hazardous materials in them so they must be disposed of properly. So be sure to check on the hours of your local recycling plant so that you can drop off your old computers and peripherals.

Earlier I mentioned that you could also use your old computers for things they weren’t intended to be used for … I’ve seen photos of computer arches, computer planters in outdoor gardens and creative sculptures made of computers and or computer monitors. If you’re feeling creative and you have enough old machines on hand you can see what you can come up with.

The Web Files » How To

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