Web hosting that works

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I’m not saying Lunarpages sure work, well, they works fine so far. Anyway, there are people around still asking about paying for hosting or free hosting. I’m about to lost myself in this free hosting communities. To be honest, I would recommend paid host, it’s not that expensive these days anyway. I used to use a lot of free hosting, it’s not like I wanna use that much of free hosting, I was forced to change the free hosting due to whatever reasons they have.

Nowadays, due to the heavy competition around the market, webhosting pricing are dropping radically this few years. I used to see web hosting that cost USD7.99 per month for a 50MB space. Nowadays, the space would be more or less 1GB, imagine the differences of only space. If you’re blogging like us here, these are the priority (At least I think so).

1, Blogging platform stable.
Make sure whatever blogging platform you’re using are stable with the hosting itself. cPanel provided a built in blogging platforms, but it doesn’t mean the machine itself support the platform well.

2, a) Webspace
For the space, I do not think that lot of space would be needed for blogging, even with pictures. 1 or 2 GB would last for years already, unless you upload video on the hosting (Why waste time? YouTube!). As for myself, a good 3 years blogging needed only 5MB with some pictures.

2, b) Database space
A lot of people didn’t realize this, there are limitation on database space too. Some webhosting only provide a 10MB database storage, if using only one blog, I think it’s more than enough, but if you have lots of blog in a host, beware.

3, Bandwidth
In a simple term, bandwidth is the transfer limitation. So if you host images and a heavy graphic web, note down how many bandwidth you might need before looking for one. For instancemk if your site’s front page is 100KB, with 100MB bandwidth, you can only allow roughly 1000 visitors every month.

These are just for the blogging ones There are more to know about hosting of course, like script supported, php version and etc. It’s all up to one’s preferences anyway. So be smart in choosing a webhosting. Don’t be like me before

Pages or categories

So, Wordpress has been around for some times, people used to just install Wordpress, get some free Wordpress theme and voila, start blogging and even better, make money. Long enough I have to say, it’s time for some changes made on Wordpress theme. Recently I notice that people started to take note on categories instead of pages.

Pages, those link at the top header usually; categories, links that usually located at the sidebar. Which one more important? Why the heck is it important by the way. Now people don’t often check pages, mostly will go and check the author. To serve the visitor right, get away from using pages to tell who are you, eg: SimplyWP Tried to write a short description about author at the sidebar instead.

Basically the most important pages one will need is the contact form eh? I can’t really tells that pages is useless though, but it doesn’t need to be so significant on all pages. The best way to go would be, placing small link at the top header, then category links at bottom of header instead of sidebar. Notice some Wordpress themes are using this layout? Now, for those who earn money from their visitors, try to think about it for a moment. It is pages that visitors looking for, or the categories? And how visible and easy to navigate to your categories link?

P/S: SimplyWP is going for a small revamp soon, so expect those I mentioned here. Sometimes I gotta do something to replace my mistake

Image drop shadow

So you wanna have a drop shadow for all your images on your site/blog. You spend most of the time touch up all the images you have in Photoshop, create white padding area then drop shadow, save it, find it’s too big on your bandwidth consumption. Finally you give up on shadow make just one black border with CSS to save your bandwidth.

Here is the idea of having a drop-shadow-alike in CSS that only require one time editing. All image upload will have no border in Wordpress. It has an ugly-fugly link border in Internet Explorer by the way. Anyway, this is the normal one colored border in CSS

img {
border: 1px solid #000000;
}

Example:

As for shadow-alike you need to tweak them a little bit. Here is my way of doing a shadow-alike in CSS for images

img {
padding: 0px 1px 1px 1px;
background: #939393;
border: 1px solid #D4D4D4;
}

Example:

Background and border colors are very much depend on your preference though. However, this would help saving quite a lot of time on editing each and every images.

Keeping a forum

Previously I blog about how to start a forum. Today I would like to continue the part 2 of the entry, how to keep to forum. As I mentioned, I personally didn’t want to start a forum anymore. It’s all because I see quite a lot of failure and my first problem was the socializing skill. But some of my friends who started forum and has a great socializing skill also failed all because

1, Right attitude!
Very important, a lot of forum admin came to me and I leave them in the end of the day. Because all they want is me to register on their forum. Then whatever feedback they get, they put it in the trash because they think they’re the admin, who are you to tell them what to do. Members giving feedback because they think they can be one of the significant member in the forum, serve them right. Explain why not and why it’s good - Learn to explain, not just thanking.

2, Keep bringing the thread.
Since you created this forum, you should have the idea what thread to be created. Do it one by one (Will explain on next point). Don’t try too hard to create a thread and ended up nobody both to reply. Be clear of the forum vision, what you want your forum to be. If it’s about relationship, pretend you are a master in it. Well, if you have the right attitude, you’ll know if it is the right thread.

3, Don’t rush, slow and steady.
After discuss with me, my friend went on and created a forum (Wrong attitude), and he used all the plugin available for the forum script, ended up he came back to me and say “Those members not even bother to feedback.”. Well my friend, you have all the plugin and nice theme etc, why bother to feedback? This is the trick, create a plain forum with nothing much there (You can install the plugin but don’t activate it yet), improve (Activate) from time to time. By this you can email all your members to remind them about your new forum. Same goes to thread creating, don’t create a bunch of thread and sit there dreaming about reply, slow and steady.

It’s not easy to maintain a forum of course. You’ll need to implement all these 3 aspect (All I know, there’s maybe more). However, if you really love to see your forum grow, I think this is no biggie right?

Is forum a risk?

A lot of my friends they wanted to start a forum, but is it a good idea to do so? I’ve been developing a few forum that failed eventually. However, from there I learnt a lot though. Being a webmaster you need to test thing out yourself in order to give people advice, no pain no gain. As for now, I don’t create forum anymore. Here are my-whys.

1, I’m a freaking internet freak (Maybe you too?).
I’m not a socialize person, I spend a lot of time at home online and doing my homework. By this I mean, I couldn’t know more friends beside those from college and from the past. Forum require members, and these members shouldn’t be your friends. Friends come to your forum just for a little support, and it doesn’t do good for long run.

2, Members first then only content.
If you wanted to create a forum, make sure you can have 50 to 100 members (Not friends) ready. With this amount of members, your forum will have it content. Just a reminder, forum content is very depending on the members.

3, Forum is not money making machine.
I’m totally doomed when my friends told me that he wanted to create a forum and earn money. When I asked how can he do that, he kept silent. Why would I have this perspective? We need to get back to the core of forum. Forum is a place where people discuss about a certain thing, it’s a support and fun thing, it’s not making money thing. Well, unless the forum is all over the internet with tons of members, by that time advertiser will come to you instead. As for starter, let’s not think about money from your forum.

Above 3 are my ideas on why I think creating a forum is a risk, but you might be different though. However, creating forum is not risking, but it requires a lot of your time, energy, some socializing skills and attitude towards the forum. I see a lot forum administrators seems to be caring themselves more than the members. Last advice “Every websites you create is a service; serve right”.

P/S: Those who always complaint about this service is not good, that service sucks and etc, try not to create any forum.