Internet Marketing Notes » Website

Hostmonster Control Panel New Look

Jason — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 10:44:27 +0000

Hostmonster has given its hosting control panel (cPanel) a new look! It now spots a much more pleasant-looking and user-friendly interface.

I’ve been with Hostmonster for almost a year and it has been good so far — no performance or reliability problems.

Here’s a screenshot of the new control panel:

I have several web domains, e-mail domains, and databases hosted under one Hostmonster account. Installing and upgrading WordPress and Joomla CMS is a breeze using the provided Fantastico utility. There’s even Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter coupons to be redeemed right from the control panel.

Considering all of the above, I think their hosting package is really value for money.

Thoroughly recommended!

Sign up for Hostmonster here!

Amazon FPS / Payments – Another PayPal?

Jason — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 08:04:17 +0000

Amazon has launched the Amazon Flexible Payment Service (FPS) which is an extension of the existing Amazon Payments. With this service, we can look forward to third-party merchants offering online payments via Amazon’s reliable and scalable payment infrastructure.

This service accepts non-US/international credit card transactions. The pricing rate is available here.

It’s only a matter of time before we see plugins or widgets that take advantage of Amazon FPS to allow even non-techie site owners to provide online payment for their products.

Withdrawal of Amazon Payment funds into international banks. Possible?

PayPal users in some countries (like mine) are not allowed to withdraw their funds into their local bank account. What about Amazon Payments? Initial indications seem to suggest that one can only withdraw funds into a US bank account though I can’t be exactly sure. If that’s true, then that’s disappointing news for some of us.

Will Amazon Payments be able to rival PayPal?

PayPal has pretty much dominated the online payments services space. I should also mention that there is also Google Checkout but at the moment, it’s not quite as pervasive as PayPal. I suppose we’ll be seeing a lot of Amazon Payment vs PayPal vs Google Checkout comparisons in the near future.

You Might Want to Know This If You’re Blogger

Jason — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 04:42:09 +0000

There’s a few interesting developments in the blog authoring scene within the last month or so.

Here, we’ll take a look at a new WordPress release, a desktop blogging tool and a new Windows browser.

#1 WordPress 2.2

WordPress 2.2 includes a number of new features as well as over 200 bug fixes. What’s new?

WordPress Widgets integration – allows you to easily customize or rearrange certain areas within your weblog. Just drag and drop!
Full Atom support – this is much like RSS.
New Blogger importer – easily import your Blogger posts and comments just by entering your login.
Infinite comment stream.
Better blog protection during plugin activation.
Core plugin and filter optimizations.
Future WYSIWYG support for Safari (Apple’s browser).

#2 Windows Live Writer Beta 2

Blogging over the web can be a painful affair especially if you have a slow connection. Solution? Desktop blog authoring! Microsoft Windows Live Writer (WLW) is one of them. WLW supports most ubiquitous blog platforms out there including Blogger and WordPress. If you have more than one blog, WLW would definitely be useful as you have now a unified way to author and publish your posts.

With WLW, you enjoy speedy WYSIWYG blog editing. Tag support (including Technorati, del.icio.us, etc) is built in.

Beta 2 of WLW introduces the following features:

Inline spell checking
Table editing
Ability to add categories
Page authoring for WordPress and TypePad
Support for excerpts and extended entries
Improved hyperlinking and image insertion
Paste Special
and many more…

WLW is fully extensible with support for plugins. e.g. there are plugins for embedding Flickr photos and videos (like YouTube).

#3 Safari 3 for Windows

Apple’s Safari browser is now available on Windows albeit in beta form.

If you’re running on Windows and you’re feeling unsure how your blog page will be rendered on the Safari browser on Apple, now you can test your page out on Safari for Windows. It’s still buggy in some parts, but overall, it’s fairly usable even in its current non-final form.

Happy blogging!

Unbeatable Value Web Hosting for Your VRE

Jason — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 08:23:44 +0000

It’s March 2007 and it came to my attention that my hosting company (Hostmonster) is now offering an irresistible deal.

Hostmonster is now offering 200 Gigabytes of hosting space and up to 2 Terabytes of transfer. As before, you’ll get one free domain name, unlimited add-on domains, unlimited subdomains, cPanel and Fantastico (for automating installation of WordPress, Joomla, etc).

At time of writing, Hostmonster is offering the package for $5.95/month for 2 years.

I host several sites under one account with them and I’m happy with the experience so far.

Furthermore, the latency times from where I live (Malaysia) to their servers is one of the best compared to other hosts. This is an important plus, as I manage all my web content using web-based content management systems.

If you’re looking to build your virtual real estate (VRE) without burning a hole in your pocket, I recommend Hostmonster.

Click here to sign up with Hostmonster!

WordPress 2.1 “Ella” Released

Jason — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 15:21:45 +0000

The latest major release of the greatest blogging engine WordPress 2.1 “Ella” is now available!

It includes tons of new features, including over 550 bug fixes.

If you’re already running WordPress 2.0.x and your hosting company offers Fantastico from the control panel, you may upgrade your existing WordPress installation from there with just a few mouse clicks.

I’ve upgraded one of my sites to WP 2.1. So far all of my WordPress plugins seem to be working fine. However, some of the toolbar buttons in the TinyMCE rich editor failed to appear in Firefox 2.0 but appeared fine in IE7. Strange!

I had wished the WP admin interface to take on a more compact look (with smaller fonts) but it remained almost the same as the previous versions.

I also understand that the popular Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin does have an issue with WP 2.1 in that tags are wiped when a comment is approved. (Yikes!)

So, what’s your take on the new version?

How to Increase Blog Search Engine Traffic by Porting to WordPress

Jason — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 06:34:37 +0000

Here’s a story of how Chris Pearson apparently increased his search engine traffic by 455% in just one month (from September to October).

He made two simple changes:

He ported his blog from MovableType to WordPress
He based his design code on the Cutline framework

Chris built the Cutline framework from scratch with SEO (search engine optimization) in mind.

With some creativity, it just proves how easy it is to implement effective SEO on the WordPress blogging platform. Read Chris’ post for a detailed analysis of the result that he has achieved.

If you’re just getting into WordPress and don’t know where to start, you can download two free chapters of Gobala’s WordPress Adsense System.

You might also be interested to read why WordPress is bettter than other blogging platforms in many ways.

Google Wants Feedback on How to Improve Measuring AdSense Success using Google Analytics

Jason — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 12:15:59 +0000

If you are both a Google Analytics and Google AdSense user, Google is seeking your feedback on the following:

Which Google Analytics reports do you use most often in conjunction with your AdSense account?

Which reports or metrics would you most like to see added to Google Analytics to help you succeed with AdSense?

Google has created a topic thread in Google Group “Anaytics Help” for users to post their feedback.

Here are some of the feedback that I thought are interesting:

..allow webmasters to track the visitors clicking on AdSense ads so that unusual click activity can be quickly detected and submitted to Google.

..be able to tell what percentage and/or what actual number of visitors left the site via an Adsense ad.

..be able to mix Adsense and Analytics data and create a single report that I can mail to my clients.

..(have) the ability to see which google ads are being clicked on and how many times. Not just which banner is being clicked on, but which individual ad is being clicked on.

..like to see referrer information and user location before they came to the site and clicked the ad.

..like to see keyword used if ever visitor found the site through search results.

There were lots of other interesting suggestions. You can find all of them here and post your own feedback too.

Personally, I’d like to see see a single sign-on for both accounts and seamless integration between Google Analytics and Google AdSense reports. What’s in your wish list?

WordPress 2.0.5 (Ronan) Released

Jason — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 04:41:48 +0000

Hi blogging folks! WordPress 2.0.5 (a.k.a. Ronan) is out and is available for immediate download. This release comes with 50 or so bug fixes.

Would I upgrade from version 2.0.4? Probably no. [Update: Oh well, I might consider upgrading. Thanks Brian. ] ~~I’ll wait for the next major release.~~

Useful links:

Blog More Efficiently with Firefox 2.0?

Jason — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 08:02:13 +0000

Finally, Firefox 2.0 Final Release is now officially available for download!

I did a small test against IE7 by loading an existing post for editing inside WordPress admin and this is what I found:

Firefox 2.0 consistently outperforms IE7 by 2 to 3 times when loading the Write Post page for editing. (30 seconds vs 1 minute is definitely significant!)
IE7 pegs at 100% CPU utilization 5 to 6 times longer than Firefox 2.0 during the page load phase.
Firefox 2.0 has a smaller memory footprint than IE7.

Below are the screenshots of the Windows Task Manager when running WordPress in Firefox 2.0 and IE7 respectively:

Firefox 2.0

Internet Explorer 7

This test was done on my old Pentium III laptop running Windows XP Professional SP2. I’ve not had the opportunity to test Firefox 2.0 on my higher-end Windows Vista RC1 desktop yet. Perhaps the results would be different on other configurations. Care to share your experiences?

Conclusion

For me at least, WordPress worked faster and more efficiently when using Firefox 2.0. As a result, my blogging experience is made much more pleasant and productive.

Why is WordPress Better Than Blogger?

Jason — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 13:02:06 +0000

Are you still building websites the old, hard way?

If you are, then stop. Most experts agree that the best way to build content websites (especially if you’re into Google Adsense) is by using WordPress. Not surprisingly, this blog is proudly powered by WordPress.

I’ve included an excellent article by Gobala Krishnan on WordPress vs Blogger right below. Read on…

Blogging Wars – WordPress Vs Blogger

There’s a war going on in the blogosphere, and it has nothing to do with bloggers dissing each other on their respective websites. The war is about control of the blogosphere by several great, many good, and tons of terrible blogging platforms. The average newbie now has “too many” options to choose from, and the battle for blogging supremacy is hotter than ever.

At my website and blogs, I’m always asked the question “Is WordPress better than Blogger?”. The answer, of course, is “Yes”. But to really understand why, it’s important to look at both blogging platforms side-by-side and see which one you really need. Here’s the comparison scale:

1) Ease of Set-up And Use

Yes, it’s much easier to set-up a blog with Blogspot.com and get your own Blogger account. You can be done in 10 minutes flat. Once you’re set-up you can start posting immediately. If you want to add a designer’s touch to your blog, there are also tons of blogger templates available for free.
Installing WordPress however can be a major headache if you don’t know what you’re doing. Since you’re going to host it on your own account, you’ll need to download the installation files, upload them to your server, set-up a database, and run the configuration script.

However, if you know which hosting account to get, you can choose one with Cpanel included. With Cpanel, you can do a one-click installation, upgrade and removal of your WordPress platform.

2) Customization & Advanced Use

Blogger doesn’t allow categories. You can’t sort your articles into different focuses, unless you know how to hack the platform. With WordPress, not only can you add categories, you can also display each category differently on your main page. In fact with the correct plugins you can even turn your WordPress into a magazine-like portal.

Publishing with Blogger can be a pain in the ass. It can take forever to post articles, especially if you’re making changes to the entire website. With WordPress, publishing is much faster, although if you load your system with all kinds of bells and whistles it can be just as frustrating. With a Blogger account, you can get additional features like “Shout Boxes” that improve interaction on your site. You can also get pretty themes and nifty little tools that you can add to the core template files. However, that’s as far as you can go with Blogger.

With WordPress however, the sky is the limit. As cliche as that may sound, not only can you get themes, additional “plugins” and advanced tools, you can also extend WordPress to far beyond just a blogging platform. The talk today is about using WordPress as a complete, user-friendly Content Management System or CMS.

3) Copyrights and Ownership of Content

I started with Blogger and I won’t say that it’s bad. But after a while I started to get frustrated with Blogger, and here’s why: Google Owns Your Content Google has the authority to shut down your account without warning if they don’t like what you’re blogging about. You don’t have absolute control over your own blog. With WordPress, you own the domain name and the blog is hosted on your own account. You have full control over your content.

With the self-hosted version of WordPress (not WordPress.com), you’re free to write about anything you want, and use the software in any way you want. Yes, Blogger allows you to publish to your own domain, but they still own the database that holds your content! Don’t forget that!

4) Search Engine Optimization and Traffic

There’s this propaganda that since Google owns Blogger, they tend to favor Blogger accounts. I won’t say that this is illogical, but from my experience, there’s no such favoritism.

I’ve heard as many stories of getting indexed fast and ranking high in search engines from both WordPress and Blogger users. As long as the content is good, the spiders will come.

When you post in Blogger, you can only ping a limited amount of sites, whereas with WordPress on your own domain you can ping as many blog directories as you want, and start getting more traffic.

As a conclusion, I would say that WordPress is only slightly ahead in terms of optimization for search engines, and building large amounts of traffic.

5) Money-Making Potential

There’s no doubt that it’s easier to get started with Google Adsense if you have a Blogger account. In fact you can now apply for Adsense from within a Blogger account. Not entirely surprising considering the fact that both are owned by the same company.

With WordPress, it can get tricky. The default installation is not enough. You’ll need a couple of plugins and even a better theme to really maximize the Adsense potential. However, this seems to be getting easier and there’s even “Adsense revenue sharing” plugins around that allow you to share ad revenue with other contributors and writers for your blog.

When you start using WordPress to build your Adsense websites, you’ll soon discover what I mean. It’s something you need to experience for yourself. I can tell you one thing though: when you go WordPress, you don’t go back.

About the Author
Gobala Krishnan is the author of WordPress Adsense System, the unique beginner’s guide to building content-rich Adsense websites with WordPress. You can download two free chapters of his book at

http://www.internetmarketingnotes.com/go/easywordpress