In celebration of Independence Day here in the USA, we are offering you a $50 discount for any new Basic hosting plan purchase!  All you have to do is use the coupon code July4.  That is a great offer for an even greater hosting plan. 

The Basic hosting plan provides you with:

+ Unlimited Disk Space
+ Unlimited Bandwidth
+ Free Domain Name Registration for a Year
+ Unlimited Addon Domains
+ and a 30-day Money Back Guarantee!

You can see a full list of hosting features here:

• Basic Hosting Plan Features and Information!

This deal is only set to go on until Monday morning, so if you’d like to save $50 on your next 12/24/60 month hosting plan purchase, you had better hurry!

There are only a few more days left to vote in our June 2009 Site of the Month contest.  You can check out this link here for more information on how and where to vote:

• Vote for the June 2009 Site of the Month!

One of those lucky web sites will not only be able to call themselves the web site of the month for an entire month, they will also gain a mention in our Lunarpages newsletter, get their own special banner to display, and gain a spot in our Site of the Month hall of fame. 

How cool is that?  Voting this time around goes from June 29th – July 5th!  So if you haven’t headed over to the Lunarforums yet to cast your vote, what are you waiting for?

How does the old saying go?  It isn’t cheating if you don’t get caught?  Well, don’t tell anybody I gave you these two great CSS cheat sheets!  Web designers rejoice, as these are two of the most handy things you can have, well… handy when it comes to cascading style sheets.

• CSS Cheat Sheet vs2 – via addedbytes.com
• CSS Cheat Sheet via LeslieFranke.com

Know of anymore cheat sheets from around the Web that you get a lot of use out of?  Let us know in the comments!

Today, in celebration of our new affiliate plan tutorial category for the wiki, I wanted to do something for the Lunarpages affiliates out there.  For those of you who have installed WordPress (and have a widget ready theme) it is super easy to get a Lunarpages banner up and running on the Lunarpages affiliate plan.

Step #1

Go visit our Lunarpages affiliate plan banner generator, and enter your affiliate user name into the text box (then hit the “enter” key on your keyboard):

Step #2

Click on the banner you wish to add to your WordPress powered blog’s sidebar.  (we have dozens to choose from).

Step #3

Copy and paste the code from the text box into your clipboard or copy it into a simple text editing program like note pad to save it for later.

Step #4

Login to your WordPress administrator settings (usually found at yourdomainname.com/wp-admin/) and then click on Appearance and then Widgets.  Now, drag and drop a Text widget onto one of your sidebars and paste the code you copied earlier into the text box for the blog sidebar widget.  You can give the sidebar widget a name too, such as “Hosting Deal”.

Step #5

Hit the “Save” button and you are done!  Now, you can go check out your blog, and make sure the banner is displaying the way you want.  There couldn’t be an easier way to get your own Lunarpages affiliate plan up and running.

Did you know that one of our affiliate plan members makes over $50,000 every month?  Now, that might be a hard goal to shoot for at first, but the fact that we offer you $65 per person you can bring to us isn’t that bad of a deal.  Don’t be left out, earn money with your hosting recommendations today!

Talk about a nice find.  While browsing through my e-mail, I had found that a reader of the Lunartics blog suggested this resource to cover.  Yahoo! offers a design and stencil kit to web designers out there for free, licensed under the Creative Commons.  That would mean it is free to share and remix, however they do ask they you give them attribution – which is only right.

They offer the kit in the following formats:  OmniGraffle, Visio (XML), PDF, PNG, and SVG.  Some of the topics covered in the kit include:

• Ad Units
• Calendars
• Carousels
• Charts and Tables
• UI Controls
• Form Elements
• and many more!

You can visit Yahoo’s Developer Network site to pick them up for yourself.  If you get some use out of them, come back, comment and show off your work. 

Now, as a web host, we are always telling customers that one of the most important things they can do is backup their web site’s content.  You can never have enough backups – because in the long run, you can never tell when the worst might happen.  In the same sense, you should also be backing up the files on your own personal computer too.  Now thanks to Lunarpages and the fine folks at Keepit – you can get unlimited desktop backups if you are a customer of Lunarpages.

For all new or existing customers, we are offering three months free of unlimited backup service at absolutely no cost at all.  You will have three months to try Keepit out, and see why they are one of the best Online backup providers out there today. 

Now, I know somebody is going to ask, “Well, how much is it after the three free months?” and I can answer that for you too.  After the three free month trial is over, you can keep the service for a low $5 per month fee.  That isn’t much to ask for when it comes to keeping your important files securely backed up off site, right?

Be sure to check out our newsletter feature on the Keepit offer, and if you have any questions on how you can gain access to this wonderful special, be sure to contact us.

Just in case you missed it, Issue 21 of the Lunarpages newsletter has been released.  The big focus this month is on TremenDesk, possibly the best hosted help desk solution you have ever seen before and an exclusive backup deal for Lunarpages clients, courtesy of Keepit.com. 

To steal a line from Ron Popeil, “That’s not all!”.  You will also get the latest Lunarpages news, suggested TV watching from the Lunar-crew, information about the Gumblar security exploit, more WordPress links than you can shake a stick at – and much much more.

+ Check out all the articles featured in this month’s newsletter!

Click now, supplies are limited!  I’ll probably not be allowed to watch info-mercials while I write anymore either…

Great tools do not make you a great writer, however it can make you a more productive one.  Here are ten of my favorite blog clients – in no specific order.  By using a desktop client to update your blog (rather than the web site interface) you can often gain features like being able to draft a post locally, or get your hands on even more tools to edit your articles.  These selections have those abilities and many more included.

w.bloggar – The one I remember being around the longest is w.bloggar.  This blogging tool will work with a number of different publishing platforms and doesn’t disappoint as far as features go.

Qumana – A really simple desktop editing tool, Qumana gives you all the publishing power you would need to write and save your post and to post to any of your blogs.

BlogDesk – BlogDesk makes it easy to write, speeds up lavish processes and assists the author with smart features.

Read the rest of this entry!

How much do you know about the Robots.txt file?  It can be a handy tool for any webmaster to know more about.  Here are some of the most frequently asked questions I get about this special little file.

What is the robots.txt file used for?

In web site development, the robots.txt file is used as a special file that can talk back to the search engine spiders and crawlers to tell them what to do. Here is a little more about them from robotstxt.org:

Web Robots (also known as Web Wanderers, Crawlers, or Spiders), are programs that traverse the Web automatically. Search engines such as Google use them to index the web content, spammers use them to scan for email addresses, and they have many other uses.

How do you create a robots.txt file?

All you have to do is create a basic text file (with the name robots.txt) in your public_html folder inside of your hosting account. You can create that from within your control panel or you can create it on your desktop, and upload it via an FTP client.

Can a robot ignore my robots.txt file?

Yes, but this does not happen that often.  Most good main-stream  robots will not do this.  So is there a way to block just the bad robots?  Kind of.  You can only control robots that obey the robots.txt file.  If that doesn’t work, you might also be able to block the IP address the robot is coming from (if they are coming from a single IP address). 

What should I put in my robots.txt file?

This would depend on what you want to do.

If you would like to make sure all crawlers and spiders make their way in, insert this into your robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

If you want to keep the spiders and bots away from your content in a particular folder, use this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /privatestuff

With "privatestuff" being the folder you wish to protect.

How can I check to see my robots.txt file has been created successfully?

It is easy to check if your have an account with Google Webmaster Tools. To analyze a site’s robots.txt file:

• Sign into Google Webmaster Tools with your Google Account.
• On the Dashboard, click the URL for the site you want.
• Click Tools, and then click Analyze robots.txt.

How can I figure out where this robot or crawler came from?

You can find a good list of just about all the different robots out there here:

• http://www.robotstxt.org/db.html

That would be a good list to check first, when you have a robot crawling your site, and you are unaware where it came from.

How do you know you are being visited by a robot?

He will mumble something about klatu verata nikto.  No wait, that was my buddy Gort.  Often the sign that your being visited by a robot is that in your server logs you see many documents have been retrieved in a very short period of time. 

Hope that helps in your robot taming ways.  If you have any other questions, feel free to ask away.

Looking for a modern looking font for your next design?  Look no further than the Contemporary – Modern font.  This wonderful creation (via MyFox on deviantART) is a great simple font face to use for anything from logos to ad text in your next graphic masterpiece. 

This is font free for public or commercial work.  If you use their font, be sure to link back to them though (or at least tell them thanks).  You can pick it up over on the DeviantART web site.