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Create Your Own .htaccess with LPCP

Mitch — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:18:58 +0000

Over the past year or so, a lot of people have enjoyed the write-up on how to create your own .htaccess file from within cPanel, so I figured I would give the same sage words of advice for everybody out there using the LPCP control panel.

To create a .htaccess file in LPCP, log into the LPCP, and then go to your File Manager. Click on the text link labeled, ” public_html” to navigate yourself inside the public_html folder.

Now, in the empty text box to your upper-right type in .htaccess, make sure the drop down box is set to “File” and then hit the button labeled, “Create”.

Your .htaccess file will be created in your public_html folder on your LPCP powered account.

Find out how to manually create and upload the .htaccess file to your web hosting account!

For more LPCP help, tips, tutorials and more, be sure to check out the web hosting wiki. Over 340 guides have been published there to help you get more out of your web hosting account at Lunarpages.

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SMF Web Hosting at Lunarpages

Mitch — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:46:18 +0000

Possibly one of the best forum scripts out there to date, Simple Machines Forum, is more than welcome to be hosted here at Lunarpages, on many of our web hosting plans. It is a free, professional grade software package that will have you setup with your own online community in just seconds.

How to Install SMF? – Simple Machine Forum comes with both cPanel’s Fantastico and LPCP’s WebApps collections, respectfully. You are also more than able to download the installation package from SMF’s official site, and install it yourself.

How to Install SMF Manually

Mods, Themes and Upgrades… oh my! – SMF, like many third party scripts we provide to you, comes ready, willing and able to handle a number of different plugins, or as they call them “modifications”. These mods will add features, remove features and many more possibilities. SMF is also no stranger to customized themes either. You can browse through their directory of themes, or design your own. The forum script is also very well written, and is kept up to date, as soon as a security (or any other) flaw arises.

More SMF Tutorials and Help

Here are a few more SMF tutorials, tips and more we have collected:

For more information, and help – be sure to check out the web hosting wiki.

Want to play with it, before you install it, yourself? Play with the demo that is hosted over at OpenSourceCMS.

November is Lunarpages Script Month!

Keep watching the Lunartics blog all throughout the month on November for even more third party script suggestions, tutorials, tips and more. You can also get tons of information and details about just a handful of the third party scripts we support on the web hosting wiki. We also have a special forum dedicated to third party script discussions over at the Lunarforums. Subscribe today to the Lunartics RSS feed for instant updates when we release a new script suggestion!

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Get Your Joomla Hosting on at Lunarpages

Mitch — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:54:21 +0000

The award winning content management system, which enables you to build web sites and powerful online applications is more than welcome at Lunarpages. Joomla is all that, and so much more. For people looking for an easy to use and powerful script to manage their digital empire, Joomla is a good way to go.

At Lunarpages, you have three ways you can get this script installed. It comes standard with cPanel’s Fantastico, LPCP’s WebApps collection or you could manually install the script too.

Extensions & Themes – Like some of the other scripts we have mentioned, it comes ready to support a number of extensions that will build upon an already solid script. You can browse through some of the best at extensions.joomla.org. At the time of writing this, they have over 3,537 to choose from. A simple search for “Joomla themes” in Google will give you many choices for slick designs you can use to get your own web site up and running.

Need Joomla Help? You can always turn towards our wonderful web hosting wiki for Joomla help, as well as our user forums. Here are a couple of more places to look for support:

Want to give it a shot? OpenSourceCMS has a great demo hosted, that will let you play with the Joomla interface, without needing to install it.

November is Lunarpages Script Month!

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Save $60 on Quicksite Hosting

Mitch — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:48:44 +0000

Here to help you save some cash (because the holidays are coming up quick!) Lunarpages has done it again with another fantastic offer. For a limited time only, you can grab your own Quicksite hosting plan for only $9.95 per month, if you sign up for the 12 month billing term. Just think about it, you could get that web site you’ve always wanted in under two hours with the Quicksite hosting plan.

A Unique Web Hosting Experience – Not only do we give you the web hosting, we also give you the tools. The Quicksite hosting plan comes with a top of the line, online web page editor. This tool can only be found at Lunarpages, and will allow you to create, edit or add to your web site anywhere, and at anytime.

We have discussed before, how the three-step publishing process works, but if you need more information check out our guide about it here.

Here are a few more interesting links:

So if you have been hesitant to check out the Quicksite hosting plan before, you’ll have no worries now. You get to save $60! You could practically get another hosting plan with those savings. It’s a limited time offer, so act fast!

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WordPress Hosting at Lunarpages

Mitch — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:22:19 +0000

All this month, on the Lunartics blog, we will highlight some of our favorite third-party scripts. From image galleries to message boards, there will be a little something for everybody. To get things started, I thought I would discuss with you why WordPress is my absolute favorite blogging script.

WordPress truly is a state-of-the-art publishing platform that is easy enough for anybody to use. It focuses on aesthetics, web standards and real usability. Also, since it is totally free to use, that makes it even better.

WordPress is Easy to Install

At Lunarpages, you can easily install WordPress via cPanel or the LPCP control panels, so that gives you instant access. If you would rather install the script yourself, you can do that too using WordPress’s world famous five-minute install.

The Extras for WordPress are Awesome

As far as extras go, you can not overlook the WordPress plugins and WordPress themes.

Plugins – You can bring up how great WordPress is, without mentioning the slew of plugins that people developed for it. You can easily install plugins from the WordPress administrator interface (after you have it installed) or browse though all the plugins available at WordPress Plugins Directory.

Themes – There are many themes you can choose from too. The world greatest designers have really given it their all to give you some great looking designs. You can browse though many of them at the WordPress Theme Directory, or even build your own theme to use.

For more help with WordPress, be sure to check out our web hosting wiki page dedicated to this great blogging script.

WordPress Help, Tutorials and Tips on the Web Hosting Wiki!

Also, try the WordPress demo over at OpenSourceCMS to play with the administrator interface.

November is Lunarpages Script Month!

Keep watching the Lunartics blog all throughout the month on November for even more third-party script suggestions, tutorials, tips and more. You can also get tons of information and details about just a handful of the third-party scripts we support on the web hosting wiki. We also have a special forum dedicated to third-party script discussions over at the Lunarforums. Subscribe today to the Lunartics RSS feed for instant updates when we release a new script suggestion!

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Keep Your WordPress Plugins Up To Date

Mitch — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:53:24 +0000

Keeping your plugins up to date is one of the most important things you can do after you have installed WordPress. For security reasons, and reasons of functionality you always want to make sure you are running the latest and greatest version of each – and here is how you can get it done quickly, through the WordPress administrator interface.

First thing, go to the Plugins page from within the WordPress admin interface.

Next, find the plugins that need to be updated. As you can see from the picture above, we only have one. On the Manage Plugins page, scroll down till you find the one that is highlighted, like this:

Click the, “upgrade automatically” link to upgrade the plugin from within WordPress. Your WordPress install then should upgrade the plugin in question, once complete – it’ll ask you to return to the plugin page. You are done. Now your plugin is updated.

How many plugins should you install? In most cases, I would suggest you keep your plugin number under ten. Also, you should check for updates early and often, because when plugins are updated they are often giving you new features, or updating security issues.

For more WordPress help, be sure to check out the web hosting wiki!

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Simple 3 Step Web Site Publishing

Mitch — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:57:08 +0000

It has been a while since we had a look at the LPQuicksite hosting plan, so I thought I would show you how you can get your website built in 2 hours or less with our fantastic publishing tools. A lot of you might think the simple three step process is more of a sales slogan than a way of how things are done, and that could not be any further from the truth. Let me show you the three steps it takes to get your web site up and running with the fantastic LPQuicksite hosting plan.

It all starts here. Once you login, you are given a very simple menu that gives you the three steps so you can simply get the job done. Step number one, is to choose from one of the 500+ templates we provide. Step number two, is to edit your web site content, and decide what you want to have displayed there. Step three, and the final step, is to simply publish. No tool out there makes it easier.

Start things off by choosing the web site design you wish to use. As mentioned before, we offer well over 500 different ones to choose from. You can also search through them by keyword, or by categories.

Edit your content. This is the step where all the magic happens, and your web site really starts to come together. Click on, “Manage Pages” setup your first page, and save it. Publishing the pages are as simple of an act as working with any word processor program out there today. We give you a fully functional WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface to design each page to meet your needs.

Publish your web site. You are done, and by publishing – you can push the changes you have made out there to the “live” version of your web site on the Web. Now your clients, visitors, family members and whomever else might be browsing your site can see your perfectly managed and well organized content.

Do you see how simple that was? Making things simpler is far from just a slogan with Lunarpages, it is a way of life. If you want to try out the demo of LPQuicksite yourself, you can do so here. With Lunarpages, even your quick and simple web site publishing solutions reside here.

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What is My SERP?

Mitch — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:29:15 +0000

When dealing with search engine optimization, a phrase you might hear tossed around is SERP, but many do not know what it really stands for.

I’ll let you know what it is, and why you need to be aware of it.

SERP is the search engine optimization slang for how well your web site is ranked in the search engines for a specific keyword query. Technically, it is a shortened version of the phrase search engine results page.

Now where you rank for a keyword in the SERP is important, because the higher you are, the more likely somebody is going to click your link in the search results and check out your web site.

For an example, let us say I am running a web site about pro wrestling. I have articles up about all the wrestlers, the big events and everything anybody would ever want to know about. Now I would like to have a high SERP result for Hulk Hogan, because he’s one of the most popular wrestlers of all time, so there has to be a lot of people searching for him.

You see, you want to target your pages at popular keywords that have to do with your web site’s content.

The thing to remember is that you want to have as high of a listing as possible when it comes to the SERP, search engine results page, for keywords that have to do with your topic of choice. So, whatcha gonna do with SERP-amania runs wild on you, brother? (ok, maybe one Hulk Hogan reference too many.)

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Basic Web Design from Lunarpages

Mitch — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 15:51:25 +0000

You can get started affordably with a five page web site professionally designed by Lunarpages. Within the web design plans we offer, Website Package 1 will provide you with your web hosting, domain registration and web site design are all placed in the hands of Lunarpages. It is the ideal hosting plan for small personal, business and informational web sites.

Here are the core features of the Website Package 1:

5 page static website (ie: home, about, services, contact, etc..)
Custom Design**
CSS Style Sheets
Includes 5 stock photos from Fotolia.com to use in your design

It is also hosted on our Basic hosting plan, which provides to you:

1 Free Domain Registration (for a year)
Unlimited Storage and Bandwidth
$700 Worth of Free Bonuses
Much Much More!

To see a demo site that was designed under these specifications, check out this link. Let Lunarpages become not only your web host, but your web site partner, to make sure your introduction into the world of Online is greeted with open arms.

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Speed Up Pages by Combining External CSS

Mitch — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:00:33 +0000

Tell me, which of these would be easier to do? Carry ten pieces of luggage with you on your trip, or put everything into one piece of luggage? The second, of course. The same thing could be said for CSS files in your web site’s code.

The use of multiple external CSS files, can slowdown the loading of a web page. Instead of telling it, “OK, load this file now” you are telling the browser, “load this file. Done? OK, now load this one, and this one and this one”. The general rule of thumb when it comes to web design is to try to use three (or less) external CSS style sheets.

Here are some rules of thumb for combining your CSS files in production from the Google Code site:

Partition the CSS into 2 files each: one CSS file containing the minimal code needed to render the page at startup; and one CSS file containing the code that isn’t needed until the page load has completed.
Serve CSS of a rarely visited component in its own file. Serve the file only when that component is requested by a user.
For CSS that shouldn’t be cached, consider inlining it.
Don’t use the CSS @import rule from a CSS file. If possible, inline the imported CSS content in the main CSS file, or load the imported CSS from the main HTML document instead.

Also worth mentioning is the fact that you should make sure in your head tags, the link to the CSS files should go before any links to any scripts. To put it in a way that everybody can understand – when your browser loads a page, it takes its time with JavaScript, because JavaScript can alter how the page looks, or the content inside the web page. So, you should always call for your .css files before you call for the JavaScript files in your web page’s head code.

I hope this helps as a pretty good guide to shave some of the loading time from your web pages. We might be talking about milliseconds here a lot of the time, but when it comes to delivering the fastest loading pages, every second does count, in true web site optimization.

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Get $50 of Free Facebook Ads from Lunarpages

Mitch — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 15:09:41 +0000

Both new and existing Lunarpages customers are getting a fantastic free offer from Facebook. As part of a promotion launched back in July, as a new (or existing) customer with Lunarpages, you are eligible to receive free Facebook Ads credits up to $50!

If you have wanted to experiment with new ways to bring in new visitors to your web site, Facebook is where the action is at. There are over 200 million people there, and this is the perfect way to reach them, with no cost to you. If you find yourself a Facebook advertising success, then we’ve just help you find one more way to advertise yourself to the masses, and I am sure you will continue on your own with the Facebook advertising system.

So how do you take part? If your not a current Lunarpages hosting client, you can take part in this limited-time offer by signing up for any annual or greater Basic hosting plan, Business hosting plan, VPS hosting plan or Dedicated hosting server. Then, once your account has been setup, you will be able to login to your Lunarpages account page, and take advantage of this offer immediately.

Current customers can grab their credit by logging in to the customer account page, and clicking on the Facebook graphic labeled, “Click Here Now for Your Free Facebook Ads Credit!”.

Need help getting that first advertisement via Facebook Ads ready for the masses? Check out this guide from our hosting newsletter:

How to Create an Effective Campaign through Facebook Ads

So there you have it, your early weekend project. I want everybody to give this a shot, and let us know how well it has worked for you. Here you have just one more great perk and reason why at Lunarpages, solutions reside here.

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New Web Site Design Solutions from Lunarpages

Mitch — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 10:49:44 +0000

In need of a professionally designed web site, but lacking the time to do it yourself or hunt down a designer? Better yet, do you want to skip having to cross you fingers and hope for the best when it comes to finding a new designer for your hosting plan? Lunarpages as you covered with not one, but three web hosting and design layout packages.

Design Package 1: Personal, Professional…Perfect!

5 Page Static Website
Custom Design
CSS Style Sheets
Includes 5 stock photos from fotolia.com
Includes 1 year of Basic Hosting
Includes 1 Free Domain Name
Free website submission to Google

Design Package 2: Take your business to the next level.

5 Page Database Driven Website
Custom Design
CSS Style Sheets
Take control with the ability to add, edit, and remove pages
Includes 5 stock photos from fotolia.com
Includes 1 hour of training on administration of website
Additional options and features are available upon request and are an additional fee (ie: forums, blogs, photo galleries, video galleries, etc…)
1 year of Basic Hosting
1 Free Domain Name

Design Package 3: The dynamic ecommerce solution.

5 Page Database Driven Ecommerce Website
Custom Design
CSS Style Sheets
Take control with the ability to add, edit, and remove pages
Includes 5 stock photos from fotolia.com
Shopping Cart included
Includes 5 initial products (additional products cost $25.00 per product)
Includes the ability to add, edit, and remove products (unlimited products and product categories)
Accept Visa, Mastercard, Discover, American Express, and PayPal
Additional options and features are available upon request and are an additional fee (ie: forums, blogs, photo galleries, video galleries, etc…)
Includes 1 hour of training on administration of website
1 year of Business Hosting
1 Free Domain Name

All that, plus the quality web hosting you have grown to love from the crew at Lunarpages. If you are ready to get started, be sure to check out each web design package, at Lunarpages.com, to find the one that best suits your needs.

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Easier E-Commerce Web Sites with MIVA

Mitch — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:24:14 +0000

MIVA Merchant 5.5, Innovative Merchant Solutions (IMS) and Lunarpages have teamed up to help you build a powerful store front easily, and in an instant. It is no secret that MIVA Merchant is the world-wide leader in e-commerce shopping cart software, and when you mix that with the quality hosting solutions from Lunarpages, this is a combination that just can not be beat.

This offer is good for both new and existing Lunarpages customers. Here are a few more details about MIVA Merchant solution:

MIVA Merchant’s incredible features include point-and-click design control, complete store design tools through Store Morph Technology™, room for unlimited products and categories, inventory merchandising, customer management, affiliate and marketing promotion services, order processing and encryption, professional analytics and customer tracking, shipping calculation and payment processing, helpful getting started wizard for real-time assistance, unlimited user account access, and more.

The best part of this offer is you start to get immediate savings after you have signed up. Through Lunarpages, add MIVA and IMS to your Business, Virtual Private Server or Dedicated hosting plan for $19.95 per month with a one time $75 setup fee, saving you over $700 dollars in the first year!

Find more details about this offer via our latest issue of the Lunarpages Newsletter. Hope it is something our Business, VPS and Dedicated customers enjoy and get a lot of use from.

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Better E-mail Hosting Solutions

Mitch — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 14:50:19 +0000

We listen to our customers and work hard to deliver them services they need to make themselves a success Online. Our e-mail web hosting solutions are a great example of this. Both the Mini-Mail and Mega-Mail e-mail plans were created to meet the customer who wanted e-mail hosting, but did not need a web site, at the moment.

Check out and compare our e-mail hosting solutions…

Mini-Mail E-mail Hosting Features:

Only costs $1 per month
You can use your own domain name, or register a new one
Store up to 100 MB of e-mail data
Control one e-mail account
3 months unlimited desktop backup from Keepit!

Mega-Mail E-mail Hosting Features:

Only costs $2 per month
You can use your own domain name, or register a new one
Store up to 1GB of e-mail data
Control as many e-mail account as you need
3 months unlimited desktop backup from Keepit!

Both E-mail Hosting Solutions Provide These Too:

Unlimited E-mail Aliases
Unlimited E-mail Forwarding
Easy to Create Auto Responders
Free SPAM scanning and protection is included
POP/SMTP/IMAP Are All Supported

The features of the e-mail hosting plans go on and on from there. You can check out both account types, pick the one that best suits your e-mail hosting needs, and sign up from the E-mail Hosting Solutions page.

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Intense VPS Hosting Management

Mitch — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 18:14:46 +0000

Lunarpages is already the ideal solution when it comes to Virtual Private Server hosting, both of the Linux and Windows flavors, so what else makes VPS web hosting with Lunarpages so great? The Intense VPS Hosting Management.

What features are included with the Managed Intense service?

Free setup of APF Firewall and Root Kit Check on the server
Up to date notifications of exploits on popular third party software
Upgrades of php, apache and administration panels for security per user authorization (we will send notice and you can decide if you want the upgrade to be performed)
One free third party script installation per billing year
Free installation of upgraded control panel
24×7x365 Phone and Help Desk support
Dedicated Support staff
Access to Lunarpages customer account page:
- Ticket Manager
- Reboots
- Bandwidth
- Knowledgebase
- Billing Options

As you can see, you get tons of great coverage, and more bang for your buck. Now for both the Linux and Windows VPS hosting services, the price of the Managed Intense service is usually $24.99 per month, however we will (for a limited time only) allow you to try it out free for 30 days!

If you are searching for that perfect middle ground when it comes between shared and dedicated hosting services, don’t forget about the great benefits of getting your Windows VPS or Linux VPS hosting plan with Lunarpages!

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Real Affordable Web Hosting at $2.95 a Month!

Mitch — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 20:38:40 +0000

Many people claim to give you affordable hosting, but how many web hosts can REALLY follow up with the promise? Lunarpages has heard the demands of the public, and is more than happy to help you out during these tough economic times. For the personal site hoster, that is working on a budget, we now have the Starter hosting plan.

The perfect solution for those people out there that have always wanted to get a web site up and running, but didn’t have the cash to do so, this plan only costs $2.95 per month. It includes the basic 5 GB of storage, and 50 GB of bandwidth per month.

Some of the other features included are:

Online Control Panel
Three Months Unlimited Desktop Backup from Keepit!
$700 Worth of Free Bonus
and much more!

At Lunarpages, we want to be much more than just your standard web host. We want to be a place were your find the answer. Want to setup a small online store? We can help you with that. Want to get started with your very first blog? We can help there too. Lunarpages specializes matching you up with your perfect hosting solution, because solutions reside here, with Lunarpages web hosting.

The Starter hosting plan is here to lift the burden off of your wallet, and help you finally get that web site idea blasting off into the world wide web.

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Deep Trawl – Favorite Web Development Freebies (Part 1 of 5)

Mitch — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:47:53 +0000

All this week I will be covering my own personal favorite five freebies that Lunarpages delivers to its customers for free. The first tool I wanted to cover was Deep Trawl. Although this one might not be a big name known by all – it is the best when it comes to diagnosing problems with your web site.

Here are just a few things that Deep Trawl will do:

searches for dead links, 404 errors, and other common website errors
finds missing images or invalid images
highlights invalid xhtml and html coding errors
seeks out spelling mistakes & undesirable user postings
shows missing SEO user defined problems
finds out of date and/or slow loading content

As you can see, it does a little ‘bit of everything.

Now, your normal day-to-day webmaster would have to pay $50 for this program… but you know what? Lunarpages delivers it absolutely free to all of it’s hosting customers as a part of the $700 free software bonus deal.

Want more Freebies? Stay Tuned!
All this week I am going to be covering my favorite fee tools, applications services and more that we deliver to our Lunarpages web hosting customers. Want to check out what your missing – sign up, and join in on the fun.

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Save $50 on our Basic Hosting Plan – 4th of July Special Deal!

Mitch — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:28:03 +0000

Update! Due to high demand and user feedback, we have decided to offer this special offer and coupon for a few more days. Be sure to act fast, if you want to save $50 on your new Lunarpages-powered Basic hosting plan. Click the banner to order!

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!

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All the Lunar News That is Fit to Print

Mitch — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:55:14 +0000

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…

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Web Hosting Newsletter Gets New RSS Feed!

Mitch — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:55:09 +0000

Be sure to go re-subscribe (or subscribe for the first time) to our new Lunarpages Newsletter feed. It has been recently changed, to make it a little more memorable – as well as so we can add some interesting new features to it in the upcoming weeks and months ahead. Here is the NEW RSS FEED ADDRESS:

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/lpnewsletter

To help you get the job done, here are a number of RSS feed chicklets you can click on to subscribe using your favorite method of choice (or to subscribe to multiple places, so you never miss a post).

Just one more Lunartastic thing to get excited about on this fantastic Friday morning.