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PHPlist Hosting with Lunarpages

Mitch — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:13:11 +0000

One of the world’s best open-source newsletter managers can be installed a number of different ways, here at Lunarpages. PHPlist is a free script that will handle all your newsletter or mailing lists for you. It is downloaded over 10,000 tie per month – and is possibly one of the most popular open-source scripts out there today.

PHPlist is fully installable via cPanel’s Fantastico, the LPCP WebApps, or by downloading it and installing it manually. Here are a few more features that it includes:

double opt-in subscription mechanism
scheduling
RSS
list segmentation
click-tracking
attachments
bounce management

Here are a few more tutorials on PHPlist to help you out:

To learn more about PHPlist, be sure to check out their official web site, the support page for PHPlist and the official PHPlist documentation. If you need anymore help – you can always turn towards the Lunarforums too:

Lunarforums – Third Party Scripts and Services Forum

It is easy to see why PHPlist is possibly the best mailing list script out there.

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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Measure a Domain’s SEO Juice Levels

Mitch — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:59:18 +0000

There are a lot of tools out there to help you see how well you are doing via the search engines out there, but few do it as completely as RankBuzz. This online tool not only gives you your Google PageRank, but also provides your Alexa rank, thumbnail, whois information, index pages, social links, on site information and even how much your web site is worth.

Each section of the web page review will also give you advice or feedback on how well you are doing. For example, blog.lunarpages.com has a Google PageRank of 6 – so they told me:

Your pagerank is going great! But we’re sure there is some room for improvement. Why not try and get some higher pagerank backlinks?

So as you can see, it does a good job at trying to help you too.

This is definitely a nice site to keep bookmarked, so that you can keep tabs on how well (or not so well) your domain is doing out there on the Web. You can check it out at RankBuzz.com.

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Another Way to Embed Twitter Content

Mitch — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:02:33 +0000

I have shown you in the past how to promote yourself with a twitter search widget, but now I have found another solution to get the same task done. If you are a user of HootSuite, you can now create embeddable columns that you can then take from your HootSuite account and embed via your own web site.

This tutorial from their web site explains the basics on how to get it done:

I have given thought to creating a Twitter landing page here on the Lunartics blog, so (as an example) this would be a great way to feature content from @lunarpages, or show who’s talking about Lunarpages, or… well, the possibilities are really endless.

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Grab a Number of Cool Google Gadgets

Mitch — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:56:06 +0000

The gadget team over at Google have made it really easy to grab any number of tools they have featured there and display them on your web site. At the time of writing this, they have over 175,000 little boxes of information to share with your own visitors.

To get started with adding your own, first visit the Google Gadgets page. You can either try searching for the one that fits your needs, or browse through the various categories.

For example, if we wanted to add Bejeweled to our web page, you could visit this link, and then click the “Add to your webpage” button. You can then select the title for the box, the width and height, and then the border for it. Once you are happy with your edits, hit the button labeled “Get the Code” to get the right code to use.

Copy the code from that web site, and paste it into your web site. You are done! Now you have a very cool gadget that could add form and functionality to your web site’s overall experience for a user.

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Translate Your Pages to Any Language

Mitch — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:53:30 +0000

Did you notice we added a new translation button to the Lunarpages web hosting wiki yesterday? Now our wonderful international audience can gain access to all the wonderful tips, tutorials and information the wiki has to offer.

How can you add this same functionality to your own web site? The magic starts on the Google Translate page. Make sure you navigate to the “Tools” tab, and select the language your web page is in.

Next, select the languages you want to offer translation to. Since Lunarpages has happy hosting customer all around the world, I selected the “All Languages” option. Now, all you have to do is copy and paste the code from the Google Translate web site onto your own web site.

Now anybody will be able to quickly translate your pages to their own native tongue, opening up a whole new international audience to your web site. For another alternative, in button form – also check out, ConveyThis.com.

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Promote Yourself with the Twitter Search Widget

Mitch — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:50:28 +0000

Looking for something to add to your web site to add a little more interactivity? How about the Twitter search widget? This is a service I just found out about, and I do have to say it makes for an interesting web site highlight.

All you have to do is go to the Twitter Search Widget page, then customize the type of widget you would like to create. Here is an example of the Lunarpages search widget I just created:

You can even use advanced Twitter search operators too, to make your results even more customized. Give this tool a shot, and give the Twitter-ers out there something to browse through.

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Cool Embeddable Widgets for Your Web Site

Mitch — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 11:24:30 +0000

A widget platform which really simplifies the development, syndication and statistics of the widgets in question is yourminis. They give you both a gallery of widgets to copy and paste onto your own web site, as well as, the tolls you will need to develop your own customized widgets.

If you need a widget to slap on your web site, this is the perfect place to start. Just browse through the widgets they have and find the one that meets your needs. For example, we have the clock widget. To use it on your web site, click the “Copy Me” icon, then grab the embed code. Copy the embed code into your clipboard and then post the embedded content on your own web site layout.

You can check out the full gallery of widgets here:

Recently Addeded Widgets on yourminis.com

Developers, they give you many tools to work from too. You can check through some of this documentation to help you get started on your own widget.

Learning Center – All the documentation and tutorials you will need to learn our API
Resources – Downloads and tools for working with our API
Developer Network – Get answers to your questions or connect with the rest of the developer community
Developer Blog – Read about events, updates, contests, and more

No matter if you are looking for a neat way to develop platform independent widgets for your web site’s side bars, or your just wanting to grab a neat looking one to display on your own web site yourminis has your bases covered when it comes to adding a little decoration to your web site.

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Add Thumbnail Previews and Content to Your Links

Mitch — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 12:43:11 +0000

It is always good to search for ways to make yourself different from the pack, and one way to get that done is to perhaps provide your web site users thumbnail previews of the links they are visiting. Snap Shots provides you with this new web site interactivity, and it is easy to setup.

The way it works is, after you have enabled it on your web site, you have the ability to make any text link to a number of "shots” that Snap Shots provides. You could link to a thumbnail of the web site or a number of other cool services. You have AudioShot for .mp3 playback, MapShot for embedded Google Maps, PhotoShot for images, RSS shot for an embeddable RSS reader. The list goes on and on.

Here are some more great features of the Snap Shot service:

Snap Shots uses your links to bring the most appropriate information about the sites you’re pointing to. Your audience doesn’t even have to leave your site to get the best of other sites.
Snap Shares gives you a portion of the ads that appear in Snap Shots and lets you do what you wish — market yourself or share them with charity.
Snap Shots Engage looks for certain key phrases within your site and connects them with the best content in the world. And you don’t even have to write a link.

Head on over to Snap.com to get started embedding more interactive content in your own web site. It is a true efficiency tool that will save your users time.

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Introduction to Mind Maps for Webmasters

Mitch — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 13:49:04 +0000

When it comes to planning out a brand new web site, organizing your thoughts can be rather difficult. You might know you want to design a web site about a specific topic, but can’t decide what else you might need in that web site to help it become successful. Mind maps are one great way to get your jumbled thoughts about your site organized.

What is a Mind Map? A mind map (or the process of mind mapping) is when you create a diagram using specific words, ideas or tasks and arrange them around a central theme or idea. By doing this, you can visualize, structure and classify ideas based around your central theme.

For an example, take a look at this mind map of my breakfast:

The centralized idea here is what I had for breakfast. You can see I had a slice of toast,a bowl of cereal and a glass of orange juice. To take it a step further, we could branch out even further with the idea of toast, like so:

What made up the toast? Well, it was a toasted slice of bread, with butter on it. So off the idea of toast, I listed bread and butter. See how easy taking one idea like breakfast and coming up with ways to visualize how it came to be?

How to Mind Map Your Site! Now that you are familiar with what a mind map is and how to use it, it is time to look at web site organization. You just got a Basic hosting plan from Lunarpages, and you want to start up a web site about super heroes. So with the super heroes topic, how could you divide it up? How about you split it into two for now, DC Comics and Marvel Comics – the two biggest comic book brands.

Now you have at least two pages planned out. Under DC Comics, you could list heroes like the Green Lantern, Batman and Superman because they all come from the DC Comics brand. For Marvel Comics, you could list super heroes like Spiderman, Iron Man, and Wolverine.

So that should be a good start as far as content goes. So what other specific pages does a web site need? What about a page that tells about the web site? Maybe, you could add a page with your contact information too.

See how organizing ideas in a mind map is helpful when it comes to organizing your web site? Much like a tree, you start at the trunk, and then break your web site into branches, and then those branches have branches, and then those branches have leaves.

What Tools and Software Can You Use for Mind Maps? Ok, so you know what to do and how to do it, now you’re probably just needing a way to get it done. You really don’t need anything too fancy to get this accomplished. For years, I just used notebook paper and pencil to sketch out my ideas into a mind map. There are some online solutions as well as software solutions you might want to check out to bring mind mapping into the digital age.

Bubbl.us is what I have been using for my screenshots above. It is an online tool that lets you drag and drop your ideas around on the mind map a very simple task. It might be a little confusing at first, but hover over anything you have a question about and you can get more information about it in the help pane in the browser. Wikipedia also has a long list of mind mapping software solutions worth checking into.

Please feel free to leave a comment and let me know how this has helped you, or if you have any other mind mapping tips or tricks that could help.

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25 Most Popular Twitter Plugins for WordPress

Mitch — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 16:08:39 +0000

Using Twitter in combination with your WordPress powered blog?

There are tons of tools and plugins you can take advantage of to make that mix of micro-blogging, and regular blogging mix into a presentation anybody (and I am sure everybody) will enjoy.

To help you get started, here are the 25 highest rated Twitter related plugins you can install into WordPress.

WordTwit – WordTwit is a plugin that utilizes the Twitter API to automatically push a published post to your Twitter account as a tweet.
Add Twitter – Displays your public Twitter messages or someone else’s for everyone to read on your blog.
Tweet Chopper – A very simple and basic widget that shows tweets for multiple authors and trends.
Advanced Twitter Widget – Widget that will enable visitors to give you/the site a virtual beer by clicking on the widget.
Tweelow Plugin – Simple plugin that displays count of your twitter followers.
Bird Feeder – Tweets about your posts when they are published.
WordPress Dashboard Twitter – The most creative name, WordPress Dashboard Twitter, in fact represents a Dashboard Widget for WordPress, that turns your Dashboard into a Twitter client.
Tweetable – Integrate Twitter with your WordPress blog. Automatically tweet new posts, display your latest tweet in your sidebar, etc.
Related Tweets – Using your blog as the seed, find quality content from the Blog Traffic Exchange and tweet it automatically.
sm00sh URL shrink – A plugin that converts all URLs in a post or comment into shorten URLs using a link shortening service.
wpCommentTwit – Use Twitter to receive notices of comments when they are left on your WordPress site.
Zipli-Retweet – Adds a re-tweet button to all WordPress posts in your blog and update your twitter account with post from your blog.
Lifestream – Streams your activity from over 50 different sources to your blog.
WP Quote Tweets – Allows authors to quote Twitter updates in posts or pages using a simple short-code.
Thread Twitter – Thread Twitter fetch your tweets and display them in thread style.
Twitter Publisher – Share a new blog post on Twitter using awe.sm or bit.ly url shorteners.
dB Twtpoll – This plugins adds a short-code for embedding polls from Twtpoll really easy.
Twitter News Feed – Collects Tweets based on specific Twitter usernames and hash-tags and then adds them as posts.
WP-TwitterSearch – Displays the latest results based on a twitter search. Options include setting multiple search terms and limiting tweets shown.
Twitter Tools – Google Analytics Tagger – Tag all your URL’s posted to twitter with Google Analytics tags using Twitter Tools.
WP to Twitter – Posts a Twitter status update when you update your WordPress blog or post to your blogroll.
Twitter Bubble – A sidebar widget showing the latest twitter update in a nice talk bubble, suitable for wide sidebars.
Feed2tweet – Feed2tweet plugins allows you to publish your new posts to your twitter account.
Commentwitter – Gives commenters the option of Tweeting their comment with a link to your post.
Tweefind – Displays tweets related to your posts, ordered by rank. Admin Options -> Tweefind.

Have another favorite that didn’t make it onto the list? Be sure to leave a comment and share it with the rest of us. As a bonus, be sure to check out the Twitter page on badges and widgets you can add with no plugins needed.

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Affiliate Plan Payment Checklist

Mitch — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 14:06:39 +0000

For all hosting plan affiliates out there, here are two things you need to remember to do to get your check in the mail. Once you get your account information, and your special affiliate program link assigned to you, you need to do a few more things to make sure you get paid after referring somebody to Lunarpages for their web hosting needs.

Double Check Your Contact Info

Be sure to double check to see that the contact information you gave us is correct. This is where your check will be sent, so we want to make sure your neighbor isn’t getting paid for your hard work.

Send in Your Tax Forms

Also, get your tax forms sent to us as soon as possible. This can be done usually via fax or by sending the scans to affiliate@lunarpages.com. If you live inside the United States, you need to send us the W-9 form. If you live outside the United States, then you need to send us the W8-BEN form. More information about that is discussed on the web hosting wiki here:

Tax Forms Help and Info for Affiliate Plan Users

Payments are usually sent around the end of the month. Click here for a list of dates. For more help with payments, including how to get paid via PayPal on your affiliate account, check out the Payments for Lunarpages Affiliates tutorial.

I hope that helps. There is no doubt that Lunarpages provides the web hosting world with the best affiliate program out there today. Not a member yet? Join today, it is free to do and in no-time at all you will be raking in the cash ($65 for each new signup!).

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Best of the Bit.ly Tools

Mitch — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 19:03:04 +0000

Quickly becoming my new favorite link shortening service, Bit.ly has a lot to offer, and a wide variety of tools to use with it. Why is it the best? It offers stats, shortens links and well, I do have to say these tools play a big part too.

Here are a few bit.ly tools I’ve run across:

bit.ly preview – an add-on for Firefox that will give you a thumbnail preview whenever you hover over any bit.ly link. If you hover over another short URL, http://tinyurl.com/5qhkwo, for example, we show the Page Title and Long URL for these links as well. (two for one deal!)

Twitter Search (for bit.ly links) – Search all the tweets from around the world, to see which have used bit.ly links to get there.

Snip-n-Tag – a Firefox extension that will shorten your URLs and add Google Analytics tracking tags. Great for measuring traffic from Twitter.

Sidebars and Bookmarklets – The people at bit.ly have also produced two bookmarklets to use. One will auto-create a bit.ly link out of the page you are looking at and the other will do so, and give you statistics about that link in a sidebar.

Gmail Gadget – Now you can shorten your links, using bit.ly, from within Gmail.

Who’s Using bit.ly Right Now? – A Twitter account where you can check out all the latest links that have been shared via the bit.ly link shortening service.

Have another favorite tool to use with bit.ly? Leave a comment!

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Bacon Flavored Link Shortening

Mitch — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 10:59:53 +0000

So, what is better than link shortening?

Bacon.

What is better than bacon?

Nothing at all.

If you can understand that, then you can understand bacn.me. This bacon inspired link shortening service is brought to you by those bacon loving people at Bacn.com. You don’t know them you say? Why they are just the a group of bacon enthusiasts drawn together with the dream of providing access to the world’s best bacon. What isn’t to love?

Back to bacn.me, like many other link shorteners before it, you give it your long URL and it spits back out a bacon flavored short URL. You can login to the site using an OpenID, so you can see how many clicks your links are getting. Also featured are a bookmarklet for easier link shortening and the list of top bac’n URLs.

So what have we learned?

Tiny URLs + Bacon = Fun for the Whole Family.

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Get Better Analytics for Online Videos

Mitch — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 18:52:20 +0000

Have you produced a number of free videos for your site, and are you looking for an easy way to make sure they get shared across the Web? If so, you might want to look at the in-depth tracking and distribution tool, TubeMogul.

This online tool helps you in two ways. It helps you promote your online video across many different video sharing sites, and it gives you the analytic stats for each video and tells you how they are performing hit-wise across the board.

Here are some of the features included:

Stunning Charts – easily create charts that track videos and/or video publishers.
Powerful Analysis Tools – create custom groups of videos, video publishers and online video sites, and receive analytics by group.
Universal Upload – Upload your videos to all major video sharing sites in one shot!
Aggregated Analytics – track online video analytics across online video sites including Google Video, MetaCafe, MySpace, AOL, Yahoo!, Revver, YouTube and more!

If I did any wide-stream video distribution, TubeMogul is definitely the tool I would be looking for to make it easier and to get the traffic numbers you’ll need to prove your skateboarding dog video is the best one out there.

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Quickly Create Free Online Polls

Mitch — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 16:10:26 +0000

Have you been looking around for an extremely easy way to embed a poll into any web site page or layout? Twiggs is a free service that will allow you to do just that. All you need to do is fill out your question, give a few answers and then let the people take your free online poll.

Want to see what it looks like? Here is an example poll:

poll by twiigs.com

So if you are looking for a really easy way to use and embed polls into your own web site, be sure to give Twiigs a shot.

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10 More Free Online Image Editors

Mitch — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 10:00:00 +0000

Due to high demand, I have been asked to give you all ten more free online image editors from the world of web design. These ten online photo tools will have you looking like a professional graphic creator in no time at all. Well, if not that – then at least they provide an online alternative, that won’t eat up disk space or cash.

Keep those suggestions rolling in, would really love to see more free online image editors that you know of or really enjoy using.

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10 Fantastic Free Online Image Editors

Mitch — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:54:13 +0000

When it comes to cutting costs, why not drop your expensive image editor? There are many free alternatives from around the Web that you can use for your simple web site design needs, photo touch-ups and so much more.

Have another favorite online image editor that didn’t make it onto the list? Be sure to leave it in the comments – and it might make our next free online image editor round up.

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Stopping Spam – Favorite Web Development Freebies (Part 3 of 5)

Mitch — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 10:00:00 +0000

Thanks to Lunarpages and our next web hosting freebie, you can stop spam in it’s tracks. Lunarpages has partnered up with the leading anti-spam e-mail service Gafana to provide 100% SPAM protection, virus protection, email backup, content filtering and a great deal more.

Gafana’s setup takes literally minutes, and after you’ve set a list of people you want to receive emails from all the time, you can go about your business. When someone not on your list attempts to email you, they are sent an auto-reply that forces them to verify they are a human being. If no verification is received, you will never receive their spam.

How much would this special deal from Gafana usually cost? Oh, somewhere in the range of $125. How much do you have to pay if you are a Lunarpages client? $0! Keep the change, because we want to give this to our clients, as a sign of appreciation.

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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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.