Blog on keithrozario.com

Secure Apache configuration for Wordpress & SSL

Mon, 30 Mar 2015 20:00:47 +0000

[caption id=“attachment_4859” align=“alignleft” width=“256”]

Apache runs nearly 50% of all active websites[/caption]

Recently I moved the hosting for keithRozario.com from a regular hosted platform called WPWebhost to my own Virtual machine on digitalOcean. The results have been great, but the migration process was a bit tedious and took some effort.

I thought I’d share my Apache configurations, so that if you’re thinking of hosting your own WordPress site on an SSL server, you’ll at least have a solid base to start off from. I’m by no means an expert here, but this is what makes sense to me, and if you have any feedback please let me know in the comments.

So let’s start.

Nearlyfreespeech the hosting provider that takes security seriously

Sun, 31 Aug 2014 22:12:54 +0000

You all know how much I love nearlyfreespeech, it’s one of the best hosting providers out there. Here’s one more reason, recently they alerted me to a suspicious number of login attempts to my wordpress site, which usually means someone was trying to hack it.

If you remember the post I did about the RHB bank scam, it’s quite common for hackers to inject pages onto a wordpress site to help them carry out banking scams. This was probably something similar.

Fortunately, the guys over at nearlyfreespeech were not just kind enough to log the attempts and alert me, but even automatically disabling the login page of the site to prevent something similar happening. Good on them!

Nearlyfreespeech is a great hosting provider and this just proves my point. Check out the email below:

My Issue with WPWebHost: Bad Support

Thu, 22 May 2014 08:00:52 +0000

Last weekend I had an issue with my hosting provider, WPWebHost.

I switched to WPWebHost 2 years ago, and recommended them because they promised wordpress hosting at an affordable rate. Wordpress hosting is where the hosting provider would support wordpress specific features, e.g. help troubleshoot plugin and theme issues, perform nightly backups, and offer ‘higher availability’ for Wordpress sites. If you’re still wondering what Wordpress is, take a look at one of my previous post.

My latest experience with WPWebHost has left me wondering if indeed this was actually Wordpress hosting or just regular hosting in disguise. I’m now wondering if I should stay with them.

Was my server really getting the 99% uptime promised by WPWebHost? Nope. Did I get the Wordpress Specific support that help identify theme and plugin issues? Nope. Does WPWebhost cost more than regular hosting from other providers like GoDaddy, Dreamhost and my previous provider NearlyFreeSpeech? Yup. So why I am still with them? Read more to find out.

Below is the full un-redacted transcript of my email correspondence with WPWebhost–I’ve left out the customer service agents name because I believe they have a right to privacy. However, nearly every time I sent an email, a different rep would respond making the whole conversation very messy and difficult to keep track off. Some emails were left out to simplify the flow.

SEO Tips for Malaysian Bloggers

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 19:03:45 +0000

A lot of my search traffic comes from Google, in July I had slightly more than 8,000 visits to my site with just over 6,000 of those coming just from Google. So it made a lot of sense for me to look into some Search Engine Optimization to help boost those numbers. In September, I had more than 10,000 visits with more 8,o00 from Google, which of course begs the question who are the lovely people giving me 2,000 hits/month without going through Google.?

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization or more commonly know by it's acronym SEO, is the process of optimizing your site so that search engines like Google know exactly what is on your site, what topics you're writing about and what keywords are present in a page. This allows the search engine to display your site as a result for people searching for topics and keywords most related to your articles.

In Laymans terms it’s making your site understandable for Google to analyze.

Google doesn’t employ thousands of workers to categorize every site on the internet, Google automatically ’tries’ to figure out what your site is about through a mixture of sophisticated algorithms and feedback from search results. SEO is about trying to help Google figure this out by adjusting certain elements of your site to fit what Googles algorithms are looking for, of course SEO isn’t just about Google, but the general concept is the same.

Why I stopped the Nuffnang Ads on my blog

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 08:00:13 +0000

About 2 months back, I posted up a nuffnang ad on my blog, and with reasons explaining why I felt the need to advertise. The guys from Nuffnang were pretty stand-up characters and I felt like I could trust them, so I begin to post Nuffnang ads and monitor that over time.

Unfortunately the results haven’t been so good, and after some reflection I decided not to port over the nuffnang ads when I migrated the blog over to a new hosting provider. It’s important to recognize that your experience with Nuffnang could be different, and I have no doubt that they do contribute significantly to some bloggers, but for me the relationship just wasn’t going anywhere and I wasn’t really getting any value out of the ads. So when I migrated my blog from Nearlyfreespeech to WPWebHost I decided not to port over the Nuffnang advertising widget–and here’s why?

WPWebHost : Wordpress Hosting in Malaysia from Exabytes

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 12:10:04 +0000

You may have noticed that my site recently got a spanking new design. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my previous wordpress theme (compositio by Design Disease) and my previous web host (the ever awesome, nearlyfreespeech), but there were 2 real compelling reasons for me to switch web host.

First, maintaining wordpress was taking a lot of time, this included the usual backups and updates and that was eating into time I could have spent researching other stuff or just plain blogging. Secondly, the site had grown both in size and visits, previously I received my first notch up the Google Page Rank, and now I’m a Page Rank 1 site (woo hoo!!). The additional traffic and storage cost were increasing to the point where it made more sense to have a fixed cost monthly payment than worry about the topping up my account (that being said, it would have still been cheaper to host on Nearlyfreespeech).

My first choice was dreamhost, but I’ve tried them before, and while they were good, they weren’t exactly out of this world. So I decided to look for a Wordpress specific hosting service, these are web host that specialize in Wordpress. They cover stuff like daily backups and offer free wordpress themes etc. Unfortunately, most Wordpress host cost quite a bit, but with some google searches, I manage to come across a Wordpress host that was well recommended, was at the right price point, and best of all–based in Malaysia.

What is wordpress?

Sat, 21 Jul 2012 04:00:57 +0000

I’m a really big fan of 3 things, Manchester United, AC/DC and Wordpress!!

Wordpress is awesome, but as awesome as it is, a lot of people don’t really know what it is.

It gets even more confusing, because there’s actually two definitions of Wordpress. One is Wordpress the blogging platform, and another is wordpress.com –the blogging website.

Wordpress is a blogging platform designed specifically to make blogging easier. It’s a tool that simplifies website creation to a point where webmasters no longer have to be programmers but just content writers. However, just like any other tool or platform, Wordpress needs to be installed–usually on a server–for it to work.

Wordpress.com is a service that offers functionality of the Wordpress blogging platform for free. On wordpress.com you can start your own blog in seconds without worrying about finding a server to install Wordpress on. However, because it’s a free service it has it’s limitations (which we’ll discuss later).

There’s a lot of confusion about Wordpress (the blogging platform) and Wordpress.com (the free service), and I hope those two lines above make the distinction clear.

What I learnt from winning the DigiWWWOW awards

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 08:00:02 +0000

[blackbirdpie url=“https://twitter.com/DiGi_Telco/status/211447275891855361”]

Exactly one month ago, I was honored to be awarded the DigiWWWOW awards Fave tech Head award. It was truly unexpected and I continue to feel grateful for it. For those of you who don’t know what the DigiWWWOW awards is, it’s basically like the Grammy Awards for Malaysian blogs, so instead of singers and producers being awarded gold statues, the DigiWWWOW awards present bloggers a cool looking glass plaque with our title on it. My award is currently sitting on my bookshelf between an Optimus Prime Model and a yellow Ferrari car.

I'm officially on Nuffnang

Sat, 07 Jul 2012 23:32:42 +0000

If you didn’t already know, there’s something on the sidebar of this site, something that hasn’t been there before. Something that I’m not particularly happy to put on my site– it is – an Advertisement!!! (gasp!)

To be more specific it’s a nuffnang add, about 10 lines of javascript code that will for the next couple of months display ads to visitors of this sites. I’m not too familiar with ads, but from what I gather I have little control over who will display ads on this site, and that’s the part I’m not particularly happy with. Aside from the usual “No alcohol” and “No tobacco” options, I couldn’t really control who I would not like to advertise on my site.

So why put ads, especially when I claim the blog cost under $4 a month?

First the blog does cost less than 4USD per month, and second it isn’t about making money–but money is still nice to have – it’s about taking this to the next level.

What is Nuffnang anyway?
Nuffnang approached me last week, and suggested that I join their network. They described it as a platform and community for Malaysian bloggers to 'unite' and provide a social and communitarian aspect to an otherwise dispersed group of bloggers working in silos. Of course, companies have to pay the bills and the whole community/social aspect of Nuffnang is funded by advertisers who view blogs as another way to reach their target audiences. Over time, blogs will slowly creep into the mainstream advertising space to compete with print and televised ads (if they haven't already).

THANK YOU: keiths.blog won the #DigiWWWOW awards

Sun, 10 Jun 2012 00:05:25 +0000

Some of you might have heard, but if you haven’t then brace yourself– I won the #DigiWWWOW awards!! WOO HOO!!

I’m still trying to come to grips on how I manage to beat out competitors like Amanz, MrPiratz.Com, Droid.my and of course Technology, Design,Inspiration. All of whom garner more hits than me, and are far more popular. Mr.Piratz was the first person to congratulate me in the backstage room.

Happy Birthday Wordpress!! Why Khairy won't be the next PM

Mon, 28 May 2012 15:17:52 +0000

Everyone who knows me, knows that I’m a passionate fan of 3 things.

Manchester United.

AC/DC.

and Wordpress!!
Wordpress, that awesome blogging platform that powers everything in the world and gives you that warm gooey feeling everytime you see it, turns 9 today. That's 9 years of internet awesome-ness.
It’s time to take a step back and contemplate the meaning of wordpress, this is an immensely popular blogging platforms that powers nearly every blog on the planet (and a lot of non-blogs as well) was created by Matt Mullenweg on May 27th 2003 as a ‘project’ , and now wordpress powers 15% of the web–for FREE!!

One year of Blogging on Nearlyfreespeech

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 13:00:48 +0000

I’m a big fan of Nearlyfreespeech. I think they’re a great webhost, and so far I haven’t been proven wrong. Sure their interface is a bit ‘simplistic’ and they’re site looks a bit dated, but overall I like the speed the provide, their infrastructure hasn’t failed me and their security hasn’t been compromised. The same can’t be said about my dreamhost account, for which I happen to pay nearly USD7/month for.

The best part about nearlyfreespeech however, is their pricing plan. Unlike other webhost that charge a flat fee per month, nearlyfreespeech charges on a pay as you go model. Basically if you don’t start a website, or nobody visits it, you don’t pay a thing. While many beginners look on the pricing plan as ‘risky’ since you could end up paying a lot of money once your site ‘really starts take off’, the real risk beginners should consider is subscribing to a 3-year plan for a blog they’ll stop updating past the first 3 months. The real risk is paying these webhost large one-off payments and use no where near the amount of bandwidth or storage to justify the $5-$10 dollar per month price tag…for the next 3 years.

4 Reasons you need an RSS feed

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 14:49:43 +0000

If you don’t know what RSS is, prepare to have your mind blown. If you’ve never used RSS, chances are you’re still bookmarking your favorite websites and blogs and visiting them on a regular basis painfully one at a time. RSS feeds allow you to magically consolidate all the content you read online, into one platform where you can get your daily dose of information all at one go.

RSS stands for really simple syndication, and it was designed as a simple way for web authors to syndicate their content across the internet. Conversely (and more importantly), it also provides a way for web users to consolidate all their favorites blogs, searches and forum threads onto one single platform.

So what is it really? Well I’m not too sure of the technical specifications to be honest, but here’s how I think it operates.

First xxx domain hijacked : Popebenedict.xxx

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 02:12:40 +0000

The first (of probably many) xxx domain hijacks have started springing up. Earlier today, a reader contacted me about a recent post I did on the .xxx domains. He mentioned that he spotted popebenedict.xxx in the wild and was curious if this was the first .xxx domain hijack. He maybe right, but in a post on his blog, he also mentions that while ICM registry doesn’t find PopeBenedict.xxx a ‘sacred’ url, it thinks osamabinladen.xxx is sacred and should be blocked from registry. In fact a quick check on the domains reveals that osamabinladen.xxx is a “Domain that has been reserved from registration”.

If you’re curious, PopeBenedict.xxx leads to a page titled “Everyone will find Islam” and notes that the website is for sale – I suspect that sale would be to the highest bidder. The website further adds that it has a long list of other pope related urls, including josephratzinger.xxx (the popes real name) and holyfather.xxx. On a slightly off-tangent topic, I don’t think anyone would be visiting josephratzinger.xxx to look for porn, but holyfather.xxx may have some promise (tongue firmly in check).

Why you readers are leaving your site: It's slow

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 16:25:58 +0000

In a remarkable infographic I stumbled across over at website 101, 25% of users will leave your page if it takes more than 4 seconds to load. 25% more will leave if it takes more than 7 seconds, so in essence if your pages takes 8 seconds to load you’ve lost a half your audience even before your page starts loading. This is pretty remarkable, 8 seconds is all it takes to lose 50% of your customer base, that’s the time it takes for people who are ‘waiting’ to turn off and head on over to other websites, presumably websites who don’t take more than 8 seconds to load.

As unfortunate as it sounds, this is really a case of webmasters and blog owners screwing themselves over, after getting half the battle won which is getting visitors to click links to your site or heading over to your site via SEO or Social Networks, you then shoot yourself in the foot by having a slow websites.

4 ways to add Pinterest 'Pin It' button to Wordpress

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 10:02:28 +0000

Pinterest is an awesome social site that let’s you ‘pin’ up interesting articles on boards that other users can view and then continue sharing. It’s absolutely amazing, and I’m in love with it. If you’re still curious about what Pinterest is or want to snag an invite (it’s still invite only btw), then just leave a comment at the bottom of this page and I’ll send you an invite as soon as I can. If you don’t know what Pinterest is, just head over a board I created from random quotes I saw from other users over here http://pinterest.com/keithrozario/quotes/.

Wordpress 3.3.1: security vulnerability fix, Thanks to Go Daddy?

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 11:30:06 +0000

Wordpress 3.3.1 was released today. This latest version of wordpress comes fresh of the heels of the 3.3 release and fixes 15 issues including a security vulnerability fix which Wordpress doesn’t fully disclose.

Wordpress admins should see the prompt to update their blogs, and a update can be done fairly quickly via the automated update from within the admin panel itself.

One thing that caught my attention was the blog post on the update from the wordpress team:

I'm so happy....

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 16:26:10 +0000

My blog & name was mentioned on BFMs tech talk today. Woo hoo!! I’m so happy!!

You can download the podcast of the show at BFMs website here , and it’s fantastic (partially because it mentions my blog).

So while MOSTI still hasn’t given up on the bill, apparently no one in the Industry wants the bill except MOSTI, and they’re just a Government Ministry. Where were the Industry players MOSTI engaged before proposing the bill? The sad part is that even drafting out the proposal of the bill would have cost money and resources that could have been better spent elsewhere…sad!

Computing Professionals Bill 2011: Not again!!

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 01:13:55 +0000

The Malaysian government is a crazy bunch, just today I saw two bits of news that left me squirming with disgust. First a short piece on Christmas Carollers requiring Police Permits to go Carolling (not just permits but full details of every activitiy) and then later today there is a new Computing Professionals Bill 2011.

Why would a government want to regulate the computing Industry? It’s not like we’re bankers or something? Why is there a need to regulate an industry that first off is too broad to define under an umbrella called computing, and secondly isn’t exactly a threat to national security.

Lowyat has done a great deal to summarize the bill and post it up for reading here..

But where we should be really intrigued is a part of the bill (according to Lowyat) that says:

Migrating wordpress to Dreamhost

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 20:44:09 +0000

Last week I migrated my blog from Nearlyfreespeech (who are awesome by the way!) to dreamhost (who are also quite awesome in their own way). What prompted the move was that I’m already subscribed to a year of hosting to dreamhost at about $6/mo, while my blog at Nearlyfreespeech is still costing me money, although admittedly not much. So I thought why waste my dreamhost hosting, and instead switch over from Nearlyfreespeech to dreamhost.

Before I start, let’s me first explain what I want to do. I want to migrate my blog from nearlyfreespech to dreamhost, in essence I want to change my hosting provider from Nearlyfreespeech to dreamhost. I do not want to change my url, I still want readers who type www.keithrozario.com to visit my blog, it’s just that the blog is now hosted on a different service provider and will ultimately have a different IP.

I also want to point out that although I already have a parallel blog setup on blog.keithrozario.com, I decided not to migrate because nearlyfreespeech kicks ass in terms of reliability, up-time and speed :).

Goodbye Google Buzz, Hello Google+

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 23:02:10 +0000

I’ve long been a great fan of all things Google, even when they weren’t exactly producing top quality stuff (like Google Wave), I stuck by them through thick and thin. That being said, it’s been more good than bad, sure they had a rough patch with Wave and Google Buzz, and yes Google+ isn’t exactly the Facebook killer it was tauted to be. However, think of all the really cool stuff they’re doing, consider the fact that I literally LIVE on Googles Cloud, all my email is on GMail, there isn’t a single day that goes by that I don’t get my daily dose of blogs via Google Reader and I do Google Searches at least 10 times a day. So overall Google is still pretty good in my book.

Be that as it may though, one of the hallmark of successful innovators is that they know when to call it quits. Google has already shelved Google Buzz, and spun off Google Wave as Apache Wave. Which begs the question of what would replace Buzz.

Damn you!! error id: "bad_httpd_conf"

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 22:37:48 +0000

If you’ve wondered what happened to my 30-day challenge to blog everyday….well it didn’t go so well. So far, I’ve fallen short last Friday (although I posted twice the next Saturday) and then missed posting this Friday and Saturday as well, turns out my challenge is pretty much over. Although, I’m still persevering, I guess even if I complete the remaining 20-odd days, I’ll always ‘know’ I missed 3 days!!

Now I’m not one to make excuses but the reason I missed these last 2 days was because I was trying to get my blog migrated from nearlyfreespeech (who are awesome by the way) to dreamhost. It took me a while to figure out all the nooks and cranies and nearly 4 hours to complete the migration. I’ll blog about migrating your wordpress once it’s done.

What is SOPA?

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 22:14:54 +0000

A couple of days ago, I stumbled onto a website by mozilla claiming “The internet we know and love is at risk”. Now I’m not one to panic but this was some serious stuff here, Mozilla is a company I admire and respect, so if it tells me something serious is going down, I stand up and pay attention.

Further reading brought on a couple of key points, namely that Mozilla was talking about the new Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that was designed to stop online piracy, but what it would effectively do was make give copyright holders essentially too much control over their copyrighted material. Now copyright holders undoubtedly have legal rights to their work, but giving them the right to shut down YouTube because someone sang their song and posted a video takes that a bit too far.

Mozilla also claim:

The fact is that this legislation as written won't stop piracy. But it would pose a serious threat to social media and user generated content sites (like YouTube) across the internet. It could also undermine some of the core technical systems underlying the internet, creating new cybersecurity risks.
As a non-profit committed to keeping the web open and accessible to all, Mozilla wants to ensure that this legislation does not jeopardize the foundational structure of the Internet.
Unfortunately, I’m not a US-Citizen so I can’t join in the calling to US members of Congress, but you probably can. Over here in Malaysia we’ve got our own laws we need fighting. Visit here if you wish to join Mozilla and their cause against SOPA.

What the Jetsons can teach us about predicting the future

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 14:43:26 +0000

Day 3 of my 30 challenge to blog everyday, and I’m already running of ideas and places to blog. I’m now in the waiting room of a my car workshop waiting as the foreman changes the tyres on my car. A couple of years ago, working in these environments would be unthinkable, you could either go to the workshop or work from the office, you couldn’t do both, but now…I can.

A couple of years before that, everyone was bunkered down with wired connection that made silly noises when connecting, in the good ol’ days we used to call that dial-up, rewind just a tad-bit more and you’d reach a age where you had to wired up to make a phone call. No cellphones and if you wanted to contact someone you’d have to have their 7 digit phone number and a pay phone to make that call from. Sounds a lot different from what we have today, but it’s true.

Why you should Blog everyday: Because Talent is over-rated

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 23:47:22 +0000

I recently finished the first chapter of Bounce, and found the content surprisingly similar to material I’ve read from Talent is overrated by Geoff Calvin, Mindset by Carol Dweck and a chapter from Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw entitled The Talent myth (I didn’t read outliers), and it seems to be the same ol’ vertabim if you want to get better at something, practice it a lot.

I personally haven’t read Outliers, but in it Gladwell expounds the virtue of practice and even creates a new 10,000 hour theory. The theory implies that with the right amount of practice anyone can achieve excellence in their fields. It even goes as far as saying that with the right amount of practice that excellence can never be denied to you, In essence guaranteeing that you will be great so long as you put in 10,000 hours of practice into your subject.

Why 10,000. The theory actually stems from 10 years of practice, but the practicality of it is that you can only consistently spend 1,000 hours every year practicing. Spend more than 1,000 and you’re likely to fizzle out. Upon reading this, I did a little calculation in my head. If I worked 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, that’s just 40 hours a week. A year has 52 weeks, and that means roughly 2000 working hours. Practically that amounts to 1700-1800 hours (minus holidays and leave). Which means to be an ’expert’ in any field requires about 60% of your working hours on practicing your ‘art’ or your area of expertise and that’s time a lot of people don’t have. Or is it?

Branding my blog Step 1: Creating a Superhero

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 09:59:00 +0000

While blogging over the weekend, I stumbled across an interesting article on marketing blogs. Part of the article advised on creating a blog identity, a sort of superhero that represented the blog. This would make your blog more memorable and thus help differentiate your blog in a very very crowded space. A superhero could be something quite simple, just a adjective and a noun and one of my favorite blogs, the evil HR lady springs to mind. Although I read the blog so often, I can’t remember the name of the author, but the branding is persistent and it just sticks. So I thought I’d create an online persona that fit my blog and a logo to go along with it. After all, keith’s blog is just as memorable as John’s blog or Mark’s blog, there really is nothing ‘sticky’ about it.

Understanding those hits from Google

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 15:07:05 +0000

I’ve started this blog ‘journey’ about 7 months ago and so far it’s been great. The experience has been a real eye opener on how technology and social media work, and now I’m beginning to develop an understanding on how hits make their way over to keithrozario.com.

For instance, even though I grew my twitter followers from zero to 350, the traffic from twitter seems really paltry. Something of the order of 2-3 hits/month. With the amount of effort I put into twitter, to say 2-3hits/month is disappointing is an understatement. I think the reason for this is that people go on twitter to search for news, not for tutorials or how-to’s.Most of my blog entries are either reviews of certain web apps or tutorials, and not so much ’news’, and that’s probably the reason twitter isn’t getting me those hits. Another possible reason is 350 isn’t the right amount of people to generate those hits.

Why I keep a blog?

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 00:35:19 +0000

Previously I shared how I reached my target of getting 1000 hits/month on my blog. To many that’s a pittance of a target, considering some bloggers average that in a day. However, blogging isn’t just about getting the hits, to me it was also a period of self-discovery, to truly see what I could do and what could be achieved once the gloves were off, and to be honest I loved every moment of it.

Even though I work in IT for one of the biggest corporations in the world, I felt I couldn’t really explore the cool IT stuff I’m so passionate about. I may for a Fortune 500 company that reports profits in the Billions of dollars, but up until last year I was using a laptop that had Windows 2000 installed. That’s a 10 year old piece of software (and OS mind you) that I was running, and people say IT moves quickly??

Create a torrent file to share with Amazon S3

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 17:09:10 +0000

As the final part of my series on stuff you can do with Amazon, I’ve already blogged about how you can share files using amazon S3 and hosting a static website on amazon S3. Now as a final part on what you can do with your FREE amazon web services account is to host a torrent file. A torrent file would allow you to share stuff online, and not pay for the full bandwidth cost of doing it, provided your leechers share the burden as well.

The concept is really simple, Amazon S3 can act as a torrent tracker as well as a storage facility, so it’s an all in one package that ensures that your torrent is tracking and there will be at least 1 tracker :)

Hosting a Web Page on Amazon S3

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 17:46:33 +0000

Yesterday, I blogged on how to share files on Amazon S3, today I’ll show you how you can host a webpage on amazon S3. Now Amazon S3 is a simple storage service, and all it does it store files, but if you store a html file you can change this simple storage service into a webhost.

How does it work? Simple.

If you store a picture file (jpeg for example), and then share a url to everyone. Chances are people will click that URL and it’ll open the picture in a browser. However, if you share a html file, then people clicking on that URL will be able to view a web page on their browser and they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, because that’s essentially what webhost do anyway, they merely store your html file.

Sharing Files using Amazon S3

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 15:43:46 +0000

There are a couple of ways you can share files on the web for free, for instance you can create a website to share your files (although that depends on whether you have a hosting plan) or you use websites like minus.com to share it (but they have limits to the file size etc etc). For sharing large files like your wedding photos, may require you fork out a bit of cash to truly have unlimited downloads and good connectivity.

If you’ve got a large 1GB file for example you’re hoping to send out to a bunch of friends and colleagues, your best bet may be Amazons Simple Storage Service (S3). The reason why I like S3, is that just like everything else with Amazon it’s a pay as you use model, which means there are no monthly fix fees and the moment your files stop becoming the flavor of the month, you’ll stop paying bandwidth for it. Plus I’m applying for a job at Amazon and hopefully this scores me some points :)

Domain Names: .xxx domain and what you should know

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 17:33:21 +0000

The internet Corporation for assigned Names and Numbers (more affectionately known as evil ICANN) has recently announced a new .xxx domain specifically for adult content online. Basically a safe place we can store porn on the internet away from our children. What’s interesting though, is that a .xxx domain are by definition associated with pornography and smut, that certain corporations and even people would not want to be a part of. For instance, I’m quite sure everyone’s lining up for www.BillClinton.xxx but Bill Clinton may not be too happy about it. So in light of this rather special domain name, comes a very special process that involves ensuring regular tax-paying adult content providers can bid for domain names they want, while allowing the rest of us to also work towards preventing others from getting our names tarnished with an .xxx post-fix.

So can we work on preventing my name from being associated with pornography?

Why Wordpress is so important

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 16:06:38 +0000

Imagine for a moment you’re an ancient social activist, somewhere in Babylon or Persia, or even ancient Rome, and you’ve just uncovered a secret of money laundering among elected officials. Armed with this information and a burning desire to expose the elected official you march out to tell the world of his exploits and hopefully stand over him in the expectation of swift justice to be executed.

How would you do it?

If you like most ancient social activist (if ever there were) would go out to the streets and shout it aloud, you’d meet the judges and the kings, and you may have your story heard. However, if you were known to be a troublemaker (as most social activist are) you’d probably not be taken seriously (at best) or even executed (at worst). This was how it was in the ancient world, where money bought power and the control of information was strongly held by those with power and by extension the money.

Accomplished: 1000 hits in 30 days

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 21:06:56 +0000

Mission Accomplished…GWB style!

When I started this blog on my birthday, I wasn’t so sure what was going to happen. I didn’t have a target, I didn’t have a goal and all I wanted to do was to start a website and keep it to myself.

Over time as I learnt about the awesomeness of wordpress, and the wonderful stuff you can do on the web, I knew I had to share that or at least write about it. So I started blogging about setting up wordpress blogs or Joomla on nearlyfreespeech, dreamhost and amazon web services. If you didn’t know how much I loved wordpress, let me tell you now…I Love it a Lot !!(arms stretched wide open)

So I set about a goal to create a blog that would get a modest hit rate of 1000 hits a month, and as of yesterday I finally crossed that target and now have had 1003 hits in the past 30 days….AMAZING!

Wordpress on Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 20:50:14 +0000

A couple of days ago, I met some guys from Amazon web services strutting their stuff out in a brilliant presentation about cloud computing. Now I must admit I haven’t been the most ardent cloud computing follower (I wasn’t really sure what it meant) , but I was ‘converted’ by these guys….to the point where I wanted to dive in and learn about the cloud.

And in keeping with my belief that the best way to learn is to do, I decided to host a website on Amazon Web Services and see if it really could be setup in minutes (as promised by Amazon). Amazon also promised year long free trial of their EC2 platform, basically you get a very small virtual machine hosted on Amazon for free (for a whole year), which was too damn ridiculous to turn down. So if Amazon was spot on their promises you could setup a wordpress site on Amazon in minutes AND it would cost you nothing for the first year…now that IS interesting.

Top Level Domains and their importance

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 12:28:05 +0000

What is a top-level domain, in simple terms it’s the part of the url after the last ‘.’ , so in my case my blogs url is http://keithrozario.com , my top-level domain would be .com.

There’s a long list of top level domains besides the regular ‘.com’ that you should be aware of if you’re hoping to start a website. Consider the case of Guy Kawasaki who bought 55 domains for his startup truemors, just to prevent cyber squatters from getting their hands on an obscure truemors url. If that doesn’t convince you, take a look at one of my favorite blogs, the EvilHRLady who in her own words:

Nearlyfreespeech, how much does it really cost? Just $3.60

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 01:05:57 +0000

For those of you who don’t know, I host this blog on an awesome webhost called nearlyfreespeech. It’s a different kind of webhost because it doesn’t offer fixed price per month packages, but rather a pay-as-you-go model. Now what that means is that you can get your website fully operational for under 1 US dollar (and I’m not kidding), however as your blog grows and you utilize more space and use up more bandwidth you’re probably wondering what kind of charges you’d be looking at, and whether it would be better off forking money for unlimited packages from the regular godaddy type host. The answer is NO. Here’s my analysis on real-life data from my blog.

Top 3 things I learnt from Blogging: Nothing technical about them

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 11:10:40 +0000

These past few weeks has been hectic, I’ve been moving into my new house which inevitably involved talking to a lot of contractors/plumbers/repairmen and I had a very busy go-live period for my project. (Go-Live refers to the point of an IT project when it successfully becomes available to the users). To top it off I upgraded my blog from wordpress 3.1.1 to 3.2 and the upgrade wasn’t as smooth as I thought it would be.

Reflecting on my blogging and my goal to reach 1000 hits/month, I think there’s a lot I learnt from this blogging experience so far from a technical perspective (setting up a website/installing a database..etc etc), but there’s a whole lot more I learnt about other things as well. Here’s the top 3 things I learnt from blogging that have nothing to do with programming.

How to bypass your office internet filters

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 01:14:52 +0000

Ever get tired of your office network administrator blocking youtube or facebook? Wished you could surf and get your daily dose of facebook and blogs from your office? Well there are many ways around this…most straightforward would be using a web-based proxy service like hidemyass .com or proxy4free.com. However, contrary to general opinion, your network administrators aren’t lazy(or stupid!). If you know about these proxies they probably know about it as well, so they’ve probably have a whole loooong list of sites categorized as ‘proxies’ that are completely blocked from access. So how do you access those web-sites your administrators have deemed…unworthy?

The solution is simple. Host your own proxy. This too can be blocked, but if you work in a fairly large company your own little private proxy is unlikely to generate enough traffic to warrant investigation and ultimately be blocked. So if I hosted my proxy on http://proxy.keithrozario.com its unlikely the traffic it generates would warrant anyone looking into it and eventually blocking it.So you have to strike a balance, surfing too much via proxy will arouse suspicion, too little and it defeats the purpose.

So how do you host your own proxy?

Updating Wordpress: Step by Step

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 11:11:42 +0000

Updating Wordpress is a pretty important step in keeping your blog safe and secure. Older versions of wordpress (even those just months old) have security flaws/bugs that are public knowledge, what this means if that if you run an older version of wordpress for your blog you’re vulnerable to these security bugs unless you upgrade. What’s even worse is that the security threats are public knowledge and even a un-skilled hacker could compromise your site. So upgrade to stay secure and get the most out of blogging experience.

So here’s how you update your Wordpress. It’s actually very simple, and I’m going to use the manually way which should be applicable regardless of which webhost you’re on. For this example, I’m using my own blog at www.keithrozario.com which is hosted on NearlyFreeSpeech.

Making Sense of Google Analytics data

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 17:34:30 +0000

It’s been near

ly 3 months since I started this blog and so far I’m no where near my target of 1000 hits a month. At least I’m about 30% of the way there, but that last 70% seems like a difficult mountain to climb here, but I’m going to try. Once again with hard work, good content and savvy marketing I’m hoping to jack up the blog hits from where it is (383 hits/month) now to where I want it to be (1000 hits/month).

Embedding Tweets in your Post using Twitter-Blackbird

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 23:31:07 +0000

Twitter Blackbird is a cool wordpres plugin that let’s you embed tweets the way they appear in twitter without having to go through snapshots and uploading jpegs into Wordpress. The tweet will then appear prominently and with all it’s formatting intact (if the tweeter had a black background, the backgroud would appear as part of the tweet…AWESOME!).

Holykaw! I'm on Alltop

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 09:05:53 +0000

A lot of my blogs are tech-centric with a focus on web 2.0 technology. However, this decision to start this ’new’ blog and abandon my old political slanted blogger blog was in part due to a book I read by Guy Kawasaki. Guy seems to be of the opinion that good is good enough, and if you’re going to do something…do something first, and then improve it as you go along.

In that spirit of doing first and improving along the way, I started www.keithrozario.com, which is the blog you’re reading right now. I’m absolutely loving blogging about tech and it’s an inner passion I should have pursued much much earlier in life.

3 popular plugins for Wordpress hacked!

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 00:55:00 +0000

If you’ve got a wordpress site hosted on your own, and you use AddThis, WPtouch, or W3 Total Cache and you updated your site within the last 48 hours, beware you could ‘potentially’ have installed an infected plugin that gave hackers backdoor access to your site.

The guys over at naked security advise you re-install those plugins and for an added security measure I advise you backup your wordpress and database just to be safe.

The vast majority of you are alright, but those are some pretty popular plugins for wordpress, I wonder where the source of the breach came from, what I know for sure is that a proper backup policy and a some added security for your blog is a solid investment for rainy days like this.

Slow Loading Wordpress: How to fix it

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 14:57:51 +0000

I have a problem with my wordpress site, it was just too slow. It was taking me 20-30 seconds to load the page, initially I thought it was nearlyfreespeech, and was contemplating moving the blog to dreamhost (both of whom happen to be amazing webhost by the way).

The reason I thought it was a host problem because my browser kept displaying ‘waiting for keithrozario.nfshost.com’ while the waiting, so I assumed that it was their servers response time. That however was too presumptuous on my part, and it took me a while to get to the bottom of things, but I finally figured it out.

I used a nifty little Firefox plugin called firebug.

Skydrive gets Spanking new HTML5 version

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 03:06:41 +0000

Yesterday

I blogged about how youtube was experimenting with a html5 version of the site, today we got come-from-behind victory for skydrive who announced that they’ve already launched their html5 version of site. Skydrive is Microsofts answer to dropbox, but unfortunately, it fell short of the mark and personally I don’t believe html5 is going to save this one.

I couldn’t log into to skydrive today, so was unable to check out how cool it became, but if you’ve got a skydrive account why don’t you give it a try and feedback.

This wonderful bit of skydrive info was brought to you by the wonderful people @ Gizmodo.

Youtube gets a spanking new html5 interface

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 10:13:37 +0000

What the hell is html5? Well you know how your iphone takes you to a special app to play youtube videos? Or how you can’t view facebook videos on your iphone? Or why you see a lego block while you’re browsing on the ipad? That’s because all these videos utilize Adobe Flash to play their videos. The catch is Apple mobile devices (including Ipads,Ipods and Iphones) don’t support flash for one reason or another. Which means you’re not going to be able to see those great videos till Apple gets on the Flash bandwagon. There is however….an alternative, and it’s name is HTML5.

WooRank: A must have tool for bloggers

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 10:31:45 +0000

My blog just turned 2 months old today, and boy has it come far. I’ve been trying real hard to make at least 1 Post a day, but most of the time it’s about 1 post every 2-3 days. It’s still a lot better than my previous blog and I’ve learnt a lot from my mistakes. However, just how good is keithrozario.com?

According to GoogleAnalytics, which I installed shortly after I created the blog, I maxed out at 28 hits a day, with a monthly average of about 12-14 hits a day this week. Quite bad when you compare me to guys like sethgodin who gets almost 80,000 hits/month or Anilnetto (a Malaysian journalist) who averages almost 1 million/month.

Tweet This doesn't work with the 'new' twitter

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 05:58:14 +0000

One of my favorite Wordpress plugins, Tweet This by Richard X. Thripp stop working ever since Twitter moved to the ’new’ twitter. I just realized this yesterday. A quick search online revealed that everyone is experiencing the issue with the plugin and Richard is MIA. When you get a free plug-in don’t complain if it breaks, I’m sure Richard is quite busy or probably has more pressing needs that write code for a free plugin that he’s not getting any money out of. Most of the complainers haven’t even donated. Plus the code is open source, and you can fix it yourself. Richard did a stand up job creating this super plugin and giving him a hard time because it’s no longer with the ’new’ twitter is just stupid.

One of the great things about open source software is the code is made public, and the general public usually has it’s collection of super-geniuses as well. One of those super-geniuses is a guy named Jeffry Pilcher from the financialbrand.com who shared on the official website of the plugin how to sort this out quickly without getting angry at Mr. Thripp.

Here’s what you do:

How to add Google's +1 to your wordpress blog

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 01:45:33 +0000

Google has just hit back at Facebook with the new +1 button. Similar to facebook’s like, it’s a one-click button to symbolize you ’like’ the site. However, that’s where the similarity ends:

Project Pier Review

Sat, 04 Jun 2011 08:59:29 +0000

Project Pier is a web-based Project Management tool written in PHP. It’s got a whole lot of bells and whistles for a open-source platform, but it does have it shortcomings as well. It all depends on what you want to accomplish with your project management tool, ProjectPier could be perfect, or it could fall woefully short. So let’s get digging:

Creating a site to share those pesky LARGE files

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 14:24:29 +0000

Ever since they took down drop.io I’ve been struggling to find a site where I could share content/files with my developers and service providers. I work for the IT department of a multinational company and sometimes I require to share content with developers and service providers that are not from my company (and therefore don’t share access to the intranet). I’m sure many people struggle with this, how do I share those large files with my team?

4 Reasons you need Web Based Project Management

Sun, 29 May 2011 18:32:59 +0000

Last week, I blogged about how to start a wiki on your blog. One of the great things about wiki was to run a entire project using a wiki, however a wiki is limited in functionality and a lack of any concrete structure makes wiki unacceptable for certain projects.

If you’re looking to run a full project management suite that lets you look at task, tasklist and milestones. Manage time and resources, provide 1-page updates for stakeholders. You’re in luck because that’s what I’m doing here today. However, before we proceed to the how-to-install, I thought it’s best if we revisit why you’d need a web-based tool for project management and how it can help overcome the 4 major pitfalls of the traditional method of managing project plans via MS Project and emails.

Consolidating Emails using Gmail

Thu, 26 May 2011 17:02:35 +0000

Previously, I posted about using Google apps to take care of your websites email needs. However, there was one nagging issue which always bugged me. My personal account was a gmail account, and if my website email address was hosted on google apps, that meant I could only login to one email at a time. This was troublesome especially if I was expecting an email on both accounts at once.

The workaround that solves this is simple, consolidate your email accounts into one login. This makes things a easier, and allowed me to check my websites emails (keith@keithrozario.com) while still using my personal email (keithjosephrozario@gmail.com).

What's Tumblr

Thu, 26 May 2011 01:36:11 +0000

I’m a bit slow to new platforms, (I’ve just discovered wordpress early last month), but in the battle supremo of the 3 most popular blogging platforms out there, Tumblr does have it’s advantages, and they’re quite many.

Creating a wiki on Nearlyfreespeech

Wed, 25 May 2011 14:51:41 +0000

Wikipedia isn’t the only Wiki around. A wiki is a generic term us geeks use to describe “A website that allows collaborative editing of its content and structure by its users”

Now wasn’t that a mouthful.

To put it simply, a wiki is a website that contains many articles, and ANYONE can update those articles.

Why do you need a site wiki, well the website gigaom has 15 different uses for a wiki. You can use it for anything from project management to knowledge retention. So having one certainly does score you points with the ladies,…well not really but you get the picture.

Contact forms: continued.

Tue, 24 May 2011 01:44:22 +0000

Previously I bloged about adding a contact form

to your wordpress powered site. The recommended approach was contact form 7, a clean and simple plugin to implement contact forms on your site. However, there are some limitations, what contact form 7 makes up in simplicity it loses in added functionality. For instance there were no captchas on contact form 7 so you can’t prevent a bot from simply continuously spamming you with messages from a nigerian prince wishing to share his vast wealths with you just because you’re a ’trust-worthy’ person.

Digging into Wordpress

Sat, 21 May 2011 14:58:36 +0000

Digging into Wordpress is a fantastic blog (and book) written by absolute masters of the wordpress realm. Recently they put up a poll on the best caching plugin for wordpress and the results clearly show that my favorite caching plugin, Hypercache is NOT the de facto standard. In fact it comes in a distant 3rd to w3 total cache and wp super cache. Oh well, I guess it pays to be different. However if you’re a wordpress newbie and looking for some new insights into wordpress, I absolutely recommend subscribing to their blog here.

LinkedIn and Facebook Login Credentials

Tue, 17 May 2011 02:59:52 +0000

While Facebook and Google wage holy war for the soul of the internet, the front line of the battle it seems is the login credential area. Facebook with it’s 100’s of millions of users are really making headway in this category. The premise is simple, for new and existing website designers, you can have your users log in with their Facebook credentials rather than your own unique credentials. What this means is that you as a web designer don’t need to worry about keeping a separate module for username and passwords. The extra advantage is even better, users don’t have to fill up crummy web forms to register for your website before actively participating in them. This has proven to improve the user uptake of your service, because it removes an extra step from your web design, users no longer have to register, they can do a simple 1-click login that immediately pulls data of the social network and then populates that into your website DB.

First Day Review: Dreamhost web hosting

Sat, 14 May 2011 02:15:29 +0000

Yesterday I took out another domain at Dreamhost.com, it’s another hosting service that got rave reviews from lifehacker. The costing is quite pricey, but I managed to get a promo code online for a $50 dollar discount. Mind you it’s still on the high side for me, it works out to about $65.00/year, but that includes both unlimited storage and bandwidth , one domain AND a who-is protect on that domain. So overall it’s pretty reasonable. When the promo ends though , (presumably when I renew next year), the price will revert to $8.95/month quite a hefty sum, so dreamhost better deliver.

Sub-domains on your site

Tue, 10 May 2011 07:38:39 +0000

Subdomains are a tricky thing. In laymans terms all it means is to have something else in place of the ‘www’ in your web address. So for example:

http://www.keithrozario.com <- This is my domain

http://resume.keithrozario.com <- this is my sub-domain, more specifically the resume sub-domain.

Creating a subdomain allows you to section out your website, while allowing your urls to look cleaner. Personally I’m a bit ‘allergic’ to the ‘/’. I much prefer a subdomain over a ‘/’.

http://resume.keithrozario.com (good!) http://www.keithrozario.com/Resume (not good!)

Adding a facebook Like Button to your post

Sun, 08 May 2011 09:18:19 +0000

Adding fa

cebook like buttons are tricky things. It used to be I’d need to install a new plugin to have these facebook like buttons. For instance I use to use DiggDigg, which is a pretty good plugin for wordpress. However, for the initiated a code version that I could stick anywhere in my post seemed a lot more flexible to me.

So how does it work. Simple.

Installing Joomla on your Nearlyfreespeech site

Sun, 01 May 2011 00:19:29 +0000

Joomla is a content management system that is customized for building actual sites. Wordpress is similar to Joomla with the exception that it’s VERY VERY tailored to blogs. Of course I’m still new to most of this, but you can read up more by searching online:

So how do you install Joomla on nearlyfreespeech, surprisingly it’s VERY easy. Follow these steps.

Testing Media RSS

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 01:01:31 +0000

MediaRSS is a wordpress plugin that allows you to post images into your RSS stream. So instead of seeing, just plain text in GoogleReader or FriendFeed you’d see text and a nice little photo. The plugin supposedly uses the first image in your post as the thumbnail to the RSS fee.

This is just a TEST!! Stay tuned for more. <br> <br>

Photo taken from Profound Whatever’s photo stream on Flickr

Moving from Blogger to Wordpress

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 14:28:40 +0000

I’ve had my blog on google powered blogger for over 8 years now. I first post on blogger was on April Fools day 2003!! That’s a full 8 years ago, my blog is probably older than some of it’s readers. All 8 of them…

I enjoyed my time with Blogger, and this project to move everything to keithrozario.com was not due to unhappiness with blogger, but rather trying to move things to the next level.

So how do you get the 200+ post from you blogger blog all the way to you ’new and improved’ wordpress powered blog that you host on your own?

Using Google Web Fonts on Wordpress

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 14:51:26 +0000

Ever got up in the morning and wished you could blog in Tangerine, or felt like only Special Elite could fully express your creative juices. How about: syncopate!!
All those words in color are in fonts that are deemed not websafe, yet you can probably view it nicely on your browsers...the trick is using Googles new web gizmo, the Google WebFonts API.

What is a Wordpress Cache and how do I use it?

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 10:49:20 +0000

Wordpress is the best blogging platform out there. It’s the best blogging platform ever. It’s great, but there is one downside. It’s SLOOOOW. How Slow, depending on what you post up. People are a lot more forgiving on a PC, but if you’re surfing on EDGE through your mobile phone, or browsing on a slow connection, it’s very very slow. Painfully slow.

There is a great solution though

Contact Form for Wordpress: Contact form 7

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 17:22:14 +0000

Even though you’ve got the social network icons on the menu bar, underneath every post and your email plastered all over the website. Sometimes it’s worth it to have a contact form for visitors to contact you via the webpage. This means they don’t have to login into facebook/twitter or their email to contact you. There are advantages of course, if someone stumbled across your page from an airport computer, they’re less likely to logon to anything there but they’d be more than willing to send you an email via your contact form. Personally I receive a lot more messages from people via the contact form then on any social media. The old way still lives :)

Domain Registration (www vs. bare domain)

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 15:31:39 +0000

As you probably know by now, I host my blog on NearlyFreeSpeech.net, they are easily the best host out there, why?

They AREEEE CHEEEEAP!!

What is a QR Code

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 16:35:59 +0000

Ever wonder what that funny looking Barcode thing on newspaper ads and beer cans is? Well it’s called a QR code and it’s a fad that catching on. Just like a barcode that encapsulates information into lines of varying size–remember that thing cashiers scan at the checkout aisle? A QR code is exactly like a bar-code but in 2 Dimensions rather than just 1.

A QR code encapsulates information into a digital block of black and white squares. However, unlike barcodes that are single dimension across one line, a QR code is 2-dimensional across both length and height. That extra dimension however, allows it to store FAR more data than a regular barcode. This extra dimension is why some call a 2D-barcode.

QR codes act like barcodes, but instead of storing numbers that need to be deciphered, QR codes store actual information in text form. So for instance the bar code for a bottle of Orange Juice would be deciphered as 11232323 , and then the supermarkets computer would tie that number to the price and description of the Orange Juice. From my previous knowledge of working with these things, I believe their called SKUs.

The QR code for the bottle would be deciphered as, Sunkist Orange Juice 5L: made in America. With all that information in text form, rather than just a number to be looked-up.

Disqus: The best comments plugin for Wordpress there is

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 16:52:31 +0000

The one thing I hated in Composito (my wordpress theme) was the ugly looking comment box. Thankfully however, I found this great plugin called Disqus.

Creating a email for your domain using Google Apps

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 12:19:05 +0000

So with the latest that the Malaysian government hopes to spend upwards of USD15 million to give every single Malaysian above 18 years of age an email address, I just noticed I have no email address @keithrozario.com

Unfortunately, Nearlyfreespeech.net (my web host) does not provide a email like other webhost do. If you’ve got your website hosted on goDaddy, Dreamhost or bluehost, you’ll have in built email functionality. If you’re with Nearlyfreespeech, you’re on your own (which is why they’re cheap).

That being said, Google also offers free email service for your own domain and it’s much better than whatever offered by GoDaddy or Dramhost. So no matter where you host your domain, I advise you use Google Apps to host your email. Here’s a quick and dirty tutorial on how to setup your Email on Google apps, and have Google host your domains email for FREE!!

Analytics for your blog

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 16:57:56 +0000

Analytics are those little bits of code that allow you to track vital statistics of your blog. Things like:

How many people visited my blog

Where did they visit from

Which country are they from

How long did they read my blog

What’s my most viewed post?

Making my blog 'look' more professional.

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 14:12:11 +0000

You can always tell the difference between a ‘standard’ blog that’s hosted off blogger or wordpress and one that looks professional. Obviously the first thing that comes to mind is the themes. If you’ve got a theme at least your blog would look a bit different, if you’ve got a premium theme (one that you bought for either 20-100 dollars), then chances are none of your visitors have seen the theme before and your blog would look a whole lot more individualistic.

I gave myself a 100 dollar budget for this blog and currently I’ve got 80 more dollars to spare. That’s not bad, considering I spent 20% of the budget and already have a good looking blog. Even though the budget permitted, I’d thought I’d save a bit of cash on the theme and just get a free one. There are some others things you can do to make your blog look a bit more professional though:

Installing those damn social media widgets.

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 08:29:43 +0000

Installing wordpress was a breeze. In fact installing wordpress was so easy I was just awestruck by it’s simplicity. Wordpress ROCKS!

Installing themes was also relatively straightforward. Some themes worked seamlessly, others took some tweaking but overall with a little html/css knowledge you’ll get the hang of it. However I had to install some custom widgets to make my site look a bit more presentable.

I installed ‘Social Media Widget’ and

The start of the blog.

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 07:14:20 +0000

After a long time, I couldn’t really figure out how to install the social media sharing buttons, and thats why it still appears to be all over the page. I’ll need to figure out to to install a good widget for sharing at the bottom of my website. Hopefully.

Before that though, I’d like to share with you the story of my blog.

My Second Post

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 10:24:35 +0000

Ok Cool, so I’ve got Social Media widgets on the side and the option to tweet and like my post.

If only I could include facebook share on the page, without messing up the design.

My First Post on Composito

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 08:22:46 +0000

I tried a couple of web designs but this one seems the best fit for me…so far :)

16 Google Wave Invitations to give out

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 09:40:00 +0000

Google Wave is supposed to be the next big thing on the internet.

What a load???

I can’t figure out how to use it correctly. From what I figured sort of like having a group chat in Y!Messenger or MSN Communicator.

Only difference is, that the information will be stored in offline, and you can upload stuff like photos and videos to it. And you can potentially add a lot of people to your wave and have a huge collaborative efforts.

Sounds great, and I plan to create a wave that actually works.

It sounds cool and has lots of potential, only problem is that very few people are on it.

I have 16 invitations, that I’m giving out. If you want one let me know. Only catch is that you have to join my first wave.

keithjosephrozario@gmail.com