For three years I have been working with the unix environment at my 9 to 5 job, it has help me in many ways as a webmaster as well. I would very much recommend any webmaster to have some basic knowledge in unix/linux command line. I have just bought myself some low end VPS to learn all about unmanage webhosting server.

Holding the root is not something new, also I have successfully setup a Ubuntu LAMP previously, so it should be a piece of cake. Not knowing that currently I am working with a low end VPS, therefore I decided not to install any control panel and phpmyadmin. I have moved my personal dormant domain, adiwong.com to the webhosting. It comes with one IPv4, so typing 46.23.67.254 will bring you directly to my server, woohoo!

It is up with Apache (comes default), MySQL (needed some upgrade) and PHP (installed). So my website is up, will restore the original website in days to come. Next plan is to try doing multi-domain with one IP that is given to me. Some OS hardening as this unmanaged service is quite scary as there is no backup and they will do no security. Will come out with a plan whereby I will schedule some backup so that I could restore them when needed.

I have always believe in website uptime affecting our SEO ranking and reduces the return visitor. This is one of the very important criteria when you pick a webhosting and not the price. I am using this service from AreMySitesUp, as poor as many of you out there, I am using the free service with 5 domain name. This is fine with me, the only downside for the free account is that this website will delete inactive users, because I do not need to check the website for my status, I tend not to login to the website.

Anyhow, I think it is a nice service to share. Let me know if you use other service for monitoring your website uptime.

Site: http://aremysitesup.com

Other than files, you need to also move your database. If you are use to the GUI, you know that there is limitation exporting and importing. This is especially true when you have a large database. Through phpmyadmin, it is also a lot slower compare to method whereby you export large MySQL via SSH.

The command:-

mysqldump -u [username] -p [DB name] | gzip > [dbname].sql.gz

It will prompt for password, type in the password for this access to the database. You will get a file name exactly like what you have typed at the end of above command ([dbname].sql.gz).

Use an ftp program to download the file.

Because the file is compress, you are downloading it even faster, and you can un-compress it on your new webhosting.

To Import the large MySQL

gzip [dbname].sql.gz

then

mysql -u [username] -p [DB name] < [dbname].sql

** If you uses a different username and DB name in your new webhost, use the new value in the bracket

I hope this this will actually make moving your wordpress or your website to another webhosting much easier.

This trick actually works well with most php scripts. There is lots of benefit to this rather than ftp out the file from your old host then ftp back all the files to new host. The better I would suggest is to zip your folder for the particular domain whereby you can use the following command:-

tar -zcvf zipfilename.tar.gz foldername/

ie. You moving a domain at riceblogger.com/. use command: tar -zcvf riceblogger.tar.gz riceblogger.com/

then move the zip file to your new host via ftp. To extract .tar.gz, you use this command

tar -zxvf riceblogger.tar.gz

I had no other choice to expore these command because I have a classifieds that contain few thousands of picture in a folder, with Filezilla, I could only display 2000, and I kept missing pictures. With zipping, I can download and upload much faster.

There is also ways to extract large MySQL via SSH. I will post them later. Since I start learning more SSH for my 9 to 6 job, I found it so useful, and it also helps in my experience as a webmaster/blogger/internet marketer. Not to forget my previous post Upgrading WordPress via SSH, it is still useful when we want to install a new blog, or the automatic upgrade is not working.

An important task as a webmaster is to prevent your resources to be stolen or your website to be hacked. I had both of this experience now after finding one of my blog got 280gb of bandwidth used on the month of June 2009 and even at 2rd week of July it is already at 350+gb of bandwidth used. Fortunately and unfortunately, I did not even get any warning email and no service disconnection from my Hostgator Shared Hosting account.

This is the stats with around 1k users a day. You can confirm someone is stealing your bandwidth when you see a sudden of increase in bandwidth usage and also see that your image bandwidth is taking a whole chunk of your bandwidth (my case was 96% of the 400+ gb at the end of the month)

Immediatelly I use .htaccess to prevent image hotlinking by adding the code below into the .htaccess file:-

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?website\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png|jpg)$ /no-hotlinking-image.jpe [L]

I know that there is draw back on this but this is the quickest and most popular method to solve this problem and as you see the bandwidth drop pretty quickly after 13 July. After that I have reduce the size of  my no-hotlinking-image.jpe to a bare minimal and also remember to include some advertisements on the image.

To find out who is stealing your image bandwidth you can check out the raw access logs. This is where I look for at cpanel admin. Download the logs and if you see some image being load on other url other than yours, visit them and you should see your image (no-hotlinking-image.jpe) display on their page.

Recently I bought myself a Nikon D90 Kit, and this is my new hobby when I am not in front of my computer. To publish my amateur photography, I have decided to use my change my personal blog into a Photoblog. I have did some research for free WordPress Theme for Photographer and found this five great theme.

Grace Photoblog Theme (Demo : Download)

This is a simple designed photographer theme that have a 900px rotating picture in front. Very nice size and method to present your photos.

Monotone (Demo : Download)

This theme changes width accordingly to your picture width and it also changes the background color to give a different look for each visitors.

Fullscreen (Demo : Download)

This is simply cool. Mouse over the picture and you will get what I mean. It is not Free yet, but they claimed that it will be given away free soon, so signup and wait.

Reflection (Demo : Download)

Create a reflection on all your photos with the help of YABP photoblog software.

Photo Blog WordPress Theme (Demo : Download)

It gives you picture a great deal of focus, mouse over the picture and you see the description. Also click on the blog info to get the archive, blogroll, pages and category.

Bonus: Zack 990 (Demo : Download) – Found it last minute

This gives your pictures collection a very organize way to browse. Few method of displaying pictures as you can see from the screenshot below.

If you are a photographer and would like some wordpress theme that would enhance your picture layout, this is definitely for you. This theme are also suitable for videographer blog. The best thing is that they are free.

If you are wondering how other twitter users direct message you when you follow them, it is because there is an automated method to do this. I found this website TweetLater, which is great in managing new followers. I would say that it is a must have for all twitter users.

Their features include:-

• Direct Message New Follower
• Posting Future Tweets
• Vet New Followers – control if you should follow back base on updates/followers/twit image
• Or you can do Auto Follow features
• Manage multiple twitter accounts
• Keyword Alert via Email
• Also some nifty paid service – but the free version is already superb

I have used it for a few months now and I am pretty satisfied with the controls I get on my twitter. This is the best Twitter Application so far compare to those I compiled some a year ago on Twitter Application.

Website: Tweet Later

Also, remember to follow @8dee

I know this is a little back track but I notice that there are actually quite a lot of blogs that are pretty good in terms of alexa ranking, pagerank and also commentators but do not have technorati ranking. So I would like to educate others to do this as you may actually deserves to be in the Malaysia Top 100 Bloggers list.

Here is the steps:-

1. Click on “Claim your blog” button like the screen shot below

2. Then enter your url

3. The only tricky part is to get the code, you can actually copy the code and make a blog post under HTML view, or you could add a link.

For wordpress the name would be “Technorati Profile” and the Web Address fields would be something like “”http://technorati.com/claim/[code here]"

As I only have 2 different counters to make my list, I cannot just simply not take technorati into account. Until I get my pagerank script to work, we will have to bear with this at the moment. Moreover, I think technorati is a good ranking to judge a blog ranking.

p/s: also you could claim your twitter account by twitting the link. But don't feel that there is much use to that.

This is the very first time for this blog to publicize feedburner count because it has been low previously. As I have reach the 100 reader mark, I have decided to publicize it. Not sure if it will increase my rss feed subscriber but I decided to give it a try.

There is a lot of bloggers talking about publicizing feedburner count too early because you will give a negative impression towards your blog. But on the other hand, you will have another icon on your website asking others to subscribe to your feeds.

Also, if you decided to keep your feed count a secret, remember to inactivate it because people will still be able to view your feed count with this reveal feedburner count trick.

If you would like to publicize your feedburner count, here is what you need to do.

Riceblogger is my blog that I spend a lot of time doing SEO, researching post and reading other blog to sharpen my skill in Internet Marketing. Unfortunately, when I do calculation base on time and effort compare to my monthly income from each blogs and website I own. Riceblogger seem to do badly mainly I think because I am not in a niche market.

If you plan to start a blog to make money, go niche topic where little people blog about it, but also at the same time have sufficient market for your to get reader.

Here is some reason why you should not start a blog about making money:-

1. Your reader most probably know which block is advertisements even though you try to blend them into your website. So CTR is always low.
2. They know how affiliate links work, so some of them will try to bypass the affiliate or use their own affiliate link to purchase.
3. There is too many of them out there. Unless you know you can become one of the top 5% of this group.
4. It is hard to stand out from the others because your post is most probably mentioned in other people’s blog post already.
5. You are most probably coping someone else content.

I have some blogs that takes less than 2 hours / week to maintain but does earn as much as RiceBlogger currently. But I am still using this blog as a bookmark and to keep track of the strategy I used to do Internet Marketing for all my other sites.

The main goal of any website is to be able to get Traffic. The best designed website, most user friendly website, quickest website or a brilliant website idea are useless without people visiting them. Getting Traffic is the primary goal of Internet Marketing. There is tons of method getting traffic and some may just cost your some money and others are simply free.

Let us explore some method that we could get traffic that does not cost us a single cents.

Digg
It is not easy getting to the very first page of Digg or getting 100+ diggs is already hard for me. If you were to hit the front page, you will easily get more than 1,000 visitors on that day.

But the very fundamental of Digg is to participate in their community. In this game, you needs friends to help you out while you had to help them at the same time.

StumbleUpon
It carries a very similar effect from Digg, but rather than having friends stumbling your post, you have other users who are stumbling post when they see a good one. Write something good, something different or something unique, then you will get a good chance of getting Stumble.

Friends do help a little since they are able to view your profile but StumbleUpon have a low limit of friends.

Feed Aggregator
I like this a lot because they provides a more consistent traffic compare to the two method above that would give you a huge spike in your traffic. There is a lot of feed aggregator out there and some may just be regional and others are categorizing according to categories. Currently I am using PPS, Blogged.my, Ping.sg and PlanetMy. These are great service and requires little to no effort. I have used them since day one.

As for PPS, I am doing it automatically through trackback, so it is easy as well.

Social Networking Website
I like Facebook features because I could use it to post my feeds and share them with 500+ of my existing friends. Plus on top of that you could do it automatically through Wordbook. If you have more time and would like to get more traffic, post a summary and then link them to your Facebook’s short message that says “What’s on your mind?”

Also you could try starting a group to generate discussion that is related to your website and include a link on the group. I have few groups that have decent members and it does bring in some traffic.

A more direct method is to message all your friends regarding your website. You can do this often as it will be regarded as spam and you will lose the effect easily. It is only good to promote a new website or something special about your blog post.

I have also covered some other method that was used previously to gain traffic from Social Networking Website.

Microblogging Platform
This is all new to me. But if you want to be connected to your reader, this is definitely the way to go. Twitter is the king right now, so you should start here, but other platform are also generating traffic. The easiest way is to have your RSS to update Twitter automatically but it is advisable to have conversation and replies to other Twitter’s Tweets.

Another platform that I like is Jaiku. Not because it is owned by Google, but because it started with RSS feeds feature and I like the design and the usability better. Not to mention it has groups too.  Unfortunately feed is no longer supported after Google decides to let to community to develop the site.

A recent service that I used is Trigga.me because it updates my Twitter, Identi.ca, Plurk and many others with just one post and I could access m.trigga.me through my Opera Mini. Unfortunately, it does not support feeds and any url shortening service, but once it does, it will rock!

Forums
This is a lot of work but you basically have to do a lot of posting to get backlinks and to get your link visible to more people. Some forum like Digital Point that allows feeds to be included are good source of traffic. It will always depends on your credibility (number of posts) and the attractiveness of the text you used for your link.

E-mail
Email is usually sending towards your friends & family. Because it is more direct and people intend to check their primary email daily, the chances that your email is looked is high, but clicking the link to visit your website will all depends.

You have notice that this mainly covers the Internet or Website Marketing, but some of them will have double effect on Search Engine Optimization at the same time.

Yup, there is a bug, and when I checked my version, it says version 1.02. I was too dependent on the plugin auto-update that comes with wordpress 2.2 above. Unfortunately, there is some who would just slip away. Thanks to CPU from Belarus who leave me a comment notifying me about the loophole. I am now updated with the latest version of Show Top Commentators plugin, version 1.06.

The loophole from the previous version even 1.05 is that when someone new comments with the same name from the top commentators list, but replace the website url with their own homepage, the original commentator will not get the credit rather the new url will replace until the original commentator come back to comment again.

Also, remember to visit my list of wordpress with top commentators plugin if you wants to get some do-follow link.