Tag: web hosting

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Short URLs to Social Services Using Own Domain and .htaccess Redirection

These days, there are many social services we use. I use some of them. Bloggers or websites also provide some links on their blogs/websites to those social service. If links to our profile is easy to remember, that should be great. For example, it’s easy to remember my Flickr photostream using http://flickr.com/orangescale, or Twitter account (http://twitter.com/thomasarie).
But, what about Facebook, Technorati, or LinkedIn? My Facebook profile page is located here: http://www.facebook.com/people/Thomas-Arie-Setiawan/695771665. There is a Facebook application to create more memorable Facebook profile, page or group. They will be something like profile.to/thomasarie or groups.to/AnyGroupName.
Few days ago, @mahadewa and @huda mentioned about this. Anyway, there is .htaccess for redirection. So, why not using it to produce more memorable URLs for our profile? It’s easy. Now, I can have https://thomasarie.com/facebook (Facebook profile), https://thomasarie.com/linkedin (LinkedIn profile), and more.
Since [added later: I have my own domain name,] my web hosting uses Apache and supports .htaccess, it’s very easy to do it. I just put these lines in my .htaccess (in the root folder).

Redirect 301 /facebook http://www.facebook.com/people/Thomas-Arie-Setiawan/695771665
Redirect 301 /flickr http://flickr.com/orangescale
Redirect 301 /linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/in/thomasarie
Redirect 301 /openid http://openid.orangescale.com/thomasarie
Redirect 301 /technorati http://technorati.com/people/technorati/thomasarie

“Redirect 301” means permanent redirection. You can add as many redirection rules there. Just see the patterns there, pretty easy to understand, right? And, I think it’s easier to remember. It also nice if we use it for our business card :)

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Get Information About Web Hosting Before You Buy One

I have been blogging for about 7 years. During that period, I experienced different types of situation — especially about dealing with many technical stuff. Let’s take the technical aspects of blogs. In my early years, I tried many blog services. And, when I wanted to move forward, I decided to get my first domain and hosting account. But, sometime I was unlucky because I got a bad service — bad uptime, not-responsive support staff, expensive service, etc.
These days, there are many hosting providers out there. Each of them offers many great features, discounts, and the price — sometimes — does not make any sense. The whole idea is that we — as customer — get many options of hosting providers. If we want to buy domain or hosting account, the process is very easy. The difficult part is getting the best service. Sometime, it’s easy. But, it can be tricky at the same time. Reading as many information about webhosting might be the best practice we can do. Just to make sure that we will make the best decision. For example, get the difference between Linux web hosting and windows web hosting.
There are many resources about web hosting articles, one of them is Web Hosting Articles & Tutorials. This site is provided by Web Hosting Rating. There are many useful articles, and those give us answers on common situation in choosing web hosting service. For example, we have a limited budget. A cheap web hosting account might be our solution. There is an article about finding reliable cheap web hosting. The article gives good information to consider:

When looking for a good web host, see if they provide 24-hour support and then proceed onto checking the response rate by sending a ticket with a question and seeing how long it takes for them to reply. The reason for this is simple – you want to get help as quickly as possible if you encounter any problems, or if the host has any problems.

If we question ourselves whether cheap web hosting is good or not, there is another information about this. Sometime, cheap web hosting can be good. Again, choosing a web hosting can be very tricky. It’s always good to spend few hours reading references. The website I mentioned offers many useful articles and it’s not only about choosing cheap or expensive web hosting. It also has articles about cPanel tutorials, domain names, etc. What makes it better is that it is using blog-like design. As bloggers — or even non-bloggers — this should be good because the articles are well-organized.

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Zookoda, your blog's friend

Zookoda logo
If you are a blogger, do you have a plan to have these features for your blog?

  • You want to build traffic and readership to your blog.
  • You want to send announcement to your blog reader on a certain event. Not always related to blog, but information you considered as “important” or “they’d better know about this”.
  • You want your readers to subscribe to your RSS feed. Once they are subscribed, your readers will received an update directly to their email inbox.
  • You want your readers put information you need. Not only email address, but also some other fields e.g. mailing address, city, country, etc.
  • You want to do those things above easily, from a single account, from a friendly interface.
  • You want them to be hosted by a service, because you do not have your own web hosting account.
  • You want to have a professional look.
  • You want to build traffic and readership to your blog.
  • You want to have a report for each feature.

If you want to have something like I mentioned above, you should try Zookoda, blog email. You can get all those features by registering to Zookoda. And, the best thing that it’s free! For its rich features, Zookoda is a blog email. It is a solution for your blog.

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Web statistics script for this site

I use some scripts to gain information about the site statisics. The first one is Shaun Inman’s Shortstat, and the second one is refer script by Textism. About the first, Thalia mentioned something about the database rows. Yes, you’re right Thalia. Well, this is how I use those scripts.

Easy-to-read statistics

Shaun Inman’s Shortstats gives me something easy to read. And, it is quite complete. I can have these information: total hits, unique visitors, browsers, referers, search strings, and visitors’ country origins. When I write this, there are thousands of rows in my statistics table.

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