When I first decided that I wanted to venture into the world of custom domains and hosted web space, I did a little browsing and eventually settled on Midphase for my hosting. Let’s just say that my experience with them was less than smooth. It wasn’t a horrible experience, but when the opportunity to leave presented itself, I had no reservations letting go.

That opportunity came in the form of a tweet I happened to notice. It was last November, I think, when someone mentioned that Dreamhost was having an anniversary special. The offer was soon to expire, so I jumped on it. For less than $10 a month, I found myself with unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth forever.

That in and of itself was more than enough to kick my old host to the curb. When I got into the control panel for my account, I was doubly happy with my choice to move to Dreamhost. Their console is easier to navigate than the cPanel console Midphase uses. Everything is much more straightforward, and much more user friendly.

There are a lot of features that I could talk about, and it could easily span several blog posts, but I’ll just mention a few of the more eye-catching features here.

One-Click Installs

There’s an Easy mode and an Advanced mode available. In Easy mode, you can’t access the installation files, which means you aren’t able to upload additional themes, plugins, etc., but all upgrades and maintenance is taken care of for you. In Advance mode, you get access to everything, and can do whatever you want. Needless to say, I only use Advanced installations.

The software available in Advanced mode (as of 2009-04-21):

• Wordpress 2.7.1 (Blogging and CMS)
• Gallery 2.3 (Image Gallery)
• ZenCart 1.3.8 (eCommerce Management)
• PhpGedView 4.2 (Geneology Software)
• OpenX 2.6.4 (Ad server)
• Pligg 9.9.5 (CMS with Social Networking)
• dotProject 2.1.1 (Project Management)
• Moodle 1.9.4 (Course/Learning Management)
• Joomla 1.5.9 (Content Management System)
• phpbb 3.0.4 (Forum/Bulletin Board)
• MediaWiki 1.13.4 (Wiki)
• WebCalendar 1.2 (Calendar)
• Advanced Poll 2.03 (Poll/Survey)

I was excited to see MediaWiki listed as the wiki installation of choice for Dreamhost. It’s my preferred wiki platform, and was unavailable as an automatic installation in cPanel’s Fantastico.

Google Apps & GMail

Upon adding a domain or subdomain to your account, Dreamhost gives you the option of using Google Apps to provide their popular Calendar, Docs, and Sites platforms for you domain. With just another click, you can have calendar.yourdomain.com, docs.yourdomain.com, and sites.yourdomain.com set up.

In addition, you can use GMail to manage your domain’s email. Just another option when you’re adding your domain or subdomain, this lets you use Google’s very popular GMail interface for all of your hosted email accounts. This is what I use for all of my email addresses, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Flash Media

Dreamhost provides a free flash-based media player, similar to what you’d find on YouTube. While it can only play .flv formatted videos, Dreamhost provides an automatic video converter. All you have to do is upload your video to your account – it can be in any of the more popular video formats – and Dreamhost will convert it to .flv for you, ready to be embedded in your website.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a video that I can demonstrate this with, but I hope to be putting some videos together for this site in the near future. When I do, I will definitely be using this feature of my Dreamhost account, instead of uploading my videos to a third-party service like YouTube or Vimeo. And the great thing about it? With unlimited storage and bandwidth, I don’t have to worry about having too many videos.

…And More!

These are just a few examples of what Dreamhost can do. I’ve had no complaints so far; and with the deal I got, I don’t foresee myself moving away from Dreamhost for a long time. If ever.

If you’re looking for your first web hosting service, or are unhappy with your current host, you can click here to give Dreamhost a try!

Over the past few years, I’ve installed Wordpress on a handful of sites. Some have seen the light of day, some have not. I’ve done numerous searches for various plugins, or have come across other blogs that recommend certain plugins. Some plugins are incredibly useful – dare I say essential – and some are more for fun.

Going through the plugins I’ve installed for this site, I realized that there were several that I always install in my new blogs. A few of these you’ll recognize and will probably already have installed on your own blog. But there are some here that most people don’t know about. Despite their relative obscurity, I’ve found them to be essential to running my blog(s) efficiently.

• Akismet – This is one of the ubiquitous plugins. There just isn’t a better comment spam filter. It requires a Wordpress API key, so you’ll have to sign up for a username at Wordpress.com and use the API key that’s shown on your profile.
• All in One SEO Pack – This plugin streamlines SEO optimization for your blog. It automatically manages titles, descriptions, keywords, and more. It’s ready to go practically right out of the box; there’s just a little minor tweaking once you get it installed. Then in each post, you can override the defaults with more specific keywords, title format, or description.
• Contact Form ][ – This is one of the lesser-known plugins, I’m guessing, but no less important. A way for readers to contact you is essential for anyone serious about blogging. What this plugin does is makes it ridiculously simple to create your own “Contact Me” page. You’ll want to fine-tune the settings, but once you have it the way you want, all you have to do is create a new Page, then click the “Insert Contact Form” button on the formatting bar. That’s it. This plugin was used to make my Contact Me page.
• What Would Seth Godin Do? – Seth Godin once said: “One opportunity that’s underused is the idea of using cookies to treat returning visitors differently than newbies….” This plugin takes that idea and runs with it. WWSGD will display a message to readers that have visited your site less than five (customizable) times, based on their cookies. This message is fully customizable with inline CSS. You might have already noticed my WWSGD-powered welcome message; the one inviting you to subscribe to my RSS feed.
• Wordpress.com Stats – This is the traffic metering plugin that’s built into Wordpress.com blogs. It provides up-to-the-minute stats, as opposed to Google Analytics, which only updates once a day. WPStats uses an easy to read layout, provides information about how your visitors arrived, and what links they click from your site. This plugin also requires an API key; you can use the same one you used for Akismet.
• WP Database Backup – Everyone knows that they should be backing up their blog on a regular basis. But unless you automate it, it’s just too tedious and time consuming to do it on your own. This plugin backs up your database without you having to do a thing. Just tweak the settings when you install it, and that’s it. You can set it to email the backups to yourself on a daily or weekly basis, and you can even have it send one whenever you want. Believe me, this plugin could save your a** some day.
• WP Dash Note – This is another obscure plugin, but now that I’ve used it, I don’t think I could ever run a Wordpress blog without it. All it does is add a text entry field on your dashboard. You can type whatever you want into that field – notes, reminders, post ideas, grocery lists, etc. – and they’ll always be displayed in the “Right Now” module of the Dashboard. It comes with a crinkled paper background, but I edited the CSS for the plugin and took it out. You can also adjust the height of the box, background color, and other attributes. It’s a simple plugin, but I’ve become dependent on it.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on these plugins, and suggestions for any other plugins that you feel are “Must-Have”.

In my previous post about making an iPhone-friendly website, I talked a bit about the growing popularity of the iPhone and iPod Touch in regards to surfing the web. Just like any other browser, you can bookmark your favorite sites, but on the iPhone and iPod Touch, you can save bookmarks to the Home screen as well.

When a bookmark is saved to the Home screen, the iPhone or iPod makes an icon for it. By default, it will use a snapshot of the web page. But what if you want your visitors to see a custom icon instead of a micro-view of your blog?

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Create a PNG image that’s 57×57 pixels. Ideally, this would be the same as your favicon or your site logo if you have one.
2. Save the image with the filename apple-touch-icon.png
3. Upload this image to the root directory of your blog.

That’s it. Now when readers bookmark your site to their Home screen, they’ll have a shiny, eye-catching icon. Go ahead, try it with this site. Even if you don’t have an iPhone or iPod Touch yourself, it doesn’t take much effort to offer an extra bell/whistle to those that do.

“But Chris, what if I don’t have the ability to upload to the root directory?”

Good question, Chris. If you’re hosting your blog on Blogspot, for example, there’s another way to do this.

1. Create your icon as mentioned above.
2. Upload the icon to your favorite image hosting service – Flickr, Photobucket, or TinyPic for example.
3. Go to Edit Template – how you do this will vary depending on your host – and insert the following code between the <head></head> tags:
   <link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="http://www.location.of/your-image.png"></link>

Please note that in the Blogspot example, the filename of the image doesn’t matter; the rel="apple-touch-icon" attribute tells the iPhone or iPod Touch what to look for.

Also note that if you’re using the WPTouch addon to create an iPhone-friendly version of your Wordpress blog, then you don’t need to worry about any of this. Choosing an icon for the “Logo & Home Screen Bookmark Icon” in the plugin’s settings will take care of this for you.

As iPhones and iPod Touches continue to fly off the shelves, it’s becoming more apparent that spending the time to make your website or blog iPhone-friendly is worth the effort.

Even with (arguably) the best mobile browser in the world, the iPhone’s small screen can make it difficult to read information on some websites. Its zooming and panning abilities make it easier, but it still limits your peripheral browsing vision. Many mainstream sites like Google, Twitter, and Facebook have mobile versions of their content that allow easier browsing, but what are us little guys supposed to do?

While Astro-Geek:3000 displays fairly well on my iPhone – well enough to read, anyway – there are some elements that are a little off. So, I looked around a little bit to see what kind of options were available to me for making an iPhone-friendly version of the blog.

InterSquash is a web-based service that creates an iPhonization using your RSS feed. It’s a good idea, but it didn’t work for AG:3k; I keep getting String could not be parsed as XML errors. Maybe you might have better luck.

The only other real option I found is a Wordpress plugin called WPTouch. It allows different customization features including colors and icons; there are some icons included in the plugin, but it also explains how you can include your own custom icons. Another nice little touch is the section at the bottom that shows you any incompatibilities between plugins.

The plugin creates a nice iPhone theme that’s easy to read and navigate, but doesn’t stifle your blog. For instance, because InterSquash uses your RSS feed, visitors would still have to visit the main site to leave comments. With WPTouch, visitors have full commenting abilities right at their fingertips. WPTouch also supports pages by displaying their links under the Menu dropdown.

WPTouch is a solid plugin that does its job well.

For quite a long time, I was trying to manage two iTunes music libraries; one at work and one at home. I listen to music probably 7 out of 8 hours a day at work, but fairly rarely at home. But when I did listen at home, I didn’t have the same playlists I had at work, since many of them are dynamic, based on play counts and ratings.

I found a remedy a month or so ago, and now I can listen to the same library at work and at home. It works wonderfully.

To make this work for yourself, you’ll need an external hard drive or some other form of portable storage. A USB thumb/pen/flash drive would work, if you have a small collection. I’m using a 160GB hard drive I’d purchased for my laptop. It’s not an external drive, but I purchased an enclosure for it. The great thing about this setup is that it doesn’t need a separate power supply; it receives enough power through the USB connection so there’s no need to carry around a bulky AC adapter. This makes it much more portable. The enclosure came with a carry pouch, so I can easily carry the hard drive and USB cable with me between home and work.

I digress.

Start off on the computer that has the library you want to use. If one library is more developed than the other, you’ll obviously want to use the more developed one.

1. First of all, move your music files onto your portable storage device. The read/write speed on an external hard drive is plenty fast enough, so if you’re worried about choppy playback, you needn’t fret. It doesn’t matter what drive letter your external drive comes up as, but it does need to remain constant every time you connect it. You may want to change it to something further down the alphabet so there’s no chance that other portable media will steal that letter. The drive letter does not need to be the same between computers, however; they can be different. For instance, it could be the K: drive on your work computer and the P: drive at home; as long as it’s always K: at work and always P: at home, you’ll be fine.
2. Once you get your music copied over, you’ll want to copy your iTunes library onto your external hard drive. It can be found in the iTunes folder in My Music (C:Documents and Settings(your username)My DocumentsMy MusiciTunes). Copy iTunes Library.itl and iTunes Music Library.xml over to your external hard drive, preferrably in their own separate folder.
3. Now that your music and library files are copied over, you can configure iTunes to use these files instead of the defaults. To do this in Windows, hold the [Shift] key while double-clicking the iTunes icon to launch it; In OS-X, hold down the Option key while launching iTunes. A window will come up asking you to specify a library. Click the “Choose Library…” button. Browse to where you saved your library onto your external hard drive and select it. iTunes will now use this library file instead of the one saved in your My Music folder.
4. The final thing you’ll want to do is change the iTunes Music folder location. To do this, go into the Settings within iTunes and click on the “Advanced” tab. Change the folder location to wherever it is on your external hard drive.

The first computer is set up.

On the second computer, all you have to do is follow steps 3 & 4 above. That’s it! You now have two computers sharing the same library, same play counts, same ratings, and same playlists! And the beauty of this setup is that you can import music on either computer and instantly have access to it on the other!

I haven’t tried it on more than two machines, but I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t do this on three, four, or as many computers as you want. Keep in mind, however, that this is not a media server. As far as I know, you can’t share out the library files to use on multiple computers simultaneously. This is a one-at-a-time setup. It’s designed for going back and forth from home/work, or perhaps if you’re going to be using an unfamiliar computer for a period of time.