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Hoosgot: Resurrecting the Lazyweb. Cool!

I have been a bit more active on StumbleUpon this month and it has helped me to get to know a lot of other bloggers, increase comments, increase traffic and promote my new hardware review blog.

Send pages to your friends via SU toolbar

To increase your site or blog traffic using StumbleUpon, all you have to do is to find your friends and others having similar interests to that of yours and add them as friends in SU. Once you have enough mutual friends in StumbleUpon, you can easily increase your site’s traffic by sending the page to all your friends via the SU toolbar and kindly asking them to stumble it.

I currently have 147 mutual friends in StumbleUpon all of which are bloggers (SU has a 200 friend limit). I found some of them via the post I put up to exchange social media contacts and some had already added me as a friend. Having many mutual SU friends makes it easy to get many stumbles for any page or comments for a post.

Make sure to thank your SU friends for stumbling and to return the favor by stumbling the pages your friends want.

Also remember to not frequently send pages to your friends for stumbling as that can be irritating and your friends may start to ignore your stumble requests. If you wish to do it frequently, send it to just your close friends.

Increasing comments

Earlier this month I had put up a post here to know people’s opinion towards faking feed count as I had a chat with a blogger who said he was actually benefiting from faking his feed count. I had send the post via SU toolbar to all my SU mutual friends and got good number of comments from many bloggers including Darren Rowse, Liz Strauss and Chris Garrett. All were good comments and not ones like "I agree" or "I disagree".

Increasing Web Traffic

Recently I had introduced my new hardware review blog here and asked my SU friends to stumble the blog and most of them did. The blog also got 15 positive reviews. I even messaged around 10-15 SU users with the computer hardware interest of which many stumbled the blog (I thanked most of them too) except for one person who got pissed off and left a negative review for the blog.

The blog received around 500 unique traffic that day and still continues to receive traffic from StumbleUpon. Some SU users were even kind enough to stumble other pages of the blog and even commented on some of the posts.

As you can see StumbleUpon is a good way to promote your blog, increase comments and to connect with other bloggers. If you use StumbleUpon, don’t forget to add  me as your friend and feel free to request stumbles

Related Posts:

• How to integrate StumbleUpon to your WordPress blog
• Import your Del.icio.us bookmarks into StumbleUpon
• Web Site Traffic Summary - April 2007
• How To Increase Alexa Rank
• Let’s Exchange Social Media Contacts

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If you bought an iPhone this Christmas hoping for some unlocking love, chances are you were disappointed. The new iPhones have a 4.6 bootloader which hasn’t yet been hacked. Specifically, they come in the following versions:

• Firmware: 1.1.2
• Bootloader:4.6_M3S2
• Modem: 04.02.13_G

For now, all OOTB iPhones with this configuration (or newer, we know 1.1.3 is coming soon) cannot be unlocked. They expect a new 1.1.3 firmware to come out in January that will contain enough information to allow them to unlock new 1.1.2 iPhones, but you never know. For now, your options are limited to:

• Buying an actually unlocked iPhone from Germany or France and paying the high unlock cost via iTunes
• Buying a Turbosim or Stealthsim card for about $100, which should be resistant to further software updates.

Good luck to everyone who bough an iPhone this Christmas and doesn’t have AT&T service. You’ll need that, and a large bucket of patience.

This blog was down for two days or more and DreamHost never bothered to reply or fix it. JohnTP.com was hosted on my friend Deep’s DreamHost account and it was blocked as my blog took a lot of resources.

Deep’s account hosted many other sites too and all were down because of this and another blog. I was on a visit to my Grandparents house at the time and never knew that my site was down until I visited it on my uncle’s PC. But I thought it was a temporary thing.

Later while traveling back home, Deep called to let me know about the mess created by DreamHost and that he has been contacting them for a long time with no luck.

After many hours, Dreamhost replied back and unblocked all sites except for this blog. I then created my own DreamHost account so that I can use VPS. Many more hours later of contacting DreamHost they moved my domain to the new account, but forgot to move the files and database!

I contacted them many times, but they never replied back. Luckily Deep came to the rescue and moved the files and database for me today.  None of my sites have ever been down for this long and thanks to DreamHost I lost a lot of traffic and money

I am now waiting for them to move the files and database of my hardware review blog to my new DreamHost account. I won’t say DreamHost sucks but their support really sucks!

Have you faced any problems with DreamHost?

Related Posts:

• Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.2 Released
• TechnoBlue Updated
• I [heart] WordPress Logo competition
• Google Sitemaps Generator WordPress Plugin Updated
• Full or Partial Feeds?

This blog was down for two days or more and DreamHost never bothered to reply or fix it. JohnTP.com was hosted on my friend Deep’s DreamHost account and it was blocked as my blog took a lot of resources.

Deep’s account hosted many other sites too and all were down because of this and another blog. I was on a visit to my Grandparents house at the time and never knew that my site was down until I visited it on my uncle’s PC. But I thought it was a temporary thing.

Later while traveling back home, Deep called to let me know about the mess created by DreamHost and that he has been contacting them for a long time with no luck.

After many hours, Dreamhost replied back and unblocked all sites except for this blog. I then created my own DreamHost account so that I can use VPS. Many more hours later of contacting DreamHost they moved my domain to the new account, but forgot to move the files and database!

I contacted them many times, but they never replied back. Luckily Deep came to the rescue and moved the files and database for me today.  None of my sites have ever been down for this long and thanks to DreamHost I lost a lot of traffic and money

I am now waiting for them to move the files and database of my hardware review blog to my new DreamHost account. I won’t say DreamHost sucks but their support really sucks!

Have you faced any problems with DreamHost?

Related Posts:

• Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.2 Released
• TechnoBlue Updated
• I [heart] WordPress Logo competition
• Google Sitemaps Generator WordPress Plugin Updated
• Full or Partial Feeds?

Welcome to part one of a two part series of articles that will guide you through the process of installing a fresh copy of WordPress or your public WordPress blog to your local machine. The first part of this series will guide you through the installation and configuration of a piece of software called WampServer. Why would you want to do this you ask? Having your WordPress blog installed on your local machine not only acts as a backup, but it gives you the option of really digging into the inner workings of your blog without having to worry about it breaking and therefor, rendering the thing useless to the public. Not only that, but it’s much faster to play with things on your local machine than it is with a LIVE site on the internet.

For this article, I am using Windows XP Service Pack 2 and something called WampServer. WampServer is a piece of software that installs everything you need to turn your PC into a webserver. This includes Apache, MySQL, PHP, SQLitemanager and PHPMyAdmin. Before we get started, head on over to the official WampServer download page and grab a copy of WampServer 2.

WampServer Installation:

The installation process is pretty simple. After accepting the license agreement and specifying where the WampServer files will be installed to, the installation file will be unpacked, doing all of the heavy work for you. Using a software application such as WampServer to install all of your webserver needs for you automatically, is the easiest way to turn your machine, into a web server. Once the installation is finished, you’ll be prompted to locate your default browser executable file. In my case, I had to direct the install to my FireFox executable file which is usually within the Mozilla folder.

One of the first things you’ll have to configure is the PHP mail parameters. For SMTP, the default value of localhost is correct. As for the email address, you can choose to type one in, or not. This can always be changed later. Once this setting is configured, you’ll be greeted with a confirmation box that tells you the installation of WampServer has been completed. Leave the option “Launch WampServer 2 now” check marked and click the finish button.

Configuring WampServer Files:

One important piece of information I have to mention. The webserver acts on port 80 which is the port responsible for HTTP traffic. If you are running Skype with it’s default configuration, you’ll notice that your Webserver is offline once you start the program. This is because by default, Skype uses port 80 and 443 for incoming connections. You can either change the port that Skype uses or you can close, then re open Skype after your Webserver is online, forcing Skype to use a different port. In essence, make sure port 80 is clear before you launch WampServer or else the Apache web service will not run.

I’ve also been informed by ayusli that will you also need to disable IIS if that is running on your system. If you don’t, you may not be able to access localhost.

Once your WampServer is online, you’ll need to edit a few files to change the configuration to allow for larger databases to be imported. These changes will take place within the PHP.ini file. The PHP.ini file is a text file that contains the configuration for the PHP programming language. The first thing you’ll need to change is the upload_max_filesize attribute. By default, this is set to 2Megabytes. This is too small of a value, so increase this to 50 or 100megs. It doesn’t need to have a specific value so long as it is larger than the size of the database file you will be importing later on in this guide. The other setting you’ll need to change is post_max_size. By default this is set to 8Megabytes. Change this to the same value as the upload_max_filesize limit. After you make this change, left click on the WampServer icon and restart all of the services. This will ensure the changes you made to the php.ini file take effect.

End Of Part 1:

If you plan on doing a fresh install of WordPress, you won’t have to worry about making any changes to the PHP.ini file after you install WampServer. However, if you plan on taking a copy of your public blog and transferring it to your local machine, the changes described above need to happen or else you will likely run into problems such as your database file being too large to import.

Part 2 of this series will go into details on how to install a fresh copy of WordPress as well as how to transfer your existing WordPress blog on the internet onto your local machine. It’s not as easy as transferring the database and then extracting a backup of files into a folder. There are a few more required tricks that need to be performed before a public blog can be successfully transferred. Look for these tips in part two which should be published in the next few days.

The Notcot group of sites, like NOTCOT.ORG, display information in an interesting way. Very compelling and well done. Not new, but new to me.

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The Airport Security Follies. “And rather than rethink our policies, the best we’ve come up with is a way to skirt them — for a fee, naturally — via schemes like Registered Traveler.”