VeriSign Domain Name Price Increase Officially Takes Effect July 1st

VeriSign as announced in December of last year, is increasing the price of .COM and .NET domains at the wholesale level  by 7% and 10% respectively, effective July 1st, 2010. The price increase had previously been approved by Icann (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers).

As a result of this increase domain registrations and renewals of .COM and .NET through HostWire will be $9.99 per year effective August 1st, 2010.

Amazon outage June 29th, 2010

Outages at Amazon.com are causing issues throughout the net. This outage seems to also affect Amazon affiliates which rely on the content feeds from Amazon.com. It is being estimated that Amazon could be losing roughly $1.7 million per hour of downtime.

Five WordPress Plugins Tested on Hostwire Blogs

One of the great aspects about WordPress is its ability to do exactly what you want it to do with very little programming knowledge. Think of an interactive application you’d like to feature on your blog, and there is bound to be a plugin that will magically execute it. At the same time, it is time consuming to find the best and most up-to-date plugin for your needs – often there are more than one with the same functionality.

But not all plugin programmers are equal, so here are 5 Hostwire-tested plugins that will totally transform your blogging experience:

1. Dagon Design Form Mailer – Interactivity is the beauty of a blog, so on occasion, you may ask your readers to submit PDF, jpg or .doc files. You could always embed a simple mailto:spam@email.com in your blog, and your readers could attach their files to their email, but you are opening yourself up to a ridiculous amount of spam, and the attached files run the risk of becoming corrupted.

A cleaner, more user-friendly method of interactivity for both you and your readers is a WordPress plugin that gives readers the ability to upload files directly to your server. Contact Forms 7 has a really nice interface and is relatively user-friendly. In order for it to work, send an email to Hostwire.com customer support to change your server’s uploading permissions.

A much safer and easier-to-install plugin that allows your users to upload files to your server is the Dagon Design Form Mailer. After installing the plugin, it is relatively easy to configure as long as you READ carefully. If you are on deadline or multitasking, chances are you are going to make a silly mistake that will cost you more time than necessary to make the plugin function correctly. Click here for the very thorough, and well-written directions. We give this plugin a 7 out of 10 for Hostwire WordPress blogs – while most of the forms traveled successfully to our inbox, some were lost in Cyberspace. This was most likely due to users trying to upload files that were too large. If you don’t need this capability, we recommend Contact Forms 7.

2. Category Order. The Category Order plugin allows you to easily reorder your categories the way you want via drag and drop. This plugin is quite handy when you want to re-arrange the navigation order of your categories because the timing of when you create them isn’t always the order you want them listed. Moreover, as you build your blog, some categories may become more important than the others, and this makes it easy to re-order them. We give this plugin a 10 out of 10.

3. FLV embed. This plugin makes it incredibly easy to embed an original .flv file (including YouTube) into a blog post or page. We give this plugin a 9 out of 10.

4. Post Sticky Status/WP-Sticky. This plugin will allow you to stick a particular post at the top of its category page permanently. That means all new content added to that category will appear AFTER your sticky post. Once you install it, a new menu will appear on the right hand side of your “Add New Post” admin area, with the options to make the post an “Announcement.” It’s easy to use, but you may want to check on these posts every once in a while because the sticky marked post isn’t sticky anymore when more posts are added a few days later. We give this plugin a 5 out of 10.

5. Get-a-Post. This plugin will allow you to feed the content of a particular post onto another page of the site by embedding a line of code in the theme template of where you want the content to appear. This can be a quick and dirty way of bringing in new elements to the homepage without having to mess with the template too much. We give this plugin a 6 out of 10.

How to Install WordPress on HostWire

Once you have created a Hostwire account that is pointing to your newly registered domain name, you can have your blog up and running with just a few clicks.

First, login to your account with the information that was emailed to you. It will look something like this:

A new client account has been created in Plesk.
Client’s contact name: Joe Schmo
Client’s login: jschmo
Client’s password: 1111
Plesk entry point: http://ds5.hostwire.com:8880

Click on the “Plesk entry point” and type in your login and password. This will take you to the Hostwire Desktop.

In the Tools section, click on the fourth option, “Install a Site Application.”

Then click on the domain name for which you want to install WordPress.

You will be taken to a page that links to all kinds of free applications. Click on “Blog” underneath the Personal section and then click on the “Install” button next to the WordPress option. You must check the box on the License Agreement (perhaps you may even want to read it to avoid any misunderstandings in the future), then click “Next.”

Under “Installation Preferences,” you can choose to upload WordPress at the root of your directory so that it appears as the Homepage of your site. If you had something else in mind for the homepage of your site, then you should create a separate directory for your blog. For example, if you name your folder, “blog,” the url for people to access it would be: http://www.MyDomain.com/blog.

The rest is pretty self-explanatory. Create a database login password; then an admin password (this will be how you will login to your blog and add content to it – perhaps this should be different from your login information for your Hostwire account).

Last step – Name your blog. You can always change it in the admin area of your blog, so don’t worry if you haven’t decided quite yet. And yes, this name can be different from the domain name.

Click “Install” and you will be set within a few minutes. Go to www.MyDomain.com/blog/wp-admin (or if you installed it at the root, go to www.MyDomain.com/wp-admin), login with the username and password you set, and you’re good to go!

And if you are lost once you’re inside your blog, no worries…stay tuned, we’ll be covering the basics of navigating your blog’s Dashboard next!

Writing Prompts for Bloggers

As creative people, it is easy to get distracted by this or that project, or worse, by the dwindling zeroes in your bank account. This week’s prompts will focus on consistency and discipline in your blogging.

Writing Prompt #1: Think of the things you DO have and write about them. For example, maybe you don’t have much money and/or no one is responding to your pitches. So what should you do? Fret about it? Waste of energy! Instead, use your free time to take inventory and then write them down in your blog. This inventory can help remind yourself and your readers who you are and what you do, and perhaps attract new readers who are searching your particular keywords. You may opt to “stick this post to the front page” (check the box next to the Visibility option on the right hand nav in your admin).

Writing Prompt #2: Now, let’s build on the previous writing prompt. You’ve got your inventory, now how about writing a separate blog post about each of those items in your inventory? Expand on each item by adding research from online articles, quotes from previous clients, a flickr or lightbox photo gallery that illustrates this particular item in your inventory, and if you’re really feeling inspired, use your web cam to make a video of yourself talking about that item by creating a free account on Ustream.tv (or you can use YouTube, if you know how to edit a video and upload it).

Writing Prompt #3: If your already exhausted from prompts #1 and #2, you may want to have a guest blogger write about your particular inventory items. It should preferably be someone who has first-hand experience with your inventory. Having someone else’s opinion helps you add things you didn’t consider, or delete things that shouldn’t have been published for public consumption. You are also building a relationship with this other blogger, and this will both of you increase traffic to both your sites.

Writing Prompt #4: You’ve got quite a lot of content now, so post each blog entry to your Facebook or Twitter account so that your friends, family and colleagues can check them out if they are interested. But don’t post them all at once. Milk this time so that you can rest before you get to the next writing prompt.

Writing Prompt #5: Open up a Paypal account so you can charge for your inventory now – whether they are products or services. Sure, you are counting on banner ads and affiliate marketing to make you money, but this is your opportunity to create other potential revenue streams you never thought about before embarking on this series of writing prompts.