Web Dev Notes

One great way to make money online is to setup your own online store. Millions of people browse the internet every-day so an online store can really help you turn your web-traffic into a profitable business. A while back I wrote an article explaining how to create an Amazon store and make money online. While creating an Amazon store is one way to approach running an e-commerce business, it does not address the fact that you still need to first setup a website! For this reason, choosing a web-host for both your website hosting and ecommerce solutions can be a much better idea.

AQhost is a cheap business web hosting company which offers ecommerce hosting. Their cheap ecommerce hosting is great for anybody looking for small business hosting. Since their packages are designed with ecommerce in mind setting up an ecommerce website becomes an extremely easy process so you can focus on making money rather than all the website configuration details.

AQhost doesn’t just set you up with a website and shopping cart. They can also help with site design and with setting up merchant accounts for processing credit cards in your new ecommerce store. They also provide SSL certificates which are used for ensuring that all transactions on your website are completed securely so that your customers can be confident their information is protected when shopping on your website.

If you check out their website you’ll also notice they have another great feature which more web-hosting companies should begin using. They have live customer support available directly on the website for quick 24/7 help to any problems you might encounter.

With hosting plans starting at $6.99/month, they’re definitely an affordable way to begin setting up a profitable online business.

This Post Brought to you by AQHost!

Last night I was doing some work on my BattleCity Classic website, which is powered by Joomla, when I came across this article regarding stupid things Joomla website administrators do. The article is quite informative in its own cruel way and unfortunately we are all guilty of something on that list! Here is the one that stood out the most for me:

5. Do all upgrades and extension installations right there on the live site. Who needs a development and testing server? If an installation fails, you’ll just uninstall it again. That will hopefully undo any damage the installation caused.

For a small website, having a development server may be overkill if the information on the website is not critical. In such a case the best thing you could do would just be making backups which could be restored should anything go wrong. If your site isn’t high traffic, a small amount of downtime may go largely unnoticed. Of course, this depends on the type of testing you are doing on your live server. If you are installing tons of extensions, then you should really consider taking the effort to put up a development server and testing it for a few days or weeks before launching the changes on your live site. If you are just making small modifications to a module or installing a reputable component like Community Builder or Joomlaboard, then you shouldn’t have to worry as much. Still, the best practice is to always be as paranoid as possible!

What is a development server you may ask? Basically, a development server is just another copy or your website. If you have installed Apache, PHP and MySQL on your computer, then you will likely be using your own machine as a development server by hosting a local copy of your website on which you first test all changes and extensions. This is the best thing you can do!

Unfortunately, most people running Joomla are not interested in doing all the setup required to run Joomla locally, as many just want a software package they can quickly and easily install on their web-hosting to manage their content and website. If you fall in this boat, you can still set-up a development server. Just install a second copy of Joomla on your web-hosting in an obscure location such that nobody will accidentally fall upon it. Then test your extensions on this second copy of Joomla before installing them on the live version visited by your users. The reason you don’t want anybody to know the URL to the development server is just for extra security, in case you do install an extension which causes a problem or creates an exploit, which could then potentially damage your live site as both are hosted on the same machine.

Most importantly though, take the time to make backups. You may find it to be a hassle, but the day you need your backup, you will be happy its not 4 months old! Don’t count on your web host for backups. While they may be able to help you, the process to retrieve the backup may lead to extended downtime for your website or they may even charge your for the backup!

Update: Have you been making backups? I now have a backup folder on my desktop in order to remind myself to make backups as often as possible. I just took a look inside the folder though and noticed that I haven’t made any new backups in over 3 months!

Time flies. It feels like I made my last backups just a few days ago, but it’s already been months. If I were to lose 3 months worth of information from my website, I would be completely devastated! In fact, I even have a few new websites that have absolutely no backup at all! After the amount of time it took to setup these new sites in the first place, it would be extremely discouraging to have to start over again from the beginning! You never know when there might be a Glitch in the Matrix…

Have you ever wondered if you really were a Web Dev nerd? I mean, you don’t necessarily have to be a nerd to enjoy web development… Today, I bring the solution to your problem! Nope, I’m not going to tell you how to stop being a nerd, i’m going to tell you definitively if you are one or not!

In order to determine if you are or are not a nerd, I have developed a simple test. Well, to be more accurate, I have copied down some jokes from the HTML Dog Blog!

Here is how the test works: If you laugh at any of the following jokes, then unfortunately you are a web dev nerd! It’s that simple. Some people would claim that simply understanding the jokes would make you a nerd, but that is where I disagree. Simply understanding the jokes means you enjoy web development and work in this area. Laughing however, means you enjoy it too much and are a total nerd.

Here we go…!

Q: Why did the XHTML actress turn down an Oscar?
A: Because she refused to be involved in the presentation.

Q: Why was the font tag an orphan?
A: Because it didn’t have a font-family.

Q: Why do CSS designers have too many children?
A: Because they employ lots of child selectors.

Q: Why was IE5’s 3-metre wide cell in the insane asylum smaller than IE6’s 3-metre wide cell?
A: Because the width of the cell included the padding.

Q: Why was the XHTML bird an invalid?
A: Because it wasn’t nested properly.

lololollollolol!

Update: For those who enjoyed the above jokes, I now have a few more that might entertain you! You can read them in the Humor section of the Software Engineer Training website.

The most popular joke on Software Engineer Training so far is, “What goes up a hill with three legs and comes down on four?“.

You might also have a good laugh checking out, Windows Evolution from 1.0 to Vista! It’s not actually a joke, the screenshots are as real as can be! It’s just hard to imagine ourselves back in those days lol!

FastCGI has been officially released for IIS6 with full Microsoft support!

Patrick Reilly writes:

Microsoft is embracing the PHP community and to help bootstrap early adopters of PHP on Windows, we’ve been validating the popular PHP applications on Windows and publishing walk-throughs that give step by step instructions on how to setup and install the most popular PHP apps on top of FastCGI and IIS/Windows.

You can download FastCGI for free at http://www.iis.net/php. FastCGI makes it possible to host PHP applications on Windows.

Leadership Training has a great article about Always Being True to your Word. The three main points Brian brings up are really important to follow if you want to be respected by your co-workers and be a successful leader. Don’t make promises you can’t keep and if you know you won’t be able to do something, let someone know sooner rather than later!

Untwisted Vortex has a good article questioning if Google is Evil Now! Definitely worth checking out if you’ve been interested in all of the page rank controversy over the last month! Plenty of great links to sources in this article as well.

Nice post from The Net is Dead about how to have Variable Variables in JavaScript. Go check out the short little tutorial.

A few people who did lose page rank recently might be very interested in this article titled, “How Yahoo or Facebook Could Really Kill Google“! Be warned, the word kill is replaced with tickle in the article!

Here’s a good post by Matt Cutts giving Tips on Your Google Reader Subscriber Numbers. The main thing the post tries to get across is that subscriber numbers can be misleading if you take them for face value since blogs can have multiple feeds! Also keep in mind, there are many ways to subscribe to a blog besides Google Reader!

Did Matt also dress up as an Lolcat for Halloween?!

John Chow has a good article about Making Money Online with Reseller Web Hosting. This has always been something that has interested me but is also something that requires an initial investment with most companies which I’ve never been willing to take. What do you think about reseller hosting?