We have set up a domain and integrated it with hosting account. Now the time has come that we check if everything has gone by our plans.

Step 1

Type in the domain name name you registered in the address bar of your browser. Press enter and wait for your page to load. It shouldn’t too long as the site has nothing to show, or in other words its empty.  You will probably see a page with the directory listing of your home folder, i.e., public_html or htdocs.

Troubleshoot

I see a page which says ‘You account has been created’ or something similar instead the directory listing.

This is nothing unusual. Hosts usually create an index page by default. You don’t need and will have to delete it later.

My site doesn’t load at all. My damn browser shows a server timeout.

There can be a lot reasons to this. Lets discuss the common ones.

1. Make sure your domain properly configed. Just check whether the nameservers you entered are correct or not.
2. It may take up to 24 or 48 or 72 hours, depending on your host, for you domain to propagate.  You domain might not have propagated. You might have to wait for few more hours.
3. Your cache memory still has the old values for your domain. Clear the cache and you’ll have your site working.

Step-2

Now the time has come to create our first personalized homepage (for testing).

Log on to your hosting account’s panel and find for something like ‘File manager’ and go to root folder (public_html on Linux servers or htdocs on windows servers). In this file you need to create a new file by the name of ‘index.html’. If a file named ‘index.html’ or ‘index.php’ or any index file already exists, you have to delete it first before creating the new one.

Once created open the file so that we add some stuff to it. I’ll say just type in a warm welcome for yourself, something like “Welcome to your site.” !!

Go open your website in an another window and you’ll see your message. So that means you are done with with testing.

Now we are through with the testing which means we can soon go live to a wider audience.

When I started with blogging, I had a pretty unclear picture in mind on how to go about blogging. So the result was … mistakes. Human tendency to play and mess around with things is too high that no one gets started in the first go. You need to get through a lot of trouble.

Well mistakes cause problems and problems may lead to mistakes. Here are a few:

Domain with a typo

What if you are with limited resources and buying a domain. While entering the domain you typed “yourdoman.com” instead of “yourdomain.com”. They look pretty similar, right. (If still didn’t find the difference, they differ by just an “i”) Anyone can misjudge this to be right and carry on with the registration. But after registration , you’ll know that you wasted a domain and your 10 bucks. Such a situation sucks. Right?

No Backup, no blog

Well, I have been in such a situation several times now. Some mis happening may lead you to a dead end. Thinking positive, you didn’t take backup, and next day you loose your blog. You’ll be left with nothing expect two options. First to start all over again and second to quit.

What the heck, installation

Installation is fun once you are familiar with it. But for the first timers it can be a hell of a job. I’ll illustrate a few situations :

a) You installed wordpress and but forgot to note down the password provided to during installation. In such a situation, an experienced person would surely change the password using phpmyadmin or do something similar. But a newbie would probably reinstall the whole thing.

b) This happens with many of us, not only bloggers, I’ll say everyone. You downloaded, uploaded and are ready to install a software. And now while installing you come to know that your host wont support all the features and now you need to look for a new host. That is really annoying right!

c) In due to course of installing something, you have a power cut or your computer hangs. Then you’ll surely want to bang your head against the wall that now you gotta start all over again.

d) While installing you come across a field that has to be filled but you don’t know what to exactly fill. eg. you need to enter your mysql username. You created ‘user’ using control panel but you didn’t know that your host add some thing to it like “cpuser_user”. You’ll have good trying “user” when it wont work.

All’s well, that updates well

Suppose while updating your wordpress installation, an error shows up and your blog stops working. If you are a hardcore webdeveloper then maybe you’ll get over this but if not, you’ll have a hard time. You’ll feel helpless as you know what went wrong but really can’t do anything about it. Your blog will be nothing more than a living dead body as it would have everything but nothing would work.

This has even happened to me last year when while updating my blog, something happened and I lost everything.

No money, what to do?

If you got a job or have any other source of steady income, then this point wont bother you. But for people who are beginning or are still studying in schools or colleges then this should be a problem. You have to arrange the startup amount for the initialization by any means. And most people tend to start working as freelancers or turn to PTCs or such programs. Once you are through you’ll feel relieved as not only bloggers but everyone feel at ease if they got money around.

Time and tide wait for none

Well, its really hard to take out time if you are employed somewhere or you need to study. A blog really requires a lot of work to be done. If you can’t devote enough time to it then its gonna be difficult, both for you and your blog. With shortage of time, you can’t really interact with your readers properly, can’t post regularly(you may take my example on this). Nothing is left important when everything is important. You have focus on everything and mange your time well.

My site’s ready, what next?

So every thing’s set and you are ready to take over the world but…… how? Even when a blogger is through with his site, he is yet to face biggest challenge of all, traffic. Getting traffic is the most difficult job for a blogger, an internet marketer or even a small shop owner. To convince people to visit your blog and comment is quite tough.

Out of ideas, can’t think of anything

You have been going great guns past few months but suddenly ………….now what?

You really can’t think of anything interesting to write about. That’s a general thing to happen once you have written so much. Even when you have some ideas, there may come some stituations when you’ll not be able to exploit them. eg. You just got a brilliant idea in your head but while surfing you come across a post, by a fellow blogger, on the same topic. Well, that would be sad and in 90% cases you tend to drop that idea.

No one wants me to blog

Situations will arise when people around you will think that you are wasting your time. That would be very discouraging and some might even quit. You may lose your interest and all the inspiration. I’ve been in such situations and lemme tell you that it really sucks. One day or the other you’ll feel like, “Forget it! Blogging is not worth my time”. errr…. That was ugly.

& many more problems are faced by the bloggers.

You would have gone through similar problems or even something which I was not able to think. I know you wouldn’t mind to share your experience with me or tell about something which I can improve on in this article.

A blogger’s life is sweet, live it to the fullest.

Originally posted on 2008-10-13

Well this is a little problem faced by lot of webmasters who are new to cms/ open source softwares.

Here are the steps for different cms:

Joomla-

Joomla directory> Templates folder> [Current Theme]> favicon.ico

Drupal-

Drupal directory> themes> [Current Theme]> favicon.ico

WordPress-

Drop the favicon in root.

Short one!

Originally posted on 21 January 2009

I have been blogging for a lot months now and would say that blogging is a great for expressing your feelings, sharing your thoughts, etc.
Blogging may have plenty of reasons to be written, for example, :
1. You want to establish yourself on internet and get people to know about who you are, what you like, etc. In shot a personal blog. That’s a wonderful way for making new friends!
2. You have an expertise in something and want to spread a little knowledge among others. A public opinion is what you’ll get in exchange. If you know what your audience likes then you know where to make profits from.
If you own a product or offer a service, then blog is the best of keeping your customers updated and gathering their suggestions.
A personal blog- A kind of blog which generally means an online diary! A place for your profile and things unrelated to any relevant topic.

Originally posted on 2008-10-12

Another cool observations from, of course, one of my sites. The site this time is, yeah, divyun.com.

What’s anti-pollution?
It’s just a term created in the honor of askimet, which protects your site from dirty comments which pollute your blog.
So my request to each and every blogger is simple and straight- Use askimet, it helps you prevent unnecessary work.
Askimet comes preloaded by default. But if you have deleted it by default, get it at askimet.com.
This plugin is not only available for wordpress but for some other softwares too like mybb, etc. But you need a askimet key from wordpress.com.

Originally posted on 08 December 2008

Piracy affects open source in several ways. Below is my one hour hard work discussing few points about open source, piracy and its affect on open source.
What is open source???
You heard about open source softwares like wordpress, linux, audacity, etc. Well these softwares are free and the their source code is readable and available to all.
A free software may not always be open source. Some softwares run under there own propriety licence and the source is closed(and are known as closed source). Similarly open source softwares may not alwas be free. If you are a blogger and use WordPress then you should know about the Revolution templates. They are now open source but are paid.
How does source code helps programmers?
Well, using the source code, programmer can modify and distribute it in his/her own way. But you gotta keep the copyright license.
“Piracy”??
Most of us are familiar with the word “piracy”. If legal words are to be used out here, I mean “Copyright infringement”. The word refers to illegal or unauthorized use of some kinda of material in a way it violates the owner’s rights. In short words, piracy means stealing or simply a crime.
Some popularly pirated softwares are Mircosoft Windows, Adobe Photoshop, vBulletin, etc.
How does piracy affects the free and the open-source?
Let’s start with examples.
Case 1 Are you a graphics designer?? If you are, you must be familiar with Adobe Photoshop. Now, I can bet that more that half of the designers would not have heard about GIMP. GIMP is a free open source software alternative to Adobe’s Photoshop.
Case 2 ~ 90% people out here are still MS Windows users. Linux is
1. better than Windows.
2. is free and open source.
3. has hundred of sub distributions.
4. it has better support professionally and from a large community.
From the above two cases it is clear that piracy is killing the scope of the open source softwares. Well, if you’ll surf the internet, you’ll find hundred of such examples.
These days piracy is widespread and is done on a large scale. You’ll see markets full of pirated items which you could get for free or for <1/10th cost of the original. This has become a business of its own. Today on every corner of a street, you’ll be able to find somebody selling pirated stuff.
Use of pirated softwares are not only illegal but they cut down the market of the open source softwares. When user can have a paid expensive software for free why the hell in the world would he/she use a open source software? The person will not even try to find a free alternate to that software. Some of the examples are listed above.
Open source getting popular??
Well, actually in the past few years the open-source has taken the lead in few sectors.
For example, wordpress is a software used by bloggers to host their blogs on their own. The software is open source and rules the blogging market.
Another one, Mozilla Firefox is best the internet browser out here and is going great guns is ready to take over Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (closed source) as the most widely used browser. Adding to competition are Opera and Google’s Chrome.
Does piracy affect the Giants??
I suppose, not much!!
An example again. Adobe Tools ( like Photoshop, DreamWeaver, etc. ) and Windows are widely used and pirated. But I don’t think Adobe or MS minds this at all. Actually Adobe/MS doesn’t have much expectations from people whom they know can’t afford the software. Their main target are large companies which buy their products in bulk.
Now the biggest question- Encourage piracy or open source? I’ll say, ” Its on you. . . . . “
P.S.
This is the biggest post of mine so far.
MyBB went open source a few days ago. It was under a propriety license but free.
MyBB is a free open-source alternative to vBulletin. btw, my site