It gives me this option in the WordPress Admin Dashboard.

I haven’t done anything to it yet – its standard and I’m just trying to learn everything about it.

Just not sure if I should click the upgrade automatically button – so before I did, I thought I should ask?
Thanks for your help

A: Thank you for contacting me. Sure you can upgrade.. WordPress upgrade is smart enough to notice if you skipped a version, it will make the necessary upgrade.
You can upgrade through the automated upgrade in the WordPress dashboard.
And since you have done nothing, no need to do a backup.

Regards.

I think the message should say ‘Not hosted here, please park the site by us first if you need to access total dns configurations’. I have been asked about it numerous times and generally find messages that show next action steps easier, than just telling ‘Not hosted here’.

If you follow the instructions from Google ( click here for the instructions ) and don’t find the link to setup the total DNS. Instead it says: DNS: (Not hosted here).  Then click on the ”Manage” link under Nameservers setup  (just on the left) and pick the radio button for “I want to park my domain” and click okay. This action will take a little and first display Total DNS: (Temporarily unavailable). After a little while, it should show a link “Total DNS Control” as in the image.

By then you can continue with step 5 to set up a cname and then setup a record for your domain.

Regards.

If you don’t have Gimp, download it from here. It’s a high quality image manipulation software that you can download under the GNU license.

Open the image in Gimp

From the Layer menu item, click on Transparency and then click on the “Add Alpha Channel” the first item in the submenu.

Click on the fuzzy selection tool from the Toolbox panel and highlight the background area on your image that you want to make transparent.

Click on the “delete” button on your laptop, or select the menu item “clear” under the Edit menu. You will start seeing the background color change to transparent. Shown in the software as gray squares (see image below).

Now you can save the new image and you should be done.

Setting up SSL on the server requires a certificate to be installed. I usually buy the certificate from godaddy. 

On some sites, you will see only certain pages redirect the page (URL) from http to https. I personally prefer to have https on the entire website and the best way to set it is on the server’s .htaccess file for the following reasons:

1- You don’t have to deal with changing your scripts or adding extra html or php redirect.

2- If you have to test the script on your local machine or on a server that isn’t SSL enabled, you don’t need to make changes to it.

3- It more secure.

Adding the following server redirects should do it. Just save the following in .htaccess under your root directory:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !on
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}

You can learn more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Https. Wikipedia explains the process in simple “plain english”.

Regards.

Instead of saving all your photos in one page, why don’t you try an album were it shows only one photo and viewers click the “next/previous” link to see other photos.
This looks more elegant than scrolling, will make the page load faster, and help you better organize your photos.
I like a photo script by Trent Foley which is using jquery and loaded it on my personal computer to test. It works fine:  http://www.twospy.com/galleriffic/

If you want to dedicate a site for photos you can use a php based script like Coppermine or Gallery, which are both offered free within cpanel and fantastico.
Do you know about or recommend an image gallery plugin. If so let me know.

Regards

“EPP is a flexible protocol designed for allocating objects within registries over the Internet.”

In other words, it is a uniform way to handle domain transactions and thus making it a lot easier to transfer domain names between registrars. It is also safer making the chance of your domain being stolen or hijacked minimal.
Different registrars use different names for EPP. I keep my domains at Godaddy.com and there, they call it Authorization Code. Other names also used are: EPP code, EPP authentication code, or EPP authorization code… They all mean the same.

To access your EPP or Authorization code at Godaddy, login to you account. Go to domain management, and click on the domain in question. A domain detail page will show all the options available to your domain.

For Security reasons, Godaddy doesn’t let account holders get the EPP code online. Godaddy.com will send the code to the administrative email on the account. All what you need to do is double check that you email is up-to-date before initiating a transfer.

Also note: Your domain has to be unlocked prior to transferring it. Also there are ICANN restrictions that will not allow you to transfer your domain, if it was registered or previously transferred within the last 60 days.

Regards.

Managing your email involves 2 parts, managing incoming and managing outgoing email.

Let’s take a look at each.

Incoming email:

In my opinion, the easiest way to manage multiple email accounts, is to forward all email you receive to one account.

This way you can manage all your incoming emails in one place. Just make sure you organize your incoming emails in a way to easily find them.

cPanel makes it easy to create many accounts for any domain you own. cPanel even offers a way to manage you email account without having to log into your cpanel hosting account itself.

If you have cPanel, you can just use port  2095 to access tools to manage your email. Just enter http://yourdomain.com:2095 from your browser. Login by entering your email in the input text for user name and password. This will take you right to your email main page, where you have the option to: forward you email, set auto responder, read incoming email …

Here I would forward all my emails to one email that I would use all the time.

Outgoing email:

Let’s assume you forward all your incoming email, to your Gmail account.
In Gmail you can set filters and label each incoming email in your inbox.

Once you are logged into your Gmail account, click on the settings link. Then click on the Accounts tab.
You will see a link to “Add another email address”
Click it to add any other email address you like.
Gmail will ask you to verify that the email you want to add is indeed your own  email.

After email verification, your new email will automatically be added to you Gmail account. Now, every time you compose an new email message, Gmail will let you choose which email you want to send from.

I think this is the simplest way to manage incoming and outgoing emails from one location. Of course, there are other ways you can use to manage email instead of using Gmail. You can do the same with Outlook or Mozilla’s Thunderbird.

What is your favorite way in managing your email accounts?

Regards.

Actually, I installed Hummingbird FTP for Windows, however I use it very rarely. I use it only, if I have to transfer large files or file archives that are greater than 100 MB in size.

With smaller size files, I always use cPanel to upload files, software, or any other file transfer need.

Here are the steps I use to upload files without using FTP programs:

- Log into your cPanel account.
- From the main screen, click on your File Manager icon.

- This will take you to a browser window showing files and folders similar to windows explorer.

- Double click on your “www” or “public_html” folder icon, not the folder name link. ( These 2 folders are linked to each other, they are basically the same).

Note: If you click on the name link “www”, you will see the folder properties in the upper right hand corner of the screen.

- After clicking on Upload file(s) link, cPanel will take you to the upload files screen.

Note: If you want to upload files to another folder, you need to double click on the icon the is corresponding to that folder.

If you want to override (replace) a file you can just click on the override check.
Upload Files now by clicking on the browse button and choosing any file from the Windows dialog box.

This screen allows you to upload 12 files. If however you want to upload a lot of files, you can create an archive (.zip) file first and upload it. After uploading it, you can extract it’s contents.

I will cover this in my next post.

As always, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me.

Regards.

Personally, I always prefer to do it in PHP, since most scripts that I use are written in PHP.

However, Frontpage and Dreamweaver allows you to easily build sites using SSI and many site owners prefer using it.

The problem:

Usually when you test your site on your local machine, it will look good. The reason is that Frontpage and Dreamweaver will handle the SSIs internally.

Later after you publish your site to the hosting servers, it will not work.

The fix:

To fix this issue you will need to add 2 directives to your htaccess file, to tell the server how to read and interpret the includes.

If you are trying to include a page with the extension .shtml, then you will need to add the following to your htaccess file:

AddType text/html .shtml
AddHandler server-parsed .shtml

If your main page ends with a .html extention, then you will need to add the following as well:

AddHandler server-parsed .html

And if you site ends with .htm, then you need to add this instead:

AddHandler server-parsed .htm

Your .htaccess file should reside at the level of you main page and should at the end look as follows:

AddType text/html .shtml
AddHandler server-parsed .shtml
AddHandler server-parsed .html

TdotHost customers can also do XSSIs (eXtended Server-Side Includes).

XSSIs were introduced in Apache versions 1.2 and above.

XSSI will allos you to programmatically add your own variables and conditions to your directives.

A common use of XSSI is to check the type of browser a visitor is using, IE vs Firefox and make conditions based on it.

In general, the advantage of using server side includes over client side logic like Javascript is mainly due to significant performance gains when loading a page.

As always, your questions are most welcome.

Regards.

I contacted the Cubecart support and they stated that it is possible your server is putting a block on the website.

Background:

As the message indicates, a 403 error is usually an access issue where your browser is receiving this from the server. The only thing you can tell is that you can’t see the file or directory that is indicated in the error message.

We at tdothost.com do not have or put any blocks on any directory.

Here is what I would do:
- Make sure that you are using the same URL that you have used before.
- Check if you have changed the permissions to access that directory, since that
last time you have logged in.
- Take a look at the htaccess file in that directory and the directory above it, and make sure it does not have any entries to prevent directory browsing.
e.g. make sure it doesn’t have “Options -Indexes” in there.

If it does have this, then check with the cube cart folks about it, just to make
sure that you are not breaking any security that they have introduced.

If you still have issues, I will be glad to help.