cPanel + Fantastico = Easy WP Upgrades
I wish I had knew about cPanel and Fantastico more than two years ago when I started using WordPress.
It’s the easiest way I’ve found to install and upgrade WordPress.
Literally, it takes seconds for both. To update all our theme demo sites at iThemes, it took me about 5 minutes total … just now.
Upgrading WordPress is something I get asked about regularly by clients, especially since later versions of WordPress include this message prominently in the Dashboard: “A new version of WordPress is available! Please update now.”
When I started getting serious about my web ventures, I went with GoDaddy. I enjoyed the ease of use of their hosting software (except for how they do email!). Then I heard about cPanel — used by most all of the other popular web hosts — and now I wished I had started with it, simply for the convenience of cPanel/Fantastico.
OK, and I got to say it, “Fantastico is fantastic.” There, I feel better.
Doreo, Lunarpages and HostGator all use cPanel …. I’d recommend them all.
Camp Out in a Niche
I say this often: “If I were starting out in a new career field or industry, one of the first things I would do is start a blog.”
Admittedly, I wouldn’t know much about that brand-new career field and you’re probably asking, “What would you blog about then?”
That’s the great thing about it though: I wouldn’t know anything!
So here what I’d blog about …
Get Fed: RSS Day May 1
If you don’t read blogs via a handy feedreader, you should. It saves sooo much time.
Daniel has started RSSDay, which will be on May 1.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. There’s a video on the site, but I’ve heard RSS or feeds are like an email inbox for websites/blogs.
I’ve got well over 100 sites that I monitor on a daily basis and going to each site to see what was updated would be crazy insane. With my feedreader — Google Reader — I can do it straight from my iPhone in bed!
By the way, if you haven’t subscribed to my feed here, click here to subscribe!
Facebook Chat: One More Reason to Get Hooked
It seems to me the value of Facebook and MySpace and the other big social networking sites who have cashed in on huge valuations and venture capital is in the number of users they have signed up … but also how often and long those users use the service.
In other words, the key to success for them is getting a large audience using your service for long periods of time.
If you offer something of value and convenience, I think you can get them (me) hooked and addicted! Twitter is starting to do this for me, but I’m still not convinced yet.
Download 8 Free WordPress iThemes
iThemes and 1800blogger have partnered to release 8 new free WordPress themes to the WP community.
We designed the themes for 1800blogger blogs, with the intent of releasing them to the public as well, so each theme is targeted to a specific niche, including: Finance, Healthcare, Personal, Political, Social (my personal favorite) and Sports.
This is just one step in how we, at iThemes, intend to give back to the community.
[ Download the 8 themes in one file here ]
In Beautiful Phoenix
I’m in Phoenix this week to present a couple of seminars on web design for a Christian communicators group and had a moment to sit in the cool air, with a coffee in hand, for about 20 minutes of pure, quiet, peaceful reflection.
This was the photo I snapped with my phone.
… I’ll let it explain the rest.
Why Free Internet Delivery Is the Future for TV and Movies
I’ve been using Hulu.com for a couple of weeks now and absolutely love it!
My wife and I are getting more and more accustomed to watching TV shows (due to the writer’s strike) online with our laptops …. and when I heard about this awesome venture between NBC and Fox, I jumped on a beta signup.
So far, I’ve watched all of Arrested Development, most of Bones, The Office, and feature movies like Point Break, Three Amigos, Ice Age, Master and Commander …. well, the list could go on.
Needless to say, there’s a lot of excellent (read: “premium”) content on Hulu as well as most of the other TV network sites.
The beauty of Hulu is that you only have to watch short commercials, which to us, are an EXTREMELY SMALL price to pay to have the 24-7 access we get. (Especially when I’m still too cheap to get a DVR!)
Anyway …. what occurred to me pretty fast is that Hulu, or the idea behind it, is the future for the TV networks in particular.
Here’s why:
See what I just did?
I just put a TV screen in the middle of my blog.
With Hulu’s embed code feature, I can broadcast one of my favorite episodes of The Office right on my website …. to you and others who I’ve tried to carefully cultivate to read my site and return.
Or translated in corporate marketing terms: I just gave them a free venue to show their commercials to my site’s readership. I broadened their exposure a little bit more with the click of a Publish button.
Apply this to dozens, hundreds, or maybe even thousands of sites.
They have just with one simple feature brought viral marketing to TV …. online.
The biggest comparison I have to this is Google.
Their custom search engine feature allow bloggers and websites to put their search engine on thousands of websites. By giving away tons of space and Superman-sized spam protection with Gmail, they can serve their text ads to me most of my day (I use Gmail for everything I do).
I think about it like this …. one day I decide to build a four-lane highway in a busy, booming area of Oklahoma City, where I live. I do this for absolutely for FREE. There’s no cost to the city, county or even those who drive on my brand-new road.
The catch is … I get to put up billboard advertising all along that highway … where thousands of drivers will see ….
Only bandwidth and server space are ridiculously cheaper than asphalt!
It’s a whole new awesome business model that I’m still grappling with it myeslf.
But it’s fascinating to me.
And if Hulu and NBC and Fox and others continue to pioneer cheap ways to give me — the Average Joe TV viewer — an easy way to help broadcast those shows — and their ads — to my readers … wow, what a new new future to explore!
