When To Change Your Blog Theme…

A Word Of Caution About Changing Your Blog Theme When You Start A New Blog…
This is the single biggest place where new bloggers get stuck. I strongly recommend that you focus your energy on writing good content first and foremost.

There is more to changing your theme than simply clicking a button. You will need to understand menus and widgets as well as have some published content before changing your theme. We’ll cover ALL of these in future lessons and it’s highly recommended that you wait until you’ve finished the first 2 training modules before attempting to change your blog theme.
Recommended…
Start with the default theme, add at least 10 posts and 1 static page, set up your categories and menus, and only then consider changing your theme.
Why You Should Wait To Change Your Blog Theme
1. The search engines do not care what your blog looks like.
They care about content, so the faster you can publish a lot of good content, the faster your blog will get listed in the search engines. If you spend weeks (or even months as some do) trying to make your blog look perfect, you’ve wasted that valuable time that could have been spent publishing content.
2. Your theme will look much better when there is content on your blog.
It’s really hard to preview a new theme on an empty blog – they all look bad when there’s no content, menus, or navigation.
Many themes offer a customizable home page, but with no content, what do you feature on the home page?
ake the time to set up your categories and publish at least 2-3 posts under each category so that you can see what a blog listing page will actually look like.
Take the time to at least write your About page so that you can see what a static page looks like.
The more content you have on your blog, the easier it will be to preview a new theme and see what it’s really going to look like.
If you absolutely, must change your blog theme now, here are step-by-step instructions for how to do it.

Which CMS Joomla, Drupal or WordPress

In order to build a high end website, open source CMS platforms are becoming greatly popular these days. Since there are a number CMS software programs available on the web, many web publishers find it quite difficult to decide which CMS will best serve their purpose – Joomla, Drupal or WordPress? All three of them have their very own pros and cons, similarities and dissimilarities with one another.

The similarities of Joomla, Drupal and WordPress:
    PHP based web development platforms.
    Licensed under the free GNU General Public License.
    Content management system uses MySQL database.
Drupal:
    Drupal is ideal for building complex, advanced and versatile sites and requires high level of expertise and experience for maintenance.
    It is for coding freaks. If you like to use more plugins and less personally generated codes, then Drupal is not ideal for you.
    Modules – plug-in catcher in Drupal has many popular and amazing enhancements and you can craft some really cool stuff that will increase your website’s functionality, performance and scalability.
Joomla:
    Joomla is a mostly a developer-oriented, extensive but user-friendly CMS. It contains much complex options regarding site development.
    Joomla requires moderately uncomplicated installation and set up processes. The terminology and structure of this tool is meant for moderately complex sites.
    It has a huge community of programmers, developers, and designers. So getting help and assistance from expert Joomla developers is easy.
    The designers, developers and administrators often find it amusing to work with.
    Joomla is becoming more user friendly with each new upgrade.
    Extensions – Joomla 1.5 search framework is used to cache pages making it real fast in downloading each page with customizable options. It also supports the System Cache Plug-in. There are many other cool extensions while using Joomla as a CMS.
WordPress:
    This is an easy-to-use platform for both developers and end users. With time, WordPress has introduced thousands of new themes, plugins and widgets that smooth the progress of WordPress as the most popular CMS ever.
    Ideal for web developers who build websites for non-technical users, because once the site is built, the client can take over the site and maintain it of his/her own that requires minimum effort and technical knowledge.
    Plug-ins – WordPress has the richest collection of plug-ins that can increase the functionality of a WordPress to a great extent. They are really easy to install. No coding knowledge is required. But if you have sufficient knowledge, you can customize a WordPress plug-in or create a plug-in from the scratch.
Other major factors for choosing the best CMS among the three:
    Backend:
    – Drupal has a master control bar which adapts the page you visit.
    – Joomla has different segregated pages for each administrative tool.
    – WordPress backend is the easiest of the three to manage and navigate through different options.
    Security – WordPress has a number of loopholes and security vulnerability for its plain construction, the plugins might also be hacked or exploited. Drupal is the best in terms of security, and Joomla is reasonably good.
    Extensions – WordPress beats the others. WP is connected with many third party commercial market places for themes and plug-ins.
    Forums and supports – WordPress and Joomla have many unofficial forums, blogs and websites for support, apart from the official ones. Drupal has a thin line of unofficial support. However, all three have great user community.

How To Start a Blog and Make Money Online

Here are 5 EASY steps we’ll take together to help you start a blog and make money online.



Are you curious about how to make money online? Think that starting a blog is the way to go?

Great! Starting a blog can be a solid way to make long-term income – just for doing some writing on stuff you actually like and care about. But there’s a little more to it than that AND it may not be for everyone. This is not a get rich quick or plug and play business. If that’s what you’re looking for, this is not the place for you.

Yes, you can make a lot of money online but, like other traditional businesses, it’s not guaranteed. Anyone who tells you otherwise, is not being truthful.

Our goal is to help people who are really serious about building a real online business – because you can make a little, or a lot of money. That all depends on you…

Here’s the big difference between making money online and going to a job every day. If you do it right, the work you do today, this week, and this year – will continue making money for years to come. It’s an investment rather than trading your time for money.

So how does this work? Search engines find and cache the articles that you write, and over time each post is “worth more” to the search engines. That means you’ll get more web site traffic with every passing month as your site gains credibility. This does not happen overnight. It takes persistence and even some hard work – but you can do it if you’re serious and committed…

We did it (Dan and I both walked away from our corporate jobs and now do this full time), and so can you. The good news is that you get to take advantage of what we’ve learned over the last several years and avoid the sand traps that we had to dig our way out of.

So let’s get started – RIGHT NOW!

Reduce the Size of MySql Databases

MySql is one of the most popular choices in databases, used by many online websites to store user details. When a database is being used online however, one of the most important factors is that it shouldn’t take up too much space on the web server. Unnecessarily allowing your MySql database to take up more room than it needs means that there is less storage space for web files that make up the websites. When web storage costs money to purchase, it is pointless to allow space to be taken up by blank areas of database, especially when there is something that you can do about this.

In order to shrink the size of a MySql database, it is important to optimize the database. This can potentially reduce the size of the database to just a fraction of its current size. It is a fast operation to complete, which should form part of your regular website maintenance.

Will I lose any data?

You wont lose any data when you optimize a database. Optimization performs a check on your current database for any empty space and reorganizes the way that the data is stored. Existing data is moved to the empty space so that the database is only being used by actual information. Technically, the empty space is deleted so that the rows in the database that were being taken up by blank cells are no longer there.

How can I tell if my database needs to be optimized?

Running optimization is not always necessary. You should check the size of the overhead in your database to see if it needs to be reduced. The overhead indicates just how much space is being taken up by empty cells.

You can find out the size of the overhead by opening your MySql database from the hosting panel in your web server control panel. Beside each of the tables in your database is an ‘overhead’ column which tells you the size of the free space.

How do I perform the optimization?

The first thing that you need to do is backup your database. This is good practice for any procedure, but because the optimization process moves and deletes parts of your database, there is a risk that something could go wrong.

To run the optimization, open your MySql application with the database open that you wish to optimize. Choose the tables that you wish to run the operation on by checking the boxes beside the tables that you wish to optimize and then click on the “with selected” drop down menu. Choose the “Optimize Table” option and allow it to run.

These are the only steps that you need to take, so if you see that your MySql database size is growing, you should back up and optimize your tables so that you can make the most of the space that you have. By performing a MySql database optimization frequently, the process will be quick and efficient. The more free space there is to clean up, the longer the process will take.