How To Start Your Very Own Blog In Fifty-One Easy Steps!
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Interested in the blogging scene? Confused how to go about setting up your very own blog? Follow these fifty-one easy steps and you'll be a l33t blogger in no time!
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In a new post to his blog today, Danne Lundqvist shares his method for creating a blog aggregator (in the style of the planet-planet sites) to re-aggregate all of the feeds back ou tinto one.   Lately I have begun to get more and more annoyed with my feed reader. I use a simple feed reader which lack most features except for subscribing to and reading feeds. The one thing that annoys me the most is that it can't aggregate several feeds into one feed. Yesterday I finally decided to scratch that itch.   His method uses the Zend Framework to accomplish the goal - and "the whole website logic (both model and controller) is about 200 lines of code". There's no exception or error handling in it, but it works and the Zend_Feed module works well to grab just about any kind of feed.
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Lukas Smith has posted his review of a book from Packt Publishing - "PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects: Practical PHP Mashups with Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, MSN Search, Yahoo!"   Duane from Pakt asked me if I would be interested in reviewing a few books for them in my blog. I picked "Mashup Projects" from the list of just released books, since I am interesting in the topic and I am actually going to give a presentation at the internal "PHP Day" we are doing at Optaros in November.   He points out the good (good writing style, well-chosen examples) and the bad (a log list of errors and oversights in the code). He also talks about the contents of the book - the different examples and the final more major project. Overall though, he sees it as a good book, one that would be a good introduction to mashups for PHP developers (if you look past the formatting issues).
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Seems like some folks just keep doing it wrong. &nbsp;Don't worry kiddies, uncle IWMLWESIWCI is here to help. Come with me, and I'll walk you through a simple step-by-step guide of how to get yourself anonymized.
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Norbet Mocsnik, having just set it up himself, is sharing the steps needed to get DokuWiki set up and working with a simple authentication system.   I promised to investigate the steps needed to set up DokuWiki with the simplest authentication scheme for a friend and I thought others might benefit from it too, so here it is.   There's about fifteen steps in all, including the download/install of the package and creating the basic functionality (like a simple Auth schema - he gives an example). Create the superuser and set up the desired restrictions and you're home free. If you want more information on authentication in DokuWiki, check out this page on the DokuWiki's wiki.
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New from Codewalkers.com today is a tutorial about creating your own page of server statistics in a shared hosting environment.
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1.      Meet the press. You will need the press on your side to get your product the attention it deserves. To do that, you will need to write a compelling press release. If you feel you can't do that, Google my name, Jaci Rae, and look up the various press releases. I will also put them on ideamarketers dot com for reference. Look at my articles section and you'll find them.    Once you have a kick it press release, go to prweb dot com and sign up for an account. You can send out a press release for $0, but I suggest a $10 to $40 investment on press releases you want to be noticed. The best days to send out a press release are Tuesday  Thursday. Check out what's going on in the media so you can tie in your press release with the headlines. While your press release is an advertisement, you don't want it to be completely written like an advertisement. It's a fine line you need to walk.    A great resource to get the names, addresses and phone numbers of the people you need to contact in both television and print is the Bull Dog Reporter. However, that might be more than you can afford. If you are on a tight budget, Google top newspapers. Go to their websites and find the contact information.    Don't randomly send out your press release. You need to target your release to the specific beat reporter. Sending your music press release to a sports reporter or your computer release to the wedding reporter won't do you any good.   2.      Do public appearances. Nothing will garner more sales or attention than personal contact and word of mouth. Go to your local mall and ask if they will allow you to do a public demonstration in exchange for what you have to offer. If they won't, ask what the costs are and then go to local business to offer them a piece of the action in advertising if they donate money.    There are many other avenues to spread the news: Local supermarkets, libraries, coffee shops, etc. Music can be sung, books can be read, products can be demonstrated and services can be spoken about and validated if you have recommendations from those people who have successfully used your service.    This will help compel those who are listening to want to invest money in you and your talent. People are more likely to buy when they have a personal experience with the product or person. Make sure to invite the media to your event and advertise it to the hilt to ensure a bigger turnout.     Put up flyers, call up your local cable company and find out how much it costs to advertise. Commercials at the local or regional level during prime time will only cost you $30 a spot (approx.).  That's for advertising on VH1, MTV and many other very high profile shows.    Go to a college that has an excellent audio/visual department. Many students will only ask for the price of the film as long as they can keep a copy for their final exam. If you have a larger budget, many professional services will do an entire commercial for $5,000. A great company is Event Management Services. Ask for Marsha Friedman who is the President. 3.      Use the web to its full advantage. Set up shop on the World Wide Web if you havent already done so. Web sites do not guarantee money, but they are an additional source of advertising for you. Join web rings. While I had seen many of my competitor's use this on their web sites, I never joined one. One day I made a decision to do just that and my Christmas web site went from being unseen to the top five for my search string of Christmas with love and other terms. The results showed up in one week.    If you don't know how to create a web site, you can go to your local college as I stated prior. There are also many web sites like webmonkeys that have quite a bit of information to help get you started. Don't waste money on people who promise you top ten ranking at this point.            4.      Donate your time and services sincerely to charitable events. Eventually you'll be able to donate your item or services and get valuable advertising without cost in exchange. Charities that I can personally recommend are the Special Olympics, Make-A-Wish and Saint Jude's Hospital. Many other charities I have worked with are just as wonderful. They need the help and you do too. Why not help someone else and in exchange, you may be able to help your business? 5.      One of the most important tips is to strategically align yourself with other successful entrepreneurs.
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First a caveat. You don't have to agree with me, this is my opinion, and my blog, and that's what blogs are for, they're places where, if you happen to have an opinion, you can put it. This is the mode of a blogger with comments. Defensive. Yuck!!  If you say in your comment that I'm dishonest, I will delete your comment. That's the only tool I have to work with until my new friends at Disqus give me the feature Wordpress has that allows you to queue up every post in moderation when blog comments get flamey. This technique tells the honesty-attackers in no uncertain terms that they should take their attacks somewhere else.  So if your comment got deleted it's because something in your comment required a response from me (or someone else) that says basically "I am honest." I just save us all the trouble. No need to defend myself if the attack is gone.  You may think I am dishonest, you can even say so (but be careful to be sure you're right, and have the courage to put your name on it, only cowards make personal attacks anonymously) and do it in your space not mine. Here, I want comments with ideas and information. It's okay to disagree with me, the people who say that all they did was disagree are wrong. I never delete a comment just for being disagreeable. I delete them if they challenge my honesty. I really don't like that, I think the people who do it are creepy.  Okay, good. Glad to get that out of the way.
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Stoyan Stefanov has posted a few suggestions that you should probably ask your host-to-be before taking the plunge, making the commitment and entrusting your life to them (well, at least your data).   know choosing a hosting company is not easy, mainly because of all affiliate sites that publish fake reviews selling the host. Just like most other things, it's pretty hard to find unbiased reviews. So here's a list of questions to ask your future host-to-be, hopefully if they say YES to all, they have a pretty good shot at being decent.   While he admits that there are non-technical questions that should be asked too, he offers up some of his suggested technical ones to help weed things out quickly. Several are more general types (cron jobs, parking domains) but others are more PHP-related (using php_value, changing php.inis). Check out the post for more suggestions.
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Early on at Rojo  I wanted to encourage future employees to blog.  As long as there are clear rules about what you can and can't blog its not really a problem is it?  Blog about what you love about Rojo !  Blog about what you think is cool in the industry!  Just don't blog about anything we haven't released yet (without permission).  The running joke is that its company policy that you *must* have a blog.  Our CEO  has a blog and of course I have a blog (you're reading it right now!). I'd link to all of the blogs of our Engineers but I don't want anyone to hire them away!  After hearing about Google firing  an employee for blogging I was a bit upset.  I love Google.  They're a pretty good co ...
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Blog: Blogs: they're here. They're read. Get used to it.
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Set up and run a hydrogen-fueled house in five easy steps. By Bob Parks from Wired magazine.
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I've been saying this ever since I started blogging.  When you have a product to announce, start a blog (if you don't already have one) and announce it. Before there were blogs, I wished Infoworld or PC Week would give space to the lead developer of the product, whether he or she is a marketer or technical, even the CEO if they wouldn't assign a former reporter or ad guy to write it, and tell us what you meant when you designed this product. Who were you thinking of and what would they do with it. And where does it go? What does 2.0 look like if it's 1.0 or 3.0 if it's 2.0.  I like it when people like Zuckerberg, Andreessen or Canter write a blog post that tells you without pulling any punches what the intent of the product is, in their own words. I'd like to hear what they said to the team that worked on it. I'd like to use my imagination. That's why I don't like Steve Jobs' keynotes, he's telling you what Eddie Haskell would say about the product to Mrs. Cleaver. You never get the intent when it's filtered by the press. And many of the people that call themselves bloggers, love them and bless them, aren't anything like bloggers, and they're everything like the bored hired writers that used to work at CNET and Fortune. In fact, many of them are exactly like them (because they are them).  We live in the age of DIY, that means if you have something to say, just say it. PS: Here's a picture of three child actors from Leave It To Beaver, taken when they're in their fifties. From left to right, Eddie Haskell, Beaver and Wally. Time Waits for No One.
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In a new tutorial over on PHPBuilder.com today, they demonstrate how to create and work with one of the most popular data exchange formats on the web today - RSS.   Recently I was looking for an RSS aggregator. I was having surprising difficulty finding one that did exactly what I wanted. [...] I began seriously considering writing my own. This month, I show you how to create a basic RSS reader yourself.   He gives a simple primer to what RSS is and what it looks like (explaining the XML spec) and includes an example of what a simple document looks like. He uses the older XML functionality in PHP (expat) to do the parsing and includes to code that he uses to get the job done.
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How did organisms get started in the first place? Share your wisdom on the Wired Wiki.
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On his blog, Stoyan Stefanov takes a look at using on of the most popular pieces of PHP forum software out there - phpBB - and optimizing the front-end.   During this short workshop there will be no changes to the phpBB code, we'll create a new template instead, so that in case something bad happens, your board will continue to work normally. As an example, I'll use the bgcanada.com/phpBB2, the board I volunteer to administrate.   The tutorial is broken up into sections:   The plan New subdomains Creating a new template Moving CSS to an external file, merging Copying files to the new subdomains Serving gzipped content Turning ETags off Expires header Sysadmin summary   It looks like a lot of steps, but each section is relatively short and written well so as not to have more information than needed. In the end you'll have a simple template that uses Yahoo's 14 optimization rules to make things work that much faster.
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Just who did start the whole blogging thing? Column Here's a quote from an interesting time in the past: ten years ago. You know, a decade back, 1997, when (It says here) 'Jorn Barger, who started his Robot Wisdom weblog in 1997, is "regarded by many" as the "first blogger".'â¦