AuburnCom Weblog

Thanks to Tim for reminding me to let everybody know the best place to go for Web Site hosting.  The company I and most of my clients use, is Dreamhost.The reasons for which include:

and a lot more, if you’re curious, head over to http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?145127 and check out their prices and plans, you’ll find that as long as you host more than one site with them, you’ll get better value than any other webhost out there!

P.S. You can use the promo code RECLAIM for big savings (two year hosting for about $100…

Comments welcome..

Watch this video to see an easy way to make the PDF smaller…  It’s one of Apple’s Tips of the weeks, choose the one entitled “Tip 29: When a PDF is too big”    

From the WSJ: ”Yahoo Inc.’s board plans to reject Microsoft Corp.’s unsolicited $44.6 billion offer to acquire the Web giant, a person familiar with the situation says.” This is a wonderfully audacious and spirited move by Yahoo! who are grossly undervalued at the moment, their stock when Microsoft made the offer was only $19 per share, the lowest in over two years, and doesn’t represent Yahoo!’s talent at picking great upcoming companies from Silicon Valley, (something Apple is also quite good at, but something I’ve never witnessed Microsofty do well).  In recent years, Yahoo! has fostered Del.icio.us, FlickR and upcoming.org, they’ve also developed gorgeous pages for the iPhone, widgets for the iPhone, Push IMAP email for the iPhone and UNLIMITED email storage space (to compete with Gmails 6Gb limit).Yahoo! brought in revenue equal to a almost a half of Google’s last quarter and has a P/E ratio almost half of Google’s, this alone should put it’s market price near $70billion (Msft offered $45billion) and when one see’s that Yahoo!’s properties (a large the largest base of email users, ties to AT&T, great ocean front properties (FlickR, Del.icio.us, Upcoming, iPhone hooks), it makes one think, “hey maybe Yahoo is actually a damn steal at $70billion”(which may be what Msft’s offer is come Monday morning…  

A question from a client: 

 remind me how to initiate tracking features, please. it’s a site i’ve seen feed or fire something but i didn’t get it when i first visited it. do i need a tutorial in it? or can a few words on phone suffice?

Our Answer:

 Initiating tracking is in this context quite a broad subject. A simple Hit counter can be setup using “Site Meter”, Detailed Web site usage and Hits can most usefully be tracked by Google Analytics, lastly, RSS feeds can be handled and subsequently tracked through FeedBurner(Recently acquired by Google).

All of these sites have free offerings but also involve a steep learning curve to set up, I could set up a good way for you to view your visits from day to day using Google Analytics and Feedburner, though it’s reasonable to postpone this until further in the future when awareness of readership becomes a more valuable piece of information (i.e. to offer readership figures to advertisers etc.)Whether you choose to set up tracking now or in the future, I hope I’ve been helpful with the above information.

Web space is such a great tool these days, it’s just like an external hard drive that you carry except that you don’t have to carry it and its ALWAYS available and unlike hard drives, it’s automatically backed up by your provider so it never goes missing or gets lost in an earthquake.If you’ve been thinking, I’d like a little web space of my own, for a blog, or to share photos, or to store 500 Gigabytes!!! of Music, Video and Data then head over to Dreamhost, it’s their tenth birthday and they’re offering great plans, their best is a 500GB plan with Domain name included for $6 bucks a month, over two years, thats, $144, to compare, a 500GB Hard drive costs about $200 on amazon, so IF you need space to store stuff, these are my boys, I always recommend them to clients, they’ve great customer service, within a day response time, are based outside LA and give a 97 day money back guarantee. Still thinking?http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?145127

Friends and Regular readers will already be aware that my friends outside Los Angeles, Dreamhost, provide the very best Web Hosting in terms of reliability, security, customer service and value.

After my clients sign up with Dreamhost, they get a lot of features, PHP, MySQL on the backend, lots of one click installs for great Web applications like Wordpress, Mambo, WebGallery and lots more, but, they also get 5000 email address spaces to give to friends, family and employees, volunteers or even specific causes, e.g. comments@yourdomain.com, stories@yourdomain.com.

Dreamhost mail supports industry standard mail functionality including Webmail (Squirrel Mail), Spam Filtering (Spam Assassin) and Mail Forwarding.

To set up an extra email account under your Dreamhost account, follow these steps, this email tutorial guide is brought to you by San Francisco’s Favorite Mac Repair, Service and Consultants, AuburnCom, if you’d like to see tutorial’s for other issues write to brendan@auburncom.com

First, point your browser to Dreamhost, then enter your information like the image below shows.

Secondly, click “Mail” in the navigation bar to the left of the Dreamhost Panel as shown below:

Next click on “Manage email”

You’re almost there! You’ll now be seeing something similar to the picture below,
click on “create new email address”

From here on, it’s quite straightforward to setup the email account, default options will be fine for most users, any email address you creat can be removed, modified or enhanced at any time in the future, so there’s no need to fret over whether to allocate 200mb for space or 2000mb for space.

You will however want to decide whether to use that powerful “Forward Only Email Address” or a standard email address, the forward only email address can work great for friends who need to be contactable through the offical company or organization’s web address but would rather have their email centralized.

We provide lots of Web Strategy advice for individuals and companies in the Bay Area and would be happy to meet with you or give a support call to you if you’d like some further help with this, call 415-871-9683 and speak to Brendan to learn more about how we can help you.

Rapidweaver is the easist method for producing straightforward content and design segregated websites. Wordpress is the best blogging web application available, Marrying these two together is possible, thanks to this tutorial by our swedish friend Nilrog