Mohsin Rasool - IAM & IGA Consultant

Google Apps – Future Of Business Communication

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Google Apps is one of the best invention in the history as far as business communication is concerned. It offers everything you need. It has all the scalability your business ever is going to need. And It has no user manual for users and no training course to use as it is THAT easy.

Are you using Google Apps for your online business? I hate the standard email packages which comes with any hosting account. I always wanted to use GMAIL for my business communications but sometime customers do not like the fact that some business is using FREE email address like you@gmail.com .. BUT it all changed…

Yeah with Google Apps you can have backend which is built on GMAIL , but in the front-end you could have you@yourdomain.com and so on! So you enjoy the both worlds!

I suggest you take a look at Google Apps today if you have not considered it before. For a business with up to 50 users it is free. So for a small business online with few employees this is not going to cost you a cent! Check out Google Apps here.

How a Website is Created Online Exactly – Part -1

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In offline world with my potential clients and friends (in Pakistan) I get this question a lot. Believe me this is very hard to explain as I have forgot the basics and I do not realize sometime that how hard it was for me to understand all of this stuff when i get started…

Today I am going to explain very general overview of a Website, its component and its stages of development and essentials. First of all let me start with three main components of a Website:

  1. Domain Name – A Name like www.YourDomain.com (You Buy it!)
  2. Hosting – Some space on a server which is 24/hours linked to internet. (You Rent it!)
  3. Webpages – Yeah the Real Website, the pages which you want to show there.

Then we have about three stages of building a website or creating webpages like:

  1. Design – Drafting and Finalizing the design of your website, the template
  2. Development – Creation of webpages using the design and code
  3. Testing and Uploading the finalized web pages to your web host.

Let’s talk more about components of a website:

Domain Name

Domain name is your website’s internet address. Just like your cell phone number it is address which is linked to your website so that whenever access that address in his browser your website is shown to him.

In technical sense, you know every computer on internet is linked to the Network through an IP…forget about it…i cannot explain this for now..sometime later..for now remember this is your website’s unique name just like your own cell phone number. You need to register this with a domain name registrar just like you do register/buy your cell phone number from a cellular company.

No there are no FREE domain names! You have to pay registration fee every year..it can cost you about Rs. 800 to Rs. 1000 per year (about $10) depending on the registrar you are using.

Yes sometime someone will offer you a free domain but you have to buy hosting or website services from them that is how they make money otherwise if they simply give away free domain names they have gone out of business in one week!

I Want a Personal Website & I do not have money to invest – I want everything free so does website domain name!!! Well for you my dear friend of college, first of all good luck with your studies. I am proud of you to see expanding your presence online. For you i recommend some free sub-domain!

Sub-Domains are Part of existing domains and companies can offer your free sub-domains at their websites. Like I own this domain www.Rboq.com , I can offer unlimited sub-domains to anyone , their domain name would be like this: for a friend with name Asad, it could be www.asad.rboq.com or in a correct way it would be http://asad.rboq.com

If you are serious in having online website i recommend own domain name. But if you just want a free ride for now, i suggest to get some free sub-domain with any reputable host online. For example Note: I have googled for some good sub-domain offers and sorry i could not find any legitimate so far…but here is best deal for you..go for latest model of website called BLOG 🙂

What is a Blog – Blog is just like a website in basic sense. It has everything in it for you to start with zero cost. You can have your blog live in one hour there are some of the big players online offering free, legitimate blogs. For Example Google’s Blogger or WordPress.com . How to create your own blog with Blogger or WordPress I will post about it in my next post, Insha Allah.

Ok what if you have credit card in hand, and ready to shell $10 for your great domain name right now, i suggest you buy through NameCheap , they are one of the best domain registrars online. I have registered and managed with them my own 50+ domain names and also many many domains of our clients are registered with them.

For now that is all, In next part I would share with you about hosting and then building a website… Stayed tuned!

Regards,

Mohsin Rasool

2Checkout Owner Alan Homewood Interviewed

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Hi,

If you do not know already about 2Checkout, you may check this out here 2Checkout.Alan Homewood Ower 2Co

Alan Homewood, the CEO and Found of 2Co was recently interviewed by RM, interview can be accesses here: Alan Homewood Interview.

I wanted to post that I have been using 2Co for years and I cannot live without their service, payment processing for every business online is the most integral part. Top payment processor used online is PayPal… But they have many disadvantages like limited to some countries, account limitation without any notice, and some people simply hate PayPal due to many other reasons…

2Checkout comes as second best option, or I should say First best option for small business owners online who need to accept payments for their product or services. It was great to know that Alan is doing his best to make as easy as possible for his clients to sell online.

They have added many features in their service recently and i love that, for example their new affiliate network, direct deposit payment option. It is great to receive payment directly in our bank account from 2Co without any Check with months of wait…

Alan said he has vision to make 2Checkout Billion Dollar Company 🙂 That is GREAT. I wish them Good Luck.

Uploading Files Fast Quick Tip

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When you are regularly blogging online, you may need some stuff to upload to your site time to time.

Like a plug-in which needs to be installed manually. You need to FTP the files of that plug-in to the plugins’ directory before you can activate it.

Here is a quick tip to save your time and frustration:

Where possible upload .zip file and then Unzip on the server!

This will save you 75% time of uploading and 99% time of brain work & tension. Because it is always easier to upload one file (no matter what size) than to upload many many tiny files.

Also in case of interruption you do not  need to worry what file is done and what needs to be re-uploaded..as you are dealing with just ONE file it is easier to manage.

That is for today a Quick tip 🙂

How to Delete All Those Spam Comments

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This is very risky to leave your WordPress blog open for all comment spam without adding any anti comment spam plugins.

This was the case with the blog which a client of us have, it had about 4000 spam comments, and it was going to take ages to delete them all from WordPress dashboard. So they came to us for the help.

We deleted all those about 4000 spam comment using little query operation at database level from phpmyadmin. I want to share the same process with you.

1. You need to login to your hosting panel and access PhpMyAdmin to access your database for that blog.

2. When you are there, select your blog’s database and then click SQL tab and run the following query:

DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = 0

3. Wow within milliseconds all spam comment junk is gone.

Deleted rows: 3994 (Query took 0.1472 sec)

Now go to your wordpress blog and see all pending(spam) comments are gone. Now you please add some anti spam plugins to stop this thing happening again. I recommend you activate built-in plugin for comment spam called akismet. And add any other anti spam plugin you may like.

WordPress as CMS Pages RSS Feeds

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More and more clients are demanding to have their site backend built on WordPress. They want to use WordPress but they do not want to use it as a blog but CMS or a Niche site.

To make a wordpress powered site look like a Content website and not just a blog, and also to make it work like a CMS, we add permanent content into Pages (instead of posts). This works great but there is a problem…

Problem is that by default WordPress does not generate RSS feeds from pages. To really benefit from this technology we need to have pages content also included into RSS feeds.

We solved this problem by installing a simple plugin available for this called RSS Include Pages.

I suggest you to install this plugin if your most of the content is in the form of Pages instead of posts in wordpress powered website.

Regards,

Mohsin

MySQL-Front What a Great Tool

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Hi,

For local development and coding I use WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) at my laptop and it is really great to do coding while disconnected from wide wide wild internet.

I use PhpMYAdmin to access MySQL db from localhost but just recently i was introduced with a Desktop Program named MySQL-Front to access MySQL db and much operations fast!

Shahzad my close friend just left today, for last two days he was with me at my dorm room + office. Wow what a learning experience to spend time with this senior developer. He has introduced this tool and I have downloaded their trail version and i am already having fun with it.

Another great development tool to add in my growing development tools collection!

Google Chrome Browser Background Problem

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Today I was working on a new wordpress theme and I discovered this Error/Bug in Google Chrome. What is the bug? Well it would not show the background of the body properly.

Every other browser like Firefox and I.E will show the background fine, but Chrome will show no background, or simple plane white color. While I used built in Element Inspect tool in Chrome, I see there it has applied blank background. I searched the Web, and found many fixes, but this is what worked for me:

Simple add to your CSS stylesheet this line:

html{ height: 100%;}

Also you may replace your Body tag, with Html,Body i.e.
Body
{some css here}

will become
Html,Body
{same CSS here.}

Hope this saves you some time and solve your problem.
Regards,
Mohsin Rasool

Quick Fix for WordPress Duplicate Content

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Most of the time new bloggers make this mistake. They have set their wordpress show full posts at their homepage, category pages and archive pages. It should not be the case, as this creates duplicate pages with same content on your website or blog which is powered by WordPress.

For SEO purposes and user friendliness, it should be set to show only summary or excerpts of posts at every pages except their own page or post page. That is there should be only one page at your blog or website which does have full orignal text, and all other pages should only show excerpt and link to that page.

This will help you have a great webpage with genuine content and many many internal and external incoming links to that page with anchor text in links. And this is surely going to rank your that page higher and higher for the related keywords targeted in that post.

So onward ask your webmaster or theme designer to set all home.php, index.php, category.php, arhive.php or any other template pages of WordPress theme to show only Excerpts of the posts, and only single.php, page.php show their full content. If you do want to do it yourself, look for DIY guide at my PressGold’s WordPress Blog for a detailed technical information related to this issue and fix. Also you can outsource this fix to my team at WarMarks.com if you do hate doing technical stuff yourself 🙂

Regards,

Mohsin Rasool

WordPress Blog Tips

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We at PressGold has started this WordPress Blog to share some of the best tips and tricks about WordPress, Blogging and Blogging using WordPress.

Most of the time new users need some customizations with new wordpress blog. At WarMarks we also help build Custom WordPress themes for our clients  for a very affordable one time charge. If you ever need WordPress Customization Service, you are welcome to visit WarMarks.com/support and send us your query. We will be responding with a quote within 12 hours time frame.

Soon we will be releasing some WordPress Themes and WordPress Plugins at our WordPress Blog, so stay tuned for new and exciting stuff released by PressGOLD team.

Have a great day,

Mohsin Rasool