Web Concepts

By Mitch “Netviber” Keeler

Want to add Lunartics, the Lunarpages Newsletter and the recent posts from Lunarforums all onto your own Lunarpages tab inside of Netvibes? Of course you do, silly. You can never have enough Lunartastic tips, tricks, articles and more. Thanks to the ease of creating a custom page via Netvibes I have this all ready and packaged together just for you.

All you need to do is click on the button bellow to add it to your own Netvibes setup.

I can promise you there is no better way to start your day!

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - $25 off Web Hosting! Coupon Code: blog25

Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “The Hostmaster” Keeler

From time to time we do receive a few frequently asked questions about our domain name registrations. I figured I would tackle a few of the most often asked ones here to help out any other current Lunarpages customers with questions or new ones who may not know yet.

What type of domains can Lunarpages register?

Lunarpages can register .com, .org, .us, .biz, .info, .name, .net, and .co.uk.

How can current customers register an additional domain name with Lunarpages?

You can add domain name registrations right from our Customer Account Page. New domain name registrations only cost $9.95 per domain name and then the same price for every year after that.

What if we don’t have a credit card on record with our account?

If that is the case, all you need to do is e-mail support@lunarapges.com with the following:

• Primary Domain Name:
• User Name:
• Home Address:
• First/Last Digits of Your Password:
• New Domain You Would Like to Register:

How can we transfer our domain name registered elsewhere to Lunarpages?

Send the same information as requested above to the same address, and we can get that taken care of for you there too. Here are a few more articles that should help you with any and all of your domain name questions you might have:

• Domain Name Transfers
• Domain Transfers and Domain Lifecycle

Also don’t forget about your free domain for life you get with the Basic and Business hosting plans.

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - $25 off Web Hosting! Coupon Code: blog25

Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “B-Ball” Keeler

The latest and greatest release of the hosting industry’s greatest newsletter is out and ready for reading. Lunarpages Newsletter, Issue 8 is ready for the masses.

In this month’s edition web have just for you packed in some of the best of the best:

• LunarNews March 2008

• Creating your First Website with LP Quicksite

• Lunar Legal - Should I register My Mark?

• A Little More About Windows Hosting

• The Pros and Cons of PayPal

• Write Better Web Site Content

• Lunarpages Interviews TheRatingBlog.com

• Top 10 Reasons to Burn Your Feed

• Lunarpages Staff Interview: The Infamous Steven Priest

• Difference in Hits vs Visits in Webalizer

• Help Us with your Hosting How-Tos

Won’t cost you a cent to read, and you can keep coming back for more. Please feel free to leave us any and all feedback on it, and also we want to hear your suggestions for Issue 9 coming to an inbox near you, this April!

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - $25 off Web Hosting! Coupon Code: blog25

Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “Q & A” Keeler

As some of you may know, Joomla is yet another one of the great free content management systems out there from the Web that you can install and use to make your web site even better. It adds management options you never thought you wanted or you never knew you needed. Over the weekend though I got a Lunartics reader asking me where could they find some templates and themes for this CMS king?

Here are a few of my suggestions for theme databases for Joomla powered web sites:

Joomla-Themes.co.uk

JoomlaShack.com

OSSkins.com

ThemesBase.com

Joomla-Themes.biz

Have any more good ones? Feel free to send them my way or drop them in as a comment. Would love to get a few more opinions on where the best places are to get Joomla themes are.

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - $25 off Web Hosting! Coupon Code: blog25

Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “Mr. Organization” Keeler

Not many of you might of realized that yesterday was the first day of Spring. That means that soon the birds will start chirping, the grass will turn green and summer will be coming up pretty quickly. So as with any other Spring tradition, it is now time to start thinking about Spring cleaning.

How do you do spring cleaning with your web site though? Well here are ten spring cleaning tips for your web site or online business that might help you get started.

1. Update Any Scripts and Plugins - Look at WordPress, Joomla and any other scripts or services you have installed and see if it is time to give them an upgrade. You should be doing this more often than every spring but now is a good time to check and make sure.
2. Do Your E-mail Addresses Work? - I recently got an e-mail from a friend who told me, “Sorry I didn’t get back to you I just figured out I had major problems with my e-mail account”. Send yourself a dummy message to make sure you don’t fall into the same boat.
3. Clean up Your Sidebars - This ‘bit of advice would be mainly for blogs. I have seen some people become really addicted to having sidebar widgets and gadgets. If you have more than five per sidebar, might be time to ditch some or at least make them look pretty again.
4. Review your Terms of Service - Make sure your terms of service and acceptable use policy are up to date and include everything you wish to include there. You may have made some changes to your web site and business since the last time you reviewed it so check it out now to make sure all your bases are still covered.
5. Check and Update your Sitemaps - If you have a Google Webmaster Tools account, it might be a good time to login and check to make sure Google didn’t find any errors, which would keep them from indexing certain parts of your web site.
6. Is Your Contact Information Correct? - Check out your contact page and make sure that the numbers, e-mail addresses and postal addresses listed there are up to date and show the correct information.
7. Renew Your Domains - When does your domain name run out of date? Might need to check and also be sure that you have all your hosting bills paid up too. This also makes for a good time to upgrade your hosting account to one with a few more perks.
8. Test Your Web Site Links - Are all your web site links working? Check your error logs in your various stats packages to see where people are finding 404s and try to fix all the broken links or non-existent pages you can find.
9. How Out of Date is Your “About Us” Section? - Checking out my own about us page on one of my other web sites I see I pretty much haven’t updated it since the launch of the site. Always good to keep this up to date because well, this is how people lean more about you and what you do.
10. Spellcheck Your Web Site Content - How many grammar errors can you find on your web site? If you don’t want to read through everything you have posted - you might try just going through a few of the most popular ones and making sure they are correct. Bad spelling really peeves some people, so best not to get on anybody’s bad side.

Have any more suggestion? Be sure to leave a comment to share with the rest of us.

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - $25 off Web Hosting! Coupon Code: blog25

Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “cPanel is Your Friend” Keeler

Your .htaccess file, with any Apache based server or hosting account is a very powerful tool that if you can learn to use for your advantage can help you complete many time consuming or difficult tasks with ease. How do you create one though for your web hosting account? This is a question that we get here time to time, and here is your solution.

Login to your cPanel with your user name and password, then once you have made it in, head over to your File Manager. Now the File Manager’s interface is a very familiar Windows-styled look at your files on your hosting account. You will want to click on your folder icon next to your public_html link next, that will take you to the insides of the public_html folder.

Inside you will see all your web site files. You need to scan down the page till you see the bold text, Create a New File. Click that and you should get in the upper-right corner a box with a few more setting to fill in. In the empty text box, put in .htaccess. Keep the drop down box on Text Document and then hit the Create button.

Now you have your .htaccess file inside of your public_html folder all with the help of cPanel and your helpful File Manger.

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - $25 off Web Hosting! Coupon Code: blog25

Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “The Transfererer” Keeler

One of the web hosting basics that all must eventually learn about and master is the art of FTP. FTP stands for file transfer protocol and acts as a way for you to move files and folders from your PC to your hosting account Online. With any of the Lunarpages web hosting accounts - this option is available to you.

Some of my top choices for FTP clients would be:

• FileZilla - One of if not the most popular open source FTP client out there today. Highly suggested solution for your file transferring needs.
• CoreFTP - Another awesome free and paid FTP program that features site file transfers, auto try failed transfers, one click transfers, keep alive functionality and more.
• SmartFTP - The best looking of the free FTP programs out there that you could use. SmartFTP is also a name you can trust, as they have been providing a good service for years.

When filling out your account information, this is what you should put in each box:

Hostname: For this, you would need to put in yourdomain.com (where yourdomain.com is your actual domain name) or servername.lunarpages.com (also where it says lunarpages.com this information might also change. See your welcome e-mail for more information).

User Name: This would be your account user name that you put in. This is the same one you use to login to your control panel.

Password: The password you can use, is the same one you use to login to your control panel.

That should be it. Try it out and see if it connects. If not, you might double check to make sure that you got all of your connection information correct. Yet again, this would be a good time to check back with your welcome e-mail to make sure that your information matches there with what you put in.

Also as a bonus we have a number of video tutorials to help you get your FTP account up and running.

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - $25 off Web Hosting! Coupon Code: blog25

Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “Your Talent Agent” Keeler

If you have a nack for writing or helping other people out please feel free to submit your own work to us. We are looking to feature one customer written article per month in our web hosting newsletter. The only thing that we ask is that the work is your own and does not belong to anybody else. Each month, month after month we will select one to toss into the Newsletter for the month.

Interested? Submit your articles to mitch.keeler@lunarpages.com with the title “LP Newsletter Article Submission”. Also be sure to include your Lunarpages hosted URL and name so that we can give you a shout out for your fabulous work. Starting next month we will feature one customer article per newsletter. If we don’t use your article one month, we will keep it on record and we may use it the next month.

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - $25 off Web Hosting! Coupon Code: blog25

Original post by Mitch

By Mitch "WordPress Guru" Keeler

WordPress might be one of the more popular blogging tools and scripts out there today, but there are still many unanswered questions about it.  Over the next few weeks I thought it might be a good idea to tackle some of these questions right here.  If you have a general WordPress question that has been keeping you up at night, feel free to send it my way to mitch.keeler@lunarpages.com.  Make sure you put in the title "Lunartics WordPress Question" so I can be sure to see it and also include your name and your Lunarpages hosted web site (if yo have one). 

As an example, lets tackle the question of changing your blog’s title. 

To change the name or title of your blog, you will need to login to the WordPress admin interface, usually found at:

yourdomain.com/wp-admin/

From there, click on Options and then the General tab. 

To change the title of your blog, find where it says "Blog title:" and put your own title into the text box next to it.  You can also change your in the text box under your title box.  Once you have done that, hit the "update options" button and you are done.

Remember to keep your questions general if possible, so that way everybody can get something out of the answer.  Have a WordPress question?  Send it my way and see it answered right here!

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - $25 off Web Hosting! Coupon Code: blog25

Original post by Mitch

Need help with importing your e-mail accounts into Gmail so that you can use Gmail as your e-mail client of choice? As long as you follow along (step by step) this should be an easy thing to do. Now why would you want to do this?

Well for an example you might really enjoy the Gmail interface? You want to have access to multiple accounts at the same time via webmail? The reasons are endless.

Setting up and using Gmail’s mail fetcher is easy and free. Won’t cost you a penny.

Step #1:
Click Settings from the top of any email page.

Step #2:
Click Accounts.

Step #3:
In the Get mail from other accounts section, click Add another mail account.

Step #4:
Enter the full email address of the account you’d like to access (you@yourdomain.com), then click Next Step.

Step #5:
Google will populate the Username and POP Server fields when possible, based on your email address. If you have problems later on down the road you might try changing it to “yourdomain.com” or “mail.yourdomain.com”. Next enter your password for the e-mail account in question. After you do that, click on Add Account.

To edit your account after it is setup, login to Gmail and then go to Settings and then the Accounts tab. Look for the section titled: Get mail from other accounts. Next to your e-mail address click on edit info to change your setting or Check mail now to manually have Gmail check for new e-mail. You can also click on View history to get a log of the last 4 times Gmail has downloaded mail from that account.

Hint: Double check and make sure your not leaving a version of the e-mail on the server (unless you want to). If no messages are being downloaded this can often cause your e-mail account to run out of space - and causing you problems with e-mail later on down the road.

Also be sure to follow the POP3 e-mail setup advice that comes with your Lunarpages welcome e-mail. For more information about using Gmail with your own e-mail account check out these links:

Gmail Help Discussion:
http://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Help-Discussion

Gmail Support:
http://mail.google.com/support/

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - $25 off Web Hosting! Coupon Code: blog25

Original post by Mitch