How to Articles and Tips on Many Subjects at i How Site dot com

How to Download and Install Free FTP Client FileZilla

What is FileZilla and Why Should You use it?

FileZilla is a free FTP (File Transfer Protocol) client. Normally, FTP clients are used to upload and download files to and from your web server. For example, you may design your web pages on your computer but to make them available on the web, you’ll need to upload your pages to the web server. FTP clients are used to accomplish that task.

While there are many free FTP clients available on the web, I recommend FileZilla because it has many neat features and it is Open Source. That means it’s available free today and it’ll be free tomorrow. This article explains how you can download and install FileZilla on your computer with windows operating system. Note that your Windows system must be Windows 2000, XP, Vista or later. If you have an older Windows system like Windows 95, 98 etc. , these system are not supported and you, unfortunately, can’t install FileZilla on your computer.

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Posted by Gurmit in CategoryGeneral, Software | No Comments »

How to Backup Your WordPress Powered Site

If you have created a website or blog using WordPress and you don’t want to lose your content in the event of a mishap, it’s important to regularly backup your WordPress powered site so that you can easily restore your site from your backup in the event that a disaster occurs and your website becomes unavailable.

Backing up your WordPress powered website or blog is a two step process:

1. Backup your WordPress database
2. Backup the WordPress files and Folders

Backing Up Your WordPress database

You should backup your WordPress database on a regular basis if you frequently update your web site or blog and your content is so important that you don’t want to lose it. You can backup your WordPress database using phpMyAdmin as described in my article
How to Backup WordPress Database with phpMyAdmin (opens in a new window).

Backing up WordPress Files and Folders

You only need to backup your WordPress files and folders if you have made any modifications or customizations or uploaded some custom content such as images etc. The simplest way to backup your Wordpress files and folders is to use your FTP client and download a copy of all content and files to your computer

For example, if your WordPress is installed in the root directory (usually public_html or www), use your FTP client to download a copy of everything inside the public_html or whatever folder your WordPress is installed in. Depending upon what sort of FTP access your web host allows, you may not be able to download a copy of all the content inside the public_html folder; that is your FTP connection will be lost before the download is complete. If that happens then try downloading copies of individual files and folders inside the public_html folder and maintaining the same structure as your live site.

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Posted by Gurmit in CategoryWordpress | No Comments »

How to Reset Your WordPress User Name and Password with phpMyAdmin

When you download and install WordPress, it automatically assigns your user name as ‘admin’ and generates a random password for you to log in to your WordPress Administration area. Many people keep using these values of user name and password. Not a good idea especially if you keep using ‘admin’ as the user name because then a hacker only has to crack your password. But if you change the user name to something other than the default ‘admin’ then the hacker will have to crack not just your password but your user name as well. This will make a hacker’s job more difficult and thus your installation a bit more secure.

You can easily change your WordPress user name and password with phpMyAdmin if you have access to phpMyAdmin - most web hosting companies provide access to phpMyAdmin; if yours doesn’t then its time to change your web host :-)

Before proceeding with this procedure, you should backup your WordPress Database if you haven’t already done so. If you don’t know how to backup your WordPress database, you can do so by following the procedure outlined in my article How to Backup Wordpress Database with phpMyAdmin (opens in new window).

Procedure to Change Your WordPress User Name and Password with phpMyAdmin

1. Log on to your phpMyAdmin and you will be on the screen shown below.
   
2. Click on the Databases (as I have pointed to with a red arrow in the image above) and you will be on a screen that shows all the databases that you might have created in your account. Click on the WordPress database and you will be on a screen showing all the tables in your WordPress database as shown in the image below.
   
3. On this screen, look for the wp_users table - the one I pointed to with a red arrow and then click on the browse button - the one I circled with red in the image above. Note that this button is not labeled as ‘browse’ but if you hover your mouse pointer at it, it’ll show ‘browse’. Once you click on this ‘browse’ button, you’ll be on a screen as shown in the image below.
   
4. The screen above will show one or all your Wordpress users if you have created more than one. The pencil shaped button that I circled in red in the above image is the edit button. Click on it and you will be on a screen as shown in the image below.
   
5. In the screen as shown in the image above, look for the user_login field and look across under the value field and you’ll see your default user name as ‘admin’. Delete that and type in your new user name. I recommend you use letters and numbers for your use name and make it at least 8 characters long. Then look for user_pass field, which should be just under the user_login field as shown in the image above. Now look across under the value field and you’ll see a long string consisting of numbers and letters; that is your current password, encrypted. Delete that and type in your new password. Again I recommend a minimum of 8 characters though ideally you should use around 12 characters. For better protection, you can use capital letters, small letters and numbers; keep in mind that user name and password are case sensitive, so to log on to your Wordpress administration area you will have to type in your user name and password exactly as you type it here.
6. After you have typed in your password, look for the ‘Function’ field corresponding to the user_pass field and use the the drop down menu to select MD5 as shown in the image above. MD5 is used to encrypt your password.
7. Note down your user name and password exactly as you typed in above; you’ll need these to log on to your WordPress admin area. Look towards the right bottom of your screen and you’ll see a ‘Go’ button. Click on it. If everything goes well, the next screen will show the SQL query and your new user name and password in now active. Log on to your WordPress admin area to make sure that your new user name and password is working.

Once again I strongly recommend that you backup your WordPress database before you carry out the above procedure as you are directly modifying the database and if for any reason you screw up the database, your whole WordPress powered site may become unavailable and your only choice will be to restore it from your backup.

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Posted by Gurmit in CategoryWordpress | No Comments »

Microsoft Wants to Swallow Yahoo

On Friday, Feb 1, 2008, Microsoft announced that it is making an offer to Yahoo Inc. shareholders to buy the company for $44.6 billion (US) in cash and stock. It made the announcement after sending a letter on Thursday, Jan 31, 2008 to Yahoo Board of Directors.

While there are doubters, the general feeling is the bid will likely succeed because of the lack-luster performance of Yahoo. Taking advantage of the general dissatisfaction of Yahoo shareholders, Microsoft made the hostile takeover bid in hopes of increasing its Internet search business share.

Will this Acquisition Benefit Microsoft

It’s no secret that Microsoft feels threatened by the dominance of Google and it desperately wants to increase it’s share of the web search business. It has been trying to do this for the last several years without any measurable success. So it’s trying to do what it best; expand by swallowing others.

By taking over Yahoo, it hopes to face up to Google but that is no sure thing. Yahoo itself swallowed a few like AltaVista, Overture etc. but still failed to become the leader. If Microsoft does succeed in taking over Yahoo, it will still take years to integrate the two giants and pose any serious challenge to Google. Lets wait and watch. Times are sure going to be very interesting for the next little while.

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Posted by Gurmit in CategoryGeneral, Search Engines - SEO | No Comments »

How to Customize WordPress Footer

This article explains how you can make simple but useful customizations to your WordPress footer. I’ll illustrate the process with one practical example - the example of putting a copyright notice in the footer which will automatically update itself year after year and you’ll never have to bother about it again.

I have noticed and, you might have noticed as well, that many webmasters put a copyright notice in the footer that does not show the current year 2008 but may show the year as 2007, 2006 etc. That happens because the webmasters have put in the notice manually and then forgot to update it. With WordPress powered website, you can easily automate the process and your copy right notice will always be up to date.

Steps to Customize WordPress Footer

Before proceeding with the steps outlined in theprocedure below, you should make a backup copy of your WordPress footer. If your WordPress is installed in the root directory (usually public_html) with the default theme, then the footer (the file named footer.php) is located at
public_html/wp-content/themes/default/footer.php
If you are using a theme other than the default then you should navigate to that theme to find your correct footer.php file. It is always a good idea to make a backup of any file you intend to edit so that if you make a mistake you can upload the backup and keep your site or blog in working order. While the steps below are based on the default theme - WordPress Default 1.6 by Michael Heilemann, they should apply to any theme you might have installed.

1. Log on to your Wordpress administration area as usual.
2. Click on the Presentation tab - the one I circled in Red as shown in the image below and then click on the Theme Editor - the one I pointed to with a red arrow in the image below.
   
3. The theme editor will open as shown in the image below.
   
   Look towards the right of the screen and you’ll see a file named footer. In the image above, it’s the very last file - the one I circled in red.
4. Click on the footer as shown in the image above and the footer.php file will be loaded into the Theme Editor as shown in the image below.
   
   Look for the<p> and the corresponding </p> tag in the footer file as shown marked with red arrow in the image above. We are going to insert the code
   <br />Copyright &#169; <?php echo(date(Y)); ?>
   just before the </p> tag. To do that copy the above code and paste it just before the </p> tag in your footer file. Click on the Update File button located near the bottom of your screen and you should see a message that the file has been updated and you are done.

Now if you visit your website with a browser, at the very bottom of your page, you should read the notice

Copyright 2008

And when the year changes to 2009, the above notice will automatically change to Copyright 2009 and so on.

You can follow the above procedure to customize your footer any way you like. The important thing to remember is that most themes limit the footer to 2 or 3 lines, so if you put in too many lines while customizing your text will overflow and it won’t be very pretty. There are ways to get around that which I’ll discuss some other time.

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Posted by Gurmit in CategoryWordpress | No Comments »

How to Protect Your WordPress Folders with Index File

WordPress is an excellent free open source software that you can use to publish your blog or website. As may be expected with any free software as popular as WordPress, there are always concerns that security of your WordPress installation may be comprised. While 100% security of any software is not practical or feasible, here is an easy step that even a novice can take to protect the contents of their WordPress folders from prying eyes.

How to Protect Your WordPress Folders with Index File

This is the easiest step that anybody, including a beginner, can take; yet I find a lot of websites that fail to take this simple precaution to protect the contents of folder from prying eyes. For example, all WordPress installations have a folder named plugins where you install various plugins to enhance the functionality of WordPress. Many installations leave this folder unprotected. In such installations, if you (or a hacker) were to direct your browser to
http://SomesiteWithUnprotectedPluginsFolder.com/wp-content/plugins you will see ALL the contents of this folder as shown in the image below:
This happens because when there is no index file (such as index.php, index.htm, index.html etc.) in a folder, the web server displays all the contents of that folder unless that folder is protected. Thus a hacker will readily know what plugins have been installed on that site and may start working on a vulnerable plugin. If you have not protected your plugins folder, it’s highly recommended that you do so. Simply follow these steps:

• Create a simple html file using any text editor such as notepad or whatever text editor you usually use and save it as index.htm. If you don’t know how to create an html file, you can copy the sample below starting from top <html> tag to the bottom </html> tag:
  <html>
  <head>
  <meta http-equiv=”Content-Language” content=”en-us”>
  <meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″>
  <title>Helpful Page</title>
  </head>
  <body>
  <p><b>Hello:</b><br />We couldn’t find anything here! Click <a href=”http://www.ihowsite.com”>i How Site</a> to go our home page and try finding it there.</p>
  </body>
  </html>
  In the above sample you should replace ihowsite.com with your own domain otherwise anybody who clicks will end up on my site; not that I mind it :-)
• Once you have created this html file, upload it (using ftp or through control panel; whatever you usually use to upload your files to your web server) to the WordPress plugins folder. If you installed your WordPress in your root directory then the path will be /public_html/wp-content/plugins
• Once you have uploaded the file, point your browser to the plugins folder and you should no longer see all the contents. Instead you (or the hacker) will see the html file you created and uploaded. Click http://ihowsite.com/wp-content/plugins to see the above sample file in action at this site.
• If you have created other folders on your blog or website (for example, you might have created an images folder) which do not have an index file, you can upload the same html file you created above to those folders and server will no longer display all the contents of those folders to the public. Instead the server will only display the html file.

It is important to remember that the above procedure is not foolproof; it’s still possible to figure out the contents of your folders. No procedure is 100% foolproof, the above procedure just makes it harder for people to figure out the contents of your folders. If somebody is bent upon hacking your site, they probably will find a way. But that’s no reason why you should not take steps such as above to protect yourself as much as possible.

NOTE: It’s also possible to protect your folders through control panel. I’ll write about that some other time. The procedure outlined above is the simplest to implement.

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Google takes PageRank Watchers by Surprise

Google PageRank is the little green bar that you see in the Google toolbar if you have installed the Google toolbar in your browser. It’s the weight or the rank that Google assigns to a website or webpage. It can vary from zero (0) to 10 with 0 being the least important or no ranking at all and 10 being the highest rank. Google uses this PageRank to assess the relevancy of a web page to a user’s search query.

In the past few days Google has updated its PageRank database and most likely its PageRank algorithm as well. This has taken many PageRank watchers by surprise as Google had updated the PageRank in October 2007 and they were not expecting one so soon in 2008. Many website owners are complaining that their PR got lowered while they were expecting it to go up!

Have you noticed any change in your websites PageRank? Don’t worry too much even if your PR has gone down, just keep adding quality content and it’ll go up in the next update. Moreover, it’s fairly obvious that PageRank is just one of the many criteria that Google uses in its algorithm.

Another thing to remember is that it’s not a good idea to depend solely on search engines for your website traffic. You should always strive to get traffic from several sources so that the impact on your traffic is minimal of any adverse change in the search engine algorithms.

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Posted by Gurmit in CategoryGoogle, Search Engines - SEO | No Comments »

How to Backup Wordpress Database with phpMyAdmin

Did you know that if you are running your blog or website on Wordpress, all your data including any posts, pages, comments etc. is stored on mySQL database? In other words, any web site created with Wordpress is dynamic - the pages are created on the fly. How does Wordpress do that? The Wordpress does that by using mySQL database as the back-end.

In a typical static HTML website all HTML pages are individually created and stored on the web server itself. Whenever a user (browser) requests an HTML page, the web server passes that page to the browser. Thus if one of the pages in an HTML web site gets damaged or accidentally deleted, you only lose that one page. That is not the case with Wordpress.

In a Wordpress powered web site, no individual pages are stored on the web server. Instead all data is stored on a mySQL database. So when a user browser requests a page, Wordpress gets all the info about that page from the mySQL database, constructs the page and presents it to the browser. If for any reason the mySQL database gets damaged or corrupted so that Wordpress is unable to read info from the database, your whole web site may be lost!

Thus it’s very important to backup the mySQL database used by Wordpress on a regular basis. This article discusses how you can backup your database by using phpMyAdmin in cPanel. Simply follow these steps:

1. Log in to your cPanel control panel. If your website control panel/interface is different from cPanel you can still use this procedure so long as you know how to get to phpMyAdmin through your control panel.
2. Once you are logged in the cPanel, look for MySQL icon as shown below.
3. Click on the MySQL icon as shown in the above image and you will get to the screen labeled MySQL Account Maintenance. It gives you information about your MySQL databases and users etc. Scroll down and you’ll see the label phpMyAdmin as shown below.
4. Click on the phpMyAdmin label and a new phpMyAdmin window will open. This phpMyAdmin window will have information about your databases, tables etc. Look for the Databases label (see the arrow that I made in the image below) and click on it.
   
5. Once you have clicked the Databases label in step 4, the next screen will show the names of all the Databases in your account. If you see only one Database listed then that is the one that was created when you installed Wordpress, click on it. But if you see more than one Databases listed then you need to click on the one that belongs to Wordpress; that will be the Database you created when you installed Wordpress.
6. Once you have clicked on the Wordpress Database in step 5, the next screen will show the tables in your Wordpress database. You don’t need to check any tables here. Instead look at the top labels and you’ll see the ‘Export‘ label among others as shown in the image below.
7. Click on the Export label as shown in the above image and you will get a screen which has several sections and you’ll need to make several selections on this screen. I’ll explain each section of this screen below:
   Export Section
   The export section is shown in the image below.
   
   In this section select all the Wordpress tables. By default, the Wordpress tables are named as wp_tablename unless you have intentionally specified something different for table_prefix in your wp-config.php file. If Wordpress is the only application that uses your database then all tables shown in this section belong to Wordpress and they will automatically be selected when this screen is opened. In case the tables are not selected, you can easily select them by clicking on the Select All label. Also make sure to select SQL as shown in the image above.
   Options Section
   This section is shown in the image below.
   
   Under this section make check marks on: Structure, Add Drop Table, Add Auto-increment value, Enclose table and field names with backquotes, Data. All these check marks are shown in the image above.
   Save as File Section
   In this section make check mark on Save as File and select Compression as None as shown in the image below.
   
   Double check to make sure you have fully completed this step (#7) and checked all the boxes as shown in the images above.
8. Once you have completed step #7 above, click on the Go button located towards the bottom right and you will be prompted to download the file and save it to your computer.
9. Select the folder where you want to save this file on your computer and the download will begin. Depending on the size of your database, the download may take a while to complete. Once the download is complete, you have backed up your Wordpress database on your computer.

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How to Install Wordpress with Fantastico

If you are thinking of installing Wordpress on your website and your web host provides the cPanel control panel, you don’t need to download, unzip and upload any files to install Wordpress. You can easily use Fantastico which is available in the cPanel.

Requirements

To proceed with this procedure you’ll need to meet the following requirements. Now-a-days almost all web hosts provide these services but if you are not sure then you should check with your web hosting provider.

• The control panel is cPanel
• You have the authority to log into your cPanel
• Your hosting includes PHP
• Your web hosting package allows you to create mySQL databases and you have at least one mySQL database available. For example if your web hosting package allows you to create a maximum of 10 mySQL databases and you have already created 10 databases for other applications, you won’t be able to install Wordpress.

Wordpress Installation Procedure Using Fantastico

Simply follow these steps:

1. Log on to your cPanel as usual
2. As soon as you log into your cPanel, you’ll see a number of icons with labels underneath them. Look towards the bottom of the cPanel (you might have to scroll down) and you’ll notice an icon with the label Fantastico De Luxe as shown below.
3. Click on the Fantastico icon and you’ll be presented with the Fantastico screen in the cPanel as shown below.
4. Look left under the heading ‘Blogs’ and you’ll see Wordpress. Click on Wordpress and the next screen of cPanel will show Wordpress as below.
5. As you can see in the above image, it gives a short description of Wordpress etc. But what we are really interested in the line that says New Installation; click on it and you will see the screen below.
6. In your cPanel screen shown above, fill in the following required information:
   • Install on domain: Your domain should have automatically been selected in the box. If not then use the drop down to select your domain on which you want to install Wordpress.
   • Install in Directory: If you want to install in the home directory (also called root directory), then leave it blank as shown in the image above. But if you want to install Wordpress in a sub-directory, then type in the name of that directory. Note that this directory should not already exist; the installation script will automatically create this directory. For example, if you want to install Wordpress in a directory like http://YourDomain.com/blog then you will type ‘blog’ (without quotes) in the above box and the directory ‘blog’ should not already exist in your home (root) directory.
   • Admin Access Data: Fill in the user name and password that you would like to use when logging on to the Wordpress admin panel. For illustration purpose I have filled in the values as ‘UserName’ and ‘password’ but you should NEVER use these values; use your own. Use only letters and numbers for username and password and note them down as after installation, you’ll need these values to log on to the Wordpress admin panel.
   • Base configuration: Fill in the required information. All these vales can be left blank except for the email. These values can be changed later in the Wordpress admin panel.
   • E-mail account configuration: These values are only needed if you plan to blog by email. If you don’t plan to blog by email or you don’t know what blogging by email means then just leave these values blank. Later on if you change your mind these values can be easily added/edited through the Wordpress admin panel.
7. After you have filled in the required information and double checked to make sure that everything is filled in correctly, click on Install Wordpress. The installation process will start and the next screen will printout important information like mySQL database name etc. that the installation will create. Note down all this information.
8. Click on the Finish Installation button and you are done! The next screen will print all important information which you should note down and it also offers you the option to get all info emailed to you.

Your Wordpress is now installed and ready for you to use.

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Posted by Gurmit in CategoryWordpress | 8 Comments »