Unless your business is selling domains or something where you regularly transfer domains, this is not normally a process you will remember easily. Sure, the domain name registrars provide help but sometimes their help has a lot of  holes in them, leaving you to guess who gets what and who’s supposed to do what. I wrote this step-by-step checklist to help make everything clear so I can refresh my memory the next time I do this. This process is based on GoDaddy so the language and actions may differ slightly but overall procedure should be the same on any registrar. Hope it helps you too! Before you do anything make sure the domain is unlocked. If buying, tell seller to unlock it for you. In total, 3 codes are needed to complete the process. Transaction ID, Security code and Authorization code. Purchase a domain name transfer from your new favorite registrar. At some point in this purchase process, you will enter the domain name you wish to transfer. Once purchase is complete, an email goes out to the Administrative contact of your domain which will contain a Transaction ID and a Security Code. You will need these codes. If the

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During the tech support session, I promised to follow up with more hands on video recordings. Well here they are. It was great timing because I hosted the support session videos myself since it was way too large for YouTube and I really didn’t want it there anyway. So I recorded the steps I took. There are two scenarios. One hosted on your own web host and another where the videos are hosted on Amazon S3 – that is covered under part 2. Hope they help you and if they did, visit the video tutorial center for more short and quick technical assistance. I highly encourage you to view them in HD quality if your Internet connection and computer settings allow or it will get kinda blurry without – I record all my newer tutorials in HD quality – it’s got to do with YouTube squeezing it. Host your own video files Pt 1 Host your own video files Pt 2 (Amazon S3)

Everyone has been asking for a recording of our tech support session. So here is the video. FYI This runs about 60 minutes long. Hopefully, we can further shorten it down to 30 minutes as time goes by. Click on the image above to launch the video, then click the play button to start playing. Here are the codes and resources mentioned throughout the session. Code to link to feed icon: <a href="http://replace-with-your-feed-url"><img src="http://replace-with-your-feed-icon-graphic" /></a> Get feed icon URLs Feed Icons RSS feed icons ultimate list Video Web Wizard Video resources Camstudio Hana FLV Player Stream Video Player FV WordPress Flowplayer Flashden Finally, if you’re interested to know, I did manage to solve Patricia’s issue. The title tag was simply not being generated on the home page. Apparently, the All-in-one-SEO pack was interfering.

If you own a WordPress powered site, on and off you may find a rash of attacks on these sites. Which means yours is vulnerable too. I love WordPress but sometimes, its strengths – easy to use and setup can also be its Achilles heel. Here’s what I mean. It’s great that they system is super easy for even the less technologically inclined. That opens up a lot of possibilities for regular users. It’s a good thing. But the down side, is when something goes wrong, the same users are also ill equipped to handle them. This is so apparent when a site gets hacked. I get so many questions like “How do I get rid of it?” Problem is, every hacking is somewhat different. Sometimes they attack at the surface level, usually editing your theme – that’s a lot easier to fix. Sometimes they go deeper into your database. That can be more evasive. Most that I’ve normally encountered is theme tampering. This usually shows up in your source codes. Which is why I work hard to manually scan my site’s source code regularly to check for irregularities. How do you know? There are a variety of ways. Some

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As WordPress is being used more and more as a content management system, the role of Pages become clearer. Most of the time, I’d use Pages for opt-ins like this one and this. Pages are also good for newsletter subscription thank yous, or special landing/offer pages that you don’t link to from the main areas of your site and only release for specified groups of people. Removing these Pages from your site is a small issue – you can either edit your theme or use a plugin to remove the links but try searching your site using WordPress’ built in search. You’ll find it pulls up matching Pages that you don’t want people to see. Not great. While there are plugins like Search Unleashed which can help you do that, they often do a bit too much than you need it to. That’s true for me. I don’t need or want extra features, just to remove Pages from the search results. Here’s the method I am using. You enter this code in your theme’s functions.php file – or create the file if the theme doesn’t come with it. If you change themes, you will only have to copy it over

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Let’s say you have a video you want to put up on your blog but you don’t want to first upload to YouTube or any third party video hosting site. How do you embed the video on your site so it still plays like a YouTube video? Here’s how. Check what format your video is. For the web, it’s best to convert it into flash first. So if you have a .WMV or .MOV file, I would convert it into a .FLV first. If you’re using Windows, you can use the Free converter called Super to go that. Their website is quite confusing. Scroll to the very bottom to find text that says “Download SUPER © setup file”. Set it up on your computer, convert the file and save it to your computer. For your blog, download and install a plugin that supports embedding FLV files like Viper’s Video Quicktags (VVQ) on your blog. There are also several other FLV player plugins available here. Do check the video player license. Viper’s Video Quicktags uses the JW FLV Media Player which requires a license if you’re using on a commercial blog. Upload your video file (after converted into .flv) to your

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Sometimes, you’ll open an email from someone whom you subscribe to and whoa! What an impressive email! Maybe you’ve seen one like that and been wondering, how do you create beautiful emails like that for your newsletter/mailings? The solution is not as difficult as you may imagine. Of course it all begins with having a good design. Mine is simple. I like to keep HTML emails simple so it loads fast and trigger less flags. Step 1 – The best way to build an HTML newsletter template is to use your good old fashioned HTML editor like FrontPage, ExpressionWeb, DreamWeaver or Notepad (uhuh). Get the design down pat in the editor and save the page onto your computer. Step 2 – Your next step is to upload any graphics to your web site or a web accessible space like Photo Bucket. I prefer to upload them to my web site because I don’t want images on third party sites to raise any flags with spam filters. Step 3 – Third, you should go back to your template in your HTML editor and switch out the image references to the full URLs of the images on your web site. This part

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