The graphic was found at pluggd.in.

So how do you create a great password that is long and  mysterious that you can actually remember? A few of my favorite posts on the topic:

• How to create strong passwords you’ll remember
• Another one on how to create strong passwords you can easily remember
• Create passwords in a flash with strong password generator
• The ultimate guide for creating strong passwords
• Create a strong password based on your personal information

So, do us all a favor – change your underwear, I mean password, frequently and save yourself the embarrassment of being caught with your pants down.

Added Bytes has got the ULTIMATE collection of cheat sheets on every topic a webmaster or blogger could need. The ones I find most useful are:

• CSS Cheat Sheet (V2)
• PHP Cheat Sheet (V2)
• HTML Character Entities Cheat Sheet
• Mod_Rewrite Cheat Sheet
• RGB Hex Color Chart

I have these and some of my other favorites printed out, in plastic sheet protectors, and filed in 3-ring binder for quick reference.

Have a great weekend!

Social Media in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.

Other Common Craft videos I love:

• Podcasting in Plain English
• RSS in Plain English
• Twitter in Plain English
• Social Bookmarking in Plain English
• Blogs in Plain English

Funny enough, I came across the video via a tweet from Mike Sansone of Converstations on Twitter. If you are on Twitter, you can follow me, too.

PS – Have you heard about SOBCon08 yet? It is part conference, part business school for bloggers, and will be the blogging event of the year. Check out the list of speakers they have lined up already – you do not want to miss it! I am competing in the SOBCon contest to go to the event for free – click on any of the SOBCon links (or the cool banner on the right) and help me out. You don’t have to do anything fancy, just click.

Here are the basic episode summaries:

• Browser Wars:  This episode is about the early days of the Internet, the rise and fall of Netscape, Microsoft’s entrance into the Browser Wars and the antics it used to acquire dominance.
• Search focuses on the evolution of the search engines as we know them today – Google, Excite and Yahoo – and the players in their amazing growth.
• Bubble (summary from the Science Channel): In an astonishing journalistic coup, the founders of the Amazon and Ebay, Jeff Bezos and Pierre Omidyar, tell the story of how their business grew from nothing to dominate the global economy and profoundly change the way we live our lives.
• People Power (summary from the Science Channel): This is the story of how the internet has changed society and how a new breed of entrepreneurs are shaping our digital futures. It all started with Napster; a way of swapping music that was dreamt up by the teenaged Shawn Fanning.

If you didn’t get to watch the shows last night, it looks like the Science Channel is rerunning them all week. Set that DVR and catch up on the history of one of the most revolutionary advances of all time – the thing we call the World Wide Web.

WHAT IS A PDF FILE?

Created by Adobe Systems in 1993, a PDF, or Portable Document Format, allows you to share any document, created in any software with anyone, on any platform. Basically, it means if I create a document in PageMaker and you want to see it, you can – and you don’t need to have PageMaker to do it.

When the PDF application was first released, the only way you could read or create a PDF file was by using Adobe’s software, which is not always affordable for the average user. Adobe released a free version of Adobe Reader, which made it much more feasible for the general public to receive the PDF files.

So reading one is easy, but how do you create one?

CREATING A PDF FILE USING AN ONLINE SERVICE

If you need to create a PDF file quickly and just don’t have the time to research the best PDF creators, download software, or learn something new, Adobe offers a FREE trial of their online PDF creator. With the Adobe online PDF creator, you can convert your first 5 PDFs for free. If you think this is a service you want to use a lot more, you can get a subscription for it.

Other online options:

• PDF Online
• Online PDF Converter
  
• Express PDF

CREATING A PDF FILE USING A DESKTOP APPLICATION

If you think you will need to create PDF files frequently, it is definitely worth downloading a PDF creator application, or if you need your PDF files to be high-end print quality, you might just need to fork out the bucks for the real thing. A lot of design software comes with PDF capabilities built in. If you are using any of them (like Dreamweaver came with Macromedia Flash Paper, a great PDF creator that I use daily), you may want to recheck your installation disks. You may have something already.

When using a desktop PDF creator, it is often as easy as sending a document to a printer. Instead of the end product being a piece of paper coming out of your printer, you will “print” the document to a PDF file that you can then email, upload or share with others electronically.

Other PDF creators give you a one-click conversion option as well. It is just a matter of reading the documentation and playing around with the software.

Adobe Acrobat Professional 8.0 is about $400, however, there are plenty of more affordable options (all under $100):

• ScanSoft PDF Converter 4 Professional
• Nitro PDF Professional
• MyPDF Maker

Free is good, too:

• CutePDF
• DocuDesk - 5 free trials
• Firefox add-on Loop to PDF lets you upload, convert and combine PDF files from your toolbar
• PDF995
• PDF Online

This was merely an introduction to PDF files and what they are. Depending on your needs or your end user needs, there are endless applications, add ons, additional capabilities and such you can get into. If you are sending files to a print publication, dealing with secure documents, multi authors, user interactivity and other challenges, it is well worth the investment into learning advanced PDF techniques.

And for all my readers who are already very adept with PDF conversion, I know there are other tools that are easy to use, powerful, and affordable. What do you use?  

• I have been doing some work in the SEO/SEM realm for a client lately. Search Engine Journal’s 32 Important Search Marketing Acronyms has come in handy more than once.
• Samuel at Wake Up Later has put together one of the best lists for freelancers that I have read in a long time! It is 10 Absolute “Nos” for Freelancers – how many of these mistakes have you made at least once in your freelance career? I know I have made some of them.
• Robyn Tippins at Practical Blogging is having a contest – she wants to know what you do to make your area of the world a better place to be and the prize is a three year subscription to Search Marketing Standard and there is also a special deal that will benefit you and a very important charity. I’ll be entering later this week.
• Another gem from Search Engine Journal is Linkbait 101: How to Create Linkable Content and Get Others to Link to It.
• Wendy at eMoms at Home shares a great list of 27 Website Promotion Sources That Have Nothing to do with Google or SEO.
• Looking for some new blogs to read? Phil Gerbyshak has shared a list of more than 125 of his personal favorites - you know if he recommends them they are great!!

Thanks to all the web professionals who continue to share their knowledge, tips and insight so that we can all benefit!!

From Pablo:

When your website uses any kind of insert data in a database (register users, add comments or anything else) it’s better to create a holder page while moving and testing everything on the new host, avoiding forgotten data on your DB. I always do that putting a holder on the old host and, on the new, keep everything working fine, because when changing DNS servers it may take a while replicating the changes to the “world”.

From Steven Rushing:

Something that very new website owners may not think about is your databases. My very first host switch, I downloaded all my files and ran. I reallly didn’t like my host.  But without the database my wordpress files were useless! This was 4 years ago now, when I was very new, but DON’T FORGET YOUR DATABASES!

From Michael:

Problems arise when people buy domains from the same web host, because transferring domains is much, much more complex (if even possible) so I would also recommend that you never buy your domain from the same company that hosts your site, even though it seems more convenient.

From Dan:

If you have access to your machine’s hosts file, do this before changing the DNS servers with your registrar:

Add entries domain name pointing to your new hosting companies IP in your hosts file (Linux, /etc/hosts; Windows, should be %SystemRoot%\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts). Then, when you go to your site in your web browser, you’ll be seeing it from your new site. You may have to restart your browser or even your computer (or just manually clear the DNS cache).

For example, if the new IP address is 1.1.1.1 and your domain is yourdomain.com, add this to your hosts file:

1.1.1.1 yourdomain.com www.yourdomain.com

This way you can test before every committing to changing DNS servers. If all looks good THEN change your DNS over.

From Michael:

Check out a Slicehost VPS. Switched from multiple shared hosting providers to a VPS and the performance has been orders of magnitude better that a shared host. It’s for the technically inclined, but if you get a VPS or dedicated server, it’s trivial to move between hosts.

From Loren:

Your list is not perfect. When you sign up for new hosting, you can have the new hosting company provide you with your IP address so you can actually see your files on the web before you change the name servers. You will also need to update your scripts as the name of your database may change depending on some hosts.

Also, some hosts (such as for .nr domains) are very picky about name server changes.. it can really be hard when some lousy companies don’t even have an online control panel for you to manage this stuff.

From Andrew:

I would not recommend having your hosting provider register your domain for you in order not to have problems later when moving to a new host.

From Barry:

I agree with a couple earlier posts–for database driven sites, the database is the most important part. Here’s a good tip if you know how to configure your databases.

First copy the files to the new host, and then also copy the database to the new host.

Then change the permissions on the new host’s database so that the OLD host has permission to access the database, and then go to the old site and edit the config files to point to the database on the new host instead of localhost.

Now if you edit the DB content (posts, comments, etc.) the changes will all be on the new host, and the database on the old host isn’t needed anymore.

Then whan that all works, switch the DNS to point to the new host….and editing your local hosts file to test the new host first is a good idea.

From Vic:

easier way – if your host is cPanel; just tell your new host to do the transfer for you – they can do it immediately within a couple moments ; all your files + emails and settings will be instantly transfered.

From webhosting:

One of the reason I prefer CPanel control panel over other control panel is because switching between Cpanel host is much easier. WHM has a feature that can helps in downloading the entire site from one server to another and thus making moving host very easy (HostGator is using Cpanel).

From Gil Megadish:

I’m an expert at this field

I have moved 5 providers in the past 2 years. The guideline above is good for static websites. I have encountered difficulties not discussed in the post. Among are:

1. While DNS update is propagating, some users see the old server, to which they register and add new content. While others see the new server and add new content to that. Within 48 hours, nobody will be using the old server, but how do you sync the old with the new?

2. Apache/PHP versions matter! PHP of one version returns warning which is an error on the other. Different versions of shutils behave differently. And last but not least, sendmail never survives the move! Remember this!

3. Always make sure your new server can handle at least the same load as the old server. If possible, make an .htaccess to force 301 redirect to the new server (by ip address of course.)

4. Use Amazon S3 for user uploaded media!

5. Another trick I haven’t tried yet, is to set two A record on your DNS, with priority for the old server. Then let it propagate for 48 hours before simply shutting down the old server and removing it from DNS. That way, clients are supposed to try both IPs, so for the first 48 hours, they will always fail on the first IP before moving to the second. Haven’t tried it yet, but time will come to move again

From Vaibhav:

I had a similar post some time ago.. This one is specific for wordpress blogs. If anyone is interested, it is at: http://blog.gadodia.net/steps-to-move-your-blog/

From Baz L:

These steps work great if you have just HTML content. Things get a bit more complicated when you have MySQL databases involved. This will help: http://www.webdevelopment2.com/moving-wordpress-to-a-different-domain/

Have you done a hosting switch? If so, what would you do differently next time or what did you learn in the process?

What is FTP?

Well, it stands for File Transfer Protocol, but all you need to know is that it is a way to connect your PC to your web host so you can transfer files from one place to the other.

It’s as easy as 1-2-3…

1. Get an FTP program

Most of the FTP programs work basically the same so once you get the hang of one of them you should be able to handle any of them. If you use Firefox, you can download FireFTP for free. It is an extremely easy FTP program to use.

Other good FTP programs include:

• CuteFTP
• CyberDuck
• Filezilla
• WS FTP Pro
• CoffeeCup Direct FTP
  

2. Set up your connection

For the purposes of this tutorial, I am going to use FireFTP instructions and screen captures. Your FTP program may not have exactly the same screens, but they all ask for the same information.

Launch FireFTP and then choose Manage Accounts. Select New. You will now see a screen that looks like this:

1. Give your site a name that makes sense (most likely your site’s name).
2. Fill in your host address - this is usually your IP address, but depending on your web host, it may be your full domain name or it could be ftp:yourdomain.com. When you set up your hosting account, this information should have been provided to you.
3. Fill in your user name and password and then choose OK. (Don’t worry about those other two tabs right now)
4. Next click the Connect button to establish a connection between your computer and the web server.

3. Drag and drop

One side of the screen will show the files on your computer and the other side will show the files on the server.

1. Navigate to the folder/file you want to upload FROM on your computer. Look at the other side of the screen and navigate to the folder you want to upload TO on the server. (See step one in the graphic)
2. On the “local” side (also known as your computer), highlight the file(s) you wish to upload.
3. The buttons in the center represent the direction of the file transfer -  you want to click on the  arrow pointing towards your server  (upload).
4. The file will arrive on your server and be listed in the folder you selected.

Most programs, like FireFTP, allow you to do this process via Drag and Drop, too. In other words, you can select the file on your local computer and drag it to the folder on the server that you want it to go to.

As for downloading – the whole process also works in reverse. You can select a file on your server and transfer it to your local computer side by following the same instructions as above, just start on the server side of the screen.

Obviously, these are just the very basics of FTP, but with a little practice, even the novice can become proficient at moving files from one place to another.

Related Posts:

• Tutorial – How to create your own FavIcon
• CSS Classroom – Div vs. Span
• 6 Easy Steps to making a Web Hosting Switch
  

In a nutshell, DIV is a block level element. In other words, you use it to define the characteristics you want a whole block of code to follow. It is used to break up sections of a page and it can contain additional tags. If you are familiar with HTML, the DIV element is very similar to the P (paragraph) element.

On the other hand, SPAN is an inline element. Inserting a SPAN tag into a line of code lets the browser know to apply the indicated style to a small section of text, but not to break the line. It cannot contain any additional elements. It is kind of like the old FONT element that you would apply in HTML.

Here is another way to remember it – a DIV can contain a SPAN but a SPAN cannot contain a DIV.

Related Posts:

• Terminology – What is CSS?
• Tutorial – How to create your own Favicon