There are a lot of good choices when it comes to picking your FTP client.  I have reviewed several via the website here and I am sure there are other good ones I haven’t looked at.  Personally, my favorite FTP client is FileZilla. You could also try out WS_FTP, SmartFTP, CuteFTP or a number of other choices there are out there.

Now that you have an FTP client, how do you get started? Well, instructions may vary depending on the FTP client you choose.  Here are the basic details you will need to input:

• Hostname: yourdomain.com
• Username: your account username
• Password: your account password
• Passive FTP: ON for linux accounts, OFF for Windows accounts

Should you use a web browser for FTP? I would suggest against it.  It can be done usually by going to ftp://yourdomain.com or ftp://user:pass@yourdomain.com/ but my best advice for you would be to get a FTP client to do the job for you.  If your webhost allows it, you might also want to set up secure FTP or FTP over a TLS connection.

This is pretty easy to setup by adding this to your .htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^mydomain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Please note, you will need to change mydomain.com to your actual domain name.

Once you have done so, both mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com will both send you to www.mydomain.com. This is usually done for search engine optimization reasons, to prevent the search engines from seeing your one web site as two different web sites.

You can also force your domain to drop the www from the address when typed in, if you would rather have it the other way around. In that situation, you would need to add this to your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mydomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Please note, you will need to change mydomain.com to your actual domain name.

This will make both mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com send you to just mydomain.com.   Hope this comes in handy the next time you are optimizing your own websites.

Facebook is more than just a social network where you can waste your time with virtual farm animals.  It is yet another social destination on the web that you should establish yourself on, so that people who care about your website, your products, or just you can learn more.  Facebook gives people several confusing routes to go when it comes to establishing any brand on their website though – so let me see if I can cut through the questions, and tell you the right direction to take your marketing on Facebook.

Facebook Profiles, Groups and Fan Pages

Facebook has three different kinds of pages that people can setup.  You have Facebook profiles, which are often used for personal profiles.  You have groups that are there for bigger causes and group activities.  Last but not least, you have fan pages – which are there to put your products on a pedestal and let people keep up with what is going on with them via Facebook.

More times than not, I would suggest that you market yourself through a Facebook fan page.

How to Setup a Facebook Fan Page

We have detailed the steps needed for starting up a Facebook Fan Page in previous articles.  You can check out my guide on how to create a Facebook fan page for more information on the exact steps. Make sure though that you put some thought in who and what you are promoting.

• If you are promoting your books, you might create a fan page per book – or a fan page for all the books
• If you are promoting your website, you might create the fan page about your entire website, or the part of the website that is the most popular

No matter which way you go, you have to ask yourself if this is something you will be able to sustain too.  People will be looking for updates early and often, so if you can not come up with something to share with those people who are your fans, maybe you need to broaden your topic a ‘bit more.

What Should You Post on Your Facebook Fan Page?

Once your Facebook fan page is setup, you can start making a strategy on how you will use it to get the word out about what it is you are putting out there.  To start out, you might setup a calendar to make weekly updates on what you are doing, that people would be interested in.  For example, if you are running a shoe store Facebook fan page, every Tuesday you might tell people about that week’s big sale on sneakers.  This way people start to say to themselves, “Hey, every Tuesday I’m going to check out that Facebook fan page – because I do need a new pair of shoes”.  No matter I you are selling shoes, promoting your recent blog post, or anything else, you have to remember that your number one job is to answer the public’s needs.

Do not just be another product, service or resource out there.  You need to be the solution to go to.

Need some inspiration? Here are a few topic ideas for you to try on your own Facebook fan page:

• Ask a question – Find something that your fan page members have in common, and ask about it. This helps inspire socialization on your Facebook fan page.
• Give advice – Give a solution to a problem that your fan page users might have.  If you sell doorknobs, then you might post a link to a website that shares doorknob shining tips.
• Get some help – Ask for your fan page members to help you with something concerning your business. For example, if you are a web designer, you might post two designs and then ask the public which one they like more and why.

Also remember,  you do not want to go overboard with updates or plugs back to your products.  Start out with regular posts that are few and far between.  As your Facebook fan page gets more users – you can do more weekly to engage those users even more.

In conclusion, you need to become an irreplaceable resource on what it is you do. It won’t happen overnight, but as time moves on and you slowly start to get more and more users – people will start to respect you as the source for what it is you are marketing to them, and will hopefully tell others to come check you out.  Facebook Fan pages are a wonderful way to extend your business, your brand or yourself to an entirely new audience.

Have Facebook fan page questions? Leave them in the comments! I would be happy to help cover any other concerns you might have on Facebook marketing.

To become a ninja in Fat Princess, you must pick up a special purple hat from within your castle, and then press the triangle button until you see you are a ninja.  The ninja has six hearts for health, and moves about as quick as the Ranger class.  Rather than the ability to upgrade hats, the ninja gets a special move in which he can turn invisible for eight to ten seconds and walk through the opponents’ castle doors.  This gives you a real advantage when it comes to grabbing the princess without being seen.

Attacking with the Ninja’s Sword – By rapidly hitting the attack button, you can make your ninja swing his ninja sword (aka katana) to attack. This is a great way to fight people when you’re in close quarters with them.  It strikes a little faster than the warrior’s sword, in my opinion.

Attacking with the Ninja’s Stars – When you hold down the attack button to charge it up, your ninja will throw stars (aka shurikens) at whomever you are targeting on the opposite team.  He will throw one star if the attack is charged 1/4th of the way, two if it is charged half way, three if it is charged 3/4ths of the way, and four if it is charged all the way up.

Turning Invisible with the Ninja

Your special move, as I touched upon before is the ability to turn invisible for eight to ten seconds once your special bar has filled all the way up.  Sneaking through the castle walls is not the only thing you can do as the invisible ninja though.  You can also try to sneak attack your opponents too.  If you attack them, while invisible, then you do three hearts worth of damage overall. However, be careful when trying to attack because once you hit the attack button, or enter an outpost, your invisibility is gone.

More Ninja Class Tips and Tricks

Here are a few more things you should remember when playing as the Ninja class in Fat Princess:

• You can set your weapons on fire to do greater damage by walking by a lit piece of wood or a torch on the battlefield.
• When you are invisible, both sides can still see your actual location if they check the map.
• Every so often, when the ninja dies he will pull out his sword and fall on it.  Something to keep an eye out for.

I hope you enjoy this guide to playing as the Ninja class in Fat Princess, for the PlayStation 3.  Even though the ninja started as a concept idea that was never really suppose to see the light of day, I am really happy with how Atomic Operations were able to make it into a very fun class of character to play with in the game.

Due to the fact that there is no villager hat machine, since the villager is who you start out as, let me talk about playing as a villager in both defensive and offensive roles.

Defensive Villager

Playing with the villager on defense, might not be the smartest idea.  He only has two hearts of health, and not much of any attack.  However, if you are in a pinch, you can use the villager’s slap attack as a way to get somebody to drop a princess.  I have played many games where I would just keep slapping the princess out of the other team’s hands just to keep them occupied till my other teammates arrived.  The number of slaps it takes to get somebody to drop a princess also seems to vary depending on what angle you hit them from (from the front, back, or sides).

Offensive Villager

When you are playing on offense, you can use the same slapping technique (by rapidly hitting the attack button) too.  The villager’s best offensive feature is its speed.  The villager class is the fastest one when it comes to carrying the princess back to your side.  Often, when a game starts you will see three or four villagers run across to try to get into the other team’s castle or fort before the doors are built to quickly grab the princess and get out while nobody is looking.

Here’s a great video to show you how effective this can be at times:

More Villager Class Tips and Tricks

Here are a few other tips to remember when playing as the villager in Fat Princess:

• Use the villager to harvest wood and ore that the worker has chopped to get more resources, faster.
• Although it is a ‘bit suicidal, you can always grab a bomb as a villager, light it and then look for the biggest mob of players from the other side to run into.
• Get the “Don’t Make Me Slap You!” trophy by slapping 20 objects out of the enemy’s hands in online games.
• Run and grab cake as the villager to get your princess fatter a lot faster.

Hope that helps you out the next time you play as the villager class in Fat Princess.  The thing to remember is they are not as useless as you might of thought.  There are a lot of good situations where having a villager coming along does come in handy.

Warriors have six hearts for health, and are fairly slow, compared to somebody like the standard villager that you start off as. If you want to get up close and personal in your PSN battles on Fat Princess, the warrior hat is the one to pick up.

Level One – Sword and Shield

When you pick up a warrior class hat before that hat machine is upgraded, your warrior will come equipped with a sword and shield.  The shield is helpful for blocking attacks or projectiles being thrown your way.  By tapping the attack button you can have your little warrior hack and slash his way through an opponent.  When you charge the attack (by holding down the attack button for a few seconds) then you get a spinning attack that reminds me somewhat of Link from the Legend of Zelda.

Level Two – Pull Out the Glaive

Once your warrior class hat machine has been upgraded, you get access to the upgraded warrior.  In this form, the warrior trades his sword and shield for a glaive.  When the warrior has the glaive, he can do the standard hack and slash like you did with your sword by tapping the attack button.  When you charge the glaive attack though (by holding down the attack button for a few seconds) you can execute a two-strike combo.  The warrior will rush the opponent at a very fast speed with one attack, then will execute a final swing attack as he jump down at the opponent.

More Warrior Class Tips and Tricks

Need more help when going into battle as the Warrior in Fat Princess?  Here are a few more tips to help you survive.

• By using your charged glaive attack, you can move across the map at a faster rate.
• Keep your eye out for gaps, water or lava you can dash over by jumping and then performing the warrior’s charged glaive attack.
• You can light your sword (level one warrior) or your glaive (level two warrior) with torches or burning wood found in the various locations on the map.
• Practice blocking attacks with the warrior’s shield.  Once you block 100 projectiles in online games – you will get the This is Caketown! trophy.

Warriors, by far, might be the most powerful class in the Fat Princess game.  However, it should be remembered that the best attempts at grabbing the princess should be done in a group.  While the warrior is a good one to pick up the princess, you want a mage freezing people, a priest healing you and well, let us just say it never hurts to have some backup.

Did you know that in Google Analytics, you can easily make annotations for big events happening to your website?  I am going to share with you the very simple way I made note of all my recent website designs in just a few steps. 

The first thing you will want to do is open up one of your website profiles in Google Analytics.  Next, under the visitor dashboard at the top, hit the tab that has the arrow pointing down on it.

Once you do that, you will see a link that says, "+ Create new annotation".  Click that link to create your new note.

Now, you will want to give the date you want the note to show up on in the first text box.  In the middle text box, leave yourself a note (I just put 2010 Redesign as my note), choose to make the note visible to other who have access to your Google Analytics report for this website or not, and then hit the save button.  Now you will see a little speech bubble come up on the date you added the annotation on.

You can do this as many times as you want.  It is a service put there to really make note of big website changes that you would like to mark in your statistics.  Events this would be perfect for could be:

• A major website redesign
• A change in your website advertisements
• The starting of a new landing page campaign

The possibilities go on and on.  I am just happy that Google provides us with such an open ended toolset to play with and customize to suit our needs.  Also worth making note of is the fact that your annotation will show up on your other traffic charts too, such as pageviews, pages/visits, bounce rate, and more.

Priests may only have four hearts for health, but they can also drain life to replenish themselves once your priest hat machine has been upgraded. We will talk more about the dark priest later though.  The priest class in Fat Princess has two stages to master too.  Before you upgrade the hat machine, they are white priests ready to heal you.  Once the priest hat machine has been upgraded though they get nasty with the ability to curse or drain the opposing team.

Level One – Healing the Party

The level one, or white priest, has an important part to play in any game.  Rather than making your teammates sit down and eat cake to refill their health, you can use your staff to get them healed up one by one or with a charged area heal.  The targeted heal is good if you are just with one or two people, and the area heal gets stronger the longer you hold down the charge button (until it has reached it’s fully charged status).  When playing as the priest, do what you can to stay out of battle. The longer you can stay alive, the longer those you are healing will stay alive too.

Level Two – Curse Them All!

Once the priest hat machine is upgraded, you get to play the role of the dark priest.  Where the white priest has a targeted healing power and an area heal, the dark priest has a targeted draining power and an area curse.  Using the dark priest to defend around the princess in the dungeon is a pretty good strategy.  With one or two dark priests, you can easily drain the opposing team – player by player as they come in one by one.  When in a large group of people on the opposing team, try using the area curse.  This will keep enemies from being able to target others, and makes their movement become really erratic.  The longer you charge the area curse, the longer these effects last.

More Priest Class Tips and Tricks

Here are a few more things to remember when you are playing as a priest in Fat Princess:

• You can use the right analogue stick to switch target when you are draining life or healing somebody.
• Since the white priest’s area heal charges faster, try charging it first and then switch your class to charge area curses faster.
• Try to do your best to stay out of the battle, but close enough to keep your teammates healed up.
• When draining life from somebody as the dark priest, finish them off by wacking them with your staff.

So if you are looking for a good way to help out the team, the priest is always a good hat to pickup.  Remember that support those who are trying to grab the princess is just as important as grabbing the princess itself.  The more support there is, the more likely you will be able to get her out of their castle and back on her fatty throne.

Google Analytics offers a lot of good information, but not everybody knows how to read it.  Today, I will show you how to compare your best performing keywords that bring people into your web site and compare it to the average traffic of your website.

To get started, you will want to login to Google Analytics, go to your site’s profile.  Next, on the left side of the screen click on Traffic Sources and then Keywords.  This will take you to the Keyword Overview screen for your domain.

Now, you can see your most popular keywords.  This screen shows all the paid and non-paid keywords people use to find your website. By default, the keywords are sorted by highest to lowest by how many visits they have brought to your website.

Click on the comparison view to see how individual popular keywords compare to the website average.

So if I were to start advertising, I would want to target some of these better keywords for my website, such as “paint.net tutorials” and “wordpress alternatives”.  Even when you take advertising out of the picture, you could also say these would be good areas to focus on when it comes to future articles or tutorials.

Hope that helps you out when using and trying to understand Google Analytics on your own.  By understanding which keywords out perform the site average, you can see where you might need to shift your attention to in future marketing or website development.

How can you do the same?

How to Create a Google Docs Form

First step, would be to go to the Google Docs web site.  Now click on the button labeled, “Create new” and select Form.

That should take you to the Google Docs form builder, where you can easily create a web site form to use.  You can add any number of:

• text boxes (single line and paragraph sized)
• multiple choice
• check boxes
• choose from a list

There are a lot of ways you can customize your form to fit your needs.  Now once your form has been created, and you are happy with the results – you will want to embed it onto your web site.

How to Embed a Google Docs Form

Click on the button labeled, “More actions” and then choose Embed.

Once you do this, a window will pop up with the code you need to copy and paste into your own web site to make your form work.

What does the final result look like?  You can see it in action here:

• Web Hosts on Twitter
• Submit a Question to the Web Hosting Show Podcast!

When somebody sends you a result, it saves it into a spreadsheet you can check out from the Google Docs interface.  A pretty neat way to save yourself on some e-mail and save your hosting account on system resources a hosted script might take.