Within the last couple of weeks, I have taken a new writing job over at The Hosting News.  This is a little ‘bit different beat that my usual posts I write because I am doing news coverage for them rather than opinion or tutorial based content. 

Check out a few of the posts I have written thus far, and let me know what you think:

• Terran Marketing Purchases WebSiteHosting.com
• The New Net Approaches – Introducing IPV6
• Egyptian Internet Access Restored
• Moving Forward After SourceForge Hack
• ISPs Face Possible Mandatory Data Retention Again

Also, go check out The Hosting News and look around a ‘bit.  The new guys behind the scenes have really done a lot to modernize the layout of the website and provide a lot of great content for people interested in learning more about web hosting and the industry around it.

Looking for a great photo album organizer to put on your website or to base your website on? Gallery is a great open source script that will let you get that job done.  It looks great as a stand alone website, and it also blends in seamlessly into your current website design too.

Here are some of my favorite features that come with Gallery:

• Auto Rotate Images – Gallery can look at information in pictures from digital cameras and automatically rotate them as needed.
• Image Quality and Size Defaults – You can limit the quality and size of images so that when images are uploaded, Gallery will resize them to save space.
• Main Gallery Page Settings – The configuration wizard contains all of the settings for how the main Gallery page looks and acts including showing or hiding the album tree, search engine, or album owner, and what frames to show around albums.
• Email Support – Set up email support to have your Gallery email users when their accounts are created or when they forget their password, email you copies, email people when the Gallery is updated, and more!
• Gallery-wide Slideshow – enable or disable a slideshow that includes all pictures in the gallery
• Commenting – turn off or on the public commenting system and configure it.
• Logging – enable logging with syslog or the Windows logger
• RSS publishing – publish your Gallery with RSS!
• Album Defaults – set defaults for the way that all new albums will originally look

If you would rather host your photos on your own hosting account, rather than relying on one of the free album hosting services out there, Gallery is a great choice.  When it comes to customizing the script, you can do so by creating or using a theme.  There are many free ones to download or you can tweak the CSS to make the page display you want to.

With Gallery, you are in control.  You can download it, and test it out for free on your own hosting account from gallery.menalto.com.

Building and hosting successful forums on your website can be a lot of hard work.  Just like you would do if you were building a house, you have to build your forums with a good foundation.  Here I have for you seven different successful forum rules you should keep in mind when you either set up a forum script, or look to redo some of your forums to make them easier for users to navigate through.

Here is my general advice for anybody out there looking to start their own forums.

1. Enable Really Simple Syndication
   You want to give people as many routes into your forums as they need.  Making sure your forum has an RSS feed gives your users one more way to keep up to date on what is happening on your forums.
2. Use an SEO Friendly Permalink Structure
   You have to have a good permalink structure to keep the search engines happy, when they are crawling over your forums.  Use page paths like "this-works-great" rather than "index=conversation2".  By using a better permalink structure, you will get ranked a little higher in search results.
3. Only Make the Forums as Complex as You Need
   Do not go overboard adding a new forum category for every wild idea you think people might want to talk about.  Only create a new category or sub-forum if there is a real need or desire for it coming from the people who use your forums.
4. Find Good People to Help You Moderate Conversations
   Once your forums have been up and running for a while, you might look towards the community you have created for people who will help you enforce the forum rules, and keep the forums active.
5. Set Some Basic Rules for Posting
   From day one, you should have a basic list of rules for people to follow.  My best advice for this situation is to keep this list somewhere where everybody can see it, and keep it simple.  If you get too complex with your rules, nobody will read them.
6. Help Feed the Discussions
   Stop in daily and see what conversations you can reply to, and try to find topics of discussion that might get more people to come by and post their thoughts, ideas, feedback or solutions.
7. Link to Your Forums from Other Places
   You need to work hard at getting new links to your forums.  You can do this from your website (if you have one) and other like-minded websites that might share the same general discussion point of your forums.

Have another rule of your own that I might have missed?  Makes sure you leave a comment and share it with the rest of us.  Learn to take care of your little community,  and make sure their needs are being met. Also, always welcome feedback, because if people care enough to complain – it means they want your forums to succeed.

Now to get to all the geeky details, for those of you wondering…

First things first, I would like to thank LayeredTech (and formerly FastServers.net before the merger) for hosting my websites for free.  I was with them for years, but here in the last few months – I really started to outgrow the free sponsored hosting environment.

So, who’s VPS plan did I decide to go with? I signed up with Site5 (yes, that same place that I work).  They offered the most bang for their buck with the VPS1 plan – and I really liked the fact that they do 100% of the management.  This means they take care of all the updates, security, monitoring and more. For $53 a month, you too can get:

• 736 MB of Memory
• 40GB of Disk Space
• 600 GB of Bandwidth
• 30 Days of Remote Guaranteed Backups

Ok, that is about as infomercial as I am going to get here.  So I hope you all forgive me for the time it took me to transfer the files from my old host to my new one (I elected to move my own files, even though Site5 offers free migrations.  What would I learn if I let them do it? *snicker*) and you keep enjoying the daily goodness I have to offer across mitchkeeler.com, mitchelaneous.com, firefoxfacts.com and webhostingshow.com.

Oh, and if you haven’t yet – join the Mitch’s Projects Facebook Fan Page!

Are you looking to a great bundle of web design and development treasures, for a fraction of the price? Then you need to go check out BundleHunt.  Right now they are offering everything from web hosting plans, premium WordPress themes, classy icons and more for a heavily discounted price.

BundleHunt is fantastic, because it does all of these things:

• Helps to Promote Great Design Tools, Software and Services
• Gives People BIG Discounts on Great Resources

I have yet to figure out how BundleHunt is making very much, but I am sure they have a business plan wrapped in there somewhere.  Currently you have 6 days left to get:

• Billings
• Flux
• 6 months of Site5 web hosting
• The Smashing Mag E-Book
• 1 Year Membership to SUBERNOVA
• Icon Dock (Icon Set)
• Designious (Vector Image Pack)
• 2 WordPress Themes from WP Bakery
• 100 HQ Photos from Photocase
• 100 Premium Files from Vandelay Premier
• 3 WordPress Themes from Mojo Themes
• Dry Icons
• 25% Off the Next Bundle

That is $1,400 worth of great and wonderful web design and development tools.  You only have to pay $49 for it all.

BundleHunt is a resource well worth bookmarking, and checking out.  You get tons a great things, for a really low discounted price.

Over at the Web Hosting Show website, some of you might have noticed I have a little giveaway going on there.  Just in case you missed it though, I thought I would share it here.  Want to win a free Apple TV?  All you need to do is subscribe to Ping! Zine, one of the greatest web hosting magazines out there today.   Check out the details on how to get your chance at the free Apple TV over at WebHostingShow.com.  A free magazine subscription, a chance to win a free Apple TV, does it get any better?

WordPress is a great publishing platform to use when you want to circulate your own collection of video or images on the Web.  Thanks to a few great plugins, you can take your dull text-based blog and really snaz it up with some great internet imagery.  Want to great a photo gallery?  Want to plug YouTube into your web site?  I have collected twenty of the best multimedia plugins for you to use with your own WordPress powered web site.

Page Flip Image Gallery – Flipping Book plugin helps you to create Image Gallery with Page Flip effects on your WordPress blog.

Post videos and photo galleries – Post your videos and photo galleries/flash slideshows easily and in seconds.

NextGEN Gallery – NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option.

WordTube – WordTube is your Media Center plugin for WordPress.

Flickr Photo Album – This Flickr plugin for WordPress will allow you to pull in your Flickr photosets and display them as albums on your WordPress site.

Lightbox 2 – Plugin used to overlay images on the current page into neat Javascript-powered overlay popups.

Smart YouTube – Smart YouTube plugin allows you to insert full featured YouTube videos into your post, comments and in RSS feed.

SEO Friendly Images – SEO Friendly Images automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images. Improves traffic from search results and makes the tags w3c/xHTML.

Thumbnail Viewer – A minimalist image viewer with an effect similar to Lightbox JS, only much faster with a whole lot less Javascript.

Flash Video Player – The flash video plugin for WordPress allows the addition of video (and other media) to a WordPress website using standards-compliant markup

PhotoXhibit – PhotoXhibit provides an interface to set up gallery widgets using Picasa / Flickr / SmugMug / WordPress Uploads and jQuery.

Shutter Reloaded – Darkens the current page and displays an image on top (like Lightbox, Thickbox, etc.), but is a lot smaller (10KB) and faster.

WordPress Video Plugin – A filter for WordPress that displays videos from many video services. Enter [videosite id] at a post and you will see a video.

Random Image Selector – Selects a random image from a specified folder, and provides.

podPress – A dream plugin for Podcasters using WordPress.

Yet Another Photoblog – Convert your WordPress 2.5+ installation into a full featured photoblog in virtually no time.

PhotoSmash Galleries – PhotoSmash – user contributable photo galleries for WordPress pages and posts with options. Auto-add galleries or specify.

All in One Video Pack – Easily add full video capabilities to your blog.

WordPress Media Flickr – You can post with Flickr photo, on visual editor toolbar.It’s very interactive interface than other plugins.

TubePress – Displays gorgeous YouTube and Vimeo galleries in your posts, pages, and/or sidebar. Please visit http://tubepress.org for more info!

With any mixture of the above plugins for WordPress, your web site will be taken from a text-based bore to a multimedia powerhouse.  Have any other suggestions for plugins I might have missed?  Leave your thoughts in the comments!

With web site design, setting up the cool rounded corners can sometimes be a pain to figure out.  So that is where cool tools like the simply named Border Radius come into play.  It was built to make the process so much easier.

With this online tool, you can generate CSS code for CSS3, as well as engine-specific code for the WebKit and Gecko rendering engines to make your corners all rounded.

To use it, all you have to do is type in a number into one of the corner boxes.  This will tell the tool by how many pixels you want the corner to be rounded:

Then, the CSS code is spit out by the web site automatically.

At the bottom of the page, you can tell the web site by which rendering engines you want the code to work with.  For the most part, I would suggest just keeping all three checked.

Border Radius is a helpful web development tool that I think every webmaster should keep bookmarked and ready for their next big web design project.  Now if there was only a tool that would make this CSS awesomeness work in Internet Explorer’s wacky rule set, we’d be all set.

Looking for a wiki script for your next great web site project? 

As somebody who’s built one from the ground up – I can tell you picking the right script for the job, is not an easy task to do.  With a surprising amount of flexibility and power, BoltWire might be one of the easiest to use wikis out there. 

It takes the cake when it comes to mixing the strengths of various script categories together.  Is it a CMS? Is it a wiki?  It is a little ‘bit of both.

The install process is simple.  All you do is download, unzip, upload and install.  It runs on just about any server with PHP4 (although PHP5 is recommended) and has a simple upgrade process too. The entire download is less than 100k, so should just take a couple of seconds to get started.

What about the Features?

Here are some of the best features about BoltWire:

• Easy to install and upgrade
• Run multiple sites off one installation
• Built in member and group management
• Easy to use wiki markup system
• Powerful search engine capabilities
• In-browser editing of skins & CSS
• Standards compliant
• UTF-8 and multi-lingual support
• One click installation of plugins

If you are new to the script, or you get it installed and start to wonder, “What’s Next?!” I would suggest checking out the documentation.  They also have a nice selection of tutorials to help you out too.

Customization?  Yes, you can customize BoltWire in many different ways.  It comes with both plugin and skin support so you are able to make it do the job you want it to do, and get it looking the way you need it to look. 

All in all, I would highly suggest checking BoltWire out, if you have a web site project that needs just a little ‘bit of wiki and a little bit of a content management system rolled into one. 

All you need to do is visit the Submit a Question page, fill the form out, and then tune in to the Web Hosting Show each time a new show is released and your question will be answered and your web site will be plugged!

What can you ask about? I’ll answer anything that is even remotely related to web hosting.  Maybe you could ask about search engine optimization techniques?  Perhaps you need to know how to install WordPress?  You might even want my recipe for poor man’s pigs in a blanket (white bread and Vienna sausages).  Give me your questions, and I will give you the answers.

Since I have both podcast #190 and podcast #200 coming up this month, I would really like to have a slew of questions to go through, so I can help each and every one of you.