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.

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.

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.

Far from being just another off topic service, in a world filled with them, the new Web Hosting Show Coupons and Deals page will deliver, and impress you.  This was a quick project I cooked up over the weekend, to better serve the public at large by delivering a better way to keep track of the latest coupons, deals and special offers from the entire web hosting world out there.

Point your browser towards: http://www.webhostingshow.com/coupons/

Once you navigate yourself to the web site, you can browse through 15 of the most recent offers that have been featured, as well as get a little description of what the offer is all about.  Then I try to link back to the source, so you can get instant gratification in the quickest way possible.

Want more web hosting coupons and deals? You can follow the Web Hosting Show’s coupons and deals on Twitter @whscoupons too.  The third content delivery method you have is the RSS feed, which you can subscribe to – to have all the deals streamed to you for free, into your favorite news reader of choice.

• Follow @whscoupons on Twitter!
• Subscribe via RSS to our Hosting Coupons!

Are you a web host? Good!  I need your help too.  Just like the Web Hosting Show podcast itself, I am looking to serve both the web hosts and the web hosting clients with this tool. Want to see your own special web hosting coupons and deals listed here? Contact me, with your web hosting special, coupon or offer and I will get it listed with the rest. For more on what went into building this new coupon tool, I would suggest you listen to podcast 198 of the Web Hosting Show where I go into a little more detail.

I really like it when any FTP program can give me better integration with my operating system, and WinSCP does do that and more.  You can create your standard shortcuts to it, add it to Window’s “Send To” context menu, and it can also be setup to be the default handler for SFTP and SCP URL addresses.

The WinSCP installer can also install drag&drop shell extension to improve WinSCP capability of downloading files using drag and drop.

Not sure where to start, after you downloaded it?  They have a plethora of guides and useful tutorials to help get you setup. So next time you are looking for a free FTP program, and you have tried the other popular names out there, give WinSCP a shot.  It might be the free FTP program experiance you’ve been looking for.

Bonus: Need more help? Check out the FTP FAQ from the Web Hosting Show!

On the Web Hosting Show podcast, we have done a lot of talking recently about web hosts that use Twitter, and how they use it.  Some use it for support, others use it for marketing, and the best ones use it for both.  Who are the most popular web hosts on Twitter though?

To put that question to the test, I thought I would compile a list of all the web hosts on Twitter that have over 1,000 followers.  Out of nearly 100 web hosts on the Web, here are the 25 that made the cut.

1. WestHost Web Hosting (WestHost) on Twitter = 1,804 followers
2. softlayer_news (softlayer_news) on Twitter = 2,609 followers
3. Sustainable Websites (sustainableweb) on Twitter = 2,946 followers
4. Surpass Web Hosting (surpass) on Twitter = 1,960 followers
5. Slicehost (slicehost) on Twitter = 3,500 followers
6. Six Apart (sixapart) on Twitter = 15,401 followers
7. SiteGround (SiteGround) on Twitter = 1,132 followers
8. Site5 Web Hosting (site5) on Twitter = 1,010 followers
9. PinchHost (PinchHost) on Twitter = 8,891 followers
10. mediatemple (mediatemple) on Twitter = 8,571 followers
11. GoDaddy.com Guy(GoDaddyGuy) on Twitter = 3,060 followers
12. lunarpages (lunarpages) on Twitter = 1,528 followers
13. linode (linode) on Twitter = 1,655 followers
14. LiquidWeb (LiquidWeb) on Twitter = 12,734 followers
15. Laughing Squid (ls_hosting) on Twitter = 1,079 followers
16. Joyent (joyent) on Twitter = 2,350 followers
17. JaguarPC (JaguarPC) on Twitter = 4,637 followers
18. Sunil Saxena (inmotionhosting) on Twitter = 1,259 followers
19. HostGator.com (hostgator) on Twitter = 4,668 followers
20. Hostcats.com (Hostcats) on Twitter = 1,299 followers
21. 123-Reg (123reg) on Twitter = 1,677 followers
22. Gary Jones (bluefur) on Twitter = 46,671 followers
23. dreamhost (DreamHost) on Twitter = 2,934 followers
24. FireHost Inc. (FireHost) on Twitter = 3,783 followers
25. INSANE Deals Only @ (HIVELOCITY) on Twitter = 6,508 followers

There you have it, 25 of the most popular web hosting companies that are on Twitter right now.  You can find a list of nearly 100 web hosts on Twitter on the Web Hosting Show’s web site.  Did your web host make the cut?