We’re talking

New Forum

First of all, and just to reiterate this, my WP Guru site is still up and running and will remain as it is – perhaps with a design overhaul in the near future, but still giving away plenty of advice. What’s new is that we’re now testing a Forum over there, and with a bit of luck we’ll install the same on here WP Hosting as well.

The forum is provided by the friendly folks at Tal.ki who provide free embeddable forums for your websites. If you’d like to build a community but don’t want to take the next year off work trying to get it going, Tal.ki is what you need. To find out more, have a look at my latest post about the forum here.

Please note that we’re still testing it at this stage. You can help out by posting and providing feedback on how it works for you.

Podcasts

My WP Guru screencasts are just as successful as ever – but since WordPress have made some design changes to the back end, it’s about time they receive a refresh.

This time however we’ll release them as Podcasts so you’ll receive the latest episodes every time they’re available. We’re aiming for a weekly release schedule throughout the year. We’ll start with a complete WordPress workshop which will start at beginner level, and once we’ve covered that we’ll cover other more in-depth topics such as specific themes and plugins.

It’ll be great fun for both you and me – if there’s anything specific you’d like to know about, drop us a line here or tweet us your suggestions.

Ready Made Websites

Have you ever looked at a wonderful premium theme, dreamt up how great your site would like with it? Have you also experienced how disappointing it is when you activate said theme and your own site doens’t like anything like the demo?

Yep, we’ve all been there – and all of us at WP Hosting thought this has got to stop. Let me introducing you to our Ready-Made websites!

WordPress can be daunting enough when you start, so let us deal with the headaches of making your site look nice, then all you have to do is update your content. That’s just how we roll.

Currently we’re building “demo sites” of the hottest themes on the market, we’ll let you know when they’re ready site by site. We’ll also tell you the specific features of each theme and how much we’ll charge you to set it up.

Affiliate Programme

As promised, we’re also working on a scheme where you guys can get an incentive if you send us new customers. This is a fairly complex thing and it’s not quite ready yet – once we’re sure it’s working as we want it you’ll be the first to know.

WordCamp Miami

We’re extremely excited to be sponsoring WordCamp Miami from the 17th-19th of February. If you’re in the area, do come along and say hello. The Sunshine State is beautiful this time of year

I’ve never been to a WordCamp before, they’re much more popular in the US than they are over here. We’re all looking forward to meeting lots of friendly Pressers – join us if you can.

Parallels Summit Orlando

As part of our US Tour this year we’ll be in Florida for two whole months working on all the things I keep telling you about. Apart from WordCamp, another highlight is the Parallels Summit in Kissimee near Orlando. The summit starts on the 14th and we want to get certified on Plesk and meet lots and lots of lovely hosting folks.

We’ll update you every step of the way – so watch this space. Oh, and don’t forget to keep up with the latest techie tips and tricks over at http://wpguru.co.uk.

See you later

Your Local Email Client

First let’s talk about the email client. That’s the programme you use to check your emails. Outlook is an email client, so is Thunderbird, Mail on Mac, Outlook Express, and even the app you use on your smart phone which you can read and send emails with. Many email services also provide access via a web interface in your browser, those are called Webmail Clients – and they’re also email clients.

Whenever you hear someone ask “what is you email client?” then what they mean is “which thing is it you’re using to read your email”.

The Incoming Mail Server

Your computer isn’t always on, so in order for you to be able to receive email at any time of the day, there’s a server somewhere in the depths of the internet which is switched on all the time. He’s listening to emails that are sent to your address – and if one arrives he puts it into a folder on his system, waiting for you to check your emails.

This guy is called your Incoming Mail Server and he’s usually working 24/7 without holidays. This server is maintained by your email provider and he can do one of two things:

Either he saves an email addressed to you and waits for you to check your email, or he can forward each email to a different address. This is useful if you have several email accounts but you’d like to receive all your mail in another central account.

If the mail server doesn’t know the address that he receives an email for, or there’s a problem on the system, he will send the email back with a message saying “Hey sender, I don’t know this recipient”. This is called bouncing (as in the email will bounce back to the sender).

A mail server usually takes care of thousands of mailboxes, so in order for him to know that you are you, you’ve been given an account with him – identified by a user name and password.

Checking Emails

All email clients need a few bits of information to communicate with the email server: that’s the host address (or mail server address), the user name for your account, and your password. Clever email clients know some details about your email service provider so all they need to know is your user name and password.

Typically it’s something like this:

• Incoming Mail Server: pop.yahoo.com (or imap.yahoo.com)
• User Name: lizzy@yahoo.com
• Password: somepassword

There’s one other important element involved though: the language in which the client and the server can communicate. Your choices are POP and IMAP, cryptic abbreviations for something that sounds extremely techie.

Nowadays both are equally supported and the choice is yours. Let me explain the differences and the pros and cons.

POP

Sometimes also called POP3 is the Post Office Protocol. It downloads all emails from the mail server and stores them in your local inbox. You have a choice of only downloading new emails that are not yet on your local system, and you also have the choice to delete emails on the mail server once they’re on your local system.

This option is good if you only have a limited amount of space on your mail server and you want to clear it out regularly. It’s also good if you access your emails from only one system.

The downside is that when you check emails from two or more devices, then only one device will have the latest emails on it which can get confusing. The same goes for sent emails – which device did you send the email from you’d like to have another look at? POP used to work really well when we all had one central system, but times have changed. Enter IMAP.

IMAP

Sometimes also called IMAP4 is the Internet Message Access Protocol. It assumes that you would like to leave all your messages on the remote server and only want to synchronise your local email client with the server. So all your emails are stored in one place (i.e. on the mail server) and you tell the mail server which emails you’ve read or moved to a different folder.

When you check emails from another device, it will synchronise with the same information so you’ll see emails the same way no matter which machine you’reaccessing them from.

IMAP is the more logical choice to use as of 2012, however even though it’s great when it works, it’s an extremely complex mechanism that happens on the mail server’s end. You’ll also want a lot of storage on your mail server. If your server and your email clients support this option, always go for IMAP. If not, you’ll have to live with POP.

The Outgoing Mail Server

We’ve spoken about the incoming mail server already (it’s the guy that receives your email while you’re asleep), but if you’re sending emails out then often his friend will take of this job: the outgoing mail server. Technically this can be handled by the same physical server, but in larger systems those will be two different machines.

The outgoing mail server communicates in a different language than the incoming server, namely SMTP (which is the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). You’ll sometimes see this as an option in your email client.

Since these can be different machines, you may be given different information by your email service provider, typically like this:

• Outgoing Mail Server: smtp.mail.yahoo.com
• User Name: lizzy@yahoo.com
• Password: somepassword

Outgoing mail isn’t more complex than incoming mail, but sadly extra security measures have been put in place because of the amount of spam email that gets sent every day. Spammers like using harmless outgoing mail servers and bombard them with milions of messages which bogs down the machines that want to send them out.

Therefore, email providers have put extra checks in place which means you may have to authenticate that you’re you before you can send your mails out. It depends on the service provider’s policy though and they’ll usually give you details on how to setup your client.

Email Adresses: Forwards and Aliases

Lastly, when you have an email account with an email provider, you’ve been given am email address like lizzy@yahoo.com. That’s usually associated with your mail account.

But what happens if you’d also like to have sales@yahoo.com, as well as firstname.lastname@yahoo.com? Do you have to have separate accounts for those?

No you don’t, you can do two things: either these emails can be forwarded so your emails will ultimately end up with lizzy@yahoo.com, or you can have Email Aliases.

Aliases tell the incoming mail server that “if something for firstname.lastname comes in, treat it as if it were for lizzy”. It’s just an instruction really to tell the server how to handle a request, a bit like an “if… then” statement.

That about covers it all – now you know all there is to know about how email works

I hope it all makes sense, feel free to ask a question below if anything is unlcear.

Hello world, WP Hosting has launched! After too much time thinking about it we finally have a presentable working website up and running. Welcome everybody!

In a nutshell: we sell the finest WordPress hosting here – check out what we’ve got on offer for you today.

We want to make it fun and easy for our customers to have a website. Headaches and hassle is best left to us, while you focus on your content.

The Launch of WP Hosting

Launching a new project is tough – it certainly is for me. Mentally taxing, physically exhausting, there never seem to be enough hours in one day to make it just perfect. But without a deadline, would things ever come to be?

We’ve got a rock solid hosting platform that we’e tested for months and I’m not going to bore you with the details. What we didn’t have is a sales platform, i.e. a dedicated website to show people what we can offer. This isn’t a one day job, so here’s a list of what we’ve done to accomplish this site as of today:

Over the coming months we’ll update you on our journey through cyber space. Just so that we don’t forget, here’s what we’re starting with:

Network Stats – December 2011

Our growing network is currently comprised of

• Physical Servers: 8
• CPU Cores: 26
• System RAM: 47 GB
• Storage Space: 7.6 TB
• Bandwidth: LOADS

Right now we’re hosting 59 Domains.

Tomorrow morning our first press release goes out and we’re expecting a lot of traffic coming through. In case you’ve read the release, thanks for staying to read the small print

Credits

I’d like to give a big shout out and say THANK YOU to all those kind souls without whom this project wouldn’t be possible. Here goes, in no particular order:

All the best from us at Guru Towers,

JAY, JULIA, WOODY & The Ninjas

In this screencast I’ll show you how easy it is to upgrade the WordPress Core, Themes and several Plugins at once. Note that this may not work on some hosts. If you’re hosting with me you have nothing to fear of course

Check out my other workshops in this series here.

In this screencast I’ll talk you through the basics of WordPress. I like to call it the “anatomy” – i.e.

• Front Page
• Header
• Sidebar
• Footer

I’ll also show you how to login to your backend and how to work with two browser tabs open at the same time. Enjoy!

Check out my other workshops in this series here.

Let’s have a look at the basics of working with WordPress. I’ll show you how to use the “back end” and the “front end” at the same time.  I’ll also demonstrate how a change you make to your website will become live on your front page.

Check out my other workshops in this series here.

In this screencast I’ll tell you everything you need to know about writing pages in WordPress. These are great for static information that does not change over time.Once you grasp this, you’ll be able to build brochure sites quickly and you’ll be able to update pages. This used to take forever with static HTML!

Pages are complex (mind you, so is WordPress) so I’ll try to pack in as much info as possible without overwhelming you. Things I’ll talk about are:

• How to create a new page
• How to update an existing page
• How to insert text and a picture into your page
• How to get rid of the Comment Box
• How to use a Page Template (like the no-sidebar template)

Remember that some functionality is down to the actual Theme you’re using. I’m using the Twenty-Ten Default Theme for this demo.

Check out my other workshops in this series here.

If you want a static page instead of your blog posts on the front page, this screencast is for you. I’ll explain all you need to know to remove the blog from your home tab (as is the default). I’ll also explain how to do the opposite and will talk more about pages and the quick edit option.

Check out my other workshops in this series here.

In this screencast I will introduce you to the WordPress Menu System. With it you can add pages, blog categories and even internal/external hyperlinks to your menu. You can even create pages that will never show up in your navigation – that’s great for landing pages and content you don’t want every visitor to see.

For this demo, I’m using the WordPress Default Theme called Twenty-Ten.

Please note that those menus need to be supported by the Theme you’re using. Many free Themes support this feature, but some older ones may not. I’ll cover how to hack unsupported themes in another workshop.

Check out my other workshops in this series here.

In this screencast I’ll explain how you populate your sidebar with useful widgets. WordPress has plenty of them built-in and it’s really easy to add them to your site.

Many websites offer badges for their services, and I’ll explain how you can embed them into your own site using the Text widget.

Check out my other workshops in this series here.