Trying my luck at the domain market…

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When one is constantly working with new web projects, as I am, it is hard not to start hoarding domain names. It is a bit of a dirty habit that it is easy to get started with and hard to let go. A couple of weeks ago me and a friend was talking about wedding domain names for an upcoming project of ours, and for some reason we just started to check if domains about Swedish royal weddings were taken. The Swedish Crown Princess Victoria has been seeing a guy for quite a few years, so a wedding should be coming up at some time soon we figured. Lo and behold some domain names were free, so we registered them on a whim. Today the Crown Princess engagement and upcoming (summer 2010) wedding was announced!

So now it is time for me to try out the domain market, not just the buying side but also the selling side. Not sure how to evaluate domain names, but I am taking a rough stab hoping that I am not too greedy and not too naive. Hoping that at least we can get some nice money to spend on Google Ads for our wedding project.

These are the domains I have, all for sale at MissDomain.com in 2 portfolios (Victoriasbrollop and Kungligtbrollop):

Let’s see what the domain fairy can bring me…

Deploying a WordPress site from localhost

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When I started to use WordPress one of the main problems I had was how to move a WordPress site from my local computer to my web host. There are some posts out there on how to deploy a WordPress blog, but quite a few of them are a bit too complicated. As with most things this problem is easily solved once you know what you are doing. It hit me the other day when I did just this for f1almanac.com that since I have now done this dozens of times I think it is time to share it with whoever has the same problem. Hopefully I can save somebody some time and frustration. So here is a step by step guide on how to deploy WordPress from localhost to your production web host.

Basic setup
I assume you have WordPress installed on your local computer, including a MySQL database and all. There is a really good guide on how to do this on WordPress.org. Once installed I also assume you have played around with your theme and settings and gotten the WordPress site to look and work just the way you want it.

My second assumption is that you have an account at a web host that supports PHP and allows you to setup a MySQL database. If you don’t then you can easily find many good cheap options via my web hosting price comparison site WebHostNinja.com. Many web hosts have one-click installs of WordPress, but this is nothing you need right now.

My third assumption is that you have a domain or subdomain where you want to have your fantastic WordPress site installed on. In this post I use the target domain name f1almanac.com, since that is the latest WordPress site I have deployed. Of course you need to replace “f1almanac.com” with your own domain name in all examples below.

Move the files
The first thing to do is to copy all your WordPress files from your local computer to your webhost. In my case this is all the files under /projects/f1_wp/ that I move to the directory on my host that corresponds to the domain I have choosen. For now just move all the files, no need to change anything in any file.

Move the database
Next thing is to move the database structure and all it’s content from your localhost to your web host. First of just do a MySQL dump of the structure and content of your WordPress schema. This can be done in most MySQL GUI applications. Personally I use Sequal Pro and there the MySQL dump option is hiding under File->Export. Refer to the help files of your MySQL GUI app (or MySQL command line if you are hardcore) how to do a dump. The dump should result in a .sql file containing SQL statements to create all tables needed as well as inserting all the data needed into those tables.

MySQL dump

Now we need to change some stuff in that .sql file. Open the file in a text editor and replace all local URLs to the URL of your new site. For me this means changing “http://localhost/f1_wp” to “http://www.f1almanac.com”. Without doing this your production WordPress installation would refer back to your localhost, and stuff would just not work. As always with search and replace, take it easy so that you dont break anything.

Replace localhost

Create a new MySQL database on your web host, and open phpMyAdmin (or MySQL client of choice) for that database. In the “Import” tab of phpMyAdmin you can import an SQL file, so choose your newly edited .sql file and click “go” to import it. This creates all the tables needed and fills it with all the content you need, this includes pages, posts, plugin settings etc.

phpMyAdmin

Change database configurations
At the moment the WordPress installation on your web host do not connect to the newly created and populated database, to do that just open wp-config.php on the host in a text editor (this is one of the files you uploaded to the host ealier). In the top of the file you find all the DB settings, so change DB_NAME, DB_USER etc to correspond to your new MySQL database and not your local database.

Once that is done you should have a fully working WordPress installation on f1almanac.com, or at least on your own domain 🙂

Final touches
Now things are working fine, but there are still some final touches before all is done. First of all your should probably login to /wp-admin on your newly deployed site and change the password of your admin user. I use extremely simple passwords on my localhost while developing, but I do not want to use simple passwords when things are live. So if you work the same way as me go and change the password to something harder to crack than “guest”…

Last thing to check is that your media files are uploaded to an existing directory. Login to the WordPress controll panel and go to Settings->Miscellaneous. It is very likely that the “Store uploads in this folder” is set incorrectly, since it was set when you installed WordPress on your localhost. Change it to the default “wp-content/uploads”, otherwise you will not be able to upload media files successfully.

upload settings

That’s it. This is a technique that has worked fine for me many times, but I am sure smarter people than me has better solutions to this. If you are one of those smarter people please share them with us all in the comments of this post…

Whishlist for the Perfect Twitter Client

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I am suffering from microblogging fragmentation. Let me explain… as everybody else I am on Twitter (@andreaskrohn), but I am mostly active in Jaiku (@andreaskrohn) since that is where the local Swedish web community hangs out. Lately the Swedish microblogging service Bloggy.se (@andreaskrohn – do you see a pattern?) has been growing, and right now it seems like the Swedish geekocracy are moving from Jaiku to Bloggy. This means that I have 3 microblogging services to spread my attention between – Twitter, Jaiku and Bloggy. Pownce is no more and Plurk and the rest I am ignoring (btw, I am @andreaskrohn there as well, as you can see my imagination is limited).

If featureset and usability would decide my choice then Jaiku is the winner, but of course community is the ruling factor. Since the communities I want to be part of will continue to be spread out over many microblogging services (maybe even more so once Jaiku goes open source), I think I need to be active on several services for a foreseeable future.

Aggregated Consumption is not the same as Communication
There are many good services for consuming the posts from all my contacts across several microblogging services. FriendFeed is a great example, that also adds a lot of neat features (again, I am andreaskrohn).  Some desktop clients also let me consume messages from several services, Twhirl lets me subscribe to posts both from Twitter and Jaiku for example. Jaiku let me subscribe to RSS feeds, so that is a way for me to get my posts from other services into Jaiku. Bloggy has the very nice feature of letting me input my Twitter and Jaiku data and then all my posts from those services are also shown in my Bloggy feed, as well as all my Bloggy posts being posted to Jaiku and Twitter.

All this solutions do have a common problem though, and that is that they are missing what is key to microblogging – it is all about communication and communication is a two way game. From Twhirl I can only post to Twitter and not to Jaiku. My comments in FriendFeed can not be looped back into Twitter/Jaiku/Bloggy. From Bloggy I can read Jaiku posts, and I can post to Jaiku, but not participate in a threaded conversation on Jaiku. So consumption is not a problem, but communication across several services efficiently is.

By now I am sure several of my readers are thinking “skip all other services and just use Twitter and stop complaining”. This might be a good strategy if I only wanted to communicate with the Twitter crowd, but belive it or not there is acctually a world outside Twitter. Also, I am not complaning (not so far at least), just explaining a problem. A problem that is solvable!

Who are we Communicating with?
So what is the solution? As I see it the best solution would be a microblogging client that can do two-way communication with several microblogging services. So how would this client work if I could dream up a whishlist… To get to that wishlist let’s first think about how we divide up the people we communicate with, and personally I come up with these criteria:

  • Language – people that do not understand Swedish do not want to read my Swedish posts, and most Swedes have a limited interest in my (admittedly very few) spanish Twitter posts. Almost everyone that follow me in any microblogging service could be interested in my posts in English.
  • Geography – to a lesser degree than language geography also plays a role. It is of very limited interest for me to know that a friend in San Fransisco wants to gather people up to meet in a bar this evening, at the same time that same friend is probably not that interested in what train to Stockholm I might be on.
  • Social group – almost the most important criteria. By “social group” I mean any group of people with similar interests or ties. It might be my family, it might be web developers, it might be fellow mashupoholics. This is the way we mostly group people in our lifes. My brother is not interested in, and can not answer, a question about SQL that I might have. The same way my developer contacts might not care about where my family is going to celebrate christmas.
  • Individuals – we all want to communicate directly with certain people.

All microblogging services and clients address some of these criteria . Groups can be handled by Jaiku channels for example. You can communicate to individuals via the “@” notation or by directo messaging. By posting Swedish posts to Jaiku and Bloggy, and English posts to Twitter the language criteria is somewhat dealt with. But this is not a natural workflow, and it sprouts conversations about the same subject in many different places.

Whishlist for the perfect microblogging client
The perfect microblogging client would allow me to communicate across services in a fluent way. It would detect what language I am writing my messages in and only send it out to the people that understand that language, no matter what microblogging service they are using. Geography and social groups should also be handled seemlessly across microblogging bounderies. It would be able to aggregate all comments made to one message into one place to create one and only one joined conversation (minirant: why oh why don’t Twitter have threaded conversations?). If I can continue dreaming the perfect microbloggin client would not only contain microblogs but also the good old chat networks – MSN, Jabber etc – where I still have quite a few contacts. My hope is that this already exists, and that it just have passed me by, if so please let me know!

Faithful Digitalistic readers might remember that I ranted about this almost a year ago in the post The Need to Mashup Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku, but since nothing much has changed I took upon me to rant once more. Maybe in a year I will acctually do something about it myself, or maybe I will just write another rant 🙂

What should I do with my mashup domains?

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Earlier this week I blogged about MashupCrowd.com and MashupSpy.com, but I still have some other mashup .com domains that I am not sure what I should do with. They are:

I am not sure what to do with them, but I think they all have potential. Especially I love MashupCookbook.com. Unfourtunatly I do not really have an idea that is good enough (read: fun + making money) yet. Do anyone smarter than me have an idea?

MashupSpy – search for all things mashup

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I have played around with Googles Custom Search Engines earlier, but now I have finally used it in a live site and it turned out quite well. On MashupSpy.com I have set up a Custom Search engine that emphazises my favourite sites about mashups – in this I have included sites about Enterprise Mashups (gartner.com), sites with lots of usefull APIs (code.google.com), sites with great tutorials (developer.yahoo.com) and sites with great mashup insipirations (programmableweb.com). See the full list of sites on mashupspy.com.

Search Engine for Mashups, APIs and Enterprise Mashups

Configuring the Search Engine in Googles control panel, adding sites etc is a walk in the park. Integrating a Custom Search Engine into the site was a bit tricky though, the documentation is far from perfect. The trick is to host the search results on your own site in an iframe (set in the Custom Search Engine control panel under “code”) and knowing that this iframe is generated by Google’s javascript when it is time to show the search result. For a while I was unsuccessfull in styling things since I tried to create my own iframe, but there is no need to complicate things like that. Also good to know is that running a Custom Search Engine locally works so-so, I got a lot of “The URI you submitted has disallowed characters.” error messages when running from localhost, but things worked perfectly once I uploaded it to the production server.

For the time it took (hours, mostly spent on learning the magics of CSS) it is an impressive functionality on MashupSpy, I will definitly use Custom Search Engines more in the future. If you have ideas on how I can improve MashupSpy or if I have missed any sites (see the full list on mashupspy.com) in my Custom Search Engine then please let me know!