First thing First, Make a Backup

Having an updated backup with you is a sensible step, but sometimes your hosting provider’s automated systems do it on your behalf. By and large hosting providers do create backup copy in every 48 hours, and this duration may vary with different hosts. For premium users they keep an updated backup which get updates every day, so in case something goes erroneous on their side or by you, all they have to do is to run backup files and your site will be back on track. However, in case you are moving to new host; you have to make a backup of all the files from FTP server and Database server. Most of the hosting providers don’t provide the remote access to the Database servers, so if you want to download database files, its little tough job. But if you are using any open source software like WordPress or Joomla running at backend of your site, you can help yourself with the plug-ins or built-in function. In case you are using WordPress for your site, you can have your backup within minutes, depending on the size of database. Just go to tools>export section and download the file for reference and this file will help you on fresh copy of WordPress installed on new server.

Notify your Audience

Notifying your audience is the best thing which you can do preserve your site respect. Place a sticky post or drop an email to the subscribers to notify them about possible downtime or bouncing back. You can utilize your social media accounts as well to notify your audience about server migration.

Purchase the Hosting Account from New Host

Now purchase a hosting account on new host. While purchasing, you will have 2 options, one is to buy new domain and other is to transfer existing domain. In my experience, you might face more downtime in buying hosting domain with existing domain. The reason is, domain transferring is a long procedure which need verifications from many departments and during that transferring procedure you might face little mean attitude from your old hosting provider. In this procedure first you have to request your existing service provider to unlock your domain as you want to migrate to new provider, and request them for AUTH CODE. During domain unlocking, service provider might take long time to convince you to not leave but can’t stop you with any force as you are the primary owner of domain. But of course during this your time will be wasted. Once you get the Auth Code, you will have to forward it to your new hosting provider and they will complete the procedure including whois record modification on your behalf, which obviously takes time. That is why I don’t really like that procedure but still many people prefer it.

In other option, you can purchase an account with some extra domain in case purchasing domain is essential by new hosting provider. When you are done with the purchasing step, you will receive FTP and Hosting Account access information of your new server.

Files & Database uploading procedure

The majority of the superior service providers can help you with that. All you have to do is to request them for migration. Just tell them you are coming from another service provider and have left it because of the downtime etc. in reply they will welcome you and will ask for the FTP and Hosting Account user name and passwords. Its okay, you can trust them now as these companies do keep a dedicated team for hosting migration cases, and they will upload all the files and database on their own. In case your new hosting provider turns out to be mean or don’t provider migration assistance in your purchased package, help yourself with the backup which you made from old account.

When should you migrate?

Deciding a right time for making the final step is pretty harsh. The best thing is, you go through your recent traffic log and highlight the days and timings in which you had lesser traffic. Remember, the more your site stays down, the more and more traffic you lose from spiders and social networks. Take a DNS changing step during highlighted time period.

Change the DNS and let the bouncing start

DNS alteration step is bit tricky but customer support of your new hosting provider can be really helpful. All you have to do is to go DOMAIN WHOIS Settings section from your old hosting account and have to replace NameServer 1 and NameServer 2 with the new parameters which your new hosting provider gave to you. Now the bouncing game has begun. It will take 24-48 hours to propagate the new DNS worldwide on every channel. During that period, people from Asia might be redirecting to your old server address in case the region channel record is not updated and people from Europe might be redirecting to your new Server address if the channel DB has been updated.

So what about the users which are still being redirect to your old server in that period? Well in case you still having relations with old hosting provider and didn’t move to new server with same domain, your site will be still up there. And a sticky note placed by you on your site will let them know about server migration.

Domain Transferring Procedure

In case you didn’t transfer to new service provider with the existing domain, you might want to transfer your domain as well so you don’t have to make site payments on two different providers. Now request your old service provider to unlock the domain and request for Auth Code and forward it to your new hosting provider and request them to affiliate it with newly existed account. After a standard procedure you will receive an email from Online NIC dept on your primary email address and will ask you to confirm the request.  Once done, you are good to go and your domain will be transferred and get locked on new service provider within 1 or 2 working days.

:: As Published on CIETRO by Saad Irfan (Cietro’s blog has been closed and few of posts are getting re-published on TechCline)

Riya was a Facial Recognition Search Engine which was closed down in 2009, but Mujal Shah utilized its technology to build up Like.com. Also remember, Google is also pretty active and serious about Image Recognition these days. Not sure, but maybe Google Goggles is a part of its experiments.  However it’s not confirmed yet, what are the Google’s intentions for using Like.com. When searched, we found out Google and Like.com has a past. Back in 2005 Google was pretty serious to acquire Riya but didn’t or couldn’t acquire it.

So keeping the iPad users on preference list should be also consider. However till now, I could not see any major difference in famous sites’ preview on iPad. But differences in navigation menu in lot of sites have been observed heavily.

Following are scripts to detect iPad users, so you can redirect your users to specific sub-domain for iPad attuned or just switch the CSS file to overcome the broken layout issues.

In short, the string replace command is easy way to find out which device is being used.

A sample Environment value (user agent)

Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10

PHP Script:

<?php

if(strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],’iPad’)){

// place your action here

// ex: header(‘Location: http://domain.com/iPad’);

}?>

JavaScript:

var isiPad = navigator.userAgent.match(/iPad/i) != null;

Through .htaccess:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*iPad.*$

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://ipad.domainname.com [R=301]

In similar way, you can detect iPhone users

<?php

if(strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],’iPhone’)){

// place your action here

}?>

Please do share your methods also through comments.

Everybody loves fast browsing and more accurate search results, when surfing internet. This new policy might be really helpful for good webmasters as they plan very well for smooth speed policy for better user experience. However some of sites with low quality materials and massive advertising slot which causes slow speed, going to suffer.

Speed factor will help making internet faster, as now every webmaster has to consider speed factor also for attaining good ranking. So if you are a site owner and running a site with lots of Plug-ins and widgets linked to external networks. It is time for you to re-consider your site structure, if you are willing to attain good rank in Google search.

Google implemented this policy couple of weeks before after lot of practice, and changes in search results ranking can be observed. Also, it is not imperative, that all the sites may face changes in search ranking, if they are already going well with quality content and good speed. Google has also suggested some of speed testing tools, to enable site owners to test site speed.

You might need to have Mozilla Firefox installed on your system to run these tests, but these are worthy to try.

Page Speed

YSlow – From Yahoo!

WebPagetest

I have been working in the SEO field from last 2 years, and these .htaccess codes always helped my projects to gain elevated ranking on search engines.

Hide Original Extension of the Page

You can hide your original page extension with the help of URL rewriting, easily, depends on the security restrictions from your host.

Replace the .htaccess from root folder of your website directory with the new .htaccess file having this script.

Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule ^(.*)\.htm$ $1.php [nc]

To understand this script, suppose you are having file contact.php on server, you can access this page by writing contact.html also. Means you don’t have to expose the original extension of your page. However [nc] just make sure that it’s not a case sensitive.

Make the URL friendlier

We will discuss tips for making URL easy to read by human and friendlier for search robots.

In case you are running a social community or shopping web site, you might be having large number of members or products. And you will also wish to make your every member’s or product’s page more search friendly and understand by human.

Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule ^ display-([0-9]+)\.php$ display.php?id=$1

Instead of using “display.php?id=1” for calling member “1”, you can access page with “member-1.php”, which is evidently straightforward to interpret by human and friendly to Search robots, as they also like sophisticated links.

In case you want to implement the same method for accessing page with the Name of Member or Product, you can’t do it with this code. The reason of mentioning this code was to filter more and more inputs for security reasons, as it will accept value of variable “id” only 0 to 9.

RewriteRule ^ display-(a-zA-Z0-9_-)\.php$ display.php?id=$1

By replacing the last with this line, you can give input of alphabets also along diigts.

You might have also noticed, some of the famous sites use short URL for their members’ profiles and use the Name as a substitute of using numerical ID.

Let suppose my Member id on a domain is “35” and my User Name is “saadirfan”. The site lets the user access my profile with the following link

“example.com/saadirfan”

Instead of

“example.com/member.php?name=saadirfan”

The code for this mystery is

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)$ member.php? name=$1

RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/$ member.php? name=$1

The second line of the script make sure that page still opens in case visitor type “example.com/saadirfan/” instead of “example.com/saadirfan”.

Redirect your Visitors to Notice Page

Don’t lose your visitors while having some maintenance work on your site. Redirect your visitors to your Notice Page to tell them the reason of downtime of your site, or ask them to subscribe to have update via email about re-launching of site. The code given below will take all the users to notice.html

Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/ notice.html$

RewriteRule .* /notice.html [R=307,L]

Redirect Visitors to Fancy Custom Error Pages

Sick with style of default custom error pages? Here is the way to redirect your visitors to your own made Custom Error Page, in case of having any error. Fancy Error Pages with colorful sorry pictures can help you to overcome the anger of the visitors as no user wants to see Error Page while accessing any URL on web.

ErrorDocument 400 /errors/400.html

ErrorDocument 401 /errors/401.html

ErrorDocument 403 /errors/403.html

ErrorDocument 404 /errors/404.html

ErrorDocument 500 /errors/500.html

Now place the pages with the name of 400.html, 401.html, 403.html, 404.html and 500.html and you will be good to go.

Prevent IP Range or a IP

Sick from Robotic attempts on your server, or facing security breach attempts from any IP? Just block the IP range or Specific IP address.

order allow,deny

deny from xxx.xxx.xxx.xx

deny from xxx.xxx.xxx.

allow from all

Confused?

order allow,deny

deny from 123.45.6.7

deny from 012.34.5.

allow from all

The script prevents the access to the site for IP 123.45.6.7, and from any range under this IP. Such as 012.34.5.1, 012.34.5.2, 012.34.5.3, 012.34.5.4, ……

Please use these codes on your own liability. There might be some restrictions on implementing some htaccess codes on your server, from your hosting provider. Your file also might be automatically get deleted and replaced with default files, depends on hosting provider’s policies. Please confirm from the service provider before proceeding.

Unfortunately I could not review WordPress on iPad personally, but I believe WordPress on iPad will give an awesome experience because of its large on-screen keyboard which will made posting, editing, moderation very easy. Properly it will be the first application for me to run when I get my hands on iPad.

The releasing of WordPress on iPad will initiate entire new dialogue of WordPress future as iPad can be an ideal touch screen device for WordPress blogging.

About Apple iPad

Download Link

From the start of the year, so many new designs have rolled out by internet giant companies. Such as, first MSN came up with new design, then blogger got update for improving its look and just a day before; Twitter has introduced new home page, and now YouTube has came up with new design. This design is expected to be under test from long, and today YouTube has decided to make it out. New design is primarily to focus on developing people interest and making design more efficient than ever before. Navigation to related posts has also got major update, and keeps the user on the site as user will find related post on same page.

YouTube is one of most visiting site on internet, and on 3^rd rank of Alexa. Vimeo is the one of main rival of it, which is getting popular day by day because of its cool look.

What makes this features cool is, users don’t have to use any specific client to share media, as the new feature transfer the file directly in the browser and receiver receives it instantly. Google is also working on bringing file transfer to Gmail, as Google mentioned on its blog

We’re working to bring file transfer and the new toolbar to Gmail too. In the meantime, you can continue to access voice, video and group chat in Gmail from the “Video and More” menu in a chat window.

In this theme update, the logo has been also modified and turned into a simple logo which reveals the sophisticated impression, for which I have been thinking for; from long time. It was not the only design, which I designed for TechCline. I was working on three different designs but lastly came up with this design and finalized it to compose this WP-theme. What’s next is, I will be sharing my designing experiences soon and also thinking to write bunch of articles about CSS, but need time. I have also learned lot of new things recently as I have increased my research level, and will be sharing what I have learned. If you do have any suggestion or feedback about new theme or facing a bug, then please write to me.