No amount of words and no manner of expression can make known how down-hearted I feel, abandoning this very lovely and precious blog for a very long time.

Since its birth in May 2008, I can say, standing up tall and shoulder-high that AZ Blogging has been a great success. Yeah, I believe so. I can’t really call myself a full time blogger, since I have too many things to take care of and I barely find time to blog. However, this is no excuse for putting this blog into a state of dormancy.

AZ Blogging is nothing out of the ordinary, but I do believe I have some folks out there who find it a very useful and handy “tool” for their blogging experience. When I say folks, I can’t really believe how dump some of them are. Ha ha ha. That’s what actually makes them my friends and readers. Everyone, even the best blogger on the planet, has once been a dummy, and that stage is one to respect.

I will continue to show my respect to those who need some help on blogging, and do my best to make posts that seem to answer questions in the s9implest manner possible.

Those who have been visiting this blog in the past, will agree with me that the traffic has dropped tremendously, maybe due to my “absence” from Entrecard, and secondly, its Pagerank has dropped from 2 to 0, maybe due to some posts from Payperpost. Well, I guess I would have to rely on Entrecard once again, and also make sure that I don’t get carried away by the numerous opportunities offered by paid blogging companies.

Just stick around and get the surprise of this New Year. I will be putting up some good stuff here.

Happy New Year!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Do you know what a sauna is? I bet you do, but for the benefit of our friends who don’t know, take this.

A sauna is a small room designed to be heated to very high temperatures. The majority of saunas are built of wood, often aromatic, that release pleasing aromas as they heat. They are usually with well-controlled humidity. They can be used both for recreational and therapeutic purposes. Most people utilize them as a relaxation tool that provides additional health benefits.

Did I just say health benefits? Yeah! That’s what we shall focus this discussion on.

Instead of regular heat, far infrared heat can be used, making them what we call Infrared Saunas .

Infrared Saunas can be of very great help to people with health conditions, including but not limited to Pain Relief, * Weight Loss (burn up to 900 cal. in a 30 min. session), Joint Stiffness, Aging, Hepatitis, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Menopausal Symptoms, Menstruation Pain, Asthma…

Consider a far infrared sauna your personal retreat, which you can get for as low as $1995. It is worth the price!

Popularity: 30% [?]

Why you walk into a well organized shop, I guess you really don’t have to ask too many questions because most of the stuff you find there have small descriptions attached to them, giving some information, explanation or price. You and I will normally call them tags.

Tagged items are easy to notice and identity. The tags they carry tell us more about them. In blogging, tags can be seen as broader categories to which a post belongs, or in the simplest sense, the main keywords in a post.

Search engines love the title tags. Most web applications and blogging software use the title tags in the title of articles, that’s why it is very important to include keywords in post titles. When a user queries information from the search engines, it is more likely that most of the results will be from articles that have the search trems in their post titles.

In SEO, as important as keywords in post titles are also keywords in urls. Yes, the search engines don’t only look for post titles but they also look at the url of the content. That is why some urls are considered search engine friendly while others are not.

One thing I love very much with wordpress is the ability for a user to decide the exact url of a post. Normally, the url assigned to a post depends strictly on the title you give it. However, this url can be changed by simply clicking on the edit icon next to it and typing a new one.

When assigning a url to a post, I try making it as search engine friendly as possible. Depending very much on keywords in urls make the urls difficult to interpret by humans, but I think that’s OK. Humans should rely on post titles while search engines take care of long and boring urls. Don’t you think so?

A good url should contain major tags from the post content, category under which the post is filed, keywords from the post title, and also any relevant “big term” not mentioned anywhere in the post.

I wish I could call this SEO for Dummies. Ha ha ha. But this really isn’t what the Pros call SEO. We shall be looking at SEO for Dummies in the near future.

Popularity: 39% [?]

Do you have good sight? Are you putting on eye glasses? Do your eye glasses cost you a fortune? Are you satisfied with them?

Not every human being walking the surface of this planet is blessed with good sight, but should seeing for the “less fortunate” in that aspect cost a fortune? Certainly not. Zenni Optical is out there to ensure that, and they do provide quality eyeglasses at extremely low costs, lower than what you can find in most, if not all places.

In addition to the very low prices, some starting at only $8.00, Zenni Optical also provides some freebies like Anti Scratch coating, UV protection and Lens Edge polishing and Beveling.

Also, in addition to full guarantee, all orders on Zenni Optical, even including the $8.00 Eyeglasses, have have High quality stylish frame, Thin and Light 1.57 index lens, Quality Hard Eyeglass case, Microfiber Lens Cleaning Cloth, plus the three freebies mentioned above.Their shipping rates are very moderate, only $4.95 per order.

Talking of varieties, Zenni Optical faces no problem with that. There, one can find a huge selection to choose from. Wondering why they sell so cheap? I thought you would never ask. They sell only our own manufactured frames direct to the customer, with no middlemen and virtually no advertising budget.

Zenni Optical is very good at its job. Find out what the Chicago Tribune says about it.

Popularity: 39% [?]

On the previous post, I announced we are done with the first part of series 3 that was introduced here and had the following topics:

Basic Things to Know About Domain Names

Spice up Your Blog with a Domain Name

Where to Register a Domain Name for Your Blog

Choosing A Good Domain Name For Your Blog

I Just Bought A Domain Name, Now What?

Series 3 is named Domain Names and Web Hosting. The first part that we just completed was solely on Domain Names. Now, we are moving forward to Web Hosting. If there is anything I missed out and you would like an explanation or want to request a post, please don’t hessitate to contact me via admin[at]azblogging.com

The second part of this series which we are heading to, begining in the next post, will be very appropriate for those who want to run self hosted blogs. Running a self hosted blog means

• Signing up for a hosting account (free or paid)
• Downloading your blogging software (eg wordpress from wordpress.org)
• Uploading the blogging software to your hosting account (using the in-built file manager on the control panel, or an ftp client (locally installed or remote).
• Configuring a database to work with your blogging software
• Installing the blogging software on your hosting account

Do I still need to talk about domain names and subdomains here? I don’t think so. Just check out the linked posts above.

The steps I just outlined above are too broad. We need to get to the roots. So, I suggest you don’t panic over words like mysql, database, ftp, filemanager, control panel..etc

You will master them when you are done.

BTW: Uncle Che is a little busy for these two months. However, he will try to keep up!

Popularity: 71% [?]

No!Web Hosting Rating is not just another web hosting rating service. It is a new and fully dynamic web hosting rating and review site. It is one you can’t afford missing, so I would encourage you to check it out. It will be very beneficial for you especially if you are following up the series i am currently running on this blog.

I am very happy that series three is running on smoothly. I have touched the basic things we need to know about domain names. Now, we are on the second part which deals with web hosting and I am very happy to announce that tomorrow, i am taking off with the first post of that second part, An Introduction to Web Hosting.

Before then, I would be very happy if you can check the service I am referring you to so that it eases your understanding of the second part of series two.

Deciding on a web host has never been an easy task. Although there are several hosting rating services out there who are specialized in reviewing and rating Web Hosts, Web Hosting Rating stands out of the crowd in many different ways.

Web Hosting Rating currently has six years of working experience and provide independent customer rating of top 10 web hosting companies. It is not all only about Ratings, reviews and awards. More information on the following are supplied.

1. plans provided by top web hosting providers
2. promotional codes and discount coupons
3. unedited reviews by real customers.

Why should you trust their ratings? As I said earlier, they are “unedited reviews by real customers”.

This service also features great articles that can be of great help to bloggers and webmasters. One of such articles I found was a Cpanel tutorial on Installing and Configuring Fantastico.

Popularity: 61% [?]

If you recently bought a domain name, I bet you can’t wait to set it up. The excitement is always overwhelming. I too just bought one. No more novicemaster.blogspot.com. Yeah I have it set up at www.novicemaster.com. Doesn’t the later look more professional and poses a higher level of credibility? That is what we have been talking about since this series began.

What is the point here? You probably want

1. your blog to be available via your new domain name
2. your blog to be available via your old domain name
3. visitors that reach your blog via your old domain name to be taken to your new domain name.

There are various means of achieving at least two of the three objectives above, and the method you would chose strictly depends on “the state of your blog” (you will understand what I mean by this in the next few paragraphs).

DNS MANAGEMENT

This is highly recommended for someone who wants to start a self-hosted blog.

Let’s say you want to start up a self hosted blog using Wordpress, for example. Self hosted means you will have to sign up for a hosting account, free or paid. Your host will give you DNS settings (Nameservers) that you would attribute to your domain name through your domain registrar. Most, if not all hosting providers will put a sign next to your addon domain name telling you its DNS status.

Now, add the domain name to your hosting account (as an addon domain, and allow from 24-48 hrs for it to be set up. After that, you are ready to install Wordpress and start blogging. Most hosting providers, if not all, will display a message near your domain name telling you if the nameservers set up are correct. Normally, you need at least two nameservers.

ZONE RECORDS

This method of attributing a domain name for a blog is very important is your blog is remote hosted, ie, hosted by an online service like blogger. If your blog is a .blogspot blog, then using your domain name for your blog would be as easy as just setting up a type of zone record called CNAME. A CNAME is just like “another name for”. If you are using blogspot, the CNAME for blogspot is ghs.google.com. Creating a CNAME for your domain name, in lay terms, means telling your domain name to search blogspot (ghs.google.com) and locate any blog that has your domain name attached to it on the publish settings of the dashboard.

The help section of Google has an extensive article to demonstrate how this is done, using various examples for different domain name registrars. If your domain name registrar is not on that article, I recommend you use this other article compiled by my humble self, which I assume is more general and down to earth.

Do not worry. If properly done, you won’t lose any traffic.

Consider reading the following articles

• AZ – BLOGGING – Using A Custom Domain for Your Blogspot Blog
• BLOGSPOT HELP - How do I use a custom domain name on my blog?
• BLOGSPOT HELP - How do I create a CNAME record for my custom domain?

URL FORWARDING and REDIRECTION

This method is recommended if you already have a self hosted blog and you do not want to migrate the entire blog to your new domain name. What you actually would have to do is redirect your domain name to the old one. Using an online redirection service is ok, but I will recommend you do it yourself. Placing a file on the root of your blog will do the job. Third will require you to go to the folder in your file manager that has the index file of your blog.

This article provides an easy method to manually redirect one

Popularity: 85% [?]

Why should I care? Why should I spend numerous hours trying to figure out a so-called appropriate domain name for my blog? It is not worth it. I can just choose any domain name I want to and I will still put up a great blog and drive traffic to it.

Wait a minute. On second thought, everything about my blog starts from a domain name. maybe I should take my time and choose one that can help me in the process of working out some “magic” for my blog

How Important is My Domain Name?

We’ve gone a long way with this series (4th post) an I do believe by now, you should be able to adrress the issue of whether you need a domain name for your blog or not. If you decide you need it, then you also have to consider how important that domain is. If you think you need a domain name but can just go for anyone, then well, the remaining part of this post is not for you. Otherwise, let’s go through a simple tips that can help you choose a domain name.

Choosing a Domanin Name is Not an Easy Task

Azblogging.com sounds very simple and obvious for this blog, but I am sure you will laugh out your lungs if I tell you it took me three days to figure it out. I think I was just lucky having it. Popular opinions hold that all the good names have been taken. This doesn’t stop you from trying, anyway. Let’s roll.

Brand Name or Generic Name?

I think this question is very vital to anyone who wants to choose a new domain name for a blog. You have to first of all decide whether you will like a brand or a generic word as your domain name.

Let me put the above question in a different way. Which do you prefer, Google.com or SearchEngine.com? Technorati.com or BlogSearchEngine.com? Google is a brand name while Searchengine is a generic name.

Whether you decide to use a brand name or a generic name, the characteristics of a good domain name remains the same (though with very confusing exceptions)

Characteristics of a Good Domain Name

Before you choose a domain name for your blog, there three things you should bare at the back of your mind.

A good domain should be Simple, Descriptive and Possessive

One domain name will hardly possess all of the above three characteristics, but why not try to make yours two? Now, let’s go deeper into the three points above.

Simplicity

A simple domain name should be memorable. People should easily be able to remember it next time they want to visit your blog. There are millions of blogs on the blogosphere and I don’t think you will expect everyone to bookmark and favorite all the good blogs they find. To achieve simplicity, make your domain name short.

“Short”, is only one word out of many in the world of domain simplicity. Not every short name is memorable. It has been proven that some acronyms are more difficult to memorize than their full meaning. For example, www.EveryBodyHasTheRightToFight.com is easier to remember than its acronym www.ebhtrtf.com. Watch Out!

Ease of pronunciation also plays a very big role. Most of the time, your site will be recommended to people verbally. If your domain name is difficult to pronounce, people will get it wrongly when transmitted over the phone. Words with pronunciations very similar to others should be avoided.

Spelling matters. Yes! A word might be very short, memorable and easy to pronounce, but is difficult to spell. This can be as a result of it having more than one spelling. If you really need that name, then make sure you buy all the related spellings. www.photosaviour.com (UK) and www.photosavior.com (US) look very alike. I don’t suppose you will go for any (though I own the former, hahahah).

Don’t use hyphens except you are very sure of what you are doing. Hyphens can be used to separate words in long domain names so that they either make sense (forexample WHO REPRESENTS whorepresents.com can be dropped for who-represents.com so that someone doesn’t mistake it for WHORE PRESENTS) or appear easy to read (for example www.everysoldiermustfights.com will be easier to read if it were www.every-soldier-must-fights.com

Description

A descriptive domain name will immediately tell you what the blog is all about. This is true especially for Generic Names. Descriptive domain name usually carry a short description of what the blog is all about, or just simply comprises of a array of keywords separated by hyphens. While it is not yet VERY certain that keywords in domain names do affect search engine ranking, most people prefer staying on the safe side. A descriptive domain name in rare instances can also be a brand name, since some brands do describe their blogs.

Possession

A possessive domain name will immediately tell you who owns it. This is true especially for Brand Names and personal names. With increase in popularity and necessity in of domain names, most people always register their name even if they don’t need it for the moment. Most, if not all brand names are possessive. They immediately tell you the person or institution behind the blog.

More thoughts about choosing a domain name

I do not really stand for the facts below, but I must confess they are rapidly gaining popularity.

• Always register a .com
• Don’t register a domain containing the digit “0” in it
• Consider naming your blog and registering a domain name starting with the digit “1.”
• Try to avoid using domains that contain ‘2’ for “to,” ‘4’ for ‘for,’ ‘u’ for ‘you.’

I think the above points do not need any clarification.
They are clear, right?

Popularity: 92% [?]

Hi Guys (or should I say noobs), welcome here again. This is the third post in this series (series 3 named Domain Names and Web Hosting). As you can see from the table of contents above, the first post was basic things to know about domain names and the second post was spice your blog with a domain name.

If you are convinced enough that you need a domain name for your blog, then let’s proceed on where to get one. Remember, when you buy a domain name, you are not actually buying as the word may imply. You are just renting it and will have to pay your annual dues until you decide not to use it any more. However, this does not strike out the fact that the domain name is temporally owned by you and the domain information will be yours and fully available to the entire web through services like whois.net, unless you pay for (or obtain free) domain privacy service.

Ok, enough of all that stuff

Where Can I Register A Domain Name?

I prefer you use the name register as opposed to buy, and I guess you have understood the explanation I gave above. You can talk of buying when you want to take the domain name over from some other individual who had already registered it, and in such a case, we are not going to be mentioning some $10.00 but many tens, if not hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Before we talk about registering a domain name, let’s have a little talk about domain registrars.

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)

We can’t talk about domain name registrars without mentioning ICANN (www.icann.org).
For every system to be successful, it needs a governing body that ensures uniformity in all activities. This is true especially in technology. Just imagine the USB Flash disk forexample. If there wasn’t a means of setting standards, then each PC manufacturing company will manufacture computers of various flash port sizes and also, USB flash disk manufactures will make USB Devices of various sizes and at the end of the day, you won’t find any pair that can go along.

ICANN is responsible for managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses. Remember we said a domain name forwards to an IP Address, so mentioning both in a single sentence is justified. If not of ICANN, then www.lainyonline.com will not be unique. It could have been possible for many registrars to register the same domain name for different individuals across the globe. The www could have been a mess altogether.

What / Who is a Domain Name Registrar?

A domain name registrar is any company that has been given the right to register domain names. This authority can come from ICANN or from the national ccTLD authority of a particular country.

What Exactly Do Domain Name Registrars Do

As earlier mentioned, a domain name registrar forwards the human readable domain name to its corresponding IP Address (which of course is the actual address of a website). Websites can still be accessed via their IP addresses, but we discussed that domains come into play to make those difficult numbers easy to handle by replacing them with words.

As we shall see earlier, domain name registrars do more than just forward domain names to IP Addresses.

Some Domain Name Registrars Worth Checking Out

I haven’t really used many domain name registration services, so I can’t present a concrete review here. However, I am very interested in a number of registrars that I have found on many reviews. If I were you I will not really trust the reviews because I don’t know how honest they are. If you want to check out a service, I recommend you ask a friend how has used it before, or someone who is not affiliated or directly linked with the service.

1. Netfirms : $4.95/yr (.com .net .org)
2. Hostway : $6.95/yr (.com .net .org)
3. FrugalName : $7.95/yr (.com .net .org)
4. Namecheap : $8.88/yr (.com .net .org)
5. AIT Domains : $7.99/yr (.com .net .org)
6. Go Daddy Software, Inc. $8.95/yr : (.com .net .org)
7. RegisterFly $8.95/yr : (.com .net .org)
8. PlanetDomain $12.99/yr : (.com .net .org)
9. Dotster $14.95/yr : (.com .net .org)
10. DirectNIC : $15/yr (.com .net .org)

The list above was borrowed from a post on E Consultant. The prices mentioned above are only for .com, .net and .org. Other TDLs feature different prices.

On this list, I have tried NameCheap, Netfirms and GoDaddy. I can proudly say NameCheap, though not the cheapest, is my best. For those of you who will like to use NameCheap, I will post a detailed review on a later date. Remember, I am just a humble and honest client. That’s all!

When choosing a Domain Name Registrar, taking price as the only yardstick is not a really good idea. One should always check out how good the customer service is, and also check out the extra benefits attached to the domain name they will purchase. Business practices and ethics also count a lot. I don’t think you will like a registrar that will intentionally trick you to allow your domain name to expire so that they can sell it at a higher price to you or another client (I know stories of such cases).

Now that you have an idea of where to register a domain name, our next post will be on how to choose the right domain name for your blog.

Popularity: 87% [?]

…instead of going straight to the Mozilla Firefox and get into my blogging madness, I decided to install Fruity Loops which I downloaded yesterday. I was still feeling a little bit sleepy (slept only for three hours; 1am to 4am) but I was happy it was dawn. I decided to make an instrumental for one of my all time favorite tracks, “My Life Story”. I guess I never told you guys before that I do rap, he he he.

It is a song I have recorded before, but the soft copy (bundle file) got bad when my studio PC crashed and the recovered file couldn’t play smoothly. The one I had on CD was even worse. What will I do? Just one option. I now have to listen to the song, re-program the instrumental using Fruity Loops 8 Professional and get back into my recording studio and put the rap on it using Samplitude 7 Professional (Eh! this is not a sponsored post don’t think twice because of the above links). The Big Slim of Slim Records featured in that song. Where will I get him now to come and redo his verse? Maybe I will just take all two verses and the chorus alone.

I am not very good at imitating stuff. I could just do another instrumental for that song, but I am already in love with the first one I did, so I just want to replicate it. After a long struggle, I figured out the introductory instruments, the verses, two versions of the bass, and the verse-chorus / semi verse-semi verse DJ-like scratch. What is left now? Just bend the instruments and give the song a specific feel. I can’t continue. I reserve that for another time when I have a cooler head. I am not very good at it. Believe me when I say I never completed any of the music theory “classes” I took online. Maybe, when I finally go to a sound engineering school, I will be “perfect”.

Now is time for me to look into a friend’s computer. It scratched last night and he brought it to me for a solution. I haven’t done PC maintenance, but many people around me assume I am too smart to do stuff they want me to do.

9am, I am done. This is when I am coming in front of my PC to blog and as usual, the first thing I do is sign in my yahoo messenger. At this hour, I don’t expect Lainy to be online, but I expect an offline message (as if it is a job I have given her, hahahaha).

What! It is Lainy always giving me the updates and good news? Every time my Alexa and Google rank change, she is the first to let me know. First thing I did was to check hers too. I am always happy when her rankings are improving, or at least not falling. I never wanted to check Noela’s blog. She’s been writing good stuff and her Alexa ranking has rapidly been improving, but I never dreamt Google could get her ranked now. She has very little blogs linking to hers. Apart from this blog and the EC 4 Religion Blog, the only blog I have seen linking to hers is Dear me in this post. Maybe I should run link checker after I am done with this post. To my greatest surprised, however, Noela’s Blog has PR 1, and her Alexa has improved gradually from 900000 plus to 578,667

AZ Blogging now has
Google PageRank = 2
Alexa Rank = 127,557 (I owe Lainy very much for this Alexa Ranking. I mean it. She understands why)
I am very happy and I strive to go further during the next updates. My ranking has never dropped since I started this blog.

I will like to thank all you. Especially YOU read this post now. If not of faithful “fans” like you, AZ Blogging will be nothing…

Popularity: 91% [?]