Using Web and Technology to Enhance Your Life

Mozilla Thunderbird is an extremely powerful and versatile email client. More over it’s free, open source and without a doubt my favorite email client.

When you create a new e-mail account from cPanel, it provides automatic configuration for Microsoft Outlook 2000 but not for Mozilla Thunderbird.

So here’s how you set you your email account with Thunderbird.

1. Open Thunderbird. On the Tools menu, select “Account Settings”.

2. Click on “Add account” or press Alt+A.

3. Select “e-mail address” and press next.

4. Type in your name and the newly created e-mail address.

5. In this dialog box, Select POP and enter the address for the incoming server. This is usually mail.domain.com (where domain stands for your … umm.. domain name). So mine’s set to mail.shypy.com

Deselect the “Use Global Inbox” checkbox – it’s a royal pain if you’ve got multiple accounts.

Step 5

6. Time to set the incoming username. It is either your username (from username@domain.com) or username+domain.com

This setting is shown by cPanel just after you create the email account.

7. Set the name to whatever you like. I set it to “Domain’s mail”.

8.  Verify all the details and go back and change any if required. Press finish and you’re almost done.

9. Click on “Server Settings” for the account and under security settings, select the radio button which says “TLS”.

10. Now you’re back to the “Account Settings” dialog box. Scroll down and select “Outgoing Server (SMTP)”

Click on “Add” if you haven’t already added any. Otherwise click on edit.

Set the server name to “mail.domain.com”.

Set the username to whatever username has been given to. Mine is username+domain.com

Do not forget to verify your port address with your hosting provider or server admin. The default setting is 25, but it may vary. Mine is 26.

And you’re done. So there it was, the step by step tutorial on setting up your email with Mozilla Thunderbird.

Wednesday is Video of the Week day. Today we have the supremely talented Jeff Dunham with Achmed the dead terrorist in one of the most viewed youtube videos of all time.

If you still haven’t seen it(were you living under a rock till now?), now is not the time to miss it.

This post is for all the dumbasses out there who, like me, have managed to forget their WordPress site login and email address at the same time.

If you forget your password you can get it back by entering your email. But if you are foolish enough to forget both the username and email address, you’re in for trouble. Ok you’re not, because in this post I’m going to show you exactly how you can retrieve/change your username, password and email address from your MySQL database.

You’ll need phpMyAdmin for this – you have it if your host has provided you with either cPanel or Direct Admin. Here are step by step instructions on how to recover your username/password/email address from the database:

1. Login to your cPanel and look for phpMyAdmin – you might have to click on the ‘databases’ icon to find it.

2. Once you’re in, select the database for the blog/site in question from the sidebar.

3. Click on the browse button for the wp_users table. (see image below)

3. Now click on the edit button (pencil) for the required username. This step also gives you your username if you’re like me and have been stupid enough to forget it.

4.  You’re almost there now. In this form, you can change your username and password. This is what you’ll see:

Don’t worry, the Value in the user_pass field is not your password – just an encrypted version of it.

5. Change the password string to whatever you want. Now from the function drop down menu, select “MD5″. The image below makes it clear.

6. Click on ‘Go’ and you’re done

That shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes, did it?

The other day, I wrote about how you can move your wordpress blog to a different server/host.

Although moving your database and files is quite a foolproof way to move your script, a couple of my friends reckoned that they’d rather stay away from databases. Although phpMyAdmin is a GUI based solution, people’d rather not mess with databases at all if they could help it. Furthermore, manually moving all the files could be time consuming if you have a slow connection at home.

That is why I decided to publish this post which shows an easier way to do the same without the hassle of meddling with phpMyAdmin.

This uses the export feature provided in the wordpress dashboard.

So here’s how you move to a new host in 2 mins:

1. Login to your wordpress blog/site

2. Click on the Manage Tab and Select “Export”. Select all authors and Download the Export File.

3. Save the .xml file on your localhost. You’ll need this later when you export it back to the new server.

4. Note down your permalink, plugin and theme settings. You’ll have to manually reset them in the newer installation.

Permalink Settings

5. The export is now complete. Head off to your domain registrar and change the DNS settings to the one provided by the new host.

6. Open cPanel on the new host and create the addon domain. Use the 5 minute install <link here> or fantastico to install a new version of WordPress.

7. Login and head off to the “Manage” tab. Select “import” and upload the .xml file that you downloaded in step 2.

8. Now you will have imported all your posts and comments to the new location. Time to tweak a few settings to make it look completely like the older version.

9. Delete the default “Hello World post”. Change the permalink settings to match those you noted in step 4.

10. You’ll also want to upload the previously used plugins to the wp-plugins folder. Upload your old theme to the wp-content folder and select it.

11. Move the wp-uploads folder.

12. Voila, your wordpress installation is complete. Your new blog looks exactly like the old one.

I have been willing to get into PPC -> CPA marketing for a long time or another, but due to one reason or another(read laziness), I wasn’t able to get started with it.

A week ago, I managed to sort it out, discipline myself and have a serious go at it.  My first couple of campaigns (one was related to weight loss and the other related to designer shoes), were not profitable so I dropped them in a couple of days. This time, I selected a simple two-page submit with only one field to be submitted on each. It was then that I hit the target (or atleast inched a little closer towards it). This campaign has generated my first CPA profits, and I am feeling quite happy to be on my way.

Here’s my last couple of days. Not bad considering the fact that I’ve never done serious PPC marketing before:

I have 4 more days in June and hope to achieve reach my target of $200 in gross commissions for the last two weeks of July.

My goal for August is to earn atleast $1000 in CPA commissions.

It’s not that hard once you take care of a couple of things:

1. Do not direct link; at least not with google adwords. Since Quality Score is such a big issue with Adwords, your max CPC can shoot through the roof if you’re directly linking to the merchants page. Use a landing page – this will boost your Quality Score and help presell the customer before he’s sent to the merchant’s page.

2. Use as many keywords as possible and sort them into as many ad groups as possible.

3. Take your time while creating the keyword list and weed out the ones which look out of place. Also make sure you don’t use broad-match – and if you do, make sure that the max CPC is set pretty low. Use negative keywords

4. Keep testing and tweaking. Take a peek into your campaign every 6 hours and observe which adgroups are converting and which aren’t. Split test landing pages and ads & keep the profitable ones.

5. Do not feel defeated even if your first couple of campaigns don’t turn out to be profitable. It is easy to lose quite a bit of $$$ with adwords in the beginning but be persistent and trust yourself. No one said it was going to be easy – keep working at it.

Oh, and by the way the CPA affiliate network that I prefer and use is Coepac.

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Greasemonkey is a Firefox addon that allows you to customize your browsing experience using snippets of JavaScript code.

You can find a huge collection of different types of user-written scripts to install run on Firefox(with Greasemonkey installed) or Opera.

Movie Dude is a UserScipt that cross-links movie sites so you don’t have to search for a movie info on related sites.

e.g Say you’re browsing the imdb page for The Dark Knight. Now if you want to visit the wikipedia entry for the same movie, you’d have to open a new tab and run an independent search.

Now with the Movie Dude script installed, you’ll automatically see small icons for  related movie entries different sites including Wikipedia, RottenTomatoes, Google Video, YouTube, MetaCritic, etc.

You can also edit the script to make it display related link from other sites. Here’s a little hack to add ThePirateBay Movie Search and Mininova Movie Search to the list.

If you’re on Firefox you’ll need to have Greasemonkey installed. Then go ahead and install the Movie Dude script.

Open up the .js file for editing in your favorite text editor and add these lines to the code:


Mininova: {
name: "Mininova",
link: "http://www.mininova.org/search/{search}/4",
icon: "http://www.mininova.org/favicon.ico",
scanURL: "mininova.org",
},
ThePirateBay: {
name: "ThePirateBay",
link: "http://thepiratebay.org/search/{search}/0/99/200",
icon: "http://www.thepiratebay.org/favicon.ico",
scanURL: "thepiratebay.org",
},

Save the file and you’re good to go. Now whenever you’re browsing IMDb and feel the urge to *ahem* have a look at *ahem* the mininova listings, all you need to do is click on the link at the top of the page.

Have Fun!

I recently changed my webhosting provider. Hence, I had to move all my sites from the old host to the new one. Doing this with static HTML/CSS sites is simple enough. But for a database backed script like wordpress it can turn out to be quite tricky.

I’ve heard this question being asked quite often by friends on Personal Messenger and on webmaster forums. That is why I made a step-by-step tutorial on how it is done.

1. Find out the name of the MySql database you’re using for the wordpress blog. Download this database to your localhost. If your host offers cPanel, then you can use phpMyAdmin to do this.

2. Open phpMyAdmin. Select the name of your database. Click on the “export” tab. Select all. Export them as an SQL file and save it on your PC.

3. Copy all the wordpress files and save them on your localhost. This includes all the files and folders in the directory for your domain. So you should have a bunch of files, and the wp-admin, wp-includes and wp-content directories. The image makes it clear:

4. Now change the DNS settings for your domain and point it to the nameservers of your new web host.

5. Create an addon domain (if required) with the new host and copy all the files and folders from your previous installation. Move the folders as they are. They should include the files and folders showing in the image above.

6. Now it is time to work with databases. Create a new MySql database and assign a user to it. You can do this easily from cPanel.

7. Open up the wp-config.php file from the root directory of your domain/blog. Edit the name of the database, username and password to match the new ones you just created in step 6.

8. Remember the database you downloaded way back in step 1? Time for it to be uploaded to the new server/host. Open up phpMyAdmin. Select the name of the new database you created for wordpress and click on the import tab.

9. Browse to the saved .sql databse and click on Go to upload it.

10. Voila! You have moved your wordpress blog to a new host!

This may take some time, but it is the most fool-proof way to move your wordpress sites/blogs to a new hosting provider/server.