It has been almost two years since I started using Mozy online backup and in that time Mozy has saved me twice from failed hard drives, I became a reseller of MozyPro and installed it on several of my clients computers, and I routinely tell people who ask me about backups that they should sign up for Mozy. It has been one service that I have been very happy with.

Since I started using Mozy I have regularly offered readers here the lasted Mozy promotional codes so they can signup with Mozy and save some money on their subscription. If you have been reading here for any time at all you know I like to save money. I suspect some of you got tired of seeing my constant mentioning of Mozy so from this point on I will not be posting the latest Mozy promotional codes here, instead I have created a new website, appropriately called, Mozy Promotional Code, where I list the latest Mozy promotional codes and specials. I will still continue to promote Mozy here with a link on my sidebar and if you want to save some money on Mozy check out Mozy promotional code.

If you came here looking to save money on Mozy with a Mozy promotional code then I can offer you 15% off by using this exclusive code. Just click here to save 15% when you sign up.

If you are still not backing up your data online using Mozy online backup, or iDrive, Carbonite, Elephant Drive or a similar service what are you waiting for? They will help keep all of your data safe.

Summer has been going by so fast it has been hard to keep up with writing here. Between working on projects and enjoying time with family. One of the projects I have been working on is a website for a Regina Auto Glass company called Expert Auto Glass. They are a new auto glass repair and replacement company here in Regina and it was fun to put together their website for them this summer.

Their site features a nice clean look that is easy to read. We also feature their recently made television commercial on the home page of the site. There website is also mobile browser friendly, so if you are out driving around and you get a stone chip you can easily navigate the website and find their location to get your stone chip repair quickly by their staff.

Check out Expert Auto Glass for all of your glass repair and replacement here in Regina. Of course if your local Regina business needs a web presence get in touch with me and I will be happy to help.

Last week I open up the doors to questions and got some great ones. I thought I would start with one of the questions from Angie.

WordPress or Joomla? Which is better and why?

I have actually posted about WordPress and Joomla in the past and at the time when I wrote that post I leaned towards using WordPress for blogs and Joomla for websites. The main reason was because of an issue I ran into creating a website with WordPress and how it handled pages. That problem seems to have been fixed and I have since created WordPress powered websites with large numbers of pages and not suffered any kinds of problems. Since I wrote that initial post on WordPress or Joomla, I have to admit I have been converted to using WordPress for more than just a blog and more as a complete content management system. Some might say this is like comparing apples to oranges, that they were created for different reasons. That might be true, but to webmasters and bloggers the reasons why something was created is not necessarily the most important thing. The most important thing is that it works.

• Administration

  In my experience WordPress offers webmasters and bloggers a better administration section to use and maintain their websites. The administration pages are easier to learn, and faster to respond. The Joomla administration has a steeper learning curve and is not as easy for people to learn.

• Friendly URL’s

  WordPress permalinks feature offers an easy way to set friendly URL’s for a website or blog. Joomla has a friendly URL option, but it does not compare to the WordPress ability to make friendly URL’s. You can install other extensions to improve upon Joomla’s friendly URL’s and that works as long as the extension author keeps the extension up, and that it does not break with the next upgrade. With WordPress this is built into the core. WordPress makes it much easier to make your URL’s look nice to your visitors.

• SEO Friendly URL’s

  Having friendly URL’s is great for users, but it is also great for the search engine’s. WordPress nice permalink feature puts it ahead of the Joomla for SEO.

• Duplicate Content Issues

  Both WordPress and Joomla suffer from a problem involving duplicate content. With WordPress it happens because of archives, categories, and tag pages all having duplicate content as the posts and pages. With Joomla it occurs because of menu pages. The problems exists for both, the difference is it easier to fix using WordPress. Even with out the use of plugins in WordPress it is possible to create a robots.txt file to prevent indexing of the categories, tag and archive pages leading the search engines to the one copy of your original content. With Joomla it is not as easy. Partly because of the problem with friendly URL’s.

• Extendibility

  Both WordPress and Joomla have a plugin or extension system that allows you to add in other features that are not native to the software. This is mostly a personal preference, but I find the WordPress plugin system much easier to work with and more reliable. I seem to be regularly fixing problems and errors with Joomla extensions.

• Really Simple Synication (RSS)

  WordPress offers a much better RSS system than Joomla that makes more content available to readers.

• Speed

  I have not sat down and timed how long it takes to add new pages or posts into WordPress or Joomla, but I know that it certainly feels much faster to publish new content on WordPress. There is a post Playing with Wire that looks more at usability between WordPress and Joomla.

While there are reasons to choose Joomla over WordPress they are quickly becoming less. In the end it comes down to what you want to do with your website and what is the easiest, most user friendly system to do it with. More and more WordPress is the easiest, user friendly system to accomplish that task. WordPress is easier to use, faster to train non-geeks, and overall allows individuals and businesses of all sizes to create interesting websites that keep people coming back too. For the majority of people WordPress will easily meet their website and blog needs.

If you are looking for a way to demo both WordPress and Joomla without installing them. Take a look at OpenSourceCMS. There you can try both systems out. The here is the Joomla demo, and here is the WordPress demo.

What do you prefer WordPress or Joomla? What made you decide one over the other?

by koka_sexton

This WordPress weekend project is not for everyone, but depending on your WordPress website it might be exactly what you are looking for. WordPress by default does not include pages in the RSS feed. This makes perfect sense if you are using WordPress mainly as a blogging platform, but what if you are using WordPress for more than just blogging but as a content management system to run your website? It then makes sense that you might want to include pages in the RSS feed to let people know when you add a new page to your website.

This is where RSS Includes Pages comes in handy. Simply install the plugin and your pages will automatically be included in the RSS feed, so your subscribers will know when you add a new page to your website. There is not a lot of features or fancy options for this plugin, it does exactly what it says it does, adds your pages to the RSS feed. If you do not want some pages you can modify the publish date to a later date so it is not published in the feed. It might be nice if the plugin gave you an option on the pages editor about whether you want it included in the RSS feed or not, but sometimes keeping it simple is best.

If you are looking for an easy way to add your website pages to your RSS feed with WordPress take a look at the RSS Includes Pages plugin. It has come in handy for a few clients I work with that use WordPress as a content management system and not just for blogging.

I have been wondering what people would like to know more about that read my blog so I thought I would open up the doors to you to ask me your webmaster and blogging questions.

The floor is all yours, what questions would you love to have answered about being a webmaster and / or blogging. Be as specific or general as you would like. Leave your questions below and I will answer them in either upcoming posts.

Looking forward to your questions!

If you are thinking of doing affiliate marketing from your WordPress blog you might have come across a plugin from MaxBlogPress called Ninja Affiliate. A couple of high profile blogs, like Daily Blog Tips and Problogger, have made posts about it and it does look like an impressive plugin. I have not personally used the Ninja Affiliate plugin but I have read about it and it does look impressive making it easy to automatically link keywords that you specify in your blog post to your affiliate links, while at the same time displaying a friendlier URL for your readers. This is a great way to help increase your affiliate sales and at the same time make it easier to manage your affiliate links. Did you know that you can get much of the same functionality of the Ninja Affilate plugin by using a couple of free GPL WordPress plugins instead of spending $97.00?

One of the great features of Ninja Affiliate is it ability to automatically turn keywords that you specify into affiliate links. For example if I type the keyword “Mozy online backup“, (you all know I like Mozy right), the keyword Mozy online backup will automatically be turned into an affiliate link leading to the Mozy website. It saves time by automatically linking keywords to affiliate links. There are a few plugins that offer similar functionality that you can try.

• Batch Links
• SEO Smart Links
• BlogMechanics KeywordLink
• KB Linker

I have not personally tried each of those plugins, but I have used SEO Smart Links and BlogMechanics KeywordLink on other WordPress blogs and both are good plugins. If you want to limit the number of affiliate links per keyword you might want to look at SEO Smart Links first. The BlogMechanics KeywordLink offers the ability to link the keyword once or all the time. This can make it harder to control how often the keyword is linked. SEO Smart Links offers a little more control over linking limits.

That takes care of part of the work. Creating nice friendly URL’s for your readers to see instead of some long affilaite link can be done with a plugin that I recommned that every WordPress blog have installed. The WordPress Redirection plugin. This plugin helps you to manage 404 error redirection, changing post permalinks, and it can be setup to manage custom affiliate links.

The WordPress Redirection plugin allows you to create groups so you can manage your affiliate links. You can create a custom group using the WordPress Redirection plugin called “Outgoing” or “Recommended”. You can then create redirection links using your affiliate links and add them to your “Outgoing” or “Recommend” group. This allows you to easily manage all of your affiliate links in one place. To create your reader friendly URL’s simply decide on a URL structure for your links. If you noticed my Mozy online backup keyword link links to http://www.lgr.ca/go/mozyonlinebackup.html, this link then redirects to my Mozy affiliate link. This is much friendlier than the Mozy affiliate link. If your affiliate link needs to be changed you now have one place to edit the link and all your keyword links that are using that URL will be redirected to the new URL. This is much faster than hunting through hundreds or thousands of posts to change your affiliate links.

It is best practise that affiliate links should be nofollowed so the search engines do not follow them. This can be done in two ways. Depending on the keyword link plugin you choose you might be able to add the nofollow attribute on the link itself using the keyword link plugin. I know that both SEO Smart Links and BlogMechanics KeywordLink allow you to do this. You can also add your custom URL’s to your robots.txt file to prevent the search engine spiders from following your affiliate links. For example I could add the following line to my robots.txt file:
Disallow: /go/

There might be other features that the Ninja Affiliate plugin can perform that I have not covered. It does appear that it has more statistics built in than is available in the Redirection plugin. The Ninja Affiliate plugin does offer all of the management in one place, while with this method you will need to go to multiple places to manage your keywords and links. Nothing a couple of opens tabs can’t do mind you. If you don’t want to spend the $97.00 to get the WordPress Ninja Affiliate plugin you might want to give this technique a try. It can help to boost your affiliate sales and provide you with an easy way to manage your affiliate links.

What do you use to manage your affiliate links on your WordPress blog?

I use Feedburner to manage my blog RSS feed like many other bloggers. Recently Feedburner has made two changes to their service that are worth talking about. One that many have been waiting for years to have and one change that has many of us shaking our heads.

First the change that many of us have been waiting for, Feedburner has finally made it possible for the subject lines of RSS to email to be customized. Feedburner has been providing an RSS to email service since before they were bought by Google. The emails were all sent out with the same subject line though, so email subscribers really had no clue what the latest post was about before they opened the email. This is a good move by Feedburner will make many bloggers happy.

Feedburner makes one good move with email subject lines, but not long ago they made a change that still dumbfounds me, they started counting Friendfeed subscribers as RSS subscribers. This move just makes me shake my head. It literally makes the Feedburner subscriber count useless. The idea is that the people who follow you on Friendfeed are subscribed to your blog, but the truth is that the majority of people that might follow you on Friendfeed might never actually notice your blog posts on their stream. For example, the majority of people that are subscribed to my Friendfeed account are my Twitter followers. The majority of those people do not follow my blog but my Twitter feed. Given the amount of noise that is on Twitter and Friendfeed they are not subscribed to my blog, they might not even notice my blog posts on those services. My ego might like seeing the inflated subscriber numbers but that is all they are, inflated and inaccurate. This move has made the subscriber numbers from Feedburner totally useless.

On the one hand it is nice to see Feedburner doing something. Many of us were starting to think that they might just be forgotten about by Google and left to die a slow death. Unfortunately with bad moves like adding Friendfeed subscribers to the numbers perhaps Google would rather force us all to abandon Feedburner so they can kill it.

 
Already on Twitter? Follow me. Not on Twitter yet, then join the conversation.

There are a number of tools that I use regularly and tend to take for granted, one of those tools is Dropbox. I have a desktop computer that I do the majority of my work on, but there are times when I meet with clients and I take my laptop. While I take transfer the files that I need from my desktop to my laptop there are occasions when I do forget a file or I create some new documents and I want to make sure that they are stored back on my desktop just in case something happens to my laptop.

I used to carry a USB flash drive around but there have been occasions when I forget to take it with me. There is nothing worse than being at a clients and realizing I forgot an important file or folder on my desktop that I wanted to show them. This is where I will usually use a VNC remote desktop to connect to my desktop computer copy the folders and files I need into my Dropbox and in a couple of seconds (or minutes depending on how large the files are) and the files are there for me to use on my Dropbox on my laptop and accessible through the web interface.

Dropbox has also come in very useful when I have created new documents on my laptop and want to make sure I have a copy of them when I am back at home just in case something happens to my laptop before I get home. I have Mozy installed on my desktop at home and it automatically backs up my files there, my laptop does not have Mozy so I backup the files using Dropbox to my desktop which will automatically backup the files. Dropbox makes it very easy for me to make sure those files are safe and where I need them. That way I don’t have to worry about losing my USB flash drive.

There are lots of other things you can do with Dropbox. I am sure I have only touched the surface of what can be done but it works well for what I need it to do. Dropbox gives you 2gb for free so you can use it without it costing a cent and it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. If you need more space you can purchase a larger account. The next account size up from free is $9.99/month or $99.00/year for 50gb. They also have a referral program that will get you more space for every person that you refer. If you need to sync files between two or more computers or want to have instant web access then take a look at Dropbox it might be just what you are looking for, I know it has helped me numerous times since I installed it.

Want to know what other websites someone else owns or works on? Thanks to SpyOnWeb you can get a pretty good idea of what other websites someone owns or is involved with. Just enter the URL of the website you want to know about and SpyOnWeb will return the other website names that are associated with that address. SpyOnWeb does more than just look up the sites that are on the same IP address though, it will look for sites that have the same AdSense publisher id and the same Google Analytics ID. This gives you a much better idea of what other sites a person is involved in.

This service is similar to another one I talked about at one time called You Get Signal. You Get Signal only returns the other websites that are on the same IP address though. If the persons website is on shared web hosting then there is no guarantee that the other websites are theirs or belong to someone else. The fact that SpyOnWeb checks not just for IP addresses but also Google AdSense and Analytics ID’s give it a better percentage that the sites it returns will be have something to do with the same person.

There is a lot of information you can find with a tool like this and while it can be fun to see what other websites people have, it may not be totally accurate as well. For example, some of the sites that it returns for me are not my personal websites, but my clients websites. Yes I do have something to do with the site, but it is not my website. There were also some websites returned that are no longer mine or on my server. Overall it can be a useful tool, especially if you are wondering what else your competition might be up too. Remember to play nice though. Like Search Engine Journal says:

I don’t advise though to use this tool for any malicious purposes.

I read about this service thanks to a post over at Search Engine Journal.