One of the tasks I have been doing regularly lately is converting older static HTML websites into WordPress websites. For smaller websites it is not difficult to copy and paste the data into the new WordPress site. The problem is, what do you do with a larger website of a few hundred to a few thousand pages? The very thought of copying and pasting that many pages from plain HTML into WordPress does not thrill me to say the least. Thankfully I have come across the BlogPig CSVPig Import plugin.

BlogPig makes several WordPress automation plugins, some of which could be seen as more on the darker side of blogging, but CSVPig is a tool that is badly needed to help import data into WordPress. It does pretty much exactly what you would expect it to do, it imports a CSV file into WordPress.

You can choose to create post or pages, create different templates depending on what you are importing and even schedule the posts to be published at some future date.

Now, you might be wondering how I use BlogPig CSVPig to import static HTML files, well it is pretty easy actually. I wrote a PHP script that takes a list of URL’s processes the page and saves the content into a CSV file. It helps that I created many of the sites that I am converting so I can make sure the HTML structure is consistent. I won’t post my script because there is a potential to use it to scrape a site.

You can also use BlogPig CSVPig for creating many other sites. I have seen it used to create affiliate based sites using merchants datafeeds. You could use it to create your own store or even to manage your own website using a spreadsheet if you are more comfortable using spreadsheet software.

For now I have found BlogPig CSVPig very useful to help clients transition from basic HTML based websites to a WordPress powered site where they have more control over their website and information.

I was doing some work and needed some social media icons to help promote a websites Twitter and Facebook page so a quick Google search quickly had me at the Social Network Icon Pack by Komodo Media. An excellent social media icon set that is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Check out this screenshot of these great icons! I only used three but if you need any social media icons take a look at this collection.

Thanks for the great icon set!

Having a reliable and fast serving website is essential today. You can have the best website in the world but if it is not up when people are trying to load it then there is not much point. Not to mention how important it is to have a fast loading website. Having a content delivery network can improve your website load time, but a decent content delivery network costs money and if you are on shared hosting you might not want to pay more money for a content delivery network just yet. Not to mention a content delivery network does not help to keep your website safe from hackers, spammers and botnet zombie machines.

This is where Cloudflare comes in. Cloudflare helps to protect your website by doing several things. First it helps to protect it from the visitors you don’t want to visit your website. It uses threat data from Project Honey Pot and a variety of other third-party sources to identify online threats. Cloudflare will then challenge. You can even use the threat control panel to ban ip addresses even entire countries.

Cloudflare can also keep your website online when for some reason or other your server goes down. Cloudflare can offer visitors cached pages while your server is offline allowing them to browse and read your content while your server is not available. Visitors will see a small notice that your server is not available. The notice will disappear as soon as your server comes back online again.

Cloudflare will also improve your websites load time, by caching the most used parts of your website. Images, javascript files and cascading styles sheets can all be cached and served through Cloudflare.

I have been using Cloudflare for just over a month on several of my own websites and I have been impressed so far with the service. I am only using the free service, but with the four sites I have added to the service I have seen a overall speed increase of 49%, saved 3.1GB in bandwidth and saved myself from 9,406 unique threats. I have also had the opportunity to test how Cloudflare can keep a website online when the server goes offline. While it was only for a short time the websites content was still available while the server was offline. Cloudflare has certainly improved several of my websites that on shared servers. I am currently only using the free Cloudflare service on some personal websites, but Cloudflare does offer more stats and control.

To get a sense of what Cloudflare can do for your website check out the 90 second video of what Cloudflare does. Also be sure to check out the Cloudflare tour page for more information.

Overall, Cloudflare is am impressive service. I am going to continue to use it for my personal sites and see how the performance improves over time. If you want to try out Cloudflare it only takes a few minutes to setup. If you do come back and leave a comment about what you think of the service.

I am sure if you have stopped by here in the past and read a few posts you would know that I am a pretty hard core Mozy online backup fan. I have good reason to be, they have helped me keep my business data safe with MozyPro. I have survived a hard drive failure with no data loss and it has helped me to occasionally recover files that I deleted by accident.

I liked MozyPro so much I started to use MozyHome to backup our family data. Mostly photos and videos. There is some other files in there as well, but the large majority of the files I backup with MozyHome are photos and video. It adds up to several hundred gigabyte, not a small amount. It has been great knowing that those files are safe offsite in the event that my local backup fails or both the local backup and computer are stolen or destroyed somehow.

Recently though Mozy has announced new backup plans for MozyHome and as result my several hundred gigabyte backup will go up in price from $103.95 every two years to over $825.00 / two years and that is assuming I create no more photos and video in the next year and a half I have on my current subscription. That is a fairly large price increase. Thankfully I do not have to worry about it until my current subscription expires in about a year and a half.

I understand that Mozy has not had a price increase for MozyHome for a long time, I also understand that I am probably part of the 10% of users that backup a lot of data. I looked at what I backup to MozyHome after the price increase was announced and yes there are some files I can remove, but the majority of them are files I want to make sure are safe. Things like photos of my kids, videos of their first steps, their first school concerts, and so on. These files are precious to me and despite what someone else might say, I want them to be backed up and safe. That is why I keep local backups of them, and why I want an online backup of them as well.

I still like Mozy, and will continue to use MozyPro to keep my business files safe, but I have to admit when my MozyHome subscription is close to over I will likely be moving my family backup to another service. I do not say that lightly, but the new MozyHome plan quotas are to small and too costly to stay with them.

When it does come time to move my home backup I am leaning towards Backblaze. My wifes laptop has Backblaze installed on it and it works well just automatically backing up everything. I like the fact that if I need to restore all of my files from them I can have a USB drive shipped to me with the files on it. You can read a Backblaze review over at Online Backup Deals if you want to know more about the service. Of course if you want to sign up you can go straight to the Backblaze website.

If you are like me and have a lot of personal data that you want to keep safe take a look at Backblaze. If I referred you to MozyHome for your home backup and you are not happy about your price increase take a look at Backblaze, they appear committed to staying an unlimited backup service.

Yahoo’s stupidity continues with news that they are closing down Delicious. While not making many headline lately Delicious was a fantastic service that allowed people to bookmark websites so you could access them anywhere. I used to use Delicious regularly to save sites that I would find so I could access the bookmarks from anywhere. The mere fact the Yahoo is closing down a service that was used by millions regularly giving them a database of website bookmarks with tags is astounding to me. How could they not find a way to make money with this service shows how poorly Yahoo had and is being run.

Of course if you use Delicious you are now going to have to export all of your bookmarks to use on another service. Search Engine Land already has a roundup of 10 alternatives that you can switch over too and a good place to start if you want to maintain your bookmarks in the cloud. One service that is not mentioned is Xmarks. While Xmarks is not the same as Delicious, it does provide you with the ability to sync your bookmarks across web browsers, and access your bookmarks over the web from any web browser. Xmarks also had a close call with closing down recently but have been acquired by LastPass so they will be around for a little while longer. At least if Xmarks does close down you will not have to worry about exporting your bookmarks since they will already be one your computer.

I wonder how long until Yahoo closes down Flickr? Course maybe someone could help out my buddy Rhett raise some money to buy it from Yahoo and make it work.

One of the reasons I love to work with WordPress is because it is so easy to extend it using plugins and themes. With mobile usage on the rise it is becoming more important to have not just a website but also a mobile version of your website so people visiting on smartphones like the iPhone, Android based phones, Blackberry and the new Windows 7 based smartphones have a customized experience. That is one of the reasons why I setup a mobile version of the LGR Internet Solutions website but there are easier ways to get a mobile website up and running on WordPress. If you are looking for an easy way to start offering a mobile version of your website take a look at the WPtouch Pro plugin by BraveNewCode.

WPtouch Pro is how many high end websites create their own mobile version, including TechCrunch, although I believe they have modified it for their own needs. WPtouch Pro is the latest version of WPtouch and is only available for purchase. You can still get the original 1.9 in the WordPress plugin directory, but the cost to purchase version 2 for one website is only $29.00! I know some people that spend that on coffee in a week, so the cost is really not that much.

The ease of offering your readers a customized mobile version of your website using WPtouch Pro is fantastic and is another great reason why you should use WordPress for creating your website. You can spend hours upon hours creating your own mobile website version, or just build with WordPress and use a plugin like WPtouch Pro to give your clients and customers access to the information they want easily.

There are not very many directories I will pay money to get into these days, but Best of the Web (BOTW) is one of the few that I will still find the time and money to submit to. BOTW does not offer many promotions very often so when one comes out you should try to take advantage of it. For October only you can save 20% off of all directory submissions including those for the UK and Blog directories.

Use the promo code SAVE20 when prompted for the promotional code and you will save 20% off the price of your submission whether you choose to pay for a one-time or annual review fee. I usually go for the one time fee of $299.95USD, even though it is a little more expensive than the recurring fee, but you only need to pay it once. Saving 20% on $299.95 saves you $59.99! Pretty good savings for a quality directory.

Visit the Best of the Web directory and submit your site today! The 20% off ends at the end of October!

I have written about some of the premium themes that are available for WordPress before but I wanted to tell you about a fairly new premium theme that is available for WordPress that I am quite impressed with. It is called Headway and it is different than many of the other premium themes that are available.

Headway is not just a premium theme, it is more a framework to build off of. There are a number of very good frameworks to start to build WordPress themes with but Headway has a unique visual editor that makes it easy to drag and drop different components into your theme. You can easily remove a sidebar on pages where you do not feel I is needed or add a sidebar to sections where you want it. Changing colours and font styles is as easy as a few clicks and changing the layout of a header is a breeze.

There is also the ability to use easy hooks to place content where you want it in the theme. Want to add some extra text to the footer, use an easy hook. Want to add an ad before or after a post, use an easy hook.

Many of the websites I have been working on lately are conversions from static HTML sites where clients are happy with the look and feel of their current website, but want the ability to edit the site themself and perhaps add a blog. Headway has become invaluable in recreating the clients website into WordPress.

Headway has also made the need to add the All in One SEO plugin no longer needed. Headway has taken many of the options of All in One SEO pack and intergrated them into the theme. You can control all the aspects of SEO including setting a custom title, meta description and keywords.

If you are looking for a fantastic theme framework to build your WordPress website with, or are a developer wanting an easy to use framework for your clients websites take a serious look at Headway. I have already created two WordPress based websites with it for clients and it has already paid for the developer license in the time I saved getting the clients sites done and out the door. Best of all my clients are happy because they can use WordPress to manage their websites and add new content.

If you use WordPress for your website or blog you might have noticed that WordPress 3.0 is now available. This is a major upgrade so I highly recommend you backup your database, and it would not hurt to make a complete backup of your current installation just in case something does not go as expected.

There are some great new features in WordPress 3.0 and it is a step forward from 2.9. The ability to host multiple websites with one WordPress installation will be excellent if your web host supports it. The addition of different types of pages will also allow people to extend WordPress into much more than just a blog.

If you want a great overview of the new WordPress take a look at the video below and don’t forget to visit the official WordPress blog about the release.

There are some applications that I use all the time and has made my life easier. Dropbox is one of those applications that I mostly use to sync files between my main desktop and my laptop so I always have the latest version of the files I am working on. It is also great to sync my latest favorite album so I can listen to it on the laptop as well. I was looking forward to the Android application coming out so I could use Dropbox to always have the most important files I need available on my phone. After installing the app from the Android market here is what I like and don’t like so far.

The Good

• Allows me to easily upload files from my Motorola Milestone to Dropbox.
• Can stream music to my phone, which is handy on a wifi connection.

Things I wish it could do

• Sync – I am amazed the I cannot sync at least some specific folders to my phone. This is one of the things Dropbox does best and it is missing in the Android app.
• Download a whole folder – I can download individual files, but it is not possible to download a whole folder at a time.

Dropbox on my laptop and desktop are great, but I have to admit I am a little disappointed in the Dropbox Android app. It seems like they just missed ignore what makes Dropbox great. Sure streaming music to your phone is cool, but I want to be able to wirelessly sync data, music and video to my Android phone so I have it when I am not connected.