Author: Forrest Corbett

GoDaddy Launches Cloud Web Hosting with Mac OS X

Posted on by Forrest Corbett — Posted in Techknow

Just a few hours ago GoDaddy launched a cloud service powered by Mac OS X. The “Economy” plan starts off at a mere $99.99/mo ($80/mo if you’re willing to take the risk of pre-paying 24 months.) They appear to be trying to push it as an easy to use cloud solution – easy because it has the “Mac’s legendary interface.”

GoDaddy doesn’t seem to be giving a lot of details on the solution. Some *nix hosts already offer most of the services listed with a custom GUI which are typically fairly easy to use. Time will tell if this adds stability and reliability to GoDaddy’s offerings… something I haven’t seen from them yet even when one pays for their premium support.

United Airlines breaks stuff, including guitars

Posted on by Forrest Corbett — Posted in Life

For several years I was flying on average about once per month. Sometimes that included United Airlines. Always with my luggage I am very careful packing. Even still, more than any other airline, United broke things more often than not. One of the best examples was a brand new hard sided suitcase that was on its second ever segment. One corner was totally crunched and the case was deformed quite badly.

It seems like I’m not alone in my experience that United Airline is a champion at breaking stuff.

WordPress Tip: You cannot move a blog with the Thesis theme enabled

Posted on by Forrest Corbett — Posted in Techknow, WordPress

Having moved WordPress blogs before, the process is not as easy as it should be but it’s also not very difficult. That is, however, unless you’re using the Thesis theme from DYIthemes.

Hopefully this will save you from much grief. If you’re using that theme, you have to disable it first, the move it. And even still, if you re-enable the theme, you must edit some files before you do so.

I experienced this issue both moving WP from one directory on a site to the root directory, and moving the site from one domain to another. No amount of scouring through the database to find the old blog URL and changing it would do the trick. I dug, and I dug and I dug – eradicating all instances of the old blog URL. All to no avail.

When moving the blog, step #4 is to change the WordPress address under Administration > Settings > General and step #5 is the same for the Blog address. If you use the Thesis them and make this change, you will watch as the change immediately reverts.

You can make the change in the database itself and after you load a page on the site, check the DB again and it too has reverted to the old URI(s).

The answer? Check your theme files. The Thesis theme files update when the theme is enabled, hardcoding the site’s URL into the theme code. Do a search for the old URL, and you will find it in the theme code. Change it to the URL of the new/updated site, or disable the theme altogether.

How to pick a great domain name

Posted on by Forrest Corbett — Posted in Techknow

Twelve years ago when I was first picking domain names, the difficulty was finding a domain that was going to have a big presence. Now that is still a challenge, but finding one with a presence as well as being relatively short, full of keywords and easy to read is much more difficult. The main reason it’s so difficult now is rather obvious – so many more domain names are taken than they were 12 years ago.

Additionally, search engines have come a long way. A top player emerged, knocked off competitors who were around much longer, and firmly established itself in the industry: Google. One current key SEO tactic is to make sure your domain name has key terms people are searching for.

There are services you can hire to help you determine this. However, this is Spring 2009 and most businesses are not overflowing with cash to spend.

I found a free way to pick a domain that is full of they keywords you need:
SEO Gems: How to pick a great Domain name