My subscription with Blue Host hosting service expires today. I’ve been downloading the site via FTP and downloading the backups I’ve been paying for for several years. I’m also exporting all content for each of my sites: tortui.com, coffee.tortui.com, journal.tortui.com, csic.tortui.com and travel.tortui.com. I finally feel about doing this. I really do very little on any of the sites only making an occasional blog. I was hesitant to leave my hosting service because of the much reduced control that I have over this wordpress.com site. On the other hand, I’ve been getting a lot of malware on those sites and am not committed to keeping everything in safe and good working order. So one of the big advantages of using this site instead is that I don’t need to worry about security. Another thing is that this site is much faster than a shared hosting service.
Category: Web Development
Added a free CloudFlare Account to this site
I added a free CloudFlare Account to tortui.com and blog.tortui.com (this site). According to the email I received after signing up this is
What CloudFlare Does:
CloudFlare uses a CDN-like infrastructure to make your site load faster. The improvement in performance means your visitors will stay longer and our caching mechanisms will save you CPU and bandwidth resources.
CloudFlare protects your website by repelling known attackers and blocking web spam. You can set your website security level to high, medium or low.
CloudFlare shows you more information on all the traffic coming to your site. In addition to visitors, you get interesting statistics on search engine crawlers and threats coming to your site too.
CloudFlare Terms of Service:
By creating this account, you accept CloudFlare’s terms of service. We urge you to review the terms of service here:
https://www.cloudflare.com/terms.html
Please read these recommend tips after joining CloudFlare: http://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-tips-recommended-steps-after-activ
Follow us:
We are constantly releasing new features based on user’s feedback. We encourage you to keep in touch:
Support: http://support.cloudflare.com/
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/cloudflare
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/cloudflare
Blog: http://blog.cloudflare.com
Google+: http://plus.google.com/100611700350554803650
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Removing the search box from Header area
I spent a long time trying to find where to do this. I finally found an article on the web:
To hide the search box in the navigation bar of Suffusion:
- Go to Suffusion Options → Sidebar Configuration → Right Header Widgets
- For “Show Search in Widget Area on right side of header”, set it to “Hide the Search”
Suffusion theme–New Photo
I cropped the image I used in the post below. It doesn’t look too bad even though there are jagged lines that are obvious.
Magazine Template in Suffusion theme
I’m trying a new theme called Suffusion. It contains a template called magazine. I don’t know how this all works so this is to test it.
I’ve checked:
If this box is checked, this post will show up as a headline in the magazine template.
Bluehost adjustments with google apps
Thanks to some help articles on my Bluehost site I discovered that not only could I use my google apps domain name, tortui.com for my Bluehost site as an addon domain; I could do so while retaining all of my google apps functionality. I made all this happen. The final very delightful discovery was that I could then switch the primary domain on my Bluehost site from kortui.com to tortui.com. I have now successfully done this. Too bad I’m paid up for two or three years with the kortui.com name. I could offer it for sale but I don’t know if I want someone else with a name so close to tortui.com. Below are the instructions that I followed except I already had the google apps account. I should say that I first tried it using the kortui.com domain name and creating a trial Google Apps account.
How to set up Google Apps for your account
Problem:
How do I use Google Apps for my email?
Answer:
To set up your account to work with Google Apps, you will first need to set up a Google Apps account.
Once you have the account created, you will need to get the mx entries set to the google servers. To do so, you will use the DNS Zone Editor tool in the Domains section of the cPanel.
- Choose your domain from the drop-down menu.
- Delete the current MX Entry (Click delete to the right of the current MX Entry)
- Add the following entries, where the preceding number is the priority:
Priority Entry 1 ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM 5 ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM 5 ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM 10 ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM 10 ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM For each entry, set the name value as @, the priority as the number, and the destination as the entry itself.
Using mail.example.com to check my email
To be able to access the Google Apps by using mail.example.com, you will need to change the CNAME for the domain using the DNS Zone Editor tool in the cpanel. You would enter the following information:
Host Record: mail
TTL: 14400
Type: CNAME
Points To: ghs.google.com
WordPress Update
I just updated WordPress to version 3.1.2
Added Google Analytics
I installed a plugin called “Google Analytics” which embeds google analytics java script code in all pages on this site. Google Analytics tracks web traffic and allows you to view reports on site usage. There are many, many WordPress plugins for Google Analytics. The one I used had a four star rating and just happened to be called “Google Analytics.”
I discovered that WordPress was set to not allow search engines. I changed the setting to “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Bing, Technorati) and archivers.”
Tortui 