Alexa Widget increases the Alexa Rank, a Myth

There are speculations about the Alexa Rank will be increased by putting a widget on your website. To test the rank of Alexa by putting the Widget on a website, we have placed the widget on one of our Cients website. Earlier the website had a rank of 120,000 Alexa Rank. We have continued the widget for a fortnight. We thought the Rank will fall into below 100,000, but for our surprise the rank increased to 135,000. Even there was a growth in Google Analytics but the Alexa Rank increased a bit.

The bottom line is Alexa Widget just shows the Rank of the website and wont count the number of visitors. And the fact is its just takes the people who visited the website with Alexa Toolbar installed.

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File Uploading Error in WordPress. “Unable to create directory-Is its parent directory writable by the server?

WordPress Error while uploading files? Did it giving an error like “Unable to create directory /home/username/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/06. Is its parent directory writable by the server?”

This problem generally occurs when we change the Server, Host or upgrade to new Version. There could be 2 reasons for this.

1. Check your image upload path.

Settings ===> Media, here check the path in “Store uploads in this folder:”. Check for the correct path. It Should be like “/home/username/public_html/wp-content/uploads” change it to just “wp-content/uploads” as default.

This method should work for 60% people.

2. Second one could problem with the Folder/File Permissions. Using a FTP Software change the permission of “wp-content” folder to 777. The Default Permission is 755. Then Change the “UpLoads” Folder Permission to 777 from 755.

This should work for remaining people.

If both the remedies wont work probably problem with the Folder Ownership. In general The User is the Owner but sometime it might have changed and the Owner could be the Apache. Ask your Customer Service/Technical Service People to check.

All the best and Happy Blogging.

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Transfer WordPress Blog to another Hosting Provider

If your wordpress self hosting site suddenly got corrupted somehow,

If your WordPress blog Sql Database got goofed up,

If someone tries to hack your WordPress blog and could successfully changed the content,

If some of the installed files vanished,

If the web server that you are hosting your site crashed and your hosting provider has no back up of files and Database,

Is your Hosting provider sucks, unreliable, downdown time beyond the tolerance limit, server can not take load, frequently crashes for your increasing traffic then its the high time to shift to another reliable Hosting Provider preferably a dedicated server.

Every blogger will have bitter experiences like above and wants to shift to another Host. What you do for shifting the entire WordPress blog to to your new host. This is a very easy process need to follow step by step.

1. Back up of Database: Take a back up of your SQL file. We have mentioned in previous post about most useful Plugins. We have many Plugins to take the Data back up like WP-DB-Backup.  Take daily back up or just schedule your Plugin, it will send a back up copy to your mailbox automatically. It is always useful to have a regular back of your Blog database.

2. Now go to any reliable Web Host (we will discuss later about some of good hosting companies) and take Web Space.

3. Point your domain name servers to new provider.

4. Most of the hosting providers are providing facility to install WordPress directly from their CPanel else use “Fantastico De Luxe”, where you will find the place to install the WordPress.org blog. Install a new wordpress blog as required like at the root or as a subdomain(dont worry about your DB at this point).

5. Now its time for main task, reinstating the Database. Under Databases of your CPanel, we can find “phpMyAdmin” which is a beautiful tool that makes our life easy. Goto “phpMyAdmin” click on the database which we need to modify. Once we click on the DB, it will take to the page where all the details of that particular DB. Now the main Course, Click on “Import” button and give the path of the Database file in SQL format on our local hard disk. Thats it we are almost done.

PS: Please note phpMyAdmin works for the database below 50MB, so beaware that your DB is below 50MB.

What if your Database is more that 50MB, just keep the sql file at /public_html of your Domain using FTP client. Go to technical support people of your Hosting provider thru Live Support or raising a ticket etc. ask them to do it for you.

6. Now open your domain to check your site, probably at this moment still the name servers might not be propagated so changes can not be visible if you type the domain. Instead use the IP address provided by your Web Hosting provider. If you see the original content appearing on your site we are 90% done.

7. Now its time to upload our Theme folder to content/themes folder to get the original look. Upload all the Plugins which you were using.

8. Wait till the name servers propagate, and start writing new articles.

Happy Blogging!!!

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