The following steps should help you easily move hosting companies. Note that I’ve changed the address as well. If you want to keep the same address, you need to ship the site address steps and also remember to update the DNS settings for your domain, which will depend on who you’ve registered your domain with.

Step 1 – Backup

Backup!!! You should be backing up regularly anyway. Remember, for WordPress sites, there are two types of backup that you need to do. Database and content files! You can easily backup your database by using a plugin called WordPress Database Backup. This will allow you to download the file, and set up weekly email backups. The database stores all your posts and settings but not images and files. The images and files need to be downloaded separately. Use an FTP client (like filezilla) to connect to your website server (or similar web based software provided by your host. Download everything in the “wp-content\” directory. While you are there, you should also download “wp-config.php” from the root directory of your website as this will store all your settings.

Step 2 – Set up WordPress on your new host

Once you have purchased your new hosting package, together with any domain you might want, you need to install WordPress on that system. This can be done in a number of ways, but the easiest it to just purchase a WordPress hosting package that has it set up automatically. Otherwise, you will need to follow the guide on WordPress.com but as you already have a WordPress site, I’m going to assume you already have done this before. Once the new hosting package is up and running, you’ll need to create a mySQL database as well to host the database. Your host company should be able to help you with this.

Step 3 – Customise your config file

Open the wp-config.php that you downloaded, set DB_NAME to the name of your new database. Set the username and password to the new username and password for this new database. Save the file and upload it over the top of the existing file on your new server. Note that you may want to save a copy of the existing file in case it has any predefined settings (like the database name) that you want to keep.

Step 4 – Change references in your database

The backed up database that you downloaded will be saved as an SQL text file (and maybe compressed needing you to decompress it first). Open it in a text editor (not notepad which can’t handle the new lines – use wordpad instead) and if you have changed your domain, use search and replace to replace all references to your old domain with your new one. Save the file. Now open PHPmyAdmin on your new server, open your newly created database and import the newly updated database SQL file. This should set up your database.

Step 5 – Restoring your images and plugins

Images, plugins and themes etc. will need to be restored too. You downloaded them from your old server in the wp-content directory. Now you need up upload them to your new server.

Step 6 – Log back into your new site

Your site should now be up and running on your new domain. If you updated config file properly and it can find the database which you correctly uploaded your SQL file to, all should be running smoothly. Your username and password for the site should be the same as before because they are stored in the database. You can now check the plugins are working properly and sit back with a cold beer.

Go to http://www.realtek.com and search for:

RTL8192SE

Scroll down to the software link and then it will give you a list of different drivers. Avoid the one at the top as this is for SU. You want the SE one.

At the terminal run:

gconf-editor

This will open up the gnome configuration editor.  The magnet url handler can be found at: /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/magnet.

Then set the ‘command’ string to launch the application you want. For example, the transmission command line would be:

transmission "%s"

The %s simply appends the link after launching transmission. You can change transmission to azureus if you want Vuze to run instead, or any bittorrent client of your choice.

Obviously all that hard work Microsoft put in to protect us ultimately provides very little real protection. Yet another example of how easy it is to run malicious code on our machines. The worry is that when we’re told we are running protected software that we believe this to be true and don’t take the basic precautions that are essential these days. Avoid going to dodgy websites where possible. Don’t download from untrusted sources. Always operate behind some kind of firewall. Don’t trust emails just because they come from addresses you know. I’d go so far as to say that we should only engage in online banking from a separate setup than we usually use for everyday browsing (i.e. chrome on Linux instead of our usual Firefox on Win7) though this is clearly not convenient for most.

And… don’t forget that iPhones aren’t safe either!

The question then must become, should we switch browsers if we consider this a problem. Of course it’s a problem but with users hopping backwards and forwards, do they really gain more protection and is it likely to cause more confusion ultimately leading to lack of security? In the long run it will be the browsers that successfully issue patches quickly and can be relied upon. If you’re going to stick with one, you want the software that will be updated automatically and you won’t have to switch from. By issuing a quick fix, Mozilla are no doubt proving they are tackling the issues head on.

The update was originally planned for the end of the month but considering the danger and bad press generated by such an official organisation in Germany urging users not to use the software, the patch was rushed through.

To make sure you have the most recent version, within Firefox, click on ‘Help’, then ‘Check for updates’. As of today, you should be running 3.6.2. This can be checked by selecting ‘Help’, then ‘About’.

Recently I’ve tried a number and it seems they are all missing the ability to search through your existing bookmarks easily, like you can do in Firefox with the official plug in there. Some of the worse ones don’t even allow you to use keyboard shortcuts to bookmark. This is a real turn off for me as I hate having to use time consuming mouse movements which slow me down and are fiddly on a track pad.

At the moment, Chromium Delicious Plugin seems to be the best option. It allows quick bookmarking with CTRL+M and is very lightweight. For searching through your bookmarks, it’s possible to use Chrome itself.

Right click on the address bar, then select “Edit search engines”. Click on add and use this following string as the URL

http://delicious.com/search?p=%s&chk=&fr=del_icio_us&lc=1&atags=&rtags=&context=userposts|@@@@|

Note that the @@@@ will need to be replaced by your username. Call the entry Delicious and use the keyword “d”. This way if you want to search through your bookmarks, just hit CTRL+L then type “D ?????” where ????? is your search string. This is quite a nice integrated approach.

Lets hope there’s a decent official one coming out soon.

It can be downloaded within Chrome at this address. With an increasing number of top quality extensions now available, the battle between Firefox is going to get interesting. With Chrome’s superior speed and seemingly faster development we will see people switching left right and centre.

Some applications seem to have implemented a work around by having an international font that can be selected in the settings. TweetDeck is a great example of this. You can turn on the international font and then SCIM works fine. See below:

So basically, at the moment, until Adobe improve the Air system, it looks like the suggested way of getting east Asian characters to work in Adobe Air is to contact the developer and ask them to implement an international font. I imaging the prospect of their software also working in China, Japan and Korea would probably be enough for most to do this.

The app, called GPush has been submitted to the appstore for vetting. Who knows whether Apple will agree to it. As push gmail is already available on other phones maybe there is some reason why Apple are allowing Yahoo but not Google. Anyway, it would be welcome for all us gmail users who are willing to risk our passwords and need instant gmail, not being able to wait 15 minutes for the system to dial in. Watch this space. I’ll keep you updated on when this app is available.