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.

1. Go to: http://apps.facebook.com/twitter/

2. Untick ‘Allow Twitter to post updates to facebook profile’.

3. Refresh the page.

4. Retick ‘Allow Twitter to post updates to facebook profile’.

All should work perfectly and Twitter will now automatically update your Facebook status. Why I had to do this I have no idea. Seems quite a few other people have been affected by this problem too.

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.

Another thing I hate is that because of this lack of any real standard, it has become necessary for a while to either have a number of different players installed or as the case usually is now, for them to be packaged up inside a flash interface, each with a different UI, none with the easy ability to access the underlying file to download or manipulate and all relying on having flash installed.

I love Flash when it’s doing its Flash thing, but I hate not being allowed it on my iPhone and I really think that Flash is not what videos should be. There is a reason why all websites are not just large Flash files. There is a reason why all website images are not Flash files. Flash has been used to get round the inconvenience of not having a decent standard for video, but really is second best to an ideal solution where all browsers have the inbuilt capacity to play, download, even edit, tag and scan a universal video format.

So along comes HTML 5. Everyone’s happy, we are on the verge of reaching a consensus about OGG Theora and Vorbis for our standards. And Apple and Nokia ruin it. They moan about the fact that the company who created OGG Xiph.org being able to patent it. Yeah, but it is still an open standard. It is still open for people to implement in the way they want. It is still free to adapt and use in every possible device without licensing issues. It is pretty good as far as quality is concerned. What else currently offers such greatness?

I’m convinced the companies who are blocking it’s adoption are doing so merely to srve their own self interest. Apple wants you to use quicktime, they control quicktime. You have to pay them to use it and download their software with their annoying ‘lets install Safari’ crap. But why should I use quicktime on my settopbox, on my Linux desktop. Why should I pay to use restricted software when a perfectly good open and free standard is available? Sure it might be organised by one organisation but it’s a hell of a lot better than what I’d have to live under were I to try and use MP3 or Windows media format.

I think it’s really sad that we’ve lost a great opportunity to move the internet forward to a universal standard that would mean people don’t have to install a whole load of crapware applications designed to peddle other paid services. An opportunity to have all internet videos to work on the iPhone instead of proprietary YouTube only. An opportunity for a thousand developers to make a thousand embedded devices that would all play the same videos. There are people who are simply not skilled enough to deal with the mess that internet video gives us right now. How many grannies understand that you need to download RealPlayer to play real videos and that won’t work in Windows Media Player which they need to play Windows Media files which won’t play on their DVD player. This is unnecessary!

I’ve tried a few out and have settled for Delicious. It seems to be the most in tune with what I need. I’ve written a summary of the top three though.

Delicious

In my opinion this is the best site. It allows you to bookmark your site using tags instead of folders (folders were so last century). The great thing about Delicious is that when you have multiple tags on an item, you can filter your results by multiple tags too, so for example, I may have a large number of items tagged with iphone and also application, but I can select iphone, then application to get down to exactly what I am looking for. Application and download will bring me a different selection etc.

Another great reason for using Delicious is its really good Firefox plugin. It makes tagging (adding) a breeze and has a nice advanced search facility. There are a nice selection of shortcut keys and it integrates well with the bookmarks menu.

Pros include a really well designed interface and clean website. Cons include the limited ability to make comments that others can read about sites in a way that say Digg does. Delicious is run by Yahoo and I suspect it’s size will allow future development to continue well.

Digg

Digg is the second most popular social bookmarking site on the net at the moment. Instead of a well organised selection of tagged pages, Digg concentrates on other user’s comments. There is a nice javascript toolbar that can be used on any site by attaching the http://digg.com/yoursitehere style URL usage. Digg will nicely create a short style URL for you to which is good for sending to people. Digg is just great if you want to find out what other people thought about a site you are visiting.

But the cons include very limited tags that are pre-set. There’s no multiple tagging. There’s no slick lookup facility in firefox like Delicious. In my opinion, Digg is limited to just a system for comments on sites. I need something more.

StumbleUpon

Stumble is based around a thoery that you will want to find quality websites based on what you already like but that you don’t know exactly what you want. You program in your keyword likes and hit the ‘Stumble’ button and it will take you to a suggested site. On all sited you can rate them with a yes/no good/bad style judgement. This goes back in the system and helps rank sites for others to stumble upon.

I like the design and I like the idea. The quality of sites is generally gquite good, but I simply am not sure about the idea of being given stuff at random, even if it is based on my taste. Again the bookmarking faccilities seem quite limited.

Conclusion

If you want to find something cool and random in your spare  time, stumble upon is quite cool. Digg also offers a similar random service. Both sites are quite good for commenting too. They have javascript toolbars that don’t need to be installed and can run through the url only which is handy. No installation needed. But the real pro will want Delicious. It has a far more advanced system for managing your bookmarks and is supported by a superior interface that can be added to Firefox. All three offer RSS feeds, the ability to add friends links and a personal profile. If only Delicious offered better commenting tools, it would be ultimate.