Tomorrow is the 1st day of February already. And if you are all aware, here at BlogDeManila, the 1st of the month is Blog Backup Day. I have written numerous articles already the importance of having a monthly backup, not only on your local hard disk but also using online backup as well.

Cloud computing is the latest buzz that resurfaced recently in the IT industry. It’s not new anymore. In reality, you’ve been using cloud computing for the past decades already.  For example, when you are reading your emails such as Yahoo or GMail using a browser, that is called cloud computing. Same when you upload your pictures on Facebook.

With the introduction of virtual servers, not to mention the low cost of hardware acquisition, online backup using “cloud” has sprouted all over. Every now and then, new companies offering online backup keeps on popping up with better options and features. As a user, this is where the dilemma  comes in. Which company truly offers the best solution?

Well, the right solution can be found on some some review sites that check regularly which among the key players in the market that can be considered as the top online backup provider. It’s is better to check them first before making your decision.

One particular feature that I’m looking for a review site is the real and genuine consumer reviews.  I even personally check the website of the reviewer (if it’s available), just to make sure their comments and suggestions are not system generated but a honest to goodness review. After checking the credentials of the recommended company, I then ask feedback on some reputable webmaster’s forums about their experiences.  My decisions is solely based on the facts that I gathered.

Putting our trust in a reputable company when it comes to backing up our data is must. You need to do your assignment in choosing the best provide. Don’t rely on Google search only.  You have to sift through them by checking various review sites, and ask those who are using those services already.

And please, don’t ever forget to backup your blog!

I couldn’t believe my luck today when I was able to register a domain name for US$1 only. You’ve read it right.

A client of mine wants to register a domain for their bike tour project. Good thing the domain is still available and I  was able to snagged the promo.

Actually, I renewed my 4 other domains first,  which were all  registered on GoDaddy, and was searching for the right coupons. I’ve tried a couple, and the coupon that gives me the highest discount is the wallet412_. I was able to get a total savings of $9.02 from S42.22. I paid $33.20 only using my Paypal account. So if you’re domains are up for renewal you may use the coupon code wallet412_ which will give you a substantial discount. By the way, I included the ICANN fee on the computation.

To get the US$1 domain name, you may use the coupon code GETFIT.  I’ve tried this coupon today and it worked like a charm. You may use it for registering any available  .COM, .US, .MOBI, .BIZ, .NET, .ORG, .CA, .CO.UK and .IN domain. I don’t have any idea on the expiration of this code but If I were you, I grabbed this opportunity to register your dream domain now.

See my transaction below.

By the way, this  won’t work on Paypal. Either you have to pay via credit card or check.

PS : I just want to remind everybody that today is the first day of the month, and it’s Blog Backup Day! So please, don’t forget to backup your blog. You won’t appreciate having a monthly backup unless something drastic happens to your blog.

I’m just here to remind and it’s up to you to act on it.

PSS : If you are looking for a good hosting company, I would highly suggest Hostgator.

Whats’ with Black Friday?  A lot of company are into “giving” mood. Is it because of the Thanksgiving day? Well, let’s hope everyday is Thanksgiving day.

I have received tons of emails about big sales on different products including services, software, WordPress themes, cheap airline tickets, domain name, vitamins and web hosting from ever reliable HostGator. This is where Blog De Manila is currently hosted for the past two years already.

The 50% OFF includes shared hosting, reseller hosting, VPS hosting, Dedicated servers and Windows hosting!

If you are paying $4.95 this will translate to $2.48/month (pre-paid) if you will get a new account. That’s it, if you are an existing client of HostGator you are still qualified for the 50% OFF as long as you  keep your original, existing account open and in good standing.

For this promotion, you can get a  hosting packages for as low as:

• Shared hosting: As low as $4.95 Now only: $2.48/month (pre-paid)
• Reseller Hosting: As low as $24.95 Now Only: $12.48/month (pre-paid)
• VPS Hosting: As low as $19.95 Now Only: $9.98/month (First Month)
• Dedicated Servers: As low as $174 Now Only $87/month (First Month)

This is very cheap hosting packages already and here’s the catch – it will only run for 1 DAY!

How can you avail of the 50% OFF?

Just SIGN UP for a new account, and you do NOT need to insert a coupon code to receive the promo. The correct coupon code will automatically be inserted on all orders placed on Black Friday.

The promotion will begin just after midnight, Friday, November 25^th, 2011 Central Standard Time (-6 GMT). The special offer will run until 11:59PM CST Friday, November 25^th, 2011.

Hurry grab your domain name  GoDaddy’s “$5 .COM Black Friday Sale!” and host in on “HostGator’s 50% OFF” promo.

I admit it. I sucked, and I failed big.

It’s hard to accept the fact that someone like me who is a preacher of backing up data lost  collectively more than a hundred posts. It’s one of the niche site where I am the administrator. The owner of the site just shook his head in an unbelief. I explained to him what happened and I’m not blaming anybody but me. We cannot sue the web host provider because it’s on their terms and conditions that they are not obligated to backup the data. We cannot request even just a partial backup from them because they too lost everything.

Let’s me state the hard fact, it is our responsibility as an admin or blogger to backup our own blog! Don’t rely on our web host provider.

But, just like what the title of my post today, I was able to recover everything (fyi: I’m still recovering more) even though I don’t have an online backup nor a full backup. I have a WordPress XML backup but it’s more than 1-year old already. It’s stale backup, not updated. I even looked on my other hard disks, but my search resulted to nothing.

I’ve tried using Google’s “cache:url” but it did not yield to a good result. It only cached the previous month. By the way, this Google tool of “cache:ur” is a one way to make sure that Google is really crawling and indexing your site. Try it, and see how Google takes a snapshot of your blog and pages. Here’s an example on how to use: simply type “cache:www.yourdomainname.com“ on Google search page (without the quote and replace the yourdomainname.com with your own domain name).

Since it didn’t quite work well with Google, the magic tool that showed up the missing post is Wayback Machine or www.archive.org. It’s a virtual time machine where you can browse your site –your missing site that is. Unlike Google, Wayback Machine includes most images in their archive!  This internet archiving machine started in 1996 and was opened to the public in 2001. Currently, it includes more than a 100 terabytes of date and has an archived of more than 150 billion pages.  You can check any web pages from 1996 up to yesterday. Try it, and see how does your site or blog looks like yesterday or a year ago. If you are lucky, you can even see your old theme.  Just type in the web site that you are looking for and make sure that you know the exact URL to be able to see the archive.

I’m forever grateful to this unsung modern hero – Wayback Machine – for  recovering not only the  missing blog  but rescuing  myself as well from humiliation. The owner of the niche site is already smiling when he saw his site has been recovered. He was mesmerized and have no idea how I did it.

Have you lost your posts in the past, not knowing where to get your backup? Now you know where to find it, even if you don’t have a physical backup in your hard drive.

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I’m sorry to all my readers because I was not able to follow-up my previous post right away. I’m busy with setting up an office, yes a physical office, not for me but for my client.

My client is based in Canada and my task was  to setup an office here in the Philippines so they can hire more staff for their projects. After searching and making negotiations for the past three weeks, finally we will move-in to the new office tomorrow.  My final tasks is to bring the various equipments tomorrow.  Wait, just a correction, I will not transfer there but  I’ll oversee everything at “arms length” so to speak.

Anyway, I really want to avoid writing a post about my topic today because, honestly, you can search  Google on “How To Choose A Domain Name” and you will be presented with almost 80million hits!

BUT with the recent change to Google’s Ranking algorithm, there are some facts  that you should know if you want to be on Google’s top ranking.

Here’s one fact that I’ve learned recently -  Google delisted, deindexed or clearly banned all .CO.CC. To prove it,  enter “site:.co.cc” in your Google search engine and see the results.  This affected all .CO.CC domains starting last month of June, 2011. So the rule of the thumb is, if you want Google to recognize you… Avoid .CO.CC  as part of your domain.

What does this mean? It simply means Top Level Domains are still the King when it comes to choosing the right domain! Google is giving priority to sites and links derived from Top Level Domains (TLDs) such as .com, .net, .org etc..  This means that you should be using a Top Level Domain  with relevant keyword(s) for your blog, affiliate pages and/or sales pages.  Here’s another rule of the thumb, .COM is still the King of the Kings when it comes to TLDs but according to my own experiment, a good SEO can beat any .COM!

I’ve mentioned the word(s) Keyword(s) on my previous statement. Why? Because Google  still (even with the Panda update) values a keyword within the domain name for ranking purposes.

For example, if you will search for the words ” Manila Blog”, I assure you that BlogDeManila will be in the first page of the search engine results page (SERP). Why? Because the words are there! “Manila” + “Blog” are both in BlogDeManila domain but since both terms are not in the front, BlogDeManila will be having a hard time to beat those who are actively using “Manila Blog”.

So another rule of  thumb in choosing a domain name, Keyword(s) works much better  when it is placed in the beginning than having another word in front of your keyword.

For those who might be asking where do I get my domain names, I will honestly tell you that I’m getting all my domains from GoDaddy and 1and1. I find them both very easy to use, specially to new bloggers or users,  when it comes to choosing and buying domain names. Both have the tools to search for the keywords and both can be paid using PayPal as well.

If you’re looking for the best domain, you may use this tool to search for it:

Well, I won’t bore you with much technical details. I hope you will learn a lesson or two from my post today. Till my next post.

This is just gonna be a very, very quick post.

I received a special coupon code today from WPWebhost which I want to share.

How to Avail the Coupon Code:

Sign up at http://www.wpwebhost.com/signup/ with the special coupon code “INDEPENDENCE” to get 47% off  the normal pricing.

What you will get?

• Free domain registration
• Free WordPress Migration
• Free WordPress Installation
• Free Premium Themes from Themefusse
• Free Bundled CDN

WPWebHost is an optimized WordPress hosting server, and if you are using WordPress you will have no other reason not to host your WordPress with WPWebHost.

This wpwebhost special coupon is applicable to all hosting plans and payment terms, and is available from July 4-6 only.

By the way, you will also enjoy FREE lifetime domain when you sign up! (except Rookie Plan which is free for only 1 year).

Happy Independence to all our American friends!

When I first installed WordPress more than 4 years ago on my 2nd blog, I admit that I fell in love with it.  It’s what you call “love at first sight”. Since then, there’s no turning back for me.

Being an I.T. consultant for more than a decade already, I’ve used various tools in developing website from Notepad (do you believe it?), HTML editors, Dreamweaver, Mambo, Joomla and more. But nothing beats WordPress in features that I’m looking for. All my clients websites are based on WordPress engine, whether they are blogs, corporate sites or just a simple mom and pop front store page.

Here Are My 7 Top (Personal) Reasons Why I’m Using WordPress

1. Great Price @Free – Who wouldn’t want free lunch? Yup, you don’t have to pay anything when you install except of course your domain and hosting. Compared it to other tools such as Dreamweaver which, as of this writing, will cost you almost US$400. Thanks to open source community, WordPress is  provided for FREE!

2. Very, very Easy to Install – Based on my experience, the hardest part of installing WordPress is setting up the database but, only if you want to install it manually. If not, it’s just one-click if your hosting is using Fantastico installer.

3. Very, very Easy to Upgrade – Specially with version 3 and up, upgrading themes, plugins and WordPress core itself is almost all in one-click already. No need to download anything if you are upgrading from the Admin dashboard.

4. Optimized for Search Engines – in short SEO. By default, WordPress is already set to be SEO friendly from page titles, summaries, permalinks, categories, blogrolls, feed submissions (pinging), meta tags  and sitemaps. There are also a number of third party plugins that will further improve WordPress SEO.

5. CMS is Pretty Damn Easy – I have clients where I developed their websites using WordPress and nothing else. These client of mine are not into blogging but they are my corporate clients. By tweaking some codes and changing the look-and-feel of the Admin dashboard, my clients doesn’t notice that their corporate website  is running in WordPress framework. In fact, WordPress has been awarded in 2010 as Open Source CMS Hall of Fame.

6. Themes and Plugins – I call these additional tools as magic tricks of WordPress. They are like wizards to me. They can extend WordPress and do almost anything you want to do. Upload a new theme and you can turn your WordPress to your eyes desire. Plugins on the other hand are “little but smart wizards”  that were designed to modify, customize, optimize and add functionality. There’s no WordPress site out there that is not using a theme or a plugin. Do you agree?

7. Vibrant and Wide support of the Community - Just try to throw in a question in Google and you will surely see an answer already. You will always find the solutions for any questions, and the community is always willing to help when you are stuck with a problem. There’s always the lifeline that you can depend on. WordPress is an open source software and is being developed, maintained and improved by hundreds of people. These group of silent brains are all working hard to make every version of WordPress surpass the previous one.

You can do a lot with WordPress. You have the power to control almost every thing on it. The limits are really only set by your own imagination and abilities. If you are just starting, try get web host provider that has WordPress on their Control Panel already such as BlueHost and Hostgator. WordPress is a secured platform but sometimes the web host is not, so don’t take chances.

So why am I using WordPress? My short answer is… WordPress is FUN!

Now tell me, why are you using WordPress? If not, then Why Not?

Remember my old laptop, Dellia? Well, she finally went into oblivion. The motherboard gave up but luckily the data on the hard disk is still intact. I’d asked one of our technician to buy me hard disk external housing with USB so I can easily access it. I was actually prepared for the worst case scenario. I put a backup of the most important data in one of our company’s PC and I have a running, application that automatically backup the data on a scheduled basis. But, even with this setup, I’m still not confident enough because there were times the network connection in our company is not stable.

My Dellia - Dell Inspiron 6400

And now, I’m looking for an external backup solution that I can just plugin to my laptop every time I go to our office and will automatically synchronize my files. I’m also hoping that I can use this on my blogs because, believe it or not, web hosting providers cannot assure their clients of a total restoration of backup in case something goes wrong. This is actually written in most web host provider’s Terms of Service (TOS). And, as I’ve mentioned in my other post that backing up of file data is against most web host’s terms even if you paid for “unlimited space”.   In fact, a lot of web hosts  have been cracking down on people using their services for backing up files. So better, read the fine print on TOS of your web host provider.

Right now, I’m reviewing WD’s portable backup solution such as the Elements Portable or MyPassport. I still can’t decide which one is better. If you have used any of these or other portable backup solutions, please let me know.

And by the way, it’s almost the end of the month, so once again please don’t forget to make a backup of your data comes June 1, our Blog Backup Day!

Blogging has become a social force and this is what the World Bloggers Day 2011 is all about.  Blogosphere has grown so large that even the main stream media are turning to bloggers to disseminate information not only in real time but  looking at it as a medium with powerful force.

Indeed a lot of fascinating news  whether good or bad  such as scandals, expose, or a simple announcing of an event where mostly ignited by a lot of bloggers.

Most, if not all media entities have “blog” in their sites as well aside from their main news.

No doubt the role of bloggers have proven vital in data dissemination exponentially. So let’s all celebrate the World Bloggers Day 2011. Find out the various activities within or near your communities by registering your blog at http://www.worldbloggersday.org/.

I’m Celebrating World Bloggers’ Day 2011

Theme: The Roles of Bloggers

Initiated by Cebu Bloggers Society, Inc.

I would like also  to remind every body about the Blog Backup Day on every 1st day of the month. Since May 1 will be on Sunday, I encourage you to do your backup before the weekend comes, which is today