eJoneClicks.com

If you have been keeping tabs on the official Google Blog, you might notice that a couple of days ago they announced the Google Browser Sync extension for the Firefox web browser.

Product Manager Brian Rakowski states:

…unifies your bookmarks, history, saved passwords, and persistent cookies across all the computers where you install it. It also remembers which tabs and windows you had open when you last closed any of your browsers and gives you a chance to reopen them.

Apple Mac OS X users already have this ability on their Safari web browsers with a little help from .Mac Sync (pronounced dot-mac-sync).  This is one of the many reasons why .Mac is appealing; the ability to synchronise your bookmarks (among other things) across any Mac that you log on to. However, unlike .Mac, Google Browser Sync is free.

In part one, I discussed about the requirements and things you need to consider before taking the plunge. If you’ve pretty much got the general idea and are ready to go ahead, let’s move on.

I have broken down the whole process into six stages:

1. Preparing your web host and database
2. Downloading, configuring and uploading WordPress
3. Exporting all your comments from Haloscan and uploading them
4. Importing from Blogger
5. Importing from Haloscan
6. Tidying up

Don’t worry if anything from the above scares you. I will go through each stage in detail below:

I recently migrated one of my blogs from Blogger, along with all my comments from Haloscan, to WordPress 2.0. It took me a couple of days of research before finally understanding what was needed to accomplish this. Once everything was already in place, it only took a few minutes to move everything across.

WordPress itself is extremely easy to install. If you don’t believe me, have a look at their Famous 5-Minute Install page.

I came across a very very short (only two paragraphs) review on 1&1 (or 1and1) web hosting while I was checking out the Acronym Replacer plugin for Wordpress.

The first time I came across 1&1 was a few years back (circa 2000-2003) when one of their flyers fell off a computer magazine I was reading. At the time, I had a website hosted on SupaNames (which I just had moved over from GetDotted). Prior to those two web host providers, I was using various free web hosts at the time such as Geocities, FortuneCity, Tripod, etc.

After 2 minutes of browsing through their website, I found two things that immediately put me off:

1. No payment via PayPal

I first came up with the idea for eJoneClicks.com in January, I had a rough idea of how I want it to look like, based on other IT-related technical websites I came across during my usual everyday clicks. It has been a while since I last sat down and developed a website.

I was shocked to find how much the world wide web has changed in terms of style, development and engineering. The last time I touched a piece of HTML code was when I first started work after graduating back in 1998. Back then, a typical website would require the following things :