1. BackWpPup

2. WP SuperCache

3. WP Minify

BackWpPup is hands down the most flexible backup solution for wordpress it can backup your whole site, part of it, or just your database to remote servers, via FTP and to the cloud! (Including Rackspace Files, which is why i Love it). Scheduled backups are a must, and if your running in a professional enviroment they are critical! Making BackWPup the most needed addon for your wordpress site.

WP SuperCache, is simply fantastic, it precaches your php output as static html, saving you database queries and speeding your site up significantly, if you ever go viral or get hit by huge traffic this little plugin will help you survive!

WP Minify was a recent discover for me, but its simply awesome it helps your reduce those evil pesky HTTP requests by combining your JS and CSS files. But be careful sometimes combining JS can kill conflicting scripts. So you might need to be wise on what javascript files to be excluded from WP Minify. But its simply awesome, it should speed up your initial website loadtimes significantly!

And thats all folks, short and sweet post here, but those WordPress Plugins are a complete necessity for anyone who is serious about WordPress.

The way to do that is to simply convert UTF-8_general_ci into UTF-8_spanish_ci. Now in PHP My Admin its easy to change the collation, but to my knowledge it is much more complex to run a mysql query that will change each table. Which is where this little php script I found comes into handy. It will convert everytable in a database to the UTF charset of your choice.

To change database simply change collation to what you need in this line: mysql_query(“ALTER TABLE $value COLLATE utf8_general_ci”);

You can use any UTF-8 charset seen here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/es/charset-unicode-sets.html

<!--?php  $db = mysql_connect('localhost','myuser_mydbuser','mypassword'); if(!$db) echo "Cannot connect to the database - incorrect details";  mysql_select_db('myuser_mydbname'); $result=mysql_query('show tables');  while($tables = mysql_fetch_array($result)) { foreach ($tables as $key =----> $value) {
mysql_query("ALTER TABLE $value COLLATE utf8_general_ci");
}}
echo "The collation of your database has been successfully changed!";
?>

I highly reccomend to remove this PHP file after you run it to do your work.

Enjoy!

June 15th, I started my dream job, I’m not making six figures, but I am doing exactly what I wanted to do: working for a seed funded high tech startup. I was hired into Arcanatura LLC an international company that has been creating and developing all natural clinically proven products for the animal health market. I’m joining a company that been in the “game” for over 3 years and is now ready to push into the U.S. market. We are pursuing a e-commerce only sales model, which is where I come in as the first hire(Web Marketing Manager) to begin a rapid development of the website, eCommerce, and social media platforms!

Many of my blog posts from here on out, will be focused on the startup world I’m in. Also I’m not the best writter in the world, but I hope many will find my knowledge and experiences that I pass on through this blog valuable!

What it looks like:

Currently it has almost zero formatting and is a work in progress, but its a very solid foundation to getting a list of events from your facebook fanpage to be dynamically and seamlessly posted on your website. Feel free to customize it to your hearts content and if you redistribute it please link back!

Oh yes so you need 3 things to make this function:

AppID

AppSecret

And an Authtoken

Get the code here:

https://github.com/joshperron/Facebook-Events-List-Widget/downloads

Reason #1 Why ATT/Verizon will get it this summer

Would a hit product that runs stockpiles dry for EVERY launch, release on four cellphone networks simultaneously? Answer: Hellll No. Apple is great and to some a Mythic God, but it cannot defy the laws of supply and demand. Even if the iPhone 4GS/5 is a “universal” phone (works on all carriers), what we are possibly seeing in these rumors is staggered launch dates. Most likely well see ATT / Verizon get the phone this summer, and T-Mobile/Sprint get it this fall/winter (possibly even next spring at latest).

Reason #2 Why ATT/Verizon will get it this summer

Our little green robotic friend, Android, has several high end Dual Core 4G phones releasing this summer, Samsung Galaxy S II, Motorola Droid Bionic, LG Optimus 2x, etc. These phones are direct competitors to the  Apple iPhone and Apple would surely lose out sales to these phones this summer if it shifted its launch date to the fall. I for one would most definitely buy one of these bleeding edge hardware packed android phones if I don’t see an iPhone 4GS/5 this summer.

As far as hardware goes I’m not going to do much interpretation on that, the next iphone will clearly be dualcore, but other than that its purely speculation.

Well see what happens at now sold out Apple WWDC 2011 from June 6-10.

Deal.iz.io is doing well, not great, but doing well and over the next few months were going to refocus the iOS app toward a webapp, which should be exciting. Unforunatly lately deal.iz.io has been getting neglected as well as this blog due to the halestorm of projects/different things going on for both myself and Steve Rolfe (the co-founder of deal.iz.io/app.iz.io).

In recent news I’m still doing Market Research work for OdonnellCo; if anyone needs a Full Service marketing firm thats the place to go. Dan, Eileen, and the whole staff are just great people who do outstanding work. Speaking of marketing, I just got picked up by Shizzlr to jump in and take on a part time marketing role. Shizzlr is also run by some awesome people and good friends of mine, co-founders Nick Jaensch and Keith Bessette. Over the past few years they have been building an excellent startup/app and have gotten several serious investors to back the company, and I’m glad to be a part of it. Shizzlr is a unique social event/ social planning application, that you all will be hearing much more of!

Thats about all for now, but stay tuned for some cool stuff!

Yeah so its probably not good style or display of writing skill starting an article title with “OMG”, but yeah app icon designers can be wicked expensive! But lets start with why we even considered the quest of pursuing an app icon designer.

Icon Designs are VERY important!

Remember the saying, “Don’t judge a book by it’s cover?” well according to a poll over at appstorm, 34% of app buyers absolutely do! Who doesn’t want to see a good looking icon that they want to click? Not to mention sometimes all users see of your app is its name and the icon, and you need to invoke them to click on it with these two things!  See the results in an image below:

Our apps done, but is the icon good enough?

When we were developing deal.iz.io we started questioning whether  or not our icon was good enough.So naturally we began checking out icon designers. Ultimately we found two sources helped us find designers that we would be okay with designing our icons.

1. dribbble.com
2. deviantart.com

Dribbble was by far the most helpful for us, and it helped us find some absolutely amazing designers!

The Price Quotes

So we got price quotes from 7 icon designers and here is our results from most expensive to least expensive.

1. $2,500
2. $1,470
3. $750
4. $450
5. $400
6. $270
7. $250

What you can expect to pay

• When you contact a Good designer for making an app icon you can expect to pay between $300.00-500.00 for a good app icon.
• When you contact a Amazing, very well known app icon designer, you better have some app seed money saved up because you will be paying well over $1,000 for a graphic that will end up as a small 57px by 57px graphic on most devices.

We ended up staying in house with our app design, and were very pleased with how it came out. Are amazing app icons worth the high cost?

Recently dealizio or deal.iz.io was accepted by the appstore! Wahoo! It was a huge relief for our app to finally get in. For those of you who haven’t herd of it, it is perhaps the best deal finding, searching, and monitoring app in the appstore. The quickest synopsis of what it helps you do is: “Find deals. Get deals. Save money. Be happy!” Enough of my pitch of the app, now comes the hardest part getting the word out!

Among 1000′s of applications trying to get noticed is very difficult, but we will do it, and we will talk  how we are doing it! As a developer /company we (app.iz.io) want to be well “cool”, so were going to take after peldi and offer as much transparency as possible! Many of my blog posts from here on out, will be very closely related to the development & marketing process of our app and company! And I hope you all enjoy everything!

The Xbox 360 is undoubtedly a great console, however one of its major downsides especially first generation Xbox 360 is the sheer amount of hardware failures. With electronics and computers a general rule of thumb is that if you can increase airflow, and reduce temperature, you increase the lifespan.

This DIY mod is for both Xbox 360 first generation and Xbox 360 Slim owners who like to set their xbox 360 horizontally. This DIY mod utilizes Xbox Kinect packaging materials to create a subtle and nearly invisible riser to give your Xbox 360 some increased airflow by lifting it further off the platform it rests on. I perfer horizontal configuration myself because its less likely to get knocked over that way.

Supplies needed:

• Xbox360 or Xbox360 Slim
• Kinect Packaging Materials
• Scissors
• Possibly a tape measure (if your a perfectionist)
• 1-3 minutes of time

Step 1: Slowly peel the “bar” of Sticky Backed Foam from Kinect Box with your hands(see picture below). If you get some paper that transfers from the box to the sticky backing no problem, you don’t need it to be extremely sticky all over.

Step 2: Once you remove the sticky bar of foam from the box, Simply cut it in half with scissors to make two equal length risers!

Step 3: Once you have the two sticky backed foam risers, simply place them on the underside of the xbox, equal distance from the center. Be sure that you do not cover up any ventilation holes (outlined below in red), covering them up would make this mod pretty much pointless.

Step 4: Admire your clean DIY mod, that cost you pretty much nothing and increased overall airflow to your Xbox 360 by lifting it up higher! Also you recycled some of that packing material instead of jut tossing it, so props to being green! Also check out the Kinect Privacy Guard Shield DIY here it is another neat mod that utilizes the Kinect Packaging Supplies.

Final Result!

So this one goes out to all the News Websites and Bloggers out there, I have one simple proposal backed with plenty of reason.

Proposal: Either display the entire article via RSS feed (for us mobile users) or make a mobile version of your website.

Mobile internet is climbing in usage, devices that run iOS operating system (iPhone, iPod touch, and the iPad) and According to TechCrunch accounted for 1.1% of all hardware on the internet in August of 2010(mobile devices in total are probably are about 2-3% now). And now several months smartphone devices are launching by the dozen, but what this means is that for major websites and blogs at least 3 in every 100 visitors is trying to view your website from a mobile device. And if you don’t have a mobile template for them, pages are slow loading, advertisements are less effective, and the overall experience is just garbage.

Now because you don’t have a mobile friendly website end users will be even more likely to view your site via a RSS reader. The problem for the user is they can only read the first 400 characters of the article before your RSS feed makes the end users view the source article in its non-mobile friendly format. See where I’m going with this?

The major drawback of taking the easy way out

So the easy way out as a new-site or blog is to simply let your RSS feed display the entire articles, but now your out of that much needed advertising income because of the clever app development of mobile applications like Pulse RSS Reader can strip those advertisements right out of your RSS feed.

So what to do?

Set your RSS feed to an appropriate character/word limit and get your website running a mobile theme! Almost every major CMS Joomla, WordPress, etc has mobile ready themes; for example WP Touch is an excellent free plugin to get any WordPress blog going mobile. Then get some Admob or Google mobile advertisements setup on your mobile theme and you have the perfect solution to the entire problem. So easy everyone should be doing it, but sites like defensetech.org a pretty popular military tech blog/news site doesn’t. So suggest if your site isn’t mobile friendly no matter how big or small, please get it mobile friendly and fast!