There have been a lot of environmental campaigns, and everyone is looking to go “green”, whether by buying a hydrogen-fueled car or just by recycling plastic however many people don’t know that they can continue with a good eco-friendly behavior by going with green web hosting.

The internet is not an eco-friendly place, that’s for sure, thinking about all the energy that is being used to power all the web-sites available online, we are talking about a huge polluter here. However, Green Geeks replace, with wind power, 3 times of the energy used by their servers which is a big plus in the eyes of an environmentalist or of someone who simply cares about the planet and future generations that are yet to come.

On Green Geeks you may find a wide range of services, from shared web hosting to vps and reseller plans which are great for starters in the online field or more experienced ‘players’ out there. There’s a 99.9 up-time guarantee and if you feel like you want your money back, you have 30 days to do that. Their tech support teams are very experienced and keen to resolve any issues that may appear in a timely manner.

When it comes to having an online business or just a simple blog where you get to share your ideas and thoughts with other internet users, web hosting is a very important part of the whole web development process. It’s the core base of everything made online, without proper web hosting your website can not be accessed by people all around the world. There are a lot of web hosting companies to choose from but there are a few aspects that you need to look for before deciding on an offer:

- Up-time: If you’re going to have a website, up-time is a serious matter that you should consider. Nobody wants to pay for web hosting and experience downtime most of the time. A reliable company will always be able to tell you that their up-time for the past few month has been over 98%.

- Professionalism : Are you valued as a potential customer? It’s very simple to check this, most of the reputable web hosting companies out there offer live chat for sales inquires and not only. It’s very recommended to have a chat with one of the online sales agents and see whether they respond to your questions, help you decide on a plan or not.

- Great support: If you may experience some issues or won’t know how to use some of the features available, great support is essential, and it should be free for shared hosting plans!

Business cards are very important nowadays and I feel like they will always be important because of one simple reason: they are a must. Whenever going at a meeting, you will want to meet new people, interact with others and so on. Alright, you will talk a lot with them at that meeting but you will also want to talk with them later tomorrow so here’s where business cards are important – they will simply give one to you, which practically is a small card that contains little information about that respective person (name,occupation,phone/e-mail).

In return, you always need to have some business cards at you. Don’t fall in that shameful situation of not having a business card at you when someone asks you for one, you just can’t simple say “alright, do you have a pencil and a piece of paper? Write down my contact info!”.

UPrinting is one great company that delivers this kind of stuff – from business cards, to canvas prints, flyers and more, you can find out more by simply visiting their website.

Done with talking, let’s get back to serious things. Here’s one great giveaway that you will definitely like, sponsored by UPrinting:

Prizes:

- The first winner gets 1000 free standard size business cards.

- The second winner gets one free 18×24 canvas print.

You can choose from any of their stocks for these items.

How to enter:

It’s very simple. Just leave a comment at the end of this post, describing what you would use the free business cards/canvas print for.

Rules:

Winners will be picked randomly. Also, winners in the United States and Canada qualify for free shipping. Shipping fees will apply to winners outside these areas.

This giveaway will end on March 26. I wish you good luck!

I’ve just upgraded all my blogs, installing the new WordPress 2.7 which seems to be fantastic! This is a review of the new WordPress script.

First of all, I can say that WordPress 2.7 has a new interface which, in my opinion, is better in terms of usability and design than the previous interfaces used on the older WordPress scripts. You wouldn’t notice the changes looking outside-in, but inside-out. The admin panel got a very clean and modern look which reminds me of the operation system called Macintosh. Here’s how the new WordPress 2.7 admin panel looks like (click on the picture for maximizing it):

What I like about WordPress 2.7

I personally switched from WordPress 2.2.1 (I know, I’m oldschool!) so obviously I had a big shock because the things are very different from what I was used with, but I addapted quickly to the new design because many things are now just much better! A new feature I really like is called “Screen Options”. What it basically does is to show or not show different things on the dashboard, things like “Right Now” (which is a short summary of your blog), “Recent Comments”, “Incoming Links”, “Plugins”, “QuickPress”, “Recent Drafts”, “WordPress Development Blog”, “Other wordpress news”, you know, in general stuff that was before too but you couldn’t do anything about them. You aren’t interested in let’s say “Other wordpress news”? No problem at all, you won’t see that box any much longer! Another cool feature is that you can now drag the boxes and arrange them the way you like. To do this you must click and hold while moving the boxes.

Did you know that wordpress can be a feedreader too? Sure thing! You can now get the latest articles of your favorite blog right into your wordpress dashboard.

What I don’t like at wordpress 2.7

There are only few things I didn’t like. For example, I am a person who should wear glasses, so I would liked it more if the font was a little bit bigger in the “New Post” page. Another aspect that I didn’t really like is still related to my eyes. Although the new design is clean and modern, there seems to be too much gray and my eyes are hurt. I would add some more blue.

Conclusion

All in all, WordPress 2.7 is great, and I again recommend you to try it. This way you’ll experience something new, something that will make you be proud of wordpress, and you will stay up to date with the latest security updates.

How do I upgrade?

Very simple! All you need to do is to download the new script from here, access your ftp, delete the old “wp-admin” and “wp-includes” folders, and then copy all the new wordpress files (skipping wp-content because there are your themes, pictures, plugins, and you don’t want to lose that), overwriting the old ones. If you encounter any problems, feel free to add a comment here, telling what happened and I will try to help you.

A very essential part of blog optimization is making it be a comfortable place for your old, faithful readers and even the new ones. I’m sure you agree with me that font size is a tricky part, on the internet, there are different opinions about how big or how small a font should be in order not to cause pain to the eyes.

I came across so many blogs and websites that had some really nice articles which could be a great read, but there was a major problem. The font size was too small for my eyes, so I couldn’t read anything. There were 2 possibilities: copy the text in a word processor and make the font bigger in order to read it without problems or just simply hit the x button and close the window. There are 99% chances that you would choose option number two (closing the window), and that’s exactly what I did. In other terms, this means money loss, high bounce rate, big decrease in the subscribers number, and more bad things for the one who tried to write a good article.

The best thing you can do is to install a plugin on your blog that will display a button on every article, a button that allows the reader to make the font smaller or bigger, according to his tastes. Luckily, if you are on wordpress, a smart coder made a very nice plugin called “WP-chgFontSize” which can be downloaded from here. Once the plugin was download, here are the installation steps, according to the author:

2. Decompress and upload the contents of the archive into /wp-content/plugins/.
3. Activate the plugin on your WP Admin > Plugins page by clicking ‘Activate’ at the end of the ‘WP-chgFontSize’ row.
4. Configure the plugin on your WP Admin > Options > Font Size page.
5. To use it, there are two possibilities:
* If your theme supports widgets, and you have installed the [widget plugin](http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/widgets/) or you are using WordPress 2.2 or higher, add the ‘WP-chgFontSize’ widget on your WP Admin > Presentation > Widgets page.
* Add `<?php chgfontsize_display_options(); ?>` at the place in the theme’s file where you want the font size selection appear.

Regarding step 5, I personally chose the second option and it looks like this (click on the photo to make it bigger):

Again, I really recommend you to use this plugin which will definitely make happy some of your readers. If any problem occurs during installation, feel free to add a comment here telling what the problem seems to be and I’ll be glad to help.

As you all know, a blog is an online journal where you can write your thoughts, opinions about certain topics, in my case: blogging about blogging. Blogging has evolved over time and you can now see huge projects like techcrunch that are actually blogs.

What’s so great about blogging, you may ask. Well, the great thing is that you can get a response from your readers on your articles, that is called feedback. Really, everyone has an opinion and you’ll see how great you feel when someone posts a comment on your article. In blogging, connecting with your readers is essential if you want to “stand out of the crowd” and do something special. Maybe that is why in the last few years the “blogoshpere” has grown so much, it came with something special.

But how can you connect with your readers?

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