From their site: “We have been online for about 4 years now, we decided to jump in and create an open source plugin for wordpress, it seems there is a need for an amazon plugin that actually works properly, so we decided to go ahead and develop one. Soon to come we will be creating new and awesome plugins.”

If you’re a plugin developer, you better watch out because they might be “creating” your plugin next! If you already use their plugin, you may want to consider another option as they are stealing your commissions without your knowledge or consent. May I recommend the original AmazonFeed?

1. Create a new empty file called aptana.sh that you will use to launch Aptana.  I store my install of Aptana in /home/username/Applications/aptana so I created the launch script in /home/username/Applications/aptana.sh.
2. Put the following code in the empty file and save it.  It will become what is called a wrapper script for launching the Aptana application.  Change the paths to match your environment.

   #!/bin/sh
   export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1
   /home/username/Applications/aptana/AptanaStudio

3. Make the script executable.  You can do this by right-clicking it in gnome and selecting Properties -> Permissions -> Allow executing file as program.  For the purists: chmod +x /home/username/Applications/aptana.sh
4. Create a launch script.  For the sake of simplicity, I create a launch script for it on my desktop by right-clicking on the desktop and selecting Create Launcher.
   Name: Aptana
   Command: /home/username/applications/aptana.sh (browse to and select the script you created)

You should be able to use a very similar setup to fix mouse clicks in Eclipse as well.  Just change the paths and filenames where appropriate.  Keep in mind that the application for Aptana is called AptanaStudio whereas in Eclipse it is simply called eclipse.

You can now test your script by double clicking the launcher or running the shell script you created.  The mouse clicking problems should be fixed.

I want you to know that setting up and maintaining a website does not have to be either difficult or excessively expensive. In fact, you can do it for under $11 / month. The only thing that might be confusing to some is simply terminology and I’ll do my best in this lesson to explain what things are as well as how they work.

When it comes right down to it, there are three simple aspects to creating a website.

1. You need something called “HOSTING”.
HOSTING is simply the word that we use to refer to where your website is stored. We will use the analogy of a house. In this analogy, your HOSTING provider is sort of like your house. You can put things INTO your house… and people can come TO your house to see the things that you have on display.

When you get HOSTING, you receive something like an address. Just as with a real house, this address indicates to other people where they can find your website. Now, unfortunately, this address can be complicated at times. Usually, it is in the form of a number something like 192.168.125.57. Sometimes, you may not have a specific number at all, so using this address can be fairly complicated for people. That’s why we get the next item on the list called a “DOMAIN”.

This website, for example, is hosted at DreamHost. They’re a company down in California which specializes in HOSTING and they’re both good and inexpensive. In fact, we very highly recommend them. For under $10 / month, they provide everything that we need to run this website, and they make it VERY easy to use. Check out DreamHost if you’re looking for somewhere good to host your websites.

We also have HOSTING COUPONS for $50 OFF. Click for more info.

2. You need what is called a “DOMAIN”.
Now a DOMAIN can be compared to a nickname or shorter name for the actual address of your website. If you are still thinking of your website as a house with an address, the DOMAIN would be something similar to a shortcut to that address. When you tell your friends to come over to your house, you don’t usually say “Come to my place at 12345 BOX 432 on This or That Street in MyCity of MyCountry with MyPostalCode”. That would probably confuse more people than it would help. Rather you say “Come to James’ place”. In the same way, a DOMAIN is a shortcut to your website.

Now, typically domains can cost anywhere between $5 and $100 / year, but most average domains cost about $10 / year. If you’ve chosen to host with DreamHost as we recommended above, they provide one domain for FREE so you don’t even have to worry about how or where to get one. You can also buy additional domains from them for about $10 / year.

3. You need “CONTENT”.
In the house analogy, this would be the same as having stuff in your house that people can look at, or interact with. Now, the type of content you want to have in your website will make a difference when choosing how to arrange that content. The content in your site can be as simple as a single page which never changes and just tells a little about who you are, or as complex as a fully automated online store.

This is where the process can get somewhat expensive, but only if you let it. So far, we’ve spent a sum total of approximately $11 / month, which isn’t bad for owning a house… er… website. Things can get pricey though when you start to design complicated sites. For example, if you did extensive bead-work, and wanted to sell your products online, with a fully automated store, you would probably need to pay someone to set up the store for you in a way that would be easy to update with new products as you get them.

On the other hand, most people looking to start out with a website, simply want a place to put their thoughts (like a blog) or somewhere to experiment with various Internet technologies. In this case, you shouldn’t really need to pay anything more than the $11 that we already have.

Say, for example, that you simply want a blog. Somewhere to put family news, or develop a community around something that you enjoy doing. DreamHost offers blogging software that can be installed and fully operational on your site with as little as 2 or 3 clicks of the mouse. They use a blogging software product called “WordPress” which is free to use, and allows you to keep your blog up-to-date without ever having to touch any code or programming behind the scenes. Just click what you want, and they do all the work of setting it up.

And SUDDENLY… we have a fully functional website, which your friends can visit and your family can keep in touch. Pretty cool eh? And all for less than $11 / month.

If you have more questions about it, or would like to talk to me further about the whole process, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to leave your comments in the comments area below.

Campus Crusade for Christ is a Christian organization which works to bring hope to hurting people around the world. We do this in a number of ways, including sharing the good news that Jesus Christ has saved each one of us from our sins. Campus Crusade also works with a number of other agencies including the “Global Aid Network”, providing relief supplies to countries dealing with local crises, and assisting with projects that promote sustainable development.

As one of the main developers of Campus Crusade’s Internet presence, TruthMedia seeks to bring the same message of hope to hurting people on the Internet.

We build online communities where the message of Jesus’ salvation is shared, and spiritual growth takes place. Activities include evangelistic websites, spiritual chat rooms, training online mentors, and support for other groups wanting to develop their own Internet ministry. (www.crusade.org)

Because of the fact that TruthMedia is non-profit, I am required to raise all the costs associated with my employment there as tax deductible donations from people who want to support the work that we do. These costs include things like my salary, medical benefits and any other costs associated with being an employee.

In light of that, part of my job involves going to people and asking them to consider helping to support me in this ministry. I would like to do that here. If you would be willing to consider helping me financially in this ministry, I would LOVE to talk to you more about it. Feel free to email me through the contact form on this site with your thoughts or questions. OR, if you would like to donate directly to my ministry, feel free to do so using one of the following links:

• Canadian Donation – Will receive a Canadian tax receipt
• USA Donation – Will receive a US tax receipt

Please choose the donation link which pertains to your location. Doing this will allow you to receive a tax deductible receipt for the appropriate country.

Thank you so much for your consideration of me in this ministry.
Have a great day,

James Warkentin

Have a good one,
the Blog Admin.

Simply put, your website host is the company or person who stores your website, and makes it available to be viewed on the internet. This person usually has a computer that stays connected to the internet, and is set up to allow people to come and browse through the information that you have placed on your website.

There are a number of different options available for hosting your website… some of them better, and some worse. There are some places that will host your website for free, as long as you are willing to display their advertising. There are other places that can charge you up to $100 each month, or more. The difficulty is learning what is right for you.

Factors to Consider:

Space. How much space is your website going to need? If you have a lot of content, or large quantities of graphics, you are going to need to be sure that whomever you host your site with, will provide adequate space for your site, without charging exorbitant fees.

Bandwidth. Bandwidth is the amount of data that you expect people to be downloading from your site on a monthly basis. If your site is mostly text with few graphics, bandwidth probably won’t be a problem. If on the other hand you plan to provide video or audio for download, or large data files and graphics, you will need to be concerned with how much bandwidth your host is able to provide, as well as the cost for additional bandwidth.

Speed. You don’t want people to have to wait 15 minutes to download your pages when your website happens to be busy. Make sure that your hosting provider is connected to a fast internet connection.

Scripting Options. You will want to make sure that your host provides the ability to run scripts on your website. If you intend to build a site with any sort of dynamic functionality (guestbooks, counters, user interaction) you will be needing scripting ability. At the time of writing, major scripting abilities you will want to ask about are PHP, CGI, ASP, FrontPage Extensions, and possibly Ruby.

Cost. The final, and usually the most important factor that you will need to consider is cost. How much do you want to spend on your hosting package. WarkenSoft would suggest that unless you operate a large company and intend to build a large online presence, you should be able to find excellent hosting for under $25 / month. In fact, in most cases you should be able to something under $10 / month.

You will notice on places on our site that WarkenSoft suggests hosting with DreamHost. For most small or medium sized businesses, the services and quality that they offer are excellent. In reference to the factors mentioned above, DreamHost offers the following:

Space: 167 Gigabytes (plenty for almost any website)
Bandwidth: 1.6 Terabytes / month (that’s a lot!)
Speed: Excellent
Cost: $7.95 / month (very competitive)
Click here to visit their site.

We have been very happy with our experience with them so far. We recommend that you give them a try. You’ll find it worth while.

Often, in order to keep track of these traffic statistics a webmaster will use some sort of script or program which monitors visitors and creates reports based on their needs. These scripts can range in size and complexity from a simple hit counter on a page, to a fully integrated data-mining application. They can also range in price from free unsupported scripts, to thousands of dollars for an integrated system. In many cases though, the first option is relatively useless, and the second is unnecessary (and usually outside of the budget). As is true with many things in life, the best solution is usually somewhere in between.

So what does a good traffic or website statistic monitering system require?

1. Basic Page View and Visitor Tracking
Especially when first starting out with building a website, it is important to know how much traffic is coming to your site, and how many pages those people are looking at. If a lot of people are coming to your site, but not going anywhere other than the first page, you may want to revisit your marketing strategy as well as searching for more “sticky” content or resources to provide to your visitors. As a webmaster, you are given a very small window of opportunity to capture the attention of the visitor before they move on to something else. In order to know this though, you will need a statistics tracking package which can tell you both how many people are coming to your site, and how many pages those people have looked at.

2. Most Active or Popular Pages
It is also very useful to know over time what pages on your site tend to be the most popular. Which pages are people hitting the most often? What pages are less popular? Knowing this can help you to fine-tune many of the strategies on your website. You may want to consider the material on the highly hit pages and focus more of your site content around those topics. If you offer advertizing on your site, you may wish to focus more heavily on those pages that are doing well. A good statistics tracking application will keep you in touch with what pages your visitors are most likely to hit.

3. Top Referring URLs
These days, one of the major factors in getting good search engine ranking, is to have other relevant sites linking to your own. Having a statistics tracking package that keeps you informed of where people are coming from as they come to your site, is KEY to building an effective online presence. Knowing how visitors got to your website can make a huge difference in how you promote your site further. You may wish to contact the owners of the referring website to consider an even more direct exchange of links, or you may wish to target similar sites to build more of the same type of traffic.

4. Search Engine Words and Phrases
Most new webmasters learn very quickly that one of the most important ways in which to generate new traffic to one’s website is to do so by carefully targetting the search engines. Having a good search engine listing essentially brings an ongoing stream of traffic to your site. Knowing what your visitors searched for in order to find you, allows you to both improve on your key words and phrases, as well as knowing what is working and what isn’t. A good website statistics package will do this for you.

Suggested Resources:
If you are looking for a software package which offers the capabilities listed above, we may have just the tool that you are looking for. WarkenSoft Productions has developed an application which we call SimpleStats. It is a PHP based, website statistics tracking package which easily fits all of the above listed criterion. We offer it for sale here on our website and we’re convinced that you will find it to be a valuable addition to your website. In fact, we’re so convinced that you’ll find it helpful, that we offer an unconditional 30 day money back guarantee if you don’t like it for any reason. We don’t charge a whole lot for it either. Feel free to check it out. Click here.

Here you will find tips on CSS coding, search engine optimization strategies, ideas for website designs and other great webmaster tools. We want to help you be more efficient as a website designer and give you the tools you need to create your masterpieces.

We will be adding new design ideas regularly, so you may want to bookmark this portion of the site to come back often.

If you’re new here, feel free to introduce yourself to us in the comments area below this post.