Nowadays it’s hardly possible to find someone who doesn’t like Gmail. It’s one of the best webmail service currently available; moreover it’s absolutely free. That’s why the great majority of us use Gmail for the personal correspondence.

People get accustomed to nice things very quickly. Thus after using Gmail (with its speed, filters, labels, huge disk space and etc.) we don’t even want to deal with hosting email. Unfortunately almost all the Web hosting providers cannot offer great email service; but that’s ok because no one is great at everything.

Can you get the power of Gmail using your own domain name? Fortunately, you can! Moreover some web hosts already have such an option built into control panel. Still if your hosting provider doesn’t have this option, don’t worry because you can set it up yourself. The only thing you should do is to follow the instructions…

Step 1 – Creating an account at Google Apps
Go to Google Apps and create a free account (sign up for the Standard Edition). However you can use the Premier Edition instead and get some special features, but it will cost you $50 per user per year. You will need to introduce the domain name and the necessary account information in order to set up the account.

Step 2 – Verification of your domain name
At this point Google needs to verify your domain name (i.e. if you are the rightful owner of the domain). Click on “Verify domain ownership”. Actually there are 2 ways you can do that:

1) uploading an HTML file containing a validation key to the root of your server (if you are not familiar with DNS settings, this would be the simplest and easiest option);
2) changing the CNAME record of your domain name to one specified by Google

You should keep in mind that the validation process may take up to 48 hours. Moreover there is one thing I would like to mention… If you are in the Google Apps Dashboard select Service Settings –> Email and under Web Address click on “Change URL”.  I recommend clicking on the “Change URLs for all domain services” because in this way you will be able to use all Google Apps. Here are the examples of custom entries:

http://mail.domainname.com
http://docs.domainname.com
http://start.domainname.com  etc…

Step 3 – Modifying MX records
This step is probably the hardest one… However there is no need to worry because it’s quite doable.
Your MX records are managed by your domain host or sometimes by domain registrator, if you have “Managed DNS” option enabled. Generally you can set custom DNS setting for your domain name. In order to make Google receive your email you need to replace your MX records with the ones of Google servers.  To do so just access your domain DNS settings (in case you don’t know how you can do this, contact the customer support service) and change current MX records (or add them if you don’t have ones) to the ones provided by Google:

ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM 10
ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM 20
ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM 20
ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM 30
ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM 30
ASPMX4.GOOGLEMAIL.COM   30
ASPMX5.GOOGLEMAIL.COM 30

Please visit Google Docs for additional info.

After that you just need to activate you email and wait. Altogether it may take up to 48 hours for the DNS records to be updated[v2]. As soon as they are changed you will be able to access your new custom Gmail login at mail.yourdomain.com. When logged into Gmail, you can access your domain settings simply by clicking on “Manage this domain”. Here you can change whatever you want (add new users, configure your mailboxes, change the Gmail logo to your own logo, etc.).
Hopefully everything is clear. Please let me know if I missed something.

Wordpress has recently announced beta version of their 2.8 edition. Here are the improvements:

User Features

• New Theme Installer routines
• Add CodePress syntax highlighting to Theme and Plugin editors
• Add Documentation(function) lookup to Theme and Plugin editors
• Use “Custom Header” for menu text and revise Default theme to reflect change
• Separate Comments into a separate postbox, from Discussion postbox, on the Edit Post screen
• Make tags accessible without Javascript on the edit screen
• Don’t ask for confirmation when marking a comment as spam
• Don’t notify post author of own comments
• Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns as set via the Screen Options tab
• Make titles into links in Dashboard Right Now module (this was in 2.7.1)
• Improved Admin icons (grey-to-transparent shadows)
• Update Blue Admin Color Scheme
• Press This improvements UI, quoting fixes, plus ability for Contributors to use Press This
• Add column “Rating” in Administration > Links > Edit
• Improve installer to help people entering wrong email addresses
• Improved Widget user interface
• Allow editing of all plugin files (Ticket 6732)
• Improved Plugin search (this was in 2.7.1) on Administration > Plugins > Add New
• Per Page option for plugins
• Move “Install a plugin in .zip format” to new Upload tab under Administration > Plugins > Add New
• Show absolute date instead of relative date for scheduled posts
• Fix tags suggest for post quick edit and bulk edit
• Permalink editor changes and fix for pages
• Autosave post/page when pressing Control/Command+S
• Add toggle all button to the Gallery tab in the uploader
• Support more than one gallery on the same page
• Add per page option to Screen Options for comments, posts, pages, media, categories, and tags
• Overhaul of LiveJournal importer (also add define WP_IMPORTING)
• Import category descriptions for Administration > Tools > Import > WordPress
• Show Tools menu for all users so they can access Turbo
• Check for new version when visiting Administration > Tools > Upgrade
• Fix most popular link category list
• Add description field for tags
• WAI-ARIA landmark roles to added to WordPress Default theme
• “Choose a city in the same timezone as you” for Timezone in Administration > Settings > General
• Remove My Hacks option from Administration > Settings > Miscellaneous
• Hide email addresses from low privilege users on Administration > Comments
• In upgrade process, provide better explanation for database upgrade message
• Enforce unique email addresses in Add/Edit users
• Make user_nicenames unique during registration
• Add “Send this password to the new user by email” option to Administration > Users > Add New
• Don’t set user’s Website url to http:// in Administration > Users > Add New
• Add password strength meter to Add User and Edit User
• Hide things that need to be available to screen readers via offscreen positioning
• Use invisible class for hiding labels and legends
• Use a semantic class name for text targeted to screen readers

As you can see, there are lots of improvements and I am going to upgrade it at all my sites when version 2.8 is released.

There are some cases when you need to avoid displaying related videos to the youtube object shown on the page. For example, today I was called by an aesthetic clinic manager who was very unsatisfied with related videos that were shown on their site. They were related to plastic surgery, and were quite offensive. So I had to disable Youtube related videos in the embedded player. The solution was very simple: you just need to add a short parameter to your Youtube URL. All you need to add is &rel=0 to the Youtube URL. It will stop displaying related videos, the thing that often takes a lot of time.

So the initial state was:

<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/4HwMzUAbfWg&hl=ru&fs=1″></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/4HwMzUAbfWg&hl=ru&fs=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

And after my modification it became:

<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/4HwMzUAbfWg&hl=ru&fs=1&rel=0“></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/4HwMzUAbfWg&hl=ru&fs=1&rel=0” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

This simple parameter will save you from unwanted videos displayed at your pages.

Recently I’ve purchased a netbook that should help me to become more mobile and to develop this site more quickly. It’s ASUS EEE 901, and it was chosen for good time on battery, low weight and all the communications available (including bluetooth). After several experiments, that were performed to increase free space on my C partition, I have deleted some folders that were essential for Windows, so I decided to restore Windows to its initial state.

The first thing I need to tell is that I don’t have an external DVD-ROM and I don’t plan to buy one. So there really was no place to insert DVD to. First thing I’ve tried was to create an ISO image of the DVD and burn it to my USB flash. That was done, but the disk refused to boot telling me I should have a DVD inserted. Then I have investigated the DVD and found two big gho files. Ok, the recovery CD uses Norton Ghost to restore image files.That’s nice.

Further investigation on the Recovery CD leaded to the discovery of winpe.iso file that contained GHOST32.exe. That was even better: it could be possible to restore images with it. The next thing I has to do was to create a bootable Flash drive and to run ghost32.exe.

So in order to restore the images you need to create a bootable flash disk. There is a list of methods that are available here . I think that the most simple is to search for “HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool” in Google. This is Freeware and it will allow you to create a bootable flash drive. The you need to copy image files (they are located under Recovery folder of the DVD and GHOST32.exe to the bootable flash. Then you will need to boot from this flash and to gun ghost32, then restore the images and you’re done!

Here is an alternative method of doing the same: http://wiki.eeeuser.com/windows:restorexp_from_usb. Hope this helps you to revent your Windows to its initial state.

If you would like to use SSL for your needs, you should have a certificate. Certificates are usually purchased, but if you need just to use SSL for your own needs, you don’t need to. There is a command that allows you to create a shared certificate for your server and use it for your own needs.

/usr/bin/openssl req -x509 -newkey rsa:1024 -keyout /etc/httpd/conf/ssl.key/server.key -out /etc/httpd/conf/ssl.crt/server.crt -days 999  -nodes

This command will create the private key for your server and then will ask for some information from your part.

That’s it! Then you need to go to the domain you’d like to enable SSL for and check “Use the server’s shared signed certificate.

If you’re working with various HTML in PHP, then you probably know that strim_tags doesn’t deal with all HTML code correctly. There are some problems with JS elements, with Microsoft Word HTML, etc. In order to get clean text, there is a function that holds all these exceptions. Its name is strip_tags_smart. You’re welcome to check its description here and the download link is located at dklab forum. Since the function uses GNU license, I won’t post any modified elements, you’re welcome to customize it in the way you like.

This function will help you if you need to monitor folders for recently changed files, or you may implement it as an anti-hacker solution to check your files. Anyway, I think you find it useful.

<?

//Put here the directory you want to search for. Put / if you want to search your entire domain
$dir=’/var/www/html/domain.com/download’;

//Put the date you want to compare with in the format of:  YYYY-mm-dd hh:mm:ss
$comparedatestr=”2009-03-25 00:00:00″;
$comparedate=strtotime($comparedatestr);

//I run the function here to start the search.
$go=modified_time($dir,$comparedate);

var_dump($go);

//This is the function which is doing the search…
function modified_time($address,$comparedate){

$files=array();
@$dir = opendir($address);

if(!$dir){ return 0; }
while($entry = readdir($dir)){
if(is_dir(”$address/$entry”) && ($entry != “..” && $entry != “.”)){
modified_time(”$address/$entry”,$comparedate);
}
else   {

if($entry != “..” && $entry != “.”) {

$fulldir=$address.’/’.$entry;
$last_modified = filemtime($fulldir);
$last_modified_str= date(”Y-m-d h:i:s”, $last_modified);

if($comparedate < $last_modified)  {
$files[$fulldir]=$last_modified_str;
}

}

}

}

return($files);

}
?>

In the sample above we’re getting the list of files that are older than the specified date into an array. We’re taking file paths into array keys and modification dates into values. I’ve performed var_dump to show the structure of this array. The original code of this function was found at PHP website.  Hope you like it.

If you manage many sites that take profits from Adsense advertising, then you probably know that irrelevant ads are often shown on your pages. This means your visitors won’t click on them and you are simply losing your profits. I have discovered the software that allows to filter these ads by advertisers, as if you’re running a niche site, the advertiser selection isn’t so great. Software I’m talikng about is AdSense Preview Tool . Let me list all the features annonuced:

• grouping of websites and URLs;
• flexible geo-targeting settings;
• automatic checking of advertisers’ websites;
• ads separation: normal, non-relevant and MFA;
• sorting of the filter items by an actuality;
• automatic deletion of old filter items.

There is a free trial available on the site. You’re welcome to try it by yourself, but I think that this software is worth its money.

Recently I got an e-mail from Google telling me I need to update privacy policy on my sites. Since I manage may Wordpress blogs, that was not a good news from me as I had to update absolutely all sites to create varions privacy policy pages. I was happy to know that Eric Giguere has created a Wordpress plugin named Privacy Policy.

All you need is to download the plugin and extract its contents in default Wordpress Plugin Directory. Then it will appear under “Settings” tab where you can customize the output.

This nice plugin will save a lot of time for those who deal with multiple sites that show Google Adsense.  It has been recemtly updated to show privacy policy that is compliant to latest Google guidelines. Must have!

Today I have discovered a service that allows you to search just message boards for the keywords you need. If you are involved in forum marketing, you might find it useful. So, let me present: Big Boards. What does this service actually do?

Big Boards has the database of active forums.  If you would like to search for forums related to your website, than that’s just for you. Certainly, there are queries to Google, that do the same, but you don’t need to know Google query syntax to locate the forums you really need. There are various options that allow you to see the forum popularity, you may sort forums by engine, etc. If you’re planning to do forum marketing for your site, that’s probably the best idea to use Big Boards.