WordPress to Facebook Tutorial

Hello Web Wisers!

Ever wondered how to integrate WordPress and Facebook?

Well Facebook have an official WordPress Plugin that makes it incredibly easy to add a like button to your website and accept comments from Facebook accounts, among other things.

We've just spent a good while creating this screen-cast for you to follow. It takes you through every step you need to take to integrate WordPress and Facebook.

If you've got any questions then don't forget to ask here, in the WordPress forum or on Twitter.

Here's the video!:

Enjoy
Barney

POP3 vs IMAP Email

Everyone always argues over POP3 and IMAP.

POP3 or Post Office Protocol, essentially means that when you press the send and receive button, you are downloading that mail from the server. Therefore the only copy of that email exists on your computer, not on the mail server or anywhere else. Not great if you want to read your email on the move.

IMAP lets you download a copy of that email. Therefore when you want to access your email from your iPad instead of your desktop, you can do, as all your mail is stored on the server as well as on your computer / iPad / phone / any other device.

Therefore I can only recommend IMAP. The number of times I've seen people loose all their mail then complain that the email server didn't have a copy is silly. Just use IMAP from now on and hopefully the number of these cases will go down!

POP3 is great if you want to be extremely secure and you use decent backup procedures. However, that's not most people, so go with IMAP as your default!

What's your thoughts? Leave us a comment.

Create A Website

We often get asked at Web Wise Forum how to create a website. This can get a bit confusing because some people mean a domain name and others mean the actual content held on your web hosting. Let's clarify the issue a bit.

A website is generally considered to be a combination of two main things. A domain name and web hosting. The domain name is the web address that you see in the URL bar above this post in your web browser. 'Blogger.com' for example is a domain name. The domain name itself doesn't have any content. It's just a series of letters that point somewhere on the internet. You can own a domain name and be fully under it's control but set it up to not point anywhere. This means people can type that URL into their browser bar, but nothing will appear. There is no content that matches up with that domain name.

The web hosting is the part of a website that people really use. This is the data, text, images and code that make up the website. See the theme on this blogger blog? The text your reading? All of that has to be held somewhere. Just like a file on your computer. If this data isn't available online how are people going to see it when they type in your domain name? Simply put, they aren't.

So essentially to create a website you first need to get yourself a domain name. There are hundreds of registrars out there, go and find one you like, pick a top level domain and get it set up.

Then you need to choose a web host. To get the best value make sure you think about how much data space you will need? Is your site media heavy? Then you probably need more space! Is it a personal blog where your images and videos are held on Instagram and YouTube? Then don't worry about having a great deal of space. Are you expecting massive amounts of traffic? Ask about your bandwidth allowance. If you just want to set up a basic site, any hosting package will do. But make sure the company responds to your calls and emails before you sign up. This is a great way to try and establish whether or not the company has a good support team and how helpful they are when things go wrong!

I hope that clears up the confusion for a few of you. If you have more questions come along to our web hosting forum and ask away!

Thanks for reading!
Web Wise Forum Admin

Domain Name Glossary

Hi Everyone

Hope you are signed up, introduced and enjoying yourself on Web Wise Forum!

Just to give you a heads up, we run a domain name glossary. This should identify any terms that you have been confused about while researching your domain names.

To give you an example of some of the more common terms:

DNS - Domain Name System. The system via which all domain names are directed to IP addresses. This system allows URLs to work. Without it you would be remembering an awful lot of numbers! 

ICANN - Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers - ICANN coordinate unique addresses across the Internet, from IP Addresses to Domain Names. They coordinate the Domain Name System (DNS), Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, Generic Top-Level Domains and Country Code Top-Level Domains. They are the highest authority in the domain name industry.

WHOIS – A protocol to query the databases that hold all the registrant details of Domain Names, IP Addresses and Networks. This allows Domain Names tobe attributed to a certain person or organisation.

And there is plenty more where that came from!

We have already defined over 50 terms and we plan to keep this growing and up to date. Head over to the thread here and have a look around. Is there a term that you need defined? Are you not sure what that article you read was about. Post in the thread and one of us will get to it as soon as possible!

Let me remind you that the forum is crawled by impartial industry experts who are going to give you the perfect answer without any waffle. That's why our newest members are posting more and staying longer!

So if you haven't already done so I suggest you go and sign up for our domain name forum today!

Web Hosting Forum

Hi Everyone

Another update here from the admin of Web Wise Forum.

We've been seeing a surge of new users in the past couple of months. Hopefully you have already signed up. If you haven't then make sure you get over to the site and get yourself an account to join the conversation.

As an update I just wanted to let you know that we have added a web hosting forum to the boards. We'll discuss everything hosting related in there. What CMS should you use? How much should you pay for hosting? Questions like this will be answered in a flash by our industry insiders who are happy to help.

Whatever you need to know I'm sure they can help. We've also set up some individual forums for the most popular Content Management Systems. If you go to the WordPress forum you will see that there are already some tutorials up there for you to follow.

Hopefully, as time goes on there will be more and more added to the forum and you can be part of it! It would be great to have you all on board so get registering, post in the introduction forums to introduce yourself and ask away! If we can ever help ... we will!

Thanks all!

See you round the forum hopefully!

Admin - Web Wise | Domain Name Forum |