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If you’ve spent any time as a web site maker in a Windows computer, you know that you can go online, and find one of many free ftp programs for the purpose of uploading your web pages to your site. But what happens when you switch to Linux, and it suddenly appears there are no ftp programs? Or else, you’ve chosen a distro (operating system) that doesn’t come with one, and you still don’t know how to install new programs?

Ah, I fretted about those thing for nothing. No need to fret! We have something better than all those ftp programs, right in our Konqueror browser.

I know, i quickly caught on that most linux-ers are using Firefox and merely use Konqueror as their file manager. I did that in no time flat too. But in SuSE 9.3 I found only KBear as an ftp program, and I couldn’t for the life of me seem to get it going. I needed to upload something quickly, so I went on a fast Google search, and discovered that if I created twin windows in Konqueror with a click, I could ftp in one window to my site, and drag and drop files. It was faster and tidier than with an ftp program. I just had to stop to give my password at the beginning of the day. The rest of the day I moved in and out with ease.

Recently I moved all my sites to a new host and the old method of reaching my sites via ftp weren’t working right;
ftp://domainname.com. That just made Konqueror hesitate several minutes, and suddenly it would show a folder icon named pub and the information bar at the bottom said logged in. But I could not find my files already online in that pub folder, and I was stymied.

When I complained to the Support desk they said to download a free ftp program.

Oh no! I want to use my Konqueror. I had learned to love the simplicity of it.

So, time to go find out what there is in that vast cyber library for information. I found it in a forum in a matter of minutes. For this particular host the syntax for reaching my sites is; ftp://username:password@domainname.com Presto! I’m in with lightening speed. I’ve already given the password. If I want to go back into a particular site later in the day, it also remembers that I’m logged in. Good to go.

I’ve just found another instruction:
Simply type ftp://user@host/ and Konqueror will prompt you for a password. If your username contains the ‘@’ sign, replace it with %40.

Maybe we need to look afresh at Konqueror and find out what other tricks it has up its sleeve.

Konqueror is the file manager for the K Desktop environment. It supports basic file management on local UNIX filesystems, from simple cut/copy and paste operations to advanced remote and local network file browsing.

Konqueror is the canvas for all the latest KDE technology, from KIO slaves (which provide mechanisms for file access) to component embedding via the KParts object interface, and it is one of the most customizable applications available.

Konqueror is an Open Source web browser with HTML 4.01 compliance, supporting Java applets, JavaScript, CSS 1, CSS 2.1, as well as Netscape plugins (for example, Flash or RealVideo plugins).

Konqueror is a universal viewing application, capable of embedding read-only viewing components in itself to view documents without ever launching another application.

NOTE: I just tried to find KBear online to see what new information there might be about it, but there is nothing. Even their home page has an error message today. Other links that are suppose to point to Kbear are taken over as ad pages for other things.

Conclusion: smart move is to stay with Konqueror. Why look for anything else when this works so well for ftp? If I end up at a server that has different requirements, I’ll just look for the right syntax in connecting to it in Konqueror.

If you’ve been thinking, “I need a decent web site online!” or “Where do you go to start an online business?” I’ve got good news for you.

First the bad news: there are so many options out there that it’s overwhelming. It gets harder and harder to decide.

The good news: prices of hosting has come down tremendously, domain name registrations are under $10/year, and you can get away with knowing very little raw code-work. (Though I still recommend that you learn as much as you can).

The best news: I’m about to offer you some real practical help!

I’ve come a long way, (Baby), from 1999, when I started my very first web site in the Composer portion of my Netscape browser. Once I got a sub-domain site on HyperMart I got rolling and put up more web pages daily. It was a Journal of my progress, and I was making entries every night at 10 pm, long before Blogs were invented.

Then I won a domain name and a year’s worth of hosting (a $450 value at that time) in a little contest. That host went under in six months, so I had to move on. I ended up at ChristianWebHost for $109/year, and things got better as I kept learning.

I soon started working on a site for a non-profit mission, and have kept adding others in the last few years. By now I had a little farm of sites I looked after. Three of my own domains, and four for others. Yes, that makes seven! I had found a host in 2003 that offered really low prices, starting at $10/year for 50MB of space. The CPanel had Fantastico, which was full of extras, and so I could install blogs, and forums, and content management systems, even shopping carts- you name it - there was a smorgasbord of extras to install at no additional cost. The support was not as good as at ChristianWebHost, but I managed to learn a lot by myself.

Lately though, I’d begun to think I would be better off with a reseller package, so that I could offer to host others’ sites, and make a bit of income - enough to cover my costs, and those of the non-profit sites I was managing. Last week I dug in and began to hunt for such a package in earnest. I did a lot of Googling, a lot of reading, and comparing.

I checked out multi-domain hosting, as that is being offered in many of the bigger services now. Instead of getting just 50MB of space, it is possible to get 3-5 GB and be allowed to host all the domains you want on that for $6.99/month. (see HostGator).

Turns out though when you search through the fine print, that they mean other domains that piggy back off your first one. Those aren’t really stand-alone sites, and you aren’t allowed to charge friends for their sites on your space. For that you have to get a reseller package.

With the reseller package comes the responsibility for those clients. In most cases - YOU are the support staff they must contact if they have a problem. You can go up to your own support Dept to ask questions so you can solve them for your clients, but you’ve got to be ready to do all that technical work.

I thought this over. I was already doing that for my group of seven sites. I wouldn’t have time to be webmaster AND promoter for dozens of others, but if I took on a few selective sites, and charged them a bit, it could still meet my expenses, and perhaps add some profit down the line. Moving to a place where I at least could get excellent support care might be worth the extra cost too.

I had been praying recently and telling the Lord, that my life was getting too routine. Now I saw that this would bring in some challenges as I would have to trust the Lord for twice as much income to cover my reseller hosting fees, but the potential to move up to a more profitable level of business opportunities - it would bring spice to my life all right!

I signed up on Friday at HostGator.com, and got busy setting up my hosting packages, then creating accounts in those for each of the seven sites, and once I had that done, I could start moving them in. On Monday morning I saw that changing my usernames and passwords for most of those sites was messing up the scripts that ran on them. So I deleted the accounts, created them over again, and restored the sites once more. I also went to GoDaddy and changed the DNS addresses to point to the new locations. Tuesday I spent re-setting passwords for the email addresses so they would work, and trouble-shooting.

One site did not show up after restoring, and I had to go to the Support Desk to create a “help me” ticket. Once they saw my problem they offered to go in and fix it for me. Turns out, i learn this morning, that it won’t work because the system I was bringing in was an older version of Mambo CMS, and this new host is set up for a more recent version. So I’ll have to set that one up from scratch today, then feed in the articles and blogs, etc. that were in the old one.

It was a site that I only spent one night a week on, and this will call for a sacrifice of at least today and maybe tomorrow to get back to where it was, but - that’s part of my job. I have to accept that.

Two other sites need a bit of fixing, but I’ll get to that this weekend. If I can say I migrated seven sites in one week’s time, I’ll be grateful. It could have been much worse. Many good “little things” happened along the way to give me an undercurrent of joy, and a sense that this is the right path for me at this time.

If you are thinking you need a web site, or have one, and would like to move it to a host you can trust - I invite you to read on. I have openings!

My niece phoned yesterday to pick my brain about hosting. Seems she and her mom, (my sister), have gone to a seminar and are excited about a web site idea. I didn’t have much time to prepare, but here’s a list of options I would recommend;

1. Shop around online, read sites, and read stuff ABOUT these hosting companies. Their own words might be fluffed.

2. Narrow down to the best two or three choices, and if you can’t decide clearly, use the ChooseIt tool which is described and linked to from ChooseIt! Remember to check out their support services.

A. Choice: Get a SiteBuildIt! web business package. It comes with domain, guides, and lots of excellent help. If you follow that, you are bound to get high rankings and make a nice income. SiteBuildIt! (If you don’t understand something, use the contact info at Questions?

B. Choice: Check with me! I’ve set up three packages at good prices, and if you know me, you know that I would do my best for you. Each package has unlimited ftp, email, lists, SQL (databases), and sub-domains. Access to your own CPanel administration area, and the whole list of goodies in Fantastico.

Basic is 100 MB with 1 GB bandwidth for $12/yr - New Start Special is $10/yr.
Double is 200 MB with 2 GB bandwidth for $24/yr - New Start Special is $20/yr.
Bouquet is 500 MB with 2 GB bandwidth for $50/yr - New Start Special is $48/yr.

C. Choice: Get a small shared hosting package for your site (small is now plenty big enough for 50 sites or more! Shared means they will have other clients on the same computer as you). Proceed cautiously, and learn as you go.

If you don’t already have my email address, use the contact form at; Contact Me (I just tested it again).

I’ve just used up a whole work morning in researching a larger hosting package. I already knew that most hosting is now done on Linux operating systems because they are much safer and free, so that the cost of hosting is just plumeting downward.

Matt Heaton, CEO of Bluehost.com says in his blog on http://mattheaton.com,;
“We build a new server for Bluehost customers about every 38 hours. That would end up being a LOT of money if we were paying for an operating system like windows on every box. The ONLY piece of software that we pay any money for in the running of Bluehost is the Cpanel licenses for out control panel. Everything else on our servers is 100% free and open source software.”

Ah-ha! That explains why some hosting companies can offer packages that seem almost too good to be true.

Some months back someone had mentioned on their site that they were moving to Site5.com, so I checked it out and was impressed. I bookmarked it. And I began to daydream about moving all my sites there, plus the ones I look after for non-profit missions. Right now that is a total of 7 sites, but could soon be more.

So the last three days I’ve given up some hours to just researching this matter. At first I thought a shared hosting package at Site5 would serve my purposes nicely, but as I read all over the site, I discovered that I wouldn’t be allowed to sub-let or re-sell spaces to other site owners, which I had hoped I could work into my dream deal.

Okay. I switched over to researching their reseller package. But it had to be paid a year in advance. A bit out of my reach at the moment, although I might handle it in another month or two. While googling for other hosts and resellers, I saw that Bluehost.com came highly recommended. I checked that out. They limited their shared package to 6 sites, and had no reseller deal.

When I searched for reseller hosting + unlimited sites, I began to see better deals price-wise. The best price so far is one in Toronto, Canada (hey, my own country!) and it is $3.99/month (or 43.89/yr) for 1 GB of space, Unlimited reseller sites allowed, That almost seems too good to be true! Which means now I must research this company very thoroughly to make sure I’m not making a rash move.

My time is up, but I want to say that if you are looking for hosting, do a thorough search and keep looking for another day or two. There are so many out there that it pays to be well informed. The features you want to make sure the company you do business with will have, are;
space offered in Gigabytes, instead of just megabytes.
Bandwidth in GB or even unlimited!
hosting is on Linux operating systems. RedHat is considered good, and CentOS, but there are many others.
Since they are practically offering this at no cost to themselves, low price is a consideration.
Maybe the determining factor is support. That is NOT equal in all places! Take time to correspond with their sales and support staff, and ask questions. See how fast they are, and how polite and knowledgeable they are. There will be days later when that will be most crucial to your web-mastering or reselling experiences. Believe me, I know whereof I speak!

You probably don’t feel like it all the time because sometimes all that you have to do simply overwhelms you. If no one else gives you a grateful hug and tells you how much you’ve accomplished in a day, you begin to wonder if you got anything done that’s worthwhile.

But stop to look at yourself, or your mom, more objectively. Mom’s know that the family has to get feed regularly, and they make it their business to get meals together even when they don’t feel hungry, or up to it.

Moms know how to get sleepyheads out of bed and on the way to school or work. (Sometimes she can even pull homework projects out of thin air).

They may not always keep the house immaculate, but if guests phone that they are dropping by in 30 minutes, a mom will in 30 minutes have been through the house like a cleansing white tornado. If you watch, you’ll be amazed at how fast she can clean up a few rooms!

Moms can clear up quarrels and squables between their children, and sometimes tame an angry husband too.

Do you realize that all that, if done by a business executive or CEO is called ‘administration’ and ‘leadership’ skills? Why should she not be able to run a web-business? She’s been groomed for it for years!

Ken Evoy, owner of SiteSell in Montreal, Canada, has long known that there are far more women online than men. You see that in how his books always tend to use a woman in his examples and illustrations, both for surfers and for people trying to make a living with a web business.

Well, he’s been proven right, by some of his own customers! At the forums for SBI owners and affiliates a couple of months back, a discussion began on how to slant the advice in his training books to work-at-home-moms in the hopes of showing them that they could handle a web site and make money for their families too. Turned out there already were a bunch of these WAHMs doing this. Four of the Moms were the most articulate, so Ken Evoy asked them to write up a new training Masters Course for him, directed expressly at this demographic group of potential customers and clients. They were Elizabeth, Cate, Jennifer and Erin.

Scattered across the US and the UK, these woman collaborated by email, and produced this new eBook, which anyone may have free of charge. It’s actually a package of three eBooks, and I’ve read the first one already. Quite inspiring! It’s like you suddenly get a great overview of how a web site can really make you some money.

Hello, Mom!

You are in constant motion as a stay-at-home mom… loving, nurturing, helping, guiding, playing, comforting, organizing, mediating, laughing, managing, healing, giving. Family comes first and you are loving it! There is no other place that you would rather be than with your kids. But, at the same time, you would also like, or you need to contribute financially to the family. So… if you stay at home, why not Work At Home, Mom (WAHM)?

WAHM-IT!, The Masters Course will show you how. Four Work-At-Home Moms (WAHMs), the course’s authors, will introduce you to a work solution that “fits” naturally with your family needs and yet is rewarding, exciting and soul-satisfying for you.

Just like they are doing, you too can create an information-rich Web site that is based on something you know and love. No technical knowledge or prior experience is necessary. You too can build a real, long-term business on the Net.

Learn from the experiences and advice of Elizabeth, Cate, Jennifer and Erin (and several other successful WAHMs) in WAHM-IT!, The Masters Course. They are busy moms just like you and they know what it’s like.

They have taken the time to tell you everything, from reviewing all your options and organizing properly. And they progress all the way to the final desired outcome, including the nitty-gritty of how to actually build a substantial income online, illustrating with well-explained case studies.

An online business is affordable, flexible, and convenient. You can work at your Web site and business when you like, at the speed that suits you, and still put the all-important needs of your family first. In other words, you can take your family to work with you!

The most amazing part about this course for Moms?

It’s free! (If you are not a mom, maybe you should show this to YOUR Mom. She already knows how to be in charge of your home and family, you can see as a Mom with a Web-business, can’t you?).

Work-at-Home-Moms WAHM-IT! The Masters Course for Work-at-Home-Moms

Click wahm-masters.zip to download WAHM-IT! to your computer. This will unzip a folder called “WAHM-IT” on your desktop (if you do not change the default location). The folder contains four files…

1) ReadMeFirst.txt — This file will get you off to a flying start. Begin here!

2) wahm-guide.pdf — “WAHM-IT!, The Masters Course” provides all the how-to information you need to successfully build a real business on the Net.

3) wahm-case-studies.pdf — The “Case Studies” volume shares the inspiring stories of real-life SBI! WAHMs and their Web sites.

4) wahm-get-organized.pdf — “Get Organized to Work at Home” offers tips on managing your household and family successfully while you work.

Find out how to use the Net, the right process, and the right tools to achieve the kind of “work payback” that you have been dreaming about. Be there for your kids, generate long-term income (that could very well become your family’s primary income), fuel your own creativity and passion, and of course, have fun!

Dad and I have been shopping for a digital camera this last week. One of my concerns was; what models would work with my Linux operating system? It has turned out to be a moot question. Meaning, linux or unix systems can handle pretty well any of the newer camera models. Unless it is a very old model, so so new and invovating that it is totally different from the current rash of digital cameras sold, your computer will simply treat it as a mass storage device, similar to your CD drive, or your floppy drive, or whatever.

I had done some online checking for price ranges and descriptions of models ahead of time, but last week Thursday, Dad and I went to the city and shopping around in six different stores that carried the cameras. Fortunately, we were too broke to be talked into buying instantly, but I took notes. That night at home, I researched the ones we had liked the best. Those were brand new names to me. They were not listed in my DigiKam program either.

Turns out they are so new hardly anything is available on them. One was the Centrios in piano black at The Source, a chain of stores that bought out the Radio Shacks in Canada. This one came with a special deal, if you spent $179 for a camera, you would get an HP photo printer with it, FREE. Dad, who doesn’t know much about cameras to begin with, but who has been hankering for one ever since some others have showed their cameras off to him, decided he liked the looks of that Centrios.

When I got to handle it, I turned it over and saw a tiny sticker saying it was made in China. The salesman said it came from the same company as NexxTech. I had received a little toy digital camera with that brand name and I hadn’t been super-impressed, but this man assured me they made some good quality stuff. I’d check it out.

The other one we liked was at WalMart because it was the lowest price we found. It was a Digital Concepts for $99. But it looked like a kit for kids camera. I found absolutely nothing on it online. I decided to put that at the bottom of our list, in case none of my first, second and third choices worked out.

Yesterday we went to pickup the Centrios and the HP printer. We bought 4 special rechargeable batteries, and a 512 SD memory card that will allow us to take 200 photos before we have to download them to the computer. That should do us fine for this reunion weekend coming up!

When we got home I let Dad handle it while I read instructions to him, so he would know how to use it on this family reunion weekend coming up tomorrow. At first, nothing seemed to work. I was beginning to feel wary, when I asked him to check whether he had put the batteries in the right way. Turned out, he had reversed them. When he got them in right, the camera came alive, buzzing and whizzing when we pressed buttons, and in a matter of minutes we were taking photos.

When Dad tired of that and went to catch up on his nap (he’s 90, you know), I took the camera to the computer, and got out the USB cable, and plugged it in. While I was looking up what to do next, the computer popped up a screen saying, to wait - it had detected a new storage device. Moments later Suse had opened a new Konqueror screen, and there were the first three photos I had taken! Ah-ha! What could be nicer than that?

Dad put the special rechargeable batteries into his recharger over night. However, we are still experimenting with the original plain AA batteries that came in the box. This morning I took it out for a walk and took pictures of whatever caught my fancy. Right now Dad is out for a picture-taking walk. We’re all set to drive off tomorrow to capture those relatives on our digital camera.