How to change database encoding

Sometimes when you transfer sites from one hosting to another, or when you install a site through your hosting interface (or when you install it via FTP) you can have encoding conflicts. And to sort this problem out you may need to change encoding in some tables in your database. There are a lot of very complicated and time consuming methods but what about changing database encoding easily?

There is one solution for changing the encoding for all database tables at once. The script is written by a web development company called Phoca and you can download the script and read step by step procedure here: How to change collation in database.

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How to add fields to Joomla registration form and translate them to your language

Today I needed to add field to Joomla registration form and translate them to Russian language.  The video gives you step-by-step instruction how do add fields.  However, there is one important thing to remember: if you have your own Joomla theme installed, you have to change registration form (default.php) in another folder.  The form then is in /templates/YOURTHEME/html/com_user/register/.

After the fields are added, you need to translate them to your language.  The file with translation lies in language/YOURLANGUAGE/com_user.ini. You have to add the names of the fields to the file. Please note, that the name should be written in capitals. For example  NAME=translation to your language.

Enjoy! :)

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Virtuemart. The “Buy” button doesn’t work.

Recently I’ve come across the following problem: there is one occasion when the “Buy” button doesn’t work in the shops made on Joomla + Virtuemart. At the beginning I thought that this is a problem with inactive cookies but I was wrong.

The problem is connected to the prefix “www” and settings in the admin panel. If the domain in admin panel is www.yourdomain.com, then if a user enters your domain without “www” he/she is not able to buy anything as the “Buy” button doesn’t work. And vice versa.

How to solve this problem?

There are two ways: via .htaccess file and via VirtueMart.cfg.php.

The second way is easier.

Find a file  VirtueMart.cfg.php (administrator/components/com_virtuemart/virtuemart.cfg.php)

Find a code:

define( ‘URL’, “www.site.ru/” );
define( ‘SECUREURL’, “www.site.ru/” );

and choose it to:

define( ‘URL’, $mosConfig_live_site.$app );
define( ‘SECUREURL’, $mosConfig_live_site.$app );

Everything should be sorted now.

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FTP error: 501 Please CLNT first

FTP error 501 Please CLNT first can occur if you use Firefox FTP console (FireFTP). As far as I understood, this happens with Windows based servers. If someone has uploaded a new files using the same login and pass, you won’t be able to see them. All you have to do in order to refresh FTP is to click “Connect”, click “OK” on the pop up error window and then click “Abort” near “Disconnect” button.  This should help.

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Different language for admin panel in WordPress

While doing work for one of my customers, I’ve come across the following problem:  it is quite complicated to set up  different language for WordPress admin panel without knowledge of coding.

However, I’ve found very easy way to do that.

First of all you have to download the plugin called Admin in English. This plugin lets you have your administration panel in English, even if the rest of your blog is translated into another language. But what if you run German blog and want to have admin panel on Russian? Then you have to do the following:
1) Find the language files for your admin panel here:  WordPress in Your Language.
2) On your site server, create a new folder in your /wp-content OR /wp-includes directory called /languages.
3) Move your language files to that directory. Remember the name of the file (language code. For example, the language code for english is en_US.
4) Unzip “Admin in English” plugin and open admin-in-english.php
5) Find the line called “return ‘en_US’;” and chang en_US to your language code.
6) Save the file and move the whole folder to /wp-content/plugins via FTP.
7) Activate “Admin in English” plugin and enjoy! :)

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Making Money by Blogging

Making money by bloggingA lot of people think about making money by blogging and don’t know where to start and what methods to use.

There are loads of different strategies: affiliate marketing, articles writing, advertising campaigns etc. But all of them require traffic. A lot of traffic. And traffic requires your time. A lot of your time. So basically, you have to sit in front of PC almost every day, write interesting articles in order to make your blog popular so visitors will keep visiting you.

I’ve tried all of the strategies and found the best one for making money by blogging (well, at least for me). Now, at the moment the money are not big (I earn about 70-80$ per month from two blogs), but I don’t have to sit in front of PC every day. In fact, I post one new article on my blogs once per 2-3 months.

The strategy is extremely simple and requires very small amount of effort. I sell a place for links on my blogs. For doing that I use two online agencies: Link Worth and Text-Link-Ads.com.

Link Worth is really good and I get the main proffit from them. They offer a lot of helpful settings, you can earn not only from links, but from writing articles and sometimes you can earn over 40$ for 300 words article there. Really good offers and prices. The main their requirement is your blog must have at least 19 posts.

Text Link Ads is not so good and it sells words inside your posts. If the advertiser wants to optimise his page by using keywords, he can buy he relevant keyword on your blog. The profit is not so good as with Link Worth, but I get 15$ for three words.

And the best thing is – they pay monthly. So if you sold a place on your blog, you know that you will be getting money up until the advertiser decides to remove the link.

Now, here comes the interesting bit: the price for the links depends on your blog PR (page rank). From my experience you can earn good money if your blog has PR3 and higher. But that doesn’t mean that you won’t be able to earn money if your blog has PR2 or 1.

How, to get PR2 or PR3? It is not very hard. All you ave to do is to submit each of your post to Social Bookmarking Services. I use SocialMarker.com for that. This site allows you to submit your post into 50 social bookmarking sites. It will take some time for you to register in all of them but it is worth doing. If you submit every article you have in to all of them, you will get some backlinks and Google will give you higher PR. Easy.

So let’s imagine you have one blog with two links and it brings 30$ per month. That’s fine isn’t it? But you can spend some time by creating some more blogs. Let’s imagine, that after one year you have 5 blogs with 2 links? This is 150$. Plus you can add Addsence on all of them and it will give you some more extra money. With five blogs you will be able to earn about 200$ and you won’t need to sit in front of PC every day. Only once per 203 months you can write an article and submit it.

This is my strategy for making money by blogging. Please fell free to ask any questions you have and I will do my best to help you.

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