Well, this works for a blog or a basic site, where you would like to give information about yourself or your small business, get feedback, run surveys, write articles, even place ads to make some money. If you want to create an e-commerce site, where you want to sell stuff, accept payments, etc., then these instructions are not for you.

OK, let us get back to the basics. Assuming that you already have a domain name (if not, get one now), there are three main ways you can set up a site with free hosting from World’s leading Internet companies:

1. Blogger from Google
2. Google Sites
3. Office Live Small Business

Part 1: Setting Up Your Domain on Blogger

In Part 1 of this article, I am going to explain how to set up your site using blogger.com. But I am not trying to create a blog, you ask. OK, I will also tell you how to make your site not look like a blog. Let us start with the steps.

Step 1: Creating a free blog on blogger.com
Create an account on blogger.com and create a blog for your site. It is easy and self explanatory. If you have a google account, use that to sign in, otherwise I recommend you create one. If not, you can use any email address to create an account. After creating an account create a blank blog site, and may be start with a simple test post. It doesn’t matter what name you choose for your blog, but it will be nice if you use the same name as your domain. For example if your website is example123.com, use example123.blogspot.com as your blog address. If the name is not available, don’t worry. choose any name that is available and you like.
(Click here to watch a little video on how to create a blog on blogger.)

Step 2: Telling Blogger Your Domain Name
Now that your free blog is set up on blogger, it is time to change your example.blogspot.com address to example.com. Here’s how to do this:

- On your blogger dashboard, click on the “Settings” link against the blog you wish to link to your domain.

- Under Settings, Click on Publishing. You will see the following message.

- Click on “Switch to Custom Domain”.

- On the next screen, click on “Switch to Advanced Settings”.

- On the next screen, enter your domain name. Just below the text box for domain name, click on “setup instructions”, which will link you to this page. Leave the setup instructions open in a separate page.

- For basic settings, say “No” to “Use a missing files host?”. Enter the Word Verification, and click on “Save Settings”.

Step 3: Telling Your Domain Registrar Where to Go
Now complete the instructions given on the setup instructions page. For this you need to visit your domain registrar’s site, e.g., if you registered your domain from Godaddy, go to godaddy.com. This step basically consists of setting up your CNAME and A NAME records. At this point don’t worry what these NAMEs mean. Your CNAME needs to point to ghs.google.com. Setting up your CNAME is enough to direct your domain www.example123.com to your blog, but you need to set up the A names to make sure even example123.com (without the www) points to the same blog. Once your DNS settings are complete, it may take several hours (sometimes upto a day) to be active.

Step 4: Setting Up Your Blog Template
While the DNS settings take effect or “propagate”, let us take some time to customize the blog.

- On your blogger dashboard, click on the “Layout” link against the blog you wish to customize.

- Use Page Elements, Fonts and Colors to change the look of your blog. You can also Pick a New Template from, or search the web for thousands of templates others have created for blogger.

Now if you are actually using this site for your blog, you don’t need to go to Step 5. If you want your site not to look like a blog, then read on.

Step 5: Making your blog look like a non-blog site
You will need to do several things to make your site not look like a blog.

- Hide or Remove Blogger Navbar: Follow instructions on this page. Or better still, use a non-blogger template that has a built in code to hide the navbar. If in doubt, ask in the comments section below.

- Under Layout > Page Elements, click on “Edit” under “Blog Posts”, and uncheck all unnecessary fields like Date, Author, Time, Comments, etc. Also under Layout > Page Elements, delete any unnecessary sidebar elements. Use sidebar to add a menu to your site.

- Various pages for your site will have to be created by going to the Posting tab. Create the pages and use the current date for the page you always want to appear on the front page. For all other posts, use an old date. Remember, you will need to keep the date for the front page later than all other pages. That is how blogger.com will know which page to show first when someone visits your website.

- Under Settings > Formatting, choose “Show 1 post” on the main page.

That is it. Your website is ready to go. Questions? Concerns? Go ahead, ask in the comments section.

09-Jul 2.8.1
20-Jul 2.8.2
03-Aug 2.8.3
12-Aug 2.8.4

Once again, it is termed a security release. According to Matt, if you are still using 2.8.3

a specially crafted URL could be requested that would allow an attacker to bypass a security check to verify a user requested a password reset. As a result, the first account without a key in the database (usually the admin account) would have its password reset and a new password would be emailed to the account owner. This doesn’t allow remote access, but it is very annoying.

So, go download 2.8.4 or upgrade using your WordPress dashboard.

To reverse the order of your comments, go to your WordPress dashboard and follow the following sequence of operations:

1. Under Settings, click on Discussion

2. Under Discussion Settings » Other comment settings it says Comments should be displayed with the older comments at the top of each page. Just change the older to newer using the drop down box, and hit “Save Changes” at the bottom of the page. You are done!

Also, as I said before the search feature at the plugins page needs to be more efficient. It still returns a number of plugins for reversing comment order, when they are no longer needed.

Exactly 2 weeks after the release of its 2.8.2 version, WordPress.org has released WordPress 2.8.3. This release has been termed as a “security release”, as some of the vulnerabilities of 2.8.1 were not fixed by 2.8.2. Ryan Boren advises:

Since this is a security release, upgrading is highly recommended.

So, if you are running your site on WordPress, go ahead and upgrade now. Don’t forget to backup your data. I am still looking for an easier way to take a backup. As I said in my last “upgrade” post, the easiest way I know to back up your WordPress blog is to go to Tools » Export in your dashboard. However, for bigger blogs, it creates an issue because while restoring your site, importing a file larger than 2 MB creates an error unless you change your php.ini file. I will write more about that soon.

Google has lived up to its promise and today it announced that Urdu and Nepali have been added to the mix.

Majority of the new languages added are Indic languages, apparently due to the multiplicity of scripts used for these languages.

Automatic transliteration needs to be configured in the Custom Search control panel using the Language settings. According to the Google Custom Search blog “It will enable conversion of Roman characters to the above languages, allowing users to search for content in these languages. After you turn transliteration on, you can select the specific transliteration languages your users can use.”

For those new to the term, XSS (Cross-site scripting) “is a type of computer security vulnerability typically found in web applications which allow code injection by malicious web users into the web pages viewed by other users. Examples of such code include client-side scripts. An exploited cross-site scripting vulnerability can be used by attackers to bypass access controls such as the same origin policy”. (from Wikipedia)

If you are upgrading your WordPress installation, make sure you make a backup of your blog. Easiest way I know to back up your WordPress blog is to to to Tools » Export in your dashboard. This creates an XML file that you can use to restore your blog if anything goes wrong.

For the last few revisions, I have been using the auto-upgrade feature of WordPress (Tools » Upgrade) For me the upgrade to 2.8.1 last week did not go as well as today’s upgrade did. When I upgraded to 2.8.1, although the blog seemed to work fine, I got errors while doing various admin tasks. I downloaded WordPress 2.8.1 and overwrote the auto-upgrade version on my server. That fixed the problem.

Method 1:

In your blogger account, click on Monetize, under the blog you want to add Adsense to.

Now select whether you want to display ads in posts, sidebar or both. You can also choose to not auto-display ads and add your code manually. Or you can choose this option if you have already enabled ads and want to use the blogger interface to only monitor earnings.

When done, click NEXT. In case you have not furnished your adsense account details, you will be able to do that, otherwise you will see the following screen.

Your adsense is set up. From the above screen, you can track your earnings, customize the locations of your ads, or make account changes.

Method 2:
In your blogger account, see first figure above, click on Layout, under the blog you want to add Adsense to. On the following screen, click on Add a Gadget in the sidebar or the footer.

Choose Adsense on the next screen.

Configure the ad size, color combination, etc., hit SAVE and you are done.

For adding more ads, repeat the same process. Just remember, you can only add up to three ad units and three link units on any page. You can also move the ad widgets to wherever you want – between the sidebar, header and the footer.

Track Earnings Using URL Channels
If you want to add the code on your own, choose HTML/Javascript under Add a Gadget. Managing your own code is more work, but it gives you more control over the location and colors of your Adsense, and also helps you track the earnings using Channels. At present, there is no way of adding channels to Adsense using the automatic Blogger Adsense feature. What you can do, however, is use URL channels to monitor the earnings on blogs you add code by the easy method.

The search feature at the plugins page is not very efficient, though. Also I wish the
plug-in database got rid of dormant plugins regularly. I found WP Contact Form III, which I thought was kind of cool because it was a combination of Doug Karr‘s and Ryan Duff‘s plugins, both recommended by problogger.net in their book “Pro-Blogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income“. The plug-in installation and activation was easy. The contact form even showed on my blog, but it didn’t show a captcha verification code. So, I figured I needed to go to the “Contact Form” configuration. That is when the error occurred: “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page”. The plug-in’s page at Wangenweb results in a 404 error. Visiting the WordPress Support Forum didn’t help much, but it did direct me to another Contact Form. “Enhanced WordPress contact form plugin” from yoast.com turned out to be my solution. It is simpler looking than the Contact Form III but works well. Check it out.

1. It is a cool thing to show off — myname@compusutra.com sounds much cooler than myname@gmail.com to me.
2. It is good publicity for your website. People who receive your email will know that you own a domain, and may own a website too. They may check it out.
3. If you are a small business then giving out a yahoo.com or hotmail.com web address definitely makes your business look smaller, so you better have a domain email of your own.

Now, I have seen more than a few people *paying* to have a domain email — as much as $30, $40 or more a year. In fact, if you buy a domain for your website, the domain registrar is definitely going to try and sell you an email package. They will also offer you a free email forwarding package, which is not as good as having your own domain email. In fact, now you can have it all free from Google Apps — at least at the time of writing this. All you need to pay for is domain registration. This post is going to explain all you need to know about setting up your domain email on Google Apps.

Step 1: Register a domain. I use GoDaddy.com – World’s No.1 Domain Registrar for domain registrations. Although their .com registration charge is usually $9.99, you can usually get it as cheap as $6.99 or $7.49 if you hunt for a discount code online. They generally run deals on .info domains. These days they sell as less as 89 cents for the first year. If you already own a domain, skip this step.

Step 2: Visit the Google Apps Standard Edition page at http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html. (Google Apps Standard Edition is different from Google Apps Business Edition, which costs $50.00 per user per year after trial.) Click the Get Started button.

Step 3: Choose Administrator radio-button, enter the domain name you want to use, and click “Get Started”.

Step 4: On the next screen you will be asked to enter your name, email address, phone number, country, and some optional information about your company. On the next screen you can choose your admin username and password. Choose a generic name like admin here. You will get a chance to set up more email addresses (generally up to 50 accounts) later.

Step 5: Now comes the hardest part of this process. On the next screen, click “Verify Domain Ownership”. It gives you two options for verifying that you own the domain – 1. Upload an HTML file, 2. Change your CNAME record. If you have not bought hosting at this stage, the first choice is not for you, so use the second choice. You will be given a string most likely starting with “google…..”, and will be asked to create a new CNAME record with that name. Keep this browser window open and open a new browser window or tab where you will complete step 6.

Step 6: For this you have to go to your domain registrar’s website (e.g., godaddy.com) and then click on “Total DNS Control” for your domain. Once there, click “Add CNAME Record” and follow instructions. When done, leave the window open and go back to the Google Apps site.

Step 7: On the Google Apps Verification Screen, click “Verify”. The next screen will tell you “We are checking domain ownership. This may take 48 hours to complete.” Actually, if you have done it right it generally takes only an hour or two. In the meantime, click on “Activate Email” under the Service Settings. The next screen will give you instructions on changing your MX (mail server) records for which you have to go back to your domain registrar’s website. You will be asked to create five different MX records.

Step 8: On the domain registrar’s website, click on MX records, and create the five different MX records. If there are any existing records, edit them to make them the Google Apps MX records, or delete them and create afresh. Remember to enter PriorityValue, HostName, Mail Server, and TTL Value, properly for each MX record. Once your domain registrar indicates that all MX records have been properly set up, return to the Google Apps email Delivery screen and click on “I have completed these steps”.

Step 9: On the next screen, you will get the message “We are checking MX records for your domain. This may take 48 hours to complete.” Don’t wait for the verification, proceed to step 10.

Step 10: Click on “Users and Groups” and then “Create a New User”. Now you can create up to 50 users by entering them one by one, or choose “multiple users” and upload data in the form of an excel file (csv format).

Now you have as many as 50 accounts available, each 7 GB, with all mail hosting provided free by Google, and the efficiency and interface of Gmail. What I generally do is I visit the new domain email account and forward the emails to my regular gmail account, so that I can check all my email at one point.

You can visit your new email account at http://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com, for example the email users for my domain can check their email by going to http://mail.google.com/a/compusutra.com. Google Apps standard edition also lets you use Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, for free.

Until now, there hasn’t been a good way to send email to friends and family in Hindi, my native language and their language of choice.

Thousands of other email users, including me, have been writing emails in Indian languages for years. I must have written my first Hindi Gmail soon after I started Gmail in 2004 (screenshot below). And the method has been pretty easy – as easy as enabling the Hindi keyboard in my Windows, which is the right way to compute multilingually. There have been a number of other ways of writing in Indian languages directly into your email box too, even if you don’t count the copy-paste online editors, like the one on this site.

So, thanks Google once again. But please don’t claim this couldn’t be done before. It’s just that you have made it a little bit easier for newbies. People used to IMEs (Input Method Editors) will continue doing it the “proper” way. Google made exactly the same claim when they added Hindi typing to Blogger two years ago, when Hindi blogs had already been in existence for a few years. Come on, don’t lie, Google!