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If you decide to accept comments on your blog, you don’t have to use the default commenting system.

For example, in WordPress, you might integrate Disqus, Facebook or Intense Debate.

Livefyre has been around almost a year and a half and is starting to make waves too. Although it’s not currently available for Blogger, Joomla, Drupal or TypePad, support for those platforms is “coming soon”. WordPress, Tumblr and custom blogging systems are supported now.

Here’s our first impression.

Setting Up Livefyre Commenting

Livefyre is arguably one of the easier commenting systems to integrate.

Users fill in a short form and create a new Livefyre account or connect their site with an existing account.

If you’re a WordPress user, the next step is to download the Livefyre plugin, install it, confirm your account and import any existing comments.

The entire process will take about two minutes on a WordPress blog, with the comments import taking a few extra minutes on top.

Pros of Livefyre

Livefyre is speedy, clean and efficient. We didn’t notice a slowdown in our limited test. The interface is minimal, which is nice, as it removes barriers to commenting.

The social networking integration in Livefyre is also powerful. Comments can be shared on social media, and friends can be tagged directly in a comment.

The anti-spam system, which is based on Impermium, seems to work very well.

Livefyre Problems

Livefyre is not particularly customisable. It can’t be themed, and the features on offer can’t be tweaked or switched off. Email notifications didn’t work during the test we did.

Visitors can’t comment without signing in to Livefyre or one of its accepted services. Though I’m pretty sure nearly everyone will have a Facebook, Twitter, Google or Linkedin account, they might not want to share it. (To be fair, other commenting systems also present this dilemma.)

While its focus on real-time commenting is admirable, we felt that very few blogs get the kind of traffic to make that matter. It looks great on the demo, but you may never see it in practice.

Finally, the moderation features are odd. Tasks are split between the WordPress dashboard and the comment page itself. There are more options on the Livefyre site, but the login procedure is confusing and our comments were in the wrong order.

Is Livefyre a Contender?

Livefyre is simple, fast and powerful, and we liked the social networking features. However, it’s inflexible. You may have to choose between ease of use and customisation.

It’s a brave new product, but one that feels slightly immature.

Image credit: premasagar

Uploading anything more complicated than basic HTML (for example, a PHP script), usually requires some fiddling with permission settings to make things work properly. Whether you’re battling an error or just following the instructions to install a new script on your server, knowing how to set permissions is essential.

Many webmasters try to set their permissions without knowing what they’re doing, or why it’s so important. This can lead to serious mistakes that can result in security and reliability issues.

Here’s the good news: permissions are easy to understand. Virtually anyone can grasp the underlying concepts in just a few minutes. Even the mysterious numbers we see when we use the CHMOD command will become much clearer after a quick primer.

Smart, Simple and Secure: File Permission Basics

The basic principle of file permissions is that not every file on your server needs to be accessed by every user. In this regard, your server is no different than your personal computer. If you have multiple accounts on the same machine, Person A may not be able to access the files of Person B for privacy reasons. But an administrator has a higher level account that allows access to everything.

Generally, three kinds of users access files: guests, which usually means visitors to the site; users (in this case, webmasters and the accounts they create); and administrators (meaning the hosting provider, or yourself if you have “root” access to the server, such as with a virtual private server (VPS)).

There’s no way to give or take away permissions from admins—they always have permission to do anything at any time. The permissions you set, on the other hand, determine what you and your visitors can do with your files. That’s where the CHMOD command comes in.

Understanding CHMOD

CHMOD, which stands for CHange MODe, is the Unix or Linux command commonly accessed via file transfer protocol (FTP) programs to change or set permissions for both files and folders. Typically, CHMOD represents the permission of a file or folder as a series of three numbers ranging from 0 to 7. The higher the number, the more “open” the permissions on the file.

The numbers each represent a different “group” of permissions:

1. User: This is the owner of the file or folder, meaning the account that uploaded it or created it.

2. Group: The group to which the user belongs. For example, if your hosting account allows you to create multiple FTP logins, they likely belong to the same group.

3. World: Everyone else, including visitors to your site.

The three groups also have three activities that can be either allowed or denied:

1. Read: The ability to read a file or list files in a folder. Without read access, a file can only be accessed by admins.

2. Write: The ability to edit/delete/rename a file, or the ability to create/delete/rename files in a folder.

3. Execute: The ability to run a script or run a script in a folder.

The three actions are then given a numeric value, with “Read” being “4,″ “Write” being “2,″ and “Execute” being “1.″ Adding these values creates a number between 0 and 7 in each of the three fields.

A file without any permissions, meaning no one but an admin could access it, is a 000. A file that can be read by anyone is a 444. A file that can be read, written and executed by anyone is a 777.

Each group can have a different value so, for example, a file with a permission of 755 can be read, written and executed by the user, but everyone else can only read or execute it, not write to it. This prevents others from editing the file.

Generally, a file’s user will have full access to it (meaning a 7), but typically others will have more restricted access. For most script files, 755 is considered the ideal. At times, other permissions are needed. For example, if you have a folder you upload files to regularly, the permissions might need to be set to 666, meaning the folder can be read and written to, but not executed.

Permission Slips: A Word About Security

The problem with permissions is that, the more you give away, the more likely it is someone else can misuse your permissions to launch an attack on your server. The lower the number, and the fewer rights granted, the better.

For example, if a script is editable but doesn’t need to be, a hacker might be able to inject malicious code into it. Likewise, if a file can be executed by any outside user, it may be used against the server or other visitors.

Be careful to set your permissions to only what is required. Designate files or folders as 777 only when absolutely necessary, and avoid giving execute permissions on files that don’t require them. Taking the time to set appropriate file permissions now can save you some pretty big headaches down the road.

File permissions are really not that confusing or difficult. The numerous great guides on the Web explaining the principles behind file permissions make it easy to track down the information you need. Although the way the information is conveyed can be a bit confusing, the principles behind file permissions are easy to grasp—and crucial to protecting your data. In the end, understanding how and why permissions work will make you a better webmaster by allowing you to keep your data secure and your users happy.

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Running a website isn’t just about technical skill – although it clearly helps to know your stuff. 

But thanks to CPanel, WordPress and other popular tools, you can get by without much technical knowledge at all.

In fact, if you’re willing to use a free hosting service, you can normally opt to use a site builder, or rely on your host’s online help and one-click installers.

There are actually a number of personal traits that will serve webmasters (and webmistresses) well as their site develops.

Read the rest of this entry »

WordPress users (and that includes us!) will be happy to know that version 3.2 had a beta release last week, bringing a slew of new features that are designed to improve the performance, usability and appearance of the blogging platform.

However, this upgrade is rather different from the others. The most touted changes are not new features or tools, but rather speed and design elements that should make WordPress cleaner, lighter and faster.

The idea is for WordPress to drop many of its old technologies and start looking forward, streamlining its code and appearance to focus on what really matters.

Sounds like a tall order eh? I think WordPress might well be able to deliver on it, although it’s tough to say at this early stage. Read the rest of this entry »

Since TwitPic’s recent controversy over its terms of service, which saw the company backtrack from an aggressive TOS that prevented its users from reselling photos they had uploaded to the service, a great deal of new attention has been focused on the contracts and agreements we sign every time we register with a new service.

It’s a fact of life that most of us don’t read our terms of service when we sign up for a new hosting account – a decision that can cost us dearly in the long run.

I can confidently say there is probably a great deal in your current terms of service that you don’t realize is there. If there is ever a legal dispute between you and your host, these could come back to haunt you; you might well have signed away more rights than you intended.

So what are some of the things buried in your TOS? Here are five things you’ll find in virtually any and all TOS’ and what they mean for you in the event of a legal dispute. Read the rest of this entry »

When it comes to third-party site statistics, Google Analytics (GA) is pretty much the gold standard. It provides a tremendous amount of practical information, integration with other Google products, including Adsense and Adwords, and clear charts all for free.

However, Google recently announced that it was taking things one step further and adding something almost no other analytics system has – a site speed feature.

The idea is fairly simple: as users load your site and the Analytics code, Google can track how long your page takes to load for them. Just like with any other statistic that GA collects, you can break down this information by page accessed, browser type and other variables to help you get a better understanding of how fast your site is moving and what variables might be causing it to slow down.

This feature is not automatically enabled on all GA accounts and will take a few steps to set up. However, once you do, you should be able to get a much more robust understanding of how your site and your host are performing with actual visitors. Read the rest of this entry »

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is one of the technologies that helped blogging grow hugely. By offering a simple method for others to subscribe to or otherwise access the content of a dynamic site, it made blogs, with their rapid pace of updates, more accessible and approachable.

For a time, an RSS feed literally determined, to many, whether a site was a blog or not. RSS was even touted as the future of content reading on the Web and was widely adopted by various mainstream media outlets in a variety of ways. Soon enough, RSS was everywhere: forums, social networks and more were all using the format and, since it was an open standard, developers were building a wide variety of products on it.

However, RSS came with its own set of problems. For content creators, it enabled scraping and other forms of content theft, kept visitors off the site and discouraged discussion on posts. For readers, though it enabled them to read more blogs and sites than would have otherwise been possible, there was still a serious problem with information overload and most people found that their RSS readers were filled with garbage.

For years, bloggers and others have been encouraging readers and friends to skip on using an RSS reader, instead using tools like Twitter and Facebook to keep on top of the news that’s relevant to them.

However, RSS may be in worse shape than previously thought. Recently both Facebook and Twitter disabled RSS functionality in their services, favoring a complete “walled garden” approach.

The future of RSS is starting to look pretty bleak and, though it likely won’t “die” anytime soon, it’s already lost much of its relevance.

That, in turn, could have a drastic impact on the future of the Web, perhaps bigger than anyone realizes right now. Read the rest of this entry »

If you are in a typical shared hosting environment, there are a lot of limitations on what you can do with your site and your server.

Though you can add domains, install PHP and other scripts and generally upload things to your site, you can’t make any actual changes to your server. If a script or a plugin requires a new server feature, an updated version of a language or a different Web server altogether, you can’t install it yourself and you have to ether convince your host to put it on your server, transfer you to another machine or simply do without. As you can imagine, many find this situation very frustrating.

But that’s the reality of a shared hosting environment; it’s one of the reasons your hosting is so cheap and why it’s still, despite sharing a server with 1000s of others, so reliable.

But if you still don’t understand why you can’t edit your server, here are a few of the more important reasons to keep in mind – hopeully, they’ll help you feel less frustrated the next time your host tells you ‘no’. Read the rest of this entry »

The hosting industry is always in flux. New companies enter the fray every day and old ones are constantly leaving, either by being sold off or changing what they offer.

As well as the stalwarts such as Hostgator, Dreamhost and GoDaddy, there are thousands of smaller companies in the market, some of which have been around for many years and some that came into being much more recently.

Anyone looking to buy hosting needs to ask themselves if they want to go with an established company or if they want to give a newer one a shot. There are advantages and disadvantages to both. Still, it’s important to know what each company has to offer and, most importantly, which is right for you and your site.
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In the early years of the web, websites were difficult to build. Many existed on a single page, or were uploaded purely as experiments.

When blogs (or ‘weblogs’) started to crop up, the one-page site was left behind.

But is the one-page site on its way back?

One-Page Sites and Site Builders

Dotster’s Instant Website package is a good example of a one-page website hosting service. It’s intended to pull together a full and complete site on a single page via a site builder. The page comes complete with Flickr gallery, Facebook, Twitter, maps and other relevant information.

Some design companies also specialise in one-page websites because they serve as a hub for the other activities of the company or individual.

There are also hundreds of companies offering site builder tools; often, the free version is limited to a handful of pages at best.

Any website is better than nothing, and a web presence can be a good way to publicise social media pages. But clearly one-page websites aren’t ideal for everyone.

The Benefits of a One-Page Site

Why might a business or individual choose a one-page structure?

• One-page sites are cheaper to design, cheaper to host and require less bandwidth.
• Anyone can get a one-page site online and functioning in almost no time. Site builders make this process even quicker.
• Static sites with no dynamic elements are generally more secure.

If you don’t have the resources to build a full website, a one-page site may suit you.

The Drawbacks of a One-Page Site

A business with a one-page website could be missing many of the features that make websites useful in marketing terms. For example, it’s basically impossible to add a blog to a static site.

One-page structures are also difficult to expand, and the design has to be pretty spot-on to prevent the page getting cluttered.

Tiny websites for businesses can also be seen as unprofessional since they don’t offer much benefit to the visitor.

Will the One-Page Trend Continue?

More individuals and businesses are relying on social media. Over time, companies may decide to focus more on social networks and less on their own site. Arguably one-page sites are becoming more common just because they’re quirky.

Ultra-compact websites may be experiencing something of a renaissance, but there are probably more reasons to build up your site than there are to cut it back.