So today I was comparing between Site5 and AN Hosting (Mid-Phase owned) and Site5 has a plan that gives you 55GBs storage and 5TBs bandwidth while AN Hosting (Mega Plan Plus) gives you 300,000MBs storage and 3,000,000MBs bandwidth. Arghhhh!!!

Here’s the decoder…

• 8 bits = 1 byte.
• 1,024 bytes = 1 kilobyte (KB).
• 1,024 kilobytes (KB) = 1 megabytye (MB or Meg)
• 1,024 megabytes (MB) = 1 gigabyte (GB or Gig)
• 1,024 gigabytes = 1 terabyte. (TB)

But often hosts will forget about the 24 part so you might need to replace all the 1024s above with 1000. It’s also a little simpler on the maths.

Staying correct with the 1024, I worked out that the AN Hosting Mega Plus Plan offers 293GBs storage (compared to 55 at Site5) and 2.86TB bandwidth (compared with 5 at Site5). So I guess it’s a question of what’s of more importance to you, hosting or bandwidth? Normally, I’d choose bandwidth but in this case I’m looking to set up some off-site private backup of some of the junk on my hard drive so the mega amounts of storage are actually looking pretty attractive.

Costs and number of sites hostable are some more important factors. Site5 with $5/month and 55 domains beats AN Hosting’s offer of $9.95/month and 30 domains hands down this round. But you have to pay 24 months upfront to get the $5 Site5 deal whereas AN Hosting’s offer only requires 12 months prepayment (and I have a 2 months free code: AN-SUMMEROFLIGHTS-0202 ) so the upfront fee is pretty similar (though of course this buys you an extra 12 months with Site5).

But I’d say the biggest factor is reliability and performance and I’ve heard very good things about MidPhase/AN Hosting, including this glowing review from Chris Pearson (aka Cutline fame).

I am a little bit of a hosting junkie so I will probably check out the Site5 offer some time soon, but for the time being, I’m going with AN Hosting. Will let you know how it goes!

Think about this scenario: A leader misspeaks, the comments are posted on a blog three minutes later, and within an hour media organizations have picked up the comments, reporting them on television and online. Meanwhile, this leader’s BlackBerry buzzes every 30 seconds with bosses, colleagues and family members all wondering the same thing: Did you really say that?

What does it take to lead amid such an intense environment?For starters, experts say vision and integrity, along with an ability to adapt, multitask and manage people. Being media savvy also is a plus.

Apparently it’s all about getting people involved in owning your vision. It is interesting though the number of companies that are now seeing it as an important marketing tool. And it is important, just the other day the blogmaster on a communal blog I occasionally post on explained that he chose a new webhost (bluehost) partially on the fact that he liked the CEO’s blog.

Kineda had some lovely linkage on her site that’s worth checking out:

• Are You an A-List Bloglebrity? » Kineda type in your blog’s address and find out whether the world loves you via linkage or if you’re as anonymous as the wind.
• How To - Design Your Own WordPress Theme by Texto.de and includes a blank base template. Cool huh?E
• Essential Tools Every Blogger Should Have » Kineda I love these sort of lists. Granted, you need to be very rich to own everything on this list, but it’s nice to have something to aspire to.

My favourite changes:

• The ability to tab between rich text and plain html - hopefully they’ve also fixed up the bugs with the rich text editor and video embedding
• The uploads manager page… cool
• Autosave… just like gmail
• Spell checking on the visual editor
• You can set any page to be the front page of your site

I love WordPress so much, and I love it even more with these new changes. They’ve also decided on a new development cycle with more frequent releases, which means the perfect WordPress will only be sooner. I’m really looking out for an update version of WordPress mu — the multiple blog WordPress. I had a look at Movable Type because so many great blogs are based around it but it was impossible to install. And most of the good plugins are charged. Definitely staying with my 5 minute install WordPress baby.

NB Sorry for being away, I started a new job and it’s been way busy getting up to speed. Having a great time of it though!

1. Find your plugin’s download page and download it to your desktop. You can find Word Press Widgets here.

2. Read any instructions, usually they are available on the download site but sometimes they are in a “readme.txt” inside the download folder. Keep this information open or print it out. It is most important to note if you need to do any customisation or if a particular folder needs to be uploaded somewhere else. Check too whether you should upload the whole of the unzipped folder or there is another folder inside that should only be uploaded (ie discard the containing folder). I’ve sometimes uploaded the unzipped folder and the plugin hasn’t worked (it wouldn’t show up in the Plugins list on Plugins/Plugins) only to find that it worked when I only uploaded the folder inside.

3. Upload the plugin folder/s to the specified destination. With simple plugins this may just be uploading the unzipped folder to your wp-content/plugins folder. Widgets has a number of different configurations that should all work. In the “widgets” folder, you should find folders called “classic” and “default”, put the contents (but not the actual folders) into the wp-contents/themes/classic folder and wp-contents/themes/default folder respectively. Get rid of these now empty folders. Upload the rest of the whole of the “widgets” folder (without “classic” and “default” folders) into wp-contents/plugins.

It should look like this (from Widgets homepage):

- wp-content
- plugins
- widgets
| delicious.php
| gsearch.php
| rss.png
| widgets.php
- scriptaculous
| builder.js
| controls.js
| dragdrop.js
| effects.js
| MIT-LICENSE
| prototype.js
| scriptaculous.js
| slider.js
| unittest.js
- themes
- classic
| functions.php (optional)
| sidebar.php (optional)
- default
| functions.php (optional)
| sidebar.php (optional)

NOTE: Your classic and default folders should already contain functions.php and sidebar.php so doing this install will overwrite them with new Widget ones. If you have already altered these files then you shouldn’t overwrite them (unless you’re happy to lose your changes). Either don’t bother with changing the templates, Widgets should still work, or look to see how you can apply the same changes to the new widget files.

4. Activate your Widgets plugin by going to Plugin/Plugins and click on “Activate” (Activate Plugins post).

5.You’ll notice also that there is also “Google Search Widget” and “del.icio.us Widget” in your list of Plugins, these are individual widgets which also need to be activated if you want to use them in your sidebars — just click on “Activate”. You can find more widgets at WordPress Third Party Widgets. Most of the time extra widgets will just be installed by being uploaded into the wp-contents/plugins/widgets folder but always check individual instructions.

6. Play with your new plugin. For Widgets if you go to Presentation/Widgets Sidebar, you’ll find that you are presented with your sidebar/s and a group of widget blocks under “Available Widgets”, just drag and drop them to the sidebars to include them in your theme. You can change the order of the blocks by dragging and if you click on the note icon (top right hand corner) you will often be given options to customise your widget. Remember to hit “Save Changes”.

If you want to go back to your default sidebar, just drag all the widget blocks off so it looks like this (and hit “Save Changes):

For more info:

• WordPress instructions can also be found at: Managing Plugins

So the first thing I suspected was there was some unwanted markup code in my page text. The easiest way of working this out is to go to Options/Writing and make sure that “Users should use the visual rich editor by default” is UNCHECKED (ie you are using the html editor not the rich visual editor).

You might also be able to click on the “html” tag in the visual rich editor to examine the html. But I don’t really trust the popup html editor in the visual rich interface (eg when I’ve posted video embeds in the popup editor they often just disappear).

Once you’re looking at the html, see if you can find any unwanted or strange code. Especially, <div>s or </div>s because these can play havoc on your theme if they are not supposed to be there. Basically, remove anything that looks like markup (ie in <>s) to be absolutely sure (you can probably leave links, images and italic/bold/format type markups if you can recognise them, I think they’re unlikely to affect the page). Save and reload your page. If it now works then you know that was the problem.

When I went into the html editor I found about seven lots of <div></div>s littered around the page, who knows how they got there. When I removed them, my “About blogmaking.net” page went back to working perfectly.

Be aware that sometimes, even just re-editing in the visual rich editor can sometimes muck around with your page’s coding, and be especially careful about editing pages with video embeds in the video rich editor because it can handle them quite strangely. Last time I tried, not only did the video disappear it replaced them with some weird <param> tags that broke the formatting of my page. I had to switch on the html editor, remove the unwanted code and repaste the video embeds.