Quick Online Tips » Site News

8 Reasons to Post Job Ads on Our Job Board

QuickOnlineTips — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 16:40:55 +0000

Our recently launched Quick Online Job Board is gaining buzz as more employers are posting their job advertisements targeting the QOT readers on the job board. So why should you post your job ad on our Job Board?

Here are 7 reasons why its a great idea to post your job here -

Featured on Front page - We list the latest jobs on the QOT front page in the sidebar so that your new job gets all the publicity it needs.
Job Tweets - All new jobs are tweeted out on Twitter so that all QOT followers get informed about new jobs.
Competitive Prices – Our job board has the most competitive prices in the job market. For a reasonable fee, you get lot of exposure to your job advertisement. Starting at $50 for 30 days, it cant get better.
Targeted Jobs - QOT is widely read by bloggers, geeks, internet marketers, technology enthusiasts, developers and web masters. Post your job ad and reach the target audience looking for a job.
Good Traffic – QOT Jobs now gets good traffic as it is well linked from the top navbar and sidebar which drives huge traffic to the job board from all pages of QOT.
Discount codes – We keep posting limited time discount promo codes. Regular RSS readers can get huge discounts for posting new job ads. If you already subscribe to our feed, you might have noticed promo codes.
Simply Hired network - Jobs posted here will automatically get listed across hundreds of job boards integrated with the Simply Hired network, which gives your job ad huge publicity for a small fee.
RSS Feed – You can subscribe the special jobs RSS feed which gets instantly updated with new jobs as they are posted. It is a great way to track new jobs.

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Original article: 8 Reasons to Post Job Ads on Our Job Board
Copyright 2009. Quick Online Tips. All Rights Reserved.

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100 Guest Blogging Articles!

QuickOnlineTips — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 19:30:34 +0000

QOT is one of the most popular guest blogging destinations on the web and we just crossed 100 guest articles! Its all thanks to the amazing guest bloggers who have sent in their best articles.

Photo by jenniferrt66 (under CC)

You too can share your tip, tricks, hacks, tools and services with our amazing readers. Write a guest article and showcase your blog to QOT readers, an active community of bloggers, technology experts, geeks and internet marketers.

We recently crossed 20,000 feed readers, which means your guest article hits the feed readers and email inboxes of 20,000 readers instantly. You get exposure in featured guest articles category, which is now one of the most trafficked category on our blog. Moreover, you get free publicity, and free permanent links from a PR6 site which is great for SEO.

We dont forget you after you guest blog – you become a privileged member of QOT who is eligible to get the news, deals and offers before other readers. We do regular roundup of top guest bloggers and you can see the top guest bloggers of 2008 here. The top traffic generating articles also get listed on our Popular articles pages, another hot traffic buzz point of our blog, and often featured on the homepage.

If you consistently send in great articles, you can become a star guest blogger, get your own tags and get featured in our blog sidebar and get full exposure to your blog with an assured 750K pageviews in a month. Meet our first star guest blogger Srikanth and read all his articles.

Read these 15 Secrets of Highly Successful Guest Bloggers and you could also join our amazing list of guest bloggers, and be part of this incredible QOT community. I take this opportunity to thank these wonderful guest bloggers who considered QOT to be a good platform to share their best content. Now grab a coffee and enjoy these 100 guest articles now.

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Original article: 100 Guest Blogging Articles!
Copyright 2009. Quick Online Tips. All Rights Reserved.

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20000 RSS Feed Readers!

QuickOnlineTips — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 17:39:11 +0000

Today QOT crossed another milestone of 20,000 RSS feed readers. Which basically means that an article posted on QOT instantly reaches 20000 dedicated readers!

Old time readers have tracked our journey across 10000 feed readers and 15000 feed readers; now we again share our feed statistics for these 20000 feed readers.

Maximum number of QOT readers prefer to subscribe RSS using Google Reader and iGoogle. With Newsgator Online closing down by August end, and migrating readers to Google reader, the Google numbers will rise further. Number of people subscribing to get our daily email updates have also increased to over 4000, due to better subscription box positioning. Bloglines has not contributed much to increased subscriber counts over the years. Feedburner recently started counting Friendfeed stats, which has contributed to more feed readers. A significant number of readers also use Zhuaxia, a socialized RSS reader for Chinese web users.

Guest blogging has increased significantly and QOT has become a top site for guest bloggers to showcase their tips, tricks and tools, and we are nearing 100 guest articles now. You can guest blog on QOT and now reach 20000 readers instantly. Read the amazing guest articles written by QOT readers and our most prolific star guest blogger Srikanth.

We thank these 20000 QOT readers who subscribe our feed and spend their valuable time checking our updates and reading our tips. We thank them for their comments and criticism which has helped this blog grow further. We hope you learnt some cool tips, tricks and services along the way and promise to keep more great content coming…

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Original article: 20000 RSS Feed Readers!
Copyright 2009. Quick Online Tips. All Rights Reserved.

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Migrated from Dreamhost to Knownhost VPS Hosting

QuickOnlineTips — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 16:12:19 +0000

QOT successfully migrated from Dreamhost shared hosting to Knownhost managed VPS hosting today. After a few days unavoidable downtime, we are back to share our learning experience with you over the next few articles.

It all started when Dreamhost disabled our account a few days back. We have requested them to tell us specific issues which we might be unaware of so that we can fix them. While it was scary, it was heartening to see the daily database backup from Wordpress Database backup plugin (my favorite plugin now) sitting in our email, but it was even more gracious of Dreamhost to allow FTP to let us backup our files via FTP. Whatever might be the issue, we had a great hosting experience with Dreamhost for over 3 years and I still recommend Dreamhost as one of the best shared web hosting services to start your site.

Knowing not where to start, I found some amazingly helpful people on Twitter (see my Twitter profile to follow them) who went out of the way to guide us, support us, suggest webhosting, and even provide personal tech support to set our server. There are just too many people to name, and I thank you all for your help and support.

Best managed VPS Hosting

As I analyzed some other popular shared hosting services like Doreo, Bluehost, Hostgator – we decided it was time to expand beyond the constraints of shared hosting (like plugin memory limits) and get a new VPS hosting server which will help QOT spread its wings to expand and grow to meet new demands of traffic.

The next day we started our search for a new managed VPS hosting service. Why managed VPS? – basically because with an unmanaged server you are on your own, you need to know your tech stuff correctly and know what you are dealing with on a daily basis. Since I am no expert with servers, it was safer to switch to managed VPS hosting.

I was recommended several unmanaged VPS hosting services like Linode, Slicehost; some semi-managed VPS hosting tools like MediaTemple and fully managed VPS hosting like Liquidweb, WiredTree, Servint, JaguarPC, and Knownhost.

Why Choose Knownhost Managed VPS?

The VPS package of Knownhost seemed affordable and feature rich. I sent an email to their sales team about how fast they could get us migrated and hosted. I expected a response in a few hours as it was off-working hours in US. To our surprise, we got an email back in less than a minute. I continued my series of queries and exchanges over the next hour and got surprisingly fast response each time. With such amazing support, my decision was easily made and I paid out for the VPS package at $40 per month. The excellent tech support continued over the next few days with the same incredible response time and is a major reason we are back online…

Though the site has been down now for over 3 days, we went through a lot – efforts to get our account back, get backups, find a new host, setup a new VPS, set up new private nameservers, wait for DNS propagation for over 24 hours. We learnt a lot from this experience and will continue to share it with QOT readers.

Stay subscribed and we will share our learning experience about Knownhost, VPS, Wordpress migration and the fascinating lessons learnt ….

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Original article: Migrated from Dreamhost to Knownhost VPS Hosting
Copyright 2009. Quick Online Tips. All Rights Reserved.

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Read QOT on Amazon Kindle

QuickOnlineTips — Sun, 24 May 2009 12:35:45 +0000

Now there is a new way to read Quick Online Tips (QOT) – on the Amazon Kindle. Recently Amazon had launched Kindle Publishing for Blogs, a fast track self publishing tool to upload blogs for sale on Kindle Store, and we got selected.

After we submitted the blog for inclusion, it got listed and was searchable on Amazon Kindle blogs the very next day. But the pricing was not decided and the blog was kept pending. Well after over a week now you can find QOT on Kindle Blogs and subscribe for $0.99 a month.

Amazon Kindle is a revolutionary wireless reader and is available in 2 versions – Kindle 2 or Kindle DX (new model with a larger screen). It uses 3G wireless to download blogs anytime, anywhere; no monthly fees, no annual contracts, no hunting for Wi-Fi hotspots and of course no PC required.

Subscribe Quick Online Tips on Amazon Kindle and discover a new way to read your favorite blog. If you don’t have a Kindle, you can subscribe to our RSS feed in Google Reader and keep getting our latest articles for free.

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Original article: Read QOT on Amazon Kindle
Copyright 2009. Quick Online Tips. All Rights Reserved.

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Dreamhost Server Crash Analysis

QuickOnlineTips — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 13:58:36 +0000

Our Dreamhost server crashed and our site has been offline for a large part for the last 2 days! This again gives us an opportunity to share what happened and some tips we learnt from this experience.

Internal server errors were on for last few weeks on our server, and we learnt more about memory intensive plugins and the need to upgrade from PHP4 to PHP5. Though mostly the server errors were fixed, it was short lived as our shared Dreamhost server crashed.

The web server, bulger, is having issues with its raid and attempts to move the drives over to a new server have also failed. We�re currently bringing up a new server and restoring it from backups� More information to come!

Update: Further hardware disaster with this machine has extended downtime, unfortunately. We are still working on it and we hope to have it back up soon. We are very sorry for the inconvenience.

Update 06:35 PDT: The machine is back up now but is still restoring from backups and some configurations are still running on the server. Websites should be up for the most part but if they�re not, don�t fret as we�re still working on it! We�ll post more updates as they come in!

Update 8:11 PM PDT: The server is still restoring from backups but sites should be online. You will notice a bit of instability meanwhile all the backups are restored but this is only temporary and subside once everything is restored. We�ll post the all clear once everything is good to go!

There has been no update for over 24 hours and it seems its not all clear as yet. This time we could not maintain traffic like before and no cached pages were functional and the entire site was down. There was no FTP access and even the homepage notice could not be posted.

Thankfully maintaining a status blog helped as an alternative Blogger blog could send out updates. Using Feedburner as the primary feed url helps to redirect the status blog feed if required. Those who follow us on Twitter, could stay connected about recent status updates from our blog. It was great that we use Google Apps to run our email, so email communication was not affected. All these tools helped to maintain contact and keep some services running.

I had a few email discussions with Dreamhost support over the last 2 days, and here is an email from yesterday highlighting what the problem was.

Thanks for writing in! I am *VERY* sorry for the inconvenience! The server that you are on, bulger, has been having a few problems as of yesterday. I’ll go ahead and explain what happened. Basically, bulger was having issues with its RAID setup and the server was going up and down intermittently. Our network admins went ahead and decided that we needed to fail the existing hardware over to new hardware in order to restore functionally to the server! The new hardware has been installed and the server is running BUT the I/O from the rsync of backup data is causing problems for people on the server. I don’t have an ETA for when the rsync will be done but we’ll get this squared away as soon as possible! I really do apologize for the inconvenience and I totally understand how frustrating a server being up and down is. That is why our network admin team is working hard to bring it up now.

And another support email today morning…

We’re very sorry for the problems that you are having with your site. The server that it was hosted on was having some hardware issues, and we tried to do a quick move to get it setup on new hardware with little downtime. Unfortunately, things didn’t go as quickly as planned and it is still having issues. We do have the hardware issue all straightened out, but we are still in the process of copying data over from our backup servers. This is causing the network of the server to become extremely saturated and is causing the server load to wildly fluctuate. At this point, we don’t see anything wrong with the server that is making your sites unavailable other than extreme load that these backups are causing on the server. Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot we can do with this server until after the data transfer is complete. All we can ask at this time is that you keep an eye on this status post to see when the issue is resolved.

Thankfully the site traffic is creeping back for the last few hours and the FTP and wordpress admin has started working.

Though Yang let me know about the Internet Supervision tool, which shows the site is still loading very slowly across the world at over 40 seconds.

As I considered the Dreamhost PS private servers upgrade, many helpful Twitter users (like @nirmaltv, @manikarthik, @sumesh, @rishi, @keithdsouza, @shivaranjan, @denharsh)� pitched in to suggest alternative VPS hosting solutions like Slicehost, Doreo, Linode, Mediatemple and it was great to see some hosting companies offering their services to us on Twitter� like @linode and @spiralhosting.

I hope Dreamhost fixes the server issues soon and posts an update to affected customers … as someone mentions in comments� “Information aids patience; silent downtime breeds discontent.”

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Original article: Dreamhost Server Crash Analysis
Copyright 2009. Quick Online Tips. All Rights Reserved.

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How to Upgrade PHP4 to PHP5 in One Click

QuickOnlineTips — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:41:49 +0000

We upgraded our server from PHP4 to PHP5 today. Irritated by my internal server errors, I checked the PHP version of the wordpress hosting server and realized our blog was still hosted on the very old PHP4.4.9 version, though PHP5.2.9 version is the latest version available. So how to upgrade PHP4 to PHP5?

PHP4 is Obsolete, Get PHP5

A quick look at the PHP5 changelog will convince you that a lot has changed and PHP5 promises to be much faster, stable and secure than PHP4. Though PHP 5 offers many new features, it continues to be very compatible with earlier versions of PHP with little functionality being broken in the process.

Even the PHP official site notifies that support for PHP 4 has been discontinued since 31 Dec 2007 and they recommend� everyone to upgrade to PHP 5.2, but I could not figure out a what to do after downloading PHP5.2. When I looked about for ways to upgrade PHP4 to PHP5, I found that it seems too technical and complicated for a blogger to perform without professional technical support.

I checked our Dreamhost hosting had announced in August 2008 that

Since PHP4 has been officially discontinued, we�re taking our first steps in discontinuing our own support. If you currently have any domains using PHP4 (in either mod_php or CGI mode), they�ll continue to work for the foreseeable future. The only change occurring is that you will no longer be able to set up a new domain as PHP4 or convert an existing PHP5 domain to use PHP4.

The few remaining one-click packages we had that required PHP4 are being upgraded simultaneously so that we�ll have no one-click packages that won�t work with new domains. If you�re in a position to do so, this might be a good time to start working on getting your websites working with PHP5 so that the later transition is easier. In most cases, the switch should be trivial.

Obviously our server had not been upgraded by default and PHP4 continued to serve us well. But the persistent internal server errors prompted us to probe deeper. I checked that the WordPress minimum requirements are still PHP version 4.3 or greater, so we were scraping the minimum requirement with PHP4.4

Upgrade PHP4 to PHP5 Easily

In my experience Dreamhost panel usually makes non-technical webmasters perform a lot of powerful stuff in a few easy clicks, so I looked around for this option… and actually found it after a lot of browsing. Dreamhost users can find the options at Domains > Manage Domains > Edit Domain

There was a drop-down option to choose your PHP version – I simply selected PHP5.2.x and got a message

And actually after 5 minutes when I checked our PHP version, it was upgraded to PHP5.2.6! Now that was fast and simple.

If you are on Dreamhost, you can also check and upgrade your PHP version. But remember you cannot switch back to PHP4 after switching to PHP5 as the option disappears from the panel after upgrade. If anything breaks, you are doing this at your own risk.

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Original article: How to Upgrade PHP4 to PHP5 in One Click
Copyright 2009. Quick Online Tips. All Rights Reserved.

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20K Pageviews Traffic Despite Internal Server Errors!

QuickOnlineTips — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 15:41:28 +0000

Regular QOT visitors would notice the site was down over last few days off and on with 500 Internal server errors. Still the site topped over 20,000 pageviews traffic everyday. The amazing secret is page caching!

When I tested most pages on the site, they would display 500 Internal server errors over the last few days and for a few days last week also. As I continued to send support tickets to Dreamhost, we expected a steep decline in site traffic, but on the contrary, if you see out usual traffic stats, the site traffic stayed not much lower than usual (Tuesday is still 4 hours to go).

Here is how the hourly traffic looks like today even though the site was down with internal server errors since morning!

This is all thanks to page caching by the amazing WP Supercache wordpress plugin which converts our wordpress php pages to html, and then caches and served them to visitors without any database requests, enabling this popular site to run over 700,000 pageviews per month on a shared hosting server on our usually amazing hosting by Dreamhost.

When the database errors persisted, even this plugin went down, but these cached html pages did not expire (since the plugin was not working!) and kept on serving html pages when visited. Moreover, since comments did not get posted due to internal server errors, and the pages were not refreshed by new comments and continued to be served.

What is great about caching is that the most visited pages by referred links and google traffic were already cached. The lesser visited pages were not cached and showed internal server errors, but that did not matter much in terms of traffic. Strangely none of the cached urls worked for me in Firefox, but were accessible in Internet explorer and Google Chrome, maybe someone can explain why (The cache was clear).

Since html pages were working, we changed the index.php page of our front page to a simple custom index.html page which had no php queries whatsoever. So the front page started working and if visitors wanted to subscribe, the email and RSS links were already working. The most popular pages were already cached, so most visitors with a high bounce rate and who did not interact further with the site in terms of comments, searching or link browsing would never notice the site was down!

So this is my story about maintaining site traffic with internal server errors, and I thank and highly recommend WP-Supercache for the same, without which we could not tide these errors. The site has just started working and some internal server errors are still on, and I am just sending this article through to let you know… till they start again.

Update: For those who inquired, traffic and ad revenue was 20-30% lower during these days. Most users never noticed the site was down and even tech support had to be convinced by pointing out to the wp-admin login url� that the site was indeed showing errors and was down.

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Huge Core Dump Files in WordPress Folders

QuickOnlineTips — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:30:43 +0000

I was surprised to see my WordPress folder sizes increasing and FTP revealed huge ‘Core’ dump files in several folders of my WordPress installation. As they gobbled up my server storage space, I had no idea where these came from and what to do with them.

I found this 38MB core file in the root directory of my WordPress installation

As I looked in subfolders, I found another 46MB core file in wp-admin

As you can see these are large files and occupy huge storage space on our server. Thankfully my hosting by� Dreamhost has unlimited storage space, so I need not worry; but if your hosting has limited storage, it could add to lot of extra charges. I downloaded and tried opening these core files with wordpad and a mix of gibberish text and symbols appeared.

Core Dump Files

I looked around for possible solutions and found more WordPress bloggers reporting this issue in the WordPress forums here and here. I learnt that these are called Core Dump files and Wikipedia says “a core dump consists of the recorded state of the working memory of a computer program at a specific time, generally when the program has terminated abnormally (crashed).” Core dumps are often used to diagnose or debug errors in computer programs.

In these forums some people advised you can delete these files and save space after backing up all your files and database. Some advise the core files can be read using GDB, the GNU Project debugger. I am not sure if I should delete these files and maybe you can help.

I understand that these files are hosted on our server to keep a record of useful data when the site crashed on a particular day, but I wonder if any hosting engineer is debugging this data or diagnosing why the server or unstable processes crashed or terminated.

Check your Wordpress installation and post a comment if you also have “Core” dump files eating your server storage space. What are you going to do about it?

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500,000 Pageviews!

QuickOnlineTips — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 14:19:04 +0000

After a long journey of several years, QOT traffic finally managed to cross 500,000 pageviews this month; to make that sound grander, that is half a million pageviews!

Here are the sitemeter statistics. Looking back at the site traffic a year back in August 2007, we had 170,000 visitors and 260,000 pageviews. This August 2008, exactly a year later, we got 340,000 visitors and over 520,000 pageviews – that is a 100% growth rate in a year.

Some events that made this difference are the BBC feature, Indian Express feature, rare 9rules branding, the Quickpress wordpress theme launch, our new photoblog, crossing 15000 RSS reader landmark, and switch to full text feeds. We got the honor of featuring in some lists like the Top 25 blogs about blogging and Top 20 Wildly Sticky, Successful and Outstanding Blogs on Blogging, and top Uber blogs.

Considering social media, there is a regular stream of Stumbleupon users visiting the site, well above any other competitor. Google Pagerank has been on a roll, falling from PR6 to PR3, then zooming back to PR6, and falling again to PR5 in the last update, but the traffic kept coming.

Some tools like the powerful All-in-One SEO pack wordpress plugin helped optimize the site for Wordpress SEO, Google sitemaps plugin sent search engines indexing deep inside the site, and WP-Super cache keeps the site up as the wonderful Dreamhost hosting keeps the site uptime in all kinds of traffic.

And of course its all thanks to the amazing QOT readers, commentors, guest bloggers, critics and subscribers who keep coming back to find useful content. 500,000 pageviews was a tough milestone to pass, but with all the QOT readers by the side, we were finally able to cross it… Thanks.

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