Month: November 2007

_trgun = “jshaffstall”

I received a contact from Zach over at Triggit asking me to review the tool.

I headed over to the site without much in the way of expectations. Since I write a blog that has been around for a while (in Internet terms, at least), I get requests like this a lot. Most of the tools don’t end up being anything all that useful, or they’re only interested in positive paid reviews, which I don’t do.

Triggit is still in a private alpha phase at the moment, but Zach gave me the code to get in. It’s always great to see these sorts of tools before they’re released.

The website is a bit minimalistic right now. The member’s area is a single page of instructions with a video demonstrating how to use Triggit. For Blogger and Typepad, Triggit will automatically integrate itself with your blog. For WordPress users, you have to insert a bit of code just after the opening body tag in your template. Hopefully they’ll release a plugin that will do this for you in the future.

And that’s it. Just the demonstration video and the code to add. No help files, tutorials, etc.

I spent some time wondering if I’d missed something, but finally decided to duplicate what the demonstration video does to see how it all works. Here’s the best advice I can give for using Triggit:

Don’t over think it! It really is as simple as the demonstration video makes it seem.

For those who might want a bit more of a step by step tutorial, here it is:

1) Bookmark the link given in your Triggit member’s area

2) Install Triggit on your blog by clicking the appropriate button on their website for Blogger or Typepad, or putting the code they give you into your WordPress theme just after the opening body tag

3) Write a post and publish it. Write the post as if you had pictures and videos and links to Amazon and Commission Junction products already in it. Put the anchor text for the links, but don’t make the links.

4) View the published post in your web browser and click your Triggit bookmark

5) Enter your Triggit username and password

6) The Triggit toolbar appears, and on it is an Add New Triggit button. Use that button to add pictures and videos anywhere in your post, or make links out of any text you like.

This is especially cool for WordPress users, since WordPress has traditionally had poor image management features. Triggit doesn’t let you do text wrapping around the image, which would be very nice, but it does allow you to easily resize the image to fit your post.

And it does all this without actually editing your post. The downside is that you must publish your post before you can Triggitfy it. So there will be a period of time during which your post will appear without the images, videos, or links. If you use WordPress’ scheduled posting capability, this might be a bit of a pain. Zach says they’re working on a button that will let you Triggitfy your posts as you edit them, so you don’t need to publish first, so this issue should go away soon.

All in all, though, a very cool technology. I’m looking forward to seeing it evolve and improve.

Want to try Triggit out early? Zach kindly gave me an access code to share with a few subscribers, so just ask me for it via the contact form on the blog.

In my How To Make Your Own Website For Free series, I’d written a post for users of JustFree.com about creating a database and its associated user.

But I realized while reading a thread at the Bloggeries blog forum that I hadn’t really helped the majority of people who are not using JustFree.com. So here’s a tutorial on creating a database using CPanel, which should hit the majority of people out there.

The database is where an application, such as WordPress, stores data. Most CPanel installations have one click installs for common applications that create the database for you, but they don’t have one click installs for every application you might want to use.

Getting Started

Once you’re logged into your hosting account, you’ll find a screen that looks similar to this one. If you use something other than CPanel, you’ll still have similar options available.

Click on the icon for MySQL databases, and you’ll see something like this:

This single screen contains three different actions we’ll have to take. We’ll want to do them in the reverse order that they’re presented, so we’ll start by creating a user who will be able to access this database. I recommend creating a unique user for each database.

Creating The User

Go to the section of the screen that looks like this:

Enter a user name and password and click the button next to the edit field. A user will be created with a name that is a combination of your CPanel user name and the name you entered. So if you entered “john”, and your CPanel user name is “jack”, the full name of the user is something like “jack_john”.

You will not need to remember this password for long, so make it fairly complex. And then before you click the button, copy and paste the password into Notepad to remember it. Also add to Notepad the full name of the user, which you’ll need when you setup your script.

Creating The Database

Now we’ll go to the section of the screen that looks like this:

Enter the name you want your database to use, and click the button. Keep it short, since generally the name will be truncated to 8 characters or so. The name of the database is also combined with your CPanel user name to create the full name of the database.

So if a CPanel user named “jack” created a database called “links”, the full database name might be “jack_links”.

Granting The User Permissions On The Database

Now we’ll go to the section of the screen that looks like this:

In the user drop down box, choose the user that you just created. In the db drop down box, choose the database you just created. Make sure the All check box is checked, then click Add User to DB.

This allows the user you created to actually work with the database you created.

Also, note that the names of the user and the database in the drop down box should be the full names. Note those for later use if you haven’t already.

Connecting To Your Script

So you’re doing all this because you have a script you want to use that requires a database. I can’t give much specific direction because I don’t know which script you’re using, but the basics are the same.

You will either edit a configuration file before you upload the script to your web host, or you will enter the information through a web interface after you have uploaded the script. Which way depends on the installation instructions for your script.

If you’re editing a configuration file, you’ll have spots where you need to put the database host, the database name, the database user, and the user’s password.

The database host should be localhost, unless you know that you have a good reason to have it be something different. The database name and database user should be the full versions of those names. The user’s password should be whatever you typed in when you created the user (copy and paste this from Notepad, don’t trust your memory).

This should get your script running and connected to the database. There might very well be more that you need to do after that to fully configure the script, but that’ll be script specific.