March is the month of Blogging here at iGeek where we are trying to educate the non tech savvy people out there how they can start their own blog and even make some money while they are at it. We have already covered the topic of starting your own blog with Blogger.com and also showed you some differences between a WordPress blog and a Blogger.com blog.

If you have read the post WordPress vs Blogger.com and decided to be taken more serious with your blog you are now asking the question, how do I go about setting up my own WordPress blog? Just note that this is a self hosted WordPress blog and not a WordPress.com blog.

Luckily WordPress is famous for their easy 5 minute installation, but before you get to the part of installing your WordPress blog there is a few things you need to take note of and get done before you can proceed.

Step 1: Register a domain

The first thing you need to do is decide what your domain should be, this is the part users type into the browser to get to your site Eg. www.igeek.co.za in my case. Domain registration is really cheap and will cost you anything from R50 to R150 depending on the type of domain you would like. There is a range of domain types available and choosing the correct one would be based on the geographic location of your audience. Com domain would be ideally if you would like to appeal to an international audience while co.za I would say if you are aiming at a local audience.

Try and keep your domain name as simple and as short possible, something users would remember easily. Once you have chosen your domain name its time to see if its available. You can register your domain through ISPs like WebAfrica, Afrihost, Hetzner or Serv these guys specialize in hosting and would help you out. A note WebAfrica currently has specials on their .com and .net domain registration for only R90.

Step 2: Hosting

Hosting is the server where your site will be running, it will be your WordPress installations’ home on the Internet. There is two types of hosting, local hosting where your site will be hosted in South Africa making it faster for local users to access and there is International hosting, much cheaper than local hosting and you get more features for the less price. It is normally advised that if your audience is local then you should stick with local hosting, but be warned if you start getting thousands of visitors a day this can become costly.

Your hosting packages requires 2 essential things for WordPress to operate on it, it must have PHP and must have at least 1 MySQL database. Opt for a Linux hosting package as they normally come standard with PHP and MySQL and they are generally cheaper packages. Also make sure you have at least 100MB of storage capacity and about 1GB+ bandwidth to start with.

You can obtain hosting from Hetzner, Afrihost, WebAfrica, Serv or Texo. Serv and Texo is ideal for a starting a blog, their prices start at R29 per month.

And that’s that, once you have sorted yourself with a domain and hosting package you are ready to install your WordPress blog, keep tuned as I will be doing a article on how to install your WordPress blog very soon.

WordPress just released the wonderful news that every self hosted WordPress site out there is about to get more real-time thanks to some new behind the scenes developments.

WordPress announced on its official blog that it has turned on support for PubSubHubbub, yeah that’s a mouth full, a move that will get RSS content of WordPress blogs to RSS readers like Google Reader or Bloglines in real-time.

How RSS feeds current works is readers poll the feed every few minutes checking if there is new content available, how it will work with PubSubHubbub is that the WordPress blogs will now push the feeds to the respective RSS readers as new content is posted.

Just today I wrote an article on the South African blog aggregators, this now opens up a hole new field for them as well. Blog aggregators like MyScoop and Afrigator will now have the ability to get your content in real time without you needing to log into the aggregator and ping your blogs. Real-time aggregation, I would like to hear if the local blog aggregators will make use of this service.

Here is a nice demo of PuSH (PubSubHubbub) in what WordPress call a “cheesy video”, for even more info on the PuSH protocol you can head over to the PuSH project page.

Earlier this year at the at the World Mobile Congress HTC released a bunch of Android phones, two of these included the HTC Desire and the HTC Legend. I just received feedback from Leaf that South Africa will indeed have these phones and maybe sooner than we think.

The HTC Desire and HTC Legend is set to be available in the first week of April in South Africa. Leaf confirmed that both devices will be available from all the telco channels, and the devices will ship with Android 2.1.

Interesting facts about the HTC Desire:

Speed and Great Visual Experience
With the 1GHz chipset, the HTC Desire offers quicker access to applications, maps, videos and more importantly a faster browsing experience. Proof point… Almost 2x faster than the iPhone 3GS, 18% faster than Nexus One for browsing; smart zoom and built in flash player.

Latest HTC Sense
Friendstream, stay close.
Discover the unexpected through HTC Sense, e.g. HTC news.
Better user experience.
Proof point…Latest version of HTC Sense

Best High End Android Experience
Thousands of applications available through Android Market
Great experience of Google Services at your fingertips
A bright wide screen visual experience
Proof point…Latest Android platform, Fast image processing power, AMOLED screen; and seamless synchronization with exchange.

The HTC Desire features a 1 GHz SnapDragon Chipset, a WVGA AMOLED screen, Full Sync with MS exchange and Media synchronization with PC just to mention a few things.

Keep an eye out for the HTC Desire and HTC Legend to hit South African early in April.

What is MyScoop, Afrigator and Amatomu you ask? They are currently the top social media blog aggregators available in South Africa. A Blog aggregator is a website that monitors all kinds of online blogs and then posts the articles to a central location for other web users to explore.

Blog aggregators does not only just collect these articles from blogs, they also do all kinds of fancy stuff working out what articles is popular amongst  users, collects statistics about the blogs and even rank them amongst each other.

For long the two major blog aggregators in South Africa has been Amatomu and Afrigator but that changed at the end of last year when Amatomu kind of closed down and that opened up the market for another entrant called MyScoop. Since then Amatomu has reopened their site but are still experiencing lots of issues.

Amatomu used to be one of my favourite blog aggregators due to the fact that they collect very useful information regarding your blog, but as their popularity grew their system could just not keep up with the demand and started to brake down on a daily basis. This is when I decided I had enough as these breakdowns caused increased loading times on my blog and I removed my Amatomu badge.

Afrigator has been doing well in the blog aggregator arena, and I am glad for them. The Afrigator team also launched a blog advertising platform called AdGator aimed at bloggers and this is where I think their attention shifted away from Afrigator leaving it a bit out dated to the other two blog aggregators. Afrigator also added a twitter like service called Gatorpeeps aiming at integrating blog aggregation with social networking, I liked Gatorpeeps at first but soon lost interest as twitter was way more active.

Afrigator lacks certain functionality that the other aggregtors has and that is the functionality to view more detailed statistics about your blog, things like a detailed visitor breakdown displaying IP’s perhaps next to the articles the visitors are viewing. Afrigator also uses a unique way of ranking blogs, they take a combination of unique visitors plus unique views plus links from other blogs and then they do some fancy calculations to obtain the blogs overall rank. These ranks also gets reset every Sunday and recalculated, so its not just a matter of who gets the most visitors has the most popular blog.

Afrigator does not only track blogs but they also aggregate videos, photos and news articles. They are also not just aimed at the local market but the African market tracking a total of more that 4000 blogs currently.

MyScoop is the latest addition to the South African blog aggregator arena, MyScoop is the brain child of Nick Duncan and has been running from November 2009 and in its 4 month of existence its already tracking more than 175 South African blogs. What makes MyScoop so unique to me is that its a project of 1 man and not that of a company, and already I find it more useful and stable than some of the other blog aggregators out there.

Since the launch of MyScoop back in November 2009, the site has seen many changes, and just recently undergone a whole face lift with some new nice features. What I like about MyScoop is the fact that Nick listens to what his users want and always welcomes suggestions on new features, think of it as a community by the community. There is some nice features lined up that includes an interactive blogs section, more detailed blog statistics, a overall blogsphere stats section as well as widgets and gadgets for your blog.

If you are a blogger and would like to get your content out there I would suggest your subscribe to one if not all of these aggregators, the more exposure your site gets the more traffic you receive and that is what you as a blogger wants.

Keep an eye out for MyScoop as I think it has the potential of becoming one of the top blog aggregators in South Africa.

Apple has sued mobile handset maker HTC for patents related to the popular Apple iPhone.  Apple said that HTC its rival smartphone maker has infringed on 20 patents.

The 20 patents that HTC allegedly infringed on include aspects related to the iPhone’s interface, user interaction and hardware.

“We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”

Currently Apple is also litigation by Nokia over the technology used in the iPhone.

One can clearly see that Apple’s problem is not really with that of HTC as hardware is only part of the patent infringements, I think Apple is trying to win this lawsuit against HTC to take on popular smartphone OS Google Android.

Is Apple feeling the heat from the popular Google Android smartphone OS? I for one think so and this may be their attempt to try and drive them out of the mobile market. If Apple will succeed, only time will tell.

WordPress or Blogger.com which one is better to run your blog on and why? Yesterday I showed users interested in starting their own blog just how easy it is to get their own blog up and running in a matter of minutes. Now the question is which is better? A self hosted WordPress blog or a Blogger.com blog?

Since my article on starting your own blog the question arise what would be better, hosting your own WordPress blog or making use of Blogger.com.

Firstly I would like to point out the fact that hosting your own WordPress blog will cost you a small fee every month due to the fact that you will have to register a domain for your blog and buy web hosting to host your WordPress blog at. These requirements are not needed when using a Blogger.com blog, Blogger.com will host your blog for you for free and you will get a free sub domain like http://igeek-howtostartablog.blogspot.com you can also register your own domain for use with Blogger.com

Installation

When it comes to installation Blogger.com makes it fairly simple and straight forward as there is no downloading or FTP of files needed, just simply click click click and you are up and running. But WordPress is not that difficult to install either, and is actually well known for its 5 minute installation, only extra steps required is uploading the WordPress files to your web host and following the on screen easy to use installation.

Customization

This is where Blogger.com lacks far behind a WordPress installation, both Blogger.com and WordPress allows for customization of themes but when it comes to stock standard working out of the box themes, WordPress trumps Blogger.com. WordPress literally has hundreds of thousand if not millions of free downloadable themes to use as you please, then there is also the nice premium themes that gets designed by companies like WooThemes.

WordPress also allows the use of static pages, something I believe Blogger.com is not capable of. Then there is all the available WordPress plugins out there, anything you can think of will most likely be there already, enabling you to make your blog as personal as you would like.

Comments

The more popular your blog becomes the more people will start commenting and interacting with your posts, and this is where spammers takes their chances to get in on the link juice. Good news is that WordPress comes stock standard with a comment spam filtering system called Akismet, something I believe Blogger.com does not have. This comes in real handy when your blog becomes more and more popular and you start to get allot of comments on a daily basis.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short is what makes your blog rank higher on Google searches than that of other blogs and sites out there.

This is where WordPress outshines Blogger.com, some may disagree and say but Google own Blogger.com and who better to understand SEO than Google? Fact is for me WordPress is more customizable when it comes to SEO friendliness with simply the activation of a plugin here and a minor modification to the WordPress settings there.

Blogger.com also allows for changing the SEO friendliness of your blog, but be prepared to dig a little deeper in finding and installing these types of plugins.

Conclusion

If you are serious about making it big in the blog world I would say go straight for a WordPress installation and spare yourself the hassle of converting your Blogger.com blog to a WordPress blog later on. However if you would just like to write a daily diary for a few close friends stick to Blogger.com, but if your aspirations are to make it big in the blogging arena and have a popular blog with thousands of visitors a day and making you allot of money then go straight for WordPress.

Check back soon as I will be doing a article soon about how to setup your own WordPress blog as well as some other nice blogging tips and tricks to help  get your blog more recognised. You can also follow me on twitter to stay up to date with the latest happenings.

You own an iPhone and is a sports fanatic? Great news is that there is now a iPhone application out from SuperSport.

The SuperSport iPhone application will give you all the latest news, scores, fixtures and information about your favourite sports including Rugby, Cricket, Football, Golf and much much more.

Head on over to the iTunes store to get your hands on the new SuperSport iPhone Application by MultiChoice.

So you want to start your own blog and tell the world exactly what is on your mind, and maybe even make a buck or two while you are at it? I’m going to show you just how you can be blogging in a matter of minutes.

What is a blog you ask? A blog is a type of website ran by an individual or sometimes multiple individuals where they can post regular entries of commentary, or keep an online journal. Blogging is the perfect way to express your opinions about certain subjects to other people on the web, or just tell them whats happening in your life.

I’ll be showing you how you can be blogging in a matter of minutes by making use of the free blogger.com platform.

If you already have a GMail account signing up to the Blogger.com service from Google is a breeze. Blogger.com is a free blogging platform that enables anybody to run their own personal blog for free. It also allows unlimited flexibility to personalize your blog with themes, gadgets and more.

Step 1: Go to http://www.blogger.com and click the Create a blog button

Step 2: Enter your name and tick the Acceptance of Terms box and click Continue

Step 3: Give your blog a title and choose a blog address, this will be the domain you type into the browser to get to blog, click Continue

Step 4: Choose a template you like, this will be the look of your blog, click Continue

Step 5: You blog is now created, to start writing your first post click Start Blogging

Step 6: To start writing your first post give your blog post a title and then start writing your heart out about what ever you would like. After writing your first blog post simply click Publish Post and your post will appear on your site for everybody to read.

See how simple it is to start your own blog? Keep coming back as I will be doing some more articles soon on blogging, including how to get more readers to your blog and setting up your first advertisement to earn money from your blog.

If you have any questions regarding starting your own blog feel free to leave a comment and I will reply swiftly.