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Use Your Domain Names Anywhere

By Matthew Guay on February 22, 2011 in Quick Tips

Finding a good hosting service and domain name can be two of the hardest things about starting a new site. Once you’ve got a solid hosting service, you can usually use it to host multiple sites. Case in point, both Techinch.com and Maybring.com both run on my same DreamHost account. Once you’ve got a good hosting service that’s running your sites stable, it’s usually quite simple to add another site.

But sometimes, your hosting service may not be the cheapest place to register domain names. Plus, if your hosting service did go bad, it’s a lot easier to move your data than your domain name. For these reasons and more, many people choose to register their domains from a domain registrars and host their sites at another hosting service. You can use this to take advantage of specials as well; Media Temple, for example, currently offers $5 .com domain name registrations to new customers, which is about half price of standard domain registration price.

So how do you get your domains working with your hosting service if you’re keeping everything separate? Here I’ll show you how to add your domain from Media Temple to a DreamHost account, and the steps should be very similar with other registrars and hosting services.

Change Your Domain’s Nameservers

First, you’ll need to change the nameservers on your domain. Login to your account at your registrar where you purchased your domain, and open your domain tools. Here you should find an option to edit the nameservers listed for your domain. This will let you point your domain to your existing hosting account so you can do something useful with your domain name.

Want to learn more about nameservers? This Wikipedia article should help you out.

In your options to edit nameservers, you should find listings to enter 2-3 nameserver names. By default, these will be the nameservers for your registrar’s hosting, but you want to change them to your hosting account’s nameservers. So, in another tab or window, go to you hosting company’s site and find their nameservers, which should be listed under your account’s domain settings. If you can’t find their nameservers, contact their support team. Once you’ve got the name servers, enter them in the nameserver fields on your domain registrar. Below you can see my settings for DreamHost’s default nameservers.

It can take up to 24-48 hours for your DNS nameservers settings to propagate, though often today it only takes a couple hours.

Add Your Domain to Your Hosting Service

Ok, so now your domain is pointing to your hosting service, so it’s time to add it to your account. Head over to your hosting service, and open your domain management panel. If you’re using DreamHost, you’ll see a Manage Domains link on the top left side of your hosting dashboard. From the domain page, select Add New Domain. Don’t worry; you won’t have to pull out your credit card. This is just to claim the domain that you’ve pointed to your hosting service and add it to your account.

Now, on the Add New Domain page, you’ll have a number of options. If you’re wanting to start a new site from this new domain, then enter it in the top field under Fully Hosted. You’ll have the option to set which folder your site’s data will be saved in, specify which user has access to the domain, and whether or not you want to add Google Apps to your domain.

Alternately, if you just want to redirect your new domain to a site you already have, scroll down and enter your domain under Redirect, then enter the domain you want to redirect the new address to. That’s what I’ve currently done with my new domain below, until I have a new site started for it.

That’s all! Now your domain should be running on your new fully hosted site on your existing hosting account, or redirecting to your site. Either way, you’ll be able to keep your domains registered wherever works best for you, while taking advantage of hosting you already have. For me, it enabled me to get 2 domains cheaper than Dreamhost’s default registration cost and add them to my account without much hassle at all.

As far as the best hosting or domain registration service, I’m afraid I can’t give you any absolute recommendation. Media Temple is highly regarded among designers and bloggers, and I’ve seriously considered using them to host Techinch.com. They offer many more advanced hosting offerings than most hosting companies, so if your site is going Pro, they’re definitely an option to consider. Plus, their current special on $5 new .com registrations is a great deal if you’re got a new domain you’d like to snag. Then, DreamHost offers great shared hosting at a very reasonable price, with an amazingly responsive and actually helpful help team. Techinch.com has been hosted on Dreamhost for over half a year now, and has had around 98% uptime which is not too bad. At the end of the day, though, you’ll get different reports from everyone about different hosting companies. The great thing is, your domains can always be moved to the hosting provider you want even without transferring them!

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Batch Edit Photos on iPad With OneEdit

By Matthew Guay on February 17, 2011 in Featured, iOS Apps, Reviews

I’ve been looking for ways to make it easier to write and blog from my iPad, trying to make it my one-stop computing solution as much as possible. For the most part, there are tons of ways to accomplish most of the tasks we’ve traditionally used a PC for right from iPad. If there’s one thing I’ve found less than intuitive, though, it’s screenshot editing. I use iPad in landscape mode most of the time, but if you take a screenshot in landscape mode, iOS saves it in portrait mode. So, if I’m reviewing an app or writing a tutorial with screenshots, I have to take screenshots, rotate each one, and then insert each shot into my post. If you rotate each shot individually, it would take forever.

Why Batch Edit Images?

But it’s not just a problem for reviewing apps. If you use your iPad for organizing or editing pictures from the Apple iPad Camera Connection Kit, or draw tons of pictures in apps like Adobe Ideas, then you’ll likely want a way to bulk edit images. Wouldn’t it br nicer to crop or rotate them all at once, then upload the entire batch to Dropbox without any extra steps? Good thing is, there’s a way you can do this from iPad.

Meet OneEdit

After a search on the App Store, I was pleased to discover OneEdit for iPad, a simple and fairly powerful batch image editing too for iOS. No, it’s not the most powerful batch image editor in the world, but for iPad, it’s a huge improvement on other basic image editors if you want to tweak tons of pictures at ones. And if you’d like to batch edit images from your iPhone or iPod Touch, OneEdit for iPhone has you covered there, too.

Batch Editing in Action

Here’s how it works:

First, tap the plus in the left column to add pictures to OneEdit. Make sure to allow OneEdit to access location data so it’ll be able to access and edit metadata on images

Now select the images you want from your photo library. If your folder has more than 50 images, you’ll be asked to select which group of 50 images to choose from. Then just tap the images that you want to bulk edit and import them. One nice feature, especially for my needs, is the ability select just landscape or portrait images. If you need pictures from multiple sources, just import from the first folder then come back and add more images.

You’re now ready to add bulk editing tasks to your images. Tap the plus in the middle column, then select from the available editing options. You can resize, rotate, crop, add text, border, logo, shadow, timestamp, color effects, or convert your image to greyscale. Then you can choose the task specific options for mosts of the tasks.

Some of the options offer a number of settings, such as the Add Text and Color Effects, while the shadow and border options are less full-featured. There’s still plenty to explore here for everyone. For the rotation settings, which was the feature I wanted most, you can rotate an image left or right, flip it upside down (curiously labeled Rotate Down). Best of all, you can choose to have OneEdit only rotate Portrait or Landscape orientated images! Yes!

Did you say you wanted to do more than one thing to an image? Don’t worry; OneEdit lets you add as many tasks as you want to your batch editing. Here, I’ve got it ready to rotate my screenshots, resize them to 640 px width, and add text to the bottom of the images. You can change the order of the tasks from the Edit button on the bottom. Finally, choose which format you want to save your pictures in; you can choose from PNG, JPG (with the quality you want), or PDF. When you’re ready to start editing your pictures, press the blue Execute button on the bottom of the middle column and then confirm it in the popup.

Hold tight, and after a few moments you’ll see thumbnails of your freshly tweaked pictures on the right column. All edits are done non-destructively, so your original shots are still safe in your pictures library. To get your new edited pictures out of OneEdit, tap Export on the top right and select to save the pictures to your iOS Photo Library, upload to Dropbox or Facebook, or transfer them to your computer.

If you choose to upload the pictures to Dropbox, you’ll need to link your account, and then you’ll be able to upload all of the pictures at once to any folder you want in your Dropbox account. Talk about easy; that shaves off so much time you would have spent otherwise uploading them individually from the Dropbox app! Alternately, if you want to just copy them directly to your computer, you’ll get a unique IP address to enter in your computer’s browser address bar. Either way, seconds later you’ll have your pictures saved and ready to be used however you want!

That’s all there is; OneEdit is quick and simple to use, and makes it a breeze to bulk edit images, screenshots, and more from your iPad or iPhone. I’m very impressed with it, and think the investment was already worthwhile. If you find yourself editing pictures or uploading them to Dropbox regurally, you should definitely give OneEdit a try. It’s sure to make your photo editing workflow flow much better on iPad!

Oh, and if you were wondering, all of the screenshots in this review were rotated, resized, and uploaded to Dropbox with OneEdit.

Our Rating: 9/10

Download OneEdit for iPad from the App Store | $2.99

Download OneEdit for iPhone or iPod Touch from the App Store | $1.99

OneEdit’s Official Site

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Type Faster on Your iPad or iPhone with TextExpander

By Matthew Guay on February 17, 2011 in Featured, iOS Apps

After recently teaching in a classroom that had an old manual typewriter with upraised rows of keys, I marveled at how much typing has changed over the past century. We went from typing in QWERTY to keep from jamming keys on original typewriters to pounding out text messages with our thumbs on small slates of metal and glass. How times change! Back then, typing was a purely manual exercise. Today, however, we’re usually typing on smart devices, younger cousins of IBM Watson. Seems like it should be easier and quicker to type today than it was back then, doesn’t it?

Turns out, there is a way to put the computing power of your device to work. TextExpander is a great app that lets your device remember the things you need to type the most so you won’t have to manually type them every time. Instead, you can just enter a short snippet of text, such as aadr, and your full text, such as your address, will be entered automatically. And once you’ve got it installed, you can use this power in many of your favorite apps, including many we’ve reviewed here at Techinch.com. Sound good? Let’s take a closer look at what TextExpander offers.

Getting Started

TextExpander Touch is one of the more interesting apps available in the App Store for several reasons. First, its one of the few ways that you can truly speed up your typing on iOS. Second, it integrates seamlessly with so many other apps, it seems like it should just be an included tool in iOS itself. To get started, just purchase and install the universal app from the App Store. Seconds later, you’ll be ready to create and edit Snippets, use these snippets to create quick notes, and find more apps to work with TextExpander Touch.

The Snippets section is the most important. Here you can create and edit snippets, which include a short abbreviation as well as the long content you want the abbreviation to expand into. There are several popular ones included in the app by default, so you can just edit the content on these to include your own personal signature, address, telephone number, and more. You can also create new ones quickly. Just make sure that your abbreviation isn’t a standard word, or you won’t be able to just enter that word in a TextExpander enabled app without it expanding to include your content. I’ve found it best to make abbreviations start with a period, such as .lorem which I use to expand into a full paragraph of lorem ipsum filler text. The sky’s the limit on what you can use snippets for; from complicated to type words to text you have to enter all the time like your address to long paragraphs you commonly include in emails, you can make tons of typing tasks faster with snippets that work best for you.

One of the best features is the wide arrange of snippets that you can add to TextExpander without typing them all in. Tap the plus button on the Snippet Groups page to add snippets from the TextExpander server. These include common misspelled words for AutoCorrect, standard HTML and CSS code snippets, and accented words that take longer to type correctly. This is an easily overlooked feature that can be a true timesaver once you’re using TextExpander all the time. Also, if you’ve been using TextExpander for Mac, you can also sync your existing snippets from your Mac to your iOS devices.

Putting TextExpander to Work

Now that you’ve got snippets of your most important info and frequently used text saved, it’s time to put it to use. You can use TextExpander as a notebook to create emails and plain text notes using TextExpander snippets. That’s what the Notes feature is for. Here you can type in full text notes like you might in SimpleNote or PlainText; this time though, you’re able to type faster thanks to the TextExpander snippets you’ve added. Just type your snippet, and it will automatically expand to the full text you’ve saved. I can now enter sig1, for example, and my full standard signature will be added to the end of an email. Once you’re finished, you can copy all of the text to your clipboard and paste it into another app, or send the message as an email or tweet immediately.

Integrating TextExpander with Other Apps

While TextExpander is useful on its own, the biggest reason to use it is because it integrates with dozens of apps you likely already use. From Twitter for iOS to the excellent Express for WordPress to PlainText, my favorite app for jotting down plain text notes, you’ll discover more places to use TextExpander than you’d ever imagine. First, though, open the Settings menu in TextExpander and turn on snippet sharing to make all of your snippets available to other apps that integrate with TextExpander.

Now you’re ready to add it to your favorite apps. Check put the link below to see all the apps that integrate with TextExpander, then check your apps settings to make sure your TextExpander support is enabled. Once it is, you can enter your TextExpander snippets and they’ll automatically expand just like they did in the TextExpander app.

If you need more help, you can browse the TextExpander online help file right inside the app. Unfortunately, the help files aren’t available offline, so you’ll have to get buy with the example snippets if you don’t have an internet connection.

The only bad thing is, none of Apple’s apps, including the iPad iWork apps, work with TextExpander. Also, it doesn’t work with WordPress for iOS, so if you want to use TextExpander to make it easier to blog from your iOS device, you’ll need to type your posts up in another app that works with it and then past it into the WordPress app.

Conclusion

Whether you’d like to make less spelling mistakes when texting from your iPhone or want to pound out essays and emails from your iPad quicker than ever, TextExpander is one of the few apps that can really help you do it. Not only does it do a great job at creating and expanding snippets, but it’s already integrated into so many apps that it will make the apps you already love and use even better. Typing on a glass screen isn’t nearly as bad as many would have guessed years ago, but it is still slower than a traditional keyboard. Once you get used to typing with TextExpander, you just might be able to increase your typing speed again. And, since it’s a universal app, you can use it on any iOS device you own.

I personally use my iPad for writing most of the time, and am now trying to integrate TextExpander snippets even further into my typing routine. If you’ve already used it, or if you try it out after this, let us know how you like it in the comments below!

Our Rating: 8/10

Download TextExpander Touch from the App Store | $4.99 – universal

TextExpander’s Official Site

Find apps compatable with TextExpander Touch

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Change Your DNS Settings on iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad

By Matthew Guay on February 4, 2011 in Quick Tips

Want to enable OpenDNS or Google DNS on your iOS device? Most default ISP DNS servers are quite slow, so you can both speed up your connection and help make it safer by switching to OpenDNS or Google DNS. Unfortunately, you can’t change DNS settings on cellular internet connections in iOS, but you can change your WiFi DNS settings to help speed up your connection. But whenever you’re on your using WiFi at your college, home, work, library, Starbucks, or anywhere else, here’s how you can switch to using the DNS server you want.

This works the same on all iOS devices, so the screenshots below show it in both iPad and iPod Touch settings screens.

First, enable WiFi on your device and connect to the WiFi network you want to use. Then, tap the blue arrow button on the right side of the network name to tweak its settings.

Now, select the DNS field, select the DNS that’s already listed, then enter the DNS settings you want. Separate different DNS addresses with commas. You’ll need to know the IP addresses of the DNS resolution system you want to use. There are several common ones, including OpenDNS, Google DNS, and a couple lesser known ones such as Norton DNS or Comodo Secure DNS. I’d personally recommend using OpenDNS or Google DNS, but you can give the others a try and choose the one that works best for you

Here’s the addresses you should use for these:

Service:	OpenDNS	Google Public DNS	Norton DNS	Comodo DNS
Primary IP:	208.67.222.222	8.8.8.8	198.153.192.1	156.154.70.22
Secondary IP:	208.67.220.220	8.8.4.4	198.153.194.1	156.154.71.22

Once you’ve added the settings, you’ll be ready to browse the internet using your new DNS service without any extra changes. Enjoy!

Do note that you have to set your DNS settings on each network, so do note that you’ll need to change this the next time you connect to a new network. The good thing is, your device will remember your recently used networks, so you shouldn’t have to change the settings once you’ve got them set for your favorite networks. To make it easier, you could save a note in your favorite note app with the DNS settings you prefer so you can copy and past them to new networks easily.

So, what DNS do you use by default? Google DNS, OpenDNS, or your local ISP’s default DNS? I usually use OpenDNS, but lately have had some problems with OpenDNS and iTunes, so I’ve been using Google DNS. Surprisingly, it’s seemed faster, lately, though that’s highly subjective. Let us know your favorite in the comments.

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Add Shortcodes to Your Posts with WooThemes the Easy Way

By Matthew Guay on February 3, 2011 in Techinch

Would you like to add more features to your blog posts without having to hand code them in HTML? All WordPress themes from WooThemes include shortcodes to make it easier for you to add quotes, buttons, download links and more to your blog posts. The only problem is, you’ll still have to remember all of the codes to add the shortcode features to your posts.

That’s all now changed as WooThemes has now incorporated a great visual shortcode generator into their theme framework. This was first created as a third party WordPress plugin by developer Rico Gundermann, but now it’s been baked into the latest WooFramework. All you’ll have to do is update your theme and you’ll be ready to start adding features from shortcodes in two clicks. Here’s how to do it.

Add Shortcodes the Easy Way

First, make sure your site is running a WooTheme with the latest version of the WooFramework. You can check this from the Update Framework button under your theme settings in your WordPress dashboard. If it’s out of date, click Update and seconds later, you’ll have the latest features.

Now, head over to your post editor to start writing a new post. You’ll notice a new Woo button on the visual editor toolbar. This opens a menu with options for all the different shortcodes you can use to add buttons, icons, multiple columns in your text, quotes, social media buttons, and more. Select the one you want to get started.

A box will now open with the options for that shortcode. Enter any text that will be included, choose your styles, and preview the whole thing on the right. Click Insert when you’re finished, and you’ll be able to see the actually shortcode used along with any modifications. Even if you prefer to simply enter raw code, this is a great way to discover your theme’s shortcode features.

You’ll likely find features you didn’t know your theme had. Below is a preview of the WooThemes tabbed box with a quote inside, all made with shortcodes on my secondary, WooThemes powered site http://maybring.com/.

Want to try out the Shortcode Generator without having a WooTheme installed on your site? Just head over to the WooThemes Playground where you can try out all of the WooThemes features without having to purchase and install a new theme on your site. Here’s more info about the WooThemes Playground: http://techinch.com/2010/10/08/testdrive-woothemes-for-free/

Conclusion

Shortcodes aren’t unique to WooThemes; in fact, most professional WordPress themes include them nowadays. ElegantThemes have actually included shortcode buttons in the post editor for a while now. The only problem is, they end up making the editor too wide for small screens, and there’s no easy way to remove the buttons from the editor. WooTheme’s integration just works better than any other I’ve tried previously, and having everything in a menu makes it very easy to use. Plus, since the original plugin is opensource, hopefully other developers can use it to add great shortcode integration for their themes as well!

Does your favorite WordPress theme include shortcodes, and do you find yourself using them often?

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