₦airaland Forum

www.talazo.com : social networking for Nigerians and african lovers: everything on myspace plus a lot more
www.sandoka.com social networking for Nigerians and african lovers: everything on myspace plus a lot more
www.afrikanas.comsocial networking for Nigerians and african lovers: everything on myspace plus a lot more
www.nairaworks.com:jobs and employment website
www.nairawork.comsocial networking for Nigerians and african lovers: everything on myspace plus a lot more

watch obama's video biography on  http://talazo.com/videos/id_210/ or go to videos section under news and politics at talazo.com

Please watch this video on obama's life at : http://talazo.com/videos/id_210/

Talazo.com has just launched a forum dedicated to obama for president: it is called obamaniacs. If you support Obama for president, contribute to obamaniacs at talazo.com

Great 100% Free Tools To Build Your Website!
Free web hosting is no secret, but finding a decent free host most certainly is! If you aren't techie enough to build your own server, and don't really want to pay for hosting. This is a good way to have a nice site for no cost to you to make a blog, show off your vacation photos in a new annoying way, Keep in touch with family, ect.

I've found a few tools I really like over the last few days I've used on this site you're viewing!

Domain Names

First, we're going to need a domain name - if you want to be fancy and get a nice .com feel free to head to ehuzu.com, and register one. However, most of the good names are taken, and the one I have works just as well. Eventually we'll run out of .nets and .coms, and everyone will have to go to other extensions realizing they are exactly that,  since anyone can register a dot com they don't win much with me in the way of credibility. There is no 'real business' or 'trustworthy individual' application.

There are plenty free domain names you can get, but most are long and rather ugly. Mine is from a website called ehuzu.com mentioned above (www.ehuzu.com) if you aren't googling it already. You can choose to have your freebie hosting forwarded or do a real deal DNS update which many free domain hosts don't offer. They are ad free, and only ask you place a small button on your page (like the one at the bottom of mine) stating you are a member of the uni.cc network. I like this site best, but there are plenty others you can grab up with extensions like .co.nr, .zap.to, ect.

Okay, we've got a free name! Next on our list is web hosting.

Webhosting

Since I've not got around to the other project i've reminded myself about (Home server/media center) it's time to get some free hosting! I've found many hosts; some better than others. Here's my top list for you to pick from!

#1 Freehostia (www.freehostia.com)

* Disk Space: 250 MB
* Traffic 5Gb
* 2 Domains
* 1 MySQL Database
* Their ads? No
* Your ads? Yes
* Custom 404 Pages

#2 Awardspace (www.awardspace.com)

* Disk Space: 200MB
* Traffic: 5GB
* 2 Domains
* 1 MySQL Database
* Their Ads?: No
* Your Ads?: Yes

The above listed providers have many other features available. There's one thing I dislike about Awardspace,  if a visitor encounters an error on one of your pages they are directed to the providers homepage with no back link or explanation for the error! I went with Free Hostia since I can edit my own 404s. However, you can get more space, traffic, ect. by allowing ads - That opens up your options a lot, but this should be fine for a personal page.

Now we have a domain name, and webhosting for $0.00. : )


Html Editors

Now that we have a place to park we need to get ourselves a car! Usually webhosting editors leave much to be desired if you're not an html wizard, but fear not. You can download many external programs to make this task much easier for you! If you are not very good at html you'll want something with a WYSIWYG(What You See Is What You Get) editor. There are plenty of these out there both commerical and open source.

I'm using Kompozer (www.kompozer.net) for my editing needs. You can open an existing document, or create a new one. If you have any experience with simple html at all this program will serve you well. For more advanced users you can edit in raw source code, there's a preivew button, view in browser option, ect. ect. All for zero dollars.

There are many other options that offer trial periods or 'restricted versions such as FirstPage, Coffee Cup, ect. I was using firstpage, but it started crashing on me as soon as they added the teaser wanting you to buy their full version, Don't know if they've fixed it or not since then, but you can check it out.

When you get done playing you can either upload directly to your webhosting using FTP with the built in program (though I prefer Filezilla) or you can click source, copy the code, and paste it into your not so friendly editor on your webhost.

Domain, webhosting, and an HTML editor,  that will be $0.00! Please come again. : )

RSS, and updating feeds
-----------------------

The newest thing i'm playing with is what you're reading! I wanted an easier way to do site updates, and integrating a blog seemed a great way to go. I messed with some things, and decided I like blogger the very best.

If you'd like to use blogger (www.blogger.com) on your website - I've found FTP to be the easiest way for me.

1. Go to your blogger homepage.
2. Click the Settings tab--- > Select "Publishing"
3. Choose the 'Publish via FTP option.


Now you need to enter your upload information. The FTP server information will be given to you somewhere on your host's page. You'll need to enter, 

1. Your host's address FTP server address
2. Blog url (Enter the homepage address if you want the blog there.)
3. Enter the FTP path (/www.yourpage.com/ for the homepage.)
4. Enter your FTP Username and Password.

You can leave everything else alone - As they don't need to be edited to get it working. Click save, and blogger will ask if you want to republish. If you have blogs posted already click 'yes', and they will be uploaded to your webpage instead of blogger's pages.

If you want to change your site's front page content you can visit blogger, and post as normal. When you publish your site will get some new content for your visitors! There's an option to subscribe, view archives, recent posts, ect. So if your friends, family, co-workers, ect. are fans of google reader like I am they can subscribe to your webby, and be notified when you post something new!

Your site will get a nice little subscription url like mine too! (http://diyproductions.uni.cc/atom.xml) Clicking it will open up a page asking if you want google reader (or whichever feeder their using) to subscribe them.

You can edit the blog template to look pretty much anyway you like. Just make sure you don't delete any code needed to transport your blog. I did find that trying to paste the template code to Kompozer, editing, and pasting it back to blogger didn't work well, 

So, I made the layout how I want it in kompozer, and paste the snippets back in their appropriate places to keep the blog working. A little slower, but nothing monumental.

Bam! Blog with RSS subscribing,  $0.00 folks. : )

Search engines
----------------

Something else that's a little irritating to find is a search engine. One that will send results of YOUR site, and not results of others from google. Most of them want some massive monthly, yearly, first born, fee to use theirs or you need the technical know how to code your own.

There are several free ones you can use. Google themselves make a site search - Though there's was not working well for me for some reason. So I went with Free Find (www.freefind.com). All you do is sign up, paste the code, have them spider your site, and you have a search for your site.

It'll search all the pages you have, and collect results for your users if you have lots of blogs or files to look through. They offer this service ad free save one banner/small text ads on top of the results page which are not very obtrusive.

You can also customize the results page to appear how you want it too! Check out mine (www.diyproductions.uni.cc) by submitting a search for anything. Clicking the logo or 'back link' sends you back to the homepage. You can alternatively select to have a 'web search' as well as site search.

We're still at zero dollars spent and we have a domain, webhost, search engine, HTML editor, blog, and an RSS feed!

There are plenty more freebies you can find by use of everyone's favorite search engine. HTML templates, buttons, graphics, pre-made content, ect. ect. This is a short list of ideas to get you started, but there are LOADS of cool site things available.

The internet was meant to be free - And we need to keep it that way! : )

Tabz
To read more topics go to http://talazo.com/forum/

How To Build A Profit-Making Website
One of the things I love to do first thing every morning is to check the Internet, to find out how much money I made over the night. Like a fisherman checking on his trap, I am thrilled to see money accumulating in my account while I sleep. The beauty of earning an income from the Internet is that my websites continue make money for me from all parts of the world. I can actually know where the money come from, and how much, and test the pages to continue improving them. Wouldn't you want that too?

Before you get the wrong idea, let me clear the air about how I make money from the web. HappyJoblessGuy is NOT about earning money from some online pyramid schemes. It is not about Multi-Level Marketing (even though I have no issue about people earning through MLM). It is not about online forex trading. I am going to show you an honest way of generating income from the web but it's going to involve a degree of hard work from you. For sure, nothing comes easy, and that includes building a machine that makes money online.

Do not have your website hosted by PBase, Tripod, Blogger, even though it can be done an hour. If you intend to earn serious, long-time income, that is not the way to do it. You want something that is 100% your own. Once you have your own website (not an account with Blogger, PBase, etc.), you will realise the amount of freedom in your hands.

If you were to ask me, what are the tools you need to build a great website, I can count them with the fingers of one hand. You can hire a web programmer to build a whole website for you, bypassing the need to be acquainted with any tool. But to own a really great website, I would urge you to do it yourself. You can't be the captain of your own ship if you can't tell stern from starboard. I have received emails from people asking to give them personal coaching. I am sorry, but I do not have time to do that, even if you're willing to pay me money.

In the next five pages of this chapter, I will go through each essential tool one by one. At the end of this chapter I will recap what we have learned. You will realise, if you haven't yet, that earning a living without holding a job requires you to learn skills that you may not have learned before. On the other hand, you may have built many websites, and are wondering what's new that I want to share. Once again, I urge you to be patient as the topics are developed.

Now, without further ado, let’s look at the 5 Essential Tools:

The first tool you need to build a great website is a HTML Editor.

A HTML Editor is a software application to write web pages. There are several brands in the market, including Microsoft Frontpage, Adobe Dreamweaver and so on. Personally I would encourage you not to use Microsoft Frontpage, as it tends to add proprietary codes to your pages, making it difficult to be edited with a different HTML Editor. The one I use is called Homesite, also from Adobe. I learned to write webpages with Homesite.

With a HTML Editor, you write the content of your pages by keying in the HTML Codes, and then checking it with the Preview function. If you do not have a HTML Editor presently installed in your computer, I strongly suggest you get one immediately and start fiddling with it. Get used to all the functions. Learn what to click to make the text bold, italics, underlined, etc., how to hyperlink, how to insert picture, and so on. A good HTML Editor does a lot of work for you, so that you can concentrate on putting together a great website. It doesn't matter which one you use, as long as you get familiar with it.

The second Essential Tool you need is knowledge of HTML Codes.

As mentioned in the previous page, you need to learn coding. To be exact, HTML Codes. HTML Codes are instructions you tell the Internet how you want to format your webpages. The basic HTML codes you need to know are:
• Title
• Body
• Head
• Html
• Headers (H1, H2, H3, etc.)
• Bold
• Italic
• Underline
• Hyperlink
• Table

In addition to the above, it would do you good to learn how to format size and colour of your font, background, border. More advanced features such as CSS would be helpful too, but are still all together very easy, that even a dummy could learn it (so if you have to, find a book for dummies and learn all about it).

The third Essential Tool is a Domain Name.

The domain name, also called the hostname or sitename, is the basic name of your website. For example, www.happyjoblessguy.com. As you probably have known, the domain name has an ending such as .com, .net, .org, etc. To use it to earn an income, I would suggest you go for .com. It is the most popular, hence, the most difficult to get. Nonetheless, you should try to get domain names with .com.

You probably will not get the first domain name of your choice, and will need to try a few times before landing on one that is still available. This is a very important exercise, so take all the time you need.

Registering and keeping a domain name will cost you approximately US$10 per year or even lower. That is peanuts if you can earn the amount back. For now, look for the domain name but don't register it yet. Instead go to Essential Tool #4 to read about Web hosting.

The fourth Essential Tool is Web hosting.

To get web hosting means you rent space on a server that will host your website. You do not need to purchase a server - you don't even need to know how a server works. All you need to know is that you need to host your website on it. The Webhost provides you the space and the interface for you to manage your website.

Think of web hosting as a safe deposit box, and the domain name as the safe deposit box number. When you register for web hosting, you are buying space in a safe deposit box. The amount you pay should determine the amount of space you need. For that reason, the web hosting fee is directly related to the amount of space you purchase. The safe deposit box number remains the same, regardless the amount of space you use. In a similar sense, the fee for domain name is fixed regardless the amount of content you have on the web.

When you start your website, the amount of space you need will most likely be pretty low, less than 1GB, so do not pay for a lot of space that you are not going to use. You can always buy more space as your needs grow. If you pay for 5GB per year, and throughout the course of that year, you never use more than 1GB, then the balance 4GB is money wasted.

The fifth and final Essential Tool you need to build a great website is an FTP Software.

An FTP Software is an application that enables you to transfer data from your computer to your website on the Internet, and vice versa. There are many other ways to do it, including using an online interface provided by your webhost, but usually, using an FTP Software is the swiftest way.

The FTP Software allows you to upload new pages to your website as well as update existing pages. The FTP Software that I use is called WS FTP, which stands for WinSock File Transfer Protocol. To download it, google "Free FTP Download" to see what comes up.

In the next chapter, we will look at Building a Profit-Making Website. As of now, I want you to be familiar with the five Essential Tools in this chapter. Please go ahead and register your web hosting and obtain your domain name, but once again, let me urge you to give the domain name a good thinking through before decided which. If you choose a wrong one at the beginning stage, fine, it only costs another US$10 or so to register another. But you need to make sure it is a domain name you want to own for years and years to come. Who knows, one day you may even sell that domain and the whole web business for $1 million? So, choose carefully.

For more topics on how to earn a living without holding a job, go to http://talazo.com/forum/

As a lot of people are doubting your story, hope you would post your USA number as quickly as you can?

we will be waiting for the number as soon as you settle down. I wish you the best of luck! You may hook me up with any responsible lady in USA too.

I have watched with unspeakable consternation petty jealousness embedded with responses of certain nairalanders. Different people find joy in different things ; in a simpler form, what brings happiness to individuals differ.If someone expresses happiness over what has happened in his or her life, it is uncivilzed of anybody to subject that source of happiness to mere condemnation. I am very happy for you even I feel that this excitement in your life will not have the same effect on me. Only God knows when we Nigerians will free ourselves of petty jealousies and unnecessary frivolities.I am pretty sure a lot of you guys showering condemnations over the wonders that have to this guy will be happier and express greater excitement if you happen to find yourselves in the same situation.Please fellow nairalanders, let us exhibit responses that are compatible with civilized moral decorum and make nairaland a place of joy and happiness and not a place of petty jealousies and outright condemnation.As for you who put up the story, more grease to your elbow and I wish you the best of luck in your endeavours!Ignore all the petty jealousies,frivolities and outright condemnation in which some nairalanders have engaged themselves.Only God knows when Nigerians will start to express joy over the happiness of other people!

We are currently looking for people with basic knowledge of computers ; the basic requirement for this job is access to the internet ; we sincerely believe if you know how to cut and paste or know how to copy and paste, you would be qualified to do this job.We are basically looking for individuals who can add a little bit of interactivity to our website. candidate must understand basic English language and must be able to follow instructions with minimal amount of supervisions.Selected candidates will be assigned unique username and passwords to be able to login remotely to our systems wherein the instructions on what to do will be given.most of the jobs and responsibilities will entail copy and paste from specifically designated website.As a first step, please click on the link below to contact our system administrator:
http://www.sandoka.com/contact.php

We are located in the USA but anybody from all over the world could apply for these positions ; international workers will be paid by money transfer of their choice.We can remotely monitor activities of all workers being hired by our company through state-of-the-art monitoring software on our system that automatically log the activities of all logged on users.If you are not serious-minded, please do not contact us ; again , if you are serious minded and looking for a high-paying job, click on this link to apply : http://www.sandoka.com/contact.php

We are currently looking for people with basic knowledge of computers ; the basic requirement for this job is access to the internet ; we sincerely believe if you know how to cut and paste or know how to copy and paste, you would be qualified to do this job.We are basically looking for individuals who can add a little bit of interactivity to our website. candidate must understand basic English language and must be able to follow instructions with minimal amount of supervisions.Selected candidates will be assigned unique username and passwords to be able to login remotely to our systems wherein the instructions on what to do will be given.most of the jobs and responsibilities will entail copy and paste from specifically designated website.As a first step, please click on the link below to contact our system administrator:
http://www.sandoka.com/contact.php

We are located in the USA but anybody from all over the world could apply for these positions ; international workers will be paid by money transfer of their choice.We can remotely monitor activities of all workers being hired by our company through state-of-the-art monitoring software on our system that automatically log the activities of all logged on users.If you are not serious-minded, please do not contact us ; again , if you are serious minded and looking for a high-paying job, click on this link to apply : http://www.sandoka.com/contact.php

This is terribly exciting!