Step 1 – Backup!

The importance of creating a backup of your site before making changes to it can never be overstated, using cPanel this can be done with just a couple of clicks and could save you hours if not days of work down the line. This process shouldn’t affect your existing site however mistakes can happen so it’s always best to be on the safe side.

 Step 2 – Export database via phpMyAdmin

Select phpMyAdmin in cPanel and click the name of the database you wish to export on the left, then click the Export tab. The default options are fine so you can just leave quick selected, then press the Go button which will download the database .sql file, make a note of where this downloads to on your computer.

Step 3 – Download website files

Login to your old site via FTP and download all files inside the public_html/ folder (assuming this is the main domain on the account, if it is an addon domain then you should download all files within the addon domain folder which is a subfolder of your public_html). You will need to upload these to the new site via FTP shortly.

Step 4 – Upload website files

You should now login to the new site FTP, and upload the files previously downloaded. If this is the main domain on a new account then these can go straight into the public_html/ folder, if it is an addon domain then you should put them inside the addon domain folder that you have specified in the cPanel Addon Domains section.

Step 5 – Create a new database

In the MySQL Databases section of cPanel you now need to create a new database

Then create a new user, making a note of the password.

Now add that user to the new database

Step 6 -  Import database via phpMyAdmin

Go to phpMyAdmin in your new account and select the new database you just created on the left. Now click the import button, then choose file and select the earlier database backup that we made, then click Go.

Step 7 – Edit configuration file with new database settings

The location of this file will vary depending on what CMS you are using, but the process should be the same for all CMS. You will need to locate the configuration file and edit this, changing the database name, database username and database user password, all of which you have previously created. The database name and database username will begin with your cPanel username followed by an underscore.

Common CMS configuration file locations (relative from installation directory):

Drupal – sites/default/settings.php

WordPress – wp-config.php

Joomla – configuration.php

Magento – app/etc/local.xml

Concrete5 – config/site.php

Step 8 – Edit the site URL in the database (URL changes only)

This step may not always be necessary, some CMS’s hardcode the site URL into the database when they are setup, if this is the case then when you visit the new site some links or the whole site may end up redirecting to the old URL. You should then go back into phpMyAdmin and select the new database, select the search tab and enter the domain surrounded by % signs, e.g. %domain.com% – You should edit any instances that show up in configuration tables to the new URL.

Step 9 – Finished!

Admire your work as you’ve just migrated your CMS successfully (with a bit of luck!)

Blogolife

BlogoLife is a simple and attractive theme built in HTML5 & CSS3 for personal blogging , it’s fully customisable and clean so can be styled if you want to change it, otherwise it can be used straight away.

Colorway

Colorway is a simple elegant theme that is fully customisable and has built in support for analytics. This theme is built by InkThemes.com and has support for a range of site types including gallery display.

Ping

SwitchUp Studio’s Ping Theme is a simple stylish blog theme, quite traditional but with fully customisable colour options.

ToomMorel Lite

ToomMorel Lite for WordPress allows you to get a stylish site up and running in minutes. It features templates for blogs, gallery, fullwidth pages without sidebar and a contact us page.

Triton Lite

Triton is a all in one WordPress theme with awesome 3 fonts, 1 slider, 1 layout & easy to use theme option panel. It is SEO friendly and has plenty of user-friendly options. The theme also comes with a contact page template which doesn’t require any setup.

ZeeBizzCard

zeeBizzCard is a clean and elegant styled Business Card Theme for WordPress that fits perfectly for a sleek homepage for personalities, freelancers, entrepreneurs or small business owners. It comes with a featured posts slider, a custom post types based portfolio and shortcodes for resume, aboutme box and skills.

A team of US engineers working at the University of California, Irvine, HRL Laboratories and the California Institute of Technology have revealed the result of their latest research, a material they claim to be the world’s lightest.

This material is created from a collection of tiny hollow tubes, each tube having a wall thickness of just 100 nanometers, around 1,000 times thinner than a human hair. These tubes are arranged into a micro-lattice formation, a diagonal pattern with the tubes crossing each other with small open spaces between them.

The resulting density of this material is 0.9 milligrams per cubic centimetre, compared to polystyrene this is around 100 times lighter. This metallic micro-lattice consists of 99.99% air and 0.01% solid which gives it such a low density.

As well as being the lightest material it is also very strong due to the ordered nature of the lattice design. Potential uses of this material due to it’s properties are in shock absorbers and next generation batteries. Further details of this research are published in the latest edition of Science.

Yesterday Apple announced the iPhone 4S at a press conference in California which you can view here. A quick breakdown of the new and improved features over the iPhone 4 follows:

• Upgraded CPU – A5 Dual Core CPU, 2x faster processing, 7x faster graphics
• Upgraded Camera – To 8MP from 5MP, increased aperture size, additional lens, improved start-up time, face-recognition & image stabiliser
• Upgraded Video Recording – To 1080P@30FPS from 720P@30FPS
• Added Siri – Voice command system
• Added iCloud – Adds features sharing all media, documents, photos, apps, calendar, mail, contacts between Apple devices, remote backup to iCloud, find friends and locate iDevices remotely and wipe them.

Upgraded CPU

Having a more responsive interface and apps running quicker is never a bad thing, that being said the iPhone 4 already had a responsive interface and to many people this may not really be noticable. This feature is touted as being ideal for gamers however the number of people, even from those who game, that actually run graphically intensive games is rather limited. This does give the potential for developers to produce more advanced games and apps specifically for the iPhone 4s in the future.

Upgraded Camera

This is said by Apple to be much closer to using a dedicated camera with the quality of pictures that it takes, and that it would stop the need to carry around a camera, at least a basic one. The features that have been added are definitely useful, increasing the aperture size and physical number of lenses should noticably increase picture quality. For many people it will eliminate the need for a separate camera. Whilst these improvements are good this was mostly the case for the previous iPhone 4 also, and won’t make a major difference to many people.

Upgraded Video Recording

Moving to 1080P from 720P is a nice step up and a natural progression, as this is the limit of almost all TV’s today being Full HD this standard is unlikely to progress in the immediate future. It is nice to have this though the disk space usage would no doubt be rapidly used up shooting video at this quality, and generally for anyone’s personal videos 720p would be adequate so I would not class this as a killer feature.

Siri

This is one of the biggest new features Apple have been pushing,  and whilst it’s new for Apple to offer it integrated on the phone you could previously download this as a free app on the App Store for the last 18 months. It allows you to use voice commands which can be naturally spoken as opposed to specifically set phrases, it’s billed as a personal assistant. It does this by processing your speech on it’s external servers and using artificial intelligence tries to do what you want. Some of the uses they have demonstrated so far include making phonecalls, setting calendar events, replying to text messages, checking the weather and playing music. This feature does look interesting, I’m sure a lot of owners will be playing with it testing the AI once available. Whether it’s actually a feature that people would use long term though or just a gimmick it’s hard to say. It could be very useful whilst driving to operate the phone handsfree so that seems like a strength, however it’s not completely handsfree as you need to hold the home button at present, perhaps this could be enabled via software in future though.

iCloud

The second big new feature Apple are pushing is iCloud, which will enable sharing of seemingly any data between iPhone / iPad / iDevices. One of the features demonstrated is taking a picture and having it instantly available on another linked device (This synergises nicely with the high quality pictures of the iPhone 4(S) and the larger high res screen of the iPad 2 (and upcoming iPad 3). It can also share music, videos, apps, documents, calendar events, contacts, basically everything that you can store. Some of the more interesting features are not the sharing though, it also lets you back up your devices to the cloud when your phone is connected via WiFi. This is a great feature, anyone who has lost their phone (especially an iPhone) knows how stressful it can be, losing all your contacts/videos/photos and being able to restore this on to a replacement phone and essentially not have lost anything apart from the physical phone would be a relief. Of course this has been available via iTunes but in the unfortunate event of a computer failure or loss at the same time as the phone it would be very useful.

Another feature of iCloud is device tracking, you can track these from their GPS signal so if your phone was lost or stolen you may well be able to track it down or provide the police these details. Finally they have a feature where you can also add your friends devices to track their location, I feel this is more of a novelty feature and thankfully you need their permission to do this so it’s not too stalker friendly, and you can turn off tracking whenever you wish.

Summary

The iPhone 4S wouldn’t be considered a must have upgrade from the iPhone 4 for all but avid Apple fans, it does add some quirky new features and improve some old ones, but nothing strikes as a must have. It is however an attractive upgrade for any iPhone 3G / 3GS users that have been waiting to upgrade.

- Steve Jobs sadly passed away the day this article was written, we would like to dedicate it to his memory. A true visionary, his work shall be remembered for many years to come.

EM Bellentesque - $99

This is a very stylish fashion boutique store theme offering many features such as: product image sizes controlled in the back-end, slideshow with over +20 transitions, mega-menu with many multiple columns styles, constantly updating new products, best-seller, the promotional information. Featuring clean lines with large product images and an attractive layout it’s perfect for a high end fashion store.

HelloMagento – Free

This free Magento Theme gives you a chance to set up your store the easy way and right way. Perfect for most types of store and its absolutely free! This also has a featured item slider and product carousel, great for showcasing individual products.

Electronics – Free

This Free Magento template is great fit for gifts, electronics, computers, music, software, games and any other gifts that you can think of. It’s styled to look futuristic, with fairly minimal colours used, which may make your products stand out.

Luxury Home – $99

This theme is great for any furniture store, designed with an easily accessible layout this is a homely yet stylish theme. It’s SEO friendly and features some attractive javascript carosels and slider menus.

Azure Universal – $99

Azure Universal Magento template will provide your store with fresh and unique look. Clean and bright store design will help focus your customers attention on your products and information. Template is based on 1 column home page layout with image slider on main page. This template can be used for any store that need clean and modern look with improved SEO compatibility and user interface.

The Samsung Chromebook Series 5 is the first of the Chromebooks to be released, and can be found for £349 at Amazon, but what do you get for your money? Not a whole lot really.

Allow me to elaborate, the Chromebook is a fairly stylish (if somewhat dated Apple-esque looking) 12.1″ netbook running Chrome OS which is essentially a browser based operating system. Now I used the word netbook which certainly isn’t a glowing adjective, but to describe it as much more would be generous. This is an Intel Atom N570 based netbook (note that Intel themselves describe it as a “processor for netbooks”) with 2GB RAM and a 16GB SSD and whilst this low power CPU means that 8-9 hours of battery life is a possibility it also means that it struggles playing 720P HD videos. This lack of oomph means that the Chromebook can’t do more than a typical netbook, with web browsing and office apps the order of the day, even Angry Birds from the Chrome store can’t run in it’s HD mode. Yes, this means that a phone would do a better job at this than the Chromebook.

When you open up the Chromebook you find a fairly large well spaced keyboard for a netbook, the standard “F” function keys have been removed from the top and replaced with some Chrome OS specific shortcut buttons for adjusting volume and switching between tabs. This large keyboard does work very well and is comfortable to use. They have also included a large trackpad, with extra space on this freed up by doing away with the left and right buttons, instead you left click by tapping a finger, and right click by tapping two fingers on the pad. This system works well and frees up the trackpad space which is very useful as you won’t be using a mouse.

Whilst the hardware story is not a great one, the Chromebook does impress with it’s fast start-up time, ready in a few seconds seconds, and the battery life is very good. The always connected nature of it means that a 3G contract is really required to use this properly on the move (assuming no wifi). The simplicity of it is a plus point too, there isn’t any fiddling required with antivirus or windows, you can just sign into a Google account and you are good to go. The 12.1″ display with a resolution of 1280×800 pixels is actually very good with accurate and vibrant colour reproduction too.

The Chromebook is a mixed bag overall, with some strong points and some weaknesses, as new Chromebooks are released though this could become a competitive platform. Improving the CPU and graphics to the level where HD video playback is comfortable would be a good start, if this could be coupled with a £50 or so price reduction this could become an attractive proposition. Right now though it’s hard to recommend these unless they are purely for businesses, used by people that won’t have any real demands beyond document editing and web browsing however in this situation they may well be the best tool for the job right now. For similar money much more capable laptops are available and these would be preferable for home users that would be using these for entertainment as well as business.

How do I get bitcoins?

Well, you can buy them from various exchanges for whatever currency you use, alternatively you can create your own through a process known as “mining”. I guess they adopted this term as in a similar way to mining gold you are creating value (in a digital sense if not real world) using your PC. The mining process uses computing power to do some complex calculations to generate new bitcoins, with the difficulty to create these escalating as more come into circulation. Bitcoins are far more efficiently generated by graphics cards than CPU’s, and at the current rate if you bought a £200 ATI graphics card such as a Radeon HD 4950 it could make around £50 of bitcoins in a month. This relies on your computer being on 24/7, and it will significantly increase the power usage of your computer, costing around £5-10 a month in electricity. This is also only going to get worse over time, as the difficulty of creating new bitcoins is scaled up roughly each two weeks, based on the total overall computing power in the Bitcoin network.

A basic principle of the Bitcoin system is that the total amount of currency in circulation is fixed, over time it will approach 21 million bitcoins. Though this may sound like a limiting number bitcoins are divisible down to eight decimal places which gives a huge amount of granularity to the currency.

This currency originated in 2009 from a self-published paper by Satoshi Nakamoto and makes for interesting reading, there are many advantages (or disadvantages depending how you look at it) of bitcoins as a method of online payment compared to the typical payment providers such as PayPal. Bitcoin transactions are made at a very low cost, currently this is 0.0005 Bitcoin which works out £0.00429 – less than half a penny. With no central authority, once a transaction is made it cannot be reversed so there is no chargeback system. Transactions offer a fairly high level of anonymity compared to other payment methods, whilst the complete history of Bitcoin transactions is publically available these show transactions simply between Bitcoin identities which cannot be firmly associated with real-life identities.

Controversy

Bitcoin has certainly had it’s share of trouble, last month the largest exchange Mt.Gox had it’s user database compromised, the end result of this was around 500,000 coins stolen from the users, with a value at the time of around $9 million. This resulted in the exchange shutting down temporarily, due to the nature of the currency this cannot be reversed, the full story is available here.

The value of bitcoins has been extremely volatile, at the start of May they were worth around $1 each and by the end around $30, as the currency grows this volatility should reduce if it can prove that it is stable and secure.

It will certainly be interesting to see how Bitcoin pans out, I wouldn’t recommend investing heavily in the currency or mining them as it would be high risk given the volatility and security problems that have been seen so far. As this currency moves forward and more secure exchanges such as Ruxum – ran by former Wall Street hotshots – start popping up it may grant more weight to this currency and fuel it’s success.

Facebook have made it clear that group chat is not a priority for their video chat, citing the fact that one-on-one video chat is far more popular on Skype than group video chat, whilst that is  true they did gloss over the fact that group chat on Skype requires one member of the chat to have a subscription to Skype premium which is a monthly paid service. Facebook are bringing this feature to their users in partnership with Skype who no doubt helped a lot with their considerable video streaming expertise, the user experience is very streamlined with just a quick download required to get going. You can then invite any of your Facebook contacts to start a video chat and this starts up with minimal fuss, making this an extremely easy way to video chat and no doubt the first time many of it’s users will have tried video chat.

Google “Hangouts” is the catchy name for their video streaming service, this service however is designed with group chat in mind. It has an invites system which is rather too clunky for it to be useful for one-on-one conversations when compared to the simple alternative, it does exactly what is required though and group chat works smoothly.

So that is the two products, Facebook video chat is superb for talking to friends individually, and Google Hangouts is great for group video chat. These products aren’t currently fighting for market share, they serve different purposes and are both very effective at what they do. Whether this will be the case in future remains to be seen, it could well be that Facebook offer group video chat if Skype decide to remove the premium for this feature which is certainly possible.

I’m sure at one time or another we’ve all had those extravagant purchases, perhaps that late night venture onto eBay for a Michael Bolton CD you simply had to have, but I can’t help thinking the Ministry of Defence may have gone a step too far offering the HMS Ark Royal with an Add to Cart button. The 10,000 tonne aircraft carrier has been decommissioned and sold earlier today, with the winner of the auction not known until later in the year (it’s rumoured to sell for around £3.5 million). You can see the actual sales page here - of course the Add to Cart button doesn’t actually let you purchase, but they should use a more suitable shopping cart system.

There are a number of choices as far as shopping cart systems go, the main ones in use are Magento, Zencart, OSCommerce, CRE Reloaded, X-Cart and Joomla with Virtuemart. Each of these has their own benefits, here is a good shopping cart review which is worth a read, it’s quite thorough and includes a feature comparison table to help you decide which one is right for you.

If you haven’t heard of graphene yet prepare to find out about a material that could lead the way in future technologies. Only discovered in 2004 by Dr Konstantin Novoselov and Dr Andre Geim – from the University of Manchester – experimenting with sticky tape and graphite (found in common pencils) they have already been awarded a Nobel Prize for this discovery.

What is graphene?

You may well have heard of it’s little brother, carbon nanotubes which are sheaths of carbon atoms rolled into cylinders with diameters roughly 10,000 times smaller than a human hair. They are incredibly strong, and amazingly conductive, sounding like something from a science-fiction novel but increasingly being used in real world applications today. Research carried out in 2008 shows that adding carbon nanotubes to standard carbon fibre at just a 1% concentration increased the overall strength of the material by 64%!

Graphene itself is a single atomic layer of carbon atoms as found in graphite, this is basically the same as a single layer carbon nanotube unrolled. Carbon atoms are arranged in a hexagonal formation with a carbon atom at every point on the hexagon, these are strongly bonded and create what we know as graphene.

Why is graphene special?

Graphene has a whole host of fantastic properties which will make it valuable to future technology, the list is really quite surprising:

• Strength

Graphene isn’t just quite strong, research at the University of Columbia calculates that graphene is the strongest material in the world. James Hone from the UoC states “The intrinsic strength of graphene can be considered as an ‘upper bound’ for the strength of materials — rather like diamond is for hardness — that could serve as a goal for engineers who design materials,”

• Electrical Conductivity

Manchester University’s Dr Leonid Ponomarenko explains graphene has “the highest current density (a million times that of copper) at room temperature; the highest intrinsic mobility (100 times more than in silicon); and conducts electricity in the limit of no electrons”. Breaking this statement down to simple terms it means that graphene is the most efficient electrical conductor, doing this faster and more precisely than any other known material.

• Thermal Conductivity

Graphene beats diamond in thermal conductivity. It’s in fact better than any other known material at conducting heat.

• Transparency

Graphene absorbs just 2.3% of light making it almost entirely transparent, yet still visible if compared to a plain white background. This could be hugely useful in solar cells and touchscreens, currently most are made from Indium Tin Oxide which absorbs around 10% of light, so this would be a great improvement, not only that but Indium Tin Oxide is brittle whereas graphene is not.

• Stiff

Graphene is also the stiffest known material, stiffer than diamond!

As you can see this is a hugely impressive list for a material that was only discovered 7 years ago, very rapid progress has been made in the production of graphene and the application of it into electronics. This BBC article contains some details on IBM’s progress using it, Dr Yu-Ming Lin, one of the scientists on the project states “This is the first wafer-scale production of graphene-integrated circuit – and we’ve shown that graphene can be integrated with other elements to form a complete function, which enables higher performance and more complex functionalities in a circuit.”

In their paper published in the journal Science, the IBM team explained that the circuit could operate at high frequencies of up to 10GHz (10 billion cycles per second), and at temperatures of up to 127°C, far exceeding the operating specifications of current silicon based processors.

The possibilities that this new material opens up are huge, it seems likely we will be using graphene based CPU’s in the future as well as finding graphene in many consumer electronics.