For any of you out there that have an iPhone, iPod Touch or Android phone you will understand the benefits of a site that has a customised interface designed for these platforms. I have been using my iPhone for almost a year now and I can’t say enough about it. With the new 3.0 software installed it handles almost all websites seamlessly, however I still get somewhat of a buzz when I stumble onto a site and see that it has a customised interface for the iPhone.

With that said, how could I have my own blog online with-out customising it to fit the iPhone? Well I couldn’t, so I set out to find out how to do it, expecting to have to learn pages of code and spend weeks trying to learn some advanced scripting methods but within 10 minutes of searching I was shocked to discover that there was a plug-in (WPTouch) for wordpress that would do it all for me in 3 easy steps bellow see how you too can have a great looking site for easy viewing on the iPhone, iPod Touch or Android line of phones.

*Remember to back up your WordPress blog before you install any plug-in <http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Backups>

Step 1
Get WPTouch: go to: http://www.bravenewcode.com/wptouch/ click “download” on the right hand side of the page to download the latest version of WPTouch.

Step 2
Unzip the download file, upload the entire wptouch folder to the WordPress wp-content/plugins directory on your web server.

Step 3
Login to your WordPress admin account in your web browser. Go to the Plugins tab, and click activate under the WPtouch iPhone Theme plug-in.

That’s it your done!

Now you can customise WPTouch to fit into the look and feel of your main site, I recommend creating and uploading an icon to use as your home icon as when anyone bookmarks your site to the Home Screen on their iPhone/Touch it will come up with that Icon, Their is a link to a Photoshop template inside the plug-in.

For a demo of how great WPTouch handles the iPhone with transitions that are smother than silk check out my blog from you device.

What are your thoughts on my iPhone site?.

I have just started reading Tim Ferriss’ book “The Four Hour Work Week” and as such I decided to check out his blog, Where I happend to notice on the front page of his blog was the above video that I found verry interesting and thought that I should share it with you. The original post for this video can be found here on his site. The video is titled “How to Blog without Killing Yourself” vice the original title of “Scalable Blogging Behaviors: How to Grow from 1 to 1,000,000 Readers”.

What are your thoughts on the video? and What are your thoughts on his book?

Hosting and Domain Names

Whilst starting to monetize my blog I came across some limitations whilst working with Blogger, so I have made the decision to move to a self-hosted blog as this will allow me to have a bit more freedom with my blog and also give me the added advantage of a domain name. It is a little more difficult to set up and does have some cost involved but I seem to have gotten out of it rather cheaply. I managed to find a free host provider through 000webhost They will give you 1500 MB of disk space and 100 GB of data transfers. They don’t have any advertising on the site either.

My domain name only cost $15 through Servergrade, however next time I would pay the little bit extra and go with cheapdomains.com.au as they have a good admin page that allows you to change things like your name servers with ease and gives you better control of your domain.

Setting Up WordPress

Once I set up the free hosting and got my domain name sorted out, I then had to install a blogging platform, for this I chose to use WordPress as it has a good stable platform that was familiar as I had used the free account from wordpress.com previously, and it has a great community base which means that there are heaps of free templates and plug-ins (widgets) available.

The installation process was relatively simple for me, WordPress have a good tutorial on their site with step by step instructions for installation, however if you are having difficulty it may be worth upgrading the free hosting provided by 000webhost to their premium account for around $5/month as it has a self installer that is provided (the free version also has the self installer however it appears to have been down for quite some time).

Importing Posts

Once you have WordPress installed you can import your previous posts from other sites such as blogger which is a great feature, the only thing that I noticed is that I didn’t import my code scripts from my posts (ie. My Amazon affiliate links). To import your posts from blogger follow these steps:

1. Log into your wordpress blog administrator account.
2. Go to the Tools menu on the Left hand side and click Import.
3. Choose the blog type that you wish to import from.
4. Simply follow then on-screen instructions to complete the importing process.

If you choose to go with another hosting provider some of the things that you will need is a MySQL database that you can create to store your blog data, I would also recommend that you look for a provider that offers some form of cPanel auto installer for WordPress. What are your thoughts or suggestions on a self-hosting with WordPress?