Post no. 005: Technology Used

During the start of the website plan, I was thinking of only making website about 'Maps of Bangladesh'. For this purpose I've purchased one domain named 'manchitro.org' back in 2010. Manchitro means Map on Bangla (Bengali). I've no prior knowledge about CMSs back then. Only basic HTML knowledge I've that time. So I started making the site in HTML after purchasing the domain. This was a very bad plan to follow. I messed up making the website with HTML. So I moved to blogger and created a blog site focused only on 'Maps of Bangladesh' (url: mapofbangladesh.blogspot.com) and it was a huge success that time. When I've decided to close the blog, it was getting 1500+ pageviews per day. And was ranked 1st for search of map of any part of Bangladesh. But I've to push the KILL switch anyway.

After making the blogger site and it's success, I plan to move to my own domain. But before moving I want to make the site this time. So I started developing the site in my localhost. And back that time I've only very little knowledge about Joomla!. So I started developing the site using Joomla! CMS. I've loose all of my data 2/3 times during the development time and develop again from scratch. And finally when I was ready with my Joomla! site, it was the era of Wordpress. But I decided to stick with Joomla!.
Only Joomla core can't fulfill all my needs for making the site 'The Bangladesh Network', I've to use enormous number of extensions along with the core installation.

List of major extensions are below:

1. JA T3 for templating/design.

2. Focal Point for showing interesting points (places, hotels, restaurants etc.) into a map.

3. JCH optimization for optimizing the site.

4. Geocode Factory Package for showing kml maps of any area.
5. Lazy Load for Joomla! for load images when scrolled to images.

Will update the list of extensions used over time.

Mahamud, The Bangladesh Network.

Post no. 004: Hosting

Hello Again.

So, I got my domain but hosting still not finalized. So I was looking for some free hosting provider and find some good ones. Start using the old 'Byethost.com' with my domain name. After a very small time (like 25-30 days), byethost banned me for using higher resources. Then I went to another free hosting which was regularly down for maintenance and ban its users after 3 days of inactivity. Again my site goes down. And I moved from all kinds of free hosting also. One thing I've learned, "No service is free and it'll never be. Every service will cost you. One way or another."

Then I came to know about a Bangladeshi company named InnovateBlu who are new and their service is good. They also offer so many other services like domain registration, DNS, Web Development and much more. I'm using their service for almost 3 years without any big issue.

There are also so many other good hosting providers like:

1. Bluehost
2. Inmotionhosting
3. Godaddy
4. 1 & 1
5. Hostgator

etc.

So that is all about hosting for now. I'll write about Joomla & some of its extensions (components, modules, plugins) used in developing the site in future posts. Thanks for stopping by. Se you all in near future.

Mahamud, The Bangladesh Network.