I just returned from a mission trip to Belize, and I’m happy to report that it went well.

First I want to say THANK YOU to everyone who contributed toward the trip either through donations, or by supporting my recent product launch. In addition to paying for this trip, we have now given over $42,700 to missionaries as a result of these online fundraisers.

It was my third trip to work with LOL Ministry in Belize. You can read about the 1st trip and 2nd trip on my blog if you’re interested.

Here’s some of what the trip entailed…

We had the privilege of removing 1600 tree “braces” and concrete forms which were used while constructing the 2nd floor of the orphanage building. (Below is my brother-in-law Micah, whom you may know from Push Button Marketer, or from my helpdesk)

Here’s me pouring sand into a mixer as we made concrete for a flight of stairs. Doing this in the sweltering heat and humidity pretty much kicked my butt and I was sick with heat exhaustion for awhile that night.

It takes a long time to build something like this in the jungle. The building is coming along nicely…

Two of the first orphans taken in by the ministry. We’re doing this for them!

We also hiked into one of the most remote villages in southern Belize. There is no road to it, and it is a long muddy hike to get there. We brought 20 fishing rod/reel combos with us, and gave them to the men of the village, along with putting on a fishing clinic.

Most of them had not seen modern fishing gear before. They really appreciated it, and there was much smiling and laughter as they learned how to fish. It was a great thing to see in a village that has often been marked by hopelessness.

It was a good opportunity to interact with the villagers. It was my 2nd trip to this village, and the fishing clinic proved to be a successful relationship building tool for the ministry we were working with.

Only a couple people caught fish during the clinic, but this guy caught 11 of them! Some people are just born fishermen, like me

My favorite picture: the fisherman’s son holding the afternoon’s catch…

I got to catch a few fish too!

A soccer game with the villagers. A little taller grass than we were accustomed to playing on, but it was a blast.

We ate our meals in the chairman of the village’s house…

The chairman’s wife and one of his daughters…

Our group along with the chairman’s family in front of his house…

Again, thanks to all who helped make this happen!

I will be in the mountains this weekend with my wife, celebrating our 11th anniversary. But please feel free to leave comments, and I will read them when I return.

Have a great day!

I stumbled onto this interesting backup service for WordPress a few months ago, but somewhat couldn’t endup writing a post for it. Most of you use different WordPress plugins to create a backup of your WordPress database and store it in your mailbox or hard disk. Though nowadays you get enough space in your inbox or hard disk, but still what about saving a bit of space especially if you can store it in a secure server? This service is provided by Backup Technology and like your normal WordPress database backup, you need to install their WordPress plugin.

I will go through the features quickly:

• You will get 50mb of disk space on their secure server.
• You can automate your backup schedule & mark a previous backup as locked so that it won’t get overwritten by a new backup.
• If you want you can get your WordPress backup sent automatically in your email.
• Using the built-in ZLIB support available in nearly all PHP installations nowadays, the WordPress plugin can reduce the size of a 50mb WordPress database to a 5mb compressed file.
• And you can use the plugin to encrypt your backups with DES, AES128 or AES256 encryption for total security.

So if you are looking forward to try new things, and care about more security, this service is worth to give a try. You are getting this WordPress service free of cost after all

NameCheap has been giving away PositiveSSL from Comodo free of cost for a long time now with any new purchase. It would normally cost you $49.95. And moreover you will get a huge discount when you renew your SSL certificate for the second year. It will only cost you $9.95. But do you really need an SSL certificate?

As a new blogger or a webmaster, you will think why not get this free SSL certificate and present my site as more professional and secure. But if you are new, there is every chance that you are missing a most important point. You cannot install your SSL certificate on shared ip. You need a dedicated ip to do that. That means you either need a dedicated hosting or a shared hosting with a unique ip address. Dedicated hosting will cost lot more than normal shared hosting that you usually use. And if you buy unique ip address for your shared hosting, you have to pay $2 or more extra monthly depending on your hosting company.

I am not discouraging you to use SSL certificate. But frankly speaking, you can live without it if you just have a blog or normal website. SSL certificate is a must have for a site that does monetary transaction with the users. Otherwise you can’t get the customer trust. I won’t buy anything from an online seller if it is not verified by a trusted SSL certificate provider like Comodo or Verisign.

So, just don’t think that you will get a free PositiveSSL certificate and install it for your blog. And you will be a proud owner of a secure server for free. It’s not as simple as that.

But even if you can’t make use of Namecheap’s free SSL certificate offer, I would still recommend you to use NameCheap for buying domain. I am in love with their user interface. You just can’t find a better one

Sometimes you may be migrating your blog to different server or importing blog posts or database from backup. Or it may even happen that your blog is broken due to some configuration problem in your hosting server. Then it is somewhat professional to show a maintenance page to your visitors. It gives a good impression to the readers and gives them some sort of  info about when to come back.

That’s where I have found this WordPress plugin real handy. Without any hardship you can show a real pro-looking maintenance page to the users. And moreover you can give access to the real state of the blog depending on the WordPress user role. Like your blog administrators can have access to both front-end and back-end while subscribers can only have access to the back-end i.e. WordPress dashboard and they will see maintenance mode in front-end.

And you can write your own custom message and use dynamic placeholders to show your  blog url, title and expected time when your blog will be live again. But one thing that you have to remember is that maintenance mode will not get deactivated automatically. But that is not that serious issue as you can show different message instead of expected time in that case. You have option to show messages like “coming back soon” when the time that you entered expires automatically.

Another nice little thing that I found worth mentioning. You can select urls that you want to exclude from maintenance mode. Suppose you want to keep your About And Contact pages working. Then you just have to specify the url paths in the plugin’s options page. And you can keep your trackback and feeds active on the same page.

Lots of options, easy interface

If you experiment with your WordPress blog a lot, then it is good to have it.