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We caught up with U23 UCI World MTB champ and Durban local, Burry Stander at a recent Cape Epic event.

Burry, one of South Africa’s brightest cycling prospects, took some time to share with us his thoughts on the 2010 Cape Epic, what it’s like riding with international mountain biking legend Christoph Sauser and some advice for first time Epic riders taking on the race in 2010.

Burry and Christoph will be one of the big teams to watch at the 2010 Cape Epic.

Stay up to date with our Cape Epic 2010 Mission coverage as it becomes available on:

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We recently bumped into legendary solo adventurer Riaan Manser at the Cape Epic route launch in Johnannesburg. In this video, Riaan shares his thoughts on the 2010 Cape Epic, his latest Madagascar adventure, leg shaving and why beards are making comeback.

Riaan is famous for his incredible solo circumnavigation of Africa, covering a staggering 37, 000km and 34 countries on a mountain bike, and more recently becoming the first person to successfully kayak 5000km around Madagascar, alone and unaided.

Riaan uses his adventures as a means to build awareness around the dire poverty in Africa, and runs several social upliftment programs that can be found on his website www.africa365.co.za.

Stay up to date with our Cape Epic 2010 Mission coverage as it becomes available:
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RSS feed
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Team RSAWEB have officially announced that they have entered 3 teams (6 riders) into the 2010 Cape Epic mountain bike race as part of their Team RSAWEB Cape Epic 2010 Mission, which includes not only participating teams and support crew, but also extensive media coverage of the event.

The Cape Epic is the world’s largest and most televised stage mountain bike race, drawing a mix of over 1200 amateur and professional riders from all around the globe to our home soil, where they must endure 722kms of SA’s toughest mountain biking terrain for 8 consecutive days. A gargantuan test of mind and body, many aim just to finish and survive to tell the tale.

As this epic adventure unfolds, we’ll be posting a series of videos chronicling the team’s progress, the race action as it happens and all the previously untold behind-the-scenes stories that take place over the duration of the race.

Traveling within close proximity to all the action, our mobile media team will be there to keep race followers on the web informed via tweets, blogs and up-to-the-minute video coverage of the race.

In our first video, we invite you to meet team members Nic, Simon, Rob and Mark. Enjoy.

Stay up to date with our Cape Epic 2010 Mission coverage as it becomes available:
Twitter
RSS feed
Email updates
Facebook


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It’s only a matter of weeks before multi-award-winning alternative rock band The Killers will be performing their first-ever South African tour, commencing on Friday, 4 December 2009 at the Coca-Cola Dome Johannesburg and Sunday 6 December at Val De Vie Estate, Cape Town.

RSAWEB is giving away two pairs of tickets – one pair for the Johannesburg show and one pair for the Cape Town show.

All you have to do to stand a chance to win is upload your ‘Killer Fan Photo’ on our fan photo album on our RSAWEB facebook fan page. The photo must demonstrate to the world just how much you love The Killers. The photo showing the most love from fellow facebookers in the form of ‘likes’ will be awarded the tickets. Remember, creativity will help you get the most votes, so don’t be afraid to let your imagination run wild.

Some suggestions:

– Shave ‘I love The Killers & RSAWEB’ into you cat’s fur.
– Build a 40 foot statue of Brandon Flowers out of lego.
– Etch ‘I’m going to see The Killers on the 4th of December’ into your boss’s car door.
– Name your newborn baby ‘Mr. Brightside’

All we need to see is the photographic evidence. And yes, you may upload multiple photos… but keep it clean please.

Upload your photos on our facebook fan album.

Start uploading now!


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RSAWEB Soccer Clinic

November 11, 2009


With 2010 just round the corner, we were inspired to invest in South Africa’s future soccer stars. To achieve this, we partnered with Upward Sports to provide a soccer clinic for the children of the Ocean View community in Cape Town. Some of our office super stars also pitched in to lend some of their skills to the clinic…

RSAWEB TV was on hand to cover the action. Take a look…


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Getting heard above all the noise on the web is becoming harder. The old mantra of, “build it and they will come” certainly does hold true on the web in many cases. There are many obvious success stories of this, ala Google, but as more of your competitors or even other websites compete for your customers eyeballs, standing out of the crowd is what you need to get right.

What is certainly true for all sites/products/services on the web is that information is king. He (or she) who holds the data and presents it in the most useful/usable format normally wins. Data can come in multiple forms: text, images, video, maps, news etc and can be presented in multiple formats: blogs, news sites, Facebook, Twitter, email, newsletter, etc.

So, how do you become successful?

1. Be interesting
Ego plays a massive part in developing a good web presence. Tell your visitors that you are good. A good way to do this with industry recognition, testimonials from customers etc.

So to stroke your ego, get connected on Twitter & Facebook and talk about yourself, your product and your site. Build up your network of followers to some decent numbers and compare yourself against your competition. Entice customers & new Twitter followers with interesting campaigns, maybe do a product discount when you increase your twitter followers to 100 (for newbies) or up it by 10% or some other strategic number.

2. KISS – Keep it simple stupid
Simplicity and usability are two of the most important factors on the web. It’s one thing having great data, but if your delivery mechanism isn’t good, it’s worth nothing. Change things slowly, introduce new concepts and see how they perform. Are you getting more visitor traffic through a new page or menu item you created since last week?

3. If you can’t measure it, how can you manage it?
Tracking is one of those vital feedback mechanisms. You need to know how people are getting to your site, what they are searching for, how long they stayed for, how many pages they viewed etc. (you need to track this via Google Analytics)

Analytics provides a FREE & amazingly powerful tool to track your users. You can also track ‘conversions’ and evaluate how these customers got to your site. Conversions can be a specific page view, like a contact form submission or a newsletter signup or even a product order.

4. Build, release. FAST (for online applications)
If your development cycle is months, by the time you have finished building it, is your product even going to suite the users? Taking a lesson from the Agile/Scrum approach to development, build something quickly and release it. Get user feedback comments and see if they like it. Customers know what they want, you can make an educated guess, but that’s exactly it, a guess. Stop guessing, release new features quickly, take a features poll from users and stop trying to understand the customers needs, get them to tell you what THEY want. Decide, build, release, get feedback, reiterate. (in 1-2 months cycles max)

5. Leverage your user base
Engage your users on Facebook, Twitter and other social media applications. Happy users are great promoters of your products. If you are selling something, create an affiliate marketing program, giving them a % of the revenue from the sale. The power of Twitter and other social media allows interesting products/services to go viral. When a new user signs up, encourage them to follow you on twitter. Possibly offer new features in advance to users that ‘retweet’ your message to their friends (this is a great way to get followers)

6. Offline Actions
The biggest debate always revolves around what offline actions one should take. Talk to as many people as possible about your product/service. Get networking, attend conferences, get invited to speak at conferences (this happens when you become the ‘expert’ in your field) and tell friends & family. Be passionate.

7. The bigger picture
Don’t expect overnight success, all these things take time to get right. Quality content & good presentation is the key, the more useful information presented in a good format, the more success you can expect to have.

Summing up
We often see companies advertising “Get listed on Google” or some other marketing tool, used to entice customers to signup for a website or web hosting, don’t be tempted, if it actually worked, everyone would be using it (even us and we don’t!). Customers also get a website built by someone else and then wonder why they don’t get any visitors.

Realistically it’s all about your content and who links to your content. Be interesting, put some effort into marketing your website and people will come, be boring and people won’t. Google Adwords is also the fastest way to get your website out there (you pay money for people clicking on adverts).

Read up on SEO (search engine optimisation) and SEM (search engine marketing) – start implementing these strategies, they do require a lot of time and energy, but they do really work.


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Securing WordPress has become a major challenge, it is certainly true that WordPress’s success is it’s Achilles heel. As new bugs/hacks are discovered, hackers, spammers and the like are quick to pounce on these opportunities to infect blogs with rubbish content and junky backlinks. Securing your WordPress based site is a crucial step to keeping your site online, your traffic flowing to it and protecting that all important Google ranking. (Google will penalise you for link to spam.)

Keep WordPress updated
Simple yet extremely effective. Updating WordPress is usually really simple. The WordPress guys have made it as simple as possible, there is an auto upgrade function built into WordPress, which makes it ultra simple. A word of caution, if you have hacked the WordPress code, your task just got massively harder. So my advice –> don’t. Keep it simple.

WordPress plugins
Definitely keep these updated. WordPress plugins do have security flaws from time to time. Rather keep them updated, again via a simple upgrade in your plugins manager.

Secure WordPress
There are some nifty plugins that can help you secure WordPress that are easy to install and work like a charm. Secure WordPress plugin

Secure your passwords
For heaven’s sake, why did you make that password for your admin user ‘password’ when you reset it? This is the easiest trick in the book, its called a brute force attack and a cracker will simply keep testing your admin or other users passwords, its just a matter of time. Make sure you use long passwords with multiple characters. Then install this: Login lockdown plugin.

Remove the WordPress version string in your theme
This prevents hackers seeing which version of WordPress you are running. This makes it harder for them to determine where they should start attacking your site. This and other smaller but very useful tweaks can be done easily by installing the WP-Security-Scan plugin.

Server Security – Intelligent blocking
This is harder to achieve if you don’t actually own or manage the server. Modsecurity is a great plugin for the apache web server and there are specific rules that can be added to your apache config to protect it even further. ModSecurity is a module for open source web servers, like apache, that acts like a detector & firewall. It works by providing protection from a wide range of typical attacks against web applications on a web server (like WordPress). For RSAWEB Hosting customers, speak to us for help around this.

For top-class WordPress Web Hosting go and check out RSAWEB. Anything from a small WordPress site to  super-large WordPress sites are catered for.


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Amazon Kindle Unboxing

November 06, 2009


Today, to my amazement a shiny new Amazon Kindle arrived on my desk. While not totally unexpected as I had ordered it online last week, I was expecting customs to give me a call first. Resisting the urge to tear open the packaging, I took a few photo’s of the beautifully packaged e-book reader for your enjoyment. Below are the first photo’s of Amazons little wonder taken at my desk.
(more…)


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Broadband Price Cuts!

October 26, 2009



Breaking News: RSAWEB ADSL users are receiving big price cuts.

Recent developments in the South African broadband landscape have empowered us to pass on significant broadband savings to our customers. It’s about time.

With immediate effect, we are pleased to announce price cuts on our Super, Premium and Ultra DSL products. Selected packages have been discounted by as much as 60%, which will bring much needed relief to broadband consumers.

Go check out our new broadband pricing structure today.

Existing DSL customers will be billed according to our new pricing starting from next month’s (November) billing cycle.


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WordPress plugins can add awesome functionality to your blog without writing a single line of ‘code’. In this tutorial, we discuss which plugins we find useful and which ones we think can add value to your website.

To find and install any of these plugins, login to your wordpress admin panel and go to ‘Plugins’ and ‘Add New’, type in the plugin name below and click ‘Install’ – you may need to configure the plugin thereafter, most of the time this is done in the admin panel.

Gravatars
Gravatars are a great way to bring interactivity to the comments section of your posts. The Gravatars plugin gives your comments personalisation. The Gravatar service is one that users upload a photo once and it will be retrieved if they comment on your site or other sites and the photo will be displayed. Many of your visitors may already have a Gravatar. It’s a simple easy way to identify users and a great way for you to have a profile picture that interacts with your users when you comment.

Google XML Sitemaps
Sitemaps assist search engines by making content easier to find, by generating an XML sitemap that all major search engines can view. Sitemaps give your site additional visibility that other competing websites probably won’t have. Every time you create a new post or page, the sitemap is generated and Google is notified of your new page. This is definitely a must have.

Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the de facto standard now for evaluating your website’s traffic. This essential tool shows you all sorts of data. Learning to interpret it can take your website from good to great. Installing this plugin means you don’t have to go and fiddle the code manually to add Google Analytics tracking code into your theme.

Google Analytics Dashboard

This nifty dashboard plugin shows you your visitor statistics on your WordPress admin dashboard. This gives you a quick overview to how many visitors you are receiving and other interesting stats without having to login to Google Analytics.

WordPress Caching with Hypercache
Caching can give your users a much faster webpage load time. It allows the server that your WordPress site is installed on to do less work. We have typically seen on busy WordPress sites of drops of up to 80% CPU utilisation on busy servers because caching was not installed, this can make a massive difference to your end users as the page will load significantly faster and their experience will be significantly improved.

Don’t use WP-Cache, but rather WP-Super-Cache or Hyper cache, both are excellent. Hyper cache is easier to install and disrupts existing WordPress sites less.

Akismet Antispam
This antispam plugin works wonders for spammers trying to post rubbish in your comments section. You will need to get a WordPress API key – very simple, its free and all you need to do is  insert it into the settings of the Akismet plugin in WordPress. Don’t worry, you can do all this via the WordPress Admin panel.

WordPress Database Backup
A simple plugin that backs up your valuable website. Once installed, you can backup your websites database and download it via FTP from an RSAWEB Web Hosting or get it emailed to an address (not always guaranteed to work due to the large potential size) actually a backup happens whenever you do anything major. It’s always better to be safe.

All in One SEO Pack
This enables your website to have proper ‘Title’ tags – this makes Google like your site more, its more descriptive (see the blue bar at the top of the window? That’s the ‘title bar’) and its essential to have good Search Engine Optimisation.

Subscribe to comments
Also a definite for websites/blogs that want to allow comments on articles. This allows a user to leave a comment and get notified of a reply. Eliminating the need for them to return to check the page to see if someone has replied. A definite must.

Conclusion
We regularly use these plugins and there are many different variants of some of these plugins. They will greatly improve your ability to manage your WordPress site and make it more appealing to the end user. All the plugins above can be installed directly from the WordPress Admin interface by going to ‘Plugins’ and ‘Add New’ and then searching for the name as they appear above.

How is your wordpress experience going? Post a comment about it and tell us which plugins you like. What other plugins do you want to see mentioned in this list?

For WordPress Web Hosting check us out.


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