Wordpress

Web Analytic tools are must have for anybody running a website since they give interesting insight into your site’s traffic patterns.

Woopra Web Analytics was mentioned/reviewed by so many sites that I had to give it a try.

After signing up for Woopra, I immediately proceeded towards the downloads page. I installed the Desktop Client (for which I had to upgrade the JRE on my system to 1.6) and also installed the WordPress Plug-in.

Only after installing the WP Plugin did I realize that I had to have an "Invitation Code" to use Woopra !

Without an code you need to wait till Woopra inspects and

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This site is powered by WordPress and when it came online 2 years back for some odd reason I opted to install WordPress on the "blog" sub-domain. I guess it was popular then to have the blog installed on its own domain.

And even though I knew the kind of content I would write, I still opted to use my name for the domain. Something which I can't change easily now :)

venukb.com remained as a dummy entry point and it just used to redirect to venukb.com/blog. I have always wanted to get rid of the sub-domain and move to the root domain.

I was of the opinion then that the move would affect the Pagerank

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There has been another round of pagerank  update and I see that many sites have got a higher pagerank and few of them have even managed to get a PR of 4 within few months !

This site had a PR of 4 from quite some time and even during the last update where few sites were penalized for selling Text Link Ads the PR of this site remained at 4

At that time, I thought that I wasn't penalized since I was not selling Text Link Ads from my home page (which had PR4) and was only having post level ads (Around 5 post level ads were active).

However this round of pagerank update has taken the

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Exactly an year back I wrote about moving this blog from GoDaddy to Dreamhost. The story continues and this year I have moved to Media Temple (referral link).

I had considered Media Temple last year, however the site revenues weren't enough to match the rates quoted by Media Temple. Even this time around I thought a lot before choosing  Media Temple. I did see a lot of negative reviews on Media Temple but I guess you would see that for every other hosting provider.

You need to use the service to come to a conclusion and MT does have a 30 day money back guarantee option.

Why shift from Dreamhost ?

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WordPress 2.5 was released some days back and I upgraded to the same with some minor hiccups. There were high expectations from me and everybody with respect to the Admin user interface.

I for one was totally disappointed when I found out that the menu items in the interface were taking almost 50% on my 15" widescreen.

Also I found that it was not just me complaining; Many found that the new admin interface was not that user friendly including Dean Robinson who came up with Fluency Admin Theme for WordPress 2.5. The theme moves the main options to a sidebar and the sub-options to the top

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WordPress, the publishing platform used for this site just got upgraded to version 2.5. As usual I used the Dreamhost "one click upgrade" and the upgrade to 2.5 was done within minutes. (I love this feature in Dreamhost :) )

However it took more than a few minutes to actually get the site going after the upgrade.

The first major issue was that I could not login to the WordPress Admin Console ! The error message indicated a fatal exception while registering the widgets and hence the dashboard could not be opened.

I knew that the error was related to a WordPress plugin and hence checked on the

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The new year has bought in a new look to my weblog. Here is a snapshot of the site opened in Safari.

The last update was done in July 2007. After checking lot of themes, I finally settled on the Freicurv theme. I still have to work on the ad placements and some of the page templates (archives etc). Meanwhile check out the new look and let me know your thoughts on the same.

Windows Live Writer Beta 3 was released a few days back and this is one tool from Microsoft that deserves a lot of praise. It definitely simplifies the task of writing posts for your blog.

Beta 3 has the following new features:

 

 

Insert videos using new 'Insert Video' dialog

Upload images to Picasaweb when publishing to your Blogger blog

Publish XHTML-style markup

Use Writer in 28 additional languages

Print your posts

Justify-align post text

Better image handling (fewer blurry images)

Resolved installation issues from last release

Many other bug fixes and enhancements

More on

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After launching the Internet browser on my HTC Touch, the first site I opened was of my own blog. The browser almost came to halt while loading the home page. When I loaded other sites such as GMail, Flickr, Google Search one thing I noticed was that all these sites had a page compatible with the mobile browser. The content fitted exactly to the bounds of the handset display. Images were kept to minimal, so was the content ! A search for Wordpress+mobile on Google took me to Alex Kings Wordpress Mobile Edition plug-in for Wordpress. The package consists of a Wordpress plug-in which detects requests from Mobile Browsers. It also has a Wordpress theme which ...

The recent problem of spam comments bypassing the Akismet filter made me realize that its too bad to rely completely on one service. For one I spent considerable amount of valuable time deleting comments. The other problem was created when these spam comments made their way as "subscription comments" and I got many mails from users asking me the steps to un-subscribe for the comments. Here are some of the alternatives to prevent comment spam: Bad Behavior Akismet focuses only on handling Comment/Pingback/Trackback spam. Your blog might be subject to other attacks such as email harvesting, automated cracking attempts etc. Bad Behavior, conceived in 2005 as a fingerprinting method for HTTP requests, ...