Moving from one web hosting to another has become one of the annual activities. However this time around, I had totally forgot about the hosting renewal; this post after 4 months would explain why I forgot about the hosting renewal

An automatic renewal (which I had not subscribed for) was tried by Media Temple which failed and I got an email notice of the same. 

Media Temples renewal charges of 170$/year was a bit too high this time around; the first year charges were also around the same, but only that the intention of moving to MT last year was different.

Google search for “MT Alternative” resulted in WebFaction.

Unlike MT, I could not find any bad reviews on WebFaction. Also at 8.5$/year (1 year prepayment) WebFaction looked reasonable compared to MT

Note: 5 year prepayment brings down the monthly charges to 5.5$

Also unlike MT, WebFaction comes with one click installers for almost 50 applications including Django, Rails, Drupal and WordPress

WebFaction control panel UI looks user unfriendly at the first glance; however once you start using it you wouldn’t stick to the initial opinion.

Moving hosting from one provider to another is a challenge which I seem to have mastered over the past 3 years. This site has traveled from:

GoDaddy -> Dreamhost -> Media Temple -> WebFaction

In the initial years, the biggest problem was of moving the data. The best solution that I have to found to resolve this problem is:

1. Sign up with the new hosting
2. tar.gz the files which needs to be moved.
3. Once the account on the new hosting is created, you would receive the server details (IP/User Account/SSH Account etc)
4. SCP the file from the existing hosting to the new hosting. Even if the data to be moved is in GB’s, it won’t take much time
5. Unzip the archived files on the new server; setup and test the application (in my case it was all WordPress) on the new hosting. You can access the application on the new server using IP since the domain name would still be pointing to the old server
6. Once the testing is done, you can go about changing the name servers to point to the new server.

It took about an hour or so for me to execute the above 6 steps; However the DNS changes does take a day or more to propagate

WebFaction looks like a decent host and hopefully this annual activity of moving from one hosting to another will stop at WebFaction.

If you want to suggest a better hosting provider, the comments section is always open.

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 approves your site !

I don’t understand as to why Woopra lets users download the software even before the user has added a site and has a valid Website ID! 

I let out my frustration on Twitter and looks like someone at Woopra has been tracking tweets on their application. My site was immediately approved ! (It might have been just coincidence as well )

Woopra Client

Woopra Client application has been written in Java and does make extensive use of the Image4J library to render the pretty looking UI.

The combination of Blue, Green, Yellow and White colors on the UI does manage to create an optical illusion !

Not sure as to what prompted the Woopra team to use this as the default color scheme. The other color schemes included in the UI are also of not much help.

What I liked ?

• Live traffic view including the Geographical view. It lets users see the active users and the number of pages they visited on your site.
• Starting a conversation with the “online” visitor (Some visitors might find this annoying )
• Visitor Tagging
• Geo Overlay on the Analytics Tab
  

What I did not like ?

• The need to install the client software on every other system
• The UI Color Scheme
• The Dashboard view
• A scrolling bar status bar which is so annoying and yes there is no option to disable it or pause it !

Also the visitor count data displayed by Woopra was only 75% of what I saw on Google Analytics or Mint. Not sure on the kind of visitors being dropped by Woopra !

Till Woopra fixes the above issues and improves the UI of the client I would recommend anyone to try out Mint Web Analytics.

I am a big fan of this app for a number of reasons including

• Ability to view the Analytics data on a Single page
• Live Traffic Data
• Best looking user interface
• Filtering/Analysis of data by third party Pepper’s
• Ability to host on your own server

Have you tried Woopra ? What is your view on Woopra ?

What analytics software do you use to track your site visitors?

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 and hence had held making such a move.  After the recent tanking of Pagerank I decided that it was the right moment to make this switch.

I had 2 ways of making this switch:

Method 1 – Changing the Blog Address in WordPress Options

WordPress can power your site’s root and yet can be copied to a separate subdirectory. In my case blog was the subdirectory and I could quickly switch to root by just changing the Blog Address in the WordPress Options.

You should also update the permalinks and rebuild the sitemap after making the above change.

However Google’s Index and sites linking to your pages would still have "blog" in the URL and this requires you to redirect all those requests to the root domain. I accomplished this easily by adding the following directive in .htaccess file

Redirect 301 /blog http://www.venukb.com

Everything worked fine until I tried to access the WordPress Admin console which was at venukb.com/blog/wp-admin. Since the /blog was redirected to root, I was never able to gain access to the admin console and with the mod_alias directive, there is no way to exclude access to a particular URL.

The only option was to fall back on mod_rewrite and use RewriteRule in conjunction with RewriteCond. I searched in a lot of forums for putting in the right rewrite directive only to end up in a confused state.

mod_rewrite is a one complex library and regular expression is something which I can probably never understand

If someone has already done this with mod_rewrite, please let me know as to what directive worked for you

Method 2 – Moving the WordPress contents to the root domain

I gave up on mod_rewrite and moved my entire blog directory including the WordPress core files to the root. With SSH access to the server, this was done in seconds with a mv command. I also backed up and restored the .htaccess file on the root domain (If you copy the .htaccess residing on the blog sub-domain, you would end up with 500 Internal Server Error)

In addition to Blog Address, I even changed the WordPress Address and as in the previous method, updated permalinks and the sitemap. The mod_alias Redirect directive worked like a charm and I had no issues in accessing the WordPress Admin console.

What else do I need to do ?

The main thing to do after moving to a different domain is to set the permanent redirection (301) and building your sitemap. The pages in your blog might have linked to several other internal pages and all this might point to the "blog" URL’s.

Even though the Redirection will take care of these links, its better off to modify these links.I am considering using the Search Regex WordPress plugin from Urban Giraffe.

If you are using a desktop based client like Windows Live Writer to publish posts, you have to update the account settings.

You might also want to monitor the 404 errors on your server and for this I am again using Urban Giraffe’s Redirection Plugin

Redirection plugin is also a powerful way of setting up Redirects in WordPress and this method totally avoids .htaccess. The author is also testing a beta version of this plugin which modified the .htaccess file itself.

If you also happened to move WordPress across domains, do share your experience.

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 PR from 4 to 2, reminding me of QOT’s PR downgrade from 6 to 3 !

I am not sure if dividing existing PR by 2 is the way of Google penalizing sites selling text link ads. I immediately stopped Text Link Ads and in a way it was even easy since a new month just began !

I have also raised a reconsideration request with Google !

But again I am not completely sure if TLA is the core reason behind this downgrade ! I moved my hosting from Dreamhost to MT some time back and one of the biggest mistakes I made was not to check on the XML sitemap.

After the hosting change, the XML sitemaps generator plugin for some odd reason started putting the XML file on venukb.com/blog while Google was searching for it on venukb.com. I had manually set to venukb.com and during the move, the option changed to “Automatic” and happened to select the subdomain.

And I realized this only after 3 weeks ! Duh !

The crawl stats also confirmed that the sitemaps were not accessible from quite some time !

I fixed the issue and even then I see that 0 pages from sitemaps are included in the search index.

Has the PR downgrade affected traffic ?

This site for one gets almost 80% of the traffic from search engines (mainly Google) and I have noticed that some of the high traffic pages are no longer in the Top 10 !

I do see a dip in the number of unique visitors, but after including the landing page, the pageview count hasn’t changed much.

I am hoping the reconsideration request to fix the PR And if any of you are running Text Link Ads and also get a huge amount of traffic from Google, you should consider switching the text ads off !

And yes be careful about XML sitemaps when you are moving to a new hosting ! (Though not sure if this is also the reason for downgrade !)

Talking of PR, do share your experience as well ! Has it improved ? Do you see change in traffic with the improved PR ?

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 ?

One main reason was the downtime that this site experienced while running on Dreamhost. At one point of time, the pingdom service used to report a downtime almost every day.

The site speed also was no way near to normal and this definitely affected the pageviews (People who come via search engine referral would hesitate to explore the site, if the landing page is too slow)

One positive thing about Dreamhost is the quality of support. I got response for almost all my support queries and unlike the site response time, I have no complaints on the support response time !

Isn’t MT expensive ?

Some of the best hosting options would cost around 10-12$/month and MT quotes around 20$/month.

However if you do a 1 year pre-payment you do save 40$. I used a coupon code and saved another 15% to finally end up with 14$/month charge which in my opinion isn’t too much if your site is monetized.

And you do have the option of reselling the hosting and this can also help in bringing down the monthly expense.

Isn’t moving data a pain ?

Moving all the data from one server to another is a time consuming task and is one of the reasons users would hesitate to switch to a different hosting. Unlike my previous move from GoDaddy to Dreamhost, this time around I had a lot of data to move !

Transferring the data from Dreamhost to my local system and then transferring it back to Media Temple would have definitely taken time. However I used one simple yet powerful SCP command to transfer the files within 10 minutes !

For e.g. to move my entire domain related files (not the database), I just executed the following command from the SSH terminal on my Dreamhost server

scp -r venukb.com u...@mediatempleaccessdomain:/backup

Note: For the above approach to work, you need to signup with MT and should have received the Access Domain related data and the login credentials for the access domain

I also dumped the database using mysqldump and again used SCP to move the SQL files onto the MT server.

The transfer was done at a blazing speed of 2MB/second. Once the data was moved, all I had to do was to move the domain related files to the MT specific server paths and restoring the SQL data on to the newly created MySQL database on MT grid.

You can even test the new setup by modifying your hosts file on Windows (i.e. I pointed venukb.com to the new MT server) and once its tested you can go ahead and modify the name servers to point to the new domain (This modification in the DNS will take some time to propagate)

Is MT worth the price ?

It just been 2 days and I am not in the state to comment on the hosting performance and support. In a few days I should be able to make a good judgement on MT and will definitely keep you posted

If anybody is already on MT, let me know how your experience has been till now (I do read a lot of posts where people write about moving to MT, but have seen very few who have written about the actual experience ! )

Meanwhile for all those keeping a tab on this blog’s RSS feed, please do open up this post in a browser and let me know if the site is loading up fast . It’s also an opportunity for you to checkout the new theme running on this blog

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 (screenshot below)

It just looks so neat and it even simplifies the user navigation. The only limitation of this theme is that it works only with CSS2 compliant browsers i.e. Firefox, Safari and IE8. If support is added for the other browsers, it should definitely qualify to become the official theme for WordPress Admin UI !

Thanks to Raj Gaurav for pointing me to this plugin!

Download Fluency Admin Plugin

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 2.5 compatibility list. The culprit plugin was the “Disable WordPress Widgets” which I had configured on my previous WordPress installation.

To fix this problem, I just SSH’ ed to my web server and deleted the plugin file.

When I used to upgrade manually, I always used to disable all the WordPress plugin’s. (This is also mentioned in the WordPress upgrade instructions).However if your hosting provides a one click upgrade, you should be more careful to ensure that you don’t run into problems like above.

The other problem I had is with Alex Kings Popularity Contest plugin. The plugin just wasn’t activating and if you are also facing the same problem all you need to do is to edit the popularity-contest.php (Line 59, if you are using the latest version)

if (!isset($wpdb)) {
        require('../../wp-blog-header.php');
        akpc_init();
}

The line require(‘../../wp-blog-header.php’) has to be changed to require(‘../wp-blog-header.php’);

WordPress 2.5 has a refreshing welcome change to the UI of the admin console. However one thing I noticed was that too less of content was displayed on my 15″ widescreen monitor. For e.g. check this image below

The site name along with the various menus itself ate almost 50% of the screen. I guess while WordPress developers test on their PC,  they always do it on big high resolution 21″-29″ monitors. I am not sure if there is anything else which can explain the reason for this being overlooked.

However I loved the Automatic plugin upgrade feature, its very useful. Also I thought that the “upgrade automatically” link should have opened in a window of its own by default

Have you upgraded to WordPress 2.5 ? What is your opinion on WordPress 2.5 ?

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 Windows Live Writer

• WLW – Powerful Desktop Based Weblog Client
• Live Writer Beta 2 Reviewed

If you are still using your favorite blogging platform’s web based console to write posts, its high time you switched to Windows Live writer !

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 takes care of rendering your site on the mobile browser.

You can easily read all the posts with no need for horizontal scrolling. The page fits your device display perfectly.

Here are some snapshots of my blog opened in IE mobile browser.

Even the images fit nicely into the display width. You almost have the same experience as reading on your normal web browser.

And if somebody is still interested in seeing the original page (loaded with ads and sidebar), you can always exit the mobile edition and view the standard browser edition.

Is your site mobile browser friendly ? If not install and activate Alex Kings WordPress Mobile Edition Plug-in. Probably I should start tagging my buddies to install and activate this plug-in

Download WordPress Mobile Edition

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, has proven shockingly effective at identifying and blocking the kind of attacks described above. So with Bad Behavior activated, you would see far less comments filtered by Akismet. In a way Bad Behavior reduced the work load of Akismet.

Spam Karma

Shiv is of the opinion that Spam Karma is much better than Akismet. But other than Shiv, I haven’t heard of too many people voicing the same opinion. Is Spam Karma a worthy alternative to Akismet ? Opinions please

Extended Comment Options

This WordPress plug-in allows you to switch comments and/or pings on or off for batches of existing posts. Once the plug-in is activated, there is a new options page added via which you could control comments on your older posts.

As far as I am concerned, I would hate to switch off commenting on older posts. Most of my posts at least have no connection to the date it was written and hence it doesn’t make sense disabling comments !

WordPress Comment Management

Now this is one options which I completely overlooked. WordPress itself has a pretty good Comment moderation and comment blacklist feature. This can be accessed via “Discussion” on WordPress options page.

In comment moderation, you can add list of words commonly used by the spammers. If a comment contains any of these words in its content, name, URL, e-mail, or IP, it will be held in the moderation queue. You can input one word or IP per line. It will match inside words, so “press” will match “WordPress”.

Comment blacklist does the same thing except for the fact that it marks the comment as spam rather than adding it to the “Comment Moderation” list.

Using the above 2 options, I could have easily marked/moderated hundreds of comments with text: “Nice” & “interesting”

Any other options to prevent comment spam ?

P.S. Benedict has confirmed that Akismet is back in action. Irrespective of this, I would definitely adopt the above options except using the Extended Comment options plug-in.

There are thousands of WordPress themes available out there;every now and then I stumble on amazing themes which I would love to use for my site. The only thing keeping me off from doing this regularly is the effort required in modifying/customizing the theme.

I have made another theme change (4th) and this time I have adopted the Silhouette theme from Brian Gardner.

When Shankar initially showed me this theme, I felt that the header was a little dark. However when I applied and saw the theme in Safari Browser, it looked amazing.

The other reason for adopting this theme is the 3 column layout which I have been wanting to have from some time now. The theme does support WordPress widgets, however I am averse to using these widgets and hence used the “Disable WordPress widgets” plug-in.

The theme seems to be working fine in Firefox and Safari, but its breaking in IE 6.Can somebody confirm how the theme is behaving in IE 7 and Opera ?There are still lot of other stuff (Recent Comments,Top Commentators) etc which is still not in place.

If you are reading this post from your favorite RSS reader, spare some time to open the page and give your valuable feedback

Akismet, one of the best anti-spam webservice has helped lot of websites including mine in identifying and blocking spam comments and trackbacks. However from the past few days, I am spending more time deleting spam comments and these comments are also making way as comment subscription notifications.

The comment text is generally the same: “Nice“, “Interesting” etc.

Is anybody else facing the same problem ? Guess I should switch on the Bad Behavior plug-in

The sidebar now displays the list of Top commentators for this blog. This has been overdue from some time now.

Nate Sanden’s Top commentator plugin eased the task of showing the top commentators. It is currently shown only on the home page.

In order to accommodate this list on my 2 column theme, I have also decided to move the Blogroll to a separate page.

(Thanks to Shankar for pointing out the Blogroll Plugin)

Note: If you are using the Top Commentators plugin, you should also have a look at the 9 options that could be tweaked by editing the plugin. (Unfortunately, the plugin doesn’t come with a preference page.

I especially found the following options useful:

reset (’hourly’, ‘daily’, ‘weekly’, ‘monthly’, ‘yearly’, ‘#’)
This tells the plugin how often it should reset the comment count for users. For example: If you choose monthly, only comments from the current month will be counted towards a visitors comment count. If you use an integer such as 30, it will show all commentators for the last 30 days.

limit (any positive integer (1 – infinity))
This will limit the maximum number of users you want shown.

filter_users (comma seperated list of usernames)
This will filter out any usernames you don’t want shown. For example: ‘Administrator,Admin’.

filter_user_ids (comma seperated list of user id’s)
This will filter out any user_ids you don’t want shown. For example: ‘1,2′. 1 is almost always the ‘Admin’ user.

number_of_comments (y=yes, n=no)
If you want to only display the commentators name and not the number of comments he/she has made, set this to ‘n’.

List of Top commentators:

• ranjitsinh

The RSS subscribes for this site is tracked using the Feedburner service. From the past week I have been observing an change in the way the feed count is reported/calculated. I am not sure if I am the only one seeing this change.

The site had an average reader count of around 130 feed subscribers. On one Wednesday it suddenly fell to 75 (almost 50% reduction). I thought that there were a bunch of guys who got bored with my posts

The day I wrote a post on Windows Live Writer, the count again shot back to 137. Yesterday I didn’t write any post and the count is back to 70′s.

Feedburner never used to report statistics based on the post frequency/count.

Has Feedburner changed the way it reports the RSS subscribers ? Anybody facing a similar problem ?

The blog now has a new look and feel ! There is no major change and only the header layout is re-designed.

I always wanted to move the “Page” links on the sidebar and now it has a new place at the bottom of the header.

However I almost spent hours together for the right color combination of Header and menu containers. Even now the combination is kind of weird and I would request a creative mind to suggest a good color combination for the header.

Feel free to comment on the things you like and dislike about the blog layout.

Note: If you are reading this post from your favorite RSS reader, for a change you have to open the link in your favorite browser to check and suggest on the layout changes

Web Analytic tools are “must have” for anybody running a website. They give interesting insight into your site’s traffic patterns. The tools give data on number of people visiting your site, the search engine used to arrive at your site, the keyword used in the search engine and much more information about every visitor visiting your site.

Web Analytics Association has the following definition for Web Analytics:

Web Analytics is the objective tracking, collection, measurement, reporting and analysis of quantitative Internet data to optimize websites and web marketing initiatives.

There are lot of freely available web analytic tools and I have used a couple of them for the past 1 year

1. StatCounter
   The free service of StatCounter has limited functionality and you infer less data with more visitors visiting your blog.
2. Slimstat
   Slimstat is a mod of Shaun Inman’s Shortstat and is very similar to Mint except that it doesn’t have the “fresh look”.
3. Google Analytics
   As mentioned in one of my earlier post, I have used Google Analytics for the past 8 months and I found it difficult to get in terms with the user interface. Of all Google products, I believe Analytics has one of the worst navigation interface.

I had heard about Mint statistics package many times and had seen many positive review written about the application. Yet the 30$ price for the license was a big ask from me and hence resisted myself from trying the tool.

However with some Ad revenues coming in I decided to allocate a part of it to “have a mint” .

I have been now trying the application from the past 1 month and it’s totally worth the money spent. Its probably the only stats tool that you might need for your weblog.

So what’s great about mint ?

• Go have a look at the official website of Mint; Browse through the features and the screenshots and I am sure you will be tempted to try.
• Next have a look a the Live Demo at Designologue. Note that the demo is running the default “Thin Mint” configuration with no third-party Pepper (plugins) installed.

How is it better than other tools?

• The analytics application is hosted on your server and you have complete control over the configuration and the data collected by the analytics tool.
• Its probably one of the best looking statistical tool.
• You can get information about the visitor count, the referrer, the recent pages, browser used by visitor and all other information in a single page (In Google Analytics you have to make at least 10 clicks to gather the ingratiation displayed by Mint)
• You can refresh information displayed by each widget almost instantly.
• The application is extensible in the sense that you could install many third-party peppers(plugins) to extract and display useful information from the statistical data collected by mint.

All in all a great tool to have as part of your website ! So go ahead a “have a mint“. (Be sure to run the Compatibility suite to check if your hosting supports Mint)

If there are any other web analytics package that you use and would like to recommend, please leave a note in the comment section.

Kawaiikuma at DoshDosh has been running a interactive experiment from some time called as “Ultimate Technorati Favorites Exchange“. (Thanks to Garry for pointing me to this programme)

After I left a comment in DoshDosh’s post 100 people have add this blog as their favorite. (Before I “enrolled” for the programme, the count stood at 7).

Increase in the favorite count will have a effect on the Technorati ranking of the site and hence might improve the traffic to the site over the period of time.

In sprit of this experiment I am also extending the Technorati Favorite Exchange.

Participating in this programme/experiment is very easy

1. Click on the link below to favorite my blog to your Technorati Favorites.

   

2. Leave a comment mentioning the link to add your blog to my Technorati favorites.

Link Format http://www.technorati.com/faves/?add=YOUR_BLOG_LINK

Note

Akismet might misbehave and log the comment as spam. I will keep a check on the spam page, however if I miss any of your comments, please contact me through the contacts page.

Backlinks are the incoming links to a website or web page and the number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of the website or a web page.

Search engines often use the number of backlinks that a website has as one of the factors for determining the website’s search engine ranking. For example, Google’s PageRank algorithm uses backlinks to help determine a site’s rank.

In today’s SEO world, more than 95% of the focus is on building quality backlinks.

BackLinkWatch lets you discover the number of sites linking to your site or web page.

It also lists the page rank of the page linking to you. You can also find out about the links using the “nofollow” flag.

Also it seems to be using Yahoo Web Service to gather and list the backlink data.

The service is free to use and it allows you to check the backlink of any website. Go ahead and check your sites backlinks at BackLinkWatch.

A landing page is the first page seen by a visitor visiting a site. (Generally from a search engine)

Seth Godin hailed as the ultimate entrepreneur of Information Age has a very interesting say on Landing pages.

Taking a cue from that article I integrated the “Landing Site” plugin for WordPress.

The plugin does the following tasks:

1. Retrieves the HTTP referrer from the referral URL
2. If its a valid reference (search engine); retrieves the keyword used in the search
3. Retrieves the posts related to this keyword and lists the same.

Example screenshot for a search done via Google for Keyword “Airtel Data Card“

Is it really helpful ?

I am not in a state to deliver that verdict as of now. But I have seen the landing page in many sites and it does help in finding useful content. Sometimes you actually stumble upon the right content via the landing pages !

So if you haven’t still integrated this feature its high time you did

Download Landing Site plugin (For WordPress only)

Gravatar, the service which lets weblogs display user provided pictures is now in private Beta.

Gravatar was taken down few weeks back for various reasons. Just when many people thought that the service was dead Gravatar 2.0 was announced.

If you are interested in joining the private beta leave a comment on this post.

If you want to know more about “Globally Recognized avatar” check this post

Akismet, one of the best anti-spam webservices has helped lot of websites in identifying and blocking spam comments and trackbacks.

However the Admin page of the Akismet plugin in WordPress has always been annoying.

Prior to version 2.0, all the comments caught by Akismet Webservice were shown in a single page.

In version 2.0 the comments are displayed in multiple pages, however the admin page is still annoying.

When I logged into the WordPress Admin Console (after 3 days) I saw that Akismet had done a good job by marking about 912 comments as spam ! Also the comments were displayed over 19 pages.

Now to the problems in this admin page:

1. There is only a “Delete all” option available on the page. Going by the quality of the service, I could blindly delete all the comments, but many a times I have seen some genuine comments being marked as spam by the service.
   What I would like to see is a “Select All” option which will allow you to select all the comments in the active page and a “Delete” option to delete those comments.
   As of now Akismet expects you to go over all the 912 comments in one shot and delete/moderate them. What a pain
2. Akismet admin page also has a “Search” feature. Now can anybody tell me what I can search in a page filled with spam comments ? Is there a way to find genuine comments using this feature ?

This is one of the testimonials about the service on the Akismet home page

Before Akismet I was spending more time deleting spam than creating content. Now I can focus on actually blogging! – Sarah King

It turns out that even after using Akismet I am spending more time moderating the comments ! Anybody having a similar experience ?

Ultimate Tag Warrior, one of the best plugin’s for WordPress is broken on WordPress 2.1. Yesterday I noticed that some of my popular posts were showing “No Tags“.

These popular posts were among the few lucky posts in my blog which receive some comments. It turns out that the comments themselves were the culprits which were making the tag disappear.

In fact Neato has documented a temporary patch for this “tag resetting” problem. So if you have recently upgraded to WordPress 2.1 and if you are using UTW do the following

1. Install the latest UTW release
2. Modify ‘ultimate_save_tags()’ function on ‘ultimate-tag-warrior-actions.php’ at line 502

if (isset($_POST['comment_post_ID'])) return $postID;
if (isset($_POST['not_spam'])) return $postID; // akismet fix
if (isset($_POST["comment"])) return $postID; // moderation.php fix

The first line already exits, you need to add 2 lines for akismet fix and moderation fix. However if you are moderating a comment, the tags will still vanish. So be careful

P.S. Also don’t forget to reset the permalinks after installing UTW; I just found out that Google Bot ended with a 404 while indexing the “tag” URL’s.

Two days back I upgraded to WordPress 2.1 and as mentioned in my earlier post, there are lot of new features added to 2.1 release. I saw many blogger’s mentioning the “AutoSave” feature as the highlight of the release.

As far as I know “AutoSave” would be the least useful feature for regular blogger’s since many of them would use a desktop based weblog client. The most important feature that I was looking forward to was the “Efficient Database code” which was supposed to improve the page load speed of the site using WordPress.

Sites hosting WordPress rarely survive the Digg Effect and this was blamed on the inefficient database code of WordPress. However after upgrading to WordPress 2.1 I am not observing any improvement in page loads !

Anybody noticed any speed difference in WordPress 2.1 or is my hosting really that bad ?

WordPress Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is available for download here. Some of the new features in 2.1 include

• Efficient database code, faster than previous versions
• Autosave
• Tabbed editor
• Lossless XML import and export for moving between WordPress blogs
• WYSIWYG spellchecker
• Search engine blocker for private blogs
• You can set any “page” to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else
• Links can now have sub-categories
• Redesigned login screen
• More AJAX to make custom fields, moderation, deletions, etc all instant
• Pages can now be drafts, or private
• Minor admin redesign
• Upload manager
• Faster dashboard

I setup the 2.1 release on my local WordPress blog. Here are some snapshots of the new features !

Admin Console

The simple boring Admin console has now been re-designed.

Tabbed Editor

Now you can switch between the web preview and the HTML code screen easily in the post editor. There is also a new spell checker included, however this is kind of redundant if you are using Firefox 2.0

New Export Feature

Now you can export your wordpress blog to a XML file and the same can be imported onto another blog. The nice thing about this feature is that all your post metadata is stored properly.

Blog Privacy Setting

If you want a totally private blog, you can now set an option to block search engines.

Front Page Setting

Now you can set any of the static pages as the front page of your blog

I am still testing the new release within my local setup, not sure If I should upgrade this blog with 2.1 RC 1 !

Batch Categories is a nice little plugin which will help you in organizing your WordPress blog categories.

Managing categories is a painful task in WordPress. The problem arises when you realize that you are writing more posts related to a topic and you decide to put all these posts under one category.

The only way to accomplish this (till now) was to to search for these posts, open each post in the admin console and add them under the new category. Batch Categories plugin helps you to do the same thing in a flash, literally

The plugin adds a new “Manage Categories” link in the WordPress administration console. On a first glance, the console does look a little confusing. There is no description for the buttons(Filter/Tag posts) used in the form.

Filter is used to search/filter the posts. Tag/Remove posts is used to assign/remove categories to the filtered posts.

It would have been nice to see a “Add/Delete Category” option in this page. Probably the plugin author can consider this for the next version

[Via QuickOnineTips]

I switched from K2 theme to Freshy some time back and though the theme looked nice, there were quite a few problems with the Freshy Theme.

1. Too many images in the theme (including bullets etc) made the page load very slow. A part of it is also because of the hosting speed (GoDaddy)
2. The theme was breaking up in IE6. Though IE7 seems to have fixed a lot of CSS issues, my analytics suggest that still many people are using IE6

Paul and Niel Patel of Pronet Advertising had come up a theme called 281 some time back and I was very impressed by that theme.

As Paul puts it, the intent was to have a strong WordPress theme that combined slick minimalist aesthetics, speed and search engine optimization.

I have to agree that it does look slick, does load faster and regarding SEO I have to wait a bit longer to see if there any improvements.

I would love to hear your comments too ! Does it look good ? Are the pages loading faster ? Also don’t forget to check out the new Archives template

You can download the 281 theme here. Also Eli Foner has adapted 281 with 3 columns.

WordPress is truly a great publishing platform. It is written completely in PHP and is backed by a MySQL database.

The true power of WordPress lies in the extensible plugin architecture. Also you can change the look and feel just by a click !

However the Admin interface of WordPress has always looked dull and there were various plugins to spruce up the UI.

One such widely used plugin was the WP Tiger Administration Plugin from Steve Smith.

I had tried the old version of this plugin and was not that impressed. Some of the pages especially the “Write Post” were not appearing properly even in Firefox

Steve has done a complete redesign of the plugin and has released Tiger Admin version 3. It boasts a more streamlined design(OS X style) and better plugin compatibility.

I installed the plugin and I was totally impressed with the new look and feel. Thanks Steve !

A picture is worth a thousand words. Check this snapshot

Matt should definitely consider adding this to the WordPress.com plugin list !

Since I wrote this post , I have been constantly searching for a good 3 column wordpress theme. I found a few good themes, however when I compared them with the K2 theme, something was always missing !

Today I have finally upgraded to a new theme called Freshy. Thanks to Thilak for finding out the theme

The theme has a nice look and feel and the sidebar has a flexible configuration. I can either have “splitted” 2 column or a normal 1 column configuration in the sidebar. However the theme doesn’t support widgets and I had to manually edit the sidebar.PHP !

The porting is still not completely over, I have added quite a bit of code from the previous k2 theme !

Don’t forget to scroll to the end of the page ! There is a nice little widget sitting at the bottom of the page.

Feedback please

When it comes to searching content in Blogs, the default search engine many people prefer is Technorati.

The Technorati engine is totally dedicated for searching within blogs. Bloggers/Publishers can ping the Technorati service to notify Technorati of new content in your blog.

In many of the publishing software including WordPress, this can be be done automatically/programmatically.

Google has become a synonym for Search, however when it comes to blog search Google is way behind.

It doesn’t mean that Google Blog search is bad, its only that the indexing of new content in blogs take lot of time and the content you get is generally not “fresh” i.e. until now !

Yesterday Google announced the introduction of Ping service for blogs. Now Bloggers can ping Google to notify about the new content and I guess this should make Google blog search service more usable.

If you are using WordPress you can programmatically ping the Blog search using the Pinging Service API

The update service can be accessed via:

Administration Console -> Options -> Writing

Add the following URL in the Update services:

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

I have still not tested whether pinging works properly, I will be testing it using this post itself

Test Update

After 5 min, I tried to search “Ping google” in Google blog search, however this post was not listed in the search results. Then I checked on the changes.xml of Google Blog search: http://blogsearch.google.com/changes.xml

I found my blog in the XML file, however the “rssUrl” field was empty !

http://www.venukb.com/blog/” rssUrl=”" when=”65″/>

As per the Pinging Service API, there should be 5 parameters with only one being optional.

Parameters: (should be sent in the same order as listed below)

• Name of site
• URL of site
• URL of the page to be checked for changes
• URL of RSS, RDF, or Atom feed
• Optional a name (or “tag”) categorizing your site content. You may delimit multiple values by using the ‘|’ character.

I am not sure if the rssUrl field is also mandatory ! Anybody had success pinging Google blog search ??

Has anyone noticed something new in the sidebar ? There was a section in the sidebar which looked something like this

The buttons could be used to subscribe for the RSS feeds of Online diary. I am not sure how many of them really used that feature, but that section did add a good visual feel the site

I just replaced it by FeedButton !

Its a one button replacement for all the RSS feed reader widgets. The Button Type can be normal as the one shown above, or you can select a “Long” type while creating the FeedButton.

As you over over the “Add feed to” button, the widget automatically expands to show all the different feed readers. Closing the widget is quite confusing, you need to manually click on the “close” link.

Do check the FAQ’s section too for some more tips on customizing the widget.

1. User A leaves a comment on a blog
2. User B (can be another user or the author of the blog) responds to the comment
3. There is no reponse back from User A on User B’s comments !

This might happen due to 3 reasons

1. User A saw User B’s response, but was not interested in continuing the converstaion
2. User A had nothing more to comment on User B’s comments.
3. User A was never aware that User B actually left a response to his comment.

If you are a kind of user who leaves a lot of comment in a lot of sites, it becomes difficult to track the conversation and will eventually lead to “Reason 3″ kind of problems.

I too faced this problem some time back and then I stumbled upon coComments. I had reviewed it some time back, check the link below.

Review of coComments

coComment allows users to track comments they�ve left on blogs in one centralized place. In effect, CoComment keeps a blog of your distributed comments. The main feature of the service is much like an email inbox – a place which centralizes all the comments you�ve made on different sites, shows you the follow-ups to those comments, and keeps them neatly organized and easy to follow for you.

And if you don’t want to regulary login to coComments to check the conversations, you can always subscribe to the RSS feeds of the conversations that you are tracking ! Makes using coCommnent much more easier

As of now I can see only these guys who are leaving comments on my site and are also using coComments.

Expecting to see more of the guys using this service .

P.S. Recently I found that there another service which helps you to track comments and it goes by the name of co.mments. I have not checked as to how exactly it works, if anyone has, please drop a “comment” on it

As you can see from the Archives section of my blog, I have compiled about 109 posts over the past 4 months.

One thing I could make out from Google Analytics statistics is that the entry and exit posts were same for most of the visitors. i.e visitors rarely check the other posts in the blog, this is especially more observed from visitors coming from Search Engines. (This is termed as Bounce Rates in Google Analytics).

Google has been the major referrer to Online Diary and the early inclusion of the blog in Google Sitemaps has done wonders ! Tag Cloud was added some time back to help users in digging the posts easily via tags.

I was considering adding the top posts/most popular posts from quite some time, however I didn’t want to bloat the sidebar with lot of content. Currently I have created a separate page for Top Posts and you can find it here. I would definitely like to have this as a part of my homepage header (as in Problogger), probably I will take care of this while shifting to a 3 column wordpress theme .

For those who are lazy to click on the Top Posts page, here is the list of Popular posts as of today

The Top Post content is delivered via Alex Kings Popularity Contest(PC) plugin and its pretty simple to configure and use. But I cannot completely agree that it really shows the top content of the site. The popularity rating of a post is calculated using various factors such as number of comments, trackbacks etc. Also if you are using the WordPress Cache plugin, the pages will be delivered via the cache and hence, the PC plugin will not consider those hits.Unfortunately I do use the WP Cache plugin and I have no intention of disabling it in the near time since I am constrained by my hosting speed.

If you don’t want a plugin calculating the popularity of the post, you should definitely consider using the Featured Posts Plugin. You can handpick your favorite posts and mark them as featured posts. Additionally, you can select an image for each feature and optionally add a small description.

P.S. The Top Post list was dynamically generated. I used the Exec-Php plugin which can be used to make php calls within static pages ! Do try it out

I was contemplating on a shift to a 3 column layout for quite some time now. With a current 2 column layout, it does become a little difficult to accommodate content.

With a single sidebar, any new block of content will just make the sidebar bigger and bigger and there is no way the visitors are going to scroll to see the content.

The 3 column helps you to make your sidebar look better, again care should be taken not to overload it with lot of links/content. I’ve been on the hunt for a good looking 3 column theme for quite some time. A three column version of K2 definitely makes sense, again there are lot of themes based on K2 and I am not able to decide.

Currently I am fishing at these sites to find the “one”:

Themes.WordPress.net

List of Themes on Codex

Alex King’s Theme Directory

BlogJoint Best WordPress themes

Suggest me some good 3 column wordpress themes …:)

P.S. I was going through my del.icio.us bookmarks and I found this article from A List Apart. Making me think, If I should design my own theme !! Nah.. I am too lazy for that

Windows Live Writer, the desktop based weblog client eased the task of writing/editing blogs. After I started using Live Writer, I had to rarely open the administration console of WordPress to edit the posts contents.

However to tag the posts, I still had to login to the administration console.

Live Writer has an SDK using which developers can develop plugins to add more functionality to the application. When I initially had a look at the Live Writer, I had only noticed the Flickr4Writer plugin.

I totally missed out Tag4Writer plugin, which can be used to insert tags to the posts. You can customize the template of the tag list via the options page.

I have customized the template as shown below

I believe now I have exhausted all reasons for which I used to login to the wordpress admin console regularly.

Download Tag4Writer

Update:
I guess the problem is not completely resolved, now I have duplication of tags, one inserted by the k2 theme and the one inserted in the post.

WordPress, the publishing software which runs this blog as well, is powerful because of 2 things

1. You can add additional functionality in the form of plugins.
2. You can change the look and feel of the blog just by a click and the changes are applied instantly.

Plugins

BlogJoint has compiled a list of Top WordPress plugins. You can find other posts mentioning the top plugins, only that this page mentions 80% of the plugins that I use !

These are some of the other plugins that I use and which are not listed in BlogJoints list

1. Autometa – Automatically generate and include HTML Meta Tags and Technorati Tags based on the full text of your post
2. Bad Behavior – Deny automated spambots access to your PHP-based Web site.
3. Browser Sniff – Detects web browser type and operating system. You can see this being used in the comments.
4. CoComment Enhancer – Inserts the needed javascript to improve interaction with cocomment.com of your WordPress blog. You can find more information on CoComments here.
5. Head Meta Description – Inserts HTML META description tag: excerpt/content brief for post/Page, description for category, and blog tagline for everything else. This plugin has helped in getting more traffic from search engines.
6. Google Analytics – This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics to your blog. Also as mentioned in my previous post, it can be used to track outbound links in your site.
7. WPVideo – Allows you to insert online videos in your post by providing the video url between the <video> tags. Also allows download the video (using Videodownloader) with a link below the video
8. SideBar Widgets – This plugin makes the management of contents in the sidebar very easy. I am not sure how BlogJoint missed this plugin !!

Themes

There are so many themes for wordpress and it makes it hard to decide on one theme. I have currently stuck to the K2 theme, and its working like a charm. Even then I am always on the lookout for much better looking themes and I am always buzy testing different themes on my local wordpress setup

SilentBits has put together a pretty nice list of Top WordPress themes. I Here are the links

Best WordPress Themes – Part 1

Best WordPress Themes – Part 2

I kind of liked the ScaryLittle and fSpring theme very much and might be shifting to one of these in the coming days.

Also do check his compilation of Non blog style wordpress themes. Kiwi and Squibble really stand out

Spam in Blogs is one of the major problem faced by most of the blog publishers. It shouldn’t be confused with splogs (Spam Blogs) which is often used to increase the PageRank of the affiliated sites, get ad impressions from visitors and use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed.

Comments are one of the major sources of spam in blogs. Unless your blog implements the Captchas, there is no way to distinguish between the comments registered by automated scripts and normal human users.

The Akismet Web service does a very good job in stopping Comment and Trackback spam. The service comes by default for blogs hosted on WordPress.com. The same can be adopted to work with hosted wordpress blogs. You just need to get the API key from a registered wordpress.com account and use it !

Whenever a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your blog it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down. My blog itself receives a lot of spam which fortunately is handled by Akismet.

However 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, has proven “shockingly effective” at identifying and blocking the kind of attacks described above.

Instructions for installing Bad Behavior on WordPress can be found here.

This application has been very effective and you can see the number of spam attacks it has blocked in footer of this page. After activating Bad Behavior, the number of spam comments caught by Akismet has reduced drastically.

In fact, Bad Behavior protects WordPress.com as well !!

Download Bad Behavior

Technobytez is the new forum for bloggers started by John. It was in a invite only mode from the past few days, and few of his friends including me have hepled in getting it going.

You can find more information about Technobytez in John’s post here.

If you are a blogger or a newbie and want to setup your own web site(blog), this forum should be helpful in resolving many of the issues.

I was checking out on a new analytics service called CrazyEgg. The application is supposed to help you get a clear picture of where your visitor are clicking including the Ads. Accordingly the user can change/customize the layout of the site. It does display the clicked links pretty nicely. You can view the results in 3 modes

1. Overlay – Get Details of Each Individual Link in the page

2. List – View full summary of click data

3. HeatMap – View what is hot and not on your page.

With the free version you can track only 2 pages and the number of visits is limited to 5000/month. The free plan does not support live reporting !. Check this snapshot for their pricing plans.

So is the paid version really worth ? The same functionality of tracking outbound links can be achieved in Google Analytics. I guess very few people are aware of this feature. The analytics is primarily used to track the incoming statistics. However you can also track outbound links in your site.

And with analytics no longer requiring “invites”, its more inviting to use this application

Tracking Outbound Links using Google Analytics

1. If you check the source of this page, you will observe for that all the hyperlinks, the onclick attribute is set. This is one example

onclick=”javascript:urchinTracker
(‘/outbound/article/www.ageofempires3.com’)

The onclick attribute is the one which does the trick. The urchinTracker takes care of logging the click in your analytics. (Note:The path doesn’t need to be exactly like mentioned above)

2. How to check in Google Analytics ? Open “Content Drilldown” under “Content Optimization”

It should show “/outbound” as one of the Directories. Click on the folder icon and you can further navigate through the links

You should be able to see the statistics for all the outbound links. Another way of checking this is through the “Top Exit Points” option

Just type “outbound” in the filter text to view the statistics.

3. Do I need to add the “onscript” manually for all the links ? If you use wordpress, the answer is NO . There is a nice little plugin called Google Analytics plugin available here. Once you activate the plugin, it automatically adds urchinTracker tracking script for all outbound links.

Check this link

http://www.intersmash.com/300images/

It has got images for

• Arrows
• Posts
• Comments
• Mails
• Bullets
• Print
• Carts and Bags

If you are thinking of customizing your wordpress theme, do consider using some of these images.