Wordpress

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 ...

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:

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 :D

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.

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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

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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

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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 :)

Click on the link below ...

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

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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:

Retrieves the HTTP referrer from the referral URL If its a valid reference (search engine); retrieves the keyword used in the search 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

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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