Wordpress

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:

There ...

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

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

if (isset($_POST['comment_post_ID'])) return

...

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 !

Orkut, the Internet social network service run by Google allows you to post personal or professional information and link to friends and acquaintances.

The service which was available only by invitation was recently opened up for all users. Also unlike other services you don't need a Google Account to access Orkut.

These are some of the things I have noticed about Orkut

Google doesn't market Orkut as a social network service. The services page has no mention of Orkut. Google Labs page also doesn't mention Orkut There is no official blog for Orkut Orkut is one service which clearly shows the usage of a Microsoft Technology (ASP) - I am not ...

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

...

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.

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) 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.

...

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

...

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

...

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 ...

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

...