Wordpress

I haven't written a post in the past 10 days and many of my friends including some readers started pinging me to check on my status :) I am very much alive, only that I was caught up with a little work and also decided to take some time off :D FeedDemon, the RSS reader that I use, was filled up with so many new posts !! I was forced to use the "Mark Folder Read" option for most of RSS folders. However I did a quick check on India Technology Bloggers feed and got myself updated with the latest happenings in the tech world. (Thanks to QOT for staring this network, its really useful) Orkut seems to have got ...

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, ...

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

I started the "Roundup" from April and somehow missed it in May. The roundup gives readers a second chance to have a look at some of the popular posts and also helps new readers to catchup on some of the interesting posts. So why just do roundup for the previous month ? Since this site is already a year old, I am including some of the popular posts of June 2006 as well :D Popular posts - June 2007 Source Control in Eclipse IDE List of Team Plugins available for Eclipse How To: Browse remote files in Eclipse IDE This post details the method to install RSE plugin and using the plugin to connect ...

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:

Microsoft's Windows Live Writer is a powerful desktop based weblog client and is currently the only product I like from Microsoft's stable. The initial beta had lot of interesting features which made it a must have for any blogger.

Review of Windows Live Writer Beta 1

There are lot of free and licensed desktop weblog clients including Qumana but not a single client is as powerful and feature rich as Live writer. Beta 2 version of Live writer is now available and there are lots of new features added into the new version.

Feature Highlights:

Inline Spell Checking - From now on you no longer need to manually run the spell checker. Inserting/Editing Tables - You can insert and edit tables. Nice add-on Support for excerpts - "Split Post" option now allows you to insert the "more" tag in the posts. Previously this could be done only via the HTML Code view Better integration of local and online edited posts. New look and feel

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

...

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