Category Archives: WordPress

All about my love for WordPress. BTW, I am self-claimed WordPress Super star.

Going to update WordPress, expect some turbulence

Guys, I am going to update my WordPress installation to WordPress 2.1 codenamed Ella. (Yes, yes I know I am late by 5 days this time).

Unlike my older updates, I am going to completely delete the files in the core directory and then going to place the latest files. So you may notice a small turbulence and I will try to keep the downtime (if any) to the minimum.

I am planning to finish the whole process with in 30 minutes and will post an update once the process is over.

Update: Everything went smoothly and this blog is now proudly running on WordPress 2.1

Update (29 Jan 2007): Well guys, the update was not as smooth as I expected. There is a small issue with the Bunny’s Technorati Tags plug in which I am using. Will post an update once I fix it.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Integrated Akismet with my About page

With my recent re-design I added the new about page, where my users can ask me questions. Instead of getting questions from users I started to get spam from spam bots and I had to manually clear them every night. Last week I was so frustrated that I thought of even taking it down.

But then I realized that I had faced the same problem some time back and immediately Akismet came to my mind. I quickly went to the website to looked at the API and thought of integrating it with my about page script.

I was about to build a wrapper for the APIs, but something with in me made me to use Google and within few moments I found that it was already done by Andrew and Paul. I downloaded the code integrated it with my script and within a few minutes my about page became immune to spam. Wow! Now I could go to bed 10 minutes earlier everyday thanks to Akismet.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Migrated from Simple Tags to Bunny Technorati Tags

Both Simple Tags and Bunny Technorati Tags are nothing but WordPress Plugins, in case if you are wondering what the hell I am taking about. 😉

Both the above plug-ins lets you to insert Technorati tags in your blog posts. I have been using Simple Tags for quite some time but was not happy with its working. It stores the technorati tags with the blog post itself inside [tags][/tags] tags and they can be displayed only at the end of the posts. I found this very limiting because it was not suiting my recent design change. I wanted to display these technorati tags on a separate box on top of every post, but with Simple Tags this will not be possible.

So I searched for other plug-ins and found that Bunny Technorati Tags suits my needs. But then I have to remove the [tags][/tags] from every posts and include them inside a custom field.

Instead of doing it manually I wrote a PHP script to make the necessary changes to the table. If any one of you is also planning to do the same migration then you can grab the script and save some hours of copy pasting.

Now, after the migration I am able to place the technorati tags in the correct place where I wanted it to be displayed.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Blog redesign

I am currently trying out a fully homegrown theme for my blog together will lot of custom PHP code for extending WordPress.

So during this period some pages may appear funny or broken. Kindly bear with me and do let me know how you feel about the new design.

I am planning to release this theme for public download. But before that I need to do lot of optimization and give the final touch. So guys stay tuned.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

Comment on coComment

Well if you know why people use Bloglines, then I am sure you would have heard about coComment. For others, it’s a new Web 2.0 (ok don’t scold me for using this word.) app which allows you to track the comments that you leave on others blogs.

coComment is an excellent example of Viral Marketing. Instead of just writing about it in the developer’s blog or releasing a press release, they made people like scoble to talk about it and it reached the peak of fame in a matter of hours. Even I was one among them who got really exited after hearing about them. I was looking for way to handle and follow up after I leave comments on blogs that I read.

The guys who are behind it are putting in lot of effort and are rolling down new features almost every week. Even today they have released some new features. And I got really impressed with them when they listed their direct competitors on their own blog. That’s the way to do business. Hat’s off guys!!

But I some how feel that you people miss the very important feature. Yes I am talking about comment crawling – the ability to follow up the comments which are entered by people who are not using coComment also. It may act as a big marketing opportunity as of now, (because, I myself have recommended it to lot of people so that I can follow up their comments too) but it may not help them in the long run.

If any of you from coComment are reading this, then I have a small idea of implementing it (in WordPress blogs at least). Every blog post (in wordpress) will have a corresponding RSS feed for the comments. So you can grab this feed every time a person leaves the comment and by just reading this feed you can get the latest comments left by other people. I actually tried to implement it some time back but didn’t found enough time to complete it.

And I found one smaller itch when commenting in blogger blogs which have enabled popup comment forms. I am not able click the coComment bookmarklet since the comment form opens in a popup and the bookmarks bar is not displaced. I used to copy the url and remove the ‘popup=ok’ part from the query string and then it works.

Apart from it, I am very happy with coComment and let’s hope that they add comment crawling soon. In fact they have also mentioned in their blog that they are currently working on it.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged | 8 Comments

WordPress 2.0.1

WordPress (my favorite blog software) has rolled up important bug fixes into a 2.0.1 release. It seems they have fixed about 114 bugs. You can read the details about these bugs in the milestone page.

If you are looking to upgrade your blog to 2.0.1 then you can refer to the Upgrading WordPress article.

I will be upgrading my blog, probably this weekend when I get some time, meanwhile if any one of you have upgraded then do let me know your experience.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged | 3 Comments

Kill that comment spam

Off late my blog has been receiving lot of comment spam. Though most of them are caught by WordPress itself I still needed to manually delete them. I planned to install Captcha to overcome it but then dropped the plan since it might cause accessibility problems and even W3C doesn’t recommend it (and me being a guy who believes that a webpage should be accessible for all :)).

Luckily Akismet came to my rescue. Akismet is the brainchild of Matt Mullenweg, the maker of WordPress. It’s a wonderful spam killer and integrates well with WordPress and other bloging platforms too. Every comment left in the blog is sent to a web service filter which filters out the spam comments and the success rate is nearly 100%.

All you need to use it in your blog is just to enable it and enter the API key which you can get by registering with WordPress.com. And once you enable it you never have to worry about spam again.

It comes as a plugin with the default installation of WordPress, but I don’t know how I missed it all these days. You can also download it from Akismet.

So, one more reason for me to love WordPress.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Why I like WordPress

Recently I was explaining to someone the benefits of using WordPress over Blogger. And in the end that made me to think why I really like WordPress, particularly 2.0. So here are some of them, in no particular order.

  • Tons of plug-ins, themes, extensible, active community etc. (The general things about WordPress)
  • Ability to take backup from Dashboard itself with just a couple of mouse clicks
  • Rich text editing – Ok I know some of you are not happy about it.
  • One click import option – you will love it if you want to shift from blogger.
  • Nice fading technique, after you make some changes
  • AJAX touch to the UI, particularly in the Write page
  • Blogroll support – Easy importing of blogroll from an OPML file.
  • Category support
  • Ability to add my own pages in addition to blog posts. Yes.. I am talking about using WordPress
    as CMS
  • Trackbacks and pingbacks
  • Well integrated approach to upload and link to images or any other file
  • Post-it bookmarklet
  • Inbuilt theme editor
  • Hierarchical management of users
  • Excellent comment spam filtering – ability to backlist comment spam based on words, ip, user etc.

I am sure I have forgotten to mention some features which I love about WordPress and will add them to the list as and when I remember them.

BTW congrats to (the smart) Santhapa (My college met) for his new photo blog, which he plans to update daily. He is studing management (MBA) in IIT Madras (Chennai ?) and off late he has started to get his hands on photography. So guys if you want to check out photos taken by a waiting-to-be-written photographer then it’s available at here at his blog.

All the best smarty..

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , | 8 Comments

My site is up again

Continuing with my digital disasters my site also went down 🙁 and you know what, I didn’t had a backup. Yes I still have to learn the lesson. 🙁

It also thought me another lesson, never buy hosting from a cheap re-seller. I brought the original hosting account from a re-seller in eBay and I was happy for about a month but after that the company just disappeared overnight. To add salt to the wound I didn’t had a backup for my blog as well.

After that I bought another account from a reliable (?) hosting company and again took the pain to import the whole blog from blogger, like how I did it a month ago. But this time the new import option available in WordPress 2.0 was of real help (more on that for another day)

I was struck up with another problem after I imported. I only had posts which I wrote before I shifted to WordPress. Thanks to Google cache and Bloglines I was able to retrieve the posts which I wrote after I moved to WordPress and then I retrieved the comments from the email that were send by WordPress. So I was able to bring back my blog to the original state before it went down.

Thanks every one for the bearing with me during the downtime and for the support shown and wish you all a happy 2006.

Self Note: So two more resolutions for the New Year
1) Don’t buy hosting account from a cheap re-seller
2) Do take BACKUP of all important stuff.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Good Bye Blogger, Hello WordPress

At last, I have finished shifting my blog from Blogger to my own domain which is running wordPress. It has been in my to-do list for quite a few months, may be from the day Fred shifted his blog to his own domain 😉

You can find the new blog at http://SudarMuthu.com/blog/ and if you have subscribed to the RSS feed the feed url (http://feeds.feedburner.com/SudarBlogs) remains the same.

Shifting all the posts with comments from Blogger has been a little pain since Blogger doesn’t provide a direct export option. But thanks to the import script written by Andy Skelton and the explanation given by catsutorials. It really saved a lot of time for me. If I find time I will write a small explanation with screenshots to help people who want to use this script.

WordPress has been really excellent so far and has satisfied all my requirements. You get tons of themes and plug-ins. And the credit goes to the community. Right now I am playing with lot of themes and may be even this theme may change in a few days.

So guys welcome to the new version of my blog and do let me know your comments and suggestions

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , | 7 Comments