Tag Archives: WordPress

Blog redesign

Published Jul 9, 2006 | In WordPress

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

WordPress 2.0.1

Published Feb 1, 2006 | In WordPress

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

Published Jan 22, 2006 | In WordPress

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

Published Jan 21, 2006 | In 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

Published Jan 10, 2006 | In WordPress

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

Published Nov 26, 2005 | In 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