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Posts Tagged ‘Blogware’
WP power the coolest
Many people consider Open Source can’t be suitable for corporate usage, especially when it comes to blogging. Some blogging platform even put out slogans like “Corporate/professional blog publishing platform”, well if you poke around a bit, soon you will find out that is nothing but just a sales speech. Reason for this post is in fact talking about a particular blog publishing platform, WordPress. In the past I came across quite a large number of people who blindly believe (never did try by themselves)- WordPress might be good, but not good enough to showcase their corporate/professional/enterprise blogging. In no way I am claiming that WordPress is perfect, it does have it fare share of issues, short coming but it’s evolving. If I tried WordPress 1.5 and comparing its short coming till now, you are comparing 16th century with 21st century . But regardless of its short coming, due to regular upgrade and easy to use functionality WP no longer treated as just another open source. Smart decision makers are using WordPress as blog engine as well as CMS for their organizations. Here is the small list of cool organization’s blog/Web Site powered by none other than WordPress: 1. CNN blogs—each…
WordPress Tweaks: Pagination
In case you are wondering what is pagination? It’s mechanism to break large quantity of data/text into pages for better usability and accessibility. For instance think you are searching for “Free blog tools” on Google, which will return around 35,500,000 results and if Goggle show you all the results in one single page-just guess how you will react? But they don’t, instead they break the results into several pages and you notice a numbered navigation link (ref: Fig. 1a) bellow each page for better navigation. Not only Google or other search engines but as well many top class web sites like New York Times, BBC so many others. Pagination is all about increasing usability where certain article turns into epic J After all when your user can navigate easily, your article/stories get more attention/affection or whatever you are after. Fig 1.1 Now our issue is how can we bring that pagination to our WordPress blogs? There are several plug-in available on WordPress plug-in directory who do paginations together with other tasks. But for the sake of just pagination why add another plug-in, and total freedom of customization cannot be achieved if you use a plug-in. WordPress got very simple and…
Few simple yet useful WordPress Tweaks
These are very easy to do stuffs, nothing complex yet in time you will find it useful. Most no-tech blogger intend to do everything through plug-ins, but why install dozens of plug-in while you can get away with just adding few tweaks? So here are five simple tweaks that will make your WP life a lot comfortable. Denying access to non-referrer request/Spam-bot request via .htaccess This is simple and straight forward way to deal your referrer spam. Well off course considering your server is Apache with mod_rewrite module installed. Since all the games played in the wp-comments-post.php file and spam-bots usually does not leave a referrer, we can detect and deny their access to wp-comments-post.php file by just using these few lines on .htaccess file (located on the root WordPress installation directory). If you don’t have any .htaccess there but your server does support one you can just create one on notepad (save as->file name- .htaccess, save as type-all files) and upload it via FTP. Don’t forget to replace *myblog.xxx.*(on line 3) with your own domain name,remember no www or http:// 12345RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} POST RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-comments-post\.php RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*myblog.xxx.* [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$ RewriteRule (.*) ^http://%{REMOTE_ADDR}/$ [R=301,L]…
Are you ready for WordPress: Dexter?
You better be ready! Since “Dexter”, as in WordPress 2.3 is already launched just a few hours ago (At the time of this posting). I was expecting the release sometime this morning, didn’t expected it almost half day earlier . So why is this WP 2.3 so special? Cause WordPress 2.3 comes with tons of features that we the users were craving for a long time. Apart from feature richness “Dexter” also took care of over 351 bugs/trouble tickets that were due in Trac. The kick ass features that will rock your blogging- 1. Automated update alerts- This new feature lets you know when there is a new release of WordPress or when any of the plugins you use has an update available. api.wordpress.org collects all the info of your WordPress version and plugin version in order to accomplish that. So no more painful upgrade headache. As far as I remember I have seen this in the Idea section of WordPress site, cool job by making this into reality. 2. In-house tagging system- For a long time WP users were using Technorati tagging, or category to tag their posts. But with the 2.3 in addition to category users will also…
MS Technology based blogging solution-BlogEngine.NET
Talking about the facts, not all the organization and people run their server under Unix/Linux. In fact a large number of organization/entity prefers windows based or ASP web hosting for their hosting solution. Anyway our discussion is not about argument whether to choose Linux/Unix or Windows based server. So what are the blog publishing software/applications for those who seeks windows server based self hosted solution? That’s what we are going to discuss. We all know there are huge arrays of open-source blog publishing application out there, as well as enterprise class self-hosted solutions, but unfortunately very few of them can be hosted on a windows server. So today’s picks for blogging software/application based on Microsoft windows server- BlogEngine.NET Type: Open Source License: Microsoft Permissive License System Requirements: ASP.NET 2.0 BlogEngine.NET is one of the finest blogging platform forged in ASP.NET 2.0. The coolest part is not too many MS technology based blogging engine you will find that is open source. It’s cool not just because it’s free and based on ASP.NET 2.0, but for ability to support multiple microformats (xFolk, Rel-Tag, Microsummary, XFN, XOXO, rel-home, rel-directory, rel-enclosure) and tons of high-end features. BlogEngine.NET is very surprisingly easy to setup and…
Making your WordPress site/blog faster
Most of the time we all talk about increasing readership, this time why not we will go for performance enhancement. Few days ago one of my subscriber expressed that, he experienced sluggishness on the back end while using WordPress as a CMS with high number of pages. He isn’t the only person who came across this problem, a lot of WP users experience related problem generally. Question is whether these problems resides in the core of WP or occasionally forced by some other issues? Actually there is no simple answer for that, any CMS whether Drupal or WordPress can experience same issues caused by numerous reasons without anything to do with the core itself. I will keep the focus of the discussion on the WordPress (self hosted) related issues to narrow it down. Why not we turn the spotlight on the fundamental reasons first, so that it would be easier to eliminate them? Your WP (WordPress) powered site may experience sluggishness for- MySQL server or connection issues. PHP Memory Limit. Apache log rotator problem (for Apache server). Broken/Degraded PHP code in template/theme files. Excessive plugin uses/ use of plugin(s) with broken codes. Some particular third party widgets/ JavaScript codes. WordPress Dashboard’s display of RSS…
Terapad changed the world of free blog hosting
Finding free yet flexible blog platform solution isn’t that easy. It’s get more harder when someone seeks a blog integrated with lot of other stuffs yet easy to handle, easy to customize and most importantly free. There are quite a few free solution that provide excellent service together with quality, looks like Terapad.com just join in that list. Terapad.com is now free, which was previously paid blog platform at it’s early stage of launching. The coolest part is they are offering a lot more then just a blog. Terapad.com which is owned by UK based SiteJourney Ltd. during it’s early launch last year used be $18/month subscription fees. But from January 2nd, 2007 they announced it to be free. Though it is ad supported (only one column ad in the sidebar), but easily can be removed by $5/month and additional 10GB bandwith. The key features of Terapad.com– 10 GB bandwith and 2 GB storage limit. In a close interview with Terapad’s Managing Director Stephan Tual, I came to know that if any blogger cross the limits (which is highly unlikely), they will take it into consideration depending the activity of blogger (Spammer precaution you can say). You can integrate built in…
Jaxtr launches new VOIP service for blogs
As telephony service specially Skype is getting more and more popular among social networking citizens, A Silicon Valley start-up is gearing up to embed free, Web-based telephone services on a variety of popular social networking and blogging services, including MySpace, Friendster and Blogger. That’s a great news for us, the bloggers, since I recall on an average i spent more or less 30 minutes everyday on Skype and i am sure a lot of bloggers do the same. Jaxtr plans to allows users to make inbound calls to bloggers from any phone in the world. Jaxtr, a little over a year old which based in Palo Alto California, said it is beginning a test by private invitation of its new calling service, with plans to make it widely available to Web users sometime early in the 2007. It is very easy to use, all you have to do is register yourself first. Once registered on Jaxtr’s site, a user can embed an interactive phone feature into selected blogs or social network profiles, Initially which will be limited to News Corp.’s MySpace, Tagged, Friendster, Hi5, Xanga and Google’s Blogger. You will be able to click on any Jaxtr link, enter your own phone number, which triggers an instant…
Adding preview tech in your site is just a snap
How many search engines have you seen on the net? A lot I am sure, and every now and then some new popped up too. If you are addict net surfer, you are probably well introduced with Snap by now. But in case you haven’t than probably, it’s a good time to introduce Snap, which is is on the top of Time magazines 50 coolest sites list. Snap search engine gives you search result just like any other search engine from keyword/search term you type, but a little different the way the present that. Search results are displayed on the left side of the page, while the other side provides a visual preview (which you can choose to view in small, medium or large. Ask.com is known to provide preview too but selective and not so big like Snap. So when you search on snap, before visiting a site you already can see what’s in there (Google’s cached page can be used for similar purpose too). In Snap not only you can see the preview of the site, but you can also open the site within snap’s frame. That is the reason Snap gain significant popularity since its launch. Now…
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