The desire to have more and more can never be extinguished. At least I cant do anything about my desire to keep my sites growing. This requires the best collection of tools. Plugins are the tools I use most.

The question when is having too many plugins bad. The answer to this question lies not in the definition of the phrase ‘too many’. In fact there you could only have a only a handful of plugins and it might be affecting your blog. Here are a few things you should know about plugins.

Type of Plugin

One way to categorize the plugins is whether the affect your blog from front end or does it only efffect your blog’s admin area.

Most Plugins affect the feel of your pages. They do present something for the blog reader to see. In my dictionary these are front-end plugins. They do sometimes provide an admin area to manage that look and feel.

The other type of plugins are only to make the life of the admin [or the blogger] easier. They do not show anything inside posts. But they provide features that helps admin in managing and publishing the post. In my lingo these are back-end plugins.

The back-end plugins are not very likely to have severe performance drawback. The obvious reason is that they come in play only from the admin area. One such example is my Flickrize Image Search. The plugin does absolutely nothing when a user is browsing through your blog. It is the front end plugins that you need to be absolutely cautious. They may hamper the performance of your blog seriously if you are not careful. Front end plugins will query the database for each posts. If they are not written smartly you will see the effect in load time of your page, and if your site has a lot of traffic, it will slow down considerably when ‘not so smart plugins’ are used.

Credibility

See how stable the plugin is before installing it on your blog. I always recommend trying and testing a plugin in your test site. Before installing a front end plugin, have a look at the plug in page and see the comments of the people who used it.

License

A commercially licensed plugin will have support behind it. Chances are that it will be more stable and tested. In case you find issues you can contact the provider and have your issues resolved. But most of the plugins we use in WordPress are free. They may not provide an excellent support. However contacting the author in most case does help.

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You are never too old to make mistakes. Never too young to start over.

I had been watching an indian blogger Shankar Ganesh  who covered a lot of ground in a very short period of time. A lot of his success in gaining a good link popularity seems to come with his highly socialized manner and lots of friends, but you can never discredit the good work he has done. After the launch of his site, the first PR update from Google gave him a very healthy rank of 5. Then for a while I stopped reading his blog. Just yesterday, I stumbled upon  ways to use your pendrive and found that it was the same blogger, who stopped publishing at his personal blog and instead started a brand new blog of Tech Tips. [Find more →]

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This is my first post in a long time for contents magic. Reason. I was busy, in matters that don’t relate to the subject of contents-magic. However I have learned a few things in the mean while and I am so much looking forward to incorporate the stuff into this site. So expect a few changes along the way.

[Find more →]

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A while back I took over the maintenance of a site. The site was transferred from one server to mine, and the after the transfer I found that the site was not maintained properly. So I went on to fix a few things.

The thing that was most horribly wrong with the site were non existent URLs. These urls fall in the following categories.

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Most of the bloggers are aware what a favicon is. And for those who don’t know , a favicon is an icon that is attached to any website just like a logo. The favicon is displayed the Web Browser in the address bar or in the book marks section . It serves as a visual indication about the website. So when you see in the address you immediately know that the website you are on is Google. Same Icon is used when you create a short cut of the web page on your desktop.

If your blog does not have a favicon, then you are certainly missing out a very important visual reminder that attaches the readers of your blog [or should I say website ?]. But not having a favicon does not mean that you are just missing that part. In fact if your WordPress theme is not properly designed then there is an equally larger penalty you might be paying - unknowingly.

Here are few less known facts about favicon .

1. A favicon icon does not need to be in .ico format , you can have GIF and PNG as well as your favicon.
2. You can have different favicon for different sections of your site, in fact you can vary favicon on a page by page basis. You can utilize this if your site is too big and you want to serve different visual reminders by segmenting your site. Just use a different url as favicon in your html.

For more information you can visit the following sites.

• http://www.w3.org/2005/10/howto-favicon
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favicon

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Elizabeth Rose has listed out a good list of plugins you don’t want to miss. I agree with most of those. You certainly want to have these, except one. Read the article and find out which one

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This advice is not for everyone. Obviously not everyone has the capability, motivation, need and desire to modify the WordPress core files. But for the programmers out there, at certain points it seems very straight forward to go ahead and modify the files in WordPress core files and achieve the desired functionlity.

For example when I was writing Flickrize Image Search, at point it was very easy for me go ahead and implement my desired functionlity in upload.php for the Image Search section. I could not. First of all it would not be a plugin anymore. But more importantly, it would render my WordPress install incompatible with any future upgrades. In essence , when I upgrade to a new version of WordPress, I would have to make the same changes again in the new core.

Bad design. This is Why WordPress supports plugin. Writing plugins is not that hard. I wrote one of my plugin Expire Comments in just 4 hours. Testing however takes more time then that.

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I recently released a plugin Flickrize Image Search. When I was releasing the plugin I took some time to create the license page for this plugin. The license says that you can freely use it for any legal purpose, and may redistribute it or modified version with an expressed written permission.

However When I was creating the license page, I encountered a 404 issue. When the license was was published, the above url was giving a 404 error. I was stumped for a while. Initially I thought that permalinks were not working. However when I looked the contents of my blog directory, I found that there was already a file named “license.txt”. Strangely that file was conflicting somehow with the page I wrote, even though the file was not of the exact same name as the page. Renaming that file solved the issue.

I believe the issue was not a WordPress issue as the 404 page I received was not coming from my theme. It was coming from my host. Any how I thought to share this strange thing and the remedy so that anyone of you may not have to waist time.

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As promised, I am releasing the beta version of my Flickrize Image Search. The plugin is available for download in zip format and is completely free. Give it a try. You will definitely find it useful.

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I had been working in last little while on a plugin. The plugin is almost done though it is missing a few minor features I would want to have, so I guess it is time to release the beta and let see how you guys rate this.

So before I release the plugin beta tomorrow let me tell you why you need this plugin.

If you are running a blog that has multiple authors, many times it happens that bloggers do know what contents they have written in past, but they may not remember each and every article written by other bloggers. The same goes true about the images others have uploaded. Now this is not just true for multi author blogs, it happens with single author blogs as well if you have been writing for a while you may not recall that your image database has 400 images stored. Only with multi author blog, it happens a lot.

The problem is actually because of two important features WordPress has not provided. [Find more →]

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