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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So the story goes like this as usual.

John, I need to have some way of uploading the author’s image. I don’t know what the heck the previous idiots were doing. They uploaded it themselves. I don’t want to call you every time I need to upload an author’s image.

So the previous solution that some guys gave him required to upload images using the ftp, and it looked like that he was afraid to death to use ftp. I could understand. An average Joe would be. So what he needed was a simple solution that would allow him to upload the photos of the author on his multi author blogging site.

Fortunately, a straightforward solution already exist from semiologic at Author’s Image Plugin. At my first glance I thought I am done right after installing the plugin. I only needed to modify the theme so that it actually use the_author_image() to get the actual image. But I was wrong. Here is why. [Find more →]

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