I am getting bored with the current WordPress theme on the blog and was interested in getting another theme (preferably free), got any recommendations? And nothing from the 10 ugliest WordPress themes please. 
May 29 2011
Recommended WordPress Themes?
Jan 04 2011
Interesting WordPress Plugins
After upgrading to the latest WordPress (v3.0.4), I also decided to have a look at the various plugins I am running. As part of that I stumbled across Ultimate Collection of WordPress pluginswhich are very interesting. If you run WordPress (and if you don’t, why not ), I would highly recommend to check them out. I already was running some of these and not heard of others which are great.
Here are some of my favourite ones (in no particular order) and those with keen eyes would notice a few of these already.
- AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button – Help people share, bookmark, and email your posts & pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg, etc.
- Akismet – this is for comment spam control and is used by millions! Excellent!
- WP FollowMe – allows you to add a twitter Follow me badge on your wordpress blog.
- Google Analyticator – name says it all I think.
- Google XML Sitemaps – same as above.
- Lightbox 2 – Used to overlay images on the current page.
- My Page Order – allows you to set the order of pages through a drag and drop interface.
- Really Simple CAPTCHA – CAPTCHA module intended to be called from other plugins; really works too!
- Search Everything – Adds search functionality and includes search highlight, search pages, excerpts, attachments, drafts, comments, tags and custom fields (metadata). It can also exclude specific pages and posts. It does not search password-protected content.
- Shockingly Big IE6 Warning – doesn’t the name say it all?
- Simple Tags – Excellent plugins, to manage your tags. Includes, suggested Tags, Mass edit tags, Autocompletion, Tag Cloud Widgets, Related Posts, Related Tags, etc
- StatPress Reloaded – real time stats for the blog
- SyntaxHighlighter Evolved – code to your site without having to modify the code at all; you cannot use the Visual editor with this.
- TinyMCE Advanced – Enables advanced features and plugins for the visual editor
- Twitter for WordPress – displays your last few tweets
- WP-Cumulus – Flash based Tag Cloud for WordPress
- WP-DBManager – Excellent plugin, that manages your WordPress including optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, etc. I use to exclusively for the automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of the database.
- WP-SmugMug – I use SmugMug for my photos online; this plugin integrates the SmugMug galleries into the blog.
I would highly recommend the above and suggest you play with them.
These plugins I have only recently installed and they seem interesting, but I have not used them enough to have the confidence to highly recommend them – yet.
- WordPress Backup (by BTE) – Backup the upload directory (images), current theme directory, and plugins directory to a zip file. I have only recently installed this plugin, and not used it enough to say how useful it is at this point.
- Automatic WordPress Backup – Automatically upload backups of important parts of your blog to Amazon S3. I am a huge S3 fan, and this seems very promising. Hopefully I can come back in a few days and weeks and blog about it.
Finally, when using plugins I would recommend the following:
- Search and install from these via the “Plugins” menu which you see when log into your WordPress dashboard. Don’t download the code manually and then try and upload it to your site. That is a more painful process.
- Try and have a test blog running – seperately from your main blog where you can test different permutations and configurations. In case something goes wrong, you won’t have your main blog go down. Of course needless to say, you should keep both your test and main blog on the same version.
- It is not a good idea to install all of the plugin’s all at the same time as you never never which plugin can cause conflict with another. Well, you can install all the plugins at the same time, just activate them one at a time and test that your blog is still running as expected after you have activated each plugin.
- Before you upgrade the version of WordPress – irrespective of how big or small the upgrade is always backup your database and files first. This would allow you to revert back to a “clean slate” in case something goes wrong.
Sep 10 2010
Postings from Android
First post from my brand new Android phone and the WordPress app. Quite impressed with it so far. I sure do miss the keyboard though.
Suggestions for any apps? My phone is HTC wildfire and nothing fancy so the apps should be able to run on this phone.
Jun 28 2010
Upgraded to WP 3.0
Just upgraded the blog to WordPress 3.0 – two clicks and I was done – can it get any simpler? What a pleasant surprise compared to the pile of crap that CS 2007+ turned out to be. Try upgrading that in something like two clicks? Ha! Well done WordPress!
Jun 21 2010
What we have learned …
… the average wife spends nearly 8,000 minutes a year nagging her husband!
Mar 11 2010
Forbes rich list
Forbes rich list is Slim pickings. Only lack of ability, inheritance and money keeps the rest of us off the Forbes list of world’s billionaires. It’s not fair? Here is Guardian’s recipe for billionaire success: get born into a rich family, invent something and sell it to Americans. Win.
Feb 14 2010
Bing Maps adding Flickr images, live video, stars
Bing Maps adding Flickr images, live video and stars – very cool.
Update: The official TED video below is quite cool and in addition to the one above, also adds more interesting features such as video – check it out.
Jan 24 2010
Win 3.1 experience in your browser
If you ever wanted a Win 3.1 experience in your broswer (why I cannot imagine – despite me running a VM), then check out michaelv.org. The irony of all of this is that there is a modern browser in that which seems to be compliant with the standards (it pases the ACID2 tests; fails the ACID3). 
Jan 10 2010
Permalinks don’t support quotes?
I don’t know if this is a feature or a bug or a configuration issue either with WordPress itself or how the web server is configured where this blog is hosted. I just posted something about compiler errors where the permalink had a single quotes in its title like : ‘qpainter-painter’-has-initialiser-but-incomplete-type. While this was handled fine by WordPress (I could successfully preview the post as well), once it was published I got the generic 500 Internal Server Error as shown below. So the question is what is wrong (if anything)? What is the expected behaviour? The only way for me to fix it was by removing the single quote in the permalinks as now you can see in the post.
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, [email-address-removed] and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Jan 07 2010
WordPress ping list
I updated the ping list for the blog based on the suggestions from Vladimir which I found via WordPress’s documentation site. Not sure if it is of any help or not, but I guess I will find out.
Dec 24 2009
Upgraded to WordPress 2.9
I just upgraded to WordPress 2.9 and wow what a pleasant experience compared to Community Server 2007! Excluding backing up the DB and the site, the actual upgrade took only a few seconds and was so painless! Such a different experience from Community Server 2007, which was so much more difficult. Loving WordPress and all the add-ins and the goodness of the communities! 
Dec 08 2009
10 must have WordPress plugins
If you search online you will loads of ‘best plugin lists’ for WordPress, however of the lot that I have seen I truly think that this one is certainly one of the best ones.
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