small things to help you live a better life ONLINE
September 12th, 2009 — wordpress
WordPress is getting it’s own image editor, ( not a plugin, added to core of wordpress ) . Do not get over excited, it’s not something like photoshop or gimp. But, most of the things you need to do to make an image ready for your blog can be done using this new editor. This includes rotating, resizing and scaling the image. Have a look at the screenshot, to know what it is, and how it looks like.
July 25th, 2009 — Twitter, wordpress
Tweetbacks
Ready for some action ? Okay, we are going to steal some comments for your blog posts from twitter. Don’t worry, they took our comments first, now we are stealing them back, so you will not be punished ( if you get caught, I don’t know you, ok ? )
Check out some blogs, with loads of twitter love. They get hundreds of RTs about theirs posts, and we envy their Tweetme counts. But most of these blog posts with 100+ tweets about them, do not get many comments. People tweet about them but ignore the comment form. But, they still love your those blog posts.
July 22nd, 2009 — google, Google Wave, wordpress
Google Wave Plugin WordPress
I don’t mind being over excited about Google wave, because I saw the google wave preview video. It’s worth being little over excited about.
Being over excited includes trying to know how it will be useful for me, and my friends, so, for those who love google wave and wordpress, let me introduce you to two wave plugins for WordPress.
update : Wanna try 8 more useful Google Wave Plugins ?
1. wp-wave-shortcodes
The first Google wave plugin for WordPress that I noticed is WordPress Wave ShortCodes. As far as I could see, it was the only plugin that has active development going on.
What it Does
Adds a shortcode to WordPress that makes it easy to embed Wave(s) in a post or page. It also adds a media button so one is not required to remember how a shortcode is structured.
That was from the plugin’s page on Google Code. So, it will help you add waves to your wordpress posts, with the use of short codes. To make it more simple, there will be a media button for this.
How to use
You will have a media button just like you have one for adding image or video, on the wordpress dashboard, where you write new posts and pages. When you click on that, you will get a menu where you can enter wave ID for your wave that you want to insert, and then specify font and background color etc.
Is there a Demo ? Can I try it ?
Yes, and No. There is a demo available here. But, you need a Google Wave Sandbox account to access the demo. If you are planning to develop a wave plugin, you can request it here. Others, wait until the end of this month, if you are lucky, you will get an account
Update : I found another one here
July 9th, 2009 — journo, wordpress
So friends, this is a post from Windows Live Writer. I have always wanted to test windows live writer, and this was one of the first things that I downloaded after installing windows 7.
As you can see, windows live writer can detect the theme of your blog, and when you start writing, it will show you the page just as it will be when published. I took a screenshot of the screen and then posted it to the draft, very easily, and resizing and placing the image was really easy.
The theme of the blog is detected using a temporary post, which will be deleted as soon as theme is detected on windows writer. You can add tags and set your categories from windows live writer dashboard. Your categories are already imported when you set up the blog.
There are plugins that you can add to your live writer installation, like blog this for firefox, polaroid picture plugin ( which makes your picture look like poladoid ) and flickr plugin etc.
Something that I miss is, the auto tagging plugin, and all in one seo pack plugin which lets me set title tags etc for search engines. There should be some workaround here also, if you know how it is done, please drop me a comment.
So far windows Live writer looks good and works really well. I will be posting more if I find anything interesting …. You can also try this once, its easy and useful. Let me know your thoughts after installing it. Installation and set up is really easy, in case you need help, please drop comments.
April 16th, 2009 — blogging, wordpress, Wordpress Themes
Is the current wordpress dashboard design perfect ? Except the widget management page, it’s awesome, that’s what I think …do you agree with me ?
The problem with the current widget management page is this : Suppose your theme has two sidebars/widget areas, and you want to move your text widget from first to the second sidebar. You will remove it from the first sidebar, save changes, select second sidebar from the drop down menu, click “show”, then add the widget to the second sidebar … but wait, already spent a lot of time “clicking” and now, do you have the content of the text widget ? NO !! You should copy the content somewhere before you remove it from the first sidebar ….. you are lost ..
…. Not any more .. here is the new widgets panel, that’s going to be ready with WordPress 2.8, the next release. Have a look, and you will understand how it solves all these issues. For those who are curious if wordpress.com users will get this feature, the answer is a BIG YES ! You may get this even before self hosted wordpress blog users, just wait n watch!! ( Click on the image to enlarge. )
Wordpress 2.8 new widgets panel
PS: Please note that this version of wordpress, 2.8 that is, under development, and there may be changes to this feature when it’s released.
April 3rd, 2009 — blogging, google, hosting, wordpress
Even if you are not an expert in SEO and stuff like that, there are things that you can do easily, even with your free wordpress.com blog. I am not an SEO geek either. I only have basic knowledge of these things, but still certain things are possible because it’s very easy.
This blog post will help you find the XML sitemap of your wordpress.com blog, and add it to Google using Webmasters Tools, a free service offered by Google. This is going to take 15 minutes of your time.
April 1st, 2009 — blogging, google, wordpress
It all started when I saw my search engine stats going up, nearly doubling, this week. I am not sure if this flow is going to continue, but I was happy when I saw that first time. I did not do anything special about this, and that made it more sweet.
Increase in hits inspired me, and I checked my stats on Google Analytics from the very first day of this new blog, and found that more than 75% of visits are from Search Engines. I do not know anything about SEO other than its meaning but still I decided to see if there was something that I can do.
March 17th, 2009 — Css, wordpress, Wordpress Themes
Adding more styles to your wordpress theme, and why is that “style” highlighted ? Simple : because, this post is about making your blog look more stylish, by adding few more stylesheets ie, style sheets for categories.
I was reading this post from http://tarskitheme.com about a brilliant plugin : Category Style Sheets. by Benedict Eastaugh. It is a simple but awesome plugin that allows you to add style sheets for each category of your blog. That means, you can have different background colors, images, link colors etc for individual category archives, and each post in that category.
What I have done, ( So Far )
I have created two style sheets for two of my categories. WordPress & Blogging. I have changed background colors for category archive pages, and individual pots in these two categories. Now, go to any blog post in that category and you will see the plugin in action. I have changed only the background color. Should I try more ? Do you have any suggestion ?
How To Do This
All you need to do is,
