Today, i upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.8. The upgradation went fine without any problems.

Wordpress 2.8

But after upgrading, I felt that the Dashboard and wordpress admin pages were loading very slow. Each page was taking 5-10 seconds to load.

I then opened the blog and tried browsing some posts. There was the same effect. The blog was slow.

It was for sure that Blog slowed down due to Wordpress 2.8 Upgrade. My first suspect was to check the plugins. There are 40+ plugins that i use. I was sure that this is due to some plugin which may not be supporting Wordpress 2.8.

I went to Plugin page and disabled all plugins at one go and saw the pages started loading faster.

I then started enabling plugins one by one and then I found the culprit plugin that slowed down the blog post upgrading to Wordpress 2.8 .

The plugin was Performancing Ads plugin. I disabled the plugin, jumped to Performancing Ads and got the javascript code to display 125X125 Ad on the sidebar.

I was surprised and was also upset on myself to see that i was using a plugin instead of placing just a one liner javascript to display the ad

The problem was solved.

Did you guys find any problem? If yes do leave a comment about the problem and the plugin that caused the problem after upgrading to Wordpress 2.8. I am sure that this will be of help to all those who have faced problems after upgrading to Wordpress 2.8

If you are new to Performancing Ads, Then Try joining Performancing Ads

Yesterday, I came across a post – Increase Internal linkings on Blog. In that post, the author talks on How to better internal linking in wordpress blog. He mentions use of 4 Plugins which will you achieve this.

I am already using 3 of the plugins out of the 4 listed there. SEO Smart Links plugin which was new for me. I immediately jumped on to Wordpress admin interface and installed SEO Smart Links plugin.

SEO Smart Links Plugin puts Contextual links

SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.

Increase Internal Linking – Smart Links Plugin

Contextual Links are the backlinks from the post. A number of such type of backlinks can easily take your blog/article page to the top of any keyword. So, even if you link to your own posts from another post, that would still count as another contextual backlink.

The plugin automatically adds links to other pages of your blog from a page with the desired keyword as the anchor text. It basically scans the post and find the keywords or a phrase and matches it with already existing post / tags / category and links it.

SEO Smart Links Features

1. Allows you to set up your own keywords and set of matching URLs
2. Allows you to set nofollow attribute and open links in new window
3. Ignore list for keywords you do not want to link
4. Control external links with custom keywords
5. You can edit the options from the administration settings panel.

I started using it and found some Contextual links getting generated. Need to monitor and also will try setting up keywords vs URL’s

Download Smarts Links Plugin and further Description

If you really liked this post, then Do subscribe and also share it by bookmarking it on social networks

More posts on Wordpress Plugins

• Best (must have) Wordpress Plugins
• 5 Security Tips to Protect Wordpress Blog
• Broken Links Remover – A must Wordpress Plugin
• Greet your Blog visitors using WP Greet Box wordpress plugin

Technorati Tags: wordpress, plugins, SEO, backlink, smart link

I have found a new Wordpress plugin called WP Greet Box. I am found it really interesting and am impressed with this plugin. I am going to first instroduce you to WP Greet Box and will give my review!

What is WP Greet Box?

This is a Wordpress plugin which show a different greeting message to your new visitors depending on their referrer URL.

Below are Few examples

If visitor arrives to the post from Google search engine, they will see a message asking to subscribe to the RSS feed if they liked the post. The plugin will also show posts based on the search keyword used in google search engine.

If a visitor arrives from Twitter, they will see a message suggesting them to twit the post and follow you on Twitter.

You can also set a default greeting message for new visitors (not matching any referrer URLs) suggesting them to subscribe to your RSS feed.

These greetings helps the visitor with the suggestions and reader interaction.

Screenshot

Features

• Show a different greeting message to your visitor depending on the referrer URL. You can add/edit/delete/disable these greeting messages as you choose.
• Greeting messages automatically get inserted into the top of your posts upon activation. There is no need to modify theme files.
• Ability to auto-insert greeting message to the top or bottom of the post.
• Greeting messages can be user closeable or not.
• Ability to detect the visitor’s search keywords from major search engines and automatically display related posts under the greeting message.
• Show a default greeting message even if the visitor does not match any of your configured referrer URL.
• Show a default greeting message even if the visitor does not have JavaScript enabled.
• AJAX greeting message in the frontend makes it compatible with caching plugins (such as WP Super Cache) and WPMU.
• AJAX administrative interface that uses nonce verification to discourage hackers.
• Ability to set a timeout to forget a visitor so we do not keep nagging them with greeting messages.
• Ability to set rules to exclude some referrer URLs from seeing greeting messages. Regular expressions is also supported (but not required!).
• Ultra customizable greeting message box (with CSS) allowing you to prefix/append HTML around the greeting message box.
• Currently the following referrers are installed by default, but you can easily create your own if your favorite referrer is not on the list!
  • blinklist.com
  • blogmarks.com
  • del.icio.us
  • delicious.com
  • digg.com
  • diigo.com
  • facebook.com
  • flickr.com
  • furl.com
  • google.*
  • ma.gnolia.com
  • mister-wong.com
  • myspace.com
  • netvibes.com
  • newsvine.com
  • reddit.com
  • search.live.com
  • search.msn.com
  • search.yahoo.com
  • simpy.com
  • stumbleupon.com
  • technorati.com
  • twitter.com
  • youtube.com

My review on WP Greet Box

You can download the from Wordpress Plugin directory. I use WP Easy Uploader Plugin to download and upload the plugin on my blog from Wordpress Admin itself.

There are no hassles for installing the plugin. It is pretty simple.

Upon activating the plugin, just go to Settings -> WP Greet Box. You will see list of referrers that are inbuilt with the plugin. If you don’t find a particular referrer then, you can add new referrers to the blog. you can also edit or delete referrers to your blog. Not only this, you can also activate or deactivate each referrer individually.

One more thing i liked and would like to mention here is the ability to display related posts. If the visitor visits the blog from any search engine, then along with the greet message you will see related posts for a query based on the search keyword used.

This is a Wordpress Plugin developed by Thaya Kareeson from OMNINOGGIN.

Check more about this Plugin at WP Greet Box Official Plugin page

Did you know about WP Greet Box before reading this? How was the review?

I was reading Do you need all those revisions? post from Nice2All blog. In the post, i found piece of SQL and PHP code.

Below is the Sample 1, how the code looked in that post:

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
document.write("<i>Hello World!");
//-->
</script>

As you can see that the coloring, formatting is making the code stand out and there are also options like view plain, copy to clipboard, print.

I think i have around 5 posts that show code samples in the posts and here is how it looks.

Below is the Sample 2:

<script type="text/javascript">
<!–
document.write("<i>Hello World!");
//–>
</script>

I know every one would prefer the Sample 1 rather than the Sample 2.

As soon as i read the above mentioned post, i left a comment asking the author about the code format and found out that it can be done by just installing a wordpress plugin called SyntaxHighlighter Plus.

How to beautify code sample in your post using Syntax Highlighter Plus:

• Open a new post or Modify an existing post
• For ex: If i want to show javascript code, then just put javascript code in between [javascript/] your code.. [/javascript]
• Save the post

It supports following languages:

* Bash — bash, sh
* C++ — cpp, c, c++
* C# — c#, c-sharp, csharp
* CSS — css
* Delphi — delphi, pascal
* Java — java
* JavaScript — js, jscript, javascript
* PHP — php
* Python — py, python
* Ruby — rb, ruby, rails, ror
* SQL — sql
* VB — vb, vb.net
* XML/HTML — xml, html, xhtml, xslt

You can find more info about this plugin here

Download SyntaxHighlighter Plus

Technorati Tags: syntax highlighters, wordpress, plugin, beautify

Entrecard + SezWho = Increase readers and comments

I joined Entrecard community one month back. I can tell you one thing that more number of readers have engaged with my blog and are regularly commenting.

Yesterday, i found out that Entrecard has joined their hands with SezWho. Immediately i jumped to sezwho website to find about it.

Well its an another great service that you can add in your blog by installing their plug-in.

SezWho – Empower your community and drive traffic with Comments, Blog rating

After going through their website, i decided to install the SezWho plug-in on this wordpress blog.
With this plug-in, the commentators will be rewarded for their comments on this blog and becomes an incentive to comment more on my blog.

Benefits on commenting on my blog:

• I have installed CommentLuv plug-in which displays your latest blog’s post beneath your comment. If you leave a comment, other readers might click on your latest blog’s post link and visit your blog. Is it not great? Read more about this plug-in Get more comments and visitors by using CommentLuv Plugin
• I have installed NoFollow Free Plug-in. If you leave more than 5 comments on my blog, nofollow tag is removed and you will get a backlink. For regular commentators its an incentive as they are getting a backlink. Read more about this plug-in Give Reward to commentators – Use ‘NoFollow Free’ WP Plugin
• I have installed Show Top Commentators plug-in. On my sidebar, i have put “Commentators of the Month”. If you see under that, you will see the list of Top Commentators of the month. If you are in the top ten then you will get a backlink for actively participating on my blog. I have set it to reset every month so that everyone a fair chance!
• I have installed SezWho plug-in yesterday. If you are already on the SezWho community and Entrecard community, your comment will be rewarded with Entrecard credits by commenting on my blog.
• More comments make the blogger happy and satisfied and also learns from other commentators

SezWho plug-in gives you more control as to what is being displayed and where, you can do so by:

• Turning on the “Disable Auto Layout” option on the SezWho plug-in configuration.
• You can Add the SezWho codes manually on your theme files

What do you think of this SezWho Plug-In?

Technorati Tags: Entrecard, sezwho, comments,

Wordpress 2.6 is out !!

Wordpress 2.6 Final is released!

This release has fixed lot of bugs and has come up with a lot of new and good features. If you are using Wordpress, i advice you to upgrade it to Wordpress 2.6 now.

Here are the few features that i immediately noticed after i upgraded wordpress to 2.6 version:

• Theme preview — Theme preview functionality would allow you to see what a new theme would look like on your blog before you activate it.
• WordPress Auto-Upgrade — There’s been some early progress on incorporating auto-upgrade for WordPress itself into version 2.6.
• Google Gears support — Now integrated into the WordPress, this feature will allow Google Gears users to experience a faster admin interface, and possibly manage their WordPress blogs while offline (how cool would that be).
• Plug-in page — You can see a bubble on the top of Plug-ins link. It lets you know the number of plug-in updates available without actually going to the page.
  

  Bubbles on top of Plug-ins

• Identicons — In WordPress 2.6 you’ll have the ability to select a default Gravatar for those who don’t have one.
• Post Revisions — Wiki-style revisions management for blog posts: a cool new power-feature, just announced on the WordPress Development Updates blog.
• Image Captioning — As pointed out by Michael, The WordPress image on the top left of this post has an image caption, a built-in feature from the going-to-be-final-WordPress 2.6!

There are many more features.

To implement image captioning, you need to add the Image Captioning CSS style code to your current theme stylesheet.

Just copy paste this Image Captioning CSS style to the bottom of your theme’s CSS:

[lang='css']/* Captions & alignment */
.aligncenter, div.aligncenter {
display: block;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}

.alignleft {
float: left;
}

.alignright {
float: right;
}

.wp-caption {
border: 1px solid #ddd;
text-align: center;
background-color: #f3f3f3;
padding-top: 4px;
margin: 10px;
-moz-border-radius: 3px;
-khtml-border-radius: 3px;
-webkit-border-radius: 3px;
border-radius: 3px;
}

.wp-caption img {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border: 0 none;
}

.wp-caption p.wp-caption-text {
font-size: 11px;
line-height: 17px;
padding: 0 4px 5px;
margin: 0;
}
/* End captions & alignment */[/lang]

What are you waiting for ? Download WordPress 2.6 it now !

Technorati Tags: wordpress 2.6 review, wordpress 2.6, wordpress 2.6 features, Identicons, Google Gears support, WordPress Auto-Upgrade, Theme Preview

Chris Jean has come up with a wonderful plugin WP Easy Uploader. It is a very useful wordpress plugin which can upload plugins, themes and any other files quickly and easily from Wordpress admin panel. You no longer have to upload the files using web File manager or from an FTP client.

I discovered this plugin from this Real Themes Blog.

Plugin features – I liked :

• You can install any theme or plugin directly from a URL and you don’t need to download it before uploading to your server
• Easily upload plugins directly to the plugins directory and theme files directly to the themes directory.
• Select to have archives automatically extracted to their destination. This means that plugins and themes will be taken care of for you, but it also means that you can zip up a large set of files and upload them quickly into a folder on your site. Currently zip, tar, gz, tar.gz, tgz, and tar.bz2 archives are supported.

I think this is one of the Must Have Wordpress Plugins. Let me know what do you think of this plugin??

Below are my other posts related to Wordpress plugins:

• Best (must have) Wordpress Plugins
• Get more comments and visitors by using CommentLuv Plugin
• Planning to change Wordpress Theme?
• Give Reward to commentators – Use ‘NoFollow Free’ WP Plugin

Technorati Tags: wordpress, wordpress plugins, easy file uploading, WP Easy Uploader, plugins

You want to give a new look to your wordpress blog.

What do you usually do?

• Search for Wordpress Themes. After finding a correct one of your choice and then change the theme.

OR

• Try changing the current Theme itself.

After that you may start making some changes or tweaking the theme. But, because of that changes, your blog may break and your blog visitors may see a buggy blog.

To avoid the above scenario, You can use “Admin Theme Preview” Wordpress plugin.

Before you read the rest of the post. I would like to thank Michael, this is the link were i discovered this plugin.

How does this plugin help you?

The Admin Theme Preview (ATP) plugin for WordPress allows for the preview of any currently installed theme without affecting the “live” blog theme viewable to site visitors. Useful for development and testing of new and existing WordPress themes.

After you install the plugin, there will a new menu called “Theme Preview” under your WordPress Administration->Design menu. There you will see all available themes that you have on your WordPress themes folder.

Now, click on the theme and you will see your blog with that theme. Only you (the admin) can see the selected theme. Your blog visitors will continue viewing the blog with the current theme. By this way you are making your site available and you (the admin) can continue modifying the theme and keep testing.

Admin Theme Preview plugin for WordPress is a MUST if you are still in the process of choosing the right theme and tweaking your current theme heavily.

NOTE : If you are using WP-SuperCache plugin, you better disable the plugin and try doing the above

I used the same plugin, when i changed my theme. you can check this post

I have just now discovered a very useful plugin for Wordpress. It is called CommentLuv Plugin.

You can also read my previous post Best (must have) Wordpress Plugins to find out more interesting Wordpress Plugins.

How does this plugin get you more comments and visitors?

After you leave a comment on a blog that has CommentLuv plugin installed, CommentLuv will try to detect the latest post from your blog and then present a link to the post at the bottom of the comment. It’s a nice way to repay those readers who leave a comment.

I discovered this plugin and found in action here. You can see my comment and also my last post link here

After you install this plugin, you will notice a new check box with following text:

Enable CommentLuv which will try and get your last blog post, please be patient while it finds it for you

CommentLuv Plugin will give you some of the below Benefits :

• You will get a link to your latest blog post
• More visitors will be willing to leave a comment as they will get a link of their latest blog post

Now that you know the benefits of this plugin, why not Download CommentLuv and get more interaction with your visitors!

Click below to download the plugin

UPDATE : CommentLuv Plugin is now Ajaxed – AjaxedCommentLuv has more exciting features

If you find this post useful. Try leaving a comment and check whether you blog last post is appearing or not

Technorati Tags: comment plugin, commentluv, killer wordpress plugins, wordpress plugins, dofollow, plugin, Social Networking, Wordpress

In my previous post, i mentioned How to Hide browser at workplace. But there are other ways to also have your privacy while browsing.

How many times it happens this… You are browsing and somebody walks in and is standing right behind you and you don’t wanna show what you are browsing.

Most of us just keep a watch on others moving around us and do surfing.

Well if you are using firefox, then you rename the open tab. For this you need to install RenameTabs Firefox extension

Here is what Valadrem the developer of this Firefox extension has to say.

Have you noticed that everybody looks the titles of your open tabs? It has a name: Paranoia! And a solution too: TabRenamizer!

If you want to Rename Firefox tabs, all you need is to install TabRenamizer
Plugin

If anyone knows any other plugins, leave a comment.

NOTE: As mentioned at the beginning of this post the link to my previous post Hide browser at workplace. But this is using Maxthon browser.
If anybody knows how to hide firefox browser. Leave a comment.

I started blogging on this website from December 2007. This blog is on Wordpress Blogging Platform( or i can call it as it uses Wordpress blogging software). It is free and it is available at wordpress.org.

I have spent lot of time searching for Wordpress Plugins, liked few and disliked few

Today, i have come up with this post to list out the ‘Must Have Plugins’ for Wordpress. This will help people who are looking for best wordpress plugins.

Wordpress Plugins in alphabetical order:

Akismet – A very useful plugin to protect your blog from spam. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.”

All in One Seo Pack – Automatic Search Engine Optimization(SEO) plugin for wordpress. I started using this plugin from Day 1 of my blogging with my first post ThinkersOnMove is now NiharsWorld! and Let me tell you, this plugin really helps you to get search engine traffic. A must plugin for all wordpress bloggers!

Chunk Urls for Wordpress – Most of the readers of the blog sometimes leave comments with url which are really long and it is difficult to shorten it manually without actually changing the URL. wp-chunk is a WordPress plugin to gracefully shorten URLs within submitted comments. It does not affect urls within posts, just comments.

Full Text Feed – Most of them know, <!––more––> feature in wordpress allows us to have Continue Reading… link in the main page of the blog for each post. But Wordpress truncates your feed’s content anywhere you insert a <!––more––> tag. This plugin undoes this functionality, allowing your feeds to contain the full text regardless of <!––more––> tag usage.

Google Analyticator – This plugin adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. It has lot of features, but the following two features are very important ones:

- Automatically tracks outbound links.
- Provides support for download link tracking.

Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap complaint sitemap for Wordpress blog. Sitemaps help your site getting indexed by the major search engines. This plugin can be put under SEO (Search Engine Optimization) plugin category.

Related Posts – This plugin is a very useful plugin. It shows similar posts already made on your blog, regardless of their category thereby makes readers read other posts that are related to the current post. It is also one of the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) plugin because, it increases internal linking on your blog. After few days i found an “improved version” of Related Entries plugin by Peter Bowyer.

SimpleTags – This plugin allows you to create a list of Technorati tags at the bottom of your post by providing a comma separated list of tags between the [tags] tags. You can use it with any blogging tool/method, not just when posting from WordPress itself (doesn’t use custom fields). Supports multiple words within tags. Also allows in-post tagging of words by enclosing them in [tag] tags. Works with the WYSIWYG editor.

Social Bookmarking RELOADED – Lot of sites have links at the top of the post or bottom of the post to allow reader to add in their favorite bookmarking sites. This plugin adds a list of XHTML compliant graphic links at the end of your posts and/or pages that allow your visitors to easily submit them in a number of social bookmarking sites.

Subscribe To Comments – This plugin allows commenters of the post to check a box before commenting and get e-notification for further comments on the post.

WordPress.com Stats – This plugin tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Note : Requires a WordPress.com API key.

WordPress Database Backup – This plugin is very useful and important. It takes backup of all the core wordpress tables and you can also select any new tables that you have. It has an option to take backup and send it as email attachment. I have setup the plugin to get the database backup every day by mail to my Gmail account.

WP-ContactForm – This plugin allows you to add a new Page Contact Form. Like i have Contact-Me Form link on the top. WP Contact Form is a drop-in form for users to contact you.

I would like to request you to drop a comment if you know any other useful plugins and if you know any which is better than any of the ones listed above.

I hope this post helps you manage your site/blog in a much more efficient way.

Technorati Tags: wordpress plugins, SEO plugins, best wordpress plugins