Archive for the 'Blogging' Category

We are beginning to see the results of FeedBurner acquisition by Google. Recently they had released the “pro” features such as stats PRO and Mybrand to the free world. This was understandable since the main revenue generation mechanism has to be the FeedBurner Ad Network!

Now they are providing FeedBurner integration with BlogSpot blogs! This means that if you have a BlogSpot blog, you can redirect the default feed to FeedBurner. This allows for a single feed stream and tracking your feed visitors is easier!

To configure all feed traffic to go through FeedBurner, add the FeedBurner URL in Site Settings -> Site Feed -> Post Feed Redirect URL field. This ensures that any feed access is redirected to FeedBurner.

What happens when FeedBurner tries to access feed? Well, BlogSpot can detect this from user agent and disable redirection only for FeedBurner server access!

Now the next thing I expect is the integration of FeedBurner Ad Network with Adsense. What they can do is to roll out FAN to all the existing Adsense publishers. Currently FAN is open to only select few who has more than 1000 or so feed subscribers.

I have a special attraction towards 3 column Wordpress themes. These themes are very efficient in making use of the screen space. Here are some of my favorite 3 column WordPress themes. Most of these themes are simple and elegant without too many images.

1.Cleaker 2.1 | Preview - This is a clean and pretty theme. It has a sophisticated look and you can easily customize the header logo. There is a widgetized version as well.

2. Prosense | Preview - This is dream come true for all the adsense based bloggers. Neat and professional look with built in adsense units. But don’t forget to change the publisher IDs There are various color variations available for this.

3. Blue Zinfandel 2.0 | Preview - This is a text heavy theme which simple and elegant. A two column version of this is also available.

4. Downtown Java theme | Preview - This is a different variation of Blue Zinfandel style. Content on the middle, a top navigation bar and a soothing color scheme are the things that makes this good.

5. Andreas theme | Preview - This probably qualifies as the most experimented 3 column theme. This blog is based on a variation of this theme. Simple, but very mechanical feel without any Web 2.0 look.

6. TypoXP reloaded | Preview- There are many variations of this simple and elegant 3 column theme. One advantage is that second and third columns can be merged if needed. Ideal for a text heavy blog. Remember, if you want uniqueness you will have to tweak it as it is a commonly used theme.

7. Qwilm theme | Preview - This is one of the most used 3 column themes. So use it if you are not very particular about your blog theme being unique. This can be used as a 4 column theme as well.

8. PlaintxtBlog theme | Preview - If you want your blog to be text centric, this is a good theme to use. But in order to be different, I suggest you to change the default color scheme.

9. Sosuechtig theme | Preview - I like this theme due to its uniqueness. Obviously you need to customize the header image. Clean theme with contrasting colors.

10. Digg 3 column | Preview - As the name says, this is a digg like theme. It has a smooth and Web 2.0 feel. It is also Widget ready.

Obviously I could have missed some great 3 column themes out there. What is your favorite?

Indian presence in the blogsphere is very strong, thanks to better broadband connectivity. Also like in Information Technology sector, Indians are pretty good in blogging simply because english is the second language for most of them.

But it is not easy to find out top 10 Indian blogs. One way is to use Alexa, but it may not give a true picture. For blogs, another metric that can be used to judge traffic is the FeedBurner subscriber count. Of course not all blogs display it, but many top Indian blogs do display FeedBurner subscriber count chicklet.

Without further “blah, blah”, here are the top 10 Indian blogs when it comes to FeedBurner feed count. This may not be perfect and if you know a blog I missed, I am only too happy to modify the list

1. Quick Online Tips by PCHere
10200+ subscribers

2. Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal
9800+ subscribers

3. JohnTp.com by John TP
1100+ subscribers

4. Tech Buzz by Thilak Raj
1000+ subscribers

5. Brajeshwar.com by Brajeshwar
700+ subscribers

6. India Uncut by Amit Varma
540+ subscribers

7. Domain Maximus by Sidin
400+ subscribers

8. Sree’s Tech Notes by Sreekandakumar
340+ subscribers

9. Ajay - on the road called life! by Ajay Dsouza
260+ subscribers

10. A Management Consultant’s Blog by Gautam Ghosh
250+ subscribers

As you can see almost all the top blogs are technology related. Also even the top blogs are way down when compared to blogs such as TechCrunch (369,000) or BoingBoing. But again almost all top Indian blogs are run by individuals not by companies!

Some of the blogs which would have appeared here if there was a subscriber count on them are gigaOM, desipundit, kiruba.com, indianpad, Emergic and many many more! It is surprising that most of these blogs are yet to use FeedBurner!

You can encourage blog readers to subscribe to the FeedBurner feed by providing auto discovery mechanism and also by providing a linked Feed icon.

But even after modifying auto feed discovery to point to FeedBurner feed, sometimes visitors will still be using the default Wordpress feed. This happens when they directly type in the Feed URL or when the feed reader uses the default Wordpress feed URL.

Now this is something which you want to discourage. There are mainly two reasons. First, you want to see the actual subscriber count. Secondly, you may want to leverage FeedBurner monetization.

What you need is a Wordpress plugin which will redirect default Wordpress feed traffic to FeedBurner feed. FeedBurner plugin written by Steve Smith (Ordered List) is the best one I think.

Installation is as simple as copying the plugin and then configuring your FeedBurner feed URL. You can also customize your comment feed URL.

Kerala Tips is currently running the Kerala Blogger Awards 2006. The total prize money is Rs. 10,000 and the winner will take home Rs. 6,000. The idea is to find the most popular Kerala Blog in 2006. There are even prizes for 2 lucky voters (Rs. 500 each).

Since there weren’t many nominations, all the blogs are put up for voting (35 blogs in total). I somehow hate the idea of blog jury. I think it is upto the readers to decide which is best!

The voting is open(a bit complicated) now and will close on March 16th. Please vote if you happen to be a reader of any of these blogs.

Disclosure: I am one of the sponsors for the event.

If Yahoo doesn’t respect copyright, can you expect bloggers to do the same?

In this case, the localized portal of Yahoo ( based on Malayalam - an indian language) has stolen recipes from a blogger and posted it as their own. To quote from blogger,

Some of the posts from this blog are lifted word by word, without my consent and posted, in Yahoo, Malayalam (beta) , and shown as their copyrighted material. See a screenshot of both the pages, which clearly shows the content lifting (copyright infringement).

If anybody else, lifted content from this blog, and exhibited somewhere else, without my permission, please remove the same.

The blogger (who is known as Su in Malayalam blogging circles) says that he has already mailed Yahoo about the copyright violation. He is yet to get any response. Obviously he is unhappy that his posts are being copied without permission!

I guess this is done by the Yahoo’s Malayalam team who probably is working on tight schedules to generate content!

I have a blog which is hosted on dreamhost and I recently upgraded it to version 2.1. The dreamhost advantage is that you can upgrade Wordpress with a single click (ok, two clicks if you consider database upgrade click also).

Everything went smooth. But when I looked at the blog I saw some database errors on the archives section! Surprisingly everything else on the blog was working. So I thought this must be a problem with the theme I was using. So I changed the theme to one of the defaults and voila! there was no error.

So the moral of the story - Check the codex Wordpress 2.1 theme compatibility list before you upgrade your blog!

Still with all the following cool features, Wordpress 2.1 upgrade is worth the hassle.

• The essential spell checker. This basically means that built in editor is better than using w.bloggar!
• The draft status for pages. This should have been there much earlier!
• Content Management Tool? - Pages can be the front page!
• Switch between plain editing and rich text editing. A must have!
• Auto saving. This is a life saver when you are writing long posts!

So what are you waiting for? Go and download Wordpress 2.1

Scobleizer in a post titled “Big gadget sites don’t link to blogs” wrote that increasingly blogs are avoiding linking to other blogs. it is not hard to see the reason - You don’t want to increase another blogger’s pagerank and give him more google juice. Many of us feel jealous when someone else posts an exclusive item on their site!

I am also guilty of the same practise. Many times I had linked to the original source completely ignoring the blog which actually lead me to the original source. Obvously that is a bad thing to do. So next time onwards I will be linking the all the sources to my post.

But it is not wise to link everything. For example, if you are writing about a phishing site or about a spamming site you should avoid linking directly. There are two reasons for this - First you don’t want to increase pageranking for the site and secondly you may also become part of the google’s red list for linking to the spammer!

Recently I got into the 2000 blogger list and found that many guys are using the list as a sort of marketing list. They publish the list on their site and all the 2000 bloggers will see the site as the latest site linking to each of them! So like me, most of the bloggers will end up visiting the linked in site!

OmniNerd is reporting that Apple lawyers are going after bloggers for using iPhone images,

Turns out Apple is not happy about all the publicity. Someone has created a skin for Windows Mobile phones that looks very similar to the new iPhone user interface. Shortly after Paul O’Brian posted a link on an xda-developer forum to the interface, he got a cease and desist letter from Apple’s lawyers. The lawyers warn, “The icons and screenshot displayed on your website are copyrighted by Apple, and copyright law explicitly prohibits unauthorized display and distribution of copyrighted works. Apple therefore demands that you remove this screenshot from your website…

Well done Apple! Harassing bloggers is an easy way to increase your business. I have a feeling that some of the Apple lawyers are Microsoft employees!

Wordpress is the most popular blogging platform out there. One of the things that made Wordpress so popular is the availability of hundreds of cool plugins and themes(most of them free!).

But plugins come with a price. Since plugins are developed by third parties, not all are very reliable. A single bad behaving plugin can bring down your entire blog! So install only necessary and useful plugins on your Wordpress installation.

I have a very limited set of plugins installed on this blog. To me, one of the most important plugin is the Related Posts plugin. Whenever you write a blog entry, this plugin automatically finds related previous posts which you can display anywhere. In my blog, you will find related entries on the right side.

Installing related post plugin is simple,

1. Download Related Posts plugin from here. If the site is down (500 error on his Wordpress installation!), direct download is here.




2. Upload the plugin file (related-posts.php) to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory and activate it.




3. Once you have activated it, a new option “Related Posts Option” will appear under plugins tab. In that you need to click on “run this script” link at the bottom. This modifies Wordpress table wp_posts to enable FULLTEXT indexes.

This should setup the Related posts plugin. But on certain Web hosting platforms I have found that “run this script” fails. This is because of the MySQL engine settings.

Following is the error I got on Globat host (on dreamhost it works fine),

#1214 - The used table type doesn’t support FULLTEXT indexes

This means that wp_posts table is NOT using MYISAM engine which is needed for FULTEXT indexes. To solve this problem run the following SQL on your PhpMyAdmin SQL console.

ALTER TABLE wp_posts ENGINE = MYISAM;

And then you can run the following SQL to configure FULLTEXT indexes.

ALTER TABLE `wp_posts` ADD FULLTEXT `post_related` (
`post_name` ,
`post_content`
)

Now you are all set. To display Related entries you can put <?php related_posts(); ?> . You can also control how the related entries should appear on your blog (For more details see Related entries readme file).

If you still face any issues, feel free to write to me.

Blogging gives you recognition and admiration among those who share your interests. When you have power, you have more responsibility as even a small mistake from you can affect a lot of people. The same holds good for blogging as well.

I am a regular reader of Amit’s Digital Inspiration. It contains a lot of good stuff and I was impressed by his writing skills. But I think lately he too is having the celebrity problems!

For example, consider his recent post - The 10 Funniest Email Messages in our Inbox. First of all, there was nothing hilarious in those mails. Secondly, it is not in good taste to publish mails written by people taking you in confidence. Casual surfers will think that you are an Internet authority and may ask your advice, but don’t make it public man!

As a fellow blogger (hey, I am no saint) , my advise to Amit is this - Man, don’t loose it.

I use w.bloggar to post to this blog. This desktop tool allows me to update my blog fast, without logging onto the wordpress console. The only problem is that w.bloggar doesn’t support creation of new categories (which I don’t need very often, but if you are using categories as tags you will find it a problem).

Here is a list of free desktop based blog publishing tools. Most of these atleast support Wordpress and Movable Type platforms. Please note I haven’t included any commercial or trial versions (for example, ecto).

Are you using one of these tools? Please let me know if I have missed out anything.

Free Desktop blogging tools for Windows

• Bleezer
• blogBuddy
• BlogDesk
• BlogED
• JBlogEditor
• IMHO
• Lycos-Qumana



• PowerBlog
• Post2Blog Express
• PostXING
• Qumana
• RocketPost Basic (Remember it is really basic!)
• Semagic
• SharpMT
• Slug
• Tanjunka (no longer available since domain expired!)
• w.bloggar
• Zoundry

Free Desktop blogging tools for Linux

• Bleezer



• BloGTK
• Drivel
• Gnome Blog
• JBlogEditor

Free Desktop blogging tools for Mac

• Bleezer



• BlogED
• iJournal
• JBlogEditor
• Lycos-Qumana
• Qumana
• Xjournal

Wordpress (the best blogging software out there) has released version 2.0.6 yesterday which includes various security fixes. If you are planning to upgrade always take a backup of everything. If you have a lot plugins installed, there is a slight chance of something getting screwed up.

I normally wait a few days to see that things are stable and people are OK with it.

As per Wordpress blog, the security issues were reported by Stefan Esser. His blog post on Wordpress vulnerabilities was pretty harsh!

Following are the main updates in 2.0.6,

• Security fixes.
• HTML quicktags now work in Safari browsers.
• Comments are filtered to prevent them from messing up your blog layout.
• Compatibility with PHP/FastCGI setups.

Note: There is no change required to the Wordpress DB to upgrade.

More Info
Download Wordpress 2.0.6
How to upgrade Wordpress from 2.0.5 to 2.0.6

Google has recently clarified that images or photos cannot be used near adsense ad units to lure Web site visitors to click them. For example, following type of usage is a strict no-no after this clarification (incidently this is used in a lot of blogs).

From the adsense blog,

We ask that publishers not line up images and ads in a way that suggests a relationship between the images and the ads. If your visitors believe that the images and the ads are directly associated, or that the advertiser is offering the exact item found in the neighboring image, they may click the ad expecting to find something that isn’t actually being offered. That’s not a good experience for users or advertisers.

After this announcement I can see a lot of sites/blogs frantically changing their ad unit placement. I wonder what effect the change will have on their ad click rates!