1. But there is a hack which allows you to see whether someone is really offline or not. The easiest way is to directly acess the online status image using the URL – http://opi.yahoo.com/online?u=userid&m=g&t=2 (replace userid with the actual user id).

2. The second way is to start a voice chat with the userid you want to check. If you don’t get an error it indicates that the user is indeed online, but in invisible mode. This works only in previous versions of Yahoo messenger.

3. The only method which seems to work on latest versions of Yahoo messenger is the IMEnviornment hack. First send a message to the user id and then immediately change the IMEnviorment. Now if the guy is really offline, you will get a message “waiting for your friend to load the theme” message. If he is online, you will just get a blank page!

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.

I thought this is because the monthly figure database was updated first and later overview database was populated. But sometime later I found that overview page showed bigger page impressions than the monthly report! When I checked about 5 minutes later both counts were same!

It is a small thing, but when you are checking your reports check monthly and all time reports as well. One of them might give you the latest view of your Adsense account!

I looked at the logs generated. The rad_install.log file under logs folder of RAD installation contained the following error,

(Jan 4, 2007 12:37:20 PM), Install, com.ibm.rational.cdi.common.CustomExec, err, Operation timed out: connect
(Jan 4, 2007 12:37:20 PM), Install, com.installshield.wizard.RunnableWizardBeanContext, err, java.lang.NullPointerException
STACK_TRACE: 5
java.lang.NullPointerException
at com.ibm.rational.cdi.common.CustomExec.parseConfigurationFile(CustomExec.java:444)
at com.ibm.rational.cdi.common.CustomExec.execute(CustomExec.java:294)
at com.installshield.wizard.RunnableWizardBeanContext.run(RunnableWizardBeanContext.java:21)

To resolve this I used the following hack. I still don’t know the root cause of the problem.

1. Uninstalled RAD.
2. Installed RAD again, but kept the install integrated WAS 6.0 button unchecked.
3. From the disk4 folder, I have manually installed WAS server. Selected custom install and then choose the directory for installation as [RAD directory]\runtimes\base_v6. The base_v6 folder was manually created.

When I started RAD again, voila! the integrated WAS server was enabled.

My Machine settings
Windows XP service pack 2 with all latest patches.
All hard disks were NTFS formatted.

References
IBM on the WAS issue in RAD
Similar problem listed on IBM forum without any solution