CrossOver Chromium

Google plans to expand its Chrome offerings to the Mac and Linux platforms.

If you’d like to try Google Chrome on a Mac, there is no need for Boot Camp etc. The guys over at CodeWeavers (producers of the awesome CrossOver for Mac program that lets you run some Windows apps on your Intel Mac) have ported Chrome for Mac as well as for Linux recently.

CrossOver Chromium is a Mac and Linux port of the open source Chromium web browser , the freely available source behind Chrome.

CrossOver Chromium requires OS X 10.4 or higher and an Intel CPU, PowerPC Macs are NOT supported. Additionally, CrossOver for Chrome is absolutely not suitable for using as day to day browser; CrossOver just produced it as a proof of concept of their capabilities.

Sooner or later Google will launch Chrome; CrossOver Chromium is just something to try out Chrome goodness. So if you feel like checking out Chrome before Google release Mac or Linux version CrossOver Chromium is your answer.

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By releasing immediate security fixes they honour their end of the deal, but do we by upgrading our WordPress accordingly? I have to say, the majority of us don’t. Apart from upgrading WordPress, there are other server related issues which may look simple, but can be your saviour or doorway to destruction.

Exploits are inevitable; you will come across them every now and then. Exploits are an unavoidable by-product of major projects; they are part of the bargain: you fix them and move on. Here is what can be done to stay safe

• Subscribe to WordPress development blog . That should keep you alert of the latest security patches and versions. Don’t just read it act on it too. So, upgrade accordingly. Upgrading might force you to take down your blog/site temporarily for few hours, but it’s still better than your server being brought down for forever, right?
• Not only do you have to upgrade WordPress, keep an eye on your plugins. I had experienced persistent XSS Vulnerability (Plugin responsible-wp-feedstats 2.4) and SQL Injection Vulnerability (Plugin responsible- WP-Stats 2.01), fortunately these were taken care of.
• Stop anonymous comments and trackbacks, why? There’s history of WordPress Trackback Charset SQL Injection Issue and other Non-WP related spam flood.
• Check your server files and folder permission accordingly. Especially Config.php file, which is an open text based file in a Web accessible directory. Not only is it Web accessible, but it contains the login and password for your blog’s database. No need to be a rocket scientist to figure out what will happen if someone naughty can get access to that.
• Directories should have permissions of 755. NEVER 777. All files should have permissions of 644. If you do want to use the built-in editor; theme files should have permissions of 666. NEVER 777. Do not use any plugin that needs to write anything to the server. No matter how drastic it sounds, trust me it will save your ass.
• Last but not the least, if you are building your own theme/or asked someone to do that for you, please do try to consult/check for latest PHP security holes or common security flaws before using that as template.

All of the above do’s and don’ts are common sense, but unfortunately we get lazy and tend to ignore most of them. Learn from my mistakes.

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I picked this up last night from BBC Technology. Naturally the entire world is going virtual more and more each day, but we never thought that every device connected to the internet would require an IP (Internet Protocol). Naturally, there isn’t an infinite number of IP addresses. The horror of running out of IP address would be nasty in this virtual Century.

Currently we use IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4), which is the fourth iteration of the Internet Protocol (IP) and the dominant network layer protocol on the Internet. Problem is, IPv4 uses 32-bit (4-byte) addresses, which limits the address space to 4,294,967,296 possible unique addresses.

You might think that’s a huge number, but around 19 million unique address are reserved for private networks and multicast addresses, which reduces the possible unique addresses that can be assigned to public networks.

At the current pace which the whole world is connecting to the net, from game consoles to mobile phones, it’s inevitable that within the next 3-4 years IPv4 unique addresses will hit Zero. Vint Cerf who is one of the founding fathers of the net (Google’s chief internet evangelist and departing chairman of ICANN), told the BBC in an interview-

There is a risk of not being able to get online….
The rate of consumption of available remaining IPv4 numbers appears to be on track to run out in 2010/11.

So as you can see, the threat is just about to knock our door.

So what’s the solution?

Well off course Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), which is designated as the successor of IPv4 nearly a decade ago, but it hasn’t been rolled out at speed. The primary change from IPv4 to IPv6 is the length of network addresses. IPv6 addresses are 128 bits long, whereas IPv4 addresses are 32 bits; where the IPv4 address space contains roughly 4 billion addresses, IPv6 has enough room for 3.4×1038 unique addresses (let me count- it’s around 335 trillion).

There are misunderstandings regarding IPv4 exhaustion that when IPv4 ran out of addresses the net would stop working, actually the net will still be the same as it is, but if the Internet doesn’t support IPv6, and unable to allocate address to your IPv4 device, you can’t connect to it. In July 2004 ICANN already announced that the root DNS servers for the Internet had been modified to support both IPv6 and IPv4.

So now the hardware manufacturers should build their devices to support IPv6 and ISP’s to be ready for IPv6 as well. The U.S. Government, for example, has specified that the network backbones of all federal agencies must deploy IPv6 by 2008. China has a five year plan to change the whole network infrastructure.

So we’re going see a lot of changes on the Internet as well as devices in the coming years. Is your network IPv6 ready?

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Windows Server 2003 simplifies branch server management, improves identity and access management, reduces storage management costs, provides a rich Web platform, did I mentioned cost-effective server virtualization as well? The latest version of Windows 2003 is R2, i.e. service pack 2 (SP2), contains some major fixes that the original release candidate was missing.

But off course before everything else, you need to know the hardware requirements windows 2003 server demands, and I have to admit it is a lot higher than any of its class. Requirements vary from edition to edition (Standard, enterprise, datacentre & web edition [no R2]); for the sake of simplicity I will limit my discussion within R2 Enterprise Edition. So here we go-

Minimum requirements:
Processor- 133 MHZ minimum (maximum 8 processor, but for the multiple processor you better use something higher than Pentium II).
RAM- 128 MB (maximum 64GB for x86 type and 2TB for x64 type machine).
HDD- 3GB considering you are installing using a CD/DVD, but for network installation less than half of it is cool.

That’s about it, apart from some obvious requirements like CD/DVD drive (unless you are installing from a network location), VGA with console redirection capabilities (now a day’s all of them do, don’t they!) And finally for heaven’s sake remember that 64-bit version is compatible only with 64-bit Intel Itanium-based systems and cannot install on 32-bit systems.

Installation:
Installation of Windows 2003 is easy as pie with a little guidance (know-how-to) and a bit of common sense:). Detailed planning can make your installation of Windows Server 2003 more efficient by helping you to avoid potential problems during installation. An understanding of the configuration options will also help to ensure that you have accurately configured your system. Before installation you should check whether your system meets the minimum requirements, Check Hardware and Software Compatibility, proper file system (FAT 32 or NTFS), and Workgroup or Domain stuffs.

The installation is pretty much straight forward just like any other windows operating system, but since it’s a server operating system there will be few obvious different setup screens that you may have never seen before (or maybe you have seen). Your first concern will be, the partition of hard drive you will install Windows 2003; it must be a NTFS file system.

If you select a new partition during Setup, create and size only the partition on which you will install Windows Server 2003. After installation, use Disk Management to partition the remaining space on the hard disk. Note that Windows Server 2003, Windows XP Professional, Windows 2000, and Windows NT are the only Microsoft operating systems that you can use to gain access to data on a local hard disk that is formatted with NTFS. If you plan to gain access to files that are on a local Windows Server 2003 partition with the Microsoft Windows 95 or Windows 98 operating systems, you should format the partition with a FAT or FAT32 file system.

At the middle of the installation (after the first reboot) you will be asked to provide a product key, the appropriate license type and number of purchased licenses. Needless to mention you have to choose exactly what you paid have for:).

At the far most end of the installation another section you should put some attention is “Network settings” area. For easier installation you can just choose typical settings and change it later (which ultimately you have to do, you know it!) or configure as you go by choosing custom settings. Then after few minutes your system should reboot again and you’r finished installing the Windows 2003 server. Its way easier than it sounds, the tricky parts are adding different roles to your server and configuring them properly, which I will cover some other day step by step.

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A Poll is one of the oldest methods of collecting user opinions. An online poll is just the next generation of that. Most sites/blogs have a contact us section to reach the webmaster but we couldn’t rely on that to gather user opinions on a specific topic or subject.

To gather extensive user opinions we can conduct a survey but for a quick on-the-spot opinion we use a poll.There are several plug-in systems out there that let you add quick poll in your blog/website but what’s the use of a poll if a large portion of users cannot access them?

Today we will look at a few poll plug-ins and check out which is best for usability and accessibility. Our discussion will be limited to only WordPress plug-ins that can be used in WP blog/sites.

Poll Daddy

A widely popular hosted poll management solution. Creating poll is as easy as pie, just as simple as type in the question and answer. Poll Daddy offers variety of customisations like multiple choice, multiple votes, user’s answer, randomized answer, closing date etc. You also will have the ability to create poll that will be displayed in poll daddy site as well.

Poll daddy offers you 14 XHTML 1.0 compliant styled widgets which you can embed in your site or blog by way of JavaScript or Flash code snippets provided by them. You can also provide your user direct link to the poll where your user will vote directly in Poll Daddy site.

Poll daddy also allows you to create your widget style and offers RSS feeds for every poll you create. All in all so far sounds cool, doesn’t it? Well don’t get too high on that, here are some usability and accessibility issues that you should consider.

First the JavaScript, if the user has JavaScript disabled they won’t get the poll, they may even get warning message from their firewall application. That isn’t cool, because a lot of users set their firewall to block third part JavaScript and Cookies.

Second the Flash code snippet; it might be one of the rising elements of RIA (RICH Internet Application), but it has yet to fully support screen readers. So as you can see you are missing a huge potential portion of users who might be interested in your site/blog.

Democracy Ajax Poll

This nice little plug-in for WordPress does exactly what its name implies. A simple two step installation, you can even use it as a permanent sidebar element (additional tweaking required) to display an ongoing poll. Poll management is simple through Wordpress admin panel. After initial configaration further CSS customization can be done to shape up the looks of the poll.

Just like other AJAX based applications this does have its accessibility issues. Another drawback of this plug-in is, occasionally it generates invalid code.

Democracy Ajax Poll is a great plug-in but only good for small scale polls with the obvious drawbacks.

WP-Polls

WP-Polls is probably the most widely used WordPress poll plug-in . Why? well, it gives you tons of customisation option which all validate to W3C. This cool plug-in adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can easily include a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page. WP-Polls is extremely customisable via templates and CSS styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you like.

Setting up WP-Polls is easy as two clicks. Poll management is so easy (via the WordPress admin control panel) that you can create the most basic poll to a complex poll on the fly.

You can create and maintain multiple polls simultaneously as well as having recurring poll to keep it ticking over.
Though WP-polls are AJAX based, in my test I didn’t came across with XSS or other slimy vulnerability so far. Java runs on server side. Strong CSS knowledge might be required for serious customization, cookie and IP setting may cause a warning massage through users firewall.

In a previous post Paul shared some information regarding increasing readership & accessibility. Apart from that information shared by Paul polls are also necessary in order to boost your readership. After all without user participation your blog is as good as dead static site.

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There is no simple answer. Any CMS, whether Drupal or Wordpress can experience the same issues caused by numerous reasons without anything to do with the core itself. I will keep the focus of this discussion on the WordPress (self hosted) related issues to narrow it down. Why dont we turn the spotlight onto the fundamental reasons first, so that it would be easier to eliminate them? Your WP (WordPress) powered site may experience sluggishness because:

• MySQL server or connection issues.
• PHP Memory Limit.
• Apache log rotator problem (for Apache server).
• Broken/Degraded PHP code in template/theme files.
• Excessive plugin uses/ use of plugin(s) with broken codes.
• Some particular third party widgets/ JavaScript codes.
• WordPress Dashboard’s display of RSS feeds.
• Pingback attempts when posting.

There are many other reasons which might trigger sluggishness, but they would be one way or another related to above mentioned causes. Now that we know what makes our WP site’s slow down (Back end or front end), let’s turn our focus on how to avoid these.

MySQL server or connection issues
Actually very little you can do about this, since your host can only resolve this. Most of the case this is a temporary issue, when your host is having an upgrade or downtime. Too many connections to your DBhost can also trigger sluggishness. Your WP back end can also slow down when MySQL Database is unable to keep up with the query demands.

Solution: Contact your server host if they are having an upgrade or downtime. Make sure your WP database isn’t shared with your other sites. Check with your hosting company regarding your DB statistics, if needed do an upgrade or change host. No use sticking to a host just because they are nice but can’t meet your technical demand.

PHP Memory Limit
The heartbeat of WP is PHP, so obviously when something goes wrong with that you will have issues. By default PHP is a beast with all kinds of nasty modules it thinks it needs to load. So the more it’s loading, the more memory you need. Why not control what to load? Disable as many extensions you are not using to save memory. There is a very useful guide on PHP configuration optimization.

Solution: Optimize your PHP configuration, avoid loading unused modules.

Apache log rotator problem (for Apache server)
This happens when your site is hosted on Apache server. When a log rotator script breaks, your server log files start growing huge in size. Meaning your server has to deal with hundreds of Megabytes excess log files that will slow it down to the point of instability.

Solution: Contact your server’s technical support. You may also check and make sure the files/directory of log files should be only server writable.

Broken/Degraded PHP code in template/theme files
Many WP users experience sluggishness for this reason as their site gets bigger. You will come across hundreds of beautiful, stunning looking WordPress themes on the web, but how will you know the PHP codes are optimized on the back end? WordPress has some basic guidelines/ requirements for theme submission, but a PHP code check isn’t one of them (Checking each themes code isn’t practical either). But, from the user’s perspective you need to make sure your themes code is optimized, as that code is the framework of the whole site.

Solution: First use wp-cache plugin (included with latest WP version installation pack). It’s the classic caching solution. It also knows how to update itself when comments are received, etc, so your site is always the most up to date and requires less load time. Second (optional) why recompile scripts every time, when you can save the bytecode? There is an extension called eAccelerator, its uses a bit of disk space but also optimizes the opcodes and saves you from having to recompile a script every time. It can shave up to 5000ms off your loading time, depending on the php code. Third switch your themes to some standard theme (for example-WordPress default theme) with all the plugins active and test the performances. If the performance remains sluggish, your problem isn’t in theme/template codes.

Excessive plugin uses/ use of plugin(s) with broken codes
This is the second most probable cause for WP to slow down. Just like above problem, this is also caused by broken PHP code or degraded MySQL queries, but in this case within the plugin files.

Solution: Don’t use a plugin when you can do it easily without the use of plugin. Activate only the plugins you want to really use, or best still, remove the non active plugins. Now deactivate all plugins and clear your browser cache. Activate one plugin and clear the cache again and check the performance, lastly clear cache again. Repeat the process until you experience slowness or finish activating all required plugins. There are ways to identify slow/degraded MySQL querries, which I will discuss in next blog tip.

Some particular third party widgets/ JavaScript codes
Oddly enough this is a random problem, meaning different people experience sluggishness with different types of third party scripts or widgets. So, why am I saying the reasons are problematic codes, where it’s random? For most cases the problem is resolved when those scripts or widgets are removed, they must have been the cause :P.

Solution: Most commonly these third party scripts/widgets have issues with new version of WordPress (reason unknown)-Snap preview anywhere, MyBloglog widget (javascript version of mybloglog) (surprisingly the slowness disappear when you manually coded the non javascript into your template), Advertising networks JavaScript codes (I experienced some of the ad networks ad script brings down your site to its knees), few dozens others. The smartest move will be keeping only the necessary ones (if possible non JavaScript version).

WordPress Dashboard’s display of RSS feeds
If you find that editing posts/templates or logging into WordPress takes a long time, the culprit is probably the WP dashboard. This is the “home” of the administration section, displays links to your latest posts, upcoming posts, comments, and incoming links. Unfortunately, it also displays a number of RSS feeds related to WordPress. While this sounds like a good idea, it often takes 30 seconds or longer to load the page because of delays fetching the RSS files, and they rarely have anything new and relevant. Two ways you can avoid that-

1. Avoid loading the Dashboard page (index.php) at all. Instead of using the “Login” link in the sidebar, you may use link that goes straight to /wp-admin/post.php. This brings you straight to the posting interface, which loads instantly, and you can use the links to reach other parts of the console, including the Dashboard if you need it.
2. If you still want to use the standard login feature, install Angsuman’s Dashboard hack, which replaces the RSS section of the dashboard with more useful links within your site.

Pingback attempts when posting
This is a random cause of your slow WP posting interface, especially the editing part. While the actual posting process is instantaneous, the delay is caused by two parts of network activity-

• WordPress attempts to use Pingback to notify every URL you’ve linked to. If you find yourself linking to WordPress blogs often, this is actually a useful feature-otherwise, it’s a waste of time. In my experience, attempts to Pingback non-blog sites are the cause of most of this delay. Lastly please for heavens sake do not use any plugin such as default trackback, because you don’t want your server to spend 40-45 seconds to trackback something that isn’t relavent to your posts.
• WordPress uses Ping-o-matic to notify search engines of your post. This is a very good thing, but occasionally causes delays. Rarely, Ping-o-matic causes a delay when posting. To eliminate this, you can remove rpc.pingomatic.com from the list of Update Services in Options -> Writing. You can even use other ping server instead of pingomatic. Here is the list of some useful ping servers which can be used instead of pingomatic.

As you can see most of the cases for slowing down a WP site isn’t WP related at all. A little bit of workaround and tricks can be just enough to avoid these.

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Yes it may be true that 80% of computer user’s desktops are one way or another dominated by Microsoft, but when it comes to the Web, Microsoft’s plays a leading lady role at best. Perhaps going after Adobe’s biggest success “Flash”, is just a sign of Microsoft’s preparation for a Web domination campaign. Anyway “Silverlight”, is a browser plugin that will allow Web content providers/publishers to offer rich video and interactive media experiences directly within their Web sites. Wondering which browser? According to an official statement issued by Microsoft (unable to find the resource at the time of writing this post), Silverlight will be compatible with Internet explorer, Firefox and Opera initially.

Silverlight, formerly code-named WPF/E uses the same technology which leverages Vista’s new graphics framework Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). As you can guess, Microsoft’s key target audience/consumer group are content providers that want to distribute video and rich media over the Web, designers and developers who build rich media content or applications and last but not the least, end users. Until now almost all of the news sites like Cnet, ZDnet, Reuter’s etc. use Adobe’s Flash as the key technology to show interactive media/content. Microsoft’s Silverlight objective is to take away that dominance. Obviously Silverlight has the good looks and an abundance of creativity enrichment.

The coolest part of “Silverlight” is that it delivers a similar user experience on both IE 7 running on Windows Vista and Firefox running on an Apple Mac computer. This means it is OS independent (cross-platform) and more importantly, end users will not have to download different video player technologies to view online media based on what OS they are running. Well that is one feature that Adobe Flash doesn’t have.

Here are some of the cool features of Silverlight

• It supports playback of WMV files on both PC and Macintosh.
• Silverlight and HTML integrate seamlessly together. Every XAML element can be accessed or manipulated from the same client-side JavaScript that would be used to interact with any DHTML element: there are no artificial boundaries or barriers, and you can even overlay HTML elements on top of Silverlight content (simply by creating a windowless frame).
• Full runtime interactivity with Silverlight generated content. The content of the XAML file can be completely server-side generated.
• Silverlight is blindingly fast - trust me it is. You just go and play the same video with Flash and Silverlight and you will see.
• Silverlight is almost 100% upward compatible with WPF. Animation, 2D vector graphics, media, text.
• This one is the coolest of all: Simple integration with existing Web technologies and assets means Silverlight works with any back-end Web environment or technology. No “rip and replace” required. Silverlight integrates with your existing infrastructure and applications, including Apache, PHP, as well as JavaScript and XHTML on the client.

There was no indication if “Silverlight” will be able to eliminate the key accessibility issue of Flash objects that is to say the lack of device independent navigation. In Adobe Flash created objects, you can bring good looks, but you can’t bring device independent navigation/control, you need a mouse for that. I’m hoping they have an answer for this. We’ll just have to want and see the final product.

Microsoft delivered a beta of Silverlight at its MIX 2007 conference at the end of April. So have your fingers crossed and wait to see the battle of rich media content generators :P.

Perhaps our friends at mydeo can tell us more.

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Unfortunately for some reason the last few hours the audio feature was not functioning due to the application’s failure to auto refresh the feed content. But our technical team has already taken care of the feed auto refresh issue and now the “Listen to this post” is 100% operational. We apologize for the inconvenience, thank you for your patience and support.

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• ICANN doesn’t care about child protection online
• Ireland Inc.
• Blind man wins fight to turn signals back on
• iMacro to save time and sanity!
• Lyro’s potential relies on Content Labels
• Blog Tips#2 Increase readership through subscription
• Goggle’s Voice activated search

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This last Friday (6th April,2007) , Google just gave another heart pounding blow when they announced an experiment to use speech recognition on telephones so consumers can ask for local information in short voice activated directory assistance service. This experimental product, Google Voice Local Search in short GOOG-411, is currently only available in English, in the US, for US business listings.

So what you need to do is dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) from any phone. You can either ask for a local business by name or type (for example Gas Station, Bar, Super Market, Dry cleaner etc.), you can even have the details sent to you via SMS. All of these are free, where conventional 411 calls in US cost $1 and higher. Google doesn’t charge users for the toll-free call or for connecting the caller to the business. Regular phone charges may apply, depending on the user’s telephone service provider.

The GOOG-411 isn’t full proof. Google already said it is seeking to fine-tune the computerized system to improve how the service recognizes users’ requests. They also mentioned that this service may not be available all the time and may not work for all users. Well off course, that is the reason GOOG-411 is still under Graduate in Google Labs.

Over time, the voice quality is likely to improve as Google roll it out for rest of the major business playgrounds, such as UK, Ireland (ok it’s not that big), France, Germany, Australia, Hong kong and Japan. This Voice activated search works a lot like conventional Google search on the net, the difference is instead of typing the keywords users are saying the keywords. From a business perspective, Google’s experiment will attract a lot of attention. Why? well, naturally because of the cost effectiveness. Don’t expect it to be ad free though, in the near future ads will roll in, that’s for sure.

Experts are predicting this might be Google’s response to last week’s Microsoft Corp. acquisition of voice search firm Tellme Networks Inc. The deal valued at more than $800 million.

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Making it easy for readers to learn about updates to your blog is vital. Subscription is the most compelling method to gain readers and retain them. There are more than 22 million blogs tracked by technorati so competition for readership is buoyant. What’s the point in providing quality content that’s hard to subscribe to and difficult to navigate. Chances are, someone else is providing similar content with user friendly subscription and navigation. So, improving the user experience by providing a friendly navigation and easy subscription method makes your readers feel that you care.

Its not rocket science, a few tweaks here and there in your blog template code is enough. Naturally, if you run out of fuel and need specific help, just post a comment and I’ll help you out.

Allow readers to subscribe to comments

Some readers may only be interested in the ongoing discussion of a specific post, rather than the whole blog. This is especially true when they’ve posted a comment themselves and wish to be updated when others respond.

There are two popular methods to enable comments subscription; comment feed and email subscription. Personally I prefer using both methods at the same time, as that gives readers a choice.

By automatically emailing people who comment on a blog post when someone else has added a comment after them, you are significantly increasing the possibility of them coming back to post more comments. In turn, this increases the possibility of them becoming more active on the blog to possibly even become a member of your community.

Method one: Via comment feed Adding an RSS feed to your posts is very simple. WordPress already has a global comment feed present, which you might have noticed if you installed a new theme. You can access this by placing the following tag in your sidebar (sidebar.php) or footer(footer.php).

<?php bloginfo(’comments_rss2_url’); ?>

But for showing RSS feed of a specific post and let readers subscribe you need a different function, actually a WP template tag.

<?php comments_rss_link(’text’, ‘file’); ?>

The “text” parameter represents the anchor text to display the comment’s RSS feed and “file” parameter represents the file the link points to. The default is ‘wp-commentsrss2.php’. Better to leave the file part at the default if you are not playing with your feed core file.

Place the code below in your themes comment section header (usually comments.php) just bellow the #postcomment call (as shown in the image). Replace the Anchor Text to suit your test.

<?php comments_rss_link(’Anchor Text‘); ?>

Method Two: email subscription

Via email subscription, your readers can be notified by email when a current discussion has been updated (someone leaves a new comment to which they may wish to respond). The advantage of adding this feature to your blog is that you are giving your readers an update alert even when they are away from their feed readers, through email which can easily be accessed via phone or PDA.

The easiest way to to add this feature is using a plugin (Subscribe to Comments). Alternatively you can implement it with a few tweaks in the comment form (Moderate PHP and SQL knowledge necessary).

Place this code snippet just bellow your comment form (comments.php) function call. Note that the classes can be configured in CSS. You can customize it further by adding subscription management, auto subscription (off course all in PHP).

<form action=”http://<?php echo $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . wp_specialchars($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']); ?>” method=”post”> <input type=”hidden” name=”comment_subscribe” value=”comment_subscribe” /> <input type=”hidden” name=”postid” value=”<?php echo $id; ?>” /> <input type=”hidden” name=”comment_ref” value=”<?php echo urlencode(’http://’ . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . wp_specialchars($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'])); ?>” /> <p class=”subscribe_comments”> <?php _e(’Subscribe without commenting’, ’subscribe_comments’); ?> <br /> <label for=”subscribe_email”><?php _e(’E-Mail:’, ’subscribe_comments’); ?> <input type=”text” name=”email” id=”subscribe_email” size=”22″ value=”<?php echo $user_email; ?>” /></label> <input type=”submit” name=”submit” value=”<?php _e(’Subscribe’, ’subscribe_comments’); ?>” /> </p> </form>

Go the extra mile - Subscribe to categories

This is a very simple yet highly adorable feature you can offer to your readers. You may write about lot of things in your blog but that doesn’t mean your readers are interested in everything you have to talk about, that’s why you sort them into categories. Now if you can offer your readers the ability to subscribe to specific categories, it would be wonderful, don’t you agree? The method is simple, as WP already has a template tag ready to take care of it.

<?php wp_list_categories(’arguments’); ?> [for WordPress 2.1 and above] <?php wp_list_cats(’arguments’); ?> [Prior to WordPress 2.1]

These two functions work almost the same, they dynamically list categories available to your blog. There are two ways you can let your readers subscribe to categories.

By showing a text RSS link beside category name-

<?phpwp_list_categories(’orderby=name&feed=RSS’); ?> [for WordPress 2.1 and above]

<?phpwp_list_cats(’orderby=name&feed=RSS’); ?> [Prior to WordPress 2.1]

By showing RSS feed image link beside category name-

<?phpwp_list_categories(’orderby=name&feed_image=/files/rss.gif‘); ?> [for WordPress 2.1 and above]

<?phpwp_list_categories(’orderby=name&feed_image=/files/rss.gif‘); ?> [Prior to WordPress 2.1]

For feed images do not forget to replace /files/rss.gif with your own feed image location. You have to place these codes to your sidebar template (usually sidebar.php) above </div>.

Good luck and give me a shout if you need a hand with anything.

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Lyro is a service introduced by Workforce LLC. So what is Lyro all about? In general, Lyro offer you nothing but an online digital business card. This business card can contain all the necessary details needed for your primary business contact details. The only detail it doesn’t display online is your email address. This stops the possibility of getting spammed from abusers of the service.

The business card page comes with a secure messaging system, so people can get in contact with you. The only thing I didn’t like is the anonymity of the massage, I prefer to know who is sending me messages. According to our CEO, Paul Walsh, this could breach marketing best practices, at least in the UK.

So what is the difference between Lyro and any other Web site where you can store your contact details? For example MSN and Yahoo allows you to store your contact details and people can contact you without knowing your mail address. I think the main differentiator is the ability to search. Yahoo and MSN profiles aren’t searchable on the Web; on the other hand Lyro’s business cards are discoverable via mainstream search engines and from within it’s own site. Every word in your business card is a keyword.

At this moment Lyro business cards are stored in a sub-domain of Lyro. You can choose the name; even change it at anytime (subject to availability). Lyro promise to introduce the following features shortly:

• Uploading a profile photo
• Customizable card
• Lyro badge

Honestly speaking, there is nothing so special about Lyro at this moment. But considering its potential with the proper use of Content labels, I have to say it has the potential to be something special - you could couple the business cards with Segala’s intention to introduce identity for companies online using Content Labels. With the use of FOAF profiles you could network friends of friends to build a powerful network. The combination of Content Labels and FOAF profiles would enable trust for people who make recommendations about friends.

So, Lyro is pretty simple as it stands today, but it could be a nice interface to company’s and individual’s identities online when coupled with Content Labels. Otherwise it will sadly be just another Web site that collects contact details for people.

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Both releases contain fixes for several publicly known minor XSS issues, one major XML-RPC issue (This is the serious one, which might give attackers control of your blog). WordPress promises that this time they are aggressively monitoring all downloads for any changes or modifications. I truly hope the previous scenario won’t be repeated.

So what are you waiting for head up to WordPress dowanload site and do the upgrades. After all “safety first”, isn’t it?

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Displaying recent posts

Most bloggers use third party plugins to show recent posts in the sidebar. Although this is the easiest way around, it certainly isn’t the most effective and customizable means.

Prior to WordPress 2.1 the most popular plugins for this purpose was “Customizable Post Listings“. These no longer work in WP 2.1 due to several reasons, of which some of them include WP function differences and extensive use of globals $table.

A lot of other plugins that are used to fetch recent posts lists are also incompatible with last few WordPress updates. Compatibility problems don’t occur when the plugin authors regularly update their plugins, but this doesn’t always happen. So, in our opinion, it’s wise not to be dependent on plugins when you can make a few tweaks to WP functions yourself to achieve the same results.

Fetching recent posts list using wp_get_archives()

This is a WordPress built-in function, a small piece of code that can bring you so much without have to use a single plugin. This function retrieve post archive related information.

The function: <?php wp_get_archives(’arguments‘); ?>

The arguments:

• type- monthly, daily, weekly, postbypost (string type)
• limit- Number of post to fetch, if not use function will show all. (integer type)
• format- Define list format, available format is html(default),option,link,custom.(string type)
• before- In html for format option text to place before the list,there is no default. (string type)
• after- In html for format option text to place after the list,there is no default. (string type)
• show_post_count- Define number of posts in an archive (1 - true) or do not (0 - false). Use only when type is set to ‘monthly’. Defaults is 0.

The example:

Now that you know what the structure of the function and arguments is, let’s put it into action. In our RHS (right sidebar of blog) you’ll notice we have a list of 10 most recent posts. So you just add the following code in your sidebar.php(left or right if you have two sidebar) before the termination(</div>). The screenshot shows where to place the code using theme editor, double click to see larger image.. Here’s the code for that-

<ul> <?php wp_get_archives(’type=postbypost&limit=10‘); ?> </ul>

The orange coloured ‘10′, represents the number of latest post we are displaying. The postbypost is the type, which bring reverse chronological posts list, we chose for our list. You can change these two values to fit your needs, as well as use other arguments to customize the functionality. Wrap it up with CSS to sync with your site navigation.

Now paste that one line code into sidebar(sidebar.php), or wherever you want to show the recent post list. Remember, whether you are placing the code in sidebar.php or category template file (usually category.php) keep the code between list declaration(ul).

Displaying recent comments

Displaying the most recent comments made throughout your blog is a way of highlighting who said what. This in our opinion, encourages some readers to check out what specific commentators are saying. This will hopefully encourage them to comment.

Unfortunately WordPress doesn’t have a one line function for showing recent comments like recent posts. So if you want to show recent comments, you either have to get a plugin (ex-Recent Comments 2.0 works with WP 2.1) or do it our way, which provides you with more flexibility.

Our way is very straight forward, just paste the code below into your sidebar(left or right sidebar.php), or wherever you want to show the recent comments.

Customization tips are bellow the code.

<?php
global $wpdb;

$sql = “SELECT DISTINCT ID, post_title, post_password, comment_ID,
comment_post_ID, comment_author, comment_date_gmt, comment_approved,
comment_type,comment_author_url,
SUBSTRING(comment_content,1,30) AS com_excerpt
FROM $wpdb->comments
LEFT OUTER JOIN $wpdb->posts ON ($wpdb->comments.comment_post_ID =
$wpdb->posts.ID)
WHERE comment_approved = ‘1′ AND comment_type = ” AND
post_password = ”
ORDER BY comment_date_gmt DESC
LIMIT 10“;
$comments = $wpdb->get_results($sql);

$output = $pre_HTML;
$output .= “\n<ul>”;
foreach ($comments as $comment) {

$output .= “\n\t<li>”.strip_tags($comment->comment_author)
.”*says&nbsp;*” . “<a href=\”" . get_permalink($comment->ID) .
“#comment-” . $comment->comment_ID . “\” title=\”on ” .
$comment->post_title . “\”>” . strip_tags($comment->com_excerpt)
.”</a>…</li>”;

}
$output .= “\n</ul>”;
$output .= $post_HTML;

echo $output;

?>

The red coloured ‘30′ represents how many characters of comments will be shown in the list, and the orange coloured ‘10′ represents how many comments it will fetch. This code by default ignores the password protected post’s comments as well as unapproved comments. This will display “comment author name” says “partial comment linked to the comment”.

The cool part of this code is you can combine it with other codes and functions, just like we did to show the flags (we will have a article on this soon as it’s quite lengthy).

Displaying summary of posts and more

It’s possible to highlight specific posts that are no longer visible on the page, or in recent posts. You may also wish to show a teaser for a few important posts. The method is very simple, it uses a built in WP function, so no need for a plugin.

Just copy the code below and paste it in your desired location [sidebar.php before </div>], the customization tips can be found bellow the code.

<ul>
<?php
$myposts = get_posts(’numberposts=5&offset=1‘);
foreach($myposts as $post) :
?>
<li><a href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>”><?php the_title();
?></a> …. <?php the_excerpt(); ?></li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

The orange coloured ‘5′ represents number of post’s summary you want to show. The red coloured ‘1′ represents offset from the last post, meaning, how many post behind the last entry of your blog. For example, if your blog is set to display 5 post at the front page, “offset=5″ will fetch you the 6th post which isn’t in the front page.

You can do a lot more with this piece of code. You can display specific posts by assigning them to a category (e.g. featured), just add *category=category ID number *at the get_posts arguments.[e.g. get_posts('numberposts=5&category=1')]. This is useful if you’ve written a post, it’s gone out of sight and you now want to highlight it again. Simply edit the post and add it to the ‘featured’ category.

You can sort the list by ascending (ASC) or descending (DSC) by adding the argument order=ASC & orderby= any wp_post table field name. Whatever you do, keep in mind that you have to use it within <ul> & </ul>tags, otherwise you will get only the first post in the list.

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Version 2.1.1 includes about 30 bug fixes, mostly minor things around encoding, XML-RPC, the object cache, and HTML code. on the other hand Version 2.0.9 only includes the security update, which was around the code to prevent XSS. Please take not that WordPress team will release security updates to 2.0 branches as often as it’s require till 2010, but all the new features and development are going into the newer branch(currently WordPress 2.1).

This is a low-to-medium priority update recommended for all WordPress users.

For complete list of changed file and download please consult with WordPress official release post.

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Talkr allows users to listen to our blog posts (in Mp3 format) instead of reading it. This is functionality that can increases the accessibility of your blog, not just to disabled users, but to everyone who may wish to download your posts and listen to them on a train.

Talkr is very well known, yet you will notice very few bloggers using it. Moreover, only a handful of bloggers utilized it properly.

So what’s the catch! The catch is very simple, you just have to follow a few simple steps to get it to working properly.

So, this is what you need to do to get it working properly. Drop us a comment if you need a hand.

1. Ensure your blog doesn’t have password protected posts, otherwise Talkr won’t work.
2. Open up a free account with Talkr.
3. After completing the registration process, log into Talkr and go to My Feed section - Talkr Podcast (keep this window open until the last process)
4. Open another browser window or tab and go to feedburner and burn a new feed (even if you already have a feed burned in feedburner), using your blog’s source feed (Atom or RSS not RDF).
5. Then login to feedburner and browse to “Content-Type Burner” under optimize tab.
6. Select “Use this Content-Type:” as text/plain, which will be last in the options. After that just activate and Save.
7. Before you logout of feedburner sure “Browser Friendly” and “SmartFeed” options are activated. Leave everything else alone.
8. Now that you have burned a feed exclusively for Talkr, in Talkr window/Tab (see step 2) use newly burned feedburner feed address in “Add RSS feed”.
9. Once the new feed is added you will notice a blue background Tab entitled “Promote this feed”, with few options. At the top of that Tab you will find Source feed and
10. Talkr feed URL. The Talkr feed URL is just like this -

http://www.talkr.com/app/cast_pods.app?feed_id=12345

Note the 4 digit feed id.

• Now go to your WP-admin-> theme editor, and open up post.php and put this code somewhere in between the <?php the_content and above the comment template call.

<img style=”border:none;” xsrc=”http://images.talkr.com/images/speaker_20.gif” mce_src=”http://images.talkr.com/images/speaker_20.gif” alt=”Listen to this article” border=”0″ />

<a xhref=”http://www.talkr.com/app/fetch.app?feed_id=4 digit feed id&perma_link=<?php the_permalink() ?>”>Listen to this article</a>

That’s it; you can do customization, or even call the same code within a single post.

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