Atul Karmarkar.Com» Blogging

WordPress 3.0 is here

Atul Karmarkar — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 11:57:23 +0000

WordPress 3.0 – Thelonious, the 13th major release of WordPress is out.

With 218 contributors, a lot of work has gone into it, with new APIs allowing for greater functionality and ease of use. One of the other big enhancements is the ability to merge WordPress and WordPress MU, the Multi User edition, making it possible to run multiple blogs from the same installation in a far more easier manner. Check out the tour video;

The new version promises much, though like with any major version, I prefer to wait a few days before jumping in to upgrade, and so it shall be in this case too.

You can download WordPress 3.0 and see for yourself.

Google’s Pac-Man logo marks a return to blogging

Atul Karmarkar — Wed, 26 May 2010 01:38:04 +0000

This past weekend was quite a fun filled and exciting one (offline) and as usual, trust Google to come up with something to stir up a frenzy online. Yes, if you were among the millions of people who use Google, you could not have missed seeing the Pac-Man logo, commemorating the game’s 30th anniversary.

Initially I thought it was among the regular logos that Google regularly puts out from time to time, but it was a pleasant surprise to find out that this ‘logo’ was actually a playable, full fledged 255 level game! All one had to do was to hit ‘Insert Coin’ and you were on your way.

Have to admit this was quite addictive and I ended up playing till the 3rd level, when it got kinda boring. All in all, it was fun to rediscover this game and spend time navigating through the maze. (and memory lane )

Google kept this on their homepage for a full 48 hours and just when one was wondering about usage statistics, RescueTime, (a Seattle-based company which offers Web-based time management and analytics tool for knowledge workers and their managers) came out with some numbers, putting the cost of Google’s Pac-Man at 4.82 million hours!

Quite something, huh…

Oh and by the way, I haven’t been regular on the blog for some time now (again!).. It’s been a combination of factors really.. what with a bad internet connection (thank you BSNL), writer’s block or just sheer laziness. Amidst all this, the blog’s RSS numbers haven’t declined and a big thanks to all you readers for keeping the faith.

Hopefully, all laziness issues have been set to rest now and you guys can look forward to my posts invading your inbox / rss readers again.

Amazon Associates integrates with Blogger

Atul Karmarkar — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 18:23:48 +0000

Amazon has announced the availability of Amazon Associates for Blogger, a direct integration between Amazon Associates and Blogger. This new collaboration enables bloggers to monetize their content by adding relevant Amazon products to their blog posts without interrupting the blog editing process.

Amazon Associates for Blogger is accessible on Associates Central. Those who don’t have a Google Blogger account can set up a free Blogger account with their Associates ID and start earning right away.

The new tool allows bloggers to add links and images to their blog posts in just 2 easy steps:

Bloggers highlight the relevant text and the Amazon Product Finder will search Amazon’s millions of products and recommend the ones that are most closely associated with the text
Bloggers can then insert a link or image to that product which includes their Associates ID, enabling them to earn up to 15% in referral fees from Amazon
Bloggers will also be able to show dynamic content in their blog sidebar using a new set of integrated Sidebar gadgets, such as gadgets for MP3 clips from the Amazon DRM-free music store, an Amazon Deals gadget, and an Amazon Search box.

Also as part of this new integration, Bloggers who don’t have a free Amazon Associates account can create one directly within Blogger so it’s a win win situation for those using Blogger. Wanna give it a shot?

WordPress Hack Attack – Is your blog safe?

Atul Karmarkar — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 11:27:06 +0000

It wasn’t a very pleasant feeling to log in to the blogosphere and twittersphere to find that WordPress was under attack.

To be more precise, all blogs running self-hosted WordPress that weren’t up to date were facing a threat from hackers. The latest version is 2.8.4 and for your own sake, it is better you upgrade right away! Apparently, the attack has not affected blogs hosted on wordpress.com.

Basically, the worm seeks to exploit holes in previous versions by taking control of admin accounts and also compromising the database integrity. A couple of ways to know if your blog has been hit;

a) You will notice some weird strings added to your permalinks, like xyz.com/title/%&(%7B$%7Beval(base64_decode($_SERVER%5BHTTP_REFERER%5D))%7D%7D|.+)&%/. The danger words here are “eval” and “base64_decode.”

b) Another way to confirm this is via the site users panel, where a hidden admin account will have been created.

Recovering from an attack will be an extremely painful process, including but not limited to firstly cleaning the content, exporting it, uninstalling & reinstalling WordPress and then importing the content after ensuring there is no malicious code in it.

As Matt explains in his post on How to Keep WordPress Secure, upgrading is like taking your vitamins, fixing a hack is open heart surgery , so upgrade NOW !!

No time for blogging

Atul Karmarkar — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 23:39:07 +0000

Have not been finding enough time to blog lately, and the frequency of posts looks all set to dwindle to some extent. As if lack of time wasn’t a problem enough, my internet connection has been acting up big time.

The service provider (BSNL) has been giving me a lot of grief and yes, numerous complaint numbers too, all to no avail. The worst part is that I a) either cannot connect, or b) get disconnected every few minutes, which is so bloody irritating. A call to the BSNL help desk elicited a lovely response - ”Please disconnect and call again… We can only accept one complaint at a time !!”

Wake up, sarkaari saands… with competition already here, how long can you afford this kind of complacency?

I’ve been blogging randomly the past few weeks, but due to this connection problem, some posts are queued up, and each time I hit publish, the connection dies on me… and the cycle continues. Will probably publish if they remain relevant to context, else they will remain confined to my drafts folder…

Do keep your comments coming in though… Am definitely looking out for them and will certainly reply !

WordPress – platform of choice among Top 100 blogs

Atul Karmarkar — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 01:46:14 +0000

Which blog platform is the top choice for those in the Technorati Top 100 blogs?

Royal Pingdom decide to put this to the test, and found that among blog software:

WordPress is used by 27 blogs in the top 100.
Movable Type is used by 12 blogs in the top 100.
Only 8 of the top 100 blogs use a custom-made blog platform.
Drupal is the only general-purpose CMS with any presence worth mentioning, with 4 blogs in the top 100.

Surprise, surprise - Very few WordPress blogs in the top 100 have updated to WP 2.7 so far !! I found this quite surprising since most blogs in this list are corporate or group / network blogs and updating/upgrading to new versions should have been a given.

Likewise, among blogging services (hosted), the order is:

Typepad
WordPress.com
Blogger

There are some more insights along with a graph and of course a list of the Top 100. It was nice to see the list of Top 100 blogs as well (including some I’d never heard of), as I hardly look at Technorati nowadays anyway.

Head over to the Royal Pingdom blog and check out the complete analysis.

Manage WordPress posts and pages with Manageable

Atul Karmarkar — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 02:26:49 +0000

Very often, WordPress users would have been in situations where they just created a post and then saved / published it, only to realize that they had to change either the date, title, post slug, author, categories etc. The prospect of going to each post individually is a big pain and takes up a huge amount of time as well.

Manageable is a wonderful plugin for all those who like to make instant changes to their posts, and what’s more, this is possible without leaving the Manage admin section. There is no need to load each post or page individually.

However, beware, this is so well integrated into the admin section that you can’t actually ‘see’ it. You need to either double click anywhere in the post row, else hit ‘Edit’ at the far right and this brings you a drop down with all necessary fields which you can edit then and there. Hit Save when you’re done.

Here is how it looks:

Another good thing is that this plugin has been integrated into the WordPress core and will be a standard inclusion in WordPress 2.7 when it is released.

Google AdSense for feeds

Atul Karmarkar — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:52:57 +0000

Logged into my Google AdSense account, and got a surprise when I hit the setup tab. Instead of the usual options, I saw an addition, AdSense for Feeds, as you can see below.

I clicked on it and was taken to a page where I could customize the ad unit. However, the eagerness and anticipation gave way to consternation when I scrolled further down to find a message saying:

The account migration guide very ‘helpfully’ told me that there was no way to migrate Feedburner feeds directly, and that it was a manual process, possible thru a Google Account. It said I should send a mail to adsense-support-aff@google.com and provide a) my FeedBurner account username and b) my Google Account email address used to sign in to AdSense.

This sucks big time, and I’m wondering why this is a manual process, especially since it’s been quite a while since Google acquired FeedBurner, so there should be no glitches involved in automating the migration process. I’m not all that keen to do so yet, and don’t want to burn a new feed for all blogs, so wait n watch for now, I guess.

SiteMeter crashing sites viewed in IE

Atul Karmarkar — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 14:43:47 +0000

SiteMeter, the web metrics tracking service, seems to be having big time problems today. When I first logged in to SiteMeter using IE, the page refused to load, then did so partly, before returning an error. I didn’t think too much of it, and simply checked my stats using FireFox.

However, later I received a mail from a reader who said he wasn’t able to view my site at all using IE ! Till this time, I had thought there was a glitch with my IE, since I could access SiteMeter in FF. I anyway use FF and Opera for my regular browsing, so did not face any issues when browsing other sites that used the SiteMeter tracking code, including my own.

A quick check around the blogosphere a while later confirmed that the problem was real, and the worst part was that there was no word from the company at all, except that there was a scheduled outage. The only option that seemed available was to remove the offending javascript tracking code.

After much checking, one fix that seemed more feasible was to use the HTML code instead of javascript, and this seemed to work. An explanation was put up by SiteMeter a while later but I think they lost a lot of goodwill not doing so earlier.

Google retires AdSense Referrals, launches Google Affiliate Network

Atul Karmarkar — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 02:25:53 +0000

Got a mail from the Google Adsense team a while ago, which said they were retiring their AdSense Referrals program during the last week of August.

They’re now offering a new alternative, called the Google Affiliate Network, aka DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network redux, which will seek to target users located in the United States.

If you are using AdSense for Referrals, Google recommends that you:

Remove the referral code from your site(s) before the last week of August
Run and save all referrals reports, so you have access to your valuable campaign information

This was not altogether surprising, and although I’ve had some moderate success with AdSense Referrals, it wasn’t really enough to justify keeping it on, though some of my sites still run those programs. Time to take them off now.

Though AdSense in general has been my #1 money maker, it is always a good idea to look at other advertising channels and not keep all your ‘ad-eggs’ in one basket. A steep climb uphill for a small publisher like me, but an enjoyable one nevertheless.

Which ad program / network is your #1 money maker?

Atul Karmarkar.Com» Blogging

WordPress 3.0 is here

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