Free web hosting is nothing new , but over the years quite a few Free web hosting providers have shut down , Geocities, Fortunecities , Lycos to name a few. Several new and small players have come in , but most of them disappear after a few months / year or so.

A friend of mine had referred me to Doteasy once and I have seen their plans, especially their free web hosting plan – which is quite promising. With the new year coming up, they seem to have a very special promotion. If you buy a .COM .NET .ORG domain at $4.95 USD, and you can also get a multi-domain cPanel web hosting service completely free for 1 year. No setup fee. Their free cPanel hosting includes all the inbuilt features such as website builder, blog, forum and other web tools like stats, hit counters and email forms. Use coupon code 0910FWH for this special offer, Click here to sign up a free hosting account, or click the banner below.

What are Blogs good for if not comments and discussion . Yes , that is a thought … I have blogged about personal musings , php scripts, open source and commercial applications such as Wordpress, vBulletin, Magento , my life as a Dmoz editor, my web development company and it’s clients and sometimes even SEO. All this time, I have not written just for making sure i get pageviews, even though I do like to get client queries. But I typically don’t have time to write for every damn thing on the internet .

But sometimes, it does make you feel that talking to yourself alone does not justify writing – I wont deny that. Battling with that frame of mind against being stuck moderating thousands of junk posts every day – i used to keep all comments in the typical Wordpress scenario . But I want to give this DoFollow idea a try.  I don’t know wether this will incite more people to initiate a discussion or dialogue , wether my musings are more boring or wether this will bring only incerasing amount of viagra and casino commenters.

But it is fixed that I have made this Blog a DoFollow blog as long as it makes sense.

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Just a few days back I had mentioned that I am in love with Magento . While surfing through the website, I noticed that they have maintained their record from last year by winning the ‘Best of Open Source Enterprise Applications (E-Commerce) from Infoworld.

The awards “recognize the best free and open source software the world has to offer to businesses, IT professionals, and productive individuals who rely on computers to get work done.” Find more about the Open Source Awards on their website .

PhpLinkdirectory script has come out with version 4 , which they are currently releasing as a “Beta” offering, ala Google . The script does come out with very many new additions , but to tweak it for bugs and client reports and feedbacks, the official / final release will come in few weeks.

The current version offers the new “widgets” , which professes to make many custom modifications and plugins easily add-able with the existing software. Some of the mentioned widgets are for displaying the latest articles, latest links, popular links etc on the left right column Or displaying streams of Twitter tweets, and Alexa graph and Compete score. As per the last post on the site, there exist 17 readymade widgets available for download.

Find more details of the upcoming features on the website. To stay tuned for other updates subscribe to our feed.

I am again getting laid back. It was almost in early August , Invisionpower announced the release of their Community Content System 1.0.0, which is more or less a Content management system / CMS built upon the backend of the base forum software.

With the sad state of the discusstv website, it has been many days since i have actively worked upon a Invisionboard forum, besides installing or updating for clients. A full feature description can be found here .

From what I have read, it basically uses the forum /community users db to decide how to handle the permissions for new pages that can now be created based on the existing structure. It also to come extend allows you to design the pages , controlled by the Css and uses a block / allows blocks to be created, for displaying some external content or ads etc. The blocks also allows you to now type in php code or display rss feeds, and also possibly use any external plugin.

As I am yet to use this, i believe it is a nice addition but it would probably make many of the old modifications defunct . The pricing is currently just 35 USD but thats probably just a starting price.

I have been involved with the ODP for quite some time now.  But lately I have been spending substantially more time with my web development business as not only it pays the bills but also was my passion all the time. ODP is and will remain to be another passion, but somewhere down the line I feel ideologically stumped . In my tenure I have seen many people arrive at this scenario for varying reasons and probably this is just another of those.  I don’t feel urged to quit , but i don’t at the same time feel motivated to go back and edit right now either.

Ever since I started editing I have been vocal about my reasonings and intentions .  I have edited , maybe not hugely in numbers some random 2500 or so edits , but I believe i also have participated in various discussions and verbal to and fro’s. In all this time, I have felt the need for quality editing as opposed to quantity – part of which is due to my involvement in my business and also my laziness , but a major part also to adhere to the Guidelines we always speak about. I like reading through old forum discussions, newsletters and instructions and formed some ideas of my own  from those.

But seemingly not all of them are to be followed – as determined by the current powers that be . With the modernization trend going on , the ODP is slanting towards a more “customer centric entity” which will supposedly need to look and cater to the vocal traffic on the web . Quality Check , although bookwise is the good thing to do , is less of a concern . In my time period I have seen the rise of need for grooming up smaller editors to larger zones without proper checking , from Metas ,  Editalls, Admins even when notified about it .  And in the recent past , I have also come across incidents where we are told that in written communications, we should think of catering more towards the vocal population on the web as opposed to the Editor community and layman visitors – which we used to be told as our Primary Interest Group .

I know what I am speaking off can easily be considered as blasphemous . But hey , this is MY blog .

We do custom scripting, development of shopping carts. Something I have noticed many times that requirements of shopping carts and ecommerce websites for different clients vary . While some may like a feature rich website along with a feature full admin panel, there are some clients who are more at ease with a simplistic approach and do not always very high end web store necessities. For clients who have a fixed idea on what they want, and even know of ready made shopping cart software such as osCommerce and Zencart or xCart etc, we do not usually offer a custom php mysql shopping cart solution. We rather suggest that we customize their open source application to match their look and feel or make it work as they want with maybe even some plugins and modifications / contributions.  But that was yeaterday , or last year .

With the advent of Magento , with its amazing look and feel , frontend , backend and readymade featuresets, I am totally blown off – have very little thing to say – why someone should not have it . Whatever I can say or something you may hear elsewhere , I can say is less ; It’s features speak volumes of its amazingness. With allready 500,000 downloads completed in January, and being mentioned in various developer blogs worldwide, over 115K registered community users, support forums in over 10 languages it would be foolishness not to follow it more closely and actively participate in its growth and build up one’s portfolio on the platform. And thats exactly what I have taken up to do .

Magento Ecommerce

vBulletin has always been a very revered product and one of the most commonly used forum software over the years. In the past 1-2 years different vbulletin sub versions in the 3.x series have given us lots of features to play with and also led to the official addons, such as Blog , Project Tools which maybe not as popular as its predecessor , but definitely picked up user interest. With the last few versions, vBulletin also has come up with the idea of introducing a community script and not just a forum software only( not my favourite though ) and also profile customizations.

But recently vbulletin website and forum also seems top be proceeding towards vBulletin 4 , their next major version. Some of the key improvements which they have announced as of yet includes :

• Cross content search system , facilitating centralized search for forum posts, blog entries and comments and any other supported products
• Better style templates and systems to make more semantic coding and adherence to CSS from the base templating system
• A better look and feel for the base product also using semantic markup
• SEO urls and search engine friendly options
• Options to include advertisements inherently in the script itself
• and a centralized attachment system

Features like these make you clearly feel that they have understood one of the points I had pointed out earlier – that it is time to stablize the main product and spend more time on improvements for the forum administrator. While additional features do sell the products, it is improvements like these that make the customer / forum administrator happy. From the official mini site for this release, I quote

Development efforts are prioritized towards those areas that can provide real, tangible benefits to our customers, at all times with an eye toward maintaining and enhancing the performance and reliability expected of a vBulletin product.

Although they have not yet given any pricing indication, but surely that can come . What they have definitely mentioned that the code is being rewritten. There is still no alpha or beta and no exact time given for us to view it.

OK , so I have not only decided to get back to blogging again , but this time I hope to keep doing it more regularly. You have heard that before , eh ? I agree but what can we do … as your work grows almost all the day goes into serving clients … and hardly you would get much time to sit down and pen your thoughts. Heck, I bought a 32″ plasma and I don’t even get to watch that

Coming to the topic title – Upgrading Wordpress 2.8.2 , i am happy to say that this blog is now running the current Wordpress release . This sub version does not include much but a XSS fix , but the Wordpress 2.8.1 was from what i remember a more detailed upgrade.

• The dashboard loading time was awful earlier which now seems much better.
• The automatic upgrade no longer accidentally deletes files when cleaning up from a failed upgrade.
• Extra security has been put in place to better protect you from plugins that do not do explicit permission checks.
• Disabled code highlighting due to browser incompatibilities.
• Switched back to curl as the default transport.

Although the auto upgrade feature is not new in these versions of Wordpress , but can’t get myself to write a Upgrade post without mentioning it. This single option has cut down some of our clients who often asked us to do a version upgrade for them as a charge. Now it is simply a breeze – whenever you see a message on your dashboard, all the next work is browser based – if you know your FTP password. Even the plugin upgrades hardly requires breaking a sweat.