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.

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.

Being a webmaster , personally … I feel a lot of other webmasters can actively help in the Open Directory Project , instead of constantly venting about the difficulty in submission , acceptance . I have also been able to harness a good amount of utility / benefit while being a voluntary editor and have recently been invited to share them on the Official Dmoz Blog .

OK , so I am somewhat happy , that I got accepted by the Boss if you know me , you would ask that I don’t work for someone , I am my own boss … so who is it that Boss and what did he accept me for, right ?

Well , I do work also as a volunteer editor on the Open Directory Project . Almost an year ago i joined under a small category and I have been learning the ropes . It’s been a informative ride mostly , save few incidents which has confused me recently in Regional/ . I like working in regional , as it helps me build up the categories with sites of local business and organizations, events and public / government utilities or important ones such as Education.

But in order to diversify my interests , I have also applied for a topical category recently . And in most occasions I have been accepted by my superiors ( Metas ) as being ready for handling more sites and categories and thus encouraged . The last category I applied for was interestingly accepted by the Dmoz Editor -in-Chief ( rdkeating25 ) – thus the Boss :p . To be frank , I was of the opinion ( from forum threads ) , that he is usually dormant / inactive in day to day operations of the directory . But maybe that is not true for all days .

You will however find him more in the new and Official Dmoz Blog – which is currently being regularly updated .

Google has updated the toolbar / pagerank again on 11th January 2008 . Interestingly i came to know in about it in the least expected place . Normally i get to know it either from the Digitalpoint forums or at Sitepoint , or even by looking at the toolbar while surfing my own websites – but this time i was notified of the fact by some co-editors at the ODP IRC . Nevertheless, hearing about it i had to go to DP once to confirm about the rest of the various webmasters, and also checked my sites.
Happy to say I have had some increase – on this blog : PR3 , at my web design website : PR4 , and also on our web hosting site – back to PR5. Backlinks have also improved , but mostly for Websys. This is quite a quicker update considering the last time during October was almost after a 7 months or 9 months gap. Hope this update also brings some better search engine positioning at the same time …. considering the backlinks have increased substantially.

We have just started creating a custom template for wordpress for a client . The wordpress work involves creating his blog theme to suit and complement his existing website and website design. This is something i have mentioned before that many customers / blog owners will require their blog to look as close to their existing website as they would want their website visitors to feel that they are still on the same website.
The work also includes installing various wordpress plugins , primarily social bookmarking icons, tags and digg and stumbleupon extensions. I wish it would have also included logo design as well , as the logo the customer has looks pretty old and outdated and out of place both on his website as well on the blog header. But as of yet , he is quite adamant that he will keep that logo.
The social bookmarking this is a weird craze and some people have become too impressed with it . I agree it is a very essential plugin for sites as well as blogs , but in this particular case, the client has requested to insert the bookmark icons in the top and bottom of every post along with a additional Digg and Stumbleupon option just under it … which is surely a overkill … the visitor , who was early frustrated by excess Ads on the websites, will not get overwhelmed with these bunch of “social bookmarks” and would easily miss the main content IMO :p

I have a fascination with the color blue . Besides it being my favourite color , it also gives a nice and bright look to a blog . Also with this particular wordpress theme , i wanted to keep the design similar to the main website design , dimensions wise . The theme is developed for the latest version of wordpress i.e. 2.3 and supports the default widget options or sidebar and tags. It is also XHTML validated and W3C compliant and created using minimal graphics .

You can see a demo here : http://www.websys.co.in/designblog/ or

view a screenshot here
if you are interested in buying it , you can … for the low price of 20 USD.

DMOZ is the original Open Directory Project, one of the oldest and most reputed directories on the internet. Along with BOTW , Yahoo Directory and Business.com , if anyone serious in getting exposure and enlistment in their topic – it is the directory to be in . Numerous seo tools use a listing in DMOZ as a criteria for evaluating a website’s value. Since it’s inception as an Open Directory Project – meaning contribution can be provided by anyone with an interest and time and energy to devote, DMOZ has kept on enlarging and diversifying into various countries and languages .

However in the past – because of its basic slowness and often inactivity among volunteers , it has become the point of anger for numerous webmasters . People often read about horror stories of not getting listed for months and years , people also hear stories about corrupt DMOZ editors – who allegedly or maybe even truly taken bribes for enlisting websites. DMOZ , like WIkipedia , is not operated by a single group of people ( as far as my knowledge goes) , rather from different ends of the Internet – thus demystifying all the theories and stories might not be possible , but to come somewhat closer to its active audience – they had opened a Public Forum . It did serve some purpose and i believe several actual rules and guidelines are better explained in there , as I was just visiting it . But since past 2 years they closed down the DMOZ Site Submission Status forum , which once again angered many a people . On visiting it today I found out that AOL staff governing DMOZ has initiated a Official DMOZ Blog . Undoubtedly this is another step in having a more public face for the ODP , keeping with the current day trends for every well known websites as well. But it remains to be seen if this will become another bloodbath between the Editors and the Webmasters and also die a unnatural death like the forum. Be as it may , I am still planning to subscribe to it’s RSS feed to stay updated .

A few days ago I was browsing an blog forum , where I came across a post where users were discussing their favourite wordpress plugins. Now , Top 10 is a unit of measure which canbe arrived in multiple ways … Top 10 Plugins based on number of Downloads, Most popular plugin based on Wodpress version , Most useful plugin based on user choice and Vote . So it may not be that easy to pinpoint the real top 10 so easily .

But on the other hand, if a plugin is downloaded by most number of wordpress users, it should be the best choice in the sense that a person would not be downloading it unless they consider it as the most useful or most functional. So to start with , heres the list of top 10 wordpress plugins which has the highest downloads from the most popular wodpress plugin repository – wordpress.org.

1. Sidebar Widget – LINK [ Downloads 173,622 ]
   ( allows you to move things (widgets) around, in and out of your sidebar – version WP 2.1 and below )
2. Akismet – LINK [ Downloads 94,434 ]
   ( checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not )
3. Google Sitemap Generator – LINK [ Downloads 61,700 ]
   ( create a google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog )
4. Wordpres.com Stats – LINK [ Downloads 61,700 ]
   ( Simple yet nice amount of stats for your blog )
5. Subscribe to comments – LINK [ Downloads 34,459]
   ( allows commenters on an entry to subscribe to e-mail notifications for subsequent comments. )
6. All in one SEO pack LINK [ Downloads 33,977 ]
   ( Creats Meta Tags , allows changing of Title tag , and avoiding duplicate content )
7. podPress LINK [ Downloads 33,399 ]
   ( Increases Wordpress’s functionality for hosting podcasts on your blog )
8. NextGEN Gallery LINK [ Downloads 26,405 ]
   ( For better Administration and handling multiple galleries; uses JQuery
9. WPG2 – WordPress / Gallery2 Integration LINK [ Downloads 24,401 ]
   ( Embeds Gallery2 within Wordpress to share photos, videos )
10. AdSense Manager LINK ( Downloads 20,649 )
    ( For managing AdSense ads on your Blog )

I have been blogging here for the past 5 months , however even then i am hardly what you can call a prolific blogger . Wordpress is a terrific blogging platform , and that is nothing new. But every day i get new examples or rather proof of that . In the past 1-2 weeks i have noticed how different people have been utilizing it to its ultimate limit – be it for personal pleasure or be it for earning money , below are some examples .

Example # 1. My friend Abhishek , who claims bloging has changed his life so much that he is now more of a blogger than a businessman . ( Inside scoop – he runs a web company with offices around the globe)

Example # 2. Some people are so obsessed with wordpress that they celebrated 15th August with the artwork mentioned here.

Example # 3. Wordpress as a free software, in the past few years has been playing a huge role in seo / search engine optimization for several sites and internet marketers. To stay in the radar for a large mass of wordpress users , several people have taken the oppurtunity to develop free plugins in order to further aid the increase in popularity of your wordpress site. create a realy useful wordpress plugin and keep giving optional support and you have got more traffic than you ever could amass using adsense or any other form of commercial advertisement.

Example # 4. What started as a similar ideology ala designing artisitic wordpress themes for free , has however now become somewhat distorted . People still continue making sponsored wordpress themes , which has now been blocked for submission on wordpress.org themes collection. This has not stopped people from carrying on the business , rather gearing up to make it into an art by itself .

Example # 5. But uptill now , all the examples were about invidual efforts on earning money or fanaticism or love for Wordpress blogging. But the probably the people who are in love with wordpress the most are the illustrious blog network owners and PaidtoBlog authors . It is not a big secret that blogs are a great way to get yourself or your product or service popularized .
Initially it started with true bloggers mentioning some service they purchased or some movie they saw or some web host they liked . Other visitors to that blog would comment asking more clarifications why they liked it or why they disliked it . This created a buzz , and if that blog had a good technorati rating or someone bookmarked that blog post , that would lead to a good traffic channel . Several businessmen and website owners found this to be a great way to get marketted and they decided to lure some bloggers to pay to write about their business or give them a link. There’s a bengali saying about tigers and taste of blood , i just cant recall … but the person who got $15 USD from some person he never knew for doing what he would have done as it is , would jump at the oppurtunity and if he is more than just a writer , he would take a cheap hosting, download 30 different free themes, utilise some even greater wordpress plugin to post simaltaneously on multiple blogs and create options for webmasters looking for getting 1000 backlinks, and a post on a page with google PR.
Google has recently come out with its paid link reporting tool , which might be the death of these paid blogging site for all we know , but at least untill that gets confirmed over the time , webmasters with blog networks ( often with multiple authors spinning diverse content with extra payment ) , will make some good money , and i can tell you this much that its nothing near to a measly 15 USD .