Wordpress

Blogging Toolkit is a set of tools and and softwares that a blogger uses to manage, publicize, monetize and optimize his blog. A blogging toolkit is needed by a blogger for generating traffic, gaining popularity and running a full featured blog.

Nirmal has tagged me to reveal my blogging toolkit and here I shall write about my blogging kit.

1. Blogging Platform

WordPress is my blogging platform. I shifted from blogger last August. WordPress has been amazing in terms of flexibility it has offered. Blogger stands no where in front of wordpress when it comes to themes, plugins and RSS feeds. The coolest thing about wordpress is the RSS feed. You can create RSS feeds for any category or even search terms

a. RSS feed for category satire of this blog- http://www.shaarique.com/category/satire/feed

RSS feed for search string doesn’t work on my blog because of feedburner replacement plugin. The usual feed address would be http://www.shaarique.com/feed/rss2/?s=wordpress for search string ‘wordpress’.

The search engine optimization is awesome in wordpress.

2. Blogging Client

I use Windows live writer. I am somehow not comfortable with the wordpress post editor. But after proxy authentication was introduced in our campus, which meant only IE and Firefox were granted permission to connect, I had to shift to the wordpress. The auto save feature is great. I have had lot of trouble with this editor as it used to mess my blog. Any open code would effect the whole page and its not possible to add HTML codes of videos directly here (which is possible in live writer). The editor is one thing I adored about blogger, it used to accept any damn HTML or javascript! Everything has its limitation :smile:

3. Statistics Software

Google Analytics and shortstats. Google analytics is great in terms of insight it offers of visitors, page views, time spent by each visitor, geographical location, goal conversion and much more. Shortstats offers a wide range of features like search string, referral, browser and country log.

4. Blog Promotion and Feeds

I use feedburner for the feed of this blog. Nothing much on the blog promotion part  :wink:

5. Browser

Firefox and IE 7. I love firefox but the memory leak problem is a big pain, which is surprisingly absent in IE 7.

6. Graphics and Images

Adobe photoshop, Microsoft paint (the coolest image editor software ever to be made) and coral Photo.

I tag eches , Garry, Madhur & Thilak. 

The inevitable has happened. Dreams were shattered, hearts were broken and many were sent to deep chasm of depression after seeing India lose to minnows Bangladesh. All the hype around ‘Team India’ seems to have suffered a big blow. I wonder why they still show that Pepsi ad, where Indian team poses like the tigers, when they falling like nail pins. Bangladeshis would have had a heartily laugh seeing these tigers become asses in front of Bengal Tigers.

Bangladesh deserved the victory because they played to their own satisfaction. They outplayed India in all departments of the game. I wonder why Indian team, being such an old and experienced, still struggles to dive and fly in the field even though India has the most powerful whitener called Rin. We have the power of Mandira Bedi, perhaps the only women commentator ever in cricket, and her fancy saaris.

Pakistan team should wait for their counterparts from across the border to get done with things and then they can together escape via the sea route. Indian players can cross over to India with the terrorists infiltrators, just a way to save money or else why spend so much or air fares.

So what should India do to get over this mental depression? Take a lesson from UP politics

DEPUTY CHIEF Minister R.R. Patil may have shut down dance bars, but Mumbai’s bar girls have found a new stage — campaign rallies in Uttar Pradesh.

The seven-stage Assembly election begins April 7 and ends May 8. Politicians have already started ‘booking’ the girls, hoping that their performances will attract larger crowds to their rallies and, ultimately, translate into votes.

Confirming the bookings, Bharatiya Bar Girls’ Union president Varsha Kale said: “The girls are flooded with such requests and are paid about Rs 1.1 lakh per show.� The money is shared by a group of 10.[HT]

They already were in a jolly mood so let them at least enjoy Caribbean. Their escape route is already set.

The Ho Ha ad is the recent Nike advertisement on TV

The two-minute ad shows boys leaping out of cars and taking up fielding positions; a Parsi statue stands with a finger up in the air, like an umpire; two girls blush as a ball hits a player in his crotch; a ball ricochets off a nearby billboard, jolting a man clipping his nose-hair; and a fielder calls out, “Ai, Balcony, ball de na!�

As for the logistics, it took four days to shoot, 250 vehicles to create the jam, 300 extras to simulate the feel of a bustling street, about 40 actors, one elephant, 20 chickens, a few pigeons, a dog and two star cricketers (Zaheer Khan and Sreesanth) to create Mean Streets cricket.

Interestingly, the set was adjacent to the Bigg Boss house, which led to some amusing and unexpected situations. “One of the balls landed on the Bigg Boss set and we could hear Rakhi Sawant screaming,� recalls Deo. The Bigg Boss producers also bor rowed their elephant briefly for an episode.[HT]

WordPress these days seems to be updating its blogging software like I edit my articles! Every 7 day you have a new release. One of the most important features for me is

You can set any “page� to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.

I am trying to use WP for a newspaper site and this type of content manager change is a gift. Other interesting features include

Links in your blogroll now support sub-categories and you can add categories on the fly.

Redesigned login screen from the Shuttle project.

More AJAX to make custom fields, moderation, deletions, and more all faster. My favorite is the comments page, which new lets you approve or unapprove things instantly.

The lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs.

Our completely redone visual editor also now includes spell checking.

I still don’t see any updates for editor. The editor is the worst part of WP and this is why I use Windows Live Writer, it lets me edit and post in just few clicks without messing up HTML. Often I run into problems posting from the WP editor, the external link option (open in new window) never works! If a HTML code is open accidentally (which is not my fault!) then it screws up the whole page. I think the editor needs a major upgrade with lot more editing options like font, size and text color. (It’s often the case that it doesn’t recognize many of the font from MS WORD and the end result is a total mess )

This release is called “Ella”. I wonder why they missed out naming their previous 2 releases.  I will wait for my host dreamhost to let me 1 click upgrade as there seems to be some MySQL minimum requirements.

Upgrade like Ubuntu is planned for future releases of WP

Based on everything we’ve learned in the past 3 years of doing WordPress, we’ve decided to shift to a more frequent release schedule like Ubuntu, with major releases coming several times a year. So, for the first time in WordPress’ history, I have an answer to when the next version is coming out: April 23rd.

 I still love WP and hence the picture of the day

I installed this wonderful addon which lets users listen to posts on this blog. Just click on the “listen to this article” at the top and you will be redirected to a window in which you can listen to the post in quicktime player. You can download quicktime here.

With few simple steps you can add this feature on your blog

1. Go to http://www.talkr.com/ and register. Input your site feed. This will generate the Talkr Feed URL. Something like http://www.talkr.com/app/cast_pods.app?feed_id=25409

2. Edit your blogger or wordpress template to include the code generated. It should be easy for blogger. For wordpress users they have to edit their ‘the_loop’ file. Paste the code generated

<p><img style=”border:none;” src=’<a href=”http://images.talkr.com/images/speaker_20.gif’”>http://images.talkr.com/images/speaker_20.gif’</a> alt=’Listen to this article’ border=’0′ /><br><a href=’<a href=”http://www.talkr.com/app/fetch.app?feed_id=25409&perma_link=[template">http://www.talkr.com/app/fetch.app?feed_id=25409&perma_link=[template</a> variable for permalink]‘><br>Listen to this article <br></a></p>

in the non-aside loop.

<p><?php } else { // Non-Aside loop ?><br><div class=”entry”><br><div class=”meta”><br><h2 class=”title” id=”post-<?php the_ID(); ?>”><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark” title=”<?php _e(‘Permanent Link to ‘, ‘tarski’); the_title(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2><br><p class=”metadata”><?php echo mysql2date(get_settings(‘date_format’), $post->post_date);<br>if(!get_option(‘tarski_hide_categories’)) { _e(‘ in ‘, ‘tarski’); the_category(‘, ‘); }<br>if($multipleAuthors) { _e(‘ by ‘, ‘tarski’); the_author_posts_link(); } <p>if($post->comment_status == ‘open’ || $post->comment_count > 0) { echo ‘ | ‘; comments_popup_link(‘No comments’, ’1 comment’, ‘% comments’, ”, ‘Comments closed’); }<br>edit_post_link(‘edit’,’ (‘,’)'); ?></p><br></div><br><?php ajax_comments_link(); ?><br><?php ajax_comments_div(); ?><br><img style=”border:none;” src=’<a href=”http://images.talkr.com/images/speaker_20.gif’”>http://images.talkr.com/images/speaker_20.gif’</a> alt=’Listen to this article’ border=’0′ /><br><a href=’<a href=”http://www.talkr.com/app/fetch.app?feed_id=25409&perma_link=”>http://www.talkr.com/app/fetch.app?feed_id=25409&perma_link=</a><?php the_permalink() ?>’><br>Listen to this article <br></a></p>

You have to edit this line perma_link=[template variable for permalink]  and replace the text in the bracket (with the brackets) with <?php the_permalink() ?>

I am using Tarski theme and hence the code shown above is of that. In other themes you need to paste the code above the <div class=”entry-content”>.

Now you can subscribe to the feed in itunes