I am a firm believer in showing love to my readers, bloggers and non-bloggers alike. I have been a ‘Do Follow‘ adopter from the very beginning of my blogging days.

DoFollow

For those unaware, WordPress makes comments a ‘nofollow’ link to make it unattractive to spammers. But, there has been a movement to reward commentators with a linkback by removing the nofollow from comments. The DoFollow WordPress plugin makes this really easy to acheive.

So, anyone leaving a comment here will get a PR5 link back to their website helping them a little in their search engine ranking. Yes, ShanKri-la just went from PR4 to PR5 with the latest pagerank update!

CommentLuv

CommentLuv is another awesome plugin in use in ShanKri-la. This is purely to highlight the commentator’s latest post automatically by parsing their blog’s feed. So, with every comment you leave, your latest post is automatically showcased in your comment giving you some exposure with my other readers.

KeywordLuv

Even though you get these benefits, the links to your site doesn’t carry much weight like a link with a targeted keyword as anchor text. That’s why we see comments with names like ‘Free iPod nano’, ‘Detroit Real Estate’. Although it looks spammy, some of these folks are well meaning and leave comments that contribute to their discussion. I can tell a spam comment most of the time and I delete them without hesitation. I do allow comments with keywords but I still don’t get to know the name of the person leaving the comment.

My friend Stephen Cronin has solved this problem with his new plugin, KeyWordLuv. Here is an excerpt:

KeywordLuv helps you reward your commentators by separating their name from their keywords in the link to their site. This gives them improved anchor text, which can help their site rank higher in the search engine results.

You can now leave a comment with your name as well as a keyword of your choice here and get a PR5 link back to your site! How cool is that? People pay big bucks for that and all you have to do is comment here.

Here is how you do it:

Leave a comment with the name field like this : (spaces are fine)

K-IntheHouse@Top Firefox Extensions

The name link in the comment will appear as:

K-IntheHouse from Top Firefox Extensions

If you are a registered user, make sure you logout to see this. Check out Stephen’s other useful WordPress plugins as well.

Words of Love

I have taken the time to make this blog friendly as well as rewarding to you should you participate in any discussion here. And I highly encourage you to do so as a blog’s real value most times lies in the discussions & comments.

But, please don’t abuse it by leaving meaningless comments like ‘Nice post’ just to get some keyword love. It doesn’t help anyone and I will delete it even though I appreciate the encouragement.

Are you ready for some loving?

Hello newcomer, did I say welcome to ShanKri-la yet? Before you move on, just wanted to thank you for visiting and we hope you come back and see us again!

I upgraded our blogs to WordPress 2.5 and I am rather pleased with the new admin layout. I read that this is the first big change since version 1.5 and WordPress has definitely come a long way.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that the upgrades went so smooth. All my plugins (30+) worked great after the upgrade except one which I’ll address at the end of the post.

Here are some of the new features/changes I came across in no particular order:

• A brand new Admin layout
• Admin profile color options
• Media Library - shows type of file, date imported and the post it appears in and a Permalink to use it elsewhere
• Supports multi-file upload
• A Manage - Link category option
• View Links (renamed Blogroll) by category and you can order it name or sort it by popularity, address or id
• Manage Posts shows tags, number of comments and status. Also sports a drop-down to view by month
• Search posts & pages (earlier no pages)
• Write screen is cleaner and sports a Toggle full screen option - very useful in my opinion
• Better support for adding different media types in the Write screen
• Excellent built-in Tag management
• Collapsible areas show tags, categories, etc under the post write screen
• The side area has been cleaned up to show just publishing options and some related links
• Related options area gives you quick links to manage all posts, comments, tags or categories
• Write link screen has an advanced option to add an image, rss feed, notes and a rating
• The Widgets page has been redesigned as well with the available, used, unused widgets filter laid out vertically instead of at the bottom of the page.
• Comment area has seen a big revamp as well.. looks and acts more like the Better Comments Manager plugin interface
• List View & Detail View
• Click on the heading to edit a comment - has a nice area to format your comment
• Settings, plugins and users management links separated out to the side
• Automatic plugin upgrade
• One buton deactivates all your plugins
• You can now set a maximum size for images in a post (Settings->Writing screen)
• Gravatar support to toggle display avatars and their rating (Settings-> Reading screen)

Here are some screenshots:

One of the best improvements for me has to be automatic plugin upgrade! This feature just rocks when you have numerous plugins like me and it pretty much becomes a hassle to keep them updated every week. Now, it frees up my time to actually write some content here.

Popularity Contest Plugin Issue

The one plugin that I had a problem updating automatically was ‘Popularity Contest’. But, WordPress Codex’s Plugin compatibility list for WordPress 2.5 already had a note linked to this plugin. Following the note, made the Popularity Contest plugin work just fine.

WordPress 2.5 Image Upload Issue

Also, when I tried to upload the images for this post I got an error with the image upload. Then, I found this useful post from Josh Highland on how to resolve it.

All I had to do was edit the .htaccess file in my server and add the following:

<IfModule mod_security.c>
<Files async-upload.php>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</Files>
</IfModule>

Overall, I am very pleased with the WordPress 2.5 upgrade and gave me a chance to get rid of some of the plugins I don’t need anymore, making way for new ones I want to try.

If you are on the wall about upgrading your blog to 2.5, hope this would give you a little push towards that. This really has to be the smoothest upgrade I have ever done!

Of course, I took the plunge after making sure I had a good backup of my blog and knowing the backing from the incredible community of helpful folks surrounding WordPress. Have you?

Download WordPress 2.5

I have been working on this theme mod for a bit and it is almost a whole month late in making its way here. I meant to release it for the New Year’s day but my day job kept me busy to complete the stuff I wanted done. So, instead here it is for your eyes today. If you are reading this in a RSS reader, please click through to check out the design effort.

Why modify instead of a new theme?

You might be thinking why I took the trouble of clobbering an excellent theme. I will have to take you back to the reason I started blogging in the first place. It was my interest in learning web development and I did not imagine I would try to make money off of it when I registered ShanKri-la (Sep 20, 2006). What better way than to get your own domain name and run a live website? After a few months of fiddling with cPanel & learning HTML & CSS, finally installed WordPress and started blogging towards the end of Feb 2007.

I am still learning various aspects of web development and have become quite adept at helping others with their WordPress theme customization. I loved the current theme I was using but wanted ShanKri-la to have it’s unique look. So, here we go with my custom modification of the Saur theme.

I have to mention a very helpful WordPress plugin that let me work on this new design while you were still looking at the old one.

Theme Test Drive WordPress plugin lets you chose a theme - in my case I made a copy of current theme to a new folder - and after activating the new theme in the plugin menu, you will see the new theme while you are logged in as Admin. Everyone else will continue to see the old theme.

Direct Advertising in ShanKri-la

I have finally opened up direct advertising in ShanKri-la. This was another reason for making the theme mod so I can implement the ad scheme the way I wanted to. A lot of themes seem to put more focus in that than usability and I wanted to strike a good balance for my readers. I would love to hear what you think about it.

Also, you won’t see Google Adsense ads anymore if you are a regular reader here or if you come directly from someone else’s site. I have made it so the ads are visible only to the search engine visitors as they are more likely to click on ads anyways and it would make it pleasant reading for my readers.

For those interested in advertising in ShanKri-la, you can get details of various advertising options from the ‘Adevrtise’ page.

Areas of Improvement

If you have a keen eye, you would probably notice all the changes but I am going to list them here quickly if anyone is interested in things of that sort.

Header area

Just some minor tweaks with the search bar gone from here to make way for a premium 468×60 ad space.

Content & Comment Area

Not any major change except the Adsense ads won’t appear for my regular readers (tell me if you miss it ) plus I have removed other ad programs that weren’t performing well.

Sidebar

This is where the big changes are done. I am a strong believer in using tags and tag clouds for easy navigation. Hence the prominent area for the tag cloud. I think the dark colored block stands out highlingting the tags, subscription options & the search field.

Also, added the 125×125 ad area for direct advertisements here.

Footer

Footer is another area I have modified a lot by moving some of the clutter from the sidebar to the footer so I can free up the sidebar space for more relevant things. Plus, the slow loading widgets such as MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, etc won’t be a concern anymore as they will be loading after everything else in the page loads up. One major advantage to this is that the sidebar now can show more and longer comments hopefully helping everyone to see the conversation going here.

I am going to concentrate next on improving the load time of the blog as well. I would love to hear any suggestions or your experience in tackling the load time problems.

After all, I have done all this to in an effort to make ShanKri-la a better reading experience for you and would love to hear how you perceive this change.

I would like to introduce my readers to a good friend of mine. I have been reading Garry Conn’s blog since day 1 of starting my blog and I still do. Every time I visit his blog I come away hevaing learnt something. He has to be one of the most helpful bloggers around.

Hello everyone! This is Garry Conn and K has offered me a wonderful opportunity to write this brief post on his blog. I am totally appreciative to have this opportunity. I want to tell you about a brand new WordPress Theme that I just unveiled called, Digs’em. Digs’em stands for Digg and SEM. We all know about Digg, but many people might not be aware of SEM. SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing and in order to be successful with marketing your blog, business, products or services in the search engine, you have to have a search engine friendly and optimized web design. Digs’em is your solution!

I have invested my skills and experience into designing my first official WordPress theme for general public use. This WordPress theme is very well coded and extremely search engine friendly… most importantly, it’s FREE!! Head on over to www.DigSEM.com and check it out LIVE and download your free copy!

I am glad to say that the RSS full feed woes are finally over for me. I hope I didn’t drive off too many readers with these problems.

What went wrong?

Although I would love to put my finger on it, the real cause is still eluding me. But, here is the sequence of steps that broke it and fixed it, if it’ll help anyone facing the same issue.

• I broke the RSS feed initially when I added a 301 redirect to direct my shankrila.com traffic to www.shankrila.com to my .htaccess file. Because my feed was http://shankrila.com/feed, it started getting redirected to the www address.
• I fixed that by changing the source feed address to include the www.
• Feed works, but only shows partial feeds.
• WordPress Admin -> Options show full text feed enabled.
• Disabled Full Text Feeds WP plugin.
• Disabled Feedburner Feedsmith WP plugin.
• Enabled Better Feeds plugin
• Source feed now shows full text feeds. - Use IE to verify as Firefox tends to show excerpts. Or you can use View Source in Firefox to see if the full text is pulled in the feed.
• Feedburner feed still shows partial feeds. Figured it might be a Feedburner cache issue and decide to give it some time. (pinging Feedburner multiple times didn’t have any effect)
• After 3 days, it still showed partial feeds.
• My initial Feedburner feed was pointed at http://www.shankrila.com/feed/rss. I decided to try http://www.shankrila.com/feed/rss2 instead and pinged Feedburner again.
• Full Text Feed works now!

I am yet to enable Feedburner Feedsmith plugin to capture all the feed traffic at one place but this was a good learning experience for me. Being a Database Administrator by day, I am anal about having a backup before changing anything in the blog. But, this one just caught me off guard.

Again, my apologies to those who were inconvenienced by this and a big thank you to all those who poured in suggestions and tips to help me resolve this problem.

First of, I would like to apologize to those who have been annoyed in the past 2 days by the partial posts in ShanKri-la feed. If you wondered if I have switched from full posts to partial posts, the answer is NO. I have no intention of forcing anyone to click over to my site from your feed reader. Ever.

I had an episode of my feed completely breaking a couple of days back. I managed to get it working again but I am still at a loss in figuring out why the feeds switched to partial posts. I have the Full Text Feed plugin installed and something is still messed up. I had read that Feedburner sometimes caches feeds and it might take a while for the full posts to show up. But, I haven’t had any luck with that either.

I have been checking WordPress Support Forums and looking at possible reasons for this breakdown. I appreciate your patience and hope to have this restored as soon as possible.

I have been using Windows Live Writer for my blogging ever since I heard good things about it from a few fellow bloggers. I have to admit, Microsoft has done stuff mostly right with this product. I do have a few gripes but nothing major.

I use my USB drive a lot and I have a bunch of portable apps installed in it and even use exclusively from it like my GreatNews feed reader. I have missed having portable version of Windows Live Writer until I stumbled across this at Tech.Life.Blogged.

Installing it is very easy:

1. Download and unzip this file into your USB drive.
2. If you have Windows Live Writer installed, already you are all set. If not, install it but you can uninstall it after you have gone through these steps.
3. Copy all files from C:\Program Files\Windows Live Writer to the unzipped folder in your USB drive with the path \WindowsLiveWriterPortable\App\WindowsLiveWriter
4. Run WindowsLiveWriterPortable.exe

One thing to note when you are using your USB drive on multiple computers is that, your drafts may not appear right. I am still trying to figure out why but if you clicked on the ‘Open’ button in the toolbar, you’d see that you haven’t lost the drafts even if it appears that way from the sidebar. So, that’s good.