Random Ramblings

Thelonious

You’ve probably already heard that word. I’m not sure what it truly means but its the code name for version 3.0 of WordPress.

If you’ve visited any social site, you would’ve noticed that all the bloggers are posting about this major update. You can read the release post to know more about this release here.

Upgrading is a simple process, just back up your database and files, I’ve got the WordPress Database Backup plugin that takes care of that for me, and then you simply click on the update WordPress link on the Dashboard. The whole process takes less than a few minutes, so don’t worry and go ahead and Upgrade to Thelonious.

Happy Blogging

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Comment : a remark, observation or criticism.
[source: Dictionary.com]

I think is nice to have comments on your articles as it allows you to discuss the topic with your readers and allows you to receive feedback. Also your readers can share their experience which helps to enrich your post and may be helpful for a future reader. At times the comments may bring to light some things that you may have not considered at all and may change your opinion too.

Recently blog comments are being exploited for their link juice value, and do follow blogs are the worst hit of the lot. (more…)

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Recently I’ve been trying out a few new themes on my blog. I’ve been looking for a clean layout and a simple design. I stumbled across quite a few nice themes and I was trying them on my blog to see how the page appears.

I installed a theme called Renegade II. And as soon as I clicked on activate the page went blank. (more…)

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In my opinion Comments are life blood of a blog. And its essential to keep the conversation going back and forth rather than just post a critical comment or remark and moving on. To encourage your readers to come back to check on their comment replies most blogs have the Subscribe to comments plugin. This is a nice plugin that sends the comment author a notification email everytime a new comment is posted to a blog post on which he/she has commented on.

Now this isn’t bad, is it? The plugin does what is set out to do, subscribe you to the comments of a blog post. But Imagine this, you post a comment on a blog post you’ve liked and the author has replied to your comment as well and you then want to leave it there. You now have to unsubscribe from your previous subscription. If you don’t unsubscribe you’ll continue to receive notification mail whenever someone comments on that post, even a few weeks after you’ve read and commented on it.

Thats not such a bad thing but lets consider this from the point of view of the commentator. His/her mailbox is constantly receiving emails for comment notifications that they posted weeks or even months ago. And this person who is probably also a busy blogger has to spend precious time scanning these emails, when they could be writing the next most popular article or visiting some blog or commenting on another blog or doing some research or blog maintenance. Do you think someone who has had such an experience will consider subscribing to the comments the next time he/she is commenting. I don’t think so!

Well thanks to fellow blogger Sire I’ve stumbled upon a plugin that not only solves this problem but also presents the comments in a threaded format, so you can easily follow the conversation, if your theme doesn’t do it already. Its called WordPress Threaded Comments.

This plugin does just what I really want as a comment reply notifier. The commentator is sent a notification email only if a reply is posted to the comment posted by the commentator. Thus the commentator does not have to worry about getting too many emails and be assured that any notification email received is for a reply to a comment that he/she has posted, hence the email will draw prompt attention to itself.

I’ve installed this plugin on my blog and it works fine. I encourage you to get this plugin too and don’t let your commentators drown in the flood of notification emails.

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I’ve been having an issue with my wordpress blog dashboard where on certain widgets like the incoming links widget and the plugins widget there was an error message displayed which indicated that it was out of memory. I earlier thought I was exceeding my allocated space on the server. I tried all I could to free up space, I deleted unused themes, I removed unused plugins. But the error message would not go away, so I had just minimized those widgets and I was ignoring this for some time.

I’ve been wanting to contact the support team from BlueHost but I’ve been putting it off because of the trouble I had earlier just trying to get Live Chat to work on my Mobile. I was able to load Live Chat earlier with Opera Mobile 10 beta 2 but there was a problem with the text entry. Recently Opera Mobile 10 beta 3 was released which has fixed the issue with text entry, So finally I decided to contact Support Desk.

I must say that their operators were very helpful. They figured that I had not used too much space and put me to the tech support team immediately. There I chatted with a very smart guy who soon figured out that the I needed to install some php script and increase the memory allocation to make my blog work fine just by reading the error message. I followed the steps that I was told by the chat support advisor my problem was resolved.

So far the 2 times I’ve contacted the Support Team for BlueHost via Live Chat they’ve been able to solve the issue promptly. So based on my experience, I think they really have a very experienced tech support team.

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