Random Ramblings

Wow! Another month has passed by so quickly. Its been nearly 4 months now that I’m hosting this blog and so far it has been a fairly good ride. The stats are looking fairly nice. The Google PR is 3, Alexa rank is 540,046. But off late I’ve been feeling a little lost. I read a post about setting a mission for your blog by Christie Kissinger. That got of me thinking, what is the mission of this blog? Thanks to this post by Tabitha I’ve been able to find the answer.

I had started this blog because I wanted to have my own domain. And also because I wanted to have complete control over my blog. Blogging here has taught me a lot about domains, wordpress, plug ins, themes, css, blog promotion etc.

The mission for this blog is to share my experiences with the world, to help people with my knowledge.

I like to share my knowledge with the world. I’ll tell you why, if I have one apple and we share it we both will have half an apple, but if I have one idea and we share it we both will still have one idea each. So although they say knowledge is power, this power increases when it is shared.

So I’ll try to focus on my mission and learn new thing that I can share with the world. Wish me luck.

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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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After I posted my review about the WordPress Mobile plugins a few days back I immediately noticed that I had received a mail from the creator of the Wapple Architect plugin, Rich Gubby who said that he had noticed that although I’d recently signed up for the dev key to enable the Wapple Architect Plugin I was using the MobilePress Plugin. He highlighted that Wapple Architect could let me style my mobile blog to look like the desktop version rather than a theme used on thousands of blogs. He insisted that I try his plugin again and even offered to help style my mobile site.
I replied informing him about the xml parsing error I got on Opera Mini. To which he replied convincing me that it may be a small part of the code that was causing the error and offered to fix it and also update the plugin so that it benefits other users of this plugin too.
Also I’ve noticed that the Wapple Architect Plugin has upgraded from version 3.0.2 to version 3.1. I’m not sure of what changes have been made to it but I’m certain that it is an actively improving plugin and is being developed by one of the most persuasive person I’ve met online.
I have temporarily changed back to the Wapple Architect Plugin till I can find something that I really like.

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