Tech Pedia » Wordpress

Blog Commenting is a Dying Art

Abhinav Kaiser — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 17:39:07 +0000

In the age of blogs, the feedback mechanism which goes hand in hand with blogging is on the brink. It is a sorry state of affair and reasons are far too many.

For starters, we have over a million blogs and users find a new blog for the unique information they may need. So, the question of loyalty withers, and so does the connection between the blogger and the reader. Even some of the top blogs, including social engines such as Digg is losing commentators fairly regularly. I am an avid reader of Digg and there used to be a time, say 4 years back when comments used to run into several hundreds, and today, the case has completely turned around.

Secondly, spamming has taken the sheen out of blog commenting. A lot of spammers, in order to get backlinks back to their site, comment on blog posts, placing links of their staked websites. This spam has brought in control measures, which avoids spammers, and at the same time some of genuine bloggers, who would like to share their websites through your website.

Google and other search engines recognize the tag no-follow, which basically tells the search engine spiders that these links need not be followed. Wordpress, the world’s most popular blogging engine has enabled no-follow tags for all its comments. So, for spammers, blogs that run on Wordpress don’t benefit much. And, as I said earlier, some genuine commentators who would like to have a reciprocate with a comment to a link onto their website are turned away as well.

To encourage comments on Tech Pedia, I have decided to do away with no-follow tags for all comments. With this, I would like to invite all blog commentators to read the available articles here and leave your feedback, and get a backlink to your website. That being said, there is a certain standard that we maintain here. The comment should compliment or supplement the blog post, and add value. If otherwise, I will not hesitate to dump it.

To remove the no-follow tag on Wordpress, I have leveraged on Dofollow plugin by Denis de Bernardy. It is a nice little plugin which does the job for you. I would recommend other bloggers to follow suit and revive the art of commenting.

Troubleshooting the Wordpress Blank Page

Abhinav Kaiser — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 18:59:38 +0000

I was in the midst of a theme change for one of my blogs and when I selected a particular free Wordpress theme, the whole blog came crashing on me. White Screen!!!! I knew that the template was faulty, and I quickly deleted it. And, I knew that if I did so, Wordpress would pick up the default theme instead.

(If you don’t like stories, jump ahead to the text in bold for the resolution technique)

But, to my surprise, the blank page persisted. Huh! I had no idea what to do next, so I deleted all the Wordpress files and re-uploaded them, hoping that it would just fix the problem, sans wp-content and wp-config.php. Problem still continued. So, I decided to do away with wp-content and replaced it with Wordpress default. Still, no change and I did the same with wp-config.php as well, vis-a-vis.

I was close to my wits end and finally I started to think logically not before carrying out some illogical troubleshooting steps. How does wordpress know that I have changed a template? It cannot be in one of the files on the server as I have not given write access to Wordpress on my server to any of the files. So, it had to be the database. Something must have gone terribly wrong with my database.

So, I started searching online to understand where Wordpress stores template information on the database. To my horror, I could not find a single, I mean a single resource that contained this information. I found this post which was on the same lines but did not cover my problem.

Well, it was time for me to put in some solid hours to troubleshoot the issue at hand. I went into my database and started peeking around hoping to find an entry that reminded me of a template. Alas! nothing even close. As I studied the table structure, the only table that came close to carrying this information was wp_options.

Before I did anything crazy, I went ahead and created a new database and checked if Wordpress installation screen shows up. Bingo! It did. I was certain that it was my database that had gone bonkers.

This is what I did to fix the problem, and it did. I dropped the wp-options table from my original database and replaced it with wp_options from the default Wordpress installation. This did the trick but I do not know yet, what other damage it has done in the process. But, I am glad that all my posts, comments, tags and categories are still around.

This was my closest shave to losing all my effort that was built over the past few years. I believe that there is still a whole lot of ambiguity about Wordpress. That being said, it is still manageable, I say it because a person like me who is a non-programmer could get into the code and change stuff and could look into the database and understand the ambiguity of code-dom. Surely, code must be poetry for these folks.

Of Wordpress Upgrades and Plugin Compatibility – you do not have sufficient permissions to access this page

Abhinav Kaiser — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 17:45:30 +0000

Although Wordpress is unquestionably the best CMS in the world due to it’s huge base of coders, it’s probably a bane on users such as me. We have a new Wordpress (minor) release almost every week which is great for the world. But, for a self publisher, the time and effort required to upgrade WP is enormous although the process itself is simple. One might argue that I don’t have to upgrade at all, but I have faced the wrath of missing a few upgrades in between and multiplying my workload.

Well, the purpose of this post is not to whine and grind about the frequency of updates but to proclaim the Eureka that I stumbled upon.

After upgrading to version 2.8, I recently noticed that a number of my plugins’ settings pages started throwing up an error message that said – you do not have sufficient permissions to access this page. I did what most of us would do by pasting the error appended by the name of the plugin in Google.

Several search pages opened up with numerous solutions. One such post mentioned about the possibility of such errors when a database is imported; not my case. Another one talked about the database prefixes that are set to anything other than wp_; not my case yet again.

To make the long story short, I found a longish fix which worked for me. I followed the same route by googling and finding fixes for my other plugins.

In the exhausted state of mine, I did manage to light a spark and found a common denominator between all the fixes. Although all the recommended fixes were lengthy, there was just one keyword that connected each one of them.

I did some little testing and found out that the fix was far more simple than what was presented.

Here it goes

1. Most plugins these days don’t come as one file anymore, that makes things a little complicated. Identify all the .php files in your plugin.
2. Open each one of them (I would start with the obvious one like the name_of_the_plugin.php) and search for admin_head.
3. After you locate it, replace it with admin_menu.
4. Voila!!!!!! The error vanishes and your plugin’s settings page is back to work.

Honest to God, I don’t know what it means or what it does, but it works. I have never bragged about me being a hacker nor do I have any high level programming skills. But, I am glad I figured this out and a few more earlier.

I am interested to know what it actually does, if anybody has even a slightest clue, bring me out of my misery.

Retrieving Passwords in Wordpress

Abhinav Kaiser — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 06:39:56 +0000

Passwords are bound to be lost. The options to retrieve them are hence on the rise. The most common ways to retrieve a lost password are to provide the email address or an user id, answer some secret questions or enter some personal information that has been already fed into the system.

With Wordpress, you primarily have just one option. You enter your email address or your username to have a password reset link mailed to your email address. Activating the mailed link in a browser will initiate another email from Wordpress which carries your password.

This option may not work all the time. There are times when your server might not support SMTP service that is required for the email to be dispatched.

We have alternate ways of achieving a password resets, but through the backend. Duh! not the Wordpress backend but your MySQL database backend.

Log into your database backend, you should see something similar to the one below depending on the version that you use.

Click on wp_users table and then hit browse.

You should see something similar to the image shown below. I have disfigured my database’s personal information and in it’s place, you should see some real text. Click on the icon that is marked by a big black arrow. Excuse my graphic design skills, it isn’t too pleasing to anybody’s eyes. :)

An editor where you can change the values of your username and password is open. Note that you will not be able to enter real text as the strings in this database are encrypted by MD5. Go over to a website which converts real strings to MD5 strings. Enter the password of a choice and upon encrypting, you will get your password in MD5 format. For example, if you chose your password as ’superman’, your MD5 string would be ‘84d961568a65073a3bcf0eb216b2a576′. Enter this MD5 string, in your db backend against user_pass field. Hit Go/Save and this should do the trick.

If you have problems in carrying this out, let me know.

Advantages of Open Source Content Management Systems like Wordpress

om — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 21:22:46 +0000

More often than not, the latest open source CMS turn out to be your best bets, though some people can’t give up the age old orthodox feeling of superiority of custom built CMS. So let’s take a look at their advantages.

The Open Source CMS like Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, RailFrog, CushyCMS and the likes of them provide the following added-advantages -

• RSS Feeds integration

• Number of plug-ins supported

• Ready-to-use

• Extendable

• Quick Assistance from Developer Community, due to presence of number of forums

• Quick Search

• Number of widgets supported

• Easily customizable

• Negligible Cost

• Extensive Documentation

You may further read about the Top 10 Open Source CMS Available in the market here.

More can find more details on web content management systems here

To find code snippets in Java, HTML, PHP, MySQL, PL/SQL and forms of Free Online Programming Tutorials Click Here

Fighting Comment Spam without Akismet

Abhinav Kaiser — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 18:29:05 +0000

Disclaimer : I don’t have any biased feeling towards Akismet. Any claims made in this post are purely factual.

I had written an article earlier stating that Akismet does not work as it supposed to. I was referring to the intelligence factor in the linked article while today, I emphasize that Akismet alone is not sufficient for bloggers. Akismet can handle limited number of spam and nowhere close to comprehensiveness.

Here’s some history : I am regularly getting spammed by the same set of spamming robots and no help is being offered by the world’s most popular anti-spam comment plugin.

It’s time for me to look elsewhere and provide a holistic view of the situation and review some of the spam preventing plugins.

The first plugin I am planning on experimenting with, is the Math Comment Spam Protection. It is a simple plugin that asks the user to perform basic addition of two numbers and provide the answer. Sounds simple! Installation is simple and involves adding code into your template, and the plugin works as it’s supposed to (at least with the addition).

The plugin is installed on this blog on a pilot basis and here are my two concerns:

- What if the spamming robots are developed to perform addition?
- What if a user cannot perform simple addition (using a calculator is an option though)

Results matter the most and the best judge is time and I expect some good amount of spam to hit me in the next 7 days. Too sad, I wouldn’t know if the plugin actually prevented spam or not. Either way, if I don’t get spammed over a period of time, then the plugin is worth it; at least for now.

I will update this post probably within a week with my results. If you have found a better workable solution, let us know. If you have a plugin which you would like us to test, do let us know.

Howto : Add Ads After First Post on your Wordpress Homepage

Abhinav Kaiser — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 16:25:37 +0000

Google limits us to display 3 ad units and 1 link unit on any given page. In Wordpress, if we would like to add adsense on the homepage, we would be limited to header, sidebar and the footer. If we add ads at the end of an article, the loop repeats the ad at least 10 times. You don’t want that to happen, isn’t it? Ideally, it would be perfect to add an ad right after the first post which could pose an unprecedented challenge. Here is a small snippet which could do the trick for you without much sweat.

1. Open your FTP application and browse to the theme files. Locate either index.php or home.php depending on the theme and open them.
2. Find this code in the file : or one of its variants such as .
3. Just before the endwhile code, insert this code:

YOUR ADSENSE/AD GOES HERE

4. Save the file and upload.
5. That’s it!

Piece of cake isn’t it. If you have any further clarifications, let me know…

Migrating from Wordpress to Joomla

Abhinav Kaiser — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 03:40:46 +0000

The title of this post could be misleading. Tech Pedia is not moving to Joomla. However, I am pondering upon moving another blog of mine from Wordpress to Joomla. The main deterrent is the database tables and the syncing of structures. I checked the web and there is no easy one click script to get the job done.

After an exhausted search through several forums, I ran into one on the Joomla forum and the poster claimed to have successfully transferred posts but not comments. Here’s a brief of the operation:

I tried various way to import Wordpress through Joomblog, but kept getting the message “no installation of Wordpress could be found.” But once I installed JD-Wordpress, imported a backup of my Wordpress database, and categorized each post, Joomlblog imported correctly!

Here are the steps:

1. Backup everything in your Wordpress site (Manage -> Backup) and save it on your computer. (If you haven’t backed anything up before, you may need to activate the plugin in Wordpress.)
2. Install Joomblog in Joomla! (1 com, 1 bot, and 2 mods)
*** If you’ve been using JD-Wordpress in Joomla!, then skip to step 6. ***
3. Install JD-Wordpress in Joomla!
4. In phpMyAdmin, import the Wordpress backup (from step 1) into the database that Joomla! is using.
5. Under Components -> JD-Wordpress, go to Manage -> Categories, and make sure they’re in a category. If it says “Uncategorized” but is not linked to a category called Uncategorized, then it’s not categorized. If this is the case, Manage -> Categories and make sure you have categories created. Then, Edit each post, select a category, and Save. There’s probably a script that could be written for phpMyadmin, but I’m not that savvy.
6. Under Components -> Joomblog, select Import, and click on Import Wordpress. *
7. Once this is complete, look in Content By Section -> Wordpress_Joomblog and you should find your articles.
8. Now is the fun time of placing the imported content in the right Joomla category and editing each one to clean up any mess the switch left behind.

* Joomblog won’t duplicate your posts if you try this process more than once.

I plan on performing these activities on a blog of mine this weekend. I will post updates and hopefully, will try to find a way to import comments as well.

If you have a better approach, do share it with us.

Cool Wordpress theme; Bus Full of Hippies

om — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 18:16:17 +0000

Bus Full of Hippies is a cool Wordpress theme recently released and is available FREE of cost! Check this out!

The Bus Full of Hippies Wordpress theme

The maximum width for images in the posts is limited to 390 pixels, which is indeed good enough…

Anything wider than that is squeezed up, in order to prevent the theme from breaking!

It is a nice wordpress theme which doesn’t really suck like few of the free themes that you wouldn’t even like to look at, despite the fact that they are FREE!!

Its surely one of those themes that you would like to try out once!

In short it’s basically a two column Light and Artistic Wordpress theme

And it has a feeling of freshness associated with itself!

Highlights of the theme are:

SEO: Average

Documentation Ease of Use: Good

Support: Well supported and frequently updated

Extra Features: Widgets!

Click here to download

Howto : Decrypt Wordpress Footer

Abhinav Kaiser — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 08:28:08 +0000

If you are a regular reader on this website, you probably know that my articles originate from absolute necessities. Recently I was looking around for a wordpress theme for one of my blogs and found one that I really liked. Unfortunately, it had an encrypted footer with ads embedded on it. I respect the template’s creator but not gonna put up ads on my website that don’t fetch revenue (to me ofcourse). The template was perfect to my liking except for the ad, so I decided to get rid of it.

I Googled and found some websites that offered help through a decrypt.php file which was capable of decrypting the footer. I tried decrypting my footer but the process failed. I lack patience to post messages on forum and wait for an answer. I need instant results so I tried using a footer.php file from a different unencrypted template. The result was not bad but not how it originally looked. I lived with it for a while before I thoughtfully screamed Eureka. I had found a simple way to do it and the decrypter was with me all along.

The decrypter is none other than your browser itself. Your browser decrypts the footer when it displays the webpage, so solution is readily available to use. I use Firefox and I would recommend you use the same as well. Reasons for doing so have been provided in my earlier articles and will provide some more later on when the time is ripe.

Here are the steps in bullets to decrypt an encrypted footer:
- Install the encrypted template on your blog and open your blog home page in Firefox
- Click on View and then Page Source; alternatively you can just hit Ctrl+U
- A new window opens up with a bunch of html code in it
- Scroll down to the end of the code page and your sidebar code is easily recognizable. You can easily identify some text that resides on your sidebar.
- Copy the code starting from when your sidebar ends until which is the latest line of your source code.
- Replace the contents in your footer.php file with the copied code and check the output
- If the copied version doesn’t resemble the original, go back to your footer.php and remove the top most line. Check if it brings your blog back to original shape. Follow this process until you find a favorable result by deleting the top most line.
- Result is guaranteed but it may take some time for you to tweak by trial and error method.

Reading through my article, it feels like there’s more history to it than the actual stuff. Sorry to bore you with my experience but it’s necessary to get the context before the actual meat.

If you face issues in decrypting the footer of your template, leave me a message along with the url.

*** UPDATE ***

Codex has a better and sophisticated process than mine. Here’s their method:

How to get rid of encoding in a theme’s footer?

Some theme authors embed links in an encoded footer making it difficult to understand what is happening in the footer. Note: this type of encoded content could be malicious as well as just a copyright banner! Here’s a method to decode (figure out) and correct the footer so there is no encoding.

In your index.php find the line that says . Above and below it add marker text like this:

Now visit your blog, view source (e.g. View->Page Source in Firefox), and copy the HTML between those two markers. Rename your footer.php and make a new copy of footer.php with that HTML code. Then change it to your hearts content. Remember to insert the before tag.