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.

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 : <?php endwhile; ?> or one of its variants such as <?php endwhile; else: ?>.
3. Just before the endwhile code, insert this code:
<?php if(!$show_ads){ ?>
YOUR ADSENSE/AD GOES HERE
<?php $show_ads = 1; } ?>
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…

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.

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

Extra Features: Widgets!

Click here to download

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 </div> when your sidebar ends until </html> 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.

When you mark a comment as “spam” in the plugin or submit it using the submit-spam API call, the mistake is noted by Akismet and it learns from your submission. – Akismet FAQs section

Akismet claims to learn from our submissions, but sadly enough, it’s not happening.

Well, I have been receiving tons of spam since I started blogging. But, there are certain spammy comments that pass through Akismet. One such cluster of comment is from sub domains originating from freehostia.com. I have marked them as spam for I-can’t-remember-how-long.

I(We) expect Akismet to automatically filter these comments based on my earlier actions, but it ain’t happening.

Like most of us, I use Gmail. If I mark a particular mail as spam either once or twice, the subsequent mails originating from that address automatically goes into my spam box. This is an ideal situation. If Gmail can do it, why can’t Akismet incorporate the same?

This is not a blasting-Akismet post. I would like to recommend the Gmail learning curve for Akismet to incorporate and make it a robust plugin.

A message kept flashing on my WP dashboard asking me to upgrade for the past few days. The installer package was downloaded from the website and all instruction followed to the point. Upgrade went smoothly and as I started to work on the theme, I observed that the categories section was showing blank. Upon investigation, it was clear to me that all the category names have been deleted.

A search conducted on WP forum revealed that the missing categories problem is a known issue and yet, the buggy WP installer is made available for download; with no mention of such a problem. This action by WP is extremely callous and the damage done by them is irreparable.

David Cumps has been an angel to many like me who have suffered through WP’s callousness. He has devised a method of naming and placing the categories. The process is arduous but a lifeline.

It took me close to 2 hours to add all the 30 odd category names after matching the posts. Although I am tired and ready for some rest, I want to caution other bloggers not to fall into the trap just as I did.

Suggestions to Wordpress

1. WP should recall the latest upgrade and the last known stable version should be made available for download.

2. WP should thoroughly check new versions on new installations and upgrades before opening it for the public.

3. New versions are being released quite frequently. This takes a toll on bloggers to have it updated on a regular basis. My advice/request is to have fewer versions incorporating several upgrades in each release.

4. A plugin needs to be released to help bloggers like me add categories in a quicker way.

Sweetcron is capable of synchronizing and recording your activities on the internet. Whether you upload a photo on flickr or bookmark a favorite site, Sweetcron will be there watching you and recording your activities on your blog.

Just like Wordpress, Movable Type and other blogging engines, Sweetcron can be hosted on your website.

Here’s the best part: Its 100% free and open source. Seems like busy times for programmers to write new plugins and mods for this new kid in town.

The proposed engine is under production as I write and will be out shortly. If you would like to be notified of its release, send in your email address at their website.

Virtual hosting has become very popular because of its price, some may even start at $1.99 per month however, in this case you do get what you pay for, don’t misunderstand this last phrase, price is no indication of the quality of a web host but considering the price it would be helpful for you not to have high expectations. Normal virtual hosting prices range from seven dollars all the way to $19 a month, this depends on the features that you will be using and the extras that you decide to sign up for, for most people the starter package will be just fine.

After you have started using a virtual server you will gain some information and knowledge about hosting a general, a virtual hosting account is basically an account which has been created on a web server which also hosts many other sites just like yours, this might not sound like something negative however, it can turn out to be just that. When you share a computer with several other websites you are basically sharing the same system resources so if the machine only has 1 GB of RAM if you install a script which uses 500 MB of RAM the other 50 sites which might be sharing the same environment will be affected because your site is already consuming half of the system resources.

Virtual accounts are normally advertise using phrases such as “unlimited bandwidth, high storage capacity, unlimited databases, etc.’ however, all of these unlimited features are regulated by the amount of system resources your website will use, if the scripts that you are running start to affect the performance of the other sites which are hosted at the same environment your account may get deactivated or your site might go down taking the entire server with it. In a nutshell, this is the most common limitation that virtual hosting accounts have.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/technology-articles/the-limitations-of-virtual-or-shared-hosting-402842.html

However you can’t really call Tumblr a precise alternative for a number of reasons. One is that you can give the appearance to visitors that your tumbelog is hosted on its own domain by redirecting the IP address. Also, a tumbelog really is more like a mini weblog. Techslut even shows you how to integrate your tumblelog (and Twitter tweets) into your WordPress setup.


If you do decide to “self-host”, they warn you that they’re not in a position to help you configure your tumblelog, so you should  ask a friend. On the other hand, if  you set up your tumblelog the regular way, there’s less headache and you get a subdomain.
Here’s my tumblelog, which display diagrams that I’ve created for various weblogs that I either write for or own. (What I should have done is provided a link to each article, so each diagram could be seen in context. In which case my tumblelog would be an index to my slice of the blogosphere.)

Features of Tumblr

Here are some of the other features and functionality of Tumblr tumblelogs:

1. Themes. Customize appearance by editing the HTML and CSS. You can even borrow theme fragments from WordPress, though you’ll have to do the conversion and twiddling yourself.

2. Content variety. Easily post several types of content: articles, quotes, links, IM conversation text, photos, and videos. The latter two can be from Flickr and YouTube; just specify the link.
3. Moblogging. Post photos from your cell phone by mailing them to a secret email address set up just for your tumblelog.
4. Bookmarklet. Post quickly using the bookmarklet. Depending on your web browser (I’m running Firefox), you can drag the bookmarklet to your Bookmarks Bar. Then, whenever  you’re on a page that you want to Tumble, just click the bookmarklet. The content type defaults to a link, but you can change that.
5. Twitter integration. Integrate your Twitter tweets into your tumbelog. (I haven’t looked deeply into this. It might amount to using the Tumblr bookmarklet to post while you are still in Twitter.)

The interface is pretty easy to use, and the text editor is WYSIWYG. However, some of the functionality doesn’t work properly in the Firefox browser. (Try adding a hyperlink to some text.) Like a blog platform and Twitter, Tumblelogs have RSS feeds with which friends can subscribe. Your feed can be full text or short, and sites like Technorati and My Yahoo! can be pinged whenever you add a new post.

What you Cannot Do With/In Tumblr

Here’s what you cannot do:

1. You cannot send or subscribe to Tumbelogs by SMS. At least not that I could see in the Tumblr FAQ.
2. You cannot pull in web feeds to generate content.
3. You cannot actually host the content on your own server. Again, not that I could see.
4. You cannot interact with other Tumblrweeds (or whatever they’re called). I.e., there are no social networking features.

So in essence, Tumblr is more like a Blogspot service than a Twitter service, but with some interesting features that make it different enough. Call it mini-blogging instead of micro-blogging. Tumblr has made it easy to post a small range of content types. It’s much more stream of consciousness than Twitter because of the content types supported, but it’s not a replacement.

What can you use it for?

I can already think of a number of uses for Tumblr that Twitter simply cannot fulfil:

1. A scrapbook. Or create a family photo album for family and friends, complete with captions or little snippets of conversation (copied from an IM text chat session).

2. Personal portal. A portal/index to all your posts, if you blog at multiple places.
3. Lens. Alternative to Squidoo lenses. Tumblr’s not an authority domain yet like Squidoo, but it could be soon.
4. Mini-blog. Burn the feed in Feedburner and use their BuzzBoost HTML/Javascript badge to display the content as a mini-blog on an actual blog, in the sidebar. So you can produce “what I’m reading/ listening to” lists on your blog, without having to upgrade your theme.

Missing features

Being a geek, I’d like to see a number of features that would round Tumblr out:

1. Social features. This might include comments, or some sort of ability to interact with other Tumblrweeds.

2. Audio. Embedding of audio files, for podcasting or for recording messages in a family photo album.
3. RSS feed importing. Tie-in with RSS feeds in a variety of ways, including importing, to generate content. This would be a very nice display vehicle for some custom Yahoo feeds.

Overall, I’d have to say I like Tumblr, at least for mini-blogging. My head hurts with ways I could use it.