Tag: Wordpress

Categories
News

Windows RC 7 released for general public

clip_image002A week after bringing out the Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) to MSDN and TechNet subscribers, Microsoft has released it to the general public as well.

This not being the final tested version, there are some risks involved in using it. According to Microsoft, people who wish to use this version should have some specific skills.

Users should know how to:

  1. Troubleshoot problems
  2. Burn an ISO image to create a DVD
  3. Install Windows
  4. Back up and restore their PC
  5. Set up a network
  6. Create and use a system recovery disk.
ADVERTISEMENT

Since Windows 7 RC is a work in progress, users may encounter technical difficulties. Hence, the users should not install the RC on their primary production machine.

Some serious issues with Windows 7 RC:

There are some serious issues you might face while using Windows 7 RC. Some of these were also occurred with Windows Vista when it was first introduced, like:

  • Some software applications, including antivirus programs, might not install or work correctly
  • Printers and video cards, may not work
  • Access to corporate or home networks may go down
  • Users’ files may get corrupt
ADVERTISEMENT

Click here to get the download for Windows 7 RC

Plus, by March 1, 2010, the program will begin shutting itself down every two hours. So those who still have the Windows 7 RC running on their computers will probably want to uninstall it. According to Microsoft, people will have to rebuild their test PCs to replace the operating system with a non-expired version of Windows and reinstall the programs and data, according to Microsoft. Oh boy!!!

Right now, with the complexities of installing the program, I don’t think a non-techie user would quite be interested in “testing” the product. Not me at least!

(Source: Windows 7rc)

[UPDATE]

On October 22, Microsoft will officially launch Windows 7.

The upgrades are most likely to be free for people who buy a new Windows Vista PC shortly before Windows 7 arrives. However, we don’t yet know when this upgrade program begins or how much Windows 7 will cost. Keep reading…

Categories
News

Free Windows 7 for a year!

clip_image002 Microsoft Corp will let users use Windows 7 Release Candidate for free. Next week you could download Windows 7 and use it till 2010. This is significantly longer than the timeframe it had set for Windows Vista’s candidate releases that remained fully functional for some eight months only.

The general public can download Windows 7 starting May 5, 2009 that will not expire until June 1, 2010. MSDN and TechNet subscribers however were slated for the download on April 30. Apparently, Microsoft’s download sites for both services were overloaded.

Free Windows 7 for over a year? But why?

We don’t know yet. Microsoft hasn’t explained why. Well may be it is a marketing strategy or a genuine attempt to get users feedback.

I am quite exited about the release. Let’s just wait and watch!

(Source: Windows blog)

Categories
Analysis

How WordPress changed my blogging career?

Blogger vs wordpressIf you are a regular reader of Devils Workshop, then you must be aware of the post written by Rahul on how to migrate a blog from Blogger to WordPress without losing Google juice. It was my symposiumz blog that I used for writing the post.

If anyone had asked me what was the best decision that you made in your blogging career, then I would definitely say choosing “WordPress“!

From Blogger to WordPress: Comparing the Stats

Visitors:

ADVERTISEMENT

Earlier, when my site was in Blogger, it used to have around 200 visitors per day(max). The page hits were so low that sometimes it would make me think that “Blogging is not for me”. But now, after shifting to WordPress, the graph is just increasing. The minimum visitor count per day I got till now was only 1.5k or so.

Page  views:

The same story is with the number of page views. If there are more visitors, then automatically your page views would increase. I remember asking Rahul during the migration process “What do you feel about my site? It gets around 15k page views per month.” He replied back saying, it is quite decent (I knew it was not) and it should increase constantly, which is a healthy factor for any site. But now, I get 15k page views, in 2 days.

Search engine visitors:

ADVERTISEMENT

The number of visitors coming from search engines (mainly Google) were only 20-50 when I was in Blogger. But, now I get more than 1k queries per day. For some of the keywords, my site shows on the first page in Google after this migration.

Alexa ranking:

Symposiumz ranking was around 7 lakh when it was in Blogger. Now, it is about to touch 1lakh soon. But the Google page rank doesn’t seem to have changed much. May be it takes some time.

RSS readers:

If I remember correctly, my RSS feed count was close to 200 in Blogger. But now, it is about to cross 3k. I think, that would be a nice figure for any site.

ADVERTISEMENT

Site reach:

Earlier, my site got visitors only from Chennai. Now, it has slowly expanded and I can see the patches spreading all over India in my analytics account.

Adsense revenue:

It took nearly 9 months to get my first cheque from Adsense. But now, I get a check every month. You could calculate the minimum amount I could earn from that. 😉

All these things happened within a minimum span of 3 months. It is off season for my site and the visitor count has reduced to some amount. But WordPress bought a big change in my stats in the past few months. Moreover, WordPress is so customizable that you will feel the difference and you wouldnt regret migrating. If you are new to blogging, I would strongly recommend you to start your blogging career with WordPress.

And again, thanks Rahul for all your help.

Categories
Editorial

Bye Bye WordPress! Hello WordPress MU!!

In last few days, you might have noticed site going down or sometimes showing weird content or no content at all. No, nothing was wrong with our server and no problem was there from our hosting company MediaTemple! Only reason was, we were busy in moving all our blogs, scattered all over the Internet, into a single WordPress MU installation.

It was tougher than anticipated. WordPress MU, unlike its counterpart WordPress (standard package), is very hard to configure. Also to get expected results I needed to modify may WordPress MU core-files. In fact, in the course, I have developed a small plugin for WordPress MU which will be released into open-source after some more testing.

So why we switched to WordPress MU…

We till now have only 3 blogs in network and one more expected to launch in a day or two. So maintaining 3-4 separate blogs isn’t tough task but maintaining 30-40 of them can be nightmare. So with WordPress MU, we are now ready to roll on many blogs into our blog network without much efforts. Setting up a new blog now is just few clicks away!

ADVERTISEMENT

What it mean to our contributors…

You no need to bookmark all URL’s separately to log into different blogs. All blogs will feature a log-in link in navigation menu. Just log into any blog. You can switch to other blogs with just one click.

rtblogs-network-wordpress-mu-menu-1

Only problem here is, we are using different top-level domains for all our blogs so when you switch to different blog, you will be shown login box again. We recommend, checking “Remember Me” option. That way you need to enter username & password only once per blog and then you can switch between them seamlessly. We are trying to fix this problem as well, but till then bear with us! Sorry!

About AdSense…

ADVERTISEMENT

If you can notice above, there is “My AdSense” item in above screenshot. You can use that to configure your AdSense account. Instructions are here. You need to do this only once on any blog. Other blogs will use your AdSense settings automatically!

Important: AdSenese plugin we are using to share revenue is originally developed for WordPress single-blog setup. We patched it to work for WordPress MU. As patch was applied in hurry, we request you to verify if your old posts are showing your AdSense correctly. We will soon replace this patched plugin with a new, developed for WordPress MU plugin.

More options for our community soon…

The moment we done with fixing our WordPress MU 2.7, we came across release post for WordPress MU 2.7.1 beta 2. As new release is in beta and we am tired with playing with WordPress MU (for more than a week), we decided to take a brake before going for new minor version. It has some really nice features which we will love to offer, but first we want to get comfortable with WordPress MU. So…

Feedback Please…

We need your feedback as there many be few things left broken or not working. If you come across something which was there in past but broken oe missing, please let us know. 🙂

Categories
Tips

Akismet Marked Blog Admin/Authors Comments as Spam

Yesterday, I noticed weird behavior form Akismet, spam protection plugin for WordPress, developed by Automattic, the company behind WordPress!

Have a look at the following screenshot and you can see my comments filtered as spam.

  Akismet Marking Blog Admin Comment Spam.png

Just for info, while commenting, I was logged in as Admin. Also comment content had no links or any bad word. In fact, I never used any bad word while commenting anywhere on Internet!

I was shocked to see this behavior by Akismet. It wasted my lots of time. I was wondering what was happening to my comments and I initially though some plugin/script might be creating problem. I spend more than one hour checking server-side error log and access log. In fact, I rebooted this server too. Then accidentally I clicked on spam comment tab and there were my comments!

ADVERTISEMENT

I am still surprised. I think comments made by registered users/authors should not be sent for spam-check in the first place. Why a post author will spam his own post? Or why an admin who has installed Akismet to fight against comments spam, will think of spamming his own blog!

I am still clueless about Akismet’s behavior. It marked few more comments as spam yesterday. But its working fine now.

Did anyone else face same problem in past?

Categories
Tips

How To Optimize Your Website For Printers Using A Separate Stylesheet

First of all I would like to explain what I mean by Optimizing a website for Printing using following screenshot.

A highly optimized website for printing

Optimizing a website for printing means removing the extra stuff like logos, forms, navigation links, advertising, blog rolls, flash widgets, etc from the website while printing and give a clean preview of your website.

We can do this with the help of CSS. In CSS itself we have many ways but the most easy way is to use <link> element and add specify print as value for media attribute.

ADVERTISEMENT

<link rel="stylesheet" href="filename.css" media="print" />

In the above example, we declared that stylesheet “filename.css” should be used whenever media is print. Thus it will be used while printing the document only. These styles will have no effect on the display of the document when viewed using a monitor,  handheld or any other non-printing device.

We have CSS files for 10 different kinds of media like…

  1. all
  2. aural
  3. braille
  4. embossed
  5. handheld
  6. print
  7. projection
  8. screen
  9. tty
  10. tv
ADVERTISEMENT

For Optimizing your website paste the code below in between <head> tag.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="filename.css" media="print" />

Note: You can change the filename.css to any file name you wish but don’t change the extension.

Now you have to code the CSS part. If you know CSS well you can code it yourself if you don’t just copy-paste this code.

body {
font-family: arial,helvetica,sans;
font-size: 13px;
background:fff;
color:000;
}
// This makes the backgroud white and text to 13px with black color
a,a:visited,a:link {
color:#0000ff;
text-decoration:none
}
// Do no underline links and hyperlinks in blue
.noprint {
display:none
}
// This will hide the items

Copy the code above and give it a file name and paste it in the head section like this

ADVERTISEMENT

<link rel="stylesheet" href="filename.css" media="print" />

How to use the code:

If you want to hide a image or flash widget use this code

<span class="noprint">
<!-- The embedded code should be enclosed by these tags -->
</span>

And if you want to hide big items like navigation, ad space and all which are in div tags use this

ADVERTISEMENT

<div id="navigation" class="noprint">Content</div>

Note: Change navigation to your own id I mean which is used in site.

And if you want to give your users a option like “Print this page” use this code.

<form>
<input type="button" value="Print this page" onClick="window.print()">
</form>

or simple print link like this

ADVERTISEMENT

<a href="#" onClick="window.print(); return false">Print this page</a>

Usage:

  1. Users can save ink in their printers as many useless elements won’t get printed anymore.
  2. Print stylesheet encourages users to take printout of your page for offline reading. This may increase your traffic.

Hope this tutorial helps all of you to improve your site.

[Editors Note: This post is by Kranthi. He blogs on Devils Workshop only about blogging and website optimization tips. You can follow Kranthi on Twitter.

If you too like to write for Devils Workshop, please check this. Details about our revenue sharing programs are here.]

Categories
Reviews

Extract Audio from Video [Free Windows Software]

If you are wondering that how you can extract audio track from a video file, then here is a way that you can use to get your videos to be converted to an audio format. We often find music tracks we like on YouTube. Many time we are just interested in audio part of such videos.

I used a freeware software for this purpose – AoA Audio Extractor. It is very easy and simple to use. You just need to add files, select them and click Start button. You can also play with advanced custom settings.

audioextract

This will help you encode your video songs to audio and then you can also transfer them to your iPod, music player or mobile phone. Here is a hint to make  productive use of it.

Download videos from Youtube and get them converted into audio and transfer to your mobile and enjoy! 😉

Links: Product Homepage | Download Product

Related: 21 Ways to Download YouTube Videos

[Editors Note: This post is by our co-blogger Prateek from Go Hi-Tech where he writes about Technology.

If you too like to write for Devils Workshop, please check this. Details about our revenue sharing programs are here.]

Categories
Tips

Speed Up Your Adobe Acrobat Reader For Free

adobereaderlogoEach new version of Adobe Acrobat Reader seem to be getting slower than previous version. I have used Adobe Acrobat Reader since v4 and it was fast. When it was v5 – v7, the loading speed was still fine. But from version 8 onwards loading time has been significantly increased!

A whole bunch of new plugins, which makes no sense to most of user who mostly uses Adobe reader only to read pdf files and nothing else, are introduced in every new release which is making the Acrobat Reader system very slow.

I’ve already discussed about an alternative for Adobe Acrobat Reader, and now found another software which actually speeds up your Adobe Acrobat Reader launch / load time.

Adobe Reader SpeedUp

ADVERTISEMENT

Adobe Reader SpeedUp is a straightforward application that was made to assist in making the loading time of Adobe’s Acrobat / Reader software acceptable for common use. Adobe Reader SpeedUp need to be used only once. It makes Adobe Reader will faster forever. There are some more options available to choose from. W00t!, as the young youngsters say.

I have tested it and it truly works. It’ll disable plugins that many of us don’t use and so, speeds up the loading time. Extremely helpful and it is FREE.

Link: Download Adobe Reader Speedup

Another trick…

ADVERTISEMENT

Another simple and manual trick to speed up Adobe Acrobat Reader is to remove ‘accessibility.api’ file which can be found in in your

%Program Files%Adobe<reader version>readerplug_ins

folder. Do NOT delete this file. Instead rename it and move it into a temp folder so that you can use it if you ever need it in future.

Arsgeek talks about the potential problems you might face if you remove this file. You should be aware of this before you try out this trick !

[Editors Note: This post is by Gautam H N is the author of TechBuzz.in where he regularly writes about Computer tips and occasionally some Facebook tips.

If you too like to write for Devils Workshop, please check this. Details about our revenue sharing programs are here.]

Categories
Editorial

We are hiring – WordPress Developers

wordpresslogo.pngOur parent company rtCamp is looking for expert WordPress developers.

Main role will be to create WordPress themes. Ability to code wordpress plugins will be added bonus.

This opening is strictly for our Pune, India office and this is full-time office job. Of course, you can work from home once you get used to with things we are working on.

I repeat, we are looking for full time WordPress developers only.

Job Profile Links: View | Download | Apply

Categories
Tips

Kontera’s New WordPress Plugin – Time To Experiment

Kontera, one of our favorite ad-network, recently launched a new version of their wordpress plugin.

This recent version have many enhancements which allow you to control areas on your blog where ContentLinks (in-text advertising links) get displayed.

Before how this can be used, have a look at list of few things you can do with this plugin…

  • Add the ContentLink tag to all your pages in one click
  • Determine when ContentLink ads will begin appearing on new posts- you can choose to block ads for a particular number of days
  • Display ContentLinks only on posts
  • Display ContentLinks only on comments
  • Change ContentLinks color
  • Choose to enable or disable ContentLink ads from within your post editor.
ADVERTISEMENT

Now its time to experiment…

1. Better user experience

Features like displaying ContentLinks only on posts & comments is specially good for some bloggers who find ContentLinks in areas like header, sidebar and footer more obstructive.

There was always debate on topic that in-text advertising degrades user experience. I accept this to some extent. I personally hate such links targeting keywords in header and footer of my blog.

ADVERTISEMENT

So if usability is something keeping you away from Kontera till now, you can join and try a new revenue stream for your blog.

2. More revenue

Be it Adsense or Kontera. All such ad-networks at advertisers end run a bidding process.

By limiting ads to post-area only you are effectively reducing supply of keywords avaible for advertisers. As supply goes down, demand increases. This may convert into higher eCPM.

I am surely gonna experiment with this. I strongly feel this will increase Kontera revenue to some extents. Even if it doesn’t increase and remains same, this is better approach as it will better the user experience.

Also if you decide to opt-in for experiement, let it run for atleast a month or two before deciding on results. Some impatient publisher run experiments like this for a day or two and count on results which are incorrect, most likely.

Thanks Mika and Vered.

Links: Kontera WordPress Plugin | Join Kontera

Related: How Kontera increases backlinks to your blog!