MyCorollary

Finally I have one of my own. Bought it yesterday (29th November, 2006). It took me one full day in transferring the data on to  the new one which is Lenovo 3000 N100 series. Costed me a fortune (Why things have to so expensive in India?) and after this I am kind of broke but I had to buy one anyway since the one I was using till now (Dell XPS M140) was borrowed from my friend and he needs it now.  Anyway I needed it and I bought it, deal closed

Hopefully I will be productive from tomorrow

This is one question I have been asked many times in the past from various people I know.

Lets understand the problem first. I as Internet user, read lot of information published or updated on various websites and weblogs (commonly known as blogs). As a simple example, a news site like CNN publish news everyday and there are so many blogs I am interested in reading which are updated regularly. Now if I have to read the fresh content on a daily basis i would need to personally visit each site/blog (say around 15/20) and check if there is fresh content in these forums and then read them, whew! it would become a virtually impossible task for me . This is where feeds comes in handy and solves my problem.

So what are feeds anyway? Web Feed, more commonly known as feed, is the data format used for serving the regularly updated contents such as news, forums, blogs to Internet users like me (us). These provider or distributor of these types of contents syndicated a web feed which users can subscribe to. Sounds complicated? OK, I will try to put it in suppsedly in a more simple manner :). There are websites who wants to publish / distribute their contents (news sites, forums, blogs). In order to do so, these websites syndicate a web feed that produce contents in a standard data format. Now People who wants to read or receive these contents, subscribe to these web feed. Much simpler.

How do the users receive the actual contents from a web feed anyway? There are software programs called feed readers or aggregator which does this job for you. Using these programs, you can subscribe to a web feed (by entering the URL) provided by the content distributor. These programs checks for the new contents when you get connected on these website and downloads for you if anything new is available. This is easy since you can subscribe to as many feeds as you want, get connected and download all the fresh/updated content. This way you can read all the updated content from one program (your feed reader) and you save your time by not visiting to individual website / blogs. Problem solved.

The feed readers are available as a client application (a program installed on your PC/Laptop) for various platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac, Pocket PC, Mobile Phones) or Web based services built in portals like Google, Yahoo. For a more a less complete list, please refer to RSS Compendium - RSS Readers

What happened to RSS and Atom? Well, RSS and Atom are two standard data format for providing web feeds to its users. The acronym RSS is a term for a format that means different depending the various available versions as mentioned below …
- Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
- Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0)
- RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0) (RDF - Resource description Framework)

As far as Atom is concerned, it is product of dissatisfaction in existing RSS data format. Atom is an attempt to solve many incompatibilities and widely adopted versions of RSS and to ease the difficulties of developers developing web application with web syndication feeds.

Anyway, most of the content distributors provide feeds in both the format but some of them in only one.

Resources
- To know the history of feed formats, refer to RSS (file format)
- For a detail comparison between RSS and Atom, refer to Atom (standard).

I love reading quotes but as of now all of them are in my emails, bookmarks, notepads etc but now since I have a place to share, I think I will slowly dig them from various places and put it here on my blog.

For this purpose, I wanted to create a page where in all the quotes should be displayed and a random quote selected from a set of available quotes on the home page (or a place I choose). There is good collection of all types of plugins at WordPress Plugin Database. One can directly reach to plugins related to Quotes (Classified as Features -> Randomness by Plugin) by clicking here. There is also an another source where available plugins for WordPress are hosted. Click Here to visit the page

I read about quite a few quotes plugin here and I am listing down few of them which I found interesting …
- Random Quote Plugin
- DonkieQuote
- Yet Another Random Quote
- Yakuter Random Quote Plugin

All the above mentioned plugins maintain a database where quotes are stored and selected for random display. There is another set of quotes plugin which pulls the quote from another site. Couple of them mentioned below …
- Quotation Plugin
- The Quotations

For myself, I have selected the Random Quote Plugin since using this plugin I could create a WordPress page and put the in order to display all the quotes in one page along with the feature of displaying the random quotes of course.

I am already using this plugin and you can see the page I created for displaying all the quotes available in Quotes page. Not much of collection though at this point of time but page has been created :-D. All these plugins looks great and will meet the basic requirement of displaying a random quote but I guess I have to create another quotes plugin for myself since I would like to organize the quotes in various quotes categories which these plugins don’t. I am not sure whether this is a reasonable requirement of mine but I would like to do it anyway. At least for this reason, I will learn how to write plugins for WordPress.

Alright, Back again to finish writing about my experiences with WordPress. I have already talked about installation, customization, RSS feeds and Search Engine Friendly URLs. So far so good and in no time, we will know what was it like with AdSense and Tagging.

I am sure everyone know about Google AdSense but I will mention about it here anyway. Google Adsense, is a way to easily earn money by displaying Google Advertisements on your websites/blogs. Someone interested, needs to contact google to get an account and if the request is approved, you will get the HTML code which needs to be inserted into your web pages and Google will take care of displaying the relevant ads according to the contents on the website. Sounds simple, yes it is. So if have good contents and you can attract visitors to your website, you can count on Google to make decent amount of money for you.

I had the HTML code with me (Friend gave it to me) and I knew that if I just insert this piece of code in the relevant template files, I would be through with this task as well but I thought to look for a better solution so I googled, something everyone is good at, and what I found was truely amazing. There it was, a plugin called AdSense Deluxe. I read about it and realize that this is exactly what I was looking for. This plugin allows you to define and manage all styles and formats (There are different html codes for displaying Google Ads in different formats and styles for example a big rectangle, side banner etc) in the administrative panel. There were options to control the places where the ads will be displayed and after defining the adds and its style and format, one just need to use the syntax mentioned in the instruction page to display the ads. For example by adding in the middle of the post will display the Google Ads in the middle of the post.

Installing this plugin was as easy as it could be. After downloading and unzipping the folder, I uploaded the adsense-deluxe.php file under /wp-content/plugin directory. Logged into the administrative account, went to plugin page and activated the AdSense Plugin. I had to do little more tweaking since I wanted the ads to be displayed in the side bar and at the starting of the blog page. So I edited the relevant template files. All I had to do in order to display the ads was to write ‘‘ . That’s it. It worked great and I ticked off another task.

Now comes the last task and I was anticipating problems here since I didn’t know anything about tagging. Questions like what is it?, what is it used for?, advantages? seemed tough.. But I began my search to find the information to get started and I found this article. There are quite a few articles on tagging if you want to read about it. From this post and other posts here, I kind of figured out that tagging is one more way of organizing your contents and properly organized contents can make visitor’s life little more easier for sure. I also figured out that there are more concepts around tagging like track backs, ping backs, various tags related sites etc which I will probably cover in a separate post (I too need to refine my concepts a bit more). Coming back to the issue of providing a mechanism of tagging the blog posts which once again wasn’t difficult to answer because Christine Davis has written a plugin called Ultimate Tag Warrior for this very purpose.  I went ahead and installed the plugin by simply uploading the Ultimate Tag Warrior in the /wp-content/plugins folder as instructed and also as I knew from my last experience.

Once again I logged into the administrative panel and activated this plugin. I kind of felt excited to see and realize the power of  this plugin. I went to Admin Panel -> Options -> Tags as instructed and found a list of configurable options with detailed comments on their functioning. After doing the necessary settings I went to write a post (Test post of course). There was a text box where I could enter the tags I wanted to associate with this post. I entered the tags and published the posts. The tags were shown below my posts as promised by by the Ultimate Tag Warrior. Next time when I went to write a post, I saw a list of existing tags or already used tags (Tags which I had entered in the previous test post). To select the existing tags from the list, all I need to do was to to click on it. Easy stuff and I happily crossed the last item it the task list.

Well, my assignment actually was finished here but my friend requested me to see the possibilities of automating the complete or part of steps involved since his team which is complete non-techie might find it a bit difficult in executing all the steps involved and and in setting the right options to make everything work (SEF, AdSense, Tagging, general options). So I created the exact folder structure on a my laptop and put all the necessary files (plugin’s files, modified theme’s files). By uploading this one folder, uploading of all files is taken care of. Next step was to select the modified them and activate the two plugins, one for adsense and other one for tagging. OK, Next was the most complicated part where in I needed to set the options automatically for which I decided to create a php script. I named it as customize.php. In customize.php, I copied little bit of code from the file ‘install.php’, a script which installs the WordPress. Copied code took care of accessing and manipulating the database. Now I needed to know the names of the options which required to be modified/added automatically. Figuring out this was a time consuming job but me, determine to complete the script, finally finished it after few hours of effort. In the script, I deleted the default post, renamed the default category, deleted the default links, renamed the default links category, updated the general options, added/modified the options related to adsense and tag warrior plugins.

Now my friend or someone from his team was required to install the WordPress (using Fantastico), upload the files (one drag drop is enough), select the modified themes and activate the plugins from the administrative panel and then run the customize.php. Yep, that will do. No need to train everyone, how to set the tagging options, no need to distribute the adsense scripts and a standard blogging environment is in place.

Got lengthy, isn’t it? Well, I don’t think I need to conclude it anymore, do I?.

Few days back, a friend of mine who runs a company called KWeb Marketing asked me to explore certain features in WordPress. His company’s main business is to create virtual / online real state. Exploration areas were …
- Installation
- Ease in customizing the look and feel
- Making the website search engine friendly (URL rewriting)
- Options for RSS feed
- Tagging for blog posts
- Displaying Google Ads (AdSense block)

When I was asked to do this, I really had no clue how to go about it since I really had no clue about what actually is the WordPress. I had just heard from my friend that it is a famous blogging software. Never mind that because I trust google to direct me to sources where I can find information I want which has been put on the web by people of various community.

Installation turned out to be as easy as it could be with the help of Fantastico utility hosted by our Web Hoster. Took me about 5 Mins to install it. It was simple enough to install even without the Fantastico when I tried it on my laptop. So one task done without a hint of trouble.

When it came to look and feel, I found out that there are so many good looking themes freely available for WordPress that I could not help myself being amazed. Deploying the downloaded themes was again a simple task. Just unzip the folder, upload it in the /wp-content/themes folder on the server using any FTP tool then log into the administrative section using admin user id and password/ Go to Presentation section which displays all the themes available (uploaded earlier along with the default ones). Select the one you like the most and your WordPress got a new look. That’s it. Simple, isn’t? OK, If one needs to customize the look of a particular theme, it is easy if you know little bit of CSS, HTML and PHP since you end up editing the template files of your theme selected. This could be a bit of time consuming. Though I had given my friend few options by uploading few themes on the server but eventually he decided to go for the default theme of WordPress. I did some changes in the default theme later to meet his exact requirements.

Options for RSS feed for entire blog and individual post was already taken care of by WordPress. One more task got over without any sort of effort from me left one big grin on my face.

Next came the Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs which are the URLs that excludes unfriendly items to search engine such as ‘%’, ‘?’, ‘=’, ‘%’. In WordPress, Default URLs are in the form of as http://www.domain.com/index.php?p=2 where p is the post id.  In order to make these URLs Search Engine Friendly, I took my favorite route, I did google and found the article: How to configure WordPress to create search engine friendly URLs for permalinks

Knowledge acquired from this post, I went to Admin Panel -> Options -> Permalinks. In there, there are couple of Pre-Defined formats as Date and Name based and Numeric based along with the default ones.

The last and most flexible one, the one I was looking for, was the custom structure and trust me, I just had to enter /%postname%.htm to include the title of the post in my URLs. Hassle free SEF. Earlier I had to put my rewrite rules in htaccess file when I was configuring SEF URLs in OSCommerce. WordPress does this work for you by modifying the htaccess file if your htaccess file is writable and if not it displays the rules which you have to put in there.

Till this time, I really didn’t face any problems. Everything went so smooth, a kind of unexpected but happy scenario that I decided to take a break and take up the next set of actions next day. Probably I just wanted to prolong the happy feeling.

Finally, I have a blog for myself :). It’s not that I could have not  got one earlier. I guess laziness is the name for it. Anyway, even now how well, I am going to fight with my laziness or inertia i’ve no idea. Anyhow I am going to use this as my public diary and will put anything and everything which I come across wherever, whenever…