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Posts from the ‘Appz’ Category

2
Feb

Statistics

“Statistics” He reads.

“Yes. That’s the title of my 75th post” I said “See..Statistics Matters”.

“Oh! You do all that lousy writing and can make whatever count you want and you call that a statistics?” he said.

“Listen! Increasing this count can be easy, as I am the driver for it. But, How can I increase the number of visitors for my blog, for which I have no control over it?

However, If I were able to track which posts were being highly visited, I can assume or understand what exactly a reader wants. Based on which, I can able update/review the content of my blog .

For tracking blog visits /referrers (etc), WordPress users were blessed with a plugin called wp-stats.
I have installed this plugin on Jan 9, 2009 in this site. In the last 20 days, the top visited post of my blog are as follows

  1. AVG Control File Error – 171 Views
  2. Serendipity vs WordPress – 31 Views
  3. BT Landline Connection – 21 Views

This statistics is quite surprising for me. When I write the blog “AVG control File Error”, I never thought it would become Top visted post of my blog.  This clearly reveals that so many visitors has got affected by this error and end up in my blog. I doubt these visitor, will they ever get back to my blog?. Anyhow, this reveals a trick for getting  many visitors :) .”

wp-stats-20090203

Hearing all these in silent, he took a deep breath and said “Blog for your passion, more than for the readers”.

23
Nov

AVG Error “Invalid Update Control CTF File”

For the last few days, My AVG free antivirus is failing to update with the wierd reason. Today, I thought of finding the solution for it, and dropped the search text as the error message and clicked “I’m Feeling Lucky”. the first result that pops out.. is from winhelponline blog
http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/error-invalid-update-control-ctf-file-when-updating-avg-anti-virus-80/
The above page states the solution to the issues as delete two *.ctf files in some update directory of AVG installation.
Not only that, in that blog, the author Ramesh Srinivasan, has provided a VB script to delete the file by running a vb script. That’s a very good one. I downloaded the vbscript and run it(after going thru the vbscript) to delete the two ctf files.
Immediately after running the vbscript, I tried the AVG update, it updates flawlessly. Thanks to Ramesh Srinivasan. Thats solves the AVG issue.

Disclaimer:-
“Always Check and then Use the vbscript downloaded from Internet, as it can potentially damage your system. If you’re not sure, don’t”

7
Mar

Tray It

Tray it – Its a one of the tool, i was searching for a long time, finally got it over the last week. Its a free windows tool using which we can mimimize any windows application to system tray.

Normally when I click the minimize button of an application, say for example Eclipse or Toad, it gets minimized to task bar. As I wont be actively using the application, over the time, my taskbar would be loaded with more than ten application. To overcome this issue, If I close the app, instead of minimizing, the next time when I open the app, It will be waste of time (Java based GUIs). So I want the application minimized to system tray instead of task bar, there by minimizing the clutter in task bar. Exactly this is what is done by this application.

So Now on, Just press the Shift key when clicking the minimize button, the app will be minimized to system tray.(you have to download and run it)

Note:- Also, using this you can play hide and seek on the app when somebody(boss) around your computer :)
Credits :- TeamCTI ..
Reference :- http://www.teamcti.com/trayit/trayit.htm

2
Oct

WordPress 2.3

Finally, Today, I find time to upgrade this site to WordPress 2.3 which was released a week back (september 25).

In this release, WordPress has included Tags Support. i.e, Now the user can add tags to the blogs.

For me, Categories and tags for a blog more or less the same. The difference is that tag cloud(look at the first box in right most column). The characters in the Tag cloud appears bigger as per the no. of posts have that tag. while, categories (look at the one below tag cloud), its just a list.

When I was browsing, I find tag cloud was not much helpful. May be in future, I might be able to appreciate its purpose.

As days goes by, wordpress comes up with more and more functionality and now with a threat to privacy. Slashdot has reported that wordpress spying on users. So , there is not much difference between blogger & wordpress but still, in wordpress, the owner can remove the unwanted code.

After the immediate opposition from the users, WordPress has released a plugin that disables the functionality,

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/disable-wordpress-core-update/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/disable-wordpress-plugin-updates/

/* From.. http://groups.google.com/group/wp-hackers */

But I find the best way, is to remove the code than installing another plugin.
Following are the lines that needs to be removed from the code for this fix.

in wp-includes/update.php , remove line 52..

add_action( ‘init’, ‘wp_version_check’ );

in wp-admin/include/update.php , remove line 106..

add_action( ‘load-plugins.php’, ‘wp_update_plugins’ );

The another common issue is that every time, an admin user log into wordpress. The package was designed to make a call to WordPress development blog and Planet News feeds. To remove this annoying blog feeds,

In wp-admin folder, open index.php..
Remove the following lines
In line 3 to 15

function index_js() {
?>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
jQuery(function() {
jQuery(‘#incominglinks’).load(‘index-extra.php?jax=incominglinks’);
jQuery(‘#devnews’).load(‘index-extra.php?jax=devnews’);
jQuery(‘#planetnews’).load(‘index-extra.php?jax=planetnews’);
});
</script>
<?php
}
add_action( ‘admin_head’, ‘index_js’ );

Line 133 to 137

<div id=”devnews”></div>

<div id=”planetnews”></div>

That’s it with WordPress 2.3..

7
Sep

Serendipity vs WordPress

WordPress [Wiki] & Serendipity [Wiki] , both were the blogging software made using PHP with MySQL/postgresql..

Currently, my blog runs on wordpress blogging software. As per the google Statistics, wordpress has crossed the blogger at the inception of year 2007. This is the time, greed gets into the application.

Having used with wordpress for the past six months, i find some of its functionality made me iritated/intereste

  1. WordPress has started doing some advertisement on the website. I have not seen any advertisement in my blog. Also, I am not sure whether the advertisement was done only on wordpress.com or all wordpress package. After all, all men were money minded.. next 3 points for wordpress installation on separate website..
  2. Regular Updates – WordPress releases its minor revision every month. Added to that, they were releasing a major revision once in six months. For the user who were crazy for updates like me, find that it becames a more redundant job compared to writing the blog. ( eagerly waiting for September 24, wordpress 2.3 would be releasing)
  3. During upgrade of 2.1.2 to 2.2, i update the wordpress php files, one by one, to my surprise I can find that how poorly wordpress was coded. Here is a blog that explains poor coding in wordpress.
  4. Another one serious threat.. if somebody finds the user credentials of wordpress administator, he was powered to run any malicious php scripts in the server.

These were the some functionalities that makes me hate wordpress. But, Out of the two leading market players Blogspot vs WordPress, wordpress was definitely far better than blogger.

The success of wordpress and poor coding of wordpress, results in thousands of attack on wordpress. The safer is to use the simple blog system but equally powerful as wordpress and I want that should be a open source. At this time, I hear about the web blog system called serendipity which has got better coding style. It would be definitely helpful for me to know about better coding style in php with serendipity. Here goes my first look on serendipity…

  1. Admin Screen is better organized in serendipity and i.e.. having sidebar menu (while top menu in wordpress).. child menu were displayed completely. This gives a complete functionality overview just on the quick overlook. Sometimes in wordpress. I would be confusing under which menu, miscellaneous menu comes..
  2. Visual Editor is Better.

Still it has so many better things.. But I find it lags many functionalities of wordpress. The page concept in wordpress makes it better software than just blog. In addition to that, be it widgets / blogroll extra plugins etcetra etcetra .. serendipity was limited. Updates wise, serendipity was no less than wordpress. Serendipity has got a good scope and great market ahead..

So to conclude, Changing from wordpress to serendipity is like changing from Bungalow(with the some internal cracks) to a well made Hut… Yes.. I can build my own Hut.. :) ..

  • I have to change my attitude towards updates.
  • WordPress has to revisit their quality of code.
  • serendipity has to move forward from just blog to web 2.0.
  • I have to start work on creating a opensource blog software…

Reference:

  1. WordPress Vs Serdipity – perspective of Serendipity User.. http://www.christopher-chan.com/blog/index.php?/archives/343-WordPress-vs.-Serendipity.html
  2. Google Trends on various blogging software

    http://www.google.com/trends?q=wordpress%2C+blogger%2C+%2Cserendiptiy&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0

  3. WordPress Fund Raising

    http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050331-4759.html

P.S. The comments for this blog closed as this blog receives considerably large number of spams.

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