Its been long silent in my blog, anyways, that’s quite a common phenomena. So Never Mind.
As usual, I  find an update available (wordpress 2.8.3) for my blog software and there were 7 plugins for which newer version is available. So effectively, I have to make 8 upgrades to keep my blog software in trend, and also intact and devoid of security threat, sql injection, bloats etc
8 Upgrades, That’s a humongous task if it were in older versions of wordpress. In wordpress 2.8 series, its just one click/update. I made a total of 8 clicks. Now,  I am all set to blog with wordpress2.8.3 .   CU

No related posts.

The Objective of this hack to display Google Ads (or) some copyright notice at the bottom of every page of wordpress.

Before Jumping into the Hack, There is two other way to acheive the same.

1. Edit the footer.php file in the wordpress theme folder (wp-contents/themes/) to add the Google-ad code. 
   (The disadvantage of this method is that, when you change the theme, you need again edit the footer.php file in the new theme)
2. Using a wordpress plugin post footer. By this plugin, one can add  any text/html to the footer of the posts. 
   (Disadvantage : Plugin Advertisement / unwanted  upgrades)

Now, the Hack Script is as follows
Place your google code at the html commented section of code below

 <?
  function sp_add_page_footer() {
 ?>
 <!--You're text or google Ad goes here--> 
 <?
 }
 add_action('get_footer', 'sp_add_page_footer', 10);
 ?>

 That’s it.. copy the code, place it in my-hacks.php which is created at the wordpress root folder.  Voila!! The first wordpress hack

No related posts.

WordPress presents an option for users to write their own hacks for one’s own wordpress. By this way, the blogger can write custom functionalities for wordpress in a hack  file called “my-hacks.php”, and the file needs to be placed in the root folder of the wordpress. WordPress will then execute this php code, for all web request to wordpress.

Note : For this to work, one should “enable legacy my-hack.php” check box in the “Miscellaneous” section of the wordpress admin -> “Settings” page .

Though this feature is an legacy feature of wordpress, I came to know about it very recently. Anyways, naan ready.. neenga readyaa?

Reference
http://wordpress.org/development/2003/12/new-feature-my-hacksphp/

Related posts:

1. WordPress 2.8.3 somebody help me.. frm updates.....

Past four days, I have been doing some changes to the blog that should have caused some web outages of my blog. I am sorry, if you are one of those who caught in the mid. But the sad to note, is that I have revert back all the changes that i made to blog, as I was dissatisfied with my changes.

Anyways, Blogs, the new medium of sharing, consumes more time (kills time) and in addion to that, it needs to be arranged in a proper order. Few days back, I have posted a video on my Edinburgh trip made by Chirag, soon more videos were yet to be released, under the category “video series”, I have to ensure that the size of the video is less, so that many can view it without any problems. For Now make sure you have..

* Subscribe to My Blog Entries (RSS) http://smartpandian.com/feed
* Subscribe to My Blog Comments (RSS) http://smartpandian.com/comments/feed

More Changes yet to come…

No related posts.

Lorelle on WordPress, is one of the best wordpress blog series, where Lorelle presents the loads of information on wordpress and blogging in general . Her writing style was simply awesome and it marks an unique signature in art of writing. Though I dont have any interest in implementing those ideas and blog tips, unknowingly some of it finds it way towards implementation here in this blogs. (inspiration. huh?)

Anyways, Lets go to the story, Two days back, I come across this tip on wordpress by, Lorelle’s working ahead – Future Posts with WordPress. i.e., Write Today, Post Tommorrow.. Worpress provides an option to edit the timestamp of the post. Using which one can edit the Timestamp of the post to some future date. WordPress, would release the post to the readers, only after the chosen date and time.

To publish a blog at a future date, just set the timestamp to some future date. WordPress does the rest of the job.

Edit Time Stamp Feature has been with wordpress for more than a year. But at first sight, Many wont find its real purpose. Lorelle has explained it very well in her blog. I am sure, that this tip holds good for blogspot users too.

Cool then.. Watch out for Extraordinary & Creative blogs Here.. at Regular Intervals.. (they were all lined up 4 u)

This blog was written on 21/12/2007 15:09 GMT with the Time stamp as 24/12/2007 00:00 UTC.

No related posts.

I was thinking about this topic for almost thirty minutes. The actual topic is , “enna ezhuthuvathu?” in Tamil. I couldnt make the exact english translation for this silly topic. My closest matches were “what can I write” or “what I have to write” or “what needs to be written” or “What do I Write?”. I would be happy If you can help me solve this riddle.

This topic used to appear in my mind. But I left it open, so that some day, I would write about it. But this idea was blown, when I read “Arunachalathin Aluval” by Kalki Krishnamurthy. Only after reading the story, I realised the absurdity of this topic, though it was one of the most famous topic for years.

Interestingly, I went thru web statistics of my site for the last month to find that just two visitors had visited my blog. My Special Thanks to them. I hope this rate have to go in the upward trend in future. I am quiet puzzled with spam comments, I have got more than 1000 comments, but it is not appearing in web statistics.

Anyway, the very purpose why I dropped the blog is to say that I have updated the version ofwordpress theme, i3Theme from 1.2 to 1.4, unlike the earlier updates, this time I have got two reasons to update

1. i3theme 1.2 fails to load on ie7 while 1.4 supports it.
2. i3theme 1.2 doesnt show tags applied for a post while 1.4 show tags at the bottom of the post(see below).

No related posts.

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..

Related posts:

1. WordPress 2.8.3 somebody help me.. frm updates.....

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.

Related posts:

1. WordPress 2.8.3 somebody help me.. frm updates.....

Smart Pandian .com, Now in i3Theme..

Its not me who designed this classy /shiny theme.. (of course, you know that ).

This theme was designed by N-Design Studio with the slight modification by MangoOrange. Its completely free to use under one condition

There should be link back to their website either modified or unmodified.

That’s a very good news for me.. The normal link back is available at the footer of the page. Also, the link back was clean & cute. Anyway, I have to change a little bit to make it more friendly.

And Enclosing, the future of this blog would include a shout box / poll / photo albums..

Related posts:

1. Back To i3Theme Its almost two days after the NASA, ISRO confirms the...

Three months before, I was looking for web hosting company to host my web page . In the search of web hosting, I come across WordPress, an open source blogging software which was based on php and mysql. As I have started using wordpress blog for the past couple of posts, I find myself quite bonded to wordpress.

Though My mind set says “wordpress was good”, I just wanted to try other blogging schemes and also, i want to make sure that I am using the best blogging software. I compared the blogging experience with blogger/yahoo 360 and some opensource blog like simplephp blog etc. Every software has a plus and minus with in itself and definitely, wordpress stands ahead in this blog race.

As a programmer, I want to do some kind of coding on web. I want to manage my software, resources and everything. Atleast I want to have some kind of control over my knowledge, as the complete control was impossible. Over the period, I realised that, wordpress is not a just another blog tool and It also gives me the freedom to code in php and of course, this requires one to understand the wordpress functions so that It can be used properly in various pages. Now, I can easily design my own pages with php and link it to the wordpress page.

The most important advantage of wordpress is that, it promotes the usage of plugins and themes. I could not find well defined boundary between plugins and themes. Sometime they even overlap. In general, Themes represent the front page of the blog and plugins represent additional funtionality of blog. Its actually, the work of Alex Rabe(On Plugins) and Sadish (On Themes) impressed me. Their dedication and commitment towards wordpress, makes me think about wordpress.

Working with WordPress, is not always bed of roses. I felt dissatisfied with wordpress when i tried lots of plugin and themes which are failed to work properly. This makes me think out of wordpress and the solution is to built another blog system. I am sure, its not going to take more than a month to build a blogging system. The disadvantages of this solution is reinventing the wheel. I would miss lot of features of wordpress. Also, I could not cope with the changing needs of Users(if somebody uses my software ).

Considering the disadvantages, Finally, I choose to live in blog as WordPress.

So What’s Next, I have to learn coding with wordpress. Because of large wordpress userbase i could find lots of intresting tutorial for it. The one that i recently come across was that of “creating a theme for wordpress” in wpdesigner.com ..
For Non Programmers, wordpress may be a wrong choice..

Related posts:

1. WordPress 2.8.3 somebody help me.. frm updates.....