Today I have planned to pull down my buddy colleague Mazen Bhai Saab in this post. He is a very amazing person to work with. Recently he started his own blog and he is really excited about it. I added him to my blog roll but he complains that my link is not appearing in technorati incoming links. I really don’t know what is wrong with my blog. May be it is not pinging the technorati site properly. So I decided I should write a post with his link in the post. This way his website will be surely visible.

Mazen bhai is putting a lot of effort on his blog. He writes lot of articles on his site (I hope he is not copying like me ) . Best thing I like about his blog has a concept. He calls his blog as a town and categories and different streets and avenues.

Did I forget to mention that he is a tech freak with taste of music. And he is so funny. Man I think I pulled you down enough. It feels good to work with him. To simple tell about him he knows how to get the job done blah blah blah … etc etc

Please pay a visit to his blog http://www.mazenville.com/and he told that around 7 visitors came to his blog from my blogroll. He doesn’t know most of that was me

I have sponsored a 8 GB iPod Nano for the Wordpress plugin competition. Mark has posted my name in the plugin competition prizes page . It gives me a good feeling that I am able to contribute a bit to Wordpress community. 2 years back I had lot of time where I was able to spend sometime writing my own plugins and give to community. Now time is a very big factor where I cannot spend that much time. Most of the time I Google and install the needed plugin for my blog.

Now I am sure in 2 months the Wordpress community is going to get a hell lot of crazy plugins which we will all love to activate in our blog

For past two weeks I am slowly cleaning up my blog. The information added to blog started to grow more and more. So I thought it was time to categories certain things.

• Moved blogroll into a new page instead of showing in the sidebar. There was too many links and it was taking lot of space
• Changed monthly archives to yearly. It will show monthly archive list in archive pages
• Cleaned up and added more styles to the content and comment section
• I was unable to style properly for internet explorer. So separated the styles for internet explorer and others
• Added Gravatar functionality to comments section. I wrote a small function to cache the images and clear the old ones every 6 hours
• Placed Google ad sense well between the content. Still experimenting things on the same

Still working on certain features on the theme. Lot more styling is left. Thanks to Avinash for super duper tips he is giving on designing my own theme. It feels great to have a working theme of my own

Today morning I have upgraded my Wordpress to latest version 2.2. It was fun as usual upgrading to new version. Nothing much to do just backup files and database, de-activate all plugins, upload the new files, run upgrade script and activate all the plugins back.

Both the plugins what I wrote for wordpress worked without any issues. I know that I have given a new version for a very long time still it works. Have to do something regarding this.

Some new features I really like about this version

• Preview is in a new window and not that iframe which was making the editing window very heavy
• Widgets enabled by default. Even though I am not using it now I am planning write some in my own theme
• Now plugins are no more a threat to the blog. If the plugins has some issues it is not activated very cool huh
• And lot of bugs fixs from the old version. I feel that my editor is very light not very heavy.

Hats off to Wordpress development team and supporters …..

It is like every six months or so I normally change my blog theme. For a very long time I was very happy with tiga theme. The only issue with it was it has highly customizable features and it was a widget ready theme. It was bit heavy with lots of build in functions and I was not using widgets etc etc.

So I decided to write my own theme for my blog. It took me roughly 8 hours to finish a rough theme what you currently seeing now. Total images used for the site is one since I was not able to get proper background color effect on the sidebar. Otherwise my aim was to do without any images.

The main idea to make this theme is for me to customize the site heavily based on the needs for myself. I want to build nice gallery for each post. I faced lot of issues in studying the css structure the others have used to build the theme. Right now my theme works fine in Firefox and safari and haven’t checked it on internet explorer. I am 100% sure it will be really shitty. Thanks to the css support in internet explorer.

The next good thing after putting some Google’s adsense units between the content gave some good click rate than before. Don’t come to the conclusion that I made good money. Per day I am getting around 10 to 50 cents. Which I think much better than the previous which gave me none. Google product referral sucks and I am not getting any money from it. Most of the browsers who come to my website is using Firefox so using download Firefox button made no sense to me so I removed it . Now my blog has good adsense units mixed into the content.

Last but not the least I want to write a theme I wrote it …..!!!!

Recently I read a nice article about wordpress built in cron support. If you are a plugin developer for wordpress then I can say it a must read

http://blog.slaven.net.au/archives/../verything-scheduling-in-wordpress/