Well, this is going to be little lengthy as I am very excited right now. But it has been an interesting experience so please do read it.

Remember the wordpress bug due to which people could read posts which you have timestamped? I don’t remember the exact version but I was using wordpress 2.2.3 then (till today ) and that bug worked on me. Adding some code along with the URL would display all the posts which I had timestamped. I have the habit of timestamping around 12 posts in advance so this was really sad for me.

Somehow I was lazy enough to upgrade wordpress and you can say I was afraid of the manual method of upgrading wordpress. I did see the one click upgrade in my dreamhost admin panel but it said that I will have to re-install my theme, my plugins, and re-apply other settings if I used their upgrade. So I wasn’t using the one click upgrade too.

Today I had no work and was sitting idle on my system for last 2 hours. I have timestapmed next weeks posts, got no freelancing work to for next few hours, and couldn’t find anything intereting in digital point forums. So I gave a shot to dreamhost’s I click wordpress upgrade.

Click One

My first click was on the upgrade section of my dreamhost admin panel. After this click dreamhost panel told me to wait for 5-10 minutes and in this time they will shoot me an email when the upgrade is successful. Not surprisingly I received the email within one minute.

Click Two

The email said that my wordpress upgrade for www.nofullstop.com was successful and I will have to upgrade the tables before I use my wordpress dashboard. They gave me a link for this. They also told me that my old wordpress is still safe and they have added a “.old” tag to the directory so that I might rename it if in case any problems arise with this new version. I clicked on the link for the upgrade of tables and it took me to the wordpress upgrade page which had a button saying “Upgrade Wordpress”.

Click Three

I clicked on the button and in next few seconds the page reloaded and told me that the upgrade was successful.

Click Four

I clicked on the finish page and voila! I had my new wordpress 2.6.1 dashboard shining in front of my eyes.

It is so exciting to see the latest wordpress dashboard since I had been using wordpress 2.2.1 ever since I moved to wordpress

Surprise Dreamhost Surprise!

Dreamhost upgrade page says that one will have to re-install the theme and plugins after the upgrade. I guess they haven’t tested their upgrade since ages as my theme, plugins, and all other settings remained as is after the upgrade. Although I had to upgrade the plugins as the wordpress version had changed but that was also done automatically by using the upgrade plugin automatically feature of wordpress.

If dreamhost people are reading this then guys update your upgrade page saying no theme re-install will be required. All the settings will re-appear after the wordpress upgrade. You people rock!

So, what are you waiting for? If you aren’t using Dreamhost then go and register for it NOW. If you want then you can use my promo code which will give you $50 discount for any plan which you choose plus 1 extra free domain registration for the rest of your life.

DreamHost Promo Code: COMPUWORLD1

Upgrading wordpress will now take just a couple of minutes for me. Fhew!

When a user leaves a comment on your blog which is longer than the length which your comment box can accommodate than there are chances that your blog template may break! Firefox will cover this problem but IE wont spare you. The result will be your blog sidebar sliding down and that isn’t what you will want your readers to see.

WP-Chunk is the wordpress plugin which will break the long URL into a short one which your comment box can accommodate and thus your template wont break. It does not affect urls within posts, just comments.

For the download link and more details click here.

This unique plugin will let you to automatically leave the link to the commenter’s last post under his comment which he leaves on your blog. The plugin checks in the feed of the URL which the person commenting posted and picks the latest article from the feed and displays it under the comment. This could be a very exciting way to promote commenting on your blog specially when you are a new blogger and looking for people to come to your blog and leave a comment.

The plugin looks for a feed in the default location of /feed/ for Wordpress users, in /feeds/posts/default for Blogspot users and /atom.xml for Typepad users.

If it can’t find a feed in the default location for the site then it will parse the page the author has used for their site field of the comment form and look for a feedburner feed, if it finds one, it goes and gets the last post they made from that. It does this at the time of the comment being posted and appends the extra text just before the comment gets saved to the database, this way it doesn’t put any extra load on the database or server other than the effort required add another 60 or so characters to the comment content.

Download CommentLuv Wordpress Plugin

Steps to install the plugin:

• Download
• Unzip
• Upload php file to plugins directory
• Activate from wordpress control panel (plugins section)

Still if you are facing any problems with the plugin than please visit the official article about this plugin.

Akismet is the plugin which is installed by default in every wordpress installation (you just need to activate it). It is very helpful in blocking huge amount of spam comments which would have either hit your blog. If you find a wordpress blog than you should be rest assured that it is using akismet.

Problem starts when akismet starts recognizing your own blog URL as spam. The result is that whenever you leave a comment on various wordpress blogs along with your blog URL, it doesn’t appear on those blogs even after trying many times. I was hit with this problem recently and almost for around 20 days I wasn’t able to leave a comment on various akismet enabled blogs. It is very frustrating as leaving good comments on blogs with similar niche as yours is the best way to publicize your infant blog.

I contacted many bloggers to remove my comment from spam and mark it as not spam. Akismet says that if people frequently mark your blog URL as not spam than akismet will learn and avoid blocking your URL as spam. I worked on this too for so many days but with no results.

Than I contacted the people at akismet and explained them of my problem. It took around 2 working days for them to contact me back with the apologies and informing me that my URL will now not be blocked by akismet. They even gave me a test page to test if I am still being blocked.

Check if your URL is being blocked as spam and contact akismet in case it is being blocked as spam.

Kudos to akismet for her awesome work.

Installed wordpress, implemented the new template, imported the posts, customized the permalinks, monetized the categories, pinged Google? Good! But you are not yet done with your new wordpress blog completely until you install the must have plugins.

Plugins are small codes which could be used to customize your wordpress blog as per your needs. But installing too many plugins could very well be the reason of slow down of your blog download speed whereas missing out some important plugin can lead to unsatisfied readers.

For a new wordpress user it is always tough to determine the plugins which are a must for his blog and so here I present the plugins which I think are a must install for your blog. Please update me if I missed any plugin!

Akismet

Akismet is among those few plugins which come pre-installed with your wordpress installation. Just click on the plugins link on the dashboard menu and you will find it. I received my first spam comment on the first day after my blog was launched on wordpress. Spammers will find you and screw your blog badly. So better get this plugin activated. And take that as a warning.

Download Akismet in case it isn’t there in your default wordpress installation

Share This

A very compact way using which your users can bookmark your blog articles on various services.

Download Share This

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will create a XML sitemap for your blog which is automatically updated whenever you update your blog.

Download Google XML Sitemaps

WP-Cache

WP-Cache is an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make you site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and the building the page from the database. WP-Cache allows to serve hundred of times more pages per second, and to reduce the response time from several tenths of seconds to less than a millisecond.

It helps you avoid the digg effect and the slashdot effect.

Download WP-Cache

Feedburner FeedSmith

Compare “feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeedURL” and “www.yourdomain.com/feeds”. Now which of these do you think is easy to remember? Ofcourse the later one.

This plugin will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed, and optionally your main comments feed as well.

Download FeedSmith

Subscribe To Comments

This plugin is handy to help when you want your readers to know that the post on which they left a comment has a new comment. It helps you start a conversation for your posts in your comments section and is always useful to get good amount of readers.

Download Subscribe To Comments

SRG Clean Archives

Mostly templates have a place to display the archives but as your blog gets older than the archives section approaches to size XXL! So it is always a better option to have a separate page for your archives.

Download SRG Clean Archives

Wordpress Contact Form With Spam Protection

Every blog should have a way for readers to contact them directly. Having a “Contact Me” page is very important and without one you could be missing out on a lot of opportunities that could arise throughout the life of your blog. This contact form is especially nice as it comes with spam protection, which is running rampant through the internet these days.

Download Wordpress Contact Form

RSS Feeds Signature

I use the plugin Post Post to deploy signatures in my RSS feeds and it does give my feeds the odd professional look. Use this if you burn feeds for your blog.

Download PostPost

Remember that these were the plugins which a new user must use in his wordpress hosted blog. As you start gaining experience with wordpres you will yourself know what else you need and what you don’t.

What plugins are you using?