This is to inform all the kind users, readers & patrons of this website and all related services that the terms of use and the privacy policy of this website has changed. It is, therefore, kindly requested that you review them and raise any objections/concerns/suggestions (whatsoever) you may have regarding the same on or before 30th March 2009.

If you do not do the same within the given period of time, then you will be assumed to have accepted the UPDATED terms of use and privacy policy of this site and all related site(s)/service(s).

Well, what can I say? I tried to upgrade automattically ( ignore my pun there ) my Bad Behaviour (v2.0.20) to version 2.0.21 and after the update I started receiving request errors such as that you can see in the image below (You can click on the image to see it in detail).

Bad Behavio(u)r v2.0.21 giving out header errors on my blog...

I have further shortened the URL of All Pumped Up! from the existing ” www.fiqbal.com/blog/about-author/ ” to the new more shorter and sleek > ” http://fiqbal.com/blog/about-author/  “. This would ofcourse shorten the URL and let you access the blog more quickly than ever before.

It’s nothing new by the way and I certainly am not the first one to be doing this. Lot’s of other people are already doing the same.

Anyway, as long as you are happy.

After taking into stock everything, I have upgraded APU to PHP5 today in the morning. I was in two minds about this since most of the PHP things out there (like themes, plugins, blog software etc.) still work on PHP4.x and doing this would have caused issues.

But then when I tried installing GamerZ’s plugins on my site, I found out that he has upgraded most of his plugins, for Wordpress 2.6 and above, to work with PHP5 and so I couldn’t use many of the features of the plugins. This of course brought to my mind some of the other plugins which were giving me errors and which I had to remove from my blog (I am not talking about the WWL plugin here!) just because I thought they are facing some issues of their own or simply were not compatible with my version of WordPress.

Well, this does away with that. Now I have the latest version of PHP and hopefully that’s the end of the recent issues I have been facing.

Well, I was kinda tweaking the blog today to checkout various plugins and their effects on the site and then was checking India’s score versus Srilanka on Cricinfo.com when I found out about widgets introduced by Cricinfo.com for site & blog owners to include scores, images and more from their vast database.

So, I went ahead and got the embedding code for the International Scores Widget to include it in the sidebar of my blog. Cricket enthusiasts will now be able to check the scores of their favorite matches without even leaving my blog!

Cricinfo.com is a big website of vast properties related to Cricket. It was previously owned by Wisden Group before being purchased by ESPN.

ESPN on the net

Cricinfo on the net

I am deactivating the World Wide Lexicon Plugin with immediate effect on APU!. This is being done to clear up my RSS feeds. Ever since I activated the plugin on my blog to enable translations into different languages, my RSS feeds have been mixed up with code coming from this plugin.

Actually the WWL plugin uses a hook to attach itself with the content of the post. Somehow this is not checked by the plugin whether it is being displayed on the website or is being seeded as an RSS feed.

After much deliberation and with the widespread availability of such tools as Google Translation and Altavista Babel Fish, I am removing the plugin to avoid discomfort to my readers who use Feed Readers to subscribe to my site.

Sorry, WWL project, I don’t understand why this issue was not fixed until now? I have to remove the plugin. I thank all for using the plugin on my site and apologies for removing it.

After a lot of effort, I have finally tweaked and tuned and fixed All Pumped Up!

Atleast, the ad placements and the page layout issues have been fixed. Plus the video embedding is fine now. So now, I get to show you a lot more videos, write more and worry less about pages breaking and layout not fitting in and so on.

Enjoy your stay. We hope you look around and find what you came for. Plus put in your feedback to help us serve you better.

I am immediately moving my blog from the current 2.5.1 version of Wordpress to 2.6. It’s not gonna be too difficult this time since I have already moved to 2.5.1 from the previous 2.3.2

It is also mentioned on the Wordpress Development blog that moving from 2.5.x to 2.6 will not affect any of the existing plugins and themes. So, I guess I can move to the latest version of Wordpress with full piece of mind.

Interestingly, the friendly people at Wordpress have announced that they will not be supporting the 2.5.x branch of Wordpress anymore and advise the current users of 2.5.x to upgrade to 2.6 ASAP. There goes the neighborhood!

So, if you happen to be just like me, upgrade soon or the support ends which of course will include security updates.

I have to say that when I switched over to Jelly theme, I was happy until I posted a picture on my blog and that made the blog get out of the formatted settings. Which means, it was not what it was meant to be shown to the readers.

So I have, for the time being, switched back to the Kubrick theme until the time I pick up one of other good themes at the Wordpress directory of themes and customize it real nice and apply it to the blog.

So, please for the moment, bear with this theme can you? Thanks guys and gals. I knew would do that.

My blog was down due to a memory allocation error that was being generated from my ISP’s meagre allocation of 8MB to all the accounts. I tried to fix it the same day that I came to know about it but was unable to do so!

Anyway, when I failed to get anything out, I went to GoDaddy.com and took up a hosting account with them. Interestingly another incident found its place in my diary of wacky happenings.

I took a Linux hosting package for an year and then went on to pay by my credit card. When I was in the process of paying them while my payment was being processed that is, my DSL went down. I thought the transaction was not completed so I went ahead and purchased the same product (of hosting) another time. This time when I clicked on ‘process payment’ for my credit card, it went through successfully and then I was taken to the products that I had with me on my account (apart from the domains I have at their place), I saw I had two hosting packages.

But wait. I purchased only one package? Or two? Actually the first transaction had gone through and I didn’t see a confirmation page as the connection was lost before I could see it.

So, I applied for a refund by cancelling the product from my account. When I got a reply from their customer care executive, I was a little surprised. I had written to them with the reason for buying by pure accident the same product two times. The executive’s reply was that he had applied for a refund on my behalf and that it was not confirmed if I would get refund or not. this was at the sole discretion if the Sales/Purchase team or whatever.
Anyway, after much hassle, they did refund me with the payment. It will take them about 5-7 business days to put the money back on my credit card.
Oh woe is me!
Well, my trouble finally seem to be over as I shift my blog (and my whole site) to GoDaddy. It was really tough since I had a big blog (by now) and shifting the mySQL thing to another server was a big headache.
Anyway, life seems to be back on track. In the coming days, the site will be back to it’s full functionality. Inshallah.
Till then Chow!