While you may want to install and test that plugin list in the directory on your blog and find out how it materializes on your blog, I suggest to choose your plugins wisely. Many of you might already have felt this: Too many plugins tend to make your WordPress installation slow.

Yes, it is true. I have checked it out myself. I installed a lot of plugins and the result is a slow responding blog.

Some tips to keep your blog in tip-top shape:

• Remember to choose your plugins wisely.
• Install and activate only those plugins that you require.
• Do not test new plugins on your actual production blog. Either create a test blog with your host or create a testing environment on your home PC or laptop.
• Do not keep plugins that you don’t use installed on your blog.
• Finally, many of the features which were previously available via plugins are now integrated into the latest release from WordPress. So, to lessen the load, keep your blog updated.

There. I hope these tips will be useful for you. Got comments? Drop them here.

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.

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.

Here’s a disturbing new trend. There seems to be a lot of automated WordPress blogs out there that are stealing content. Some link back to you, some don’t. In all the possibility they do steal your content and sometime quote the content written by you to some unknown name (possibly generated by the automated blog).

This is very very upsetting. I write something, I quote the source clearly and then link back to the source (from where I referencing a story). This trend is stealing traffic from the rightful owners (of the article) to these blogs which are simply ripping content off.

What this means to you as a blog owner is, a automated-blog steals your content and then ranks higher than your blog when a search is made (for content from your site). This happens because the stealing (auto) blog has links to, like, a thousand blogs which get it a better pagerank from Google. So, in the end you find your blog (with the original content) at the bottom of the stack!

Beware, that’s all I can say. Even as I finish this post, I am searching for a solution to this menace myself. Let us see what happens. Till then, watch your blog’s back.

The WordPress team has released the first release candidate of the next major release, v2.3. For more details check out the post: WordPress 2.3 Release Candidate 1.

True to their word of releasing a new beta/RC every week right up to the final release of 2.3, the WordPress team has released a third and final Beta release.

I had downloaded this plugin called WP-Wetfloor plugin by Siuyee which is in turn a wrapper plugin for Cow’s Reflections.js javascript code and makes it work on WordPress (well up until version 2.1 came out).

When version 2.1 came out, a lot of plugins broke up (with WordPress) due to a change in the hierarchy and many events were either dropped or renamed. Unfortunately for us, the Wetfloow plugin was a casualty of this change. After the author of WP-Wetfloor expressed her inability to make changes to it due to lack of time, I was trying to figure out how to modify the plugin myself and make it available to you all.

In the meantime, I found a workaround for this problem. As I work towards finding a way to fix the issue with this plugin with regards to it’s integration with the Editor in WordPress, I encourage you to use this workaround. It will be a little bit time consuming but believe me it IS worth the extra time. Don’t you agree?

To make the plugin work, simply install the latest version of the plugin from the plugin’s homepage and install (and activate) it to your blog.

After you finish doing this. Instead of searching for the button in the WordPress Rich Text Editor, simply insert an image using the normal “Insert Image” button and then go to the Code tab of the editor.

After going to the Code tab (which shows the HTML code for the post that you are editing), find the <img src="path to your image" /> tag that has the image that you want to use the Reflection API with and insert the following line class="reflect rheight80 ropacity40" in the same tag. After you insert the tag, it should look something like this:

<img src="path to your image" class="reflect rheight80 ropacity40" />

That’s it. This should do it for you.

Liked the article? Or not? Please share your feelings. I want some praise from you (or my share of ass-kicking if it is justified! ). Post your comments.

There have been some database changes in the next major release of WordPress, v2.3. The changes are going to affect a lot of plugins as outlined in this article from Ryan, WordPress 2.3 Database Schema Changes.

If you are a plugin author, please heed to the changes if this affects you and upgrade the plugins accordingly. If you are a Blogger who is using WordPress, please make sure your plugins and themes are compatible before migrating to the new version.

As for me, I might as well have some coffee. I am still on version 2.2 of WordPress. I couldn’t even upgrade to the security fixes released by the WP guys! Busy as I am, I couldn’t spare the time for it. As for upgrading to 2.3, I really do not know when I’m gonna do it (If I think of it at all). Maybe by version 2.5 or something? I have to think. Ok, not much time to think about this.

That’s it I’ll go for my coffee now.

There is a(n) (informal) saying in India that goes, ‘Before a new law is formed, ways to circumvent it are created in advance‘. This has been quite right in the case of spammers too. Albeit they didn’t get ways beforehand after a technology was introduced to fight their methods. It was after the introduction that the spammers were almost always working on finding ways to ‘get around’.

Anyway, I found one thing when I first started using WordPress an year ago. There are a million bots out there which are waiting for you to expose a form over the internet. That’s all they need to start their work! After getting emails for comment moderation by the hundreds, I searched and found Akismet (keeping in mind the fact that I was new to WordPress at that time). I activated Akismet and then found the result was pretty good. Akismet did keep a lot of them out. But, eventually, it did let quite many in.

So, I searched again. This time I found another great WordPress Plugin called SpamKarma 2. This was really good. I activated it and then deactivated Akismet just to make sure the two don’t fight with each other like Freddie and Jason and harm the users of the blog like the hapless teenagers in my favorite movie. But, it worked good upto sometime and then it also slipped a couple of times. Damn! Those spammers are smarter than I thought.

So, I search yet again. This time I found BadBehavior Plugin. This plugin blocks unusual or unconventional ways of accessing your site. So, I put it up and activated it on my blog. Next thing you know I turned on the Akismet plugin. So my blog is now running these anti-spam plugins: Akismet, BadBehavior and SpamKarma 2.

Oh yeah, I found another useful plugin (although how effective it is, is yet to be ascertained!) called Simple Trackback Validation. This plugin makes sure that the trackbacks posted on your articles are genuine and belong to pages that contain links back to the article in question.

So, the plugins running on my WordPress blog at the moment are: Akismet, BadBehavior, SpamKarma2 and Simple Trackback Validation Plugin.

I hope this article will guide you with the necessary ways to fight Spammers. I have benefited from following these guidelines and you will too. Even though after installing so many plugins, you may not be able to filter 100% spams but it sure helps to be on the safe side. Trust me you wouldn’t want to receive comment moderation email alerts a hundred/thousand times.

Well, I think many of you know it already. But, I’ll mention it anyway. Recently, this article posted on the Official Yahoo Publisher’s Network Blog, Groking MyBlogLog, talked about 11 great tips from the MyBlogLog Community Manager, Robyn Tippins.

It will surely serve your interests (and your blog’s) to check out what she has to say. This will make sure that you are top of that list getting traffic relevant to your topics/articles.