Well, to make the user experience at APU! a little more engaging and cool, I have done the following changes and improvements (as and whenever I could, this is just a summary with more to follow) which will make your stay a little more involving and engaging:

• URL change: OK, this is what has happened in actual terms. If you used to access the URL which looked some thing like this: ” http://www.fiqbal.com/blog/archives/2008/07/blog-changes “, it will now become something like this -> ” http://www.fiqbal.com/blog/2008/07/blog-changes “. This will change the URL and make it shorter. However due to an extremely nice feature of WordPress 2.3 and above, the old URL will work just fine. So, while I would advise you to change your bookmarks to the new format, the old formats will still work. Thanks WordPress, I love you!
• Secondly, I have added video ads. Yep! They are now available in my region and most importantly to me and there they are on the sidebar of APU. Well, this would certainly let you choose which videos you wanna watch. I know it may make the site a little slow for some but trust me they are worth it. You get to watch what you want and give a little change in the process to look after my blog!
• Email Article Feature: This feature will allow you to share your favorite articles on APU! with your friends and family. So, from now on, if you like something don’t keep it to yourself. Share It with everybody!
• More is coming soon….

So, I hope this will add to your experience with my Blog!

Well, after numerous customizations and tweaks according to the needs of All Pumped Up!, I have finally activated the new theme on my blog. The theme is Dikatruu Jelly and is quite well commented by the author for customizations by the blog authors/admins according to their need.

I have managed to do so in about 10 days during which period it was on my local test environment. Anyway, I hope this theme proves to be faster and more efficient in letting our users read the blog that they enjoy!

So, I was just looking around and found this post, Two Amazing WordPress Plugins, that gave me the whereabouts of a very good multilingual plugin for WordPress from the Worldwide Lexicon Project that helps users of a WordPress blog to translate the blog to different languages.

Now, this means a lot of things get solved for me. I have observed a lot of spanish users on my blog and since Google has been creating difficulties for some other widely available plugins in using Google’s Translation services via automation, I thought this will be a good alternative.

Atleast we have some hard working people over at the WWL project who are dedicated to the understandability of one language to another. I wish them good luck.

Oh yeah, and thanks for this good plugin. It will help my blog’s readers to read in their native languages whatever I write here.

I have been trying to add some innovations to the site to make it more user friendly and easy to navigate and bookmark at your favorite social bookmarking services. I was myself a little bit worried what would happen if I didn’t provide good options to users? Well, it would mean losing out on some avid readers of All Pumped Up! (which I can’t possibly afford at any stage of the site!).

So, I was playing around with the site layout and the widgets which make my blog’s sidebar look like a bridge to Alaska!

So, I just found while a good social bookmark manager called AddThis which lets a site’s visitor bookmark a post to his favorite site without the source site getting cluttered with all those buttons lying around and occupying precious real estate!

Well, I do need to set some other things in the sidebar in order which will happen without affecting your use of the site. I will also keep posting in the same time so that’s not to be worried about.