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!

I am planning a brand new shiny look for my primary website: fiqbal.com, pretty soon. The blog will get a new look (with the use of a customizable WordPress theme) but will stay in the same place. I might change the focus of my blog, All Pumped Up! to all things technology while my personal blogging will move to a new location (all this is in APU! right now).

Actually I have been thinking of this since quite some time but didn’t really get the time to do so. I have somehow forced myself to go through the overhaul in the coming weeks. It will be slow and steady but surely it’s in the pipeline.

I hope things turn out the way I am planning for right now. I will keep you posted on this.

Well, I know about the Site theme still not being completely implemented but I’ll start work on it now that I feel better. Actually, due to flu, I have been drifting around not being able to concentrate on my work or my blog. But, with me feeling better, I can start getting back to my blog slowly.

So, you can expect the theme, that I have applied, to get customized along the way. In the meantime, help yourself to the vast archive that I have at hand on my blog.

There’s another change that I have made to the blog before writing this entry. I have changed the permalinks of the site to make it more user-friendly and month oriented. So for example if a link looked like this previously > http://www.fiqbal.com/blog/2007/11/01/some-post/ will now look like this > http://www.fiqbal.com/blog/archives/2007/11/some-post/

So, this makes it a little more, well I don’t know, professional maybe? Oh just for the change, I made it this way so that it looks good.

I have managed to integrate Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatar) support onto the comments page of my blog, All Pumped Up!

This is courtesy of the code provided by Matt that can be accessed here, Gravatar Snippet.

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.

Actually that’s exactly what it was… Quite busy for me and due to that, I couldn’t write in to my blog . Not that it was the sole factor in my not posting to the blog. Actually, in the time that I did get, I was quite lazy in posting. Suddenly this thing was flowing inside me that made me not post to the blog.

Well, I thought before I go off for the weekend (for those who don’t know, I have my weekend on Thursdays and Fridays), I should drop off a couple of lines to let the people around here know that I am very much alive and kickin’.

In my efforts to bring you new things, I will post some more of my Shayari on Saturday. The second part from the collection that I have written for my fiance’, Jiya.

Well, gotta go now, I guess. See you around.