Updates Your RSS Feed Address For Samanathon.com & New Link Love For Commentators

Written by Saman Sadeghi on April 14, 2008 and has been viewed 588 views times. 16 Comments »

I was on Stephen Fung’s site recently and noticed that he’s running the Commentluv plugin. I though this plugin was a great idea and it would be the perfect addition to the Do Follow movement, so I’ve installed it here on Samanathon.com!

What this means for you, dear reader, is that I will disable FeedBurner from handling my feed information, so you need to revert your feed reader’s address for this site to: http://samanathon.com/feed. I really don’t look at the metrics from FeedBurner and there’s no reason why they should be getting all my PageRank love! For more information, please read: Don’t Let Your CommentLuv Be Stolen Away!

What Does The Commentluv Plugin Do?

Commentluv ads a checkbox to the bottom of your post’s comment form that gives your commentator the option of adding a link to their latest post to the end of their comment. This means that, in addition to a link to their site in their name, they get a deep link to their latest article! The more you comment on blogs that use this plugin, the more deep links you get to different articles!

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  • WordPress Plugin: 404 Notifier

    Written by Saman Sadeghi on September 20, 2007 and has been viewed 1,461 views times. 18 Comments »

    83 File Not Found (404) ErrorsHere is a great example of why you really need to install this plugin: Within an hour of installing this plugin, I received 83 notices of 404 errors - that’s 83 missed opportunities to reach visitors!!! And that was only the first hour, I was away from my computer for the weekend and when I return, there were 372 File Not Found (404) errors!

    It seems the problem was all of the StumbleUpon traffic for my Royale Noir: A Secret XP Theme Uncovered post: I recently changed the post slug - I wrote a redirect in my .htaccess file but I missed something! Also, I have been editing all of my tags and restructured my permalinks recently, and it turns out that I had to rewrite quite a few links from my past 383 posts!

    Why You Should Install This Plugin

    I think this plugin should be mandatory! It will help you fix errors that have developed over time, and help your site retain it’s professional look - no visitor will try too hard to look for missing content on your site, they’ll just Google for another site that will have the information they’re looking for! :shock:

    404 Notifier Options

    You can have the plugin print a special RSS feed or send you an email!

    Tips

    Another great use (for me) is: I manage quite a few blogs out there, and I installed this plugin on all of the and had them all send emails to the same address - that way, I only have to check one place for all of my sites (instead of checking a ton of feeds).

    Download The 404 Notifier Plugin

    404 Notifier (look for the “Download” button on the right sidebar)

    What Is A 404 Error?

    A File Not Found (404) Error means that, while your browser was able to access the site, the file (or dynamic URL) you where trying to access was not found. This could be in the form of broken links, deleted files, typo’s, etc. - basically, your visitors are missing out on the information they where looking for! More information on 404 Errors.

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  • Would You Install A iPhone Plugin For Your Blog?

    Written by Saman Sadeghi on July 24, 2007 and has been viewed 1,484 views times. 7 Comments »

    The Apple iPhoneI just StumbledUpon an interesting WordPress plugin: iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme. This plugin will automatically detect the Apple iPhone User Agent reformats your blog’s content for optimized viewing with a special theme only to iPhone visitors (man, that was a mouthful!), all other browsers will view your WordPress blog with your current theme.

    In the past, I have installed plugins for the Wii and PSP browsers but ultimately removed them - that was during my 41-plugins-installed days. My question is this: Would you/should you install this plugin? We all know that the iPhone’s Safari browser is a true browser, it renders the web as it should be - but should we make content easier to read on a 320 x 480 screen?

    Enter iPhoney

    Speaking of the iPhone, I found this interesting application called iPhoney. Here is the description from the site:

    iPhoney gives you a pixel-accurate web browsing environment—powered by Safari—that you can use when developing web sites for iPhone. It’s the perfect 320 by 480-pixel canvas for your iPhone development. And it’s free.
    iPhoney is not an iPhone simulator but instead is designed for web developers who want to create 320 by 480 (or 480 by 320) websites for use with iPhone. It gives you a canvas on which to test the visual quality of your designs. If you have questions about iPhoney, visit our issue tracker on SourceForge, as our support team doesn’t provide technical support for iPhoney.

    Unfortunately, it’s a Mac only application and it wont show you load times but I thought it was very interesting! Again, would you install this plugin in the off chance someone will access your site from the iPhone?

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  • Publish To WordPress From Microsoft Word 2007

    Written by Saman Sadeghi on July 5, 2007 and has been viewed 1,038 views times. 22 Comments »

    I must say that I absolutely love the entire Office 2007 suite!! Office 2003 was a good product, everything worked as you would expect (except for Outlook which a bloated piece of crap) – but everything in Office 2007 is improved and makes productivity so much more efficient! Here is one example, I created this very post through Word 2007 – from the first keystroke to publishing, I never opened my browser! And the best thing about it, Word 2007 actually produces clean HTML – unlike Word 2003 which sticks in its own markup language, which creates more info for the browser to have to deal with and ultimately ignore, creating longer page load times.

    Why Bother

    You get an offline editor that has fantastic spelling and grammar checking!

    Info

    Setting up Word to publish was very easy and will work with Windows XP and Vista and it only takes a few dialogs to set it all up! Also, you can have more than one blog set up under multiple blog systems. The following are supported:

    • Windows Live Spaces
    • Blogger
    • SharePoint blog
    • Community Server
    • TypePad
    • WordPress
    • Other

    Setup

    1. To start, click the round Office button, Publish, then Blog.Setting Up A New Blog Account
    2. Since this is the first time were setting this up, click the Register Now button in the Register a Blog Account dialog.Register A Blog Account Dialog
    3. In the New Blog Account dialog, select WordPress from the drop down menu.New Blog Account Dialog
    4. In the New WordPress Account dialog, you get to fill in all of the important information. In the Blog Post URL, fill in your blog’s address; if you’ve installed WordPress somewhere other than your site’s root, then you need to specify that here. Say you’ve installed WordPress at: http://example.com/blog then the URL would be http://example.com/blog/xmlrpc.php.Now enter your username and password. These would be the values that you use to log into WordPress!If you would like Word to upload pictures for you, we can set that up by clicking the Picture Options button.

      New WordPress Account Dialog

    5. The Picture Options dialog is a little tricky, so pay attention! You can choose to have Word publish images to directly to you blog provider (think a wordpress.com account) or to your server (if you or a host is serving your site). I’m hosting this site, so I chose the My own server option[1]. In the Upload URL text box, type in the address as so: ftp://username:password@URL.com/folder. So, let’s say that this is your information:
      • WordPress Username: Bob
      • WordPress Password: monkey123
      • WordPress URL: boblovesmonkeys.com
      • Folder: images

      Then you would type: ftp://bob:monkey123@boblovesmonkeys.com/images - notice the colon between the username and password and that there is not “http://” in the URL.

      And the source would read: http:// boblovesmonkeys.com/images

      If you upload your images to the default location (from within posts), you can set that up as: ftp://user:pass@URL.com/full/path/to/wp-content/uploads
      And the Source URL would be http://URL.com/wp-content/uploads.
      Picture Options Dialog

    6. Click OK and you’re all done!

    Create Your First Blog Entry

    Now, you can see the Ribbon has changed to blogging mode! You can Publish, Publish as draft, Insert your categories (yep, it will download all of your categories!) [2], Open existing posts, set up new blogs and even insert HTML objects like pictures, links, charts and so much more! You can even create drop shadows and other image effects!

    New Blog Post

    After you are done, you can simply click the Publish button and your post will be live!

    Options

    If you want to take advantage of WordPress’s Time Stamp feature, publish the post as a draft and then go online and set the time and publish it from there!

    [1] The problem with having Word upload your images, is that it names the images in this format: date_postid_description.ext. For example an image would be called 070207_Word_1.gif and Word tries to optimize the images before uploading them and can make them look too lossy. It would be nice to be able to configure the image quality, but you can’t have it all! :razz:

    [2] To set more the one category, click the Insert Category button again.

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  • Out With PHPBB And In with WordPress’ bbPress

    Written by Saman Sadeghi on June 1, 2007 and has been viewed 5,681 views times. 22 Comments »

    I am so tired of moderating my forums - PHPBB is just way too prone to spambots - and the help system sucks!! I couldn’t find any of the answers that I had. Plus, everyone uses them and I want something different.

    Enter bbPress

    From the good folks who have brought us WordPress, comes bbPress. The bbPress forums are designed to be lightweight, efficient and secure - and from what I’ve seen so far, they are! Check out my forums, I am still working on them but everything should be working! I’m still using the default theme (which looks great) but I’ll change that soon…

    What’s So Great About bbPress?

    Well, a few things! Here’s a short list:

    1. Powered By The Ones We Love
      At it’s core, the development is being handled by the same group of smarty-pants geeks that build WordPress, which we all know is the best blogging app around!
    2. Lightweight Design
      PHPBB was easy to install, but it was a pain to moderate and use. BBPress is tiny and extremely powerful and - just like WordPress, you can use plugins to make it even better!
    3. Plugins
      That’s right, just like WordPress, there are plugins. Although, you need to take a few more steps to get them installed, it really is pretty easy - and the support community is fantastic too!
    4. Themes
      You can customize the look and feel of your forums just as easily as you can with your blog!
    5. Integrable
      One of the coolest features is that you can integrate bbPress and WordPress together! You can use the same database (or choose not too) and your user ID’s and roles will be seamlessly integrated. I chose not to do this, because I don’t force my commentators to register.
    6. No Spam
      BBPress can be protected by Akismet, the same service that already protects every WordPress install! Take that Spambots! :twisted:
    7. RSS Feeds Everywhere
      Each user, topic and tag has a feed (just like WordPress) so you can subscribe to anything and everything!

    Who Else Uses bbPress

    Well, there are actually some very big names using bbPress right this very second!

    Final Thoughts

    I shouldn’t say “Final” because I’ve only played with the boards for a short time, but I am very impressed so far! I do wish that installing plugins was a little more streamlined but I think I am really spoiled by WordPress’ fantastic system. Also, bbPress is only at version 0.8.1, and it is awesome! There is always room for improvement, and I know that the Automattic guys won’t disappoint!

    Also, I have installed the MyBlogLog plugin so anyone who registers with their blogs URL will automatically have their avatar displayed! Sadly, if you registered on the old boards, you have to register again… Sorry. bbPress doesn’t import sucky code :razz:

    What Are You Waiting For?!?!

    Head over the my boards and register - I will continue giving out free linkbacks to the top posters each week!

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