There have been no posts at all (well, almost) here in the past 2-3 months. The reason for that is, I have been a bit snowed under by the extremeley busy routine I am having to do. The long commute to work, long hours, some DIY at home etc all add up. However, there is some stuff that I want to write about and I will do as soon as I get some free time.

This post is just to say that I am still here, just as a silent audience though.  So stay tuned guys.

I have just upgraded this blog to the latest version of WordPress (version 2.6). There are a couple useful features introduced in this release. A full list can be found here.

The 2 most important features are integration with Google Gears and Theme Preview. Theme Preview is actually a big one for me, because before now, you really had to just activate a theme and hope that it would work.  That has changed now and you can now preview your new theme before your audience does.

Integration with Gears, I beleive, is minimal at the moment, as it just saves a local copy of all the JS and CSS files used and nothing more, but its a very good first step and I am sure future versions will have extended integration.

Update: I actually forgot to write about another very important feature. 2.6 has now got post revisions. That’s very useful, everytime I hit Save, it maintains a separate version of the post. Would be very handy when I make mistakes while writing and can easily switch back to last known good versions.

Well, during the installation, I did run into one little issue. I used the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin to do the upgrade and it kinda broke just before it was to re-activate my plugins. For some reason, the file wp-load.php wasnt copied in the whole process. I did check my permissions and they were all fine.
I simply had to download the installation manually and extract wp-load.php and put it in the right location on the server. That did the trick. I was back up and running after that. Apart from that, a pretty neat upgrade! I am still a happy WordPress user!

Yes, thats the 100th post on my blog. It took me 7 months to get to 100 posts, which is not too bad I think. I have not been able to write posts in the past few weeks as compared to before, mainly because my new contract keeps me very busy and by the time I get home, I am completely knackered and there is just no time and energy for blogging. However, I still enjoy reading others’ blog posts.

I do hope to be more active at blogging though as I firmly beleive that when you write your thoughts out, you improve your own thought process because thats actually when you think how you could have done it better (atleast I do that) .

Thanks to all the readers who took the time to read my blogs and I hope to have the learning process going on .

Happy coding!

I use WordPress as my blogging software and I just read the news that WordPress 2.5 has been released. I have been following some posts about this and there has been a lot of talk about this release. This is a major release with features like multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.

So, I just went ahead and did an upgrade. My previous version was 2.3.2 . The upgrade went smoothly apart from the fact that one of my plugins named “Gregarious” stopped working after the upgrade. This plugin was handling the social bookmarking icons on the site including Digg and others. Not a big problem, I can try to fix this later, but the new version does look good indeed. For anyone currently on WordPress, its definitely worth upgrading.

P.S. Check your wordpress hosting provider for more updates of the latest version of wordpress.

Well, its kinda annoying. My blog has been online for about 6 months now and it was only last week that the number of spam comments I receive, crossed 1000. But I was checking the spam comments today and I was surprised to see that total number of spam comments caught has gone up to 2012. Well, thats over 1000 spams in a week!

Thanks a lot to Akismet for doing all the hard work of catching and deleting spam silently and effectively.

However, one note to spammers, if you are smart enough to get into the system by breaking the captcha or by what ever other ways, you should be smart enough to “not” continue spamming after finding out that your comments get deleted automatically.