I have moved this blog to a much faster location now!. Hopefully all the complaints I received on the website speed would just go away. Now to the question directly:-

How do I blog to Worpress using eMail with attachments?
During the process of migration , I had a requirement to make a new blog post by means of an eMail. Yes, I would like to blog to wordpress by sending an email. I tried the default option available in WordPress, but it does not seem to work with image attachments. Do you know of any method/plugin to achieve the same?. Let me know. I will give you a cookie!

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Firefox is slow as a snail on my Windows XP laptop these days. I take the blame partly because of the number of plugins I might have fed it. The system is freezing every now and then.

I’ve got around 500+ Feeds to track everyday through Netvibes. That excellent ajaxed’ web application is crawling to death within Firefox. I was excited to see the Safari for windows, but it is not so stable and secure as of now.

I have been using Ubuntu from the Hoary days to last years Dapper. Switched partly due to organizational policies of using Windows. But these system freezes are tempting me to go back to the Ubuntu times.

I got the Feisty Fawn CD from a colleague and booted off. The primary concern for me was to find a decent blogging client for WordPress on Ubuntu. Searched around and did not find any good ones. I am finally giving a try with the ScribeFire. The Firefox plugin which helps you blog on many platforms.

So now, I have booted off the Feisty CD, Fired up the Firefox, installed the ScribeFire plugin and is writing this post inside ScribeFire. This is no comparison the cozy world of Microsoft Windows Live Writer. Still there is live previews and Technorati inline-tags support. Let me see how it goes. Wish someone found a way to get Windows Live Writer Working with Wine. I guess it is not easy, as WLW uses the latest .NET runtime features.

Does anyone have any Ubuntu Blogging Stories to share?!

[tags] blogging tools, Ubuntu, Windows Live Writer, ScribeFire [/tags]

Related posts:

1. My favorite Leopard Applications
2. Software Cost Comparison between Mac and Windows

Have you seen the new CNN beta site? I’ve heard earlier that CNN political ticker blogs runs WordPress CMS.

What do you think about this beta site?. I liked the new interface better.

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What is Usability ?

Usability is about how people use your blog. Usability is also about how people can find your blog, navigate your blog and about how they can find relevant information on  your blog.

How does themes help ?

WordPress and other CMS (Content Management Systems) comes with fantastic default themes. But regular features built-in to those themes may not be enough. Especially from the usability point of view. Here I will describe how you can customize your blog theme to improve the usability.

Which Theme to choose?

WordPress is an open platform. Many other CMS too are. Finding a theme to suit your blog is not difficult. See the following WordPress theme resources.

Official WordPress themes Archives
83 Beautiful WordPress Themes
Best Minimalist WordPress Themes
Top 10 WordPress Themes

One important thing to note is to choose a theme which renders the post-body first and others next. Prefer a theme which has bigger readable/adjustable fonts. Make use of the screen size. 3 column themes are good at it. Give more importance to the white space on the page. Having good amount of white space improves readability. Have lesser icons. Also change the DIV tags of your picture holders to allow text to wrap around it. Having blank wasted spaces next to the images are non-intuitive.

How people land on your blog? Measure, analyze and evolve.

Use a Web Stats package. You have to :-

1. Install a Web Stats Package plugin.
1. Ultimate Google Analytics
2. Reinvigorate
3. Automattic Stats
2. See what are the keywords people use to land on your page
3. See which are the most ‘found’ pages
4. See the Visit Duration
5. Measure the Visit Depth
6. Measure average time/page

Some of these stats packages requires you to paste JavaScript on your theme files to enable statistics tracking.

Think about How to increase that 12.50% share of 5-15 minute users and increase the pageviews. They may have left because they could not figure out how to navigate or when they cannot find any other relevant information. They may also have left blinded by your theme color! 

Let people know about you and your blog
Create an ‘About’ page. That page should preferably contain a welcome message. Your professional/personal profile is also welcome. An interesting short description about what your blog is all about is essential. But try to keep it short. You may also keep a contact form to keep in touch – on the ‘About’ page. To create a contact form you can use the following wordpress plugins:-

1. WordPress Contact Form with Spam Protection
2. cForms

Some people also prefer to keep a ‘About’ section on the home page instead of a separate page. That is also effective.
You may also opt to show some site statistics screenshots on the about page.

Let people Read your content

1. Keep your Post titles descriptive as you can. Avoid very short titles
• Use dynamic title plugin. This helps on SEO and also helps easy access to your page.
2. Use SubHeadings for long post. As I am doing here.
3. Give importance to white space
4. Avoid distracting icons within the content. Contextual ads within the content is permissible even from a usability point of view. Those who are avert to ads anyway uses Ad blockers.
5. Properly organize your posts in to categories and tags. Understand the difference between Tags and Categories.

Let people find relevant information

1. After the post content, always show other related information.
1. Use this related posts plugin. This will show other related posts on your blog.
2. You can also use SpotBack and SphereIt plugins to show content recommendations.
3. Showing a Tag Cloud along with your content also helps.
4. Make sure that your theme shows the relevant category information for each post.
2. Provide Search options on your blog
1. Always keep the main Search box near the top right corner. That is where people expect it to be.
2. Have additional search options near the related information & content recommendations. This helps people search beyond your recommendations.
3. Avoid wordpress ‘Live Search’ -  as it is slow to respond.
4. Apart from the default Search Box of your theme, you may also consider using Google Coop based Custom Search Box. Use the Mighty Search plugin to show the search results within your blog.
3. Showcase your best and popular content
1. Use Top Posts plugin to show most viewed content. You may also append some of the posts which you consider are best.
2. Use Comment Analysis to show the most commented posts
3. You can also show the Recently popular posts using Comment Analysis plugin
4. Use Latest Comments plugin to show the readers where the conversations are busy.
4. Have an Archives page
   Most of the users immediately go to Archives section to see the posts by category and by date. Crafting a specialized archives page using ELA plugin is very effective. There are other ways to show archives using Smart Archives and CAR. You can also use a category List drop down list on the sidebar.
5. Have a sitemap Page
1. Make an XHTML Archive using this plugin and link it in sitemap page.
2. Links and Describe all your pages
3. Show Monthly and Topical Archive pages
4. The sitemap page should also enlist the Feed types and respective links.

Let people navigate

1. Restrict the number of home page posts to 3 or 4
2. The Post titles should be clickable. Readers have no patience to search for the “Read the rest of the entry” link.
3. Avoid the bottom-of-the-site navigational systems. They should be on the right or left or on either side of the post content.
4. Some people advocate for avoiding a Home page link as it breaks the navigation. But I differ and recommend having it.
5. You can create a Next and Prev post link above or after the post body.
6. Make sure that your category and tag cloud entries are all clickable entities
7. Always think about the existence of the Browser back button during the blog design
8. The comment box should be immediately visible after the post
9. Avoid paged comments. If you have to use, have a minimum of 20 comments per page.
10. Have a threaded comments section.
11. Let them make corrections on their comments.
12. Don’t open new window for any of your external links.
13. Put visitors in control.

Let people rate, discuss and followup

1. Never auto-enable the comments subscription checkbox. Visitors can choose.
2. Give or Suggest them better options to followup the discussions.
3. Use cookies to suggest subscription options.
4. Use social media tools to rate and recommend user generated content.
5. Show the number of RSS readers , to generate confidence on prospective RSS readers.

Think about Language

1. Provide Translation tools to assist non-english readers.
2. AnswerTips enabling your site is highly recommended.

Think about mobility

Prospective users are all over the Mobile Web too. Creating a customized simplistic version of your website is of high priority. You can use the following plugins to enable mobility for your wordpress blog.

1. WordPress Mobile
2. WordPress Mobile Edition

In addition to the above, frequent usability testing &  reviews with friends and readers are highly recommended to continuously improve the usability aspects of your blog.

Related posts:

1. A Question to the readers

What would you do to make your blog ’stand out’ ?. Apart from writing well , the next big factor may be the looks of your blog. I am listing out some themes which I thought are beautiful – yet not much used widely.  Click on the Image to download the theme. Please do also check the theme authors page for any further instructions.

Unique WordPress Themes

• PotPourri by Maki

• WiiLike

• HyaLine

• HemingwayEx

• LivingOS Beta

• Webby Blue

• ProSense by Maki

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Seth Godin is a marketing genius. His writing style is unimitable. Ultimately everything boils down to excellent copywriting.  He once remarked about using the power of cookies to greet the returning visitors. This resulted in the making of a WWSGD wordpress plugin.

Taking cues from What Would Seth Godin Do and a WebTemp script, I have created a modified script to detect AdBlock and then show an WWSGD type RSS subscription message.

You may not be monetizing, still increasing feed count should make you happy!

Let someone know me the success with Adbrite/Bidvertiser scripts as inner HTML ;)

Code:

1. Have your adsense script inside a <DIV id=”adsense”> tag.
2. Paste the following script just above the </body> tag. In my case it was in the footer.php file.

<script type=”text/javascript”>
setTimeout(‘check_ads()’, 1000);
function check_ads() {
var blocked = false;
var e = document.getElementsByTagName(“iframe”);
for (var i = 0; i < e.length; i++)
if ((e[i].src.indexOf(“googlesyndication.com”) > -1) &&
(e[i].setAttribute && (e[i].style.visibility == “hidden” ||
e[i].style.display == “none”))) blocked = true;
if (!window.opera && (!window.google_last_modified_time ||
!google_last_modified_time)) blocked = true;
if ((e.length == 0) || blocked) {
var s = “<p style=’border:thin dotted black; padding:3mm;’>Subscribe to my <a href=’http://vinodlive.com/feed/’>RSS feed</a>. Thanks for visiting!</p>”
document.getElementById(“adsense”).innerHTML = s;
}
}
</script>

Don’t forget to change the feed address to yours.

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Comments makes you blog better! For me they are always a source of inspiration. I am doing a review series of a couple of WordPress relevant services/plugins which caught my eye recently.

CommentPower

This service is still in closed beta and will be launching soon. I had a chance to try it out early and you can see it for real, in my comments section.

With CommentPower everyone has an opportunity to evaluate any comment. The Comment author is rewarded with points for any valuable comment they make on blogs which are CommentPower enabled. All the rewards and comment links of a any comment-author is centrally managed in the CommentPower Servers.

The AJAXified interface of CommentPower is really usable. Implementing the Plugin on your WordPress blog does require you to be fairly knowledgeable in PHP.

These are features supported by CommentPower:-

• Cross-connects blogs and other social mediums based on common participants
• Identifies and highlights the best user generated content making it easy to find quality content
• Enables readers to browse user generated content based on the users
• Enables site owners to drive traffic by leveraging their community
• Provide context on the contributors in your community(see image below)
• Lowers the bar for participation by empowering readers to contribute by voting
• Incentivizes positive contribution by rewarding contributors with “portable credibility”

The comment-highlighting functions are highly recommended as it helps while wading through tons of comments on regularly read popular blogs.

The traffic generation of CommentsPower is exciting but I would rather like to see the CommentsPower implemented as a FireFox Plugin if it has to realize soon.

This is definitely an innovative idea worth trying!.

Related posts:

1. A Question to the readers

Hope you like this new Website Design. And my sincere apologies to my readers – for being not able to ‘Comment’ on the posts in the last week. I was on a short vacation . Before I left, I had wrongly implemented a ‘math captcha’ to avoid spam comments and it did not work well with Spam Karma. I was wondering the absence of comments in the last one week!. Thankfully, Thilak today informed me about the problem through a MyBlogLog Message. Now the problem is rectified. Happy Commenting!

Another important development:- I have been nominated by Everton on his exclusive ‘Pimp my Blog’ programme to improve the blogs on various aspects. I have been using his theme here for quite some time, with varied success. I even tried switching between some other custom designed themes. BUT always came back to Everton’s!. I must say that his theme is the one which WORKED for me till date. Now that the Pimping is on.. expect some great results further !

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I was doing some more tweaks with the wordpress setup today and was wow’d to see the following! …

1. Peter has some very good orginal and reworked Themes to offer.
2. I deactivated the Gravatar and Mybloglog specific plugins because of performance issues and shifted to this excellent plugin (MBLA) by Jan Olsen.
3. MuTube has some latest and reliable plugins to offer:-
   Adsense Manager
   Create, manage and position Adsense Ads from within the WordPress admin panel.
   Update Manager
   Receive notifications when new versions of your plugins are available.
   Quick SMS
   Allow visitors to your blog to send you free SMS messages.
   IM Online
   Show your MSN, Yahoo & ICQ online status on your blog pages.
   Infocon Widget
   InfoCON internet status alerts in your blog sidebar.
   Blogtimes with Icons
   Basic plugin which shows your posting times over the past month.
4. FireStats by Omry Yadan is one of the feature rich web-statistics plugin out there. It can also enable some localization to the comments.

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When I began with WordPress, I wrote about my favorite plugins and themes earlier.

After a couple of months experimentation and learning – here I am with the new list. Don’t forget to let me know your thoughts !

Best SEO Plugins

Dofollow 2.0

Disables the rel=nofollow attribute in comments. By Denis de Bernardy.

Google Sitemaps 2.7.1
This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. By Arne Brachhold.

Optimal Title 2.0
Mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the ‘separator’ to after the title rather than before. By Aaron Schaefer.

SEO Title Tag 2.0beta
Search engine optimize your blog’s title tags. Create a customized title tag for any post, static page, category page, UltimateTagWarrior tag page – indeed, any URL! And will auto-insert the tag name into the title on tag pages generated by UltimateTagWarrior plugin. Admin allows for mass editing of title tags. By Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts.

Ultimate Google Analytics 1.5.2
Enable Google Analytics on your blog. Has options to also track external links, mailto links and links to downloads on your own site. By Wilfred van der Deijl.

What Would Seth Godin Do 1.2
Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors By Richard K Miller.

Utility Plugins

Dnghu_en_v 1.0 By Carlos Quiles.
This WordPress Translation Plugin is the very, very simple PHP script, which adds translations from and into most language pairs offered by Google, Altavista and Tranexp. Unlike others WordPress translator utilities, dnghu does not use flag images, it is probably the simplest possible script you can write to add this functionality, and it should be valid XHTML.

Search Meter 2.1
Keeps track of what your visitors are searching for. After you have activated this plugin, you can check the Search Meter Statistics page to see what your visitors are searching for on your blog. By Bennett McElwee.

Spam Karma 2 2.2 r3
Ultimate Spam Killer for WordPress.

WordPress Database Backup 1.8
On-demand backup of your WordPress database. By Scott Merrill.

wp-cache 2.0.22
Very fast cache module. It’s composed of several modules, this plugin can configure and manage the whole system. By Ricardo Galli Granada

Visualization Plugins:

Extended Live Archives 0.10beta-r18
Implements a dynamic archive, inspired by Binary Bonsai and the original Super Archives by Jonas Rabbe.. By Arnaud Froment.

Fancy Excerpt 2.6
Enhances WordPress’ default excerpt generator by generating sentence aware excerpts. By Denis de Bernardy.

Gravatar 1.1
This plugin allows you to generate a gravatar URL complete with rating, size, default, and border options. See the documentation for syntax and usage. By Tom Werner.

Less 1.1
Change the (more…) link so it displays the entire post, not just the part after the “more”. By Bennett McElwee.

MightySearch 1.1
Create your onsite Google Search with wordpress. By mightyhitter.

Popular Tags for UTW widget 1.0
Displays the n most popular tags in a tag cloud – requires Ultimate Tag Warrior! By James Carppe.

Previous Posts widget 1.0
A more customizable version of the built-in Recent Posts widget. By James Carppe

Related Posts 2.02
Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. By Alexander Malov & Mike Lu.

Sidebar Widgets 1.2.1.20070210b
Adds “Sidebar Widgets” panel under Presentation menu By Automattic, Inc..

Text Link Ads v2 2.0.1
Really Simple Web/RSS Advertising For Personal or Commercial Use By Justin Klemm & Matthew Drouin

Ultimate Tag Warrior 3.14159265
Ultimate Tag Warrior is a tagging plugin, that’s heavy on tag visualisation. I Like Pi! By Christine Davis.

Ultimate Tag Warrior: ReTag Post-Extention 0.11
Extention for UTW2 that allows you to edit the tags of multiple post at the same time. Based on Christine Davis UTW. By Tobias Jordans.

WordPress Mobile Edition 2.0
Show a mobile view of the post/page if the visitor is on a known mobile device. By Alex King.

Community Plugins:

WP-UserOnline 2.10
Enable you to display how many users are online on your WordPress blog with detailed statistics of where they are and who there are(Members/Guests/Search Bots). By GaMerZ.

WP-UserOnline Widget 2.10
Adds a UserOnline Widget To Display Users Online From WP-UserOnline Plugin. Please Activate WP-UserOnline First. By GaMerZ.

Technorati Rank 1.1.1
A plugin for users who wish to display their Technorati Rank. Requires a Technorati API Key, WordPress 2.1+ and PHP5+ (uses SimpleXML). By Douglas Karr.

Subscribe To Comments 2.1
Allows readers to recieve notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. Based on version 1 from Scriptygoddess By Mark Jaquith.

Full Text Feed 1.03
Prevents WordPress 2.1+ from adding a more link to your website’s feed. By Ronald Heft, Jr.

Feedburner Feed Replacement 2.2
Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while letting through some important User-Agents. By Steve Smith

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