WordPress 2.5-Step-by-Step upgrade Guide for Beginners

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As many of you would know that, WordPress 2.5 RC 2 beta is released. I am not sure how many of you have upgraded. This post is not for the people who have already upgraded and have been playing around with this baby for sometime. So if you happen to be one of them, you can stop reading at your own discretion. However, the purpose of this post is to get the newbies and the non-geeks to upgrade to the new release.

Step 1: Backing up your old wordpress

If you are wondering that the step one is download the latest beta release and to upload it, then I am afraid my friends you’d making one of the biggest mistake called as ignorance. Unless, you feel ignorance is a bliss to you, you can do it (upload). But if you don’t want to screw up, then for every upgrade, the first step is backup my dear friends. Backing up your wordpress is a great idea before any upgrade, whether it is for a stable release or it is for a beta release. You can do it pretty easily by looking for the steps to backup on Google, or you can use my favorite backup plugin WP-DBManager. Follow the installation guide.

Once you have backed up your wordpress, you can move to the next step.

Step 2: Installing the latest wordpress (wordpress 2.5 RC 2)

The next step in the process is to download the beta release. Once you have downloaded the zip/tar.gz file, extract it and save it on some location of your hard disk. What you have to do next is to just upload the content of the wordpress folder to your website host using FTP. During upload your FTP client will prompt you that the files already exist. It’s safe to say overwrite all. Safe because, your old files and folders will stay intact and only the native (old) wordpress files will be over written. Patience is the virtue at this point as it might take sometime to upload the new files using FTP client.

Step 3: Updating the database tables to meet the requirements of wordpress 2.5

Once you have successfully uploaded all the files, the next step is to get indulged. Log into your admin area and the first thing that you see is not the page that asks for user name and password. The first page asks you to update the database.

It is self explanatory, so just hit the link update database. After the database is successfully updated, you’ll see a page that has a link which says continue. Just hit continue. You’ll redirected to the admin login page. Use your login and you are in.

Upgraded to WordPress 2.5 RC2

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I just upgraded to WordPress 2.5 RC2. I think they have hired some user interface scientist (as my friend would call me. The 2.5 build looks amazing and not as cluttered as the 2.3.3. I am not sure why the update version was not named 2.4.

It has some cool new features. I am trying to collate all of it along with a snapshot of all the admin pages to make a tutorial for how to upgrade and off all what are the key features to the new build. I must caution you that if you are planning to upgrade, make sure you take the back-up of your blog on the regular basis and only upgrade at your own risk. With beta comes the curiosity of newness and pleasure to be the very few to taste the flavor of it. But with Beta releases, the risk of screwing up is also there.

I’ll post a detailed post in sometime. Until then keep your fingers crossed or just upgrade .

A New Tool From Google Alarms Sites-Revisited

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If there was a better so called E-Commerce Report, it has to be the one published on NewYork times dated 24 April 2008. A complete misunderstanding of user behavior and importantly user’s knowledge. The post titled A New Tool From Google Alarms Sites, talks about a new feature that Google launched called search with in search to help the so called big players on the net to combat their identity crisis. However, the bigger crisis is not that nytimes chose to make this a story (I fully appreciate the FYI nature of the news), the bigger crisis is the fact that the news post is written trying to suggest that the users are dumb not to understand a phenomenon like the one it emphasizes on.

My point is people are making too much of the fact that Google has launched a service that has greater SEO impact than Google itself would have imagined. But to place an argument on baseless assumption has become the norm of today’s journalism. The feature that Google has launched is

This month, the company introduced a search-within-search feature that lets users stay on Google to find pages on popular sites like those of The Washington Post, Wikipedia, The New York Times, Wal-Mart and others. The search box appears when someone enters the name of certain Web addresses or company names — say, “Best Buy” — rather than entering a request like “cellphones.”

If I could use an image to depict what is the point nytimes is trying to make, it would look something like this:

What you are seeing is the result of a query nytimes on Google and the first result is of course the official nytimes website. But what is interesting (at least nytimes is trying to prove it to be interesting) is the fact that there is small little search box to search with in the site. How about a little knowledge of something called as “Google’s Query Modifiers”. If nytimes was a little more informed about this they would not have tries to sensationalize the story. But, I guess we all are the prisoners of journalism.

This feature in Google has always existed and if you would have wanted to search something within a site (not just necessarily the so called popular sites only), you could simply use the search query along with site: as a query modifier. I cannot imagine people have time for such crap and in fact even indulge in an argument to make a point. How about some sense of respect to user’s understanding of Internet and the world of web.

5 Tips if you are starting a blog – A step-by-step guide

As I’ve settled a little with my blog. I am taking this opportunity to help the newbies with setting up their own wordpress blog. Following 5 tips which are in the format of a step-by-step guide would make it easy for people to set up their blog.

1) The first and most important tip is to get your own website and avoid blogging with blogging services like wordpress and blogger. What I mean by that is, you need to have your own website like digitally yours one and not something like http://xyz123.blogspot.com or http://xyz123.wordpress.com.

However, it is not mandatory that you have your blog hosted on a TLD (top level domain). What I mean is it’s not cumpolsory to have http://digitallife.co.in, you can have the website and host your blog on a sub domain like http://blog.digitallife.com or as a directory like http://digitallife.co.in/blog/. What’s important is that you are the owner of the TLD i.e. http://digitallife.co.in in this case.

2) If you are a hardcore programmer, please use your own ways of creating your blog. If you are novice, the best option you have is to install the latest version of wordpress (I personally feel that wordpress is the best blogging platform). You can download the latest copy (2.3.3) from here. Please avoid beta releases if you are not an expert. There is a famous five minute installation of wordpress here.

3) WordPress is such a versatile tool that it gives you enormous power and with power comes responsibility. The responsibility of not screwing up. So to avoid any screw up of your wordpress on your server, I suggest you to make a replica of you wordpress and run it on your localhost. For this you’ll need:

• A WAMP (WAMP is an acronym that stands for Windows, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (or Perl or Python)). I use Vertrigo which can be found here. I will do an exhaustive post on the basic setup of wordpress on localhost using Vertrigo.

• After you have installed the WAMP, you can installed the wordpress (2.3.3) that you’ve downloaded. Start playing with installing themes and plugins as per the requirement of your blog. I’ll do a post on my favorite themes and plugins which I am using.

4) The next step is to ensure that your blog is seo optimized. Again, for this there are multiple plugins that you can find by visiting plugins section. Also, ensure that the URL of your post is not dynamic. What I mean by this, by default wordpress generates dynamic URLs for the posts that you publish. Something like this http://digitallife.co.in/?p=19. Instead your URL should be http://digitallife.co.in/highest-traffic-keyword-on-internet/.

This can be easily changed by customizing permalinks under the options section in your wordpress. Following snapshots will help you get a clear picture.

5) The last and most important thing is to take a regular backup of your blog. You must be asking me, how do I do that? It’s pretty simple, just use the plugin named WP-DBManager. I’ll do another post giving a complete tutorial on the usage and functionality of this plugin.

I hope, this post will be of some use to all the people planning to start their blog. These are just few tips when you are planning to start a blog. I’ll use another post with pictorial diagrams to tell you how to install wordpress on your hosting server.

Spying mp3 Sunglasses

You don’t have to be a detective/spy to own a pair a funky spy sunglasses. Don’t get too excited though, because these glasses by no chance of imagination are X-ray glasses. Forget about watching females nude. This sunglass is powered with 1.3 pixel camera, capable of taking 1280×1024 pixel images. It comes with a remote control to power you with stealth mode photo shooting. What more is that these are not just sunglasses to spy they actually are made of high quality frame with UV400 Polaroid flip up lenses. The battery is a polymer li-ion rechargeable and provide 9 hours of photo shooting.

It comes with a USB 2.0 interface via a mini USB port for data download and upload along with recharging the battery.However, if you get sick of spying on people then you can use the 1 GB memory stick to listen to your favorite numbers as these glasses also have a provision to play music right into your ears with built-in ear buds.

Help a friend by spying on her girlfriend while listening to some relaxing music. BTW the best part about the glasses is that they cost as less as $99. I am wondering when and if they would enter Indian market.