http://www.mastermindclasses.in

Feel free to visit their site for more information:

MPPET 2008 Solutions

Good Luck!

]]> http://digitallife.co.in/mp-pet-2008-solution/feed/ 65 http://digitallife.co.in/lifesaver-plugins-for-wordpress-25-plugins-for-admin-area/ http://digitallife.co.in/lifesaver-plugins-for-wordpress-25-plugins-for-admin-area/#comments Mon, 21 Apr 2008 11:55:32 +0000 digitallife http://digitallife.co.in/?p=65 [ad#ad-2]

Alright, I have waited long to write a post on WordPress plugins. However, there are too many I love and it won’t be justified to make a single post for all of them. What I am going to do is write a post on the plugins I love and I think I cannot live without based on categories. By categories I mean the functionality they bring. For example, anti-spam plugins, bookmark plugins and RSS feed plugins etc. This post is dedicated to plugins that makes your WordPress admin area a better place.

I’ll dedicate this post to two plugins which I think brings beauty and ease to the way you move around in the admin area.

Before I start, let me tell you that I am on WordPress 2.5. Also, I strongly advice you to take a backup of your WordPress before you flirt with these plugins. Now that you are ready, let’s begin.

Although, WordPress 2.5 has a refreshingly great looks over it’s predecessors, I still feel that they have to get the navigation easier. I mean, each section has some subsections, like write section has subsections namely post, page and links. If you want to go to any of these subsection you have no choice but to go through the main section Write. Life would be much more easy if this whole navigation would be driven by Menu based navigation. And to achieve something like that there’s a plugin called as Admin Drop Down Menu.

Pictures say more than words. So, here’s the snapshot.

The second plugin actually beautifies rather than making navigation easier. However, it makes a great combination with the Admin Drop Down Menu. This plugin is called as Fluency Admin. I have not come across any conflict they cause or if they have any drawbacks. Following is how your admin area will look after installing both the plugins.

Life isn’t all that easy when you have updates and upgrades available at such rapid pace as Mozilla Firefox project. With an upgrade usually the framework is so much modified that your current Firefox extensions don’t work with the Alpha or Beta release. Now if you have an intermittent problem of testing newer non-stable versions of softwares then you miss out on the extensibility feature.

For example, there are very few extensions of Firefox 2.0.* which are compatible with Firefox 3 Beta. Hold on please, there is a tweak to get all your extensions (With exception of a few like Google Toolbar for Firefox crashes) working with Firefox 3 beta release. From what I have experienced the so called and much awaited FF 3 has some cool features. I have not played around with it much, but the first problem that I faced was to get all my extensions working with this new release. Here’s what you have to do to get all your extensions working. I must caution you though that there could be extensions that might make your Firefox unstable and make it crash. From what I have read All-in-one gestures when used with this tweak makes it crash for the first time. Also, this can cause some security glitch as well. So please use it at your own risk. Following are the steps:

1. In a new tab type about:config. You get a beautiful (and funny) window which looks like this.
   You know which button to hit.
2. Once you reach the about:config page look for an entry named extensions.checkCompatibility. If you see the entry then change the value to false.
3. However, if you did not find an entry, then right click any where on the page and under new select boolean. Set it’s value to false. That’s all.
4. Now you should have an entry that looks like this
5. Close Firefox and restart. See the magic, all your old extensions are now working and are visible.

You see a warning message marked with an arrow like the following:

Help yourself with further experimentation. And remember it’s a tweak that means it’s not suppose to be tweaked to avoid any glitches. I am sure with the final release all the extensions will be compatible. There is another way as well to make extensions compatible, but for that you have to make code level changes and I am not discussing them. Let me know if someone wants to do it that way.

As a decent upgrade tool (Just in case you don’t want to flirt with your directory structure on your FTP), you could use InstantUpgrade plugin. This plugin is in Beta, so please use it at your own risk. Also, one bug that I found with the plugin is that even when you deactivate it (even remove it from your WP Plugin Directory), it doesn’t listen and tries to associate itself with the upgrade link in WordPress Dashboard.

The second drawback (for advance user) of the plugin is that it only allows you (by default unless you mention the version) to upgrade to the latest stable release. Doesn’t automatically upgrade to the beta or nightly builds. As, I promised, I’ll do a complete review of WordPress 2.5 on my other blog.

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.

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.

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.