Alpesh Nakar's Blog » WordPress

Premium Theme Giveaway Contest

Alpesh — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 02:38:51 +0000

Are you an admirer of Brian Gardner’s WordPress Themes? I sure am. For sometime now, I have been eyeing his Revolution Theme and this contest, that he has been running, could not have come at a better time.

I’d sure would love to win one of the 3 themes he is offering for free! This blog has seen theme changes and would love to settle down with a premium theme for good. Revolution News Theme fits perfect for my blog, since I share a lot of news as it happens, in addition to my own content.

I love the way headlines have been setup – I’d use Latest Technology news here. I use different categories and keep them few as far as possible, hence news for categories would be great – like SharePoint, WordPress, Vista, Microsoft, Google.

In other featured stories, I’d use my featured content. I look forward to winning this contest.

Brian, this indeed is a great gesture on your part. Thank you.

Premium Theme Giveaway Contest was published on Alpesh Nakar's Blog

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Blogging: Anniversary Giveaway!

Alpesh — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 09:14:34 +0000

David Airey is celebrating his blog’s first anniversary with some style, I’d say! I just read about this on Engtech’s blog

David’s got great sponsorship going there. Just to sum them up …

Gold Award

The ultimate business blog package

Logo design from David Airey.

Custom WordPress theme design from Nate Whitehill.

Personal marketing / advertising plan from Maki of Dosh Dosh.

One year’s hosting and blog setup from John Boardley

Signed copy of Blogging Tips by Lorelle VanFossen of Lorelle on WordPress.

Silver Award

A second logo design from Tara Roskell of Graphic Design Blog.

Website critique from Randa Clay of Randa Clay Design.

One hour SEO consultation with Lyndon Antcliff of Cornwall SEO.

$60 of books from Amazon courtesy of Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.

Bronze award

Logo / blog header design from Jonathan-C. Phillips

One hour blog optimization consultation with Daniel Scocco of Daily Blog Tips.

Revolution Premium WordPress theme package (personal package) from Brian Gardner.

Blog review and email interview published on Make It Great! with Phil Gerbyshak.

Bonus prizes

The following prizes will be drawn individually.

Podcasting kit

Behringer Podcastudio USB Podcasting Kit, by Fraser’s Affiliate Marketing Blog.

Free money

$25 via PayPal – Gayla McCord of Mom Gadget.

USB storage keys

2GB USB storage key x 3 – Jamie Clague at Terinea Weblog. Three USB sticks will make up three separate prizes, with free worldwide postage.

Blog reviews and design help

Full blog review with deep links and images published on Blog-Op with Chris Lodge.

Blog review from Aaron Russell of miLienzo.

Expert WordPress blog help from Lakshmi Mareddy of Chilligavva.

Blog review from Hock Ng of Marketing Tools Review.

Blog makeover from Charles Jordan of The Queer Chef.

Telephone and Skype consultations

Blog writing consultation with Ben Yoskovitz of Instigator Blog.

Two 45 minute coaching consultations with Mark McGuinness of Wishful Thinking.

4 hour business growth consultation with Rebecca Caroe, via telephone / Skype, or face-to-face in London / Cambridge.

Tele-Coaching with Tammy Lenski.

One hour product launch consultation with Design Translator (DT) of Design Sojourn.

Blog improvement or monetization advice with Easton Ellsworth of Business Blogwire.

Art and literature

Two premium quality books designed and produced by David Hyde of david the designer.

Copy of Brand Aid by Brad VanAuken of The Blake Project.

Watercolour print from Ed Roach Watercolours.

Online advertising

728px by 90px banner ad for 30 days above the fold on The Blog Experiment, courtesy of Sara.

125px by 125px image ad for 30 days on Smart Wealthy Rich.

Ad icon located site-wide in the top left of Blog-Op, courtesy of Chris Lodge.

30 day text link ad shown site-wide on Contest Blogger.

125px by 125px image ad for 30 days on Freelance Folder.

Forum membership

Lifetime membership to the paid membership site that Andy Beard, WordPress SEO and Niche Marketer, will launch on Andybeard.eu (eta and value yet to be determined).

Prize draw details

The deadline for entries is Wednesday, September 26th 2007, and the winners will be announced here on Monday, October 1st 2007. Names will be drawn using a random generator.

Now that’s some bounty I’d like to get my hands on! Good one!

Happy Anniversary Dave!

Blogging: Anniversary Giveaway! was published on Alpesh Nakar's Blog

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WLW and WordPress Invalid Server Response

Alpesh — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 11:52:35 +0000

I have been trying to use Windows Live Writer Beta 2 to post to my wordpress blog but to no avail!

I’d keep getting this error:

Windows Live Writer was not able to automatically detect your blog: Invalid Server Response – The response to the blogger.getUsersBlogs method received from the weblog server was invalid: Invalid response document returned from XmlRpc server

I have just found this solution; add to .htaccess file

SecFilterInheritance Off

Done! It’s all good now.

Check out Digital Inspiration for some more solutions

WLW and WordPress Invalid Server Response was published on Alpesh Nakar's Blog

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1st Year: Plugin Power

Alpesh — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 11:25:46 +0000

In my first year of blogging, these plugins have powered my blog. I’d like to see what plugins you are using and if you had only 5 plugins to choose, what would they be? Compare it…

Add Sig 1.2 Add a custom signature to the bottom of posts with the author’s information Do you see me inviting you to subscribe to rss feeds at the end of this post and every other post? This is made possible with Add sig plugin.

Alternative to this plugin is POSTPOST by my friend Douglas Karr. This plugin allows you to add content before or after your post within your site or within your feed. Current Version 1.1.1

Akismet 2.0.2 – Need I say anything about this? Only it ain’t enough. Combine it with the next plugin

Bad Behavior 2.0.9 Deny automated spambots access to your PHP-based Web site.

Clicky Web Analytics 0.3b – This is the newest kid on the block to help you analyze your blog traffic. I would love to see this Clicky generate most popular posts that I can display in the sidebar or a page by itself. I have just installed it and haven’t checked the results as yet.

Integrate Clicky Web Analytics into your WordPress blog without the need to edit any templates. Includes support for automatically tagging your blog visitors by name, and the ability to ignore visits from blog administrators.

By Sean Hammons, Douglas Karr.

Comment Email Responder 2.3 Emails commenter when an admin replies to the comment, if commenter is not subscribed to email updates via Subscribe-to-Comments. Original idea/coding by Andrew Flusche

By Owen Cutajar. I don’t know how if this is working, since I am the admin. Anyone can confirm?

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator 2.7 Generates a customizable sitemap containing all posts and pages. By Aleister. This is a must have if you want to have a SEO blog. Just add the link of the sitemap page to robots.txt file and you are all sorted.

Dean’s Permalinks Migration 1.0 With this plugin, I have changed my permalinks from /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ to /%postname%/. You can safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website,and even doesn’t hurt your google pagerank. By Dean Lee. I picked this up from Everton Blair of ConnectedInternet.

Dofollow 2.0 Disables the rel=nofollow attribute in comments. By Denis de Bernardy. Pros and cons of using this plugin as always with any plugin, but I just love it and I discovered this plugin thanks again to Douglas Karr. Popular blogs with high page ranking using this plugin do tend to get abused. There’s always a way out of that

FeedBurner FeedSmith 2.2 Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. By FeedBurner.

firstRSS 0.2.0 firstRSS is a simple RSS aggregator for posts. By Chris Hatcher. If you are my sharepoint reader, have you checked out this page? Or this one? You will love this one for sure, if you use firefox!

Fold Category List 1.12 Provides PHP functions to display a folding category tree By Rob Schumann. I picked this up from Everton Blair of ConnectedInternet. I use this since Everton’s theme has this built in! I have picked up so much from Everton and ConnectedInternet. Just love them J!

Full Text Feed 1.03 Prevents WordPress 2.1+ from adding a more link to your website’s feed. By Ronald Heft, Jr.. Yes, my blog feeds are not full, even though I use this plugin. This plugin ensures full feeds and for me, it ensures feedflares J

Google Analytics 0.51v This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics to your blog. By Rich Boakes.

Google Sitemaps 3.0b4 This generator will create a sitemaps.org compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. Configuration Page

By Arne Brachhold.

MightyAdsense 4.1 Keep your adsense code & output it in posts. By mightyhitter. I love this plugin. Changed themes? Ads still appear before posts, after posts, inline – whatever you configured for your earlier theme.

More Smilies 2.1 Allows you to choose different emoticon (smiley) sets to use in WP. By Matt Read. I picked this one from Hans of BlogoSquare

NiceAdmin 1.0.0 NiceAdmin was built from the SpotMilk Theme, the Milk theme by Max Rudberg, and its overall main layout remains based on the default admin theme that comes with WP 2.1. The CSS was fine-tuned by Sean of Geek With Laptop. By Douglas Karr.

Douglas wanted to build something and I emailed him the digg admin plugin that I got off another blog. Check out what Doug did with that!

OpenID Delegation 0.1 Adds OpenID delegation to a WordPress blog allowing users to authenticate/signin/signup to OpenID supported sites with their blog’s URL. By Eran Sandler.

OpenID Registration $Rev: 85 $ WordPress OpenID Registration, Authentication, and Commenting. Requires JanRain PHP OpenID library 1.2.1. By Alan J Castonguay, Hans Granqvist.

Optimal Title 3.0 Mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the ‘separator’ to after the title rather than before. By Aaron Schaefer.

Reinvigorate 1.0 Reinvigorate tracking plugin for WordPress. By Sean McNamara.

This plugin is by blog stats invite only Reinvigorate.

Related Posts 2.04 Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. By Alexander Malov, Mike Lu & Jon Bourne.

Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form v.2.0WP B20070414 This powerful yet easy-to-install contact form features exceptional accessibility and usability while still providing extensive anti-spam and anti-exploit security features. By Mike Cherim and Mike Jolley.

This plugin in combination with Akismet, SK2 and Bad Behaviour takes forefront in spam protection

Sideblog WordPress Plugin 3.6 A simple aside plugin.

This plugin delivers RSS exclusive feeds for my subscribed readers.

Spam Karma 2 2.2 r3 Ultimate Spam Killer for WordPress. By dr Dave.

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

Text Link Ads 3.0.1 Really Simple Web/RSS Advertising For Personal or Commercial Use By Justin Klemm & Matthew Drouin & Alex King.

Ultimate Tag Warrior 3.1415926 Ultimate Tag Warrior is a tagging plugin, that’s heavy on tag visualization. I Like Pi! By Christine Davis.

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

WordPress.com Stats 1.0 Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key. By Andy Skelton.

So that makes 4 web stats plugins – Clicky, WordPress.com, Reinvirogate and Google. Which one do you use and which is best?

Would you recommend any other plugins? Less the better heh ?

1st Year: Plugin Power was published on Alpesh Nakar's Blog

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Logo for you blog, does it matter?

Alpesh — Sun, 06 May 2007 19:00:27 +0000

One of the many ‘things’ you want to have for your blog, to individualise your identity. Does that make sense? Well to me it does. To stand out from the million blogs, especially when you cannot afford to have a custom theme, you would want to have atleast a well designed logo and favicon for your blog.

Mr Byte from Link O Byte, has recently written a cool howto to create your own Web 2 logo. In all honesty, I liked the logo and also the favicon. He has done it well using Adobe Photoshop CS. I ain’t a designer, but I would love to try out his tutorial to see if I can come up withÂ something early next week.

Well done Mr. Byte! I am not sure, if a logo could fit my current theme design, which I have no intentions of changing for quite a while. What do you think? Will it make any difference?

Blog Bump

Logo for you blog, does it matter? was published on Alpesh Nakar's Blog

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Speedlink's: April 27 2007

Alpesh — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 13:31:04 +0000

It’s almost Saturday for me. But hey, I’d had to get this out the door Well this week the focus is definitely on WordPress. Optimising, customising your favourite blog platform. There are heaps of ‘resources’ and I think you can never get enough.

Let’s start with WP Admin Dashboard.

My Blog Mate Douglas crankedÂ up a cool ‘Nice Admin‘ plugin after I sent him another dashboard custom plugin. It is cool and you must have this. I have it on all my ‘blogs’.

Miriam shares a plugin that will replace your dashboard with custom feeds. Cool

Small Potato of 30 WordPress in 30 days fame has started a new series – reviewing WordPress Themes that designers submit. Check it out!

Mark blogs about WordPress Theme Generator. Have you tried that already?

And last but not least, change that login page for your wordpress blog platform!

I am sure you will find these useful. Have a good weekend!

Speedlink's: April 27 2007 was published on Alpesh Nakar's Blog

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WebSnapr! Must Have!

Alpesh — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 00:42:58 +0000

Thats exactly what it does! Snapshot (screenshots) of almost any webpage. It shows a thumbnail of the webpage, before you click on it.

Thats the snapshot my blog, I got after typing in http://images.websnapr.com/?url=alpesh.nakars.com/blog

And…

It’s got some cool tools, including 2 plugin for WordPress as well!!!

Some plugins and useful implementations using WebSnapr:

WebSnapr Preview Bubble: A simple, unobtrusive script used to display an overlay bubble showing a hyperlink target thumbnail. Author: Xavier Larrea.
Preview bubble of Microsoft.com
WP-Websnapr WordPress plugin: Automatically allows visitors to preview your post’s linked websites by using Websnapr service. Author: Andres Santos.
Snapr WordPress plugin: Another WP plugin that integrates the WebSnapr service in your blog. Author: XSBlog2.0

Check it out!

del.icio.us tags: Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Tools, WordPress plugins, WordPress, Snapr, WebSnapr

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WebSnapr! Must Have! was published on Alpesh Nakar's Blog

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