Wordpress on Shivanand Velmurugan — Product leader. Systems thinker.

Hey wordpress guys, have you heard of diff?!

Tue, 06 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I hate having to upgrade software. I truly do. I release a version every 3 months, and it try to make the upgrade as painless as possible. For an application like wordpress, that has been around for such a long, I would expect that they would do something to make it a little easier to upgrade.

Ok. Sorry about the rant, but here is my problem: the download for wordpress 2.5.1 is around 1 MB, but what has really changed is only a few lines. However, according to wordpress, you have to go through a time-consuming process to get your blog up to date.

EX-SideRSS

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

After several months of keeping away from updating or changing my website, I broke the fast today. I found a wonderful plugin, sideRSS, which allows display of RSS feeds within a blog’s sidebar. As usual, I needed a specific functionality that was not supported the way I wanted it. I hacked it a little bit, renamed the plugin, and posted a custom version for download on my website.

If you need to share Google Shared Items, on your blog, but hate to include javascript (like I do), then use this. You can download it here (right-click and use “Save Target As…”) and find install information here.

Wordpress commended for lack of spam

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Me and thousands of other people, continue to use wordpress, one of the leading blog management systems (sounds kewl, eh? ;) ), and proof that is it in fact leading is here.

Apparently, Wordpress.com, has the least spam, compared to other free blog-hosting services. The honored list of competitors, include the likes of google, myspace and AOL, each one of them goliaths! Matt Mullenweg, the creator of Wordpress, associates the success of wordpress.com spam protection to Akismet. This is something that I use now. I used spam-karma before this, which was pretty good, but with Akismet, it is almost zero-management.

Website clean up

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been hosting this site for over 2 years now. Nothing much has come of it, except satisfying my own ever-growing obsession with all things that are related to “The Web”.

Over time, I have managed to accumalate a lot of unwanted scripts, html files, tools and code snippets, that I have randomly uploaded to my website. It is a junkyard of sorts, and several attempts at clean it up has ended in adding more crud.

Common Access Portal

Sat, 20 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

With advent of web 2.0, and some habits cultivated over the last decade, I have a certain list of tasks that I do everyday. I current visit a bunch of websites more than once a day, and an integrated interface would do me so much good.

mail, a whole set of accounts, gmail, yahoo, etc
feed readers
blog editor
orkut
del.icio
google notebook

What is lacking, is the ability to have a single sign-on/account mgmt capability, a common dashboard, ability to cross-launch/cross-post content.

Page link in wordpress

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I have been wondering for sometime now, how K2, added an entry in pages, but the content was controlled from the one of the php files in the theme directory.

It turns out that is is very simple (yet elegant … hat’s off to wordpress guys). I used this to integrate FAlbum into K2.

Okay, let’s get on with the tutorial:
*WARNING*: Take a backup of your database before you proceed with the following