Today (July 1^st ) is known as the unofficial WordPress day, where fans from all over the world can thank the people behind WordPress and also can express their love for WordPress. They are also running an event and have some nice giveaways. All you have to do is to let everyone know why you love WordPress by leaving a comment at WPCandy or write a blog post about WordPress.

So instead of writing a post explaining why and how I love WordPress (which I have already done), I thought of sharing some information which will be useful for people who are interested in WordPress. So here we go..

Sometime ago Weblog Tools Collection published a list of Twitter users whom you can follow to get updated information about WordPress.

Nowdays I use FriendFeed more than Twitter (I have to confess this sometime). So I tried to find their corresponding FriendFeed usernames so that I can subscribe to them. The following is the list with their real names first, followed by their Twitter user names and then followed by their FriendFeed usernames.

• Matt Mullenweg - photomatt - No FriendFeed Account
• WordPress - WordPress This is the user account tied into the WordPress.org RSS Feed - No FriendFeed Account
• Lloyd Budd - lloydbudd - lloydbudd
• Donncha O Caoimh - donncha - donncha
• Mark Jaquith - markjaquith - markjaquith
• Lisa Sabin Wilson - LisaSabin - lisasabinwilson
• Brian Gardner - bgardner - No FriendFeed Account
• David Peralty - davidcubed - davidperalty
• Cory Miller - corymiller303 - No FriendFeed Account
• Steven Milne - wordpressguy - No FriendFeed Account
• Ozh - ozh - ozh
• Andrew Rickmann - arickmann - arickmann
• Ryan McCue - rmccue - No FriendFeed Account
• Joost de Valk - jdevalk - jdevalk
• Warwick Poole - warwickp - linuxinternet
• Ptah Dunbar - ptahdunbar - ptahdunbar
• Charles Stricklin - cstricklin - No FriendFeed Account
• Nathan Rice - nathanrice - No FriendFeed Account
• John Kolbert - johnkolbert - johnkolbert (private feed)
• 1catbiz - onecatbiz - No FriendFeed Account
• Hans Engel - hans_engel - hansengel
• Leland - themelab - No FriendFeed Account
• Ronald Huereca - ronalfy - No FriendFeed Account
• Ryan - ryanhellyer - No FriendFeed Account
• Ian Stewart - iandstewart - No FriendFeed Account
• BuddyPress - buddypressdev - No FriendFeed Account
• Mark Ghosh - laughinglizard - laughinglizard
• Jeff Chandler - jeffr0 - No FriendFeed Account
• Andy Peatling - apeatling - No FriendFeed Account
• Andy Skelton - skeltoac - No FriendFeed Account
• Michael Castilla - wpcandy - No FriendFeed Account

The following are some of my additions to the list which was not originally published by Weblog Tools Collection.

• Alex King - alexkingorg - alexkingorg
• Sudar - SudarMuthu - Sudar - Yeah, that’s me

I will try to keep the list updated and let me know if you feel I need to add someone else to this list. Till then happy FriendFeeding and my heart felt thanks to Matt and the team for an excellent product without which this site may never exist

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The way in which they have shut down has shocked me more than the fact that they have shut down the service.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not here to criticize or accuse them for shutting down. After all they were still in beta, (which means, use at your own risk). But I was rather annoyed that they didn’t even bother to send an email to the users, so that they can be prepared. It seems that they have posted a message in their website, but the users will visit the website only when they have to recover some documents which were already synced. The majority of the work was done by the desktop client and it is still running in my system tray, without giving any clue that the service was already shutdown.

I was one of the early adopters of the service and was so pleased with the service that I even wrote some tutorials about it. I have some critical documents which I update on daily basics. I wanted a simple solution to backup these documents and retrieve them based on date. DocSyncer was the perfect solution for me. I installed and pointed it to the directory in which I kept these documents and the client automatically backed up the documents to my Google Docs account.

A couple of day’s back I wanted to retrieve the document and tried to access the DocSyncer website but found that it was down. After a quick search in Google, I found that DocSyncer was dead. Last time I received an email from them was on April 22^nd, when they announced pro account. This is not the first time I was affected because a service which I was using shutdown its doors, but I would have really appreciated if they could have sent a simple email saying that the service is going to be shut down.

Anyways, thank you Cliff Shaw and DocSyncer team for an excellent service which I was using for the past couple of months and my best wishes for your next startup.

If anyone from DocSyncer is reading this, then can you please let me know whether it is possible to opensource DocSyncer, at least the client alone?

Meanwhile my search for an online backup system continues and I am planning to have a look at Windows Mesh and Dropbox. If anyone knows a better solution, then do let me know.

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This is the eighth edition of the Chennai Photowalk which is going to be on both June 15th and 22nd. We will start at Panagal Park in T.Nagar and proceed in an easterly direction down Thyagaraya road, and end the walk at Residency towers. The initiative is by Chandrachoodan Gopalakrishnan and you can get more information from his blog. You can also browse photos of the previous photowalks in Flickr.

For me, this is the first time to be part of a photowalk and so I am really excited. If you are in Chennai and ready to sacrifice a Sunday evening, then please do come. You don’t need to have an expensive camera; there are people who are going to shoot using their mobile cameras itself.

Update: You can find the photos which I took during the PhotoWalk in Flickr. There are lot of teddies out there

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• pipesCamp (Dec 21, 2007)

His stat’s blog - thestatbot which he started last month is currently at position 76 in the Techmeme Leaderboard (as I am writing this blog entry) and has already been mentioned by TechCrunch. It is a remarkable achievement for a blog which is less than 2 months old. Congrats Yuvi and all the best with thestatbot.

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PS: Frequent readers of my blog would have noticed that I am not very active these days; things are going fast in my personal life and the posting frequency will soon be normal.

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I am writing it down here so that all I have to remember is that I just need to search my blog if I need to do it again in future.

Okay the command you have to use is (I am assuming that you are not logged in as root, which is the recommended approach)

sudo update-alternatives --config editor

And then press the number corresponding to the editor which you want to use. Below is the screenshot of how it looked in my slice.

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If you are wondering what is CSS Naked day, then this is the definition from the official site

The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good ‘ol play on words. It’s time to show off your <body>.

If even you want to participate then register your site in the official site and then strip the CSS from your site. If you are on WordPress then you can use this plugin.

Happy stripping

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I am going to update my installation now and this blog might appear clunky while I am doing that. I have installed WordPress using svn so it is just a single shell command for me to update. Thanks to Joost, I converted my installation into a svn installation when WordPress 2.2.2 was released.

By the way this will be my last post using the old admin screens, I will post my experience with the new admin screens in a couple of days. Meanwhile if you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, then I highly recommend you to update to WordPress 2.5. Happy upgrading

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The main feature of the iPod audio book format is that the iPod can remember the last listening position and also we can adjust the reading speed in case, which is not possible if it is in MP3 format.

I started looking for a program to convert MP3 files to iPod audio book format and found an excellent program MP3 to iPod Audio Book Converter. It is free, opensource and the best part is that it works.

Download the program and install it. Once installed start the program from start menu and then click the Add button.

Select the MP3 files and then click the Open button. (You can also press shift to select multiple files)

Arrange the files in the correct order and then click the Start Conversion button. You can also edit the tags if you want.

The program will ask to specify the file name and once given it will start the conversion.
Once the program finishes you can add the file to iTunes and then sync it with iPod. Happy Listening

Links:

You can download MP3 to iPod Audio Book Converter from its download page.
You can also get some free Audio book from AudioBooksForFree.com

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• No related posts.

There were lot of arguments for and against the removal of this logo, at least for IE7. I found that there was even a ticket created in trac (WordPress public bug reporting database) for removing it, which was closed by Matt as wontfix. I personally felt it was a very minor thing to argue about and I neither agree nor disagree in removing it.

Someone in the thread suggested that we can create a Plugin which could output some CSS to hide the logo, which let me to create a very small (probably useless) Plugin called No Browse Happy Plugin. This is similar to the No Howdy Plugin by Ozh, very useless in my point of view but might matter a lot for someone.

If you look at the source code you could find that it is nothing fancy but just an echo statement which prints the following CSS code in the header.

#bh {
display: none;
}

In short, I just wasted two minutes to stop someone from wasting hours in arguing about something which is useless (at least in my point of view).

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I recently received a gift certificate for Rs 2000 from my office, which I can use to buy either books or cds. I am planning to spend Rs 2000 equally among technical, fiction and non-fiction books and I need your recommendation. For technical, I am planning to buy some books related to Ruby but I don’t have much idea for fiction and non-fiction books. So suggest me some books which I can buy.

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To run multiple instances, all you need to do is to pass the parameter nomutex to the Google Talk Exe file.

c:\program files\google\google talk\googletalk.exe" /nomutex

If you want, you can create a new shortcut in your desktop with this parameter.

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The default Apache configuration preserves the log files only for the last 10 days, but I wanted to permanently archive this files. After some searches in Google I came across an excellent program called Cronolog. Cronolog is a simple filter program which writes each log entry to a separate log file named after the filename format specified. You can use a variety of parameters like current date, time etc to define the filename template.

First we have to install cronolog, either by using aptitude or by downloading it from its download page. Then you have to change the log file name path in the virtual host file. (In Ubuntu Gusty, the virtual host files are situated in the path /etc/apache2/sites-enabled). I am using the following file format for this blog
# Custom log file locations
LogLevel warn
ErrorLog "|/usr/sbin/cronolog /path/to/logs/%Y/%m/%Y-%m-%d-sudarmuthu.com-error.log"
CustomLog "|/usr/sbin/cronolog /path/to/logs/%Y/%m/%Y-%m-%d-sudarmuthu.com-access.log" combined

which will store my log files in separate folders for each year and for each month, like the below hierarchy
/2007/12/2007-11-01-sudarmuthu.com-access.log
/2007/12/2007-11-02-sudarmuthu.com-access.log
......
/2008/01/2008-01-01-sudarmuthu.com-access.log
/2008/01/2008-01-02-sudarmuthu.com-access.log
......

You can use a variety of modifiers for the filename and I have documented some of them in the below table. You can get more information from its documentation.

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I am planning to constantly updated this post, so if you have any other links which might be useful do leave a comment and I will add them.

Homepage

• Official homepage - http://jquery.com/
• Official Plugin Repository - http://jquery.com/plugins/

References

• Official Documentation - http://docs.jquery.com/Main_Page
• Visual API Reference - http://visualjquery.com/
• jQuery API Browser - http://remysharp.com/jquery-api/

Tutorial/Articles

• Simplify Ajax development with jQuery - http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-ajaxjquery.html
• Easy Ajax with jQuery - http://www.sitepoint.com/article/ajax-jquery
• jQuery: Easy JavaScript for Designers - http://www.sitepoint.com/article/jquery-javascipt-designers
• jQuery: Write less, do more- http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/jquery-write-less-do-more/
• Creating a jQuery Plugin - http://docs.jquery.com/Plugins/Authoring

jQuery related slides

• A Short Introduction To jQuery - The slide which I prepared for my jQuery Presentation.
• jQuery in 15 minutes
• Extending jQuery
• JavaScript the Smart Way - Getting Started with jQuery
• Beginning Jquery In Drupal Theming
• jQuery - write less, do more javascript toolkit

Some useful Plugins

• LinkedSelect
• Auto-populating Select Boxes
• jQuery Validation Plugin
• jQuery UI Datepicker
• ScrollShow

jQuery Related Books

• jQuery in Action
• jQuery Reference Guide
• Learning jQuery: Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques

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Anyways to be positive I learned a lot of new things about jQuery when I did my research to prepare for the presentation, even though I have been using it for the past couple of months. Hope you guys also find my slides about jQuery useful.

| View | Upload your own

I have uploaded the slide to slideshare and you can download it from there. I have also collected lot of links about jQuery during my research and I will post them soon. Update: You can find these links here.

There were some great presentations and I particularly liked the talk on Django by KG (Oops! I forgot to find out whether he has a blog). I also learned lot of good things about Ruby on Rails. More reasons for me to get my hands dirty with Ruby on Rails.

Special thanks to Prabhu and other organizers for a wonderful event.

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The full source code of this gadget is available here and if you are interested you can add it to your Google personalised page by clicking this button.

After you add the gadget, you just need to enter your FeedBurner feed URL. The gadget will fetch the subscriber count for the past one week and will display it in a nice bar graph using Google Charts API.

API’s used

The following are the API’s used for creating this gadget

• Google Gadget API
• FeedBurner Awareness API
• Google Charts API

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You have to go to the Account settings tab and then click disconnect and then connect again. You will be taken to a page where you can select either Google Apps account or standard Gmail account.

This is very useful to me, since I have started to use my Google Apps account instead of the standard Gmail account. Good job DocSyncer!

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I followed my instinct and tried to see whether it is possible to do it in a simple way. In the end I accomplished it with less than 10 lines of code and more importantly without the need to edit the theme files. Another instance of the KISS principle in action

I packed it as a Plugin so that you can just drop it into your plugins directory, activate it and then forget about it. It is called Simple Reverse Comments and you can download it from my Plugins page.

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First is the response time graph from Site24×7, an excellent service to monitor your site’s uptime and response time.

Second is the graph from Google’s Webmaster tool, which shows the number of KB’s of data downloaded per day from my blog.

I have just 2 words to say - THANKYOU SLICEHOST

By the way I have also upgr