Darren recently conducted a quiz on ‘Are You a ProBlogger?’. I took part in it and the result- I am a Serious Amateur with 21 points out of 40. The quiz was conducted just for fun and to test a WordPress Plugin.

Have you taken part in the quiz? What is your score?

Today when I was working on my theme, I found that the changes were not being shown at times. This problem is due to the default Cache system of WordPress. It does not give you any option to delete it’s cache also.

That’s why I installed WordPress Cache Inspect. The plugin helps us analyse the behaviour of the cache builtin to WordPress v2.0. It provides the administrator with a quick overview of how the cache is performing and allows the cache to be cleared manually from an Admin page.

Installation is easy. All you have to do is upload and activate the plugin. And a menu ‘Cache’ comes up under Manage in the Admin Panel. From there you will be able to clear the cache whenever you want.

As long as you are logged in, the plugin displays a small semi-transparent box in the top right hand corner of the page that displays the administrator with a quick overview of how the cache is performing.

Note: This plugin requires WordPress 2.0 or later to function as it relies on the existance of the cache and the ability to detect plugin activation/deactivation to register the new manage_cache role.

I have added this plugin to the WordPress Plugin Collection which currently lists out 40 useful plugins

Download WordPress Cache Inspect

Paul Stamatiou shared his OPML with his readers today and I liked the idea. So I thought of doing the same. For those of you who do not know what OPML is-

OPML stands for Outline Processor Markup Language and is the XML format for an outline. It is the standard and preferred format for importing and exporting a collection of feeds

If you love to read Blogs, feel free to import my OPML. It has currently about 64 feeds. You may share your OPML here if you wish.

Download my OPML

You maybe already knowing that Google sometimes shows images next to Adsense Ads. Here are some of the images collected by Telendro.

Via Google Blogoscoped

Nowadays many people have added my site to their Blogroll and I thank them all for that. But the problem is that most of them have linked to http://johntp.com and not www.johntp.com, Please correct this as soon as possible as I am currently facing a problem with my PageRank.

Please do link me on your site if you find my blog useful

For the past few days, I have been spending my time fixing and optimizing my blog. The first thing I had to do was to fix the header which had display problems in Mac, Linux and some other Operating Systems. The tough part here was to confirm that I had fixed the problem because I only had Windows XP. Thanks to LiewCF for the confirmation and screenshot in Firefox on his Mac.

Secondly I thought of optimizing my blog for Search Engines by putting unique meta description tag to all of my pages. For this I used the head meta description WordPress plugin. I also tried to validate my XHTML. Within an hour I reduced 200 errors to 34. I hope this helps bots in crawling my pages more easily. I have noticed an improvement in the number of indexed pages by Google from 14,900 to 15,700. This does not have to be because of the fixed errors, but I hope it helps.

I made a few changes to the Header and redesigned my Comments Template.

I tried to Speed up my site by using shorthand CSS properties, removing unnecessary META tags, putting CSS and JavaScript into external documents, removing the unwanted codes to plugins I don’t use for example Flickr and Del.icio.us. Then removed the comments and white spaces with the help of CSS Tweak. I also removed a few unneccesary images and uninstalled a few WordPress Plugins that I don’t use frequently to reduce database calls. I also removed the Adsense Ads from footer.

Now I have to combine my contentwise.css and style.css after removing the unneccesary codes. Many more things to do…

I recommend that you also reinvent your blog with a few tweaks or a complete redesign of your blog theme. It can help you stimulate new interest in old readers and also draw in new readers

Zeo backported the new WordPress login page to be used in 2.0.4 and previous versions of WordPress. The new login page is currently available only on WordPress.com and 2.1.

To get the new Login page, download the files containing the CSS style sheet and background image from here

Installation

Make necessary backup to your current wp-admin/wp-admin.css. Download and extract the zip file to your WordPress installation root folder. It will attempt to overwrite your current wp-admin.css. If everything goes OK, you will see the new login page on your blog.

via Zeo’s Blog

The people at Meebo recently announced a new service called MeeboMe that lets your visitors chat directly with you on any web page. The sad part is that this isn’t a shoutbox where every visitor can see each other–it’s a direct connection to you, just like an instant messenger. It’s a widget for WordPress.

If you have a blog on WordPress.com and a widget-ready theme, just go to your Presentation>Widgets admin page and drop the widget into your sidebar. Then go to meebome.com, get a bit of code and paste it into the widget. Save the changes. As long as you’re logged in at meebo.com, your visitors will be able to chat with you directly!

In case your WordPress blog is not hosted on WordPress.com, you can paste the embed code right into a Text widget.

You can see the Meebo Widget in action here.

via WordPress Blog

15 years ago, on 6th August 1991, Sir Tim Berners-Lee posted a message on Usenet about a project called WorldWideWeb… “On that day the web went world wide” writes Amit Agarwal.

Now the WWW is 15 years old. So, HAPPY BIRTHDAY WORLD WIDE WEB !

I have no idea what I would have done without the Internet. Today it is like a part of my body. I can’t live without it

via Google System

I just came to know from TechCrunch that FeedBurner is beta testing a new product called “Networks” which are groups of blogs on a single topic that are using Feedburner to manage their RSS feed. The product is currently planned for a September launch.

The goal is to create high quality collections of similar types of publishers so as to allow people to subscribe to a single feed containing all of the content from all of the blogs in that category.

These are some of the benefits to Subscribers and Publishers as listed by Brad Feld.

Benefits to Subscribers

• It’s easy to find high quality relevant bloggers / feeds for a specific topic through the aggregation into a Network.
• There will be a “micro-portal” for each Network – you’ll be able to go to a landing page that lists all the members of the network, selectively subscribe to their feeds, or explore their blogs.
• You’ll be able to subscribe to the spliced Network feed

Benefits to Publishers

• The “micro-portal” will be another place for subscribers to find your blog / feed.
• You will get new readers as a result of people that subscribe to the spliced feed
• Advertisers will be able buy ads in the Network with higher quality advertising that is relevant to the readers of feeds in the Network.
• You’ll have Network oriented publicity tools which will help cross-promote feeds in the network.
• You might make some new friends via your fellow Network members.

via TechCrunch