I’ve just upgraded my Blogging software to WordPress latest version 2.5

Since I skipped a version I noticed huge improvements, tags, widgets, new dashboard, new interfaces, more info in this post WordPress 2.5

Every Eid vacation I end up with an extra free time, I usually use it to learn new stuff, the latest vacation I decided to learn Drupal. Drupal is a Content management system (CMS), it is basically a software to help you manage your content.

Drupal is a modular and customizable CMS, you can use it to build different types of web sites, a Blog, company or organization web site, community website, you name it.

rayed.com to new server with upgraded softwares:
FreeBSD 6.2
Apache 2
PHP 5
MySQL 5

Today me and Abdullah launched Muntaqa.

Muntaqa is a website that collect large number of email groups, e.g. AbuNawaf, and displays them in a single page, people can vote, bookmark, and comment on all emails.

In the front page you will get the most popular emails, so you want miss any interesting emails in the Arabic web sphere 🙂

Muntaqa works like Digg, but instead of submitting websites, we automatically submit emails from email groups. A big population of computer users in Arab world (at least in Saudi Arabia) still consider the emails as the only form of publishing in the Internet.

On of the cool new features of WordPress 2.1 is “Front Page” options it allows you to make WordPress front page a static page instead of showing latest post.
This make WordPress suitable as CMS for small websites, without any heavy customizations.

UPDATE: I found an easier way to do the same thing Check it out

In my blog I write in both languages English and Arabic, but I have to switch text direction from the template default English direction “Left to Right” to Arabic “Right to Left”.

One way do to it is to add HTML tags in each Arabic entry.

Another way to do it is to utilize WordPress “Custom Fields” feature, WordPress allows you to add custom fields to any entry, so I add a new custom field to my Arabic entries, the key will be “wp_direction” and the value will be “rtl”.

My dear Friend Fahad AlShenaifi finally found a time to launch his blog, http://fahadblog.com/wordpress/

The blog in English, and talk about Ubuntu, computer security, and him self.

Don’t miss his photo gallery.

Inpired by Flickr’s Dirty Little Secret post, about how Flickr thumbnails make the photo prettier than the original photo.

The article suggest that Flick sharpen the image before it resize it.

So I did my own test, this the result and you are the judge:

Image 1, normal resize.

Image 2, sharpen before resize.

Sharpened and saturated +100:

All I need to know is how to do it from inside PHP.

Few weeks ago I started using Google Reader, and so far it is amazing. Basically you subscribe all your RSS feeds you are interested in Google Reader, and instead of visiting 10 or 20 website, you visit Reader page to get the latest updates.

The integration with Firefox is amazing, just click on RSS icon and you can add it directly to Google Reader, very easy.

I used to use Thunderbird for a while for RSS, but after I set it up I forgot to use it. The subscription method is bit more complex than Google reader, and lack of a single folder for all of my RSS feeds make it useless.

Since I upgraded my WordPress to version 2 I used Akismet to protect my from comment spam, it did a great job for a while but lately it passes a lot of spam, I am not sure what is the problem but I am suspecting some network problems.

So until I resolve this problem I’ll try using CaptCha! plug-in, it uses captcha method to prevent spamming.

Captcha works as follow, when you want to submit a comment, the website displays an image with few characters shown in wave shapes, and you requested to type the character you see to accept your comment, the idea is to prevent automatic script from submitting comment because they can not read the character in the screen, even if they used OCR it would be very hard to recognize it.

Pingback is a method for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles.

Implementing Pingback feature is very easy, you need to add the following code to your template:

<link rel="pingback" href="http://www.alriyadh.com/php/xmlrpc/" />


This code will make other blogging software notify your software that it is linking to it, It do this by sending “pingback.ping” XML-RPC request to the given URL, when you get the notification you can add it to the database, email it, or do what ever you want with it.

It has been 4 months since I put Google ads on my site, and so far the result are rediclousy funny, I only earned $4 🙂 , I didn’t expect to get anything at all, and even if I did I doubt that they will send to Saudi Arabia.

Today, I noticed an ad that I didn’t like and it appeared very frequently, so I decided to block it, fortunately Google have a mechanisim for that but it will take some time, so I decided to switch from text ads to image ads, and change the location of the banner to better place, and I will wait to see how it will affect my earnings.

While upgrading WordPress to version 2, I backed up my database and I noticed that the comments table size is around 1.7MB which is huge, I don’t have that many comments. I find out that WordPress don’t delete comments even if they were marked spam, so I deleted them manually, so go check your comments table and save some space.

WP1 Spam detection:
WordPress 1.x has a feature that mark comments as spam if they match certin keywords, it was doing very good job, except for that last few weeks I start getting new spam comments so I had to update my spam keywods.

Today I had to finish writing some code for Alriyadh Worldcup web site, and I was expecting it to take at least 5 to 6 hours, and it had to be finished today, so I planned all my evening for that coding session

Fortunately I finished the job in 2 hours, and I had some extra time in my hand, so I decided to do something I planned to do for very long time, upgrade WordPress, so I sat down and upgrade it from version 1.5 to the latest version, alhamdu lelah the upgrade process was very smoth, althogh some features didn’t work, mainy the rich text editing feature.

Today my friend Feras Al-Jumah sent me a link to a WordPress theme called PaintedDesert. I liked it so much that I installed it on my blog, hope everybody like it.
Thanks Feras for the link.

Here is a screenshot of my old theme:

Today I’ll end my Alexa experiment. During the last 60 days I tried to improve my Alexa ranking, my ranking jumped from 1,603,040 to 133,430.

Today I removed Alexa ranking banner in my website footer, and I’ll remove all A9 toolbar extension from Firefox, it is occupying 20,000 pixels from my screen and I rarely use it.

WikiPedia definition:

Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website.

I’ve just received my Google Analytics Invitation, so I subscribed to the free service. Of course no interesting reports until now, but I’ll keep you updated when I got anything interesting.

Finally my website http://rayed.com/ became the first result in Google when searching for “Rayed”:
http://www.google.com/search?q=rayed

For years and years when you search for my name you will get X-Ray related sites, because the past of the verb “ray” is “rayed”.

I signed up with Google AdSense, and you can find Google Ads in sidebar, I am still learning about the AdDense program.
But basically it allow content providers (i.e. owner of Internet websites) to earn money by displaying google ads, and each time a person click on an add it add more credit to him.
To learn more here are some links from Wikipedia links:
AdSense
AdWords
Mediabot

Long time ago I built a PHP script that fetch and parse Arabic BBC news and format them in Javscript format, this can be used by adding few HTML code in your website.

The script located at: http://rayed.com/bbcjs.php3

I stopped the script more than 5 years ago, but until now I found many entries in my log asking for that file, so I decide to take an action, I put the file back but I put a warning message to notify the user that the script is no longer working.

I chaned the default image that comes with the default WordPress theme, what do you think about it.

My ranking from:
1,603,040
To:
1,052,170
In less than 10 days.

UPDATE: My ranking jumped to 629,132, I am starting to enjoy this 😉
UPDATE: Day 17 my ranking is now 473,585.
UPDATE: Day 20 my ranking is now 388,412.
UPDATE: Day 23 my ranking is now 360,154, I guess it starting to slow down.
UPDATE: Day 28 my ranking is now 322,116.

I really hate Alexa, and I never trust their ranking method, you must install their toolbar to get counted but I never saw any one using their toolbar, but unfortunately it is the only was to measure website popularity.

Any way I am going to use A9 toolbar (which is part of Amazon, who in turn own Alexa), and I added Alexa Badge in the bottom of my page to see how this will affect my website ranking.

Today a friend of mine opened my old web site http://myweb.saudi.net.sa/rayed/ and I noticed that my flickr badge is working again! I thought he used an external proxy, but he wasn’t 🙂
Flickr is open again but is it for good or it is just a mistake from ISU.
I enabled my Flickr badge again, I miss Flickr!
UPDATE: ISU blocked flickr again 🙁
UPDATE: It is open now, I am confused!
UPDATE: It seems that Flickr is open in Riyadh proxies, and not on Jeddah proxies, I hope it is closed by mistake.

WordPress the blogging software that runs my site released version 2.
A lot of new features, the admin interface is complete changed with many new enhancements, they also added WYSIWYG editor, and easier file upload.

This a very disturbing story, I don’t recommend reading it at all, or at least don’t try to visualize the story.

A family left their 3 kids, oldest is 8, at home with the family maid, they were playing in the garden with a small kitten they have, while playing it rained and the kitten got wet, so the kids thought they need to dry her, so they put her in the microwave and they clicked random numbers and started cooking the poor kitten, after few minutes the microwave exploded and the kitten internal part shattered all over the kitchen.

If you like SlashDot the technical news site, you will love Digg.

My first impression of digg is that Digg has more links, and less discussion.

The major advantage about Digg is that stories are picked by users not by ad editor, which makes it self maintained site! check Digg FAQ.

There is even a dedicated website to compare Digg to Slashdot, and give score to based on how fast they post a news, so far the result Digg 24, Slashdot 14:
http://diggvsdot.com/

ISU blocked Flickr for the third time in less than a year, I HATE YOU ISU.

Please help me to unblock Flickr by filing URL unblocking request.

The importance of flickr is that thousands of weblogs and personal websites host their image at flickr, so by blocking flickr they blocked all images from all of these weblogs.

I added small Javascript to the list:

<select onchange=" location.href= this.options[this.selectedIndex].value; ">


I moved my blog from Blogger to WordPress the process was very easy, but I am still having difficulties with slow parts of WordPress!

I am thinking seriously about moving from Blogger to WordPress, Blogger is really great service, I mainly choose it because it doesn’t need any server side scripting at all, i.e. it will work with SAUDI NET myweb service.
But lately I moved some parts of my site to a new server, and I now have a more reliable Apache+PHP+MySQL installation, and start playing with wordpress and it was really cool feature, I even built a plugin 🙂
any way here is my test wordpress page: (http://rayed.rayed.com/wordpress/)

WordPress is a personal blogging software, works with PHP and MySQL.
The first page of WordPress administration page is called dash board it usually takes forever to load, this due the fact that WordPress display some RSS feed from its development blog.
The loading problem caused by trying to access the RSS feed with a proxy server, which won’t work inside Saudi Arabia, so here is the fix, in the file wp-includes/class-snoopy.php modify the proxy lines to be something like:

var $proxy_host = "proxy.saudi.net.sa"; // proxy host to use
var $proxy_port = "8080"; // proxy port to use


Bookmarks … store them, categorize them, share them, plus much more…
Register and find out how great is it.
http://del.icio.us/