This blog has been quiet, but it doesn’t mean that my life as a geek has been put on hold.

Far from it, as you can guess from the title of this post.

First off, I’ve scheduled a release of the latest version of the Top Commentators Widget sometime in November. A couple of bugs were mentioned by users like you, which I hope can be addressed by v.1.4. So, thanks for taking the time to report the errors. Please continue to do so by going to WP.org’s Support Forum if you can find anything else that’s in the widget in need of improvement. Information like these help make TCW useful and usable.

Secondly, I’m cooking up a project that I started three months ago (infact, it was two weeks after I gave birth to my son with designer genes). And it wasn’t until recently that I found out it has a name, thanks to my recent endeavor into Drupal.

My project is called the WordPress Installation Profiles. It might not work the way the Drupal community does it, but the idea is more or less there. This idea has also been discussed before, but as the post mentioned, the closest one out there was done by WordPress QI, and that’s still not quite like what I was hoping.

This idea came about after I saw a couple of Internet marketers out there monetizing a “software” that supposedly improves your WordPress site’s SEO. Upon further investigation, it turned out that it was merely a collection of already well-known (and free!) WordPress plugins, packaged into a single zipped file, and can be installed with a few clicks through a customized install.php file. I realized that, hey, I can do this too!

I was thinking of building one, then selling them off. But then I thought, in the spirit of open-source and WordPress, why not make them free as well? So, yeah, it’ll be available for you to download, FREE!

My first WordPress installation profile will be created around the concept of affiliate marketing blogs, with the following plugin options built into it:

• autoresponders
• opt-in subscriptions
• affiliate products auto-detection
• ad rotator / manager
• those SEO plugins for sure

This profile should also include a suitable theme, which I’m still trying to decide which to use. Then once this is done, I’ll be leveraging my Blogging Fu web site, where it will serve as a repository for all the installation profiles which I will be building later.

I’ll figure out my monetizing strategy later, but one thing’s for sure, those readily-available installation profiles will remain free once they are up there for downloading.

Any comments? Suggestions? Feel free to vent in the comments section below.

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I’ve finally come around to fixing the bugs in this version of TCW. I have added in most of the codes that support Gravatar, thanks to the work of Sergio Nascimento.

Hopefully the next update would include the ability to add multiple TCW to more than one sidebar within a blog, as suggested by someone via Facebook. I’ll do what I can

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Update: SOLVED! Dagnabit! Apparently, disabling ONLY my Robots Meta plugin did the trick! Db0 is my lifesaver!

A warning by Google Webmasters alerted me to a problem I didn’t realize until quite recently. I have tried for the past three days to figure out why my monthly Archives link stopped working the way it suppose to. Have a look at my sidebar, scroll down until you see my Archives section, and click on, let’s say, my March 2008 posts archive. You’ll notice that it does a redirect to my main index page, instead of listing out the posts for March 2008. Strangely, my Categories and Tags permalinks are working as normal.

I’ve tried the following fixes that I found when scouring the Web to solve this:

1. Adding “/category” and “/tag” in the Categories and Tag permalink setting. I did that, but the problem didn’t run away.
2. Resetting the Permalinks to default. Nope, that didn’t repair the Archives, either. Again, Categories and Tags, as well as single posts and pages reflected the default setting and worked.
3. Inserting “/index.php” before the custom and default permalink. Didn’t work, either. Besides, I’m using a Linux hosting, and index.php is usually used as a fix for those hosting under Windows.
4. Disabled all my plugins. Every last one of them. That didn’t work.
5. Reset my .htaccess file. I backed up my original .htaccess file, emptied out the one in the server, and got the WordPress Permalinks do a fresh rewrite on the server’s .htaccess.Though the fresh Permalinks setting appeared in the .htaccess files, my Archives links still didn’t work.
6. Overwrite wp-includes/rewrite.php to those in versions WP2.3.3 and WP2.5, fixes and otherwise. That just caused my blog to be ridden with so much call function errors, so obviously that didn’t work, either.

I’m at a loss. I’d like to downgrade to WordPress 2.3.3, but I didn’t have my version 2.3.3 database backup, and I dread what happens if I do downgrade. I expect it will break everything in my blog.

Sheesh. I made it clear here and here how much I disliked these recent “improvements” that were done since WordPress 2.5, and I should have stuck to my guts on staying with WP 2.3.3 if I were not so worried about missing out on all those security patches.

What frustrates me the most is that I tried to recreate the problem in my local sandbox to no avail! Don’t tell me that after all these while I thought I was expert enough in WordPress, my brain has now regressed to a WP level n00b!

HELP!

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Instant Upgrade: Upgrade your WordPress-Installation with one simple click.

This is one of the plugins in my blog I could never live without. I installed it just before I went into a blog hiatus about 3 months ago. I used to do my WordPress upgrades manually, by FTPing to and fro my server. Instant Upgrade helps me to do that in about 0.001 seconds. The interesting part about this plugin is its ability to downgrade to a lower version of WordPress should you choose to do so, although I haven’t personally tested it myself for fear of a database screw-up.

Alex Günsche did a good work on this simple plugin. I’m sure there’s a few more WP upgrade plugins out there that works as well or better than Instant Upgrade, and I have tried two others, both didn’t work at all.

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I have been working on two main things for the past two months — frantically doing sponsored posts, and fiddling with more WordPress plugins.

Installing the Math Comment Spam Protection has definitely been one of the smartest moves I’ve made with my blog. Not only was it easy to install, but the spam comments Akismet captured made a staggering drop from 50ish a day to only one every other day! Another good thing that comes with installing this plugin is that I don’t have to moderate my comments anymore, and my commenters can get the instant gratification of immediately seeing their comments posted. Now I have more time to bloghop and make more dough.

I didn’t pay much attention with the new features that were to be in WordPress 2.3, so I couldn’t help but curse myself when I found out — after upgrading to WP 2.3 — that the new version comes with a built-in tagging support. Sheesh, if I had known, I wouldn’t even bother installing Ultimate Tag Warrior two weeks prior. For the sake of supposedly improving my blog SEO, I had to endure some temporary brain cramps as I tried to understand why in the world I would need to activate three UTW plugins in my dashboard, and looked through the unending options I had to go through. I just find UTW to be a hassle, and ultimately my bad experience with UTW prompted me to remove it, and to stick to the simple tagging option.

I’ve only slowed down in my WordPress plugin tinkering this week (due to my next big plan on making money) — I should update the WordPress Plugin I Use page after this.

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