WP Euro 2008 - Liven up Euro 2008 in your wordpress blog

The second most anticipated football event in the world after World Cup, Euro 2008 will be kicked off in the next 10/11 days (depend on your region). This round, the championship will be co-hosted by Austria-Switzerland.

And to remind you that (especially girls), your favorite team, England is not qualified. So don’t expect to watch the likes of Beckham or Rooney on TV. But perhaps ,they still be there as spectator, pity them.. lol

To liven up this game among Wordpress community, Sven Kubiak has created WP Euro 2008, a wordpress plugin to display the live result and incoming match on your wordpress blog. Cool right??

wp-euro-2008

The data is taken from Open Liga (via web service) and refreshed every 5 minutes. You must have PHP 5 with SOAP extension to have this plugin work. My attempt to install it was unsuccessful due to my PHP 5 lacking this extension.

This is must have plugin for Zaki and Zool ( you have arsenal blog rite??), since they’re great fan of football. I’m going for France! Who do you think will win?

Plugin Homepage (translated to english)

Auto blogging with wordpress + unique article wizard plugin

Previously I had written on how to fill up your article directory with free articles from UAW. With similar service, you can actually turn your Wordpress into article directory using this plugin.

Preparation before installation.
It is recommended to do keyword and market research before the setup of any new blogs. Since no category is provided/created by this plugin or by UAW, you’re required to create appropriate categories prior to installation, although you can add or remove the category later on.

Installation

Like other plugins, installation is straight forward. Upload the plugin folder into the /wp-content/plugin and activate it from your plugin menu.

After installation, if you’re using Wordpress 2.5.1, browse to setting followed by UAW-Control. This is the UAW admin menu, where you setup everything including how many articles you want to receive per day, categories (it is based on the categories you have created earlier) and etc

The plugin might not work perfectly at the moment. UAW is in the middle of making this plugin better (they’d just finished gathering info from the user), so you might see certain issues arising such as below

Articles received not matching the category

No article received for certain category

After everything is in place and you have start receiving articles, you might want to add, modify or remove categories, or move the articles from one category to another.

Auto blogging
This is what I was talking about before. Yes, this is possible with the combination of this plugin with Wordpress and Blogspot. Set it to auto approve each articles on the niche topic of your choice, and you got blog that has new contents everyday.

I have read about RSStoblog or Article Extractor plugin that allows you to setup article directory on Wordpress platform or doing auto posting, but that plugin will cause you hundred bucks. With this plugin, you can kick your auto blogging within a minute and free of charge.

Every tool has its down side and this plugin is not perfect either. While the combination of RSStoblog + Article Extractor can provide you the article on the topic of your choice on daily basis, UAW plugin is not able to do so 100%. First, it still depends on the article availability at certain time, and secondly, it is possible that certain categories won’t have or receive any articles, again due to no article on that particular topic.

Another thing that I don’t really recommend is, if let’s say you’re away or unable to update your blog, turn on this plugin and let it posts a new article daily. But, this might turn your visitor away from your blog later on.

Btw, this article is not meant to teach you how to spam the net with duplicate contents on different blogs, but to give you idea on how you can setup auto-pilot blog. Use it at your own risk. ;~)

The plugin control panel has almost similar pages : Site Demo

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zaki 3 May 2008 plugin Article Directory, auto blogging, UAW plugin, unique article wizard 16 Comments

Pages broken after wordpress 2.5.1 upgrade

Apparently the Wordpress 2.5.1 upgrade last week did not went smooth as what I initially thought. I missed testing my wordpress pages (not post) above such author, contact form. If you notice, all pages were broken. It’ll direct me to 404 page. I only came across to this issue when I trying to add top post and archive page. It works on preview but not when it get published

Root cause?
It seems like this is related to permalink , not related to what so ever plugin. Upon checking on Wordpress forum, it has been reported since version 2.5, but similar issue is still there. If I modify back the permalink structure to default setup, or using resolution (a) below, the pages are accessible.

Resolution

a) for normal or ‘pretty’ permalink (most of us use this)

Simply change your permalink to /%postname%/ or use default structure . It works in this blog, but I prefer to to stay with current permalink /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ since all my contents were indexed this way by search engine. I worried that Google will see this as broken link, even though I have Permalink Redirect plugin installed. Hopefully I manage to find the permanent fix soon

b) For PATHINFO permalink structure

This is for those who using Apache running on Windows or those that permalink structure beginning with index.php E.g /index.php/%postname%/ .Download new rewrite.php from here, and replace the current file at your /wp-include directory. You can find the discussion’s thread here.

Looks like I had to live with broken pages at least for now, for the sake of permalink and the contents indexed by search engines. Since I don’t have any contact form, should you have any inquiry, just leave it at any comment section, or shoot me an email to zakifahmi at gmail dot com

Learn more about permalink from this page. Heck, I waste a lot of time to figure out this fix since last night, but at least I learn a lot of things. Fair enough!!

zaki 1 May 2008 Wordpress broken link, page broken, Wordpress, wordpress 2.5.1 19 Comments

Blogjer is now powered by wordpress 2.5.1

Yeah. Wordpress 2.5.1 is now available for download. According to the announcement page, it fixes over 70 bugs on 2.5 released.

I consider myself lucky since I have planned and allocated my time today to upgrade blogjer at least to Wordpress 2.5. But thank God, the latest version is available there, so this is a bonus for me. In fact, I didn’t even know that 2.5.1 had just been released 2 days ago.

Since this blog was setup almost a year ago, this is the first time I’m upgrading this blog. I’m kinda lazy sometimes to upgrade my Wordpress. Until that Sunday..

The upgrading process runs smoothly. But the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade is not working this round. I don’t know why. It got stuck in the step of downloading the latest Wordpress file. So I continued the installation manually. Thanks to Am for the precious Upgrade Wordpress Tutorial. I didn’t know that the upgrade process is pretty simple and straight forward though.

Overall, I did not see any big issue. Only my SK2 is not working properly, it prompts a message error on its plugin setup, but I have since disabled it and enabled back my Akismat temporarily. I’m in a hurry to read a few ebooks that I had just bought yesterday.

I have also migrated blogjer to Serverfreak to take advantage of a more powerful server (hopefully) and to avoid intermittent downtime with Netkl. I still recommend Netkl, it is not their fault either (due to data center issue).

This is the first time I’m doing this. At first I would like to hire someone to do it, but after considering that I have a few more websites (bigger db and file) to be migrated soon, I say to myself why not you do it yourself. Save money and at least I have hands-on experience to do it. Furthermore, if I break apart blogjer, I still have other copy on another hosting.

It takes quite a while to boost my confidence to do it by myself, but these 2 tutorials at howtospoter and optiniche really is a time saver for me. Within an hour everything completed.

However, it took almost 2 days for the DNS replication to complete. When it was first set, DNS was pointing to the new web hosting in within 3 hours. However 1 day after that, it seems that the DNS had pointed back to the old webhosting (I put both server name in my nameserver, to avoid downtime). I’ve no idea why it happened, so in case if you’ve had encountered such a case, I’d appreciate if you can share it.

How to identify if you’re pointed to the new location? You can view the source and look for the line such as below

<link rel='stylesheet' href='http://www.blogjer.com......version=2.5.1' type='text/css' />
<link rel='stylesheet' href='http://www.blogjer.com......version=2.5.1' type='text/css' />
<link rel='stylesheet' href='http://www.blogjer.com......version=2.5.1' type='text/css' />

Btw, did you notice the performance improvement?

Have you upgrade your website?

You might want to consider upgrading your wordpress ASAP if this is what going to happen soon. Some screen shot of my new dashboard

The new dashboard

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Dashboard bottom

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Plugin page

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The new post editor, nice huh?

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Post editor bottom

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The new widget page, the old version function better I think

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Plugin menu, not much changes

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Some menu now located at the right hand side

zaki 28 April 2008 Wordpress 14 Comments

Free vs paid magazine-news wordpress themes

Magazine-news style Wordpress theme has became quite popular nowadays especially to established blog who as a lot of contents. Problogger.net and skorcareer.com.my are among establish blogs which has implemeted this theme. If you have intention to use or buy any theme, below themes are some that I found quite amazing.

Free version

Option

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