This is not another contest!! I’m happy to announce that there are 50 WPDesigner’s themes club accounts up for grab on first come first serve basis. No string attached

Last month, I paid USD5 to join this club which guarantees you at least 12 themes per year. The best thing about this club membership is, you’re free to redesign the template without having to put back the link to the original creator. In fact I’ve used in on my new blog which I’ll announce soon once it reach 20 posts

WPDesigner owner, Tung Do, nick named “Small Potato” is very generous to give away 20,000 memberships with certain condition. You can’t get this membership from him free of charge from him. But, the good news is, I can, but it is limited to first 50 person only

How to get your account? It still pending the download script from WPDesigner, but if you interested, please follow the guidelines below-

1. Compose an email to zakifahmi [at] gmail [dot] com. Replace [a] with @ and [dot] with .
2. Put subject “WPDesigner account@Blogjer.com”
3. Write whatever you want inside (as long as not SPAM, love letter or try to sell something). Send it and done. I’ll reply with download link once I get update from WPDesigner.

Update 7-March-2008 : I just got the download link and pass code. All emails replied

If you notice, blogjer.com is very slow for the last couple of days. I’m very much aware of this, but I couldn’t find out what was happening initially. Only blogjer.com is affected. The rest of the websites sharing the same web hosting package work fine.

After hours of digging, I finally know why. This is how it started. Few days ago, I installed WP-OpenId, OpenId plugin to allow commenting using OpenID standard, which means you can use your account such as Yahoo, Technorati to leave comments. But unfortunately it did not go as smooth as I had predicted.

The problem even started in the midst of activating this plugin. Since I’m still using php4, I have to change some part of the code to get the plugin activated. It works, but the problem didn’t stop there. On this plugin menu, there is 1 warning that I don’t expect to cause slowness on the whole blogjer.com. Furthermore it is a warning message only, not an error. I know it was my mistake for not doing further research when I see this error initially. My bad.. I leave the warning message in place without taking any action. This also causes the drop of the number of visitors and traffic to blogjer. 

I’m suspecting this is some kind of memory leaking perhaps

Warning: implode() [function.implode]: Bad arguments. in
/home/myusername/domains/mydomain/public_html/wp-content/plugins/openid/interface.php on line 379

There is adiscussion about this error, but no resolution is found at this point. I have deactivated and deleted the plugin from my hosting package, but it seems the problem can still be seen slightly. I’m thinking of installing WP-Cache2 to increase the performance, but maybe on a later stage and after doing feasibility study of this plugin. I don’t want the same problem reoccurring.

Off topic, I found this articles which is top of the google’s search for the keyword ‘how to improve Wordpress performance‘ but it seems like no one is commenting this article. Does it mean that its not good enough, or that Google has mistakenly put this article on top of search engine result?

In case if you’re interested on how to improve your wordpress performance, you better check out Wordpress optimization page. There are bunches of information available there.

I’m reviewing this blog structure and setting to see if it is set up properly and SEO optimized. 2 areas that I’m looking at : what is the best structure for permalink and if it is good to place the contents in multiple categories. It began when I was reading SEOBook’s blogger’s guide to SEO. 1 thing that caught my attention was this 1 video on why you should place your contents into a single category. Please view the video created by graywolf and you’ll understand why. Basically it is about duplicate contents in the eye of search engine. I’ve been occasionally placing my contents on more than 1 categories, so moving forward I should (and you too) avoid it.

Another areas that I’ve been considering is how permalink should be structured. Permalink is one of the earliest setting that you must consider when you initially set up your blog. The default setup which is http://www.blogjer.com/?p=123 looks meaningless to most users.

Some blogs put in dates (it could be in whatever format and whether full date or not) + post title whereas some only put the post title. So which one is better in terms of SEO? Frankly speaking, I’m not sure which one. Initially, when I started blogging, I was using the one with only post title. But after some time, I changed them to have date + post title since I have a regular weekly post called what-interesting which covers on the interesting stuffs that I could find for that particular week, only which I have it discontinued. I plan to have the post title ‘What is interesting this week’ instead of ‘What is interesting this week Dec 27 2007′. The latter looks quite long and not so attractive. So, the idea is, since I have the date on my permalink, I can remove the date from my post title without the content being considered as a duplicate content by search engines due to the similar title posted each week.

I’m also doing spot checks on a couple of blogs in my RSS reader to see what their common practice is. The blogs are those of famous SEO blogs, official search engine blogs, famous earn income online blogs, tech blog and etc. This is done randomly and link love is only given to the blogs with their name different than their URL.

Permalink with name based only without date

SEOMoz.com
SEOBook.com
Greywolf -
Digital Inspiration - Title + post #
JohnChow.com
Matt Cutt of Google

Permalink with name based + date
lorelle at wordpress
techcrunch.com
searchengineland.com - Date + number
Shoemoney.com
Problogger.net - Archive + date
LiewCF.com - Archive folder + date
Google Official Blog - Archive folder + Date
Ask.com Official Blog - Archive folder + Date
Microsoft live search blog - Archive folder + Date

Permalink with Numeric only

Yahoo and Jeremy seems like did not care about their permalink. It is using only numeric.

Yahoo Search Blog -
Jeremy - Yahoo Search Engineer

So, what do you think? Which one is more SOE friendly??

Yahoo had recently released the plugin (is it their first plugin?) for wordpress called Yahoo Shortcut . So how does it work? The concept of this plugin is, as you type in your post, the plugin will look for any picture from Flickr , places, companies, products, people and much etc. If it finds any relevant contents or videos, the matched keyword will be underlined and you will be able to decide whether you want to display them or not

If you’re like me who’d love to have a least 1 image on each of my post (to make them more interesting), this plugin is definitely for you. So in case if you’re in hurry, but you want to publish your post ASAP, you don’t have to worry to find suitable image anymore, edit them, upload to your server and embed in your post. With Yahoo Shortcut, you will be able to control them from within your wordpress

This post is the first time I’m experimenting with this plugin after installing it few days ago. It seems that none of my keyword matches with any images from Flickr and other shortcut listed in their service, but there is a menu which allows you to choose the picture manually from flickr. See available shortcut below, which part of current Yahoo services

Flickr Photos
Maps
Financial Information
Products
Autos
News
Web Search

This is how your post might look like before and after using Yahoo Shortcut

What I notice when I’m typing this post directly on wordpress editor is, it seems that there is a slight lagging on the words typed to appear (it could be my wireless internet connection, but i had never encountered this kind of lagging before) on the editor, but it is understandable since the plugin is working real time in matching your keyword with the shortcuts. But this problem is gone when I use wired LAN to connect to internet, so this must be due to my internet connection speed

The most interesting part is (not related to this plugin function) , there are also free tshirt for the first 500 bloggers who install this plugin, but this is for US residents only. Hopefully, when Yahoo releases another plugin for wordpress in future, they will include those outside of the US since most of wordpress traffic comes from there

Watch the video to have a better understanding on how it works. You’ll love it (hopefully). 1 more thing, this plugin is for wordpress only