XDForum (example: Anaconda Forum) is a nice basic forum software which works seamlessly with WordPress blogs (download our free theme and plugins). Unfortunately it works out-of-the-box with default permalinks only. Most site today use nice permalinks. This mini-tutorial will teach you how to use XDForum with nice permalinks (how to enable; tips and more).

Read more (109 words) »

I have added a forum for our popular 3 column widgetized Anaconda Theme (for WordPress blogs).

Read more (27 words) »

I have been in an interesting discussion with a very high profile client when Google Search came up. One recurring thought which came up was how the apparent strength of Google search, that made it the number one search engine, is its very weakness in several industries. And Google haven't been able to address them over the years.

Read more (182 words) »

Scott Adams, creator of popular comics strip Dilbert, lost his voice 18 months ago due to spasmodic dysphonia, an incurable condition, after he strained his voice during a bout with allergies. He recovered his voice after tremendous self-effort in an apparently miraculous way by rhyming.

Read more (484 words) »

Often you have files in your subversion directiory which you do not want to commit / check-in. Such files could be compiled files, intermediate files used for data processing etc. Subversion provides a simple way to exclude such files. The good news is that it allows you to specify them using patterns, so you don't have to individually specify them.

Read more (208 words) »

Revision number of a file is an important information. Two most common uses are in serialization and in making version specific database upgrades for an application. I am using it for the later. Here is a simple way how you can add revision number (Id, Date, Author and HeadURL) automatically to your source files.

Read more (347 words) »

I am happy to announce the release of Angsuman's Translator Plugin Pro version 3.2 for WordPress 2.x blogs. This is a feature packed release (details) based on customer feedback. There are few fixes in too primarily to adjust to Google Translation engines changing page structure.

We will start shipping it from today. It may take a day or two for all copies to be shipped. The documentation will be updated very soon.

The key features in this release are:

1. Support for fopen has been added (in addition to curl). Now the plugin can be used on sites without curl enabled. Whenever the program detects that curl is not available it tries to use fopen.
2. Better support for safe_mode and open_basedir. Some restrictive web hosting providers enable safe_mode and / or set open_basedir. It used to restrict the options users can use in their plugin. We have overcome this difficulty by implementing the functionalities which were being restricted by safe_mode and open_basedir settings without compromising security or functionality.
3. Data caching in true database tables. Previously the data was being cached in WordPress settings which can consume lots of memory for sites with very high loads and/or having lots of pages.
   This change makes the translation perfectly scalable on heavy load sites without compromising performance.
   It will also enables us to track any caching issues quickly, not that we expect any. It will enable using caching on systems with lower memory allocation and lower database field limits. No more will you have to increase max_packet_size or memory_limit parameters.
4. Google Translation has changed their data translation mode this week. In this version we have fully accounted for their changes.
5. Ability to delete cache manually. You now have the ability to delete all the caching (disk and database) we do with a single convenient button in translator manage options.
6. Translator will restrict itself to translating pages from your blog only. In version 3.1 the translation criteria was relaxed to include pages from the same domain which occassionally lead it to modify url's which it cannot translate. This has been fixed in 3.2.
7. Domain validation will be case insensitive. This gives latitude to bloggers to call their blogs www.MyBlog.com or www.myblog.com interchangeably.
8. You can now restrict displaying flags to languages of your choice. Quite a few customers asked us to be able to restrict translation to a subset of the languages we provide. Now you can do it by unchecking the languages you don't want to display in your translation bar.
9. Better support of XHTML 1.0 standard in translated pages.
10. Modifying Translator options is now restricted to users having 'edit_plugins' privileges. Normally admin users have privilege to edit plugins. This is one feature which haven't been a user request. However it is important as it prevents un-privileged users in multi-user blog from accessing and changing the Translator options.

Note: Angsuman's Translator Plugin Pro (features, testimonials, get software) is a professionally designed plugin which provides automatic machine translation of your blog in eight different languages - German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Chinese. It is search engine optimized, supports WordPress widgets, uses nice permalinks, super-fast (cacheable) and lots more. In short you instantly multiple your page count by 8 while making your blog accessible to a much larger population of non-English speaking world.

Open up conf/settings.php and add this line:

Read more (79 words) »

First of all I want to make it clear that having a MySQL database without a password set (on your root account) is a very very bad idea. However I wanted to set it up on my home machine which has XAMPP installed. And XAMPP by default creates a root account for MySQL without any password. I had several applications installed in that configuration. So I tried to do the same with Vanilla. However Vanilla wouldn't allow me to do so. Actually the setup goes fine but then it refuses to show claiming failure to connect to the database. Here is a simple solution.

Read more (163 words) »

.htaccess is a web server directive file populalrly used in Apache Web Server in Linux / Unix environment. In windows environment there is a simple way to enable and use .htaccess. Additionally it allows you to create nice permalinks for software like WordPress or phpBB.

Read more (171 words) »