Selenium is a high quality open source test automation tool for web application testing. Selenium runs in Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Firefox on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh, Safari on the Mac, with plans to support Safari on iPhone soon. Selenium test scripts are portable, can be run from browsers (using Selenium IDE) or from JUNit or NGUnit (using Selenium RC) etc.. For example, test scripts written using Selenium IDE in Firefox on Windows can run on Firefox in Mac or Linux, without changing any code. Selenium tests run directly in browsers and so matches the end-user experience closely.

There are three variants of Selenium, which can be used in isolation or in combination to create complete automation test suite for your web applications.

• Selenium Core - In Selenium Core the tests scripts (written in HTML) and the Selenium Test Runner (written in Javascript) are uploaded to the same web server that hosts the application you are trying to test. It is a simpler form of Selenium, and suitable for non-developers, but it has some inherent limitations.


• Selenium IDE - Selenium IDE is a Firefox plugin, which includes the entire Selenium Core, allows you to record, play back, edit, and debug tests in browser. It provides the simplest introduction to Selenium and is highly recommended for beginners. You can save the tests / test suite created in xml or html format. However to run them in an automated fashion you need Selenium Remote Control which is described next.


• Selenium Remote Control - The Selenium Remote Control allows you to develop test cases and test suites in Java (supports JUnit & NGUnit), PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl and even .NET. It is the most flexible setup but requires some development knowledge to set up and use.


• Selenium Grid - Selenium Grid allows several Selenium Remote Control servers to be accessed in parallel by Selenium Grid server. This is extremely useful for automated load and stress testing of web applications.

Today we will discuss on how you can easily create automatic test scripts using Selenium IDE and convert them to JUnit tests (which uses Selenium Remote Control) which can be added to your JUnit based automatic regression test suite.
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WordPress, in recent versions, have forces the display of WordPress as the generator in meta tags along with the version information in the header of your WordPress blogs - <meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.5.1" />. Unlike previous versions there is not easy way to remove it. Unless WordPress is using that to provide support (which it doesn’t), I don’t see any good reason for providing that extra bit of help to hackers, do you? Here is a simple plugin which will remove the WordPress generator meta tag along with its version information.

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Newer versions of WordPress (2.3.1 and above) adds two extra lines to your blog header. They are:
<link rel="EditURI" type="application/rsd+xml" title="RSD" href="http://blog.taragana.com/xmlrpc.php?rsd" /><link rel="wlwmanifest" type="application/wlwmanifest+xml" href="http://blog.taragana.com/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml" />
You need them to use Windows Live Writer to write to your WordPress blog. However many, like me, do not use Windows Live Writer. For them such headers are simply junk and add to the size of their pages (and download time) without adding any value to them or to their users. For such bloggers (majority I presume) here is a simple WordPress plugin (Angsuman's Windows Live Manifest Remover WordPress plugin) which removes these two header links from your WordPress blog.

Download Angsuman's Windows Live Header Remover Plugin, rename the file to angsumans-windows-live-header-remover.php, upload it to wp-content/plugins folder of your blog and activate it from Plugin Management screen. It requires zero configuration. It does one thing and does it well - remove these two useless headers from your WordPress blog.

Technical Note: There is a similar WordPress plugin which does the same thing. This plugin works differently in that it doesn't add the code directly to the plugin body but to the 'init' hook. This ensures that this plugin will remain compatible with future versions of WordPress as it doesn't depend on the relative order of execution of the plugins versus the default WordPress filters. Sounds complicated? To put it simply - Install the plugin and then forget about it forever. It will continue to serve you (your blog) in the background for a very long time.

You can get more free WordPress plugins here.

For regular spammers and sploggers, banning their IP address is a simple and effective way to get rid of them. I will describe three methods here with the simplest at the very end. Let’s take a simple case study. ntoolz.net has been copying my posts with an automated content creation tool and then blessing me with a pingback for his splog content! So I decided to ban him.

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Arne Brachold’s popular XML Sitemap generator plugin for WordPress may report fewer URL than that exists on your website. This in turn means less URL’s which you are submitting to search engines for indexing.

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I am happy to announce an affiliate marketing program for Translator Plugin Gold. Now you can sell your favorite WordPress plugin and earn 30% of the proceeds, a cool 30$ per sale. You can find more details and enroll here:
Translator Plugin Gold Affiliate Program.

Affiliate program for Translator plugins has been a much requested feature from our customers. I am happy that we finally got it out of the door (blame me for the delay). We will include more of our products in near future.

You can send your feedback using the comment form below or the contact form. Discuss it in our forum.

Any bloggers with multiple WordPress blogs soon realizes the pain and time it costs to maintain the almost identical code base for each blogs when he has to take backups and upgrade his blogs. I was looking at various multi-blog WordPress solutions (not WordPress Mu)…

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Frankly I am tired of the Flash based image uploader. It doesn’t work most of the time, when it works it is pretty unstable, frequently fails on Opera, doesn’t work (for me) on Firefox in Linux even with latest Flash, doesn’t work with .htaccess fix and more. In short it is simply not worth it. You are much better off without the Flash based image / media uploader in WordPress 2.5.1. There is a simple way you can disable it and forget it.

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Gadging.com is a new (free) service which allows you to share your Google Analytics statistics with the world of just for your tools or application, get it as RSS feed for displaying on your blog, compare how your site ranks with others and more. And it takes less than a minute to configure.

Benefits of joining Gadging.com

1. Gadging allows you to selectively share your Google Analytics data to the entire world. You can use the provided RSS feeds of your data on your own sites and blogs.

2. Each Google Analytics profile is displayed on its own page which shows the most popular pages, geographic distribution of your visitors and other stats.

3. Your popular articles may be featured on the front page too under the Most Popular section. Your less popular pages may also be featured in the least popular section on the front page. That is not all.

4. Random pages from all the sites are also highlighted on front page too, thereby allowing pages from any sites to be featured.

We created Gadging.com to allow us to display Google Analytics data on our front page (Hot Topics). In the process we decided to share it to all. You can use any RSS displayer plugin to display the data from Gadging on your own site.

Currently we support Google Analytics only. We have plans to support other analytics software soon.

How to use Gadging.com

In less than a minute you can get your RSS feed for your Google Analytics data, share them with the world and more. Here are the steps:
1. Login to Google Analytics
2. Click on View Reports for the profile you want to share
3. Click on Email button (at the top, just under Dashboard) and beside Export.
4. Click on Schedule tab
5. In Send to others type ga@gadging.com
6. Uncheck Send to me
7. In Subjecttype in the exact URL of your site. For example for this blog I typed http://blog.taragana.com
8. Select Format as XML
9. Choose Daily for Date Range/Schedule
10. Click on Schedule and you are done!

You are done!

Every morning Google will sent a copy of your daily stats to gadging.com which we will use to update the site. You will also get an email (after Google sends us the first report) providing you with your personal url for your blog where you can see your site’s statistics. For example, this blog’s stats are available here. It will also be featured in the Recently Added Sites section on the front pages.

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We have developed a new combo bar for displaying the languages for Translator Plugin Pro & Gold. Check it on the top right of this blog. You can select a language to translate to and you will be directed to the translated version of the page, no button to click.

The coolest feature is that it also works in browsers without Javascript, giving a decent layout. Additionally the links are fully accessible by search engine spiders like Googlebot, Yahoo Slurp! etc.

It consumes much less space than the previous versions and takes a fraction of the time to load (not to mention reduced network traffic) as only one small image is loaded instead of 32 images for 32 langauges in Translator Gold.

Would you like it on your blog? … A single combo bar to translate your WordPress blog to 32 languages?