I had spent sleepless nights looking for a good blogging client for my Nokia E71 . This is a great phone and I had really thought that Nokia would have taken enough care in making things more efficient with it’s business series!
Little did I know that people in the enterprise do not really blog, they have people to blog for them!

About 10 minutes ago, I stumbled upon ;) a great tool – WordMobi . I was directed to this site by an unofficial Nokia E71 blog – E71.wordpress.com. WordMobi is available here . The developer claims that the application will work without any trouble on Nokia E71 and has also been tested on Symbian 5 series . It requires Python to be installed on the phone before WordMobi is installed and there is a very good installation guide here .

I particularly like the insert options. There is no need for you to know HTML anymore. The application has everything set for you, in form of start and stop. So if you want to insert a link, all you need to do is select Insert Link , and type the address. You can continue o write your text after that, and once you are done, again go to Insert Link and select it!

This post has been created using WordMobi!

Posted by Wordmobi

To-Do after installing WordPress – Maintenance

On March 23, 2009, in Tech Gyan, by shashank

This post is in continuance from the previous post, which was about customizing the visual appearance of the WordPress blog. After I finished ensuring the my blog was looking fairly good, I moved on to combat the next biggest problem with WordPress – Comment Spam.

Any blog, which has a good Google Page Rank, suffers from trackback and comment spam. There are various marketers who find this as the easiest way of improving their link popularity and getting free traffic. The best way to get rid of this spam is to activate the Akismet plug-in, which is included by default with the WordPress installation. From the Akismet website:

Akismet is a contraction of Automattic Kismet. Our favorite definition of kismet is "Kismet (principle), the magnetic attractive force that actualizes the playing out of karma; often used in the positive sense."

Use of Akismet requires a key, which can be obtained by registering for an account with WordPress.com. The plug-in is good to go after its activated, however advanced users may change settings to please their geek nerves.

The only other thing required now, before actually starting to write to the blog, is to ensure that the Search Engines can find the blog easily and they can also index it well. WordPress has 2 popular plug-ins, All in One SEO Pack and Google XML Sitemaps Generator. These two plug-ins also work out-of-the-box. There are no changes required, however options are available if you want to customize them.

With this done, the blog is ready for posts. I guess there are a few more customizations and optimizations that are possible and we can discuss them in the posts to come. Do write in if you have any suggestions or best practices.

What did I first do after I installed WordPress on my GoDaddy shared hosting account?

I logged in to my account and found that I had to update the WordPress installation to 2.7.1 from 2.7. Thanks to the latest 2.7 version, this task is now automated. I remember downloading the WordPress files and uploading them one by one to my server to update it every time there was an update. Slow Internet and the GoDaddy limit of uploading one file at a time made the entire process very frustrating.

After the single click update, the first thing that I did was to change the default theme of the blog. It is important to make the blog look good, and that is one reason I moved from the Windows Live Spaces. WordPress offers hundreds of beautiful themes for the blog, making customizations easy.

It is not difficult to change the theme of the blog. There are hundreds of free and premium themes available online. You can Google for a good WordPress theme and then download it. It needs to be copied to the /wp-content/themes/ folder in your installation.

Once you have the theme copied, It will be available in the appearance menu in your blog’s admin panel.

After changing the theme, next most important thing is to check the URLs of the blog. It is a pity that if you will not change the URL (permalink) of your blog then they will appear in a machine like format

http://shashankrana.com/?p=100

To change these URLs, you need to have a few permissions from your webhost. If you manage your own server then there are no issues otherwise you may want to check before you activate permalinks for your blog. You need to check THIS POST HERE about Pretty Permalinks and then you can also check THIS POST HERE for the solution that I use. There are various ways of making your blog URL look readable. The ones here are easy and fast.

I will continue this in the next post. Do write in if you have any questions or a better way of doing things.