Who approves of the riots that the MNS rages in the name of Maharashtrians? Definitely not any of those I know who strictly condemn them. Are even Maharashtrians safe from this? Apparently not.

In Goonda Raj, Marathi manoos and Mumbai Mirror editor Deepak Lokhande has related his experience of Tuesday where he bore the brunt of Raj Thackeray?s zeal to ?save? Maharashtrians!

Live on the Bleeding Edge of WordPress with SVN explains how to keep your WordPress Blog running the latest sub-version build of WordPress. It is highly recommended that you do not use the sub-version builds in a production environment. They are meant for testers.

In 6 Must Have Symbian S60 Mobile Applications I’ve reviewed six applications that I can’t live without on my Nokia N73.

I upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.3 when it released last week and had a great deal of trouble trying to get things to work out here.

This is one major release of WordPress, that really requires you to check all your plugins.

Anyway, one of my favorite plugins is Flickr Photo Album, which allows me to easily integrate Flickr with my photos’ page out here.

The current version of the plugin throws up a

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare get_users_drafts()

This has happened because WordPress 2.3 has done away with admin-db.php and now uses user.php to call the same function.

I found a solution in the Flickr Forum. Open wp-content/plugins/silaspartners/flickr/admin_options_load.php and find

require_once(dirname(__FILE__).$tmpPath.'/wp-admin/admin-db.php');

Replace with:

// changed since WP2.3
require_once(dirname(__FILE__).$tmpPath.'/wp-admin/includes/user.php');

This should fix the error and get your album working perfectly once again. Just need to wait till the author fixes this.

If you are, like me, one of the sole IT knowledgeable folks in your family and friends’ circle, then Lifehack’s How to Survive as the Family Tech Support Guy (or Gal) is meant for you!

Browsers are equipped to serve compressed pages. Most hosts too have mod_gzip or zlib extensions installed to ensure you can avail of these features.

Compression ensures that your browser receives a smaller packet and so you effectively save bandwidth.

WordPress by default also comes with this feature that enables you to compress the webpages and send them to the browser.

You can find it under Options » Reading. Scroll to the bottom where you will find WordPress should compress articles (gzip) if browsers ask for them.

I’ve noticed upto 1 second difference between the loading times of my pages with this checked and unchecked.

After checking this, it is best to analyze your page to see if gzip is infact working or not. For this I use Web Page Analyzer.

In case you do have the above option checked and this is reporting that the files are not compressed, you will need to talk to your host.

Many of us have WP-Cache installed on our WordPress installation. When a page is requested for the first time, WP-Cache creates a cache file for the page. Subsequent requests are served from the cache. This ensures that the page doesn’t need to be recompiled, thus reducing the load on the server.

The problem with WP-Cache is that it doesn’t support GZip encoding. This means, that you need to first uncheck the above option that I talked about. This also means that you’re increasing the load time of your pages as well as consuming more bandwidth.

However, Mark Jaquith and Chris Stormer have found that a minor change in the the code of the plugin can turn on GZip encoding.

All you need to do is find the line

foreach ($meta->headers as $header) {

in wp-cache-phase1.php. This is line 35 in my file.

Just before this line you need to add:

if ( extension_loaded('zlib') ) ob_start('ob_gzhandler');

Now, your file will look like:

if ( extension_loaded('zlib') ) ob_start('ob_gzhandler');
foreach ($meta->headers as $header) {

Save the file and upload it and your set.

You can analyze the page again using the analyzer to check if the files are compressed.

Note that the above option in WordPress has to be disabled, or your pages will be royally messed up!

For those interested, the line of code we added checks if the zlib extension is installed. If it is, then it calls ob_gzhandler which gzips the output buffer and sends it to the browser.

Mark introduced me to AuctionAds (aff) soon after it was launched. AuctionAds by default is not contextual, but my article guides you through establishing just that.

If you have been using Google Reader, you would have noticed that it doesn’t work with Opera as of now.

However, there is a fix available for the same which is very easy to apply.

1. Get hold of reader.js and save it to some location on your PC, e.g. C:\Program Files\Opera\profile\cache4\
2. In Opera, visit http://www.google.com/reader/ and then right click in the page your Google Reader page, click Edit site preferences
3. Go to Scripting and see the box for choosing a file there? type the path to reader.js that you got in Step 1. i.e. C:\Program Files\Opera\profile\cache4\reader.js in our example.
4. Refresh the page.

Source: YesWhyYen and Tech-Buzz

WordPress 2.0 introduced a lot of additional features in the Write Post screen.

One was the Post Preview sceen which now loads the entire post as if it would look on your site and this is a major bandwidth hog.

Another addition was the Inline Uploading. I still use IImage Browser along with my Open Picture Window Plugin for adding images to my posts.

Few other things that you may want to remove are the Optional Excerpt, Trackbacks and Custom Fields and Post Author if you never use these.

Mark Jaquith‘s Clutter Free WordPress Plugin lets you hide everything but the post preview.

I like Mark’s plugin because it gives you an easy way to hide the things you don’t want and thus save space. However, it uses CSS to hide and doesn’t prevent their downloading.

If you are comfortable editting WordPress Core code, 24FightingChickens suggests a method to remove the Post Preview. It suggests using simple HTML Comment to prevent this display. Using the HTML comment tells the browser not to parse and display the text.

You can extend this even further to hide other things on the WordPress Post Screen.

I’ve written a short guide on how you go about doing this.

Read Cleaning Up the WordPress Post Screen.

And once again I get into the great dilema of deciding what do I use to run my photo album. The last time I was in a similar dilema was when I had to choose between Gallery2 or Coppermine.

I’ve always been toying with the idea of integrating the photo gallery within this blog itself. Everybody remembers this URL and it makes sense.

I can do this with both Gallery2 and Flickr, however with the current installation of G2 on a seperate domain is not possible.

This means hosting Gallery2 on this blog, which is something I am not very keen of doing just yet.

I had been looking at some of the features that Flickr has to offer and concluded that the free account will definitely not serve my purpose. However, the Pro seems promising.

So here is my comparison of the two:

Price:

Gallery2 is open source and hence free for use.
Flickr Pro works out to be for $24.95/yr or 47.99 for two years, which is about two bucks a month. Affordable!

Maintenance:

With Gallery2, I have to always keep track of updates, especially security releases. Also the bundle is really heavy and occupies a great deal of space on my account. The trouble is making full installations and upgrades which has been getting to me!

Flickr will be maintenance free for me. It is owned by Yahoo! which IMO is a good thing.
I also don’t have to bother about hosting the photos as well as downtime (this of course isn’t so much of an issue).

Integration:

Integration of Gallery2 in my blog would be via the WPG2 Plugin. I do believe it integrates even across subdomains or different domains, but I am not sure. Have you got this to work?

Integration of Flickr would be via FAlbum.
One plus point of this is I already have a release for FAlbum with Connections Reloaded and this will just give me an opportunity to properly test it myself.

Features:

Gallery2 has an amazing list of features. This was the main reason why I went in for it in the the first place.

Flickr too comes with a good deal of features. Having the pro account also gives me unlimited storage and unlimited sets, unmetered (they say unlimited, but I prefer the term unmetered) bandwidth.

I do have a good deal of storage for Gallery2 as I have my own hosting. And I have a decent amount of bandwidth which I don’t consume anyway. As for photosets, Gallery2 gives me unlimited on that front, so basically the Flickr Pro is just one up on Flickr Free.
Also, I don’t know if Flickr supports sub-photosets Flickr doesn’t support sub-photosets.
Gallery2 definitely lets me have subalbums.

Uploading:

This is one place that Gallery2 beats Flickr hands down. This was also one of the reasons I chose G2 over Coppermine.
Besides the web upload you can also upload zip files and unzip them automatically. The best is using the Gallery Remote which I have been using to date.

Flickr comes with its own collection of Uploading Tools. Their Uploadr looks neat, but it doesn’t seem as many features as Gallery Remote. However, jUploadr seems to makeup for it.

One thing working for Flickr is the huge collection of third party apps and services available.

As of now, I am pretty much divided on choosing which to go in for. Switching over means a great deal of work to be done in uploading all my pictures.
However, continuing with G2 also means that if later I decide to switch that would again be a great deal of work.

Switching over also means I will have one domain free for use, which could or maynot be a great thing

Are you using either of these? Would be great if you could help me decide.

And any kind soul like to gift me a Flickr Pro account?