Just few days have passed & Wordpress developers have been forced to release a maintenance version for Wordpress 2.9. The main issue is that current Wordpress 2.9 is triggering a bug in certain versions of PHP’s curl extension & for that pingback & scheduled posts are not working properly in different hosting environment. Besides, they have fixed 14 tickets in this maintenance upgrade.
So, if you are having any problem after you have installed Wordpress 2.9, you can give it a try.
By the way, this blog is working perfectly after I upgraded to Wordpress 2.9 & I am quite happy with it 
You can not only choose from predefined image set, but also you can upload your own customize image to set as Twitter background. This option has been there in Twitter for a long time. So actually if you are new to Twitter or looking to customize your Twitter account for branding, here is how you can do it.
From Twitter account click Settings tab. Then click Design button in the settings page.
The point is that you just don’t have to buy custom Twitter background. If you have a good designing sense, you can create an image with your own logo, information or picture. As you can see from the screenshot, you can even choose any custom color to give a different look to your Twitter background, sidebar, text or even links. You can always give it a try for fun or for creating your own brand.
Change Colour:
Change Background Image:
And for truly professional theme, you can always avail a service where you can order & buy customized Twitter theme specific to your requirements. But why not try to customize your Twitter account for free at first
At first I thought I won’t mention it as existing Wordpress users can see the upgrade notification from their dashboard. But still there are so many bloggers who are interested about Wordpress & still don’t use it. So just to let you know Wordpress 2.9 is out & I have upgraded to it without any difficulty.
Then I tried to upgrade all my plugins simultaneously with only one click to the latest versions as I have six old ones. It took me some time to find it, as the batch upgrade option is not present in Plugins, but rather in Tools> Upgrade option. I had a very good video preview in a post made in Wordpress.org about all the new important features of Wordpress 2.9. If you want to explore a bit, go there & you will learn where to find them & how to use them.
I don’t know how many of you noticed it. Google has recently introduced its own url-shortening service. But it is not a standalone service right now. You can use it only from Google Toolbar & more importantly we, bloggers can use it in FeedBurner service. So I was checking what functionality has been added to my FeedBurner account. And I just saw Google has added option to socialize your feed automatically with Twitter with the new url shortening service. From your FeedBurner dashboard go to your feed & then click “Publicize” tab. There you will find “Socialize” option. Add your Twitter account there giving your Twitter usename & password. Change options to set what part of your feed that you want to show in your Twitter upadates like blog post title only, post body only or both title and post body.
It is similar to free services like TwitterFeed that I am currently using. But then you don’t have to rely on third-party url shortening services like tiniURL, bit.ly etc. You can manage whole thing from one single Google FeedBurner account. Besides, one main feature of Google’s own url shortening service is to enhance security. So, as in Google web search, if Google finds out that your http://goo.gl url is redirecting to a malicious url that can harm a computer it will show warning to the user. That means new users will have less fear clicking on the feed link in Twitter. So it may be easier to attract some new clicks.
I am thinking of moving to FeedBurner automatic Twitter update service for my blog. But I am having trouble accessing my TwitterFeed account using my OpenId. I will have to contact them & turn the feed off for Twitter there. Can’t serve double Twitter updates for a single blog post update
Yeah! That’s true. You can now call .tk a real free top level domain as it has started giving away free dns service. The domain forwarding service that redirects .tk url to your current sub-domain is still there. But it’s bad for SEO. But recently they have added free dns service option to it. That means if you want you can use your existing Name Servers to point them to your domain or you can use free dns service from Dot TK to point your own ip address to your new .tk domain.
So you don’t have to use frames now and your content will be properly mapped with your domain urls. And will be shown properly in search engines for all of your different pages giving you normal SEO benefits.
No doubt, when you search for copied content of your blog you usually use CopyScape. They are the leader in checking plagiarism after all. But using their free search I usually get some false results & for unlimited searches you need to purchase their premium account. So it is not bad to look for one or two free CopyScape alternatives that can search for stolen contents from your blog all over the web.
Recently I stumbled on to CopyGator that exactly does that in a complete free way. And you can choose from two neat options to get notified about your stolen content. You can add a small banner like in the screenshot in your blog. And when CopyGator finds a copied content of your blog in blogosphere it will automatically get turned into red.
Or if you don’t want to display that image badge, you have the option to submit your RSS feed to CopyGator & they will create an overview page for you where you can see who copied your content. And you don’t have to do anything anymore. It will keep track of all subsequent posts from then & watch over the blogosphere for any copied part.
The search results seem to be relevant. And according to them, they aggregate data from over two million blog feeds & parse around half a million new blog posts per day. So the database range seems to be huge & there is better chance that you will find the plagiarism. It’s worth to give a try.
About 10 days ago, Google published a post about comment spam on their WebmasterCentral blog. They have warned that they have the means for understanding the link graph & they can determine and tackle comment spam links using algorithmic methods. They can even determine the fine-line spams that some webmasters deploy like instead of blunt spam they will say “great site!” as a comment with a keyword as their name. So in best case, you will receive a little or no SEO value at all for posting meaningless comments in other websites & blogs.
But still I doubt if spammers will stop spamming. These may be hard facts about comment spam, but comment spammers are hard nuts to crack. They perhaps just like to spam 
Just a minute ! If I were a professional blogger, then only you could have said it to be unprofessional. But I am just a passionate blogger, not a pro one.
Now I am putting the simple thing simply. I forgot to renew my domain. Lately my schedule has become very hectic & I am pretty busy finishing my work. So I am not able to give time to this blog that much. But I don’t think it can be an excuse. It’s unforgivable for a blogger who blogs about blogging & says himself a passionate blogger.
So just after reactivating my domain with NameCheap I thought of letting you know what happened & how much a guy could become insincere! So just don’t run away from this blog. At least I have admitted it honestly. And honestly is the best policy
