1. Native Tagging Support. Now this is one feature that I’ve been waiting for. Although UTW did a great job on this, but I always think that it is good to do the tagging without going through a plugin. However, the tagging feature is not so great after all. More details on this further down.
2. Update Notification. I am someone who’s lazy to check plugin’s site to see any updates. With this, I can see it in my dashboard and download ‘em immediately. Though it doesn’t update for you automatically, this notification is sufficient
3. Canonical URLs. I’ve been using some .htaccess trick to achieve this, but looks like the devs manage to put in the core.
4. Better Post Management. There’s this new filter thing in your post management, and you can easily filter your drafts. Nifty.

There are more features in the developement blog.

The Upgrade Process

I thought the schema changes would kill my blog. I even created a testbed to test if the upgrades will work smoothly. I tried running the upgrades on the testbed. Everything works fine. Not as dramatic as Edrei’s case

The upgrade is a breeze if your plugin does not a direct call to the deprecated tables in your database. In my case, only KGArchives and Tan Tan WordPress Report fails. Author of KGArchives may be doing some updates on the plugin released a WP2.3 compatible KGArchives, but there’s no news on Tan Tan WordPress Report. UTW fails to work too, but there’s a UTW importer in WP2.3. Popular Post plugin have problem in the admin interface, but it works without a problem in the user end.

The transition from UTW to WP2.3 native tagging is rather painless, though there’s some iffy-ness somewhere in between. Now here’s a few things I don like about tagging in WP2.3:

1. There’s no proper tag management. It is said that the devs are waiting for the community to create plugins to further extend the tagging capabilities, and they can steal the idea and put them in the next release. So, I guess I have to wait for a while for a better tag management plugin to pop out.
2. Two words tagging fails. Space doesn’t work. All spaces in two words or more tags are replaced with a dash. UTW handles the presentation purpose with no problems, because I don’t see the dash in any tag titles, although there is in the admin area and slugs. Perhaps I have to make myself used to one word tagging.
3. The function to call out tags in a post, the_tags(), fails. I MUST use it in The Loop, which is kinda annoying because I have tags in the sidebar. Which is why, at the moment, I am not showing tags. Couldn’t something be done so that the_tags can be called anywhere in single.php?

Overall, WP2.3 is satisfactory, but not up to my liking.

Part #2: The Redesign

Ever since the Web2.0 hype on the internet, I always wanted to revamp my site and follow the trend. If you are a reader since day one, you should know that my site used to be known as Clueless Dream. And yes, my site is still number 1 ranking in Google (at the time I am writing this entry) for the keyword "clueless dream", which is weird, because I kinda dump the wording from my blog except for some older entries.

Old school design eh? Despite being old school, that design have better Adsense Click-Through-Rate than my current design! Well, I have to let-go of my ad-revenue for the sake of better looking site (at least to me) .

The Logo

I was still in the Web2.0 mood when I am doing the redesign. I figure why not create a logo for my blog? After fiddling around shapes tools in my Adobe Fireworks, I come out with this fiery shape thingy.

That is the original logo I created, before I turn it around and resize it. It is created with 9 Spiral shape, with a little shadows and a dip of gradients. Walla, I got my logo. I resize it and turn it around so that it look more like fiery shape thing. What you see currently in my header is the end result.

The Colours

When it comes to websites, for some reason I like the reds and pinks. In real life, I don’t wear or use anything pink. Weird eh? I remembered my previous design, the time when I released the first Cherry Berry, a lot of my friends asked me, “Since when a guy like you turn so faggoty?” Well, until now, I still can’t resist having pink in my blog. There you go, I am using pink in my links!

I used the Web Developer Tools to extract the colour information in my blog. See? I use a lot of blacks and greys, with some a pinch of pinks and reds. The combination isn't that bad I think. Well, I am not so much of a colour perfectionist, it works for me, and so far nobody complained about the colours, yet.

The Layout

I am not so much of a person with thousands of widgets to play around in the sidebar. That's why I only use single sidebar instead of dual sidebar. Because most people read from left to right, I guess it makes more sense to have the content in the left and sidebar on the right. In terms of SEO and readability, I have my Content to load first, followed by Sidebar. As for the Homepage, I have additional "Welcome Message" at the top for readers to easily navigate through the topics that I write.

The "Skeleton" of my current design. No paper version, I don't have scanner

For the sake of easier styling and a cleaner HTML, I sketched a skeleton on paper, and try style the DIVs accordingly. I am not going through the details because it will make this entry goes on and on and on. Hah Well, I might write on the creating a WordPress Theme Guides in the future

Tips and Tricks

Here are some tips and tricks for those of you who would love to customize a WordPress theme yourself

Ads in between Entries

A lot of people want to insert their Ads in between two entries on their WordPress blog, but don't know how. Well, I will show you how for now. It's really simple, just a play with numbers. Open your index.php and lets do the magic!

First, you look for this code.

Make changes to it by inserting some 2 line of codes:

Well, that's not all. Now look further down until you find endwhile. Add some codes before it so the end result would be:

And you will have post in between the first and the second entry.

The Nicer Category

The thing about WordPress when you post an entry into multiple categories, the_category() template tag will stupidly separate each category with a comma, or other separator that you chose. So, if your entry is posted in 3 categories, it will show as "Entry posted under Category, Category2, Category3". It makes more sense if it is "Entry posted under Category, Category2 and Category3". So, how do you do it? Well, open up functions.php in your theme folder and paste this code:

The next thing you do is replace the_category() in your theme files with the_nice_category(). Nifty eh?

Gravatar in Posts

One of the cool feature I implemented to TheMiak is the use of gravatar in a post! Well, now I will reveal the secret. Open up functions.php in your theme folder and paste this code.

The usage is the same as the gravatar plugin, only that the code you put is <?php gravatar_post() ?>, and it must be in within The_Loop.

That's it I guess. Stay tune for part 3 of this series, where I will write on how to create a more usable homepage, not just the default show latest blog post page.

The solutions? Force your visitor to register just to leave a short comment? This will make leaving a comment a big hassle, and visitor will just go away because of this. Perhaps putting all comments by first time commenter into moderation? This is also not a good idea if you’re not always there to monitor your blog.

There are a lot Anti Spam plugins out there, but that doesn't mean you can download ALL of it and enable it on your blog. Remember, having a lot of plugins activated could slow down your blog if you have a lot of visitors coming at a time. Here are a few anti spam plugin handpicked by me that works great after few months using them.

The Firewall: Bad Behavior

This plugin serve as your blog's shell, the outer most layers to protect your blog against spams.

Bad Behavior was designed and built by watching actual spambots which harvested email addresses, posted comment spam, and used fake referrers. By logging their entire HTTP requests and comparing them to HTTP requests of legitimate users, it is possible to detect most spambots. Bad Behavior blocks spambots with a short error message. (Source)

So basically, Bad Behavior blocks any spambots that tries to enter your blog. This means that you're protected even before the spambots tries to do anything to your blog.

I remembered Spambot DoS attack (similar to this and this) on my blog several months ago. Imagine getting thousands of comment spam in minutes. The flood totally brings down my website (think getting your site Dugg or Slashdot-ed). I was forced to renamed wp-comments-post.php to something else. Bad Behavior kinda help to prevent such thing happens again.

The Filter: Simple Spam Filter

Shit happens. Firewalls aren't perfect. And this is where the filter gets its job done. This plugin is really simple at filtering comments. It is very common to see BB Codes in your spam. I guess spambots tend to spam blogs and forum at the same time. Simple Spam Filter works by rejecting comments that matches patterns set in the filter. The default setting is good enough to filter MOST of the spams. This plugin greatly the amount of spam caught in your spam vault.

The Spam Vault: Akismet

Akismet. WordPress's official Anti Spam plugin. To use it, you have to obtain a free API key by getting yourself an account in WordPress.com. The good thing about Akismet is that you just have to activate the plugin, enter your API Keys, and wait for it to do the magic. The down side? False positives. Especially those commenter who used a lot of cursing word like Fuck. If you don't want to get yourself in the spam statistic, you have to be nice when commenting

Alternatives

A lot of bloggers says that Spam Karma 2 very effective, in fact, way better that Akismet. I find it not so effective because it tends to give spam comment a positive karma, which is weird. It shouldn't work that way, but somehow the glitch is present in my blog. If you're too lazy to get an API key, or the false positives in Akismet is pissing you off, Spam Karma 2 should be the one for you.

CAPTCHA should work as well, but I don't really recommend it. CAPTCHAs can be really ridiculous. Math Comment Protection can be better than CAPTCHAs, but I find it funny to solve simple maths problem just to leave a comment.

With the firewall, the filter and the spam vault, your WordPress blog should have less spam. If not, it should be in a more manageable level.

Part #1: The Change of Site Structure

The first thing I did when doing revamp is to change my site structure. My blog used to be located at blog.geminigeek.com, and all pages resides in blog.geminigeek.com/xxxx. It doesn't seem wrong to me at first. But after a while, I guess I should better off pimping my domain rather than subdomain because there was a time where blog.geminigeek.com has PR5 and my geminigeek.com only PR3!! So, I changed my site's blog to geminigeek.com/blog.

When you talk about talk about PR, I'm sure you will think about the search engine result. I have a few blog entries that turns out to be first in Google Search. I don't want to lose my visitor. I did a 301 Redirection on my blog subdomain to geminigeek.com/blog, while retaining the permalink structure. This way, I manage to retain my visitor and successfully changed my site structure! And this is what I paste to my .htaccess in the root of blog subdomain:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^blog.geminigeek.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://geminigeek.com/blog/$1 [L,R=301]

This rule will automatically redirect blog.geminigeek.com/some/dir to geminigeek.com/blog/some/dir. Nifty eh? There's a lot you can do if you know how to use mod_rewrite. Too bad, I don't understand anything about it

Ok, I have the structure that I wanted. But because of this, a second problem arises. I installed my wordpress in a /blog directory of my domain root. That means that all my Pages will reside under my /blog directory. To make explanation simple, my About Page is now located at geminigeek.com/blog/about/!! And that doesn't make sense to me. Ah, call me a perfectionist, because even a small site structure thing is my concern I wanted my about pages in geminigeek.com/about/. The solution? Move the wordpress installation to domain root. However, by doing that, going to geminigeek.com/blog will throw a 404 File not found error. So, I leave it as it is.

Then, WordPress 2.1 is released, and there's a feature where you can set pages as your home and make your blog reside in some other pages. One good feature for those who wants to use WordPress as more than just a blogging platform. With this feature, I can put all my blog post in a /blog page and have my home used some other pages. And so, a new site structure like the this current one is born. Now my site structure makes more sense to me.

Tips for Part #1

1. Always think about the Search Engine, if your site traffic relies a lot on Search Engine traffic. Do proper 301 redirection if you're doing site structure change so that your site's URL is updated on the search engines index, and your site won't throw 404 error to the visitor.
2. WordPress 2.1 and above supports Static Front Page. For those who installs their wordpress in the domain root, but wants to have their blog in its own "virtual" /blog directory, use this feature. I will write on a guide to create an interactive homepage for your site.

For the next section, I will write about the layout and designing process for GeminiGeek's Online Journal. Stay tune.

Go to the Project's page to download.

Sorry for the lack of updates. I am currently working on a highly anticipated wordpress theme, CherryBerry2. So far coding is going on very smoothly. If everything goes well, I can release CherryBerry2 in a few weeks time.

I am using KISS principle to develope this theme, so I do hope people won't have to pull their hair just to customize the theme. Because of that, I am dumping this theme supports on older browser. Your codes can't be simple to support both modern and older browsers (think of the CSS Hacks). So far, this theme looks fine on most modern browser on Windows platform.

So, before I release this theme, any suggestion for features to be added in this theme? I am not too sure what people want in their theme. I can try implement any requested feature that is within my skills to CherryBerry2.

Update: I created a page for Cherry Berry 2, with all the roadmap and crap. This is to prevent myself from slacking off

At last, after spending hours coding this theme, I finally finished it. Special thanks to Kael who drew and coloured the banner. Anyways, My friend is satisfied. I am satisfied because this is one of my best work so far, other than the theme used here of course The theme used there is based on this theme used here. And this will be the based for Cherry Berry 2. Now that I have finished this project, Cherry Berry 2 will be on the way.

TheMiak is a comic + blog site, and my friend requested me to do a redesign for that site since early this year. But I've been slacking off and lazy. And study of course. Finally finished it, and everyone's happy now. But I still have to do one more thing on the site, that is to setup a comic gallery.

Among the features I have implement on TheMiak redesign are:

1. Gravatars. On both post and comment. Now how cool is that? The reason I used gravatar on post as well is because it is a group blog, and I think it would be good if all bloggers have their own avatar, thus using Gravatar, a Globally Recognized Avatar.
2. Official Comments. Without the plugin. Well, this mini hack uses codes discussed in the MalaysiaBloggers forum. So anyway, if the author of the site leaves a comment, there will be a star on his/her name. Just like how it is here on my blog.
3. Widgetized. Now I know how to widgetize my theme. I widgetize TheMiak theme is because I want to learn how to implement widget to a theme. This is for Cherry Berry 2 after all

I learned a lot when coding this theme. And I hope to create a better theme in the future.

Because of these nuisance, I upgraded my wordpress and all my spam plugin. Hopefully my first, the outer most protection can prevent all those spams from coming in. Then, I don't have to worry about my bandwidth sucking up

Enough geektalk. Now to the test phase. For anyone reading these, try leaving a comment, see if my spam plugin caught you as spam or not. Of course, don leave pointless comments like "asdasdasd". That is spam. Anyway, if you are not a spambot but you are flagged as spams, leave me a message at the shoutbox or my email/msn messenger at geminigeek [at] gmail [dot] com. I will try to resolve the issue as fast as possible. Thanks

Well, competition starts on 15th January and ends on 28th February. One whole month to design, the time is more than enough. I have been lazying around, and now its time for me to play with codes!! Woohoo
Hmmm... with 10 judges around, and the judges are secret, I wonder how do they judge the design. Accessibility? Looks? Cross-browser compatibility? But I guess that DannyFoo and AlexAllied are surely two of the 10 judges, since they are quite popular for designing in the malaysian blogospehere.

That's all I have to write for today. Blogger's block for the past few days. X/

By the way, the WordPress Theme page is now filled with a theme. Yea, just one