Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

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Contest: Free Dreamhost hosting for two years!

May 17th, 2009 by Naman Bagga | 50 Comments | Filed in Blogging, General, Tech Talk

Recently, I won a free Dreamhost hosting account for two years through Ankur's contest. I don't really need hosting at the moment so I've decided to give away the hosting account in a contest similar to Ankur's contest. The hosting account is worth $215 approximately. This contest is for Twitter users so if you are not a Twitter user, Sign up for Twitter.

Here's how you can participate in the contest and win web hosting for two years-

1. Follow me on Twitter.
2. Tweet this message from your twitter account, exactly as its given here: Follow @namanb and tweet to win free web hosting for two years! RT to win. Visit http://namanb.com/p458 for more details.
3. Leave a comment on this blog post. Your comment should have the link to the tweet from your account containing the message I mentioned above. This will be used to verify whether you’re following me, and have tweeted the message. You can get this direct link to your tweet by clicking on the ‘about X minutes / X hours ago’ text beneath your tweet.
Also mention how you came to know about the contest in the comment.
4. You can enter the contest multiple times, but you need to tweet again to re-enter.
5. I will chose a winner at random.
6. The contest ends at 2359 hours on 3rd June 2009.

I am the judge of this competition, my decision is final and I may change the contest rules or cancel the contest any time for any reason.

PS- This contest is open for everyone, there are no restrictions.

PPS- The last date for the contest has been updated to 3rd June 2009.

PPPS- The winner of the contest has been announced on this post.

WP Greet Box

May 7th, 2009 by Naman Bagga | 1 Comment | Filed in Blogging

If you are reading this post, you've either arrived here from some site like Google, Twitter or Facebook or have directly visited this post. You would obviously feel good if you were greeted and shown the way around this blog. If you've reached here searching for something, you might as well be interested in related posts. WP Greet Box is a WordPress plugin that does exactly what I've mentioned. If you scroll down to the end of this post(provided that you are reading it on my blog), you can see a box greeting you.

WP Greet Box is a really useful plugin with alot of customizations available. You can customize greetings for visitors landing on your blog through different referrers. You can also decide the position of the greet box. WP Greet Box not only looks good but also enhances your blog and improves traffic.

Traffic Jam

May 5th, 2009 by Naman Bagga | 4 Comments | Filed in Blogging, Tech Talk

My blog got its all time high number of visits on 3rd May. It registered more than 4000 visits. This post is not about bragging about my blog. The heavy traffic translated into a small issue. A few popular posts were getting lots of traffic and comments. In fact, I got about 300 comments on that day. I had email notifications for comments turned on. I also have the Subscribe to Comments plugin installed to enable users to subscribe to followup comments.

WordPress uses a function called wp_mail to send emails. I had got about 42 subscribers to comments on a particular posts. Thus every time a comment was posted, about 43 emails were sent by the wp_mail function. There was a particular time when too many comments were posted in a short span of time and the script started using too many server resources. Thus my host, Godaddy killed the process. Thus, WordPress was unable to send any emails like comment notifications and contact form mails.

I tried disabling and re-enabling comment emails and plugins that use the wp_mail function but nothing seemed to work. I searched for solution to this problem everywhere but found no help. 24 hours later, I started receiving emails again. Godaddy automatically re-enabled the script after 24 hours.

One thing I've learnt the hard way is that I need to keep a check on email subscriptions whenever I get heavy traffic. I've been looking for alternatives to using the wp_mail function. I tried a couple of plugins-WP-Mail_SMTP and Climy Swift SMTP to try to use my SMTP server in place of the wp_mail function but they don't seem to work for me. For now, I've decided to disable comment subscriptions temporarily during heavy traffic period.

This also explains why I haven't been replying to all the comments. I've been busy with all this for the past two days. I would like to apologize to all my readers who didn't get follow-up comment emails or whose comments I didn't reply to.

Another Reason To Move From Blogger

April 30th, 2009 by Naman Bagga | 2 Comments | Filed in Blogging

WordPress Is Best
Creative Commons License photo credit: TylerIngram

I've recently moved my blog from Blogger to self-hosted WordPress.I can feel what I was missing for a long time.This post is motivated by a recent incident that happened.A PayPerPost Advertiser recently banned all Blogger blogs from doing any of their opportunities.This was the reason for the ban-

As the blogosphere shifts, we (My firm Softduit and my clients) will no longer advertise on Blogger powered blogs with or without unique domain names. We have found that the quality of sites powered by the Blogger platform is decreasing rapidly; the effectiveness of sites powered by Blogger is much lower than those on self hosted WordPress, and more. I will reconsider this ban if an individual blogger moves to self hosted WordPress, but it is your site to do with what you like and our campaigns and campaign dollars to do the same. This ban does not have anything to do with the individual quality of this blog itself, but instead the neighborhood of blogs powered by the Blogger platform. I will be more than happy to help bloggers transition to WordPress. I apologize for the tone that is carried with the word ‘ban’, I’d prefer to use the word exclude. I do wish you all the success in the world and the blogosphere and I can help you find that success, I will! I can be found in the forums. Best Regards, brettbum

If you have a blogger blog, people, Advertisers and even search engines don't take you seriously. If you are serious about blogging, you should definitely move to your own hosting.

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