Arun Gupta, Miles to go ...

Getting Started with Wordpress Customization

So you have a brand new Wordpress installation and would like to start blogging. There are several tutorials available on that topic. However it's important to customize your blog as it reflects your style / personality. Wordpress official documentation is extensive, very nicely organized and provide great tips on how to customize your blogs. But it can take a while to go through the docs and customize look-and-feel of your blog.

This blog entry explains how this blog was customized from a fresh Wordpress installation.

• Pick a theme that you like and customize it. This blog started with "Classic" theme and added pages as relevant. This is totally a personal preference as I like the header + right navigation bar + body format.
• Add your picture and edit the "About" page so that readers know you.
• Customize sidebar
  • Prefer static toolbar by editing "sidebar.php" instead of dynamic toolbar created using the "Appearance" -> "Widgets".
  • Add "search" dialog box
  • Add Twitter widget (choose "Yes" for "Loop old results", explained here). May not be relevant if you don't tweet, but seems like everybody is these days ;-)
  • Add a ClustrMap widget to monitor geographical spread of readership.
  • Total Page hits / page views on sidebar + on each post (How ?)
• Installed the following Wordpress plugins to begin with:
  • Google XML Sitemaps - Creates a Google Sitemaps compliant XML file and submits the blog content to Google, Bing and Ask.com. It took 1.64 seconds for the first creation and used 12.75 MB.
  • Sociable - Adds social media button to your posts
  • Google Analyticator plugin - Adds Google Analytics script to monitor traffic. Even though Google Analytics capture geographical distribution as well but I like the ClustrMap widget that can be displayed on the nav bar. Do Google Analytics provide that kind of widget ?
  • Search Plugin for Firefox and IE - Creates a Firefox and IE search plug-in. Install the plugin, go to "Settings", "Search Browser" to generate the code and insert in "header.php". Add a customized search page by copying "search.php" from the "default" theme. Show the summarized result with clickable links to the content.
  • Smart 404 plugin - Creates a clean and simple page with a friendly error message to a reader who might have somehow reached a broken link or mistyped the URL. Add/Edit a 404.php as explained here. It's important to not loose your reader and instead gracefully guide them to the next steps.
  • YARPP - Shows a list of related entries based on a unique algorithm for display on your blog and RSS feeds. A templating feature allows customization of the display.
  • WP Greet Box - Show a different greeting message to your new visitors
    depending on their referrer URL.
• Some more customizations
  • Add pre/code styles to "styles.css" for code formatting. Now simple <pre> and <code> will format the code nicely.
  • Create hierarchical categories so that readers can read the topic of their choice
  • Add Next and Previous links to each page (<?php posts_nav_link(); ?>) and each blog post (<?php previous_post(); ?> <?php next_post(); ?>) as described here.
  • Personalize the page using a favicon as described here.
  • Change the default permalink format from "http://example.com/?p=N" to "http://example.com/year/month/day/post-name" as described here. This makes your blog entry URLs search-engine friendly.
• Editing
  • If you prefer editing online, disable the "Visual rich editor" as it strips all the paragraph formatting from a nicely-formatted HTML page. It's primarily meant for newbies and I like better control over the HTML formatting so prefer editing it manually.
  • Choose a blog editor client. It seems Wordpress adds line breaks (<br>) if the text in a line is not wrapped. Qumana was chosen as the blog editor after trying nvu, Kompozer, Ecto, MarsEdit, Smultron, and HTML Tidy. Loving it's WYSIWYG capabilities, transition between WYSIWYG and source view is seamless, ease of cross-posting to multiple blogs and intuitive interface.
• Join Technorati (if not already) and Claim your blog.

Any other obvious tips that are missing ?

Technorati: wordpress blog milestogo

Posted by Arun Gupta in General  |  Comments[0]

This blog is moving!

I've been blogging for little over four years now. The first blog entry was on Apr 8, 2005 on weblogs.java.net/blog/arungupta. A new blog was born on Aug 2, 2005 on blogs.sun.com/arungupta. While java.net blog was focused exclusively on technical entries, blogs.sun.com also talked a lot about personal stuff as well. Both blogs.sun.com and java.net teams have done a stupendous job providing my first ever blogging platform ever. I learned a lot during the process and will always remain thankful to them for that. blogs.sun.com provide a fair amount of look-and-feel customization and java.net somewhat basic (although it seems to be changing). But here are few things that I never encountered being an end-user:

• What does it involve to manage and administer a blog server ?
• How to leverage the "community innovation" with pluggability, extensibility, themes, and other stuff in the blogging world ?
• How to have complete control (including hosting, domain, installation, upgrade, etc) over your blog ?
• What issues are involved in ensuring high availability of a blog ?
• What are the "joys" of running a blog on personal domain ?
• Who knows what future has in store ? It's easier to deal with uncertainty this way ;-)

• If you subscribe to "http://feeds.feedburner.com/MilesToGo", then you are taken care of because the underlying blog has been updated to reflect the change.
• If you subscribe to "http://blogs.sun.com/arungupta/feed/entries/atom" or "http://blogs.sun.com/arungupta/feed/entries/rss" then update the URL to "http://feeds.feedburner.com/MilesToGo".
• If you subscribe to "http://blogs.sun.com/arungupta/feed/comments/atom" or "http://blogs.sun.com/arungupta/feed/comments/rss" then update the URL to "http://blog.arungupta.me/comments/feed/".
• If you read the blog on web, then change your bookmarks to "http://blog.arungupta.me".
• For IE and Firefox users, you can add a custom search engine to search this blog by right-clicking on the top-left corner in Search Engines/Providers drop-down and selecting "Miles to go ...". Make sure the photograph in the text matches the one displayed in the top-right corner of new blog.

Technorati: milestogo bsc java.net wordpress

Posted by Arun Gupta in General  |  Comments[0]

"Miles to go" is 4 years old ... yaay!

Last week (Aug 2 to be precise), this blog turned 4 years old.

All the way from Hello Blogsphere more than 4 years ago to multiple tips, screencasts, deep dive technical entries, fun stuff, running tips and lots more ... I've thoroughly enjoyed publishing content on this blog. Hope you did too :)

Here are some comparable statistics with blogs.sun.com ...

• 732,251 visits and 984,877 page views since Jan 5, 2007 according to Google Analytics
• 21,862 cities from 211 countries according to Google Analytics. Surprisingly (pleasant) London is far exceeding other cities :)
• 837,889 visits since Jun 12, 2006 according to clustrmaps
• 63.04% is organic search (58.37% from Google, 2.54% from Yahoo), 23.66% from referring sites, 13.2% is direct traffic
• 50% of the visits come from Firefox, 38% from IE
• 80% from Windows, 10.04% from Macintosh, 7.74% from Linux

• 287 blog entries & 1598 comments
• Visitors from 12 new countries
• 334,545 page visits & 427,352 page views

Posted by Arun Gupta in General  |  Comments[0]

ClustrMaps Archive - Jun 20, 2009

The clustrmaps on this blog are scheduled to be archived sometime around today. And so here is a snapshot of visitors to this blog from Jun 20, 2008.



The legend is:



And here is the same map with smaller clusters:



The entries tagged milestogo show other similar statistics.

Technorati: blogs bsc milestogo clustrmaps

Posted by Arun Gupta in General  |  Comments[0]

blogs.sun.com turns 5

blogs.sun.com - the blogging server for Sun employees has been chugging along for 5 years today!

Congratulations to Linda and her team for running a stupendous show and providing all Sun employees with a great opportunity to engage with the community.

• 633,614 visits and 871,737 page views since Jan 5, 2007 according to Google Analytics
• 20,088 cities from 210 countries according to Google Analytics
• 747,907 visits since Jun 12, 2006 according to clustrmaps

Posted by Arun Gupta in General  |  Comments[1]

800th Blog Entry

Do you know this blog has been read in 19,457 cities from 208 countries, has more than 25% repeat visitors, and close to 3000 comments ?

Now that's nothing comparable to Scobleizer or TechCrunch but I'm still happy with the achievement :)

This is the 800th blog entry in little over 3.5 years and below are some statistics.

Before this blog is published, the following counter was shown in the top-right corner of the blog:



With this blog, the # of blog entries will now be incremented to 800.

Here are some charts generated by Google Analytics since Dec 2006:



And then a geographic distribution of visitors ...



And the page views ...



Here is another distribution (since Jun 2008) generated by clustrmaps:




Archived versions of Jun 2006 - Jun 2007 and Jun 2007- Jun 2008 are available. I really wish however there was a way to generate a consolidated map from all the years. It even features in top-1000 free users :)

Here is the tag cloud of entries:



As evident from the tag cloud, GlassFish (427), NetBeans (191), Web services (146), Ruby-on-Rails (128), and JRuby (107) are some of the prominent technologies featured so far.

And finally the top-25 entries:




Now the march towards 900th entry and finally completing a centennial ... most likely this year :)

Technorati: blogs bsc googleanalytics milestogo clustrmaps

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Blog Fan

It is embarrassing to share the post below but certainly very encouraging to know that readers like the posts on my two blogs (weblogs.java.net/weblogs/java.net and blogs.sun.com/arungupta).



I've thoroughly enjoyed 544 posts on weblogs.java.net and 762 posts on blogs.sun.com so far :)

Thanks for the continued readership and feel free to send suggestions by leaving a comment on the blog!

Technorati: blogs java.net bsc milestogo

Posted by Arun Gupta in General  |  Comments[1]

TOTD #59: How to add Twitter feeds to blogs.sun.com ? + Other Twitter Tools

Twitter is a micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users's updates which are text-based posts upto 140 characters in length. This Tip Of The Day will show how to add Twitter feeds to your blog but first some facts about Twitter:

The State of Twittersphere Q4 2008 was released recently (generated using Tweet Grader) and shows:

• Total of 4-5 million users
• 70% users joined in 2008, 20% joined in past 60 days, 5-10 new accounts/day (so mostly noobies)
• Only 5% have 250 or more followers
• Only 0.8% have 1000 or more followers
• 35% tweeters have 10 or fewer followers
• 9% tweeters follow no one at all

1. Go to twitter.com/widgets and select Other as shown below:
   
   
   
   It allows you to create Flash and HTML widgets for any web page. Twitter feeds can be directly added to some other popular social networking websites by selecting their option.
   
2. Click on "Continue" and choose between Flash or HTML widget as shown below:
   
   
   
3. Click on "Continue" and feel free to customize as shown below:
   
   
   
   "Number of updates" is the number of tweets that will be shown and title can be changed as well.
4. For blogs.sun.com, this obtained code fragment can be easily added to "_sideColumn" template.

1. Twitterfeed: Twitter your blog entries
2. Twitterank: Page rank for Tweeters (85.01 as of this writing, live here)
3. Twinfluence: Combined influence of twitterers and followers (as of Jan 2)
4. TwitterCounter: Widget that shows twitterer follower
5. TwitterFox: Firefox extension that notifies of tweets (really sweet and lots of other related plugins)
6. SocialToo: Manage online interactions of Twitter (surveys, auto-follow/unfollow, Direct Messages to new followers)
7. TweetStats: Trends and analysis as shown below:
   
   
   
   Live stats for @arungupta are available here.
8. TweetLater: Schedule tweets for a particular time/day and some other features similar to SocialToo (auto-follow/unfollow and DM to new followers)
9. Easy Tweets: Schedule tweets in future, automatically post RSS feeds and other similar features

Posted by Arun Gupta in web2.0  |  Comments[5]

Happy New Year 2009!

Wishing everybody a very happy and prosperous 2009!

With 275 total blog entries published during 2008 on this blog, 2008 was the most blogging-healthy year. Thanks to all the readers of this blog for a continually increased readership.

Here are some statistics for this blog for the year 2008 (2007 stats here) generated by Google Analytics:



2007 reported 183,031 visits and that shows upto 86% growth in page visits.




The average index is constantly over 2000 (again better than 2007). But there is a definite mismatch between numbers reported blogs.sun.com (powered by Roller) and Google Analytics. Unless the definition of "page views" is different, the numbers reported on this blog are constantly in the figure of 6-8K/day and Analytics report only in the vicinity of 2K.

Here is a geographic distribution of visitors:



And same data using ClustrMaps (from Jun 20, 2008 only):



Jun 2007 - Jun 2008 clustrmap is archived here.

Here is the tag cloud (including number of blog entries on each tag):




And finally here are the top-25 accessed blog entries:





Enjoy the new year eve celebrations all around the world:


Let 2009 bring peace and prosperity every where!

Technorati: happynewyear 2008 2009 blogs bsc googleanalytics milestogo

Posted by Arun Gupta in General  |  Comments[4]

Wordle: Word Cloud Applet

Wordle is pretty cool Applet (yeaaaah, still new ones are being developed ;-) that creates a word cloud from any RSS feed. I blog at blogs.sun.com and weblogs.java.net and most of the content is GlassFish-focused. Here are some wordles generated from my two feeds:

Posted by Arun Gupta in web2.0  |  Comments[5]

LOTD #5: Blogging Gold for Sun - Forrester loves it!

A recent report by Forrester Research published a list of 15 companies that really get corporate blogging and produce blogs that are informative, fascinating, and a joy to read even for people who aren’t die-hard fans of the company. Here is what the report says about Sun Microsystems:

Like Adobe, Sun allows their employees to blog. They’ve been doing it for a long time, and their blog portal has over 4,500 bloggers covering over 110,000 posts. Some of their blogs, such as that of Web 2.0 and Web Services Evangelist Arun Gupta, have become quite popular on their own. That’s 110,000 posts of promotional gold for Sun and they know it.

Here are recent statistics of blogs.sun.com:


That's a comment for each post! I'm happy that this blog contibutes it's share.

All previous entries in this series are archived at LOTD.

Technorati: lotd milestogo sun forrester blogging

Posted by Arun Gupta in General  |  Comments[0]

2000 comments on "Miles to go..."

This blog has now been commented (including trackbacks) 2000 times. Here are the statistics as of this morning:



With 671 entries, that makes it approx 3 comments/entry.

And the tag cloud showing the # of blog entries on each topic. GlassFish is certainly way above others :)



And finally a tool to evaluate blog worth:

Posted by Arun Gupta in General  |  Comments[2]

"Miles to go ..." 3 years old

3 years and 4 days ago Hello Blogsphere! was the first entry on "Miles to go ..." (this blog).

657 entries & 1939 comments later, here are some stats after Google Analytics was enabled on Jan 4, 2007.

A steady growth of visitors in past 18 months ...



A World map overlay showing visitors country ...



And a different perspective of countries ...



Here is some data generated by Clustrmap from Jun 2007 - Jun 2007 ...



And then for Jun 2007 - Jun 2008 ...



And now the top rated content ...



Technorati: milestogo birthday

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"Miles to go ..." in Japanese

GlassFish Globalization team in Japan has started translating some of my blogs (on reader's request basis) in Japanese. The first installment is now live on GlassFish Wiki.

Posted by Arun Gupta in General  |  Comments[3]

Happy New Year 2008!

2007 is history. Even in 2008 a day is gone, and 2 days in some parts of the world. But better late than never, so this blog wishes everybody in the blogosphere a very happy new year!

Here are some of the statistics for this blog for the year 2007:

Site Usage

Page Views

There is a high likelihood of mismatch between the way Roller instance of blogs.sun.com and Google Analytics calculate pageviews (or may be the definition of "pageviews" is different). This blog typically averages from 4-6k hits/day for past 6 months as reported on the side bar of blogs.sun.com. That would calculate to 1.27 million pageviews (5k hits/day ~ 6 months + 2k hits/day ~ 6 months) but Google Analytics report approx 1/4th of that number.

Top-25 sites

The statistics so far are generated using Google Analytics.

Geo Map of Visitors (still Miles to Go ... :)

Places visited by this blog

And a brief moment of excitement was when this blog showed up at the top rank on blogs.sun.com :)

Thanks to all the readers of this blog for a continually increased readership. Please feel free to suggest topics that you'd like to hear about.

Technorati: happynewyear 2007 2008 blogs bsc googleanalytics

Posted by Arun Gupta in General  |  Comments[5]