TheAnand

Sometimes, it becomes necessary to run a PHP code in your wordpress posts or pages to display a plugin output or for other reasons to make use of wordpress as a powerful CMS. There are virtually countless plugins which allow you to run PHP in wordpress.

“WordPress PHP exec” is a plugin that lets you execute dynamic PHP code in posts. It masks PHP code before balanceTags, and unmask them afterwards, so it should be safe to use PHP code that has literal HTML tags in it, for example: code which print out HTML.

For example, you can put you PHP codes like

It is really simple to create the style of theme you want with wordpress that you can do a wordpress magazine style homepage and theme like my homepage with almost no expertise in wordpress theming!

Until recently my hompage was a php page with only page! I did not really bother with converting my homepage into wordpress since I did not have much of a content to post there anyways. But my tastes keep changing all the time and individual php files were of no use if I had to change the design. So I posted that exact php into a wordpress theme in less than 60 seconds. How?

Last week I was again struggling with server issues and downtimes on all my sites which made me look at ways to reduce the load on my poor server. I currently have about 50 wordpress installations and some 10 php based sites on the server.

Though wordpress is considered to be a efficient script, having 50 of them at the same place can be a problem, or so I learnt! Going through the “ways to speed up wordpress tips” across the google results on the blogosphere, I noticed the regular tips like

1. Upgrade wordpress to the latest edition

I am trying to redesign my homepage at the moment and in the process applying my new found skills with PHP. One thing I put in on all the versions of my homepage is a online status indicator with Yahoo! so that people can contact me directly and have their bricks on my face. Usually I go with the normal script code Yahoo! with their default images for online and offline statuses. But this time, I wanted to display custom images for my online and offline status indicators.

The whole blogosphere is going through a redesign frenzy at the moment, so I decided to do one on my blog too. Though no earth-shattering changes from the previous blog theme, I changed the header and title of this blog to something that describes the blog better and how I want it to be. I am beginning to feel that this is my personal blog and what I share here will be in its archives forever, I want it to be more meaningful and help me look back at times in the future.

How NOT to SEO

I recently noticed that I rank pretty high for the keyword “Web Designer Cochin” on the first as the 4th result. I got all happy and then I decided to have a goal to reach the top to topple the currently numero uno. I with my knowledge of search engine optimization, I optimized my pages with keywords in the title(I did not have it before), keywords in the body and stuff like that. But to my astonishment, I found Google kicked me to the second page for all my good ranking terms. Now I have been going up this week again to reach the 6th position. So the moral of the story is – “Do not optimize your sites too much for keywords, anchor text is important and don’t live by Google!”.

This is an antique debate on using the do-follow plugin on your blogs. Are you looking for more comments on your blog or are you concerned about having a blog that “leaks” pageranks? I had some thoughts on this since I started blogging about a year back. But when JohnChow decided to sell do-follow on the comments on his blog, I decided to take some steps to make commenting more prominent on my blog too.

Recently I noticed that Court was doing a bit of SEO for wordpress themes by checking their code and tweaking it to get the most out of them. I must say that I am pretty much satisfied using the themes he had optimized for SEO, since my minisite ranks pretty google for its terms.

So I asked him if he could look at my first wordpress theme – Arabian Sea and optimize a bit here and tweak a ‘lil there. And he did and now you can get my theme all SEO’d for free! He has made some minor tweaks to some of the files to give your content more attention and to prevent other page elements to steal focus of the search spiders. Read about the changes he made and to download the optimized theme.

Are you the #1 out there? I am usually asking this since I have seen a few #1′s being toppled off by others. These new #1′s are then toppled by others and so on. It is usually very easy to target the numero uno and try to overtake them. But staying at the top is pretty difficult since you have to do things done by none, you have no guiding light and have to tread ways untread paths.

I was thinking of making this into a video of sorts, but my stupid digicam is on a riot since my vacation in August. So people, I am announcing the winner of my contest – Smilu!!! Consider yourself lucky to win this prize since it will just help you get out of that blogspot domain and host it independently. I picked this blog from a random number of the entrants. Smilu, I have sent you a mail now, please respond by tommorow otherwise the prize gets rolled over

I usually take some time off to optimize my sites once in a while. I always thought that Search Engine Traffic is the best traffic for a blog. Since this traffic is highly targeted and they reach your blog looking for something specific and they are more likely to click on your contextual ads since they relate to what the visitor is looking for.

I recently updated my theme and added more useful WordPress Plugins. If you want to know which plugins are running of this Web Designer/Developer blog, you will want to check my recent wordpress plugins posts here and some useful plugins post here. I was thinking of putting up a page for all plugins I use, but never really have the time to compile it together. Maybe sometime later

This week I added a few plugins which will change the look and feel of the blog.

AJAX Comment: Now all comments made on this blog will require no more page refreshes. Demo? Make a comment!

Today I went around digging my own archives again to find some of my well received posts. Those who are new to my blog might find it interesting. Tell me what deserves a kudos or a kick!

• Made for Paid Posts is the next big thing!
• My Cash Giveaway, are you in yet?
• Who is the best of PHP, ASP and JSP?
• Make money with your blog.

These are some of the posts I found to get some good traffic from searches too. Tomorrow on, I will be tell you some really helpful ways to get your blog some fast and easy linkbacks for some PR and Google love! Maybe I am turning into a SEO blogger now.

I uploaded the new theme yesterday night, but there some problems with the display not working properly and some design/color problems. I am trying hard to solve them as soon as possible. I am trying to make this theme as cool as possible before I release this theme to the WordPress community.

Here is my list of things to do:

• Make the search box placement proper
• Make it properly visible in all the resolutions
• Tweak the colors and make them cooler and smoother.
• Solve all the problems faced by the visitors at my blog here.

I think the best way to learn PHP, or any other programming language for that matter, is through practical application of the language. I was looking around for a way to learn PHP easily and having fun on the way when I was thinking of designing a new theme for wordpress blogs. This is definitely a good way to learn some PHP, loads of CSS and get a basic foundation on how these work together and stuff.

I am feeling a bit uneasy for letting my posting frequency dwindle these days. But I have been awfully busy with some new projects and my learnings with PHP.

Last month I spent about $75 buying 2 new sites and 3 new domains and advertising my site a bit for some search engine love. Here are some sites I bought recently.

Capital-Surf – This is a blog where I use to make some sponsored posts and other paid posts. The site also has a page rank which I can use to benefit my other sites also.

Last week I was talking about the preferred web programming language for building Web Applications and the best to learn amongst PHP, ASP and JSP. Most of the readers commented that PHP is perfect for me. I did a few searches and found that it is true.

Here is what I conclude:

ASP is the preferred language of most VB developers, as is very related to the desktop programming language. Also it will be very easy to sell your skills if you are good with ASP. A simple search with Monster Job Search will tell you this. At the time of searching for jobs, I found 2228 openings for ASP and just 668 for PHP.