TheAnand

Believe it or not, I never relied extensively on my browsers’ dictionary to spell the word – entrepreneurship until recently when I started to fill up my profiles on the web. As with everyone, with frequent usage I learnt the word without having to wait for the wavy red underline.

Someday is not a day of the week.

I have been meaning to update this blog “someday soon”. “Procrastination”  is the word I learnt. It was true. “Someday” never came over the past few months and this blog sat around ignored by its own author. While there are stats about how many blogs are started every hour, there has to be a similarly surprising numbers of blogs which just hang around stagnant.

I wonder why it never struck me to complie a list of SEO friendly wordpress themes on my blog as I am constantly searching for them myself!

I usually have a select of 10-20 themes which I use on most of my niche websites mostly because I have heavily modified them myself or find them to be perfectly coded for Search Engines. This is my list of 10 Search engine friendly wordpress themes.

1. Green Park 2 -

2. PlainTxt -

3. A Dream to Host -

4. Dateless Sniper 1.0

WordPress wins hands down as the best CMS platform ever built. I build all my sites using wordpress and then customize them to become SEO powerhouses. I can confidently assure you that – I eat SEO for wordpress!

If you are looking for some basic SEO tips, I suggest reading my post – Free Search Engine Optimization Tips to get a head start. For those looking for some wordpress seo tips, lets start!

1. Permalinks – The most important and the most power SEO tip for wordpress. It basically changes your links from sitename/page_id=12 to a more human readable format as sitename/postname. You can find it under Settings>Permalinks. Simple huh?

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

Guess what came in the mail last weekend?!

WordPress sent me a whole lot of goodies so that I can keep enlightening the world about how wonderful they are! Thanks guys, you rock!

P.S: Thanks Arun at MillionClues for letting me know about this schwag.

I just found that wordpress have come together to release something called WordPress.Tv. According to the site,

WordPress.tv is Your Visual Resource for All Things WordPress

They have video tutorials for a lot of things to do in wordpress like adding a about me page, or writing and publishing a post. Must visit for all wordpress newbies and gurus alike. I hope to contribute to the site some day with my own little hacks and breaks on wordpress. It will help all those people who love how-to videos for doing new and unfamilier stuff with wordpress. Good thinking on the video site from wordpress. Life just became easier!!

Blogging from Desktop Blog Editors are something you should consider using for all your blogs as they take blogging to an all new level of productivity and time saving.Desktop Blog Editors are already used by a lot of bloggers and they tend to make things easier for a lot of people.

So, do you use a blog editor apart from the ones on your wordpress blogging platform?

Popular desktop based blogging softwares include Windows Live Writer, Post2Blog and some firefox based addons like performancing or flock browser based ones.

The possible advantages I can think about using these blog editors and tools are:

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?

When I was starting my money online ventures almost 3 years(woo, the anniversary is comin up!) back I had adsense on my personal site in geocities and stuck up adsense chunks on all the three pages of my site and was waiting for revenue to roll in. But then, if you have had your hands dirty with adsense, you probably now know that it does not work that way

I got my account activated on the 3rd of November 2005. And that was my first years income on adsense! But unlike most others, I did not quit Currently making a decent money on adsense, I guess I can talk about a few reasons why you do not make anything out of your adsense sites.

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

Yea, I want to give you a chance to redesign that blog of yours with a spanking new design and give a breath of fresh air to your blog. The design will be as per your tastes and inputs. For a example of the wordpress magic I can do, check up the design of this blog, my homepage and my free themes section.

Why do you need a professional design?

How could you even ask that question! No one wants to be one of the millions, everyone wants to be the one in millions out there. I have redesigned my blog three times now after using the popular misty look theme.

The blog is finally up and running. I was having a hectic time tweaking the plugins and design to get that perfect look that I missed the posting for a few days. Presenting, TheAnand 2008!

Also, I will be putting up my old theme for public download soon since some people seemed to like it better. And wordpress themes have my fancy that I will be putting up a few of my themes for download asap.

I am in the process of tweaking the new design for TheAnand. Feel free to chime in your comments. Its should be fully funtional by this week and I will put in a post when thats done. What do you think?

I never get fed up of searching for new snazzy plugins to make my blog more beautiful. A beautiful blog makes you want to blog more effectively or so I believe. You might want to check out my other wordpress plugin posts like this one.

• My New WordPress Plugins
• Another 7 Useful WordPress plugins
• Yet more Useful WordPress Plugins

On to this editions useful and cool wordpress plugins

Different Posts Per Page: This is a plugin that lets you define how many posts you want to display per page. I find this very useful since I want to display all the posts in the archives page, but only 7 on the homepage, 5 on the results page and likewise. Neat.

OWN UP! WHO DID THIS?

Besides other things, suicide is illegal but once the crime is committed, the “criminal” cannot be punished! But no, I am not planning a suicide. Whoever searching for that bit of information will have to be disappointed for the moment. Seriously, who is it anyways? Own up now. You get 1000 brownie points and a embarrassing link back from my blog.

Update WordPress leaving your hair intact. Seriously!

I have WordPress on majority of my sites and I have a bad headache each time I do a upgrade. I find it tiresome hair-pulling to have all the file backups and database backups and deactivate the plugins, upload new files and all that. Takes me about 30 minutes for each site. Imagine the headache for 15 sites! Then on, I started out sourcing my headaches upgrades on Digitalpoint. Worth the money spent for sure!

Last week I came across a plugin I always wished for; one which upgrades the wordpress site sans all trouble!

While you have nothing apart to do online, I usually engage myself in my sites stats which usually make no sense like our stock markets One set of stats I always keep an eye out for is my search engine keyword traffic. One one side, its a good SEO practice to write information on stuff people are looking for, on the other hand its a sneaking up into what people use to find my site

I have this really nice plugin called Search Meter for WordPress which shows you what people are searching for in your wordpress blog. I find it amusing to see what people search for in my site. Here is a screenshot of one of the best parts:

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.

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.

This has to be the first time I ever took this long a break from blogging since I started off almost a year ago. Initially it used to be a redirect problem which was solved with the help of a line addition to the .htaccess file. Then it turned out that I was seeing two different blogs for each URL of the blog. That took a while to solve. Suddenly my proxies are taken down by my host saying that the bandwidth limit has been exceeded. This came as a blow considering that I was told that I will have unmetered bandwidth.

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!

I was experimenting with wordpress themes for testing them for providing a viable backlink source for my site. I recently uploaded my theme to wordpress and received more then 100 downloads in the first two or three days. This was simply excellent considering that it was my first theme and possibly my last one too!

My technorati authority jumped about 60 points and the rankings by about 40k upwards. But about the quality of links, I am not very happy since most of these blogs were brand new and some were even in foreign languages! I did see a PR3 and a few links of that levels coming in.

The promotion is going strong and as I promised, here are the first set of participants for the contest. If you are unaware, TheAnand is giving away $27.93 in a linkback contest. Besides the chance to win, you get a free from my blog too. Though the PR is not very decent, but the other rankings are good So people, keep them coming! and others, drop by these blogs and who knows what you will find?

• Jaxim has a blog which notes all the contest from blogosphere. It is a good resource for all those people who are looking for cool contests to enter! The latest one to include is a $2500 prize money!

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 love wordpress for its plugins. Its like buying a plain car with the essentials and later on adding on accessories as you require them. And the best part about WordPress is that there are a lot of talented plugin creators out there, a set of people who share the love of the best blogging platform ever!

I published my set of useful wordpress plugins the other day, it contained a lot of plugins that every blog should be equipped with. This time around these plugins are made to enhance the the visitor experience. Here it is:

I have finally updated my blog to the latest version of my favourite blogging platform – WordPress. I really hate updating this though, since it involves a lot of work, like all other lazy people, I would love a one-click update feature.

And I have a lot of feature requests too, I want my dashboard to be completely customizable and powered by AJAX or something for all those drag and drop functionality. Here is some of the feature requests I have:

• Dashboard can be more functional with an option to see how many comments are in moderation now, to see the comments preview, reply to comments from dashboard and the like.

I am bringing in some of my previous posts to the front page. The traffic to this blog have reached places in the last few months, so it will be nice to have some of my interesting posts from the archive to the front page. Here we go!

• First will be the JohChow Pen, which will be the star post till it finds another home in another part of the world. Who’s claiming it next?
• The All new Yahoo! Web based chat. Looks nice and super.Have you logged in recently?

After reading John’s ingenious evil plan, I came up with a counter action. JohnChow’s blog has a commenting system that is incredibly evil and for me, spammy. The top commentators position on his blog is very much sought after by backlink whores bringing in comments like “Hmm” “Nice one” “I love this blog!” and others of the kind. I absolutely hate these kind of comments anywhere. They hardly contribute to the discussion and basically kills a blog. The result? I never read the comments section after reading a post. I never comment since I am sure not to get anything worthwhile doing it.

This is my series about making money with your blog in 10 steps from scratch. This post is divided into two parts, first regarding setting up your blog and second about making money off it.

Step 1: Setting up your blog. This is a fairly easy job, get a domain, install wordpress and you are done! Speaking about this, I prefer that you setup your blog in a separate .com domain, since it gives you some physiological credibility factor. Not to downgrade the blogs in blogspot and other free blog sites. The blogspot has some really fine bloggers like Kumiko, Mikes Money Making Missions and others who are making money off free blogs. But having a .com is as cheap as it can get. So, why not get one?

I found this new idea for power blogging last month, and I wanted to test it before I let you know if it really works or not. When I started blogging some time back, I usually sit for some time and think about the topic to blog and research about it and then blog about it. a very time consuming process, right? My initial target was a blog post every 3 days. But I could not reach that target with this type of process being followed.