There was a forum discussion about displaying older posts but it was inconclusive. So I went on to hack this widget (which is based on WordPress’ default Recent Post widget” to create the Older Posts widget.

This is just a simple widget. Just drag and drop this widget into the side bar just like any other widget. It asks from starting from which recent post till which recent post it should display. Enter these values and save it. So let’s say your blog home page currently displays 10 recent posts. Just enter the starting post as 11 and enter say 10 as the number of posts it needs to display. The widget will display 10 posts starting from your 11th oldest post. . Installation instructions are added as a part of the plugin package it’s simple just like installation of any other widget.

Hope this widget is of some use to somebody

Download Older Posts Widget

Method 1: Direct MySQL Query

If you know yourself around phpMyAdmin and MySQL queries, just run this one line query in the “Sql Query” window of your WordPress database in phpMyAdmin. This query instantaneously deletes all comments in “pending” status. All your approved comments won’t be touched. To be on the safer side you may also want to backup your entire database or just wp_comments table just in case something goes wrong.

DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = 0

Method 2: Using a wordpress plugin

If you don’t want to mess with your database directly, use a plugin like Delete Pending Comments . I tried this in a blog which had around 600 pending comments. Took about 4 minutes to delete all pending comments and it did the job well. There are also few other plugins similar to this plugin out there in the WordPress Plugin Directory.

These situations are common but don’t despair, setting up of phpMyAdmin and get it up and running can be done in a few simple steps. There are two ways to do this. Both the methods illustrated are for linux hosts only. Even though the steps to setup phpMyAdmin are the same in both Windows and Linux hosts, the commands are different.

Method 1. Setup phpMyAdmin Via SSH/Commandline
If you have ssh command line access, this is the fastest and easiest way to setup phpmyadmin

Step 1: Login to the commandline using “putty” if using windows or any other SSH client.

Step 2: Move into the webroot of the domain for which you are going to setup phpMyAdmin
$ cd public_html

Step 3: Wget the phpMyAdmin tar.gz file from sourceforge
$ wget http://space.dl.sourceforge.net/project/phpmyadmin/phpMyAdmin/3.3.8/phpMyAdmin-3.3.8-english.tar.gz
This will download phpMyAdmin directly from sourceforge into your server.

Step 4: extract the tar.gz file
$ tar xvzf phpMyAdmin-3.3.8-english.tar.gz
When you run this command, phpMyAdmin will be extracted in a “phpMyAdmin-3.3.8-english” directory

Step 5: Rename the “phpMyAdmin-3.3.8-english” directory to something simple, say “pma”
$ mv phpMyAdmin-3.3.8-english pma

Step 6: Now you need to rename the “config.sample.inc.php” file to “config.inc.php”. But before that we need to go inside the pma directory
$ cd pma
$ mv config.sample.inc.php config.inc.php

Step 7: The last one!! You need to edit config.inc.php. In around the 30th line of config.inc.php , you would have to replace
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = 'cookie'; with
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = 'http';
i.e ‘cookie’ has to be changed to ‘http’. For this you can either edit the file via vi or nano by typing
$ vi config.inc.php or
$ nano config.inc.php
then change the values and save the file.

That’s it ! you can now access phpMyAdmin via http://yourdomain.com/pma . Enter username as your database username and password as your database password and login and enjoy!

Method 2. Setup via ftp
This is not the fastest method, but if you don’t have SSH command line access, you need to use this method. This method, worst case wouldn’t take you anything more than 5 minutes anyways to setup phpMyAdmin.

If you are on a cpanel hosting, or a hosting which provides filemanager in the control panel, you are a little bit lucky.

You can download the tar.gz or .gz version of phpMyAdmin from here to your computer and the upload the file to your public_html folder. Then extract the archive file using the file manager. You can then rename the “phpMyAdmin-3.3.8-english” folder which is created to a simpler name say “pma”. Move into the pma folder and do the steps 6 & 7 as mentioned in the SSH method i.e rename config.sample.inc.php to config.inc.php and edit the config.inc.php and replace
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = 'cookie'; with $cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = 'http'; . You are now done.

If you do not have a file manager as a part of your hosting control panel, then the only option you have is download a phpMyAdmin.zip or any archived version from here , then extract the files in your computer, upload the phpMyAdmin folder into your public_html folder using an ftp software like filezilla and then execute steps 6 & 7

Content can be anything from Blog entries, news articles, media files or applications. The idea is to save browsing time and effort by automatically bringing the relevant and updated information from your favourite sites and displaying it in a convenient reader. Usually, the syndicated information is just the headlines or a short form of the content, which also contains the hyperlink to the complete information page- in case the user chooses to visit them. Such syndicated contents are very common in the websites today, and its highly likely that you might have come across a web feed without knowing it.

There are two parts in the implementation of a web feed. The web feed page and the reader or aggregator. Consider an example. You have a certain Blog or a news website that you visit, and the information in them gets updated frequently. If the publisher of that particular page provides the feed option, he/she would also publish the page in a web feed format such as RSS. You can identify if the page is feed enabled or not by spotting the feed logo (which is common to all kinds of web feed formats). By clicking on the logo and choosing the appropriate ‘reader application’, you will be able to subscribe the content of the page on to your reader. The reader or aggregator is a client program that is able to pull the information from the feed page, as allowed by the feed page. This aggregator may be a desktop client, an in-built feature that comes with a number of browsers like mozilla, or ones provided by websites such as my yahoo and igoogle.

Most blogs and news websites provide the option these days. Popular implementations of media RSS include youtube and yahoo. One can get a list of RSS sites from feedster.com. Providing RSS websites are also useful for people who conduct their business in the Internet, particularly in Internet or Online Marketing. RSS can be an effective marketing tool for your website, especially in fields like E-mail marketing and publishing, Search engine marketing and optimization, Business blogging, Internet advertising, Digital public relations, Branding and e-commerce.

RSS can ‘power’ your website, providing you with the following:

• Valuable, updated, and relevant resources for site visitors and potential clients – RSS is ideal for websites that contain (and syndicate) a lot of information that has to be changed or updated regularly.
• Search engine optimization for the website. •Increased traffic for the website – your website can ‘harvest’ and display information from other sites, driving more traffic to your own website.
• A wide selection of ‘channels’ for content distribution, such as PDA’s, cellular phones, voice mails, and email ticklers.
• A reliable way to have your web content delivered to Internet users and potential clients – RSS ensures that your site is viewed by the people who are interested in them, without having them blocked and ‘cleaned’ by ISPs or Spam filters.

For clients, RSS provides the following advantages:

• RSS feeds are timelier. If you are subscribed to a certain feed, you can get updates on it immediately.
• You don’t have to have an e-mail program to get an RSS feed. They all can be read online easily and quickly. You no longer have to worry about opening your e-mail and searching for the new messages.
• You, as the subscriber, are in full control of your RSS feeds. If you ever want to remove yourself from a list, you can do so easily. You don’t have to worry about not being taken off a mailing list.
• RSS feeds stay private. If you choose not to, you don’t have to give out any personal information when you sign up for a feed. You don’t have to give your name or even your e-mail address. This ensures that your information will not be sold to any other companies.

I hope this short write-up now empowers you with the knowledge of what RSS feed is and it’s uses

The link to commenter’s site does serve some good purposes like letting the comment poster link to his/her blog/site which might have good resources and also allows free publicity and exchange of traffic between genuine blogs and sites via the comment links, but there is way too much nuisance and problems which weigh down these advantages.

Well this is what you need to do if you want to remove these links. Go to the wp-includes directory in your wordpress installation via ftp, locate a file called comment-template.php (in older versions of wordpress you would need to find comment-functions.php) , download the file, create a backup of the file to make sure you can upload a working copy in case you mess up.
Open the php file with notepad (any text editor) or any code editing software you may have. Now in the file at around line 106 you would locate a function called get_comment_author_link() (around line 347 if you are editing comment-functions.php) . The line number might vary from wordpress versions, but the code within the function is the same for all versions of wordpress after 1.5, so this hack will work for all versions of wordpress 1.5 and up. Within the function you would see the following lines
[sourcecode language='php']
$url = get_comment_author_url();
$author = get_comment_author();
if ( empty( $url ) || ‘http://’ == $url )
$return = $author;
else
$return = “$author“;
return apply_filters(‘get_comment_author_link’, $return);
[/sourcecode]

What this function does is, check if the comment author posted a URL when he/she posted a comment, if there is no url it just prints the author name, if there is an URL with the comment then wordpress prints the author’s name as a link to the author’s website. We are going to modify the function to just print the author’s name (without a link) even if a URL is present with the comment. For that just replace
[sourcecode language='php']
$return = “$author“;
[/sourcecode]
With
[sourcecode language='php']
$return = $author;
[/sourcecode]

And you are done! Just save the file, upload the file back into the server and you should get comments with links removed with just the author’s name throughout the website!

Next I am going to try to totally remove the URL field while posting comments into the blog to save the hassle of commenter’s entering a URL. Will get back with a quick guide for that when I succeed.

•You have renamed your user account via computer management and windows still uses the folder with the old username to store your profile information.
•You want to move the profile folder from its default location to a different location for reasons like backing up, making up space in the drive windows is installed etc.

Moving or renaming your windows profile folder has 2 steps
1.Locating and renaming or moving your profile folder: You can locate your profile folder in your %SystemDrive%\Documents and Settings\Username . for example for a normail windows installation and for username ‘techallica’ the profile folder would be c:\Documents and Settings\techalllica. Now you may proceed to rename your username folder (in our case ‘techallica’) to your new username or move the username folder to another location say for ex. D:\profiles\techallica

2.Let windows know your changes: Once you have moved or renamed the folder, the next step is to register the changes in the windows registry system so that Windows knows where to locate your profile folder. To do so you need to open the registry editor by clicking on ‘run’ from the start menu and typing ‘regedit’ in the ‘run’ window. This will open up the registry editor. In the registry editor navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
To make things complicated windows employes something called ‘SID’ to uniquely identify user accounts. Each user account in the windows system is allotted an unique ‘SID’. You need to know the unique ‘SID’ of the user account whose profile folder you just renamed or moved. To locate the ‘SID’ just download the following script by clicking here and run it. The script will output the unique ‘SID’ of all the accounts in the system. Just note down the SID of the account being modified, get back to the registry editor, and select the correct userid. Now in the right pane, double click on ‘ProfileImagePath’ (which stores the path to the profile folder of the username) and set the correct path to the profile folder. Our case d:\profiles\techallica. If you have just renamed your profile folder then it would be C:\Documents and Settings\newusername (assuming windows is installed in C:\)

3.Done: You are done now. Just close the editor, log out of windows and login back and see if you can log back in successfully (which you most probably should)

every time you finish a browsing session i.e. every time you close internet explorer.  Enabling this option is quite simple and once done you need not bother anymore of clearing your temporary internet files and thus worry about breach of your privacy.

Follow these simple steps:
Open up the internet options window from the tools menu in internet explorer, click on the advanced tab. Tick on the option which says “Empty temporary internet files folder when browser is closed” and click on ok to save settings and close the window. Now windows automatically clears temporary internet files every time you finish browsing.

Step1: Open Internet options window of Internet Explorer

Step 2: Click on advanced tab and you will see the following window

Step 3: Tick on option “Empty Temporary Internet Files folder when browser is closed” then click on Ok to close the Internet options window. DONE!

Cookies even though always deemed evil are harmless bits of information stored by websites on your computer. Cookies are similar in some ways to temporary internet files. Cookies usually have information like site preferences, automatic login details etc and are saved by the sites you visit into your computer. Cookies also are a big privacy concern because anybody having access to your computer can browse your cookies folder and learn about the sites you visit. Therefore clearing the cookies folder is as important as clearing the temporary internet files.  Clearing both the temporary internet files and cookies is a simple task.

Open up internet explorer, On the tools menu choose internet options Under temporary internet files section, click on the “Delete Files” button, confirm your delete action (check  “delete offline files” box also) and the internet options screen is shown again. Now click on “Delete Cookies”, on the confirmation pop up click “ok”. You will be taken back to the internet options screen, click Ok to close the screen.

Please be advised that it may take a while for the temporary internet files to get deleted especially if you haven’t done it before recently and there are lots of files to delete. The computer may go un-responsive for a few seconds, don’t panic, its normal. You have now successfully deleted both cookies and temporary internet files from your computer and thus compromise of privacy due to these files is no longer possible.

Step 1: Open internet options window and click on Delete Files

Step 2: Confirm deletion

Step 3: Click on Delete Cookies button

Step 4: Confirm cookie delete

P.S Tired of clearing temporary internet files every time you complete browsing? There is a way of deleting internet files automatically, read the next post.

To prevent such things to happen, it’s advisable to clear the browser history on a regular basis, preferably at the end of every browsing session to maintain privacy. The only downside of deleting the browser history would be that if you forget the URL or address of the website you have visited in the past, you wouldn’t be able to go to your browser history and easily locate it.

To clear websites history is straight forward process.
1.    Open up internet explorer,
2.    Once its open, in the menu, click on tools and then select Internet options
3.    Then click on clear history button.

This clears your internet history. You can also adjust the number of days internet explorer maintains your browser history. By default it’s 30 days.  Click ok to save the changes and exit the screen. With your internet history under control, your windows privacy control is much easier.