Read an interesting article titled Growing shift from blogs by Verne G. Kopytoff in NST dated February, 28 2011. The gist of the article was about the waning interest in blogging by the younger generations who prefer social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to blogs. Do you think that blogging is at its ending? For me, I just don’t think so..

Blogging started about 10 years ago by services, such as Blogger and LiveJournal, became so popular that Merriam-Webster declared “blog” as the word of the year in 2004. I remembered that.. Now, blogs are being challenged by Facebook with its all-purpose hub for posting anything under the Sun and Twitter that becomes part of the so called microblogging services, which allows messages of no longer than 140 characters..

Let me share some quotes from the article that would be of interest to bloggers..

According to Elisa Camahort Page, a co-founder of BlogHer, “If you’re looking for  substantive conversation, you turn to blogs. You aren’t going to find it on Facebook, and you aren’t going to find it in 140 characters on Twitter.”

“The act of telling your story and sharing part of your life with somebody is alive and well — even more so than at the dawn of blogging. It’s just morphing onto other platforms.”, said Lee Rainie, director of the Internet and American Life Project.

How is Blogger, owned by Google, doing? It had a 2% decline, to 58.6 million unique visitors in the United States in December 2010 compared to a year earlier. However, globally, its unique visitors rose 9%, to 323 million. Have you ever wondered what would happen if Google decides to shutdown Blogger?

On the other hand,WordPress and Tumblr, which also calls itself a blogging service, seem to have avoided any decline. Isn’t that interesting? According to Toni Schneider, chief executive of Automattic, the company that commercializes WordPress blogging software, bloggers often use Facebook and Twitter to promote their blog posts to a wider audience thus making them complimentary rather than competitors. He also mentioned that WordPress is mostly for serious bloggers, not the younger novices who are defecting to social networking.

“There is a lot of fragmentation. But at this point, anyone who is taking blogging seriously — they’re using several mediums to get a large amount of their traffic.”, said Schneider.

Looks like blogging will still be around for a long time folks!

People who arrived at this page were looking for:

I hate complicated things and naturally, I would look for shortcuts while fully aware that most shortcuts do not work… Tau tak pe…

This time, I took the shortcut in redirecting my sub domain under http://bbd.kisahberuang.com to http://kisahberuang.com.

The shortcut that I am referring to is using the redirect function in my cPanel.

So, after importing all entries and comments, I selected Redirect with or without www and then selected the Wild Card Redirect as well. It was supposed to make your old links go to your new links when people click on them. So it said…

Done. Tested. The main URL has no issue and it got directed to the new domain. But, the old links, such as from search engine results, gave a page not found instead… Hampeh betui…

I saw Sam of serverfreak online and asked him about my problem. He gave me a solution. That’s why I changed from my previous hosting to serverfreak. It has the best customer services so far. Promote dia sebab dah tolong for free… If you need a reliable hosting, give serverfreak a try. Go to http://www.web-hosting.net.my/.

The solution. Changed the .htaccess file in the subdomain. Changed the original,

To

Now, I managed to get any URL referring to the old domain to go to the new domain. Yes! Aku berjaya…

p/s;

Still could not figure out how to get old links/entries to go to the old links/entries in the new domain. Camna ek?

It is good to be back after a few days away due to the celebration of Aidil Adha recently. I have been receiving a few queries on how to put the link to my RSS feed using the widget at the bottom right of this blog page and therefore, I might as well share it with all of you who wants to have that as well.

Before I go on, please take note that I am not a programmer and therefore, my explanation would not go beyond my limited technical knowledge. Furthermore, I found this piece of code while hopping around from one blog to another and I could not remember where I learned this but this method was mentioned in a few blogs out there. So, blog hopping is not really a waste of time after all…

This method is the simplest that I have found so far. The other method that I learned was more complex and required that you have access to your hosting server. So, for the benefit of those who are not self hosted, I have decided to teach you this simple coding and it is what I am using too.

CAUTIONS: I am not responsible for any damage to your blog so do this after you have backed up your code and at your own risk!

Below is the code that you need to copy to your HTML file.

<div style="display:scroll;position:fixed;bottom:5px;right:5px;">
<a href="http://your own URL here" title="your own title here">
<img style=border="0" src="the location of your image file here" alt="your own text here"></a></div>

You need to copy this code right after the <body> tag if you want to load it first or before the </body> tag if you want to load it last, in your HTML file. If you do not know how to do that, I suggest that you go and read a bit about your theme file / HTML file as without that basic, I do not recommend that you touch it.

After you have copied the code above, replace the part as indicated in the code above with your own URL as well as your own image location. The texts are optional but it would be nice of you to add them in.

You can experiment with the location of the image by changing the value starting from the "display and before the closing ".

You may need to press F5 if nothing happened after you have updated your HTML file and if still nothing happenen after that, you must have done something wrong. This should work on any self hosted wordpress blog as well as any Blogger blog. I have no knowledge about any other blog platform out there.

Another thing to note is, if you have copied the code above to your Notepad, just pay attention to the ” sign as Notepad tends to change it and it would not work if you just copy from it directly. Just retype all the ” and you will be okay.

That’s all for now and enjoy your new skill.

Eid Mubarak, Salam Aidil Fitri, Salam Lebaran: This Raya has been mostly about driving here and there for my family and I. On the eve of Aidil Fitri, I drove to my office and then back to my house to pick up my wife and son and then we drove to Malacca to pick up my in-laws.

On the first day of Aidil Fitri, I drove to the mosque and then to Tesco, both in Shah Alam. On the second day, I drove to KL to pick up the MPV and then drove to Central Market looking for some buttons and then drove back to Shah Alam followed by a drive to Port Dickson for a picnic and then back to Shah Alam.

On the third day, I drove to KLIA LCCT to send my father in-law off to Pekan Baru and then drove to Kuala Lipis to spend some times with my mother and after that drive, my brother in-law took over the driving duty and I designated myself to be the navigator only. So he drove from Kuala Lipis back to Shah Alam and a few other places as well.

The final drive for me was yesterday, which was only a few hours ago, where we sent back the MPV to the owner who landed at LCCT from Jakarta and then drove back to Shah Alam, which we just arrived today. Where will I be driving to later today?

Kisahberuang.com updated to WordPress 2.6.2: Finally, the Fantastico De Luxe gave me the option to upgrade to 2.6.2 from 2.6.1. Even though this blog is not really affected by the security issues on 2.6.1, I just want it to be up to date. Some of you might ask why I didn’t go for the auto update plugin. I tried it and I just do not like it.

Contact Form replaced: Previously this blog was using the Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form v.2.0WP contact form but I found it to be too messy and then when someone left a comment telling me that the contact form was not working, I replaced it with Easy Contact. I have successfully tested it.

Holiday Mood: I am still on leave from work until end of the week so if this blog is not updated regularly, then you know why. Anyone has to work today?

Kisahberuang.com was down for about 10 hours today due to, according to the hosting company, SQL exceeded some limits bla bla bla… I believed many regular visitors were getting the site not found or something not found error. That was bad. Really bad! Thank God I was busy at work today and therefore, less time to nag the hosting people. Apparently, all of their customers were affected too. Duh!

When it finally went up, I found that only the main domain was up. My family blog and my wife’s online shopping blog that are hosted on the sub-domains of Kisahberuang.com were still down. The default answer given by the hosting people is, “Still checking for solution…” Duh!

I hate waiting and do nothing while some people were looking for solution. I didn’t even think that they are still working at midnight anyway. So, I decided to take the matters into my own hands. While going through the cPanel and Fantastico, I noticed that the upgrade to WordPress 2.6.1 option was available. Therefore, without hesitation, I upgraded this blog.

Well that was not the solution to the sub-domains problem. I continued my quest and still I could not find anything missing even after I compared each files from the sub-domains to the main domain. Everything looked normal. As if I knew what to look for…

That called for drastic action! I deleted all the sub-domains and added them back with the same name hoping that it would just know where to get whatever necessary to bring back my other blogs. I remembered reading somewhere that the DNS needs time to refresh so, I left them alone for awhile.

Believe it or not! All my sub-domain blogs are back online now.

Any advise from any expert out there?

*Nice wordpress logo from 3nhanced.com.

I was having a few technical problems with my previous Forte theme and getting help to resolve those problems was not that easy. The main reason was that the Forte theme was heavily coded and it was rather difficult for me, who has very little knowledge on PHP to figure out how certain things work. I had spent days to get certain parts of the theme to work the way I wanted it to work and still there are others that I just could not figure out.

So, I decided to look around for a simpler theme that allows me to easily tweak it with the little PHP skills that I have and I came upon Word Press’d from Blog2Life.

It is  a clean, open, uncluttered, visually appealing and the part that I like best, very quick loading theme. The coding is simple and lots of notes in the PHP for guidance. While it took me days to set my blog in Forte, it took only a few hours to configure Word Press’d.

I maintained most of the plugins from the previous theme and added a few new ones since it was easy to configure those plugins under this theme. May be when I have the time, I will blog about the plugins that I am using on my blog.

Then again, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What looks good to me does not necessarily looks the same to others. Feel free to let me know what you think of this new theme.

Every time I logged in to my dashboard, there would be a link to upgrade my WordPress from 2.5.1 to 2.6. Eventually, last Monday I could not resist it anymore and bravely (may be stupidly would be more appropriate…) click to upgrade via the Fantastico. Well, I said bravely because that would be the first time for me doing such a thing and stupidly because I did not do my research first.

Anyway, the upgrade took only a few seconds and once I refreshed my blog, everything seemed to be in order. That remained true until I clicked on one of the posts link and ka-boom! I got the shock of my life. Not just any kind of shock but it was one of those monkey kind of shock. Terkejut beruk, if I were to say it in my mother tongue.

I asked my hosting support and they suspected it was a database problem and after about 3 days of trying this and that and with myself getting from shocked to annoyed, the hosting support finally found that the problem have been reported by many others who upgraded to 2.6. Thanks to KG Lim of eSurge Network who pointed me to that and for trying hard to resolve the issue.

The problem had nothing to do with the database but it was due to the permalinks. For those who have been using the default format, then they would not get the problem. Any other format would give you the 404 page not found error.

If I have done more research before the upgrade, I would have found out that there is a temporary fixed (before 2.6.1) that have been posted at the WordPress.org Support Forum. There are three ways to get rid of the 404 problem:

1. If you’re using Linux/Apache on your webserver, you don’t really need the index.php anyway. Try removing it. The index.php thing was only meant for IIS servers, which don’t support mod_rewrite.
2. If you need/want the index.php to be there, then on the Settings->Permalinks screen, add some values in for the category and tag bases. The words “category” and “tag” will do just fine. As long as they are not blank, this should work around the bug.
3. (For advanced users only) If you want to patch the problem yourself, there is a fix available in trac ticket 7306.

I tried the first one and my whole blog could not even load and the third one is too complicated for me. Therefore, I went for the easiest solution, which is the second one, and things were back to normal.

Despite the three day loss, it was a great experience for me!

This is my first time running a blog on a self hosted WordPress platform and it has taken me a lot of time trying to figure out how to customize a standard theme into something that is more personalized to my own taste.

This is also my first time using a UNIX hosting but to my surprise cPanel is actually quite simple to use. Getting around the cPanel did not really take me long and in less than one hour I managed to install WordPress via the Fantastico De Luxe. Some of you, who are more technically inclined might be tempted to say: “What? Less than an hour? That’s way too long!”

By the way, I love the Fantastico smiling face logo.

So, the real difficult part is to get the selected theme to the way I want it to be. Bit by bit, I have managed to figure out how the codes work and you can see the results on this blog. Most of the things were discovered by trial and error while some others were found on the internet, published by those who had gone through the pain before me.

I am glad that I made the moved from Blogger to WordPress and now my limitation is only my skills on HTML, CSS and PHP. Other than that, my template will always, at least, look slightly different than yours…