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Track Your Favorite Keywords with Favebot

Syahid A. — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 08:41:11 +0000

The old way to keep track of something on the Internet is to visit a web page and search for specific keywords on that site. Rinse and repeat the same procedure on another site over and over again in another endless cycle. This method works nicely but not really the smartest way to do it. Solution: track your favorite keywords with Favebot.

Favebot is a tool that you can use to track specific, favorite keywords of yours automatically. Keywords can be anything from tech news, my chemical romance, gardening, make money online etc. To track a keyword, simply create a “New Tracking” rule and enter a keyword that you want to track. Next, you will need to select your search categories, which cover items ranging from blogs, books, dvds, events, musics, news, podcasts, pictures or videos. Select fewer categories to be more specific or vice versa to have Favebot returned a broader variation of search results.

Favebot then will search and list down all listed items related to keywords that you have entered. You can click on a keyword to read all of them from the “Discoveries” tab OR subscribe to the keyword’s RSS feed, whichever is most comfortable to you. You can also use the RSS feed to display discovered contents on your blog, Facebook, MySpace and others.

For example, here are my results on tracking the “Digsby” keyword, one of the popular IM and social bookmarking clients around. Results returned are pretty decent, but a few “spammy” or irrelevant items are expected from tools like this. To get better results, Favebot recommends that you insert more than 1 keyword, preferably 2 to 4.

Favebot is not a perfect tool but it really makes tracking favorite keywords easier than before. Bloggers will absolutely find this useful to track keywords from the same niche. With Favebot, the results come to you!

Another alternative to Favebot: Google Alerts.

Tags: favebot, keywords, track keywords

Bypass WordPress More Tags to Show Full Text RSS Feed

Syahid A. — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 10:20:12 +0000

If you are using the “more” property () to show summary of a post in your blog, it is most likely that your RSS feed will be truncated, even if you instruct WordPress in the Options page to show “full text” for syndication feeds. If you are still wondering if you can somehow bypass this restriction, don’t worry, you can!

To bypass the WordPress more tags, you need to download and install the “Full Text Feed” WordPress plugin by Ronald Heft Jr .

What it does that it prevents WordPress from adding the more tag to your feed, thus lets you offer full, lovable RSS feed that will surely win your reader’s heart. Smart plugin eh?

Tags: wordpress, wordpress plugin, extension, blogging tips, wordpress tips

Experience the Impact of StumbleUpon Traffic!

Syahid A. — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 16:37:06 +0000

James Yeang of Friedbeef stumbled my post, 13 Useful Gmail Email Settings That You Probably Miss Out, and I was quite surprised with the outcome. My site seldom gains traffic this high, so I am quite pleased to share the results with you. Check out the graphics gained from 2 website statistical plugins below to understand the impact StumbleUpon brings to TechMalaya.com.

Statistics from the WordPress Blog Stats Plugin

Statistics from the Hosting Provider AWStats Plugin

What I Learn From StumbleUpon Based Traffic

Based on this experience,

StumbleUpon is a great way to gain instant traffic, especially if the person that is stumbling your post has significant contributions to the StumbleUpon community.

StumbleUpon traffic does not last long so make sure you use them to to earn more fans / feed readers. If you can, create a related entry to the stumbled post so that you can provide better contents for new readers (and earn new subscribers!).

StumbleUpon traffic is a great way to test the robustness of your hosting provider.

Unique and useful posts will increase the chance of being stumbled by somebody.

Any experience of being stumbled by somebody? Why don’t you share it here by leaving some comments?

Enable Pretty Permalink for Local WordPress Installation

Syahid A. — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 22:15:17 +0000

A default WordPress installation does not come with pretty permalinks (links with nice, readable words that reflect your post content e.g). An example of a default WordPress permalink:

http://www.syahid.com/?p=123

It will be better to change the above web address / permalink to reflect the content of your post (pretty permalinks), for example:

http://www.syahid.com/2007/10/08/sample-post/

Much better right?

How to Enable Pretty Permalink for Local WordPress Installation

If you have followed my WordPress on local installation guide, you will realize that changing your default permalinks from Options -> Permalinks -> Customize Permalink Structure on your WordPress dashboard will not work immediately after installation. There are two things you need to change to make it work:

1- Enable Apache mod_rewrite module

Open your httpd.conf configuration file (C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\conf\httpd.conf) with Notepad.

Remove the # on the #LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so line so it becomes LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so only.

Save httpd.conf .

2- Enable AllowOverride for web directory folder (htdocs)

Open your httpd.conf configuration file (C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\conf\httpd.conf) with Notepad.

Under the section, change a the line that says AllowOverride None to AllowOverride All.

Save your httpd.conf .

And do restart you local Apache web server once . Now your can enable the pretty permalink structure from the WordPress dashboard and it will work nicely after that.

Beginner’s Guide: Install WordPress on Local Apache Web Server

Syahid A. — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 16:15:00 +0000

Imagine installing a new, untested WordPress plugin directly inside your hosted, live web server, just to find out that it screw the whole blog? Imagine another situation – switching to a new WordPress theme just to find out that it doesn’t work nicely with your favorite WordPress plugins? There is a way to solve all of this problem – by doing all of the above in a test environment, accomplished by having a nice WordPress setup mimicking your live server, inside your own local PC .

Steps to Install WordPress on a Local Apache Web server

1- Make sure you have installed Apache web server with PHP and MySQL support. If you have not yet done so, you can follow my Windows guides regarding Apache and PHP Installation. Rest assured that my guides passed the basic requirements needed to run WordPress (PHP 4.2 or greater + MySQL 4.0 or greater).

2- Download the latest WordPress zip package from here.

3- Start your Apache and MySQL service. Make sure you can access your locally setup homepage.

4- You need to create a MySQL database for WordPress. In this guide, I use PhpMyAdmin (find out how to install PhpMyAdmin). Login to your PhpMyAdmin (or any software that you use) and create a MySQL database with a name of your choice (I choose “wp”).

5- Make sure your “wp” database was successfully created. Example:

7- Extract the downloaded WordPress zip package to your Apache root directory. If you follow my guide, the path is C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\htdocs\ . This will create a “wordpress” folder inside the “htdocs” directory.

8- (optional) You can rename the “wordpress” folder to anything. Some people changed it to “wp” or “blog” so their blog address will be “http:///blog” or “http:///wp” instead of http:///wordpress .

9- Open your WordPress folder (wordpress / wp / blog ), copy wp-config-sample.php to a new file called wp-config.php. I changed mine to “blog”.

10- Edit wp-config.php with any text editor e.g. Notepad. Change the things that I have marked out in bold. Don’t forget to save the file afterwards.

define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘your-wordpress-database-name‘); // The name of the database
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘root‘); // Your MySQL admin username used to manage the database above
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘root-user-password‘); // …and password
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’); // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value
define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);

11- Fire-up your web browser. Type in your web server name plus your WordPress setup path (http://blog/wp-admin/install.php), for example:

http://www.syahid.com/blog/wp-admin/install.php

Remember! “blog” can be “wordpress” or “wp” depending on what you put on step 8. Default is “wordpress”.

12- If the previous step was successful, you will be shown a WordPress initial start page. Click “First Step“.

13- Insert your Weblog title and your email account. Don’t worry, both are changeable after setup. Click the big, bold “Continue to Second Step” button.

14- You will be given an initial password to access your blog account. Copy it somewhere safe. You will need it later. Click the “wp-login” link to access your WordPress login page.

15- Enter “admin” as Username and the “password given to you before” as Password. Obviously, click the “Login” button afterwards.

16- You had successfully installed WordPress if you get a page similar to the picture shown below.

17- You can view your initial blog with the not-so-wonderful default theme by clicking on the “View Site” link.

18- Don’t forget to change your password! To do so, click “Users” –> “Authors and Users”. Then select “admin” by ticking the box under “ID” and click the “Edit” button.

19- Enter the new password of your choice TWICE and click “Update User“. Test your password by logging out of WordPress and log in again with the new password.

You have successfully installed and run WordPress on Apache web server locally! Now you can mimic your live WordPress site by installing a similar WordPress theme, plugins and more. The next time a wonderful themes or plugins seems relevant to your blog, safely test it on your local WordPress server before applying it live on the Internet. Better be safe than sorry!

Bonus Video: Learn how to install WordPress live

Tags: wordpress, blogging, tutorial, blogger, apache, webserver

50 Best 3 Column, Widget Ready WordPress Themes (with Screen shots)

Syahid A. — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 09:58:41 +0000

Before I started out this TechMalaya blog, I spent a quite long time looking for a suitable, 3 column, widget ready WordPress theme for my blog. A three column theme works best for a blog because you can use the columns to split your post, categories, advertisements and other elements, thus making your posts more readable and content-rich.

Based on my findings, I have collected more than 50 themes that in my opinion, the best that you can get from the Internet. Kindly choose, use and acknowledge these brilliant theme designers that shares all their hard work for free. Here are the 3 column, widget ready WordPress themes in no particular order:

1- Blog Pixel Version 2