zParacha.com

Welcome to redesigned and improved zParacha.com. I have been thinking of giving my blog a face-lift for some time. I considered several options including designing/developing a new theme from scratch, buying Thesis and then modifying it, or buying a premium theme. Since I have several options I kept considering pros and cons of each one and in the process the planned upgrade was delayed. Basically I was just procrastinating.

Finally, I decided to get it down and settled on this elegant, free premium theme. I am still working on some minor customization but I believe this is a nice, professional-looking theme that meets my requirements.

Share your thoughts on this new design. Do you like the color scheme, page layout? What do you not like? What elements do you think I can change to further improve the look?

If one of your new year resolutions for 2010 is to improve your blogging and take your blog to the next level then I have a great news for you. ProBlogger Darren is offering a sweet deal on his very popular 31 Days to Build a Better Blog workbook. For a limited time you will receive following three items for free when you buy the workbook. More

I have TwitterTools plugin to tweet my new blog posts to my twitter account. Recently I noticed that my tweets from TwitterTools plugin do not have the URL to my posts. I checked my plugin settings and everything looked OK. More

Earlier this week WordPress 2.9.1 was released to fix some minor bugs found in release 2.9. It also fixes the annoying issue some bloggers faced with posts scheduling and pingbacks. It is always a good idea to keep your WordPress installation (and all plugins) uptodate, so I would strongly encourage you to upgrade to 2.9.1 as soon as possible.

You can upgrade directly from you Admin console or if you prefer you can download the latest version here.

Good luck.

While you are celebrating the arrival of the new year, don’t forget to update the year on the copyright notice on your blog. The simplest way is to edit the file and replace 2009 with 2010, but a better solution would be to replace the year in your copyright declaration with following line of PHP code.

<?php echo date("Y"); ?>

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One of earliest third party tools that I started using for Twitter is TwitterFeed. This service automatically tweets your new blog posts for you. I have been using TwitterFeed for almost two years and I wrote about this service when I started using this. I am quite satisfied with this service but I am switching now to recently announced service by Google.
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One of the widely used WordPress is the More tag. This tag is used split a post so that only a portion of the post is
displayed on the front page. When WordPress sees More tag, it inserts a link to next line of the post. By default
the text of the link is “Read more”. But you can easily change the text and appearance of the link.
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If you have been blogging regularly for more than few months, chances are you have quite a few posts on your blog. That is a good thing. As a blogger you are supposed to blog regularly to provide useful and relevant information to your blog readers. But unless you dictate how your homepage is displayed WordPress will display several posts (or excerpts of posts) on the homepage. Usually you don’t want to display all your posts on the front page. So how do you tell WordPress to display only a certain number of posts on the front page? The answer is simple. More

Amazon.com being the largest online retailer offers a variety of merchandise. Because of their huge selection of products it is no surprise that Amazon affiliate program is so popular among bloggers.

With an astonishing number of products available through Amazon.com it is quite likely that every blogger will find a related product to link in every blog post. On the other hand, this vast jungle of products can also be overwhelming for bloggers who naturally want to spend their time on writing post not searching for related products.

Unfortunately, Amazon did not offer any help to bloggers to easily create affiliate-links for its products. Every affiliate has to find related products using their keywords and then manually create the link into the articles. This is laborious and cumbersome exercise.

But now there is a better alternative. More

Recently I upgraded to WordPress 2.8.5. The upgrade process itself went smoothly but some of the plugins I have installed on my blog stopped working with latest WordPress version. One of them is AdSense Deluxe.I use AdSense units on my blog (as you can see) and use AdSense Deluxe plugin to manage my ads. The plugin was still displaying my AdSense units properly, the problem was that I could not access its admin panel to change settings or ad units. I was getting following error.

“You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.”

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