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?

A fresh new look. is a post from: zParacha.com | Effective programming and blogging tips by Zaheer Paracha

 

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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.

• Free Report: 9 Things to Do to Get Your Blog On Track in The New Year

• Podcast with Leo Babauta from Zen Habits
• Podcast with Neil Patel from QuickSprout

For just $19.95 this is a steal, so if you were planning to spend some money on learning about blogging this is good place to invest.
You can make your purchase here.

Jump-start your blog with free gifts from ProBlogger. is a post from: zParacha.com | Effective programming and blogging tips by Zaheer Paracha

 

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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.

I thought may be I have wrong user id and API key for my bit.ly account so I checked the user id and the account key and that combination appeared to be correct. I tried disabling and then re-enabling the plugin but that did not help. I was inclined to blame the plugin developer for this bug but being a software developer I strongly believe in user error scenario so I decided to double check the settings that require user input.

In the plugin settings you need to provide

• your Twitter id and password
• bit.ly username and API key.

My Twitter account information was correct since the plugin was able to post my tweets.

Next I checked my bit.ly settings and guess what I found. A space at the end of my bit.ly API key! Although to naked eye the API key looked OK, however on close examination I found an empty space at the end. That empty space was causing a failed authentication on bit.ly side hence there was no URL in the tweets. I removed the empty space and now everything is peachy.

If you are also facing the same problem with TwitterTools plugin make sure there is no extra space in your bit.ly API key.

Good luck!

TwitterTools plugin publishing tweets without URL is a post from: zParacha.com | Effective programming and blogging tips by Zaheer Paracha

 

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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.

WordPress 2.9.1 released. is a post from: zParacha.com | Effective programming and blogging tips by Zaheer Paracha

 

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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"); ?>

This way you don’t have to worry about updating the year in the future. Usually the copyright notice is in the footer so you will have to add this code to your footer.php file.

Enjoy.

Update copyright year on your blog is a post from: zParacha.com | Effective programming and blogging tips by Zaheer Paracha

 

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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.

Since I already use other Google services, switching from TwitterFeed to Google will eliminate the need of another third party service.

Google offers all the functionality that TwitterFeed has. The setup process is straightforward.

1. Login to your FeedBurner account.
2. Select the feed that you want to link to your twitter account.
3. Click on the “Publicize” tab.
4. Under the Services column on the left side of the screen you will see Socialize. Click on Socialize link.
5. On the Socialize link page you will see “Add Twitter Account” button. Click on the button to authorize Google Feedburner to access your twitter account using oAuth.
6. Select your formatting options and number of items and any additional text that you want to append to your tweets. I use “New at zparacha.com:” before my tweets announcing my new blog posts.
7. Another new Google URL shorting service (goo.gl) is used to create short versions of your feed links, e.g. http://goo.gl/abcd.
8. You can also choose to let FeedBurner create hashtag from your post’s category.
9. Nice little thing is the live preview of your tweets. At the bottom of the screen a preview of your tweets is displayed as you make changes to your selections.
10. Once you are satisfied with your changes, click Save button and activate the service.
11. Now when you publish a blog post, it will automatically be published to your Twitter followers.

Enjoy.

Publish your blog posts to Twitter with Feedburner. is a post from: zParacha.com | Effective programming and blogging tips by Zaheer Paracha

 

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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.

Just follow these simple steps to customize your More tag.

• Log on to your blog as administartor.
• From your dashboard, click on Appearacnce->Edit->. This will bring up a text editor and a list of your theme files.
• Select the file that renders your homepage that is index.php.
• In the text editor, now search for <?php the_content(_(‘Read more’));?> in the file.
• Replace the phrase ‘Read more’ with whatever text you like. I changed it to “Continue Reading” on this blog.
• Click on update file button to save the changes.
• Visit your homepage. Your new text should greet you.

But that is not all. If you want you can also change the style of the link. You can add background image, use different color or anything else that you can accomplish using CSS styles and your imagination.
By default WordPress associates a CSS class “more-link” to the ‘more’ link. So to change the appearance of this link you can add a new class in your stylesheet or if you already have this class just change it to make this link the way you want.
For instance I added following styles for my more link.

a.more-link:link{

text-transform:capitalize;

float:right;

text-decoration:none;

border-bottom: 1px dotted #ba0000;

font-weight:bold;

}

a.more-link:hover{

text-decoration:none;

border-bottom:none;

font-weight:normal;

color:#0000FF;

}

Enjoy.

How to customize More tag in WordPress is a post from: zParacha.com | Effective programming and blogging tips by Zaheer Paracha

 

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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.

You can certainly use a plugin to limit the number of posts on the front page, but if you are comfortable with editing a PHP file then you can accomplish this task yourself without installing a plugin.


All you need to do is to add following code before the loop statement in the index.php file of your theme.

<?php
//Set limit of posts on the front page to 8.
query_posts('posts_per_page=8');
? >

A word of advice: Make a backup of your index.php file before editing, just in case you need to revert to the original file.

Open index.php in a text editor of your choice or in WordPress. Search for the line

<?php if(have_posts()) :  while(have_posts()) : the_post(); ? >

Replace this line with

<?php query_posts('posts_per_page=8');
 if(have_posts()) :  php while(have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

After end of the loop, you should have a line with

<?php endif; ?>

After this line add following line to reset the query.

<?php wp_reset_query();?>

Now on your homepage you will have only 8 posts (or excerpts).
I randomly used '8', you can put any number you desire.

Enjoy!

How to limit number of posts on your WordPress homepage. is a post from: zParacha.com | Effective programming and blogging tips by Zaheer Paracha

 

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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. .

The good folks at Apture have enhanced their popular plugin to incorporate Amazon products among other resources.
Now all you have to do is to do is during writing a post, highlight a keyword and press the Apture’s button, a pop-up window will give you all the available resources, select reference and then click on Amazon. A list of related products will appear, choose the one you like and a link with your amazon affiliate id will be inserted automatically into your post. And you can go on merrily writing your post.

How to configure Apture for Amazon Affiliate Links

To take advantage of this convenience, you will need to follow these steps.

• Download and activate the Apture plugin.
• Next you will need to create an account with Apture and obtain your Apture token. You will need this token to use their services.
• While at Apture’s website goto your account page and click on ‘Edit Settings’ link. You will see ‘Monetize’ link. Click on that link and then enter your Amazon affiliate id and submit the form. Now your affiliate id is linked to your Apture token.
• Go back to your WordPress admin console and configure Apture plugin. You will need your Apture token id. Enter your Apture site token and click on Update settings button.

You are now all set to easily incorporate Amazon links in your product.

Now when you write a post and want to add Amazon affiliate link, just highlight a keyword in your post and click on the Apture add link button to easily add the link.

Enjoy.

How to add Amazon affiliate links to your posts in one step. is a post from: zParacha.com | Effective programming and blogging tips by Zaheer Paracha

 

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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.”

It is a very handy plugin so I was very disappointed that is not compatible with WordPress 2.8.5. With no update available for this plugin I had to go into the plugin code to fix the problem.

Fortunately with a little research I was able to find and fix the problem.
Here is a step by step guide to make AdSense Deluxe work with WordPress 2.8.1 and beyond.

• Logon to your WordPress dashboard.
• Go to Plugins and then Installed.
• You will see a list of all the plugins you have installed on your blog.
• Locate the link for AdSense Deluxe plugin. Click on the ‘Edit’ link, located under plugin’s name.
• A text-editing box with plugin’s code will come up.
• Search for the phrase admin_head and then replace it with admin_menu.
• Here is the code before and after the change

Before the change:

if( function_exists('add_action') ){
		add_action('admin_head', 'add_adsense_deluxe_menu');
               	add_action('wp_head', 'add_adsense_deluxe_handle_head');
}

After the change:

if( function_exists('add_action') ){
		add_action('admin_menu', 'add_adsense_deluxe_menu');
               	add_action('wp_head', 'add_adsense_deluxe_handle_head');
}

• Click on “Update File” button.
• Now you should be able to access the options page of AdSense Deluxe plugin.

I hope this post helps you in fixing your plugin issues.
Enjoy.!

Make AdSense Deluxe plugin work with WordPress 2.8.5 is a post from: zParacha.com | Effective programming and blogging tips by Zaheer Paracha

 

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