For those of you that are not on top of what’s happening in the iPhone community, the Dev Team, the preeminent group of iPhone hackers, just released Yellow Sn0w, a software unlocking tool that can be run directly from the iPhone.
Yellow Sn0w is ridiculously easy to use, assuming you’re already on a jailbroken iPhone. If you’re interested in unlocking your iPhone so it can run on any cellphone carrier, then hop over to my iPhone blog where I wrote a post about how to unlock the iPhone 3G.
This post was inspired by a tweet from Lorelle, my favorite WordPress expert. Lorelle’s tweet was saying “Make WordPress’ search function suck Less” with a link to this post. I had WordPress search issues in the past and found a few solutions and I thought I would learn a little bit more from this post, but I didn’t.
Basically this post was about manually tweaking your search.php file, which improves the WordPress search feature but it still doesn’t make it a good search feature. The main problem with the WordPress search feature, besides the irrelevancy, is that if you have a large blog of a few hundreds posts, then there is not much you can do to speed up the search.
I don’t pretend to be an expert about WordPress (I’m actually far from that!) but I do think both solutions I will talk about in this post are much better at delivering very good search results for your WordPress blog. By “good search results”, I mean results that are delivered quickly, that are relevant to your search query, and sorted by relevance.
The wpSearch plugin is like having your own custom search engine on your blog. wpSearch is based on “Lucene“, a full-featured open source text search engine. wpSearch is fast, and relevant, which is pretty much everything I need from a search engine on my blog.
To set up wpSearch on your blog, simply download the plugin from here, then upload it, set permission to 777 (very important), and activate the plugin from your admin panel. After activating it, you will have to build the search index database, which may take a while (about 5 posts/second) if you have many posts on your blog. That’s all there is to it. Now check your search feature and you will see a huge difference in the results you will get. The relevancy will be so much better that like me, you’ll want to blog about it ;-)
Adsense for Search (AFS) is now my favorite search feature for my blogs for 2 reasons: for one it is the best search engine you can get; and two, you can actually make money from it. Even though I hate Google as a company, I can’t deny that their search algorithm delivers the best you can get from a seach engine thus far.
Now the main concern about Adsense For Search is that you have to rely on Google to crawl your website to index your new posts. Some people won’t use Adsense For Search for this one reason. Yes, you have to wait for Google to crawl your site and index your pages but how much does that really matter in your case? I mean, is it that important to you that your post must be foundable immediately after being published?
Besides, one benefit of Adsense For Search that I have been able to verify on all my blogs is that when AFS is implemented on your site, Google will come visit you quickly and more often. I haven’t done scientific tests on this, but I was able to notice it on many occasions. Most of the time, when I publish something on my blogs, the post is picked up by Google within hours, sometimes within minutes.
To set up, AFS, you will need a Google Adsense account.
A while back, when I started this blog, I installed the DoFollow plugin which removes the nofollow attribute of the URL of your commenters and any URL included in the comment itself. The reason I installed this plugin was to quickly get many backlinks to this blog.
Indeed, when your blog is “dofollow”, you get featured on many sites or blogs that give list of dofollow blogs. Doing this got me listed on a few hundred blogs in no time creating a large amount of backlinks, which is probably the reason why my blog has a PR4.
The downside of this as you can imagine is that you get quite a bit of spam comment. Akismet handles most of it but from time to time I had to manually delete comments. But most people commenting on my blog just to get a link back are actually very well behaved. Most didn’t abuse it and left genuinely interesting comments. In this case, I didn’t delete the comment.
Today I decided it is time to go back to the nofollow rule. My blog is clearly not intended to make money or anything like that so I really don’t care about traffic and Google PR, which in my opinion doesn’t even mean anything anyways. Besides, I will probably remain listed as a dofollow blog on many sites so I don’t think I’m gonna suffer any link juice dicrease.
WordPress just released version 2.7 of their software and I have to say that it is one big update! Although there is not much change in the overall functionalities, something that changes is the overall layout of the admin panel. The WP team has spent a lot of time and put quite a bit in the way of resources towards making things both look and work nicer. This release doesn’t contain any security fixes that I am aware of, but it definitely feels quite a bit faster. Well, at least in my rather unscientific tests, it does. Your mileage may vary, of course…
As usual when you update, there is a risk of screwing something up. What I always do before updating is exporting all my post. This way, I know that if there is a problem during the process, all my posts will be safe somewhere on my PC.
If you’ve updated to a previous version before, you may have encountered issues such as not being able to login for example. As I was able to verify before, the most common problem comes from the plugins.
The best way to avoid any problem with you plugins is to access your server and rename your plugin folder, right before updating WordPress. For example, I rename my plugins folder to “plugins-old”. Then I update WordPress, update my database and when this is done, I go back to my plugins folder that I previously renamed “plugins-old” and rename it “plugins” again.
My hosting company, DreamHost, automatically creates a new “plugins” folder when I update to a newer version so I always have to delete this one first before renaming my folder to “plugins”.
Doing so avoid losing all your plugins or having to reactivate all of them individually. Hope that will help some of you.
Last Friday, Apple updated the iPhone firmware to 2.2, fixing a bunch of security holes and adding a few more features such as direct podcast download, Google street view and more… As usual when a firmware update comes out, I recommended to jailbreakers to wait for the GO from the Dev Team to upgrade. At the time, I also forsaw that it would take just a few days to the Dev Team to come up with a jailbreak method.
Well, it took about 24 hours for our favorite iPhone hackers to release updated versions of QuickPwn and PwnageTool, making firmware 2.2 jailbreakable again.
So I wrote a few tutorials over at my iPhone blog on how to do this. If you have any interest in dowbgrading, jailbreaking, or unlocking your iPhone, check any of these links:
OMG what did I just say? Why in the world would you hate Google? Google is so awesomely uber amazing. I mean, without Google, you’d still be using Yahoo for your searches; you’d still be using Hotmail for your emails; and you’d still be using MapQuest to get directions. Isn’t Google a life saver?
The fact is that Google is not a life saver. Google is a life creeper! Google is reducing your vision field and the worst thing is that you don’t even notice anything, and you’re probably asking for more.
A look at Google products and future products is scary. Mail, blogs, search, browser, health, advertising, video, books, maps, images, office tools, and so much more… Tell me one thing Google doesn’t do and chances are they’re already working on it.
What really scares me in the trust people put in Google. Their moto “don’t be evil” has been obsolete for quite a while – in case you didn’t know, Google gave away info about dissidents to the Chinese government. For a company that aims at not being evil, that’s a miss…
My prediction is that in less than 5 years we will see associations of people against Google. Remember how MicroSoft was hated by everyone in the 90’s? I predict it’s going to be much more than that. I also predict that sooner rather than later there will be a financial scandal shaking the market’s trust in Google.
You must think that I am crazy and that I have nothing to support what I am saying. You’re right. I am crazy and I have no evidence but please remember me in a few years when you blog about how much you hate Google…
The other day I was looking for a new background image for my Twitter page so I did what any normal person would do, I googled it… I thought I was going to be overwhelmed by the amount of websites offering such a service; I mean, how many of these are there to pimp your myspace page? But I was wrong, there is no good site out there that offers good and original Twitter wallpapers.
That’s why I decided to post about this so if like me, you’re looking for a theme for your Twitter page, you may want to check out some of the following sites.
UPDATE: I recently created a website called TwitBackgroundImages.com where I will try to upload Twitter backgrounds as often as I can. So hop over there, and check them out!
This is my personal favorite. Paul Anthony offers us what he calls “26 awesome backgrounds for twitter fanboys (and girls)”. I really like this site because it gives original templates with the matching color codes so you can also customize your designs colors.
French entrepreneur Fabrice Epelboin says that like me, he was looking to personalize his profile page on Twitter but he couldn’t find a good website. Unlike me though, he has design skills so he was able to make his own. He has 2 PSD files to download. They are really worth the look.
This website offers 5 PSD files of Twitter backgrounds that you can download and tweak to make your own using an image editor. I’m no designer so I couldn’t use this but you might be able to do something out of it. If you’re a designer, you can also submit your Twitter designs to the site.
This blog post tells you how to create an original Twitter background template using PowerPoint. From the author: “Who would’ve thought that the presentation app used to lull audiences to sleep could also be used to create an appealing Twitter background? The process is fairly simple and only limited by your imagination and Twitter’s 800Kb upload limit.”
A few PSD files to download and tweak. Not really interesting.
This designer actually offers her free services to design Twitter background images for you. She also have a few original wallpapers to download. Definitely worth a look.
Three Twitter wallpapers with the Twitter bird on them to download.
If you’re a designer you may want to visit CronCast to get the Twitter background guidelines. From file dimensions to color palettes, he tells you eveything you have to know on the specifics of creating your own Twitter wallpaper image.
Any other sources that you know? Please share them in the comments. Oh by the way, follow me on Twitter ;-)
I went to El Salvador last June to get some good surf with a few friends and my cousin. That was a great trip, even though I’m still trying to recover from it. You may want to read my previous post about this trip…
One of the guys who were surfing with us took a bunch of pictures of us surfing but he never got to put it on his SmugMug account until recently. I downloaded all the pictures about me and added them to my Flickr account and created a slideshow, just for you. How lucky, huh?
That’s crazy how a few surf shots can make you realize how much you suck. I know I’m not an amazing surfer, and although I learned a great deal during this trip, I still think I look like a kook. Oh well, I’m not there to win the WCT, I’m just trying to have fun, and in most cases, I do have fun.
Today I upgraded my personal franchise blog from WordPress 2.1 to WordPress 2.6.2. I know, what a big upgrade… To do so, I simply went to my webhost admin panel and used their one-click upgrade service. Within 2 minutes I received an email from my host telling me that everything went fine.
So I tried to go back to my blog admin panel but it would not let me in. Every time I entered my login and password, it would just go back to the login page. I tried typing wrong password and it would give me an errror message. Going back to the homepage of the blog, I realized it was showing me as logged in. Strange.
That’s when I decided to use my secret troubleshooting weapon…. Google (I know, it’s no secret weapon). I googled “can’t login to wordpress after upgrade” and I the first result thta popped up was a page on WordPress forum.
This is the solution I used:
I had this problem after I updated my WP. Tried everything… cleaning out the cash, the cookies, changing the admin password, making changes in the wp-login.php, making changes to wp-config.php.
The last thing I tried was to clean out all of my plugins, deleting them from my ftp (after downloading everything to my computer!) and then when I tried to login I got a message that my database neded uppdating because it didn’t “fit” to my wordpress installation. An now… I can login!
But this also seems like a good fix:
I’m having this problem when upgrading to 2.6.2 with Fantastico. Here’s the process that’s been consistently working for me to correct it:
- Using FTP, rename the
pluginsfolder (at/wp-content/plugins/) toplugins-old- Log in as usual
- I am prompted to upgrade the database, so I click that button and it does
- Rename
plugins-oldback toplugins- Log in again
Once I do that, everything seems to work.
If you’re having any login issue after updating WordPress, you may want to try any of the fixes.
For those of you who don’t know yet, I operate an iPhone blog that’s getting quite some attention lately. We average between 8,000 and 10,000 visits per day and I had to hire 2 co-bloggers (Alicia and Cody) to help me satisfy our readers’ hunger for iPhone news, tips, hacks and cracks.
I got in touch with the AllTop.com team to help them put together the iPhone page. I sent them a list of the best iPhone websites and resources out there. Obviously, they also included the iPhone Download Blog on their page.
It’s nice to be able to participate in the iPhone community and to make it better, little by little. If you go to the AllTop iPhone page, you will see that my blog is right at the top, in second position, which gives me PR5 links to 5 of my most recent posts as well as a link to the homepage. That’s some solid SEO juice!
Next step is to get my company’s franchising blog on AllTop but I’m going to wait a few weeks since we just launched the blog a few days ago and it doesn’t have much content.