A while back my cousin asked me to read Twilight by Stephanie Meyer.

She asked me to make sure not to read any reviews nor see the trailer for the upcoming movie or it will just spoil the book for me. She had loved the book and was totally obsessed with it. Her words were: I am having a mid life crisis - being so obsessed with this book. I had no idea what she meant.

So I finally went ahead and read the book.

The beginning was alright and it got interesting by the second, third chapter. Halfway through the book, I thought it was good enuff to keep me engrossed and to keep reading but I still had no idea why my cousin was so crazy about it.

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Wordpress, by default adds a no-follow tag to links in comments.

What that means in very simple terms is that a Search Engine Bot should not follow that link. Your commentator receives no link benefit from this and gets no page rank credit from Google. The reason why this is a default action in Wordpress is to combat comment spam, to stop people from leaving meaningless comments just to get a link back to their websites.

However, all this does is inconvenience the real posters who are genuinely contributing to the discussion. The no-follow tag has not served its pupose and has not stopped spam flooding your comments. Best option is to just use the Akismet plugin (comes with Wordpress) for that and be done with it.

So let’s come back to the people who are contributing effectively to a discussion on your blog. Why are they being punished? They are giving something, they should get something back. It is a fair exchange. And it is a win-win situation as you can be at the receiving end as well by posting comments on blogs that do-follow links.

So from today onwards, this blog is officially a DO FOLLOW blog.

You can use a very simple, set it and forget it plugin called Semiologic Do-Follow

You can add your do-follow blog to this list.

There is a list of more plugins as well as directories you can add your do-follow blog to. Check it out.

In that case let me present to you the The Non-Designer’s Design Book

This has to be one of the most recommended design book of all times.

Why?

It is a very simple read. It is great for beginners and acts as a good reference for designers who have been at it a bit.

It offers design guidelines with great examples on how to properly utilize them. While, at the same time there are examples of designs that do not follow the guidelines and still look great!

Bottom line: Design guidelines are just that - guidelines. They are not rules that have to be followed at all costs. The book does however, warn you against common design mistakes that amateur designer’s usually make.

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If you have tried using the NextGen Gallery Plugin (and mind you it is one of the best image gallery plugins out there for Wordpress) then chances are you might have run into the php memory limit problem.

What this means is that unless you increase the memory limit, you might have problems with automatic thumbnail creation.

There are a few options here:

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While I was busy designing his blog, my friend Rob beat me to this announcement (as soon as I had given him the update on WP). Now I can either re-do the whole thing again or point you to his post so you can read about all the great new features. Oh and he has a video up as well.

See Rob’s Post

And I just upgraded two of my websites to WP 2.5.1

Although some of the features (word count, post revisions, turbo blog) in 2.6 are tempting me to upgrade, I think I will wait a bit and make sure the plugin authors update their plugins to ensure compatibility with 2.6. I’m betting by the time that happens and I get on the 2.6 bandwagon, it will be time for 2.7 … not that I’m complaining

I seem to be in a redesign everything I see mode lol.

Not only have I recently redesigned this blog, I have also gone ahead and done a complete overhaul of DotsnDashes Website Designs.

I have made both designs wider as I needed the extra space and it gives the site the much needed white space.

DotsnDashes looks so different from what it used to now.

See the old design below:

Click here to see the new design.

This has to be the most useful and time saving plugin ever. What are the steps you follow when you install a plugin? Here’s how I do it:

1. Look for a plugin which performs the needed function.
2. Download the plugin
3. Unzip it and place it in the plugins directory locally
4. FTP the plugin to my website
5. Login to Worpress, go to the plugins page and activate the plugin

Here’s how you do it with Plugin Central:

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This is not the must-have top of the list plugin. Nor is it one you can’t live without. It is just one of those fun, I want this option, kind of thing.

The plugin I am talking about is the Stray Random Quotes plugin. It let’s you add an unlimited number of quotes, be they famous ones or your own rants, to the database. These posts are then displayed in your sidebar randomly and one at a time.

You can also click next to view the next random quote.

Just a bit of harmless fun!

This can also be used to add a random tip. I can imagine a yellow post-it or a piece of torn paper with some random wisdom posted at the top of your website.

Time to go take a look!

Edit: See how I have used this plugin in the header. It can also be added to your sidebar as a widget if your theme is widget enabled.

Trying to add code to your wordpress post can be one of the most frustrating experiences. That is if you want the code to appear as code in your post.

Say, something like this:

<ul><li>This would have been a bullet</li></ul>

Had this been added to Wordpress normally, it would have appeared as a bullet. But since I’ve used a really cool plugin called ‘Code Auto Escape’, I can add code as code as long as I add pre and code tags around it.

Now you may never need to show html, xhtml, javacript, php, etc code in yuor posts but just in case you do, this is the plugin to get.

Get the Code Auto Escape Plugin

I have been installing and trying out new plugins at this blog. Some have worked out very well while others have not been anything to talk about.

So over the next few days I am going to go over the gems that I have found. Some you can’t live without and some are just a luxury.

However, the best out of the lot is the Accordion plugin. See the tabbed navigation in the sidebar for Categories/Archives/Tabs? Yes, that is accordion. It can display up to 6 tabs for plugins which use li tags. This is necessary as it encloses everything in ul list tags.

However, I have a tweak around that.

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