For those of you who are regular readers, you know that I previously published blog updates regularly to keep you guys posted on the changes I’ve made to the blog like the plugins I’ve installed/uninstalled or the changes in the layout like adding, removing or moving banners, widgets or other stuff. I haven’t published a blog update for more than year and I think its about time I did another one.

Uninstalled Plugins

• Firestats – Firestats is a WordPress plugin that keeps track of real time statistics, recent referrers, search engine keywords, recent popular pages and other visitor information. It also displays the country, operating system and browser used by a person who left a coment. I used to love this plugin, but because it uses up too much disk space and increases the size of the WordPress database, I decided to uninstall it and instead use other online services to keep track of my blog statistics and analytics.
• WP Grins – A plugin that displays emoticons/smileys for readers to use in the comment form. I uninstalled this plugin because it had a conflict with the WMD Editor plugin.
• WP Post Ratings – Plugin that enables the readers to rate the post. Uninstalled WP Post Ratings because I felt like it doesn’t serve its purpose and it wasn’t really that relevant. Aside from that, I also discovered that there were a few visitors who purposely sabotaged the posts by rating posts low. I don’t know the reason why they did it but WP Post Ratings keeps track of the visitors IP address so I know who did it and what posts they rated.
• MyAvatars – Plugin that displays a commentators MyBlogLog avatar or Gravatar. Really liked this plugin but decided to get rid of it to minimize the use of plugins and instead use Gravatar which didn’t require a plugin.
• Lightbox 2 – Javascript that enables viewing of larger images within the same window.. Had a conflict with one of the scripts used by my theme – Fresh News.
• WP-Polls – Plugin that adds an AJAX poll system to any WordPress blog. I’ve temporarily removed it coz I have no use for it right now. I might put it back when I come up with something that I might need your opinion with.

Installed Plugins

• Blog Stats – Adds shortcodes so you can easily insert and display certain blog stats on your blog posts or pages.
• Global Translator – Plugin that automatically translates blog posts into 41 different languages using 4 different online translation engines Google Translation Engine, Babelfish Translation Engine, FreeTranslations.com and Promt.
• Google Syntax Highlighter for WordPress – Plugin makes using the Google Syntax highlighter to highlight code snippets within WordPress simple.
• UserAgent Spy – Plugin that displays the visitors operating system and web browser in each comment they make. Used this to replace the Firestats plugin feature that displays country, operating sytem and browser.
• WMD Editor – Adds the WMD Editor to the comment field, to make it easier for visitors to leave comments. You can see it in action above the comment form.
• WP-Clickmap – Plugin that creates a clickmap (similar to heatmap) that displays the areas where visitors click for each page.

Other Blog Changes

• Moved FeedBurner to my Google account so JaypeeOnline’s new RSS feed URL is now http://feeds2.feedburner.com/jaypeeonline/HhAk. Please update your RSS readers and aggregators.
• Added the Twit This Post option after each blog post. If you like any of my posts, please feel free to share it with others on Twitter.
• Installed the UserVoice feedback widget that lets readers/visitors anonymously give feedback and vote for suggested ideas. Feedback tab found on the left side of the blog.
• Moved the Previous Post and Next Post links from below the comment form to the section between the post and the comments.

For those of you who are still not aware of the Top Commentator of the Month award/contest, you might be interested to know that each month I’ll be giving away prizes like cash, tshirts and schwag to the person who leaves the most comments each month. Check out the official page to know more about the rules and how to join.

There are some WordPress plugins that I’ve recently installed that I will be writing a review of in the next couple of weeks so if you’re interested and would want to know more about it, make sure to subscribe to my RSS feed so you don’t miss the upcoming WordPress Plugin reviews.

Also, if any of you guys have any comments, ideas or suggestions to make JaypeeOnline better, please don’t hesitate to share it with me via the comments or contact page. If you want to remain anonymous, you can use the feedback tab found on the left side of the blog. Thanks and have a nice day!

New WordPress theme – Rhea V1.0 is now available for public download! This is a Widget ready, Three-column theme with soft colors and rounded edges. We have made a special provision for you to add a Lightbox image gallery to the sidebars. You can download the Nextgen Gallery plugin and then go to the widgets section to add it to your sidebar.

The Rhea WordPress theme requires the Nextgen Gallery plugin for the Lightbox image gallery found in the left sidebar which you can easily add as a widget. This theme has been tested on Firefox, Flock, IE 7 and Opera.

Screenshot:

My Take:
Rhea v1.0 is a simple but pretty theme that will definitely appeal to most bloggers. It’s easy to customize and you can make it look even better if you can create a custom header yourself or have one made for you. You can also change the background color or use a patterned background to make it unique and different from other blogs using the same theme. This theme has a lot of potential, just use your creativity and imagination.

Even if the default setup requires the Nextgen photo gallery plugin to run the photo gallery in the left sidebar, it doesn’t mean that you need to have a photo gallery. If you prefer not to have it, you can easily replace it with something else. You can move the right sidebar contents there and because this theme is widget-ready, you can use it for your widgets. And if you’re running ads on your blog, you can use that space for Adsense, Adbrite, Bidvertiser or banners for other affiliate advertising.

Great work Jai! I’m sure a lot of WordPress users are both happy and thankful that you’ve created this theme. I give the Rhea v1.0 a 4 out of 5.

Preview or Download the Rhea v1.0 theme for WordPress.

Upgrading to WordPress 2.2 was no sweat. Everything went smoothly and I didn’t encounter any problem whatsoever. The only thing I had to fix were some custom fields or parameters for a couple plugins that I used. Aside from upgrading my WordPress installation, I also installed and re-installed a few plugins.

1. Enforce .www Preference – I installed this plugin because I wanted to make sure that all queries and links to my blog point to only one URL which is http://jaypeeonline.net. If your site can be accessed with both http://domain.com and www.domain.com formats, most search engines treat them as two different domains therefore affecting your backlinks.

2. WP-Chunk – Once in a while, someone posts a comment and inserts a very long URL that overlaps the comment box and messes up the layout. This can be really annoying and with this plugin, you’ll no longer worry about those long URLs. WP-Chunk cuts off the long URL and displays a shorter version and you can also specify how many characters long for the displayed URL.

3. MyAvatars – I reinstalled this plugin after I noticed that my own gravatar wasn’t showing up. I could see other people’s gravatars except mine. I also activated the Gravatar support for this plugin.

Yesterday, John Chow made a post about the MyAvatars plugin being broken. He turned off the plugin after finding out that instead of avatars, the plugin displayed broken images. But not long after he published his entry, the plugin seem to be working again and the avatars were back. I guess the guys at MyBlogLog read John’s post and went to fix it right away.

4. LightBox 2.02 Plugin – I had this plugin when I installed the Lazy K Gallery plugin for my Photos page. A few weeks ago, I noticed that when I clicked on the images, they’re not displayed using Lightbox (Javascript-powered overlay popups). So I checked the plugin page and found a new version, LightBox 0.6.4 Beta. I replaced the one I had installed and after activating the plugin, I checked on my photos and this time it worked.

There’s one plugin I installed that I didn’t include in this list. I’ll feature it separately as a plugin review so watch out for it.