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!

The last time I did a theme reboot or change my blog theme/layout was early this year when I installed a customized version of Magazine News. I liked my previous theme/layout, but it didn’t really work out as I expected it to be and I also grew tired of it. I spent a good amount of time scanning and browsing currently available free and premium WordPress themes and after narrowing my options and weighing things out, I was able to decided on which theme to use.

JaypeeOnline has a fresh new theme and it’s called “Fresh News”. I purchased this theme from WooThemes during their Halloween Special promo where they offered three themes for the price of one. Although Fresh News is not a new theme, I’ve always liked it ever since it was released by WooThemes. Now that I have it, I just wish that I had purchased this theme earlier.

It took a while for me to finish customizing the Fresh News theme because it uses a lot of built-in functions, includes and other files that my previous themes didn’t have. I had to go through the code and familiarize myself with the theme structure. I’m glad that as a WooThemes customer, I have access to the support forum where I was able to ask help with some of the customization. The forum admin and Woo Ninjas (moderators) were very friendly, helpful and prompt in answering my questions and replying to my support threads.

As you can see, the layout has changed a lot from the previous theme. Previously, there were three columns that had two sidebars and a bottom bar. Now, it only has two columns and no bottom bar. I’ve dropped some plugins like the Page-Navi which I don’t need anymore, Post-Ratings because I feel like its not serving its purpose and MyAvatars because Fresh News already has built-in Gravatar support. I also got rid of some scripts/widgets like FeedBurner (RSS readers), TopBlogs and Ratified. I thought about also removing the Entrecard widget but I decided to keep it for now.

Anyways, this layout and all the stuff you see here are not yet final. It’s still a work in progress so it means I could still change some parts of it and add/remove stuff. There are some stuff that I plan on adding that I’m sure would be useful for both you, my regular readers and the visitors. Also, I would really appreciate it if you can help me by pointing out bugs, errors or typos that you might find in any part of the blog. Comments, suggestions and feedback are also much welcome. You can leave a comment here or contact me.

So what do you think about the new theme/layout? Do you think its better than the previous one? Why or why not? What are the things you think I should change or improve? I value your opinion. Thanks for your time and have a nice day!

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.

You might or might not have noticed the changes in some parts of my blog so I’m gonna talk about it in detail, the parts that I’ve updated, changed and tweaked.

First stop is my About page. This one got it’s much needed and long overdue update. You see, I have a difficult time writing stuff or talking about myself. Since I started my blog, I’ve never had the chance or motivation to write something for this particular page.

A few days back, as I was sitting in front of the computer, I don’t know what got into me but all of a sudden, I decided to edit my About page. As soon as I started typing, it all just flowed so smoothly and what you see now is what I accomplished that day. It’s not that much but it’s way, way better than my previous one. I might just add a few more things one of these days.

Next thing I did was to tweak my sidebar. If you can see, not all sidebar elements show up in every page. Some only appear in the index page and others in posts or pages. Some of you guys might have already done this with your blog but it just hit me the other day when I was looking at my theme. I noticed how it displays the RSS feeds and the “share this post” buttons. I hope you know what I’m talking about. Anyways, I got to work and started looking the sidebar code. I found out that it was using the “If, Else and Else If” statements. After several minutes, I figured out everything and then implemented it on my blog.

One of the newest plugins I installed is the MyAvatars plugin which I used to replace the Gravatar plugin. I decided to replace it because I’ve been wanting to change my avatar but Gravatar has been closed to users for a long time because it was under development. MyAvatars uses the avatar from MyBlogLog. So if you’re part of the MyBlogLog community your avatar would show in the comments you leave on my posts.

Cruise was the first to comment about this next one, my favicon. Previously, I was using the my theme’s favicon. I thought that it would be better to have a unique favicon for my blog and what better way than to use my own picture, right? So I created one online using this site. You can also create one here.

I have been trying to find a way to improve how the links were displayed in my Links page. Before I had all links in one long column. I know that it could be a hassle for visitors to go all the way down just to go through the list. Thank goodness for the IMP Links plugin. If you take a look at my new Links page, you’ll see that the links are nicely and neatly arranged into two columns. You can also edit the IMP Links’ css to make it fit to your theme or preference. To go with the new look, I also created new categories and assigned each link to the different categories.

Last but not least, I installed the Top Commentators plugin and it appears in the sidebar everytime you read a post. It’s quite easy to customize and install. You can choose whether to display the top commentators on a daily, monthly or yearly period. Mine is configured to display the all-time top commentators. You can also choose whether or not to link the commentator’s name to their website. You filter out users and urls that you don’t want to be included in the list. I filtered out myself from the list so it would only show comments from you guys.

There ya go. That’s the most recent updates or changes that I’ve done to my blog. If you have any questions regarding the usage, implementation or need help in installing the mentioned plugins, just send me a message and I’ll do my best to help you.

UPDATE:
I’ve just fixed the comment avatars. I edited and configured the MyAvatar plugin so that it would also fetch the ones from Gravatar.com. Now, comments can display both avatars for both MyBlogLog and Gravatar.
Btw, the plugin looks up Gravatar first so if you’r e registered with both, your Gravatar image will be the one displayed. Next, I’ll try to figure out how to fetch the ones from WordPress.com accounts.