I take great pleasure in introducing “Shunya“ – a brand new blog of mine.
Shunya is my second blog and is primarily going to be a reflection of my experiences as a webmaster at the Stamford International University as well as some of the choicest picks on numerics & computing.
May 15th by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG
Ever wondered who reads your blog or how easy (or complicated) is it for your visitors to understand your blog’s content? The Blog Readability Test, is one of those odd-but-fun-and-cool tools that analyses your content and based on the topics & linguistics (types of words used, terminology etc.), names the minimum level of readers who are able to decipher the content. I’m not really sure about the parameters used to come up with the readability score, but I’m simply making a wild guess on the most logical choices.
Using the tool is outright simple. You enter your blog’s URL and hit the Check Readability Now button. On an average it takes about 2-5 seconds to analyse the content (depending on your home-page size) and spits out a badge stating the readership level. My blog got tagged as College (Postgrad).
Although I can’t vouch for the accuracy level of their algorithms, it may give you a decent idea on how much you need to perk your content up to get to the desired level.
What’s the Readability Level of your blog?
Jul 15th by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG
Following my review of Defensio, Michael Hampton (of Bad Behavior fame) left a comment on the same post assuring that Bad Behavior would run just fine along side Defensio without causing any sort of hiccups for the latter. My thoughts exactly – since Defensio operates more or less on the same principles as that of Akismet, whereas Bad Behavior’s modus operandi is a bit different.
Instead of filtering spam and diverting them to a hold (quarantine), Bad Behavior entirely denies access to your site to suspicious IPs (the ones from where there are an excessive number of requests within a short period of time). Logically, this shouldn’t hamper Defensio in any way. Michael’s comment had got me wondering if I should enable BB again and today’s incident gave me a hard shove in the same direction.
What happened today? Well… Defensio went for a toss, and that too for a good while (it’s till not back up as I’m writing this post). This is the second downtime I faced ever since I installed it, though I’m not certain of the cause. It may be because of lack of infrastructure to handle such high volumes of network activity or some other temporary server outage. Either ways, what I faced was a massive spam flood – the likes of which I never encountered while using the Akismet + Bad Behavior combination. Luckily, I had comment moderation turned on! End result? Here’s a snapshot of my inbox. See for yourself 
Motivation enough to start using Bad Behavior again? I totally think so. Besides, as Michael pointed out earlier, it can’t hurt Defensio in any way other than denying their spam-harvester its share of spam.
Jul 10th by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG
Right since the beginning of my blogging career, I’ve been using Akismet in conjuction with Bad Behavior to weed out spam from my blog. Akismet is as a natural choice since it comes parcelled with WordPress installations. As for Bad Behavior, I decided to use it after reading plenty of articles on effective spam filtering.
Akismet has worked just fine for me so far. It has it’s occasional false positives (marking legit. comments as spam) – but I’m all right with it, since I don’t get much of spam everyday (at the most a 100). While Akismet may be very good at catching spam, there’s one quarter it needs to be revamped big time. The list of spams in Akismet is presented in a paginated manner while displaying the full body of each spam, making the list unnecessarily large and extremely tedious to go through. As I mentioned earlier – I don’t receive much of spam everyday. So, it’s relatively easy for me to wade through the list and pick-out any false positives. However, imagine what a pain it must be for the larger blogs receiving thousands of spam comments everyday. There are big chances of a good amount of legitimate comments going down the drain along with the spam flood. To make the situation worse, lately there have been a lot of complaints about Akismet producing more and more false positives.
After going through a bunch of reviews – both positive and negative, I decided to go ahead and give Defensio a try. For those who didn’t know, Defensio is a community-based anti-spam service similar to Akismet – but with certain added enhancements. They offer anti-spam solutions for a wide range of blogging platforms. It’s free for personal use while for commercial usage a nominal charge is levied on a per month basis.
Defensio sorts your quarantined comments by their “spaminess” value. This means that finding the occasional legitimate comment buried in your spambox (aka false positive) becomes dead easy: with Defensio you simply need to monitor the top portion of your quarantine to be confident that there’s no ham amongst your spam.
After I installed this plug-in, the first few spams that were caught were arranged into two distinct groups – Somewhat Spammy and Moderately Spammy. I’m yet to see the Super Spams… but I get the general idea.
A really nice feature of Defensio is that only the first line of the spam comment is shown (along with a link to display the full content). This makes for much better readability and sifting through the list. If you recall, I was grumbling about the lack of this in Akismet towards the beginning of this post. Score 1 for Defensio.
Before I forget, I’d like to mention one more contrasting point. When I had first installed Akismet and got my API key from WordPress.com, it gave me an insane amount of trouble to validate the key. This has been the same for any new blog I’ve helped install. For some reason, the validation wouldn’t go through for at least an hour following the registration at WordPress.com. However, with Defensio it was just click-and-go. Score 2.
Another distinct advantage of Defensio is that apart from the community anti-spam fighting feature, it operates on a blog-to-blog level.
This means that no two bloggers will see Defensio react in precisely the same way, even for similar comments, which is a good thing – because one person’s ham might be another person’s spam. And our continuously evolving set of algorithmic tricks ensures that we’ll never let spammers gain the upper hand.
Also available are RSS feeds of your comments and spam – which makes the monitoring less painful by curtailing the need to login into the Admin Panel on a regular basis. The Defensio site keeps track of your spam statistics and presents nicely decked-up charts that summarizes the evolution of spam and performance on your blog – a cool eye-candy feature to while your time away and “satisfy your inner bean-counter“.
Keep in mind, this is NOT an Akismet bashing post. I really respect the work of Matt and his team. They are the pioneers in this and without them – more than 80% of the WordPress based blogs wouldn’t see through a single day of Spam Attack. However, Defensio does offer a wider range of tools and features and that makes it a more viable option.
Now all I got to see is how well it handles my spam. On the initial try, it did get two false negatives – i.e. spam comments which passed through as legitimate ones. But since this is its teething phase, I’m going to overlook that and give it a chance to evolve according to my comment preferences. Will report back in a couple of weeks time (or two) on how well it’s performing.
Jun 20th by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG
There’s a brand new money earner for your blog up and about – BlogRolled. If you just made a wild guess regarding their modus operandi, you’re right! It’s a service that pays you for placing the advertisers’ links in your blogroll. At this point of time, the site doesn’t offer much information regarding the company.
The site itself contains a barebone outline of how their service is going to operate along with a sign-up section for both bloggers and advertisers. I came to know about it through this mail from ReviewMe, which stated that this service is brought to you by Shawn Nafziger, the president of Page1Promotion, LLC, an SEO consulting firm serving small business clients across the USA.
Now the first thought that pops in your mind when you hear of this service is – BLOGROLL !! That’s like prime real-estate. The average blogroll appears in the sidebar and nowadays it’s common practise to display the sidebar on all pages – whether on the blog index or along with individual posts. In effect, the links placed in your blogroll are highly visible to all Search Engine spiders, irrespective of the part of the site they are crawling. My point is, that each of the paid links must bring in a decent amount of cash in lieu of such high visibility (as opposed to text link ads placed on single posts). It’s pointless to give up such prime location to low paying advertisers.
I’ve signed-up with them and intend to have a deeper look at it. More on it later. Meanwhile, has anyone else out there started availing this service? If so, care to share your experience with us?
Jun 18th by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG
There are plenty of services on the net which offer shiny ranking badges for your site. Rank Widget brings the more popular ones among these (Google PageRank, Alexa Traffic Rank, Technorati Blog Rank & Yahoo Search InLinks) under one roof and presents them in a plethora of colours and designs that’ll suit every conceivable taste.
The service is free and really simple to use. Just visit Rank Widget, enter your own site’s URL and select the type of ranking badge (among the above mentioned four) you want. Once you’ve hit the Get Rank button, the selected ranking appears on a multitude of badges (both static and animated) along with the code needed to embed each in your site.
If you’re one who likes to proudly show off your site’s ranking, this service is a must try for you.
Oct 11th by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG
This one’s meant for the forumers… a simple online tool to create animated Userbars – which are small rectangular images frequently sighted in forum signatures. They usually convey the interests, hobbies, or graphical skills – in short, the personality of a user. Userbars come in a wide variety of flavours including the animated ones. Here are a couple of examples of Userbars…
Ubanimator can prove to be a great help in creating animated flicks out of your Userbars. The tool takes up a maximum of 10 different Userbars as input and creates an animated gif file based on the transitions (Fade, Scroll Up, Scroll Left, Door & Squish) and pause between each transition, specified by you. The gif file can then be easily added to your signature. The tools has been designed to provide you with a a hassle-free one-step process. The only major drawback I found is the lack of ability to specify different transitions between different Userbars. Whatever transition you pick is applied globally. But then, the complexity of the tool would have increased quite a bit that way. Here’s how an animated Userbar looks like…
As for the actual Userbars used to design the animated flick – you’ve got 3 options. If you’re a skilled enough artist and have got a bunch of pre-created Userbars, simply go ahead and upload them. Or, you can point the tool to the location (URL) of existing Userbars on the net. The third option (for the artistically challenged) involves choosing a set of readily available Userbars from a huge archive at the Ubanimator site. The archive contains Userbars for every conceivable subject from video games to music to TV shows and movies. If you don’t find one of your liking, you can always head over to the popular Userbar forums such as Userbars.com and Userbars.net and check out the collection there.
Visit Ubanimator and try it out for yourself…
Aug 13th by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG
A brief intro…
Past few weeks I’ve been extremely busy designing a Property Investment site for a client. The primary requirement was a custom CMS (Content Management System) – which I had to build from scratch. While it drove me over the edge at times overall it was a thoroughly 
enjoyable as well as an educational journey for me. Since this is a site that caters to foreign investors, one of the requirements was a Currency Conversion Calculator which could be embedded in any of the articles thus providing the visitors an opportunity to get an idea of the property prices in their native currencies, without having to leave the page. At first I sought the easy way out – i.e. I searched far & wide for a currency calculator service that’d allow me to convert between almost any of the world currencies. Unfortunately the free ones out there are really pathetic and the my client wasn’t willing to shell out any $$ for a paid service. That got me down to designing one on my own. I’ve been dabbling in AJAX for a while now and find the whole idea of RIA (Rich Internet Application) really attractive. So I decided to walk the AJAX way and came up with this cool-tool. Once done with the main project, I was so satisfied with the result that I thought it’d be a really good idea to convert it into a sidebar widget for WordPress. So here I am, with curreX – the Ajax based Currency Converter for WordPress.
curreX 
(99.5 KiB, 5,951 downloads)
Installation couldn’t get any easier. Once downloaded, simply…
That’s it…
For those who’re using curreX with non-widget-enabled themes, you should insert the function
< ? show_currex( default_from, default_to, decimal_places, type, title ); ?>
in an appropriate place. For further details on this function & it’s parameters, refer to the FAQs section of the readme.txt bundled in the distribution.
A live demonstration of this can be found under the Coding section of my blog. Though the implementation of the demo is slightly different (it’s hard-coded into in a page), it should give you an idea on what the widget can do.
show_currex() function (for non widget-enabled themes) has changed slightly too – to support embedding of the flash widget.Please Note
I offer support for my plug-ins via the Chaos Laboratory Support Forum only. I will NOT respond to support queries left in the comment section below and, in most cases, will also not publish them. Of course, if you’d like to say something nice or helpful, then feel free to leave a comment!
If you find this plug-in useful, please consider making a donation towards further development of this useful little utility.
Alternatively, you can help me by reviewing this post by clicking on the following link. Believe it or not, this will help us both earn some cash from PayPerPost.
Mar 01st by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG
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