This would be a good option as our Email readers can directly move to online reader if they prefer. In fact if this could be configurable, publishers can add more options.

However the disadvantage here is  readers will subscribe to Feedburner url even if you are using MyBrand feature of  Feedburner. So in case you plan to move the count might drop.

What do you think ?

Add to Google Reader in Feedburner Email Subscriptions by Ashish Mohta originally appeared on Technospot.Net on May 28, 2009, 9:22 am. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Summary links in Feedburner Newsletter

If you click on it, the user can directly scroll down to read that particular articles in the mail. I checked some of previous newsletters which I got but none of them had this.

But I am sure very happy and so would be readers with this and had been TOP ONE feature request. Pretty Helpful when you have like 6 to 7 articles and readers have scroll down to discover all of your articles one by one.  This way they can choose what they want to read.

Feedburner Summary links for Email Subscriptions by Ashish Mohta originally appeared on Technospot.Net on May 24, 2009, 8:52 am. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Microsoft Excel text 2 Columns Menu

Lets say you have a line which you had copied from somehwere and contains data like First Name, Second Name and City. Now once you put it in excel and you want to seperate out in diff columns , this will be a difficult job, Specially when you have lets say 300 lines of such data.

Its time you should know Columns to Text Feature of Micrsoft Office Excel 2007. This helps you to break along text into columns of excel based on certain de-limiters. Most of the time you will have just on delimiter in these cases. You can save a lot of time doing this.

Converting Text 2 columns in MS office 2007 Excel

The menu is availble under Data Tab of the ribbon menu.

Use delimiters for breaking text into columns in Excel by Ashish Mohta originally appeared on Technospot.Net on October 28, 2008, 1:25 am. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Social Networking Site's Popularity

Its really cool to see this thing but the only thing I was wondering why just Alexa was taken into account. Its popular service but I think mixing stats from 2-3 others sites which provide traffic ranking would be a better idea. And Twiiter is missing!!!! Please add it.

PS: I had linked the image to the source page. You can click on it to see a larger image.

Related : Social Media Sites – Are we using it in real sense [ Podcast ]

Find out which Social Networking Site is famous where by Ashish Mohta originally appeared on Technospot.Net on October 22, 2008, 7:38 pm. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I would suggest to use Google Webmaster 404 gadget in your 404 pages. Its a script which tries to find closest match to the wrong url people land up on your site. The suggested match , as far as my understanding goes, is being matched with the site map url we provide them. In case it is not able to find anything, it would give a link to your home page.

Here is an example :

You can find this under Web Master console > Tools > Enhance 404 Pages

Enhance your 404 page with Google Webmaster 404 gadget by Ashish Mohta originally appeared on Technospot.Net on October 20, 2008, 7:30 am. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Call it dramatic but all of a sudden the newsgator feed reader which I use to read feeds started popping up the feed updates. It triggered my mind and I rushed to check my blog feed there.  80 Posts I had there which made me little happy and then All of a sudden I got the idea of Google Reader. On Immediate check I found some posts there and then I kept scrolling and Guess what I had all 1080 posts there. Wow…. that was one major luck.

Google Reader containing Posts and their dat

Google Feed reader had stored all my posts from the day I started. That was so surprising. I could have never expected. Now we were sure that  the articles were there.  The next was to plan out and which was :-

Our Strategy:

• To post back all the post with exact url.
• To bring most of the comments ( If possible )
• Find the changes I would have made with time as Google Reader doesnt keep the changed things.
• Find when the articles was written so we can maintain the chronology.

Hurdles :

• To maintain the traffic.
• Find all the popular post.
• Changes made with time in the posts.
• Recovering lost images.

Tools we used to get the posts back:

1. Google Reader : For Approximate Dates, Post Content
2. Google Cache : To get the change done on the articles.
3. Google Analytics and Wordpress Stats to find the popular posts.

Step: 1 Pulling out Popular and Posts which changed with time

Then I started pulling all the popular posts one by one. The best was to use Google Search with the exact title I had for the titles as seen in the Google Reader. This gets my posts in the first result. Next thing I did was to hit the cache link of the article to get the latest updates if any.

Using Google Cache to get latest udpates

We had to be quick on this as Google Cache changes every week. I found which ever posts I knew I had changed and started posting updates.  These steps I did for 250 + posts of mine which started bring good amount of hits slowly.

The hurdle of getting the exact url was getting over we were able to pull the correct url both from feedburner or the Google Cache. We were not able to find the exact date but we used the dates which we saw in Google Reader as approximate dates.

Step 2: Checking for Not Found Pages

its really impossible to find all the post which would gets hit specially the smaller ones . So i decided to spend 2-3 hrs on tracking the not found pages.

• I used Alexa King 404 Plugin which gives out email or feed for every not found thing on a wordpress blog.
• I use Woopra for live tracking. This came out to be very handy as I can find in real time which articles were giving me 404. I was immedatiely recording everthing down so I can pull it up later on.

Woopra for Live tracking for 404

This gave me around 200 articles which use to get hits. Remember I was watching the traffic when its high traffic time for.

Step 3 : Pulling Articles by Month:

By this time I had already more then 400 articles up and running. Ths traffic was stil on down side now. Since Google did not find articles i guess the traffic was going slowly down.

Now the 404 errors were also reducing and moreover the cahce had already begun to change.  So we had no other choice left but start pulling from the Google reader and putting it one by one. Trust me it was so painful i used to hate my self for not taking the backup.

Step 4 : Image Recovery ( This was Major Luck )

Well there is no means we could have recovered images but when I started blogging I did not used to have my images here. I had many of my images hosted at photo bucket. This was little relievf. I decided to start re-making the images article by article until tomorrow.

I was in office and it alarmed me that I had my backups of images to an extent in my old laptop. I got back home and found it. Wow I am so happy I did not reformat it after i got my new laptop.

So now most of the problems got solved. I had the images, article and dates. Problem was 80% solved.

Image Recovery

Stage 5: Check , Re check everything .

This is what I am doing now as I write this post. Since I copied everything I had to keep a keen check if there was something missing, loss of formatting, and links. In this phase I am putting back the images also. This should be over by tonight or max in the morning.

We have recovered by 85% and should be ok in a week or so as the traffic starts flowing back.So this is how Technospot.Net is back now. We have a new theme which we are still working on to tweak it and add utilities every where.

As a summary :

• We found all our posts in the Google Reader. Since I used to give full feeds we had everything, Thanks to Darren Rowse whose one of the post inspired me to switch from partial feed to complete feed
• Google Cache helped us in getting the modified articles.
• Woopra and Alexa Kings 404 Plugin helped me to find quick not found pages.
• Hosting Images on other server is a good idea but depends.

What did I learn from this :

The major mistake I made was to rely on the host backup. I had never any issue with my hosting except this.

• Even though I pay 10$ for the back up , they have given me the direct access to those backups
• I should always take backup of my Images, Database and Theme on my side alone which I have started doing it again and will continue to do it.
• One of the major thing which I gained was that I got a chance to re visit all my posts and fixed a lot of things. Even the images which I am adding have their alt tags availble. It would be interesting to see if this affects.

The 2 weeks of painful time is coming to end now. I had been through a lot but it was a learning experience. I wonder if this would have happened next year and I would have never check my backup. I though of sharing this with you all in case if somebody looses his data like I did, this is one good way.

At the end I would also like to thanks some of the people specially people on Twitter who had been always asking me how its going. My Wife who had seen me just sitting on the computer all the time since last week and had no time talking to her either. Thanks for Sampat who helped in finding things at places and Of course Manav who had been so  morally supportive to me.

Thats the story peeps and We are back with a BANG!!!!!!!!!!!!

How did we Recreate the complete Blog without a Damn Backup by Ashish Mohta originally appeared on Technospot.Net on September 27, 2008, 3:29 pm. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

• “Forum” keyword was appended when you accesss any forum e.g http://sitename.com/<forum-directory>/forum/<forum slug>
• “topic” keyword was also appended for every post made e.g http://sitename.com<forum-directory>/topic/<actualy topic slug>

Now I understand why both the keywords are reqired but again from SEO point it has no meaning unless somebody runs a forum on “forums” topic. The next thing I did was look around for a hack and luckily at this post there was a solution , but not actual plugin was supported. I copied the code given there and tested around and was successful.

Before I start, I have just tested around with the code given by the memebers over there. So test it before you use it. And moreover I am not supporting it as I did not make it and cant do it either.

I made a plugin from the code given and took re-write code for .htaccess files. Here is how they look

PLUGIN:( Taken from the forum link )

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Remove Topic Forum
Plugin URI: http://bbpress.org/
Description: Allows to remove forum and topic word in url
Author: Ashish Mohta
Version: 1.0
Author URI: http://www.technospot.net/blogs/
*/

function my_get_forum_link_filter( $link , $forum_id = 0 ) {
//retrieve the forum object
$forum = get_forum( get_forum_id( $forum_id ));

//check for rewrite
$rewrite = bb_get_option( ‘mod_rewrite’ );
if ( $rewrite ) {
//what kind of rewrite there is? slug use “forum_slug” column, else the column is “forum_id”
$column = ($rewrite === ’slugs’)?(’forum_slug’):(’forum_id’);

// change /forum/pets-discussions in /pets-discussions
// this work only if the rewrite module is modded!
// and this work only if the slugged name will NEVER
// be a reserved word like “rss” or “bb-images”
// and this is achieved by a filter on bb_slug_sanitize
$link = str_replace(’forum/’ . $forum->$column , $forum->$column, $link);
}
return $link.”/”; // Very important line! // Added extra slash :Ashish
}

add_filter( ‘get_forum_link’, ‘my_get_forum_link_filter’ );

function my_get_topic_link_filter( $link, $topic_id = 0) {
//retrieve the topic object
$topic = get_topic( get_topic_id( $topic_id ));

//retrieve the forum object that is the topic container
$forum = get_forum( get_forum_id( $topic->forum_id ));

//check for rewrite
$rewrite = bb_get_option( ‘mod_rewrite’ );
if ( $rewrite ) {
//what kind of rewrite there is? slug use “forum_slug” column, else the column is “forum_id”
$column = ($rewrite === ’slugs’)?(’forum_slug’):(’forum_id’);

//create the “forum/pets-discussions” chunk to show the hierarchical relation forum->topic
$forum_nice_uri = “forum/” . $forum->$column . “/”;

//attach the hierarchical chunk to the link
$link = str_replace(bb_get_option(’uri’), bb_get_option(’uri’) . $forum_nice_uri, $link);

// change /forum/pets-discussions/topic/my-sweet-dog in /pets-discussions/my-sweet-dog
// this work only if the rewrite module is modded!
// and this work only if the slugged name will NEVER
// be a reserved word like “rss” or “bb-images”
// and this is achieved by a filter on bb_slug_sanitize
$link = str_replace(’forum/’ . $forum->$column , $forum->$column, $link);
$link = str_replace(’topic/’ . $topic->$column , $topic->$column, $link);
}

return $link.”/” ; // Very important line! // Added Extra Slash :Ashish
}

add_filter( ‘get_topic_link’, ‘my_get_topic_link_filter’ );

function my_bb_slug_sanitize_filter( $text_slug, $text_original = ”, $length = 0 ) {
// add “r-” by regex when the string begins with “bb-” or “my-” or is a reserved word
return preg_replace(’/^(my-.*|bb-.*|rss|tags|view|profiles)$/’, ‘r-$1′, $text_slug);
}

add_filter( ‘bb_slug_sanitize’, ‘my_bb_slug_sanitize_filter’ );

?>

.htcaccess file:

( Taken from one same forum link and modified a little. You will need to remove the MULTIVIEW from your existing .htaccess file )

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /forums

Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteRule ^tags/([^/]+)/page/([0-9]+)/?$ tags.php?tag=$1&page=$2 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^tags/([^/]+)/?$ tags.php?tag=$1 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^tags/?$ tags.php [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^profile/([^/]+)/page/([0-9]+)/?$ profile.php?id=$1&page=$2 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^profile/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/?$ profile.php?id=$1&tab=$2 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^profile/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/page/([0-9]+)/?$ profile.php?id=$1&tab=$2&page=$3 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^profile/([^/]+)/?$ profile.php?id=$1 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^view/([^/]+)/page/([0-9]+)/?$ view.php?view=$1&page=$2 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^view/([^/]+)/?$ view.php?view=$1 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^rss/?$ rss.php [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^rss/forum/([^/]+)/?$ rss.php?forum=$1 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^rss/topic/([^/]+)/?$ rss.php?topic=$1 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^rss/tags/([^/]+)/?$ rss.php?tag=$1 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^rss/profile/([^/]+)/?$ rss.php?profile=$1 [L,QSA]

RewriteRule ^([^.]+)/([^.]+)/page/([0-9]+)/?$ topic.php?id=$2&page=$3 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^([^/.]+)/([^.]+)/?$ topic.php?id=$2 [L,QSA]

RewriteRule ^([^/.]+)/page/([0-9]+)/?$ forum.php?id=$1&page=$2 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^([^/.]+)/?$ forum.php?id=$1 [L,QSA]
</IfModule>

Place the plugin file in my-plugin directory and .htaccess file in bbpress root directory. Active the plugin. and it should work fine.

The Problem I find with this.

• The Link to BBpress admin board link does not work from main site. It redirects to home page. You will need to manually type the link to go inside.
• In case you type something which does not exists as http://sitename.com/<bbpress-directory>/sdaksda it returns http://sitename.com/<bbpress-directory>// . An extra slash.

Except these 2 there is no problem I see so far but Its not easy to predict as I dont have lot of posts or users. So if you want to try it out download the files here . You can give your feedback here if you can improve it. And If somebody wants they can support the plugin and enhance it. You can see demo of this on the forum I tested on but You wont be able to register and anyways it just a test forum

How to remove forum and topic keyword from bbpress url by Ashish Mohta originally appeared on Technospot.Net on April 4, 2008, 10:29 pm. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

It was time when we need to set goals to attain our objectives. So why is Goal Setting is important ? Why we need just we keep writing and no questions asked no parameters checked. I will tell you why !!

#1 Goals – It direct the activities of the blog:

Goals provide a direction for the activities, defines a purpose and set priorities for group action. In simple words you need to understand what’s the motive of the blog rather than individuals goal. If the individual authors know the goal of your blog they know what is expected from them and hence they focus more on results and actions to attain them.

#2 Goals – It acts as a motivational factor:

Goals are like efforts you put on to make a great coffee. Aroma , the taste of a coffee make people to make it. People feel involved only if they take part in goal setting process. They will be motivated towards the result ( remember the coffee ) and will be more committed to the blog.

Now it does not mean we Goal of the blog forgets the goal of individuals. Authors need to attain satisfaction too so they can be happy to work for it. So the main goal should help them to attain their goal or you might not see them any more.

#3 Goals – It emphasize team-work :

Goals improve the cohesiveness between authors as they are interdependent on each other to achieve it. Not exactly sometimes but overall. Say for an example you have 3 authors and they write on Linux, Windows and Mac. They are altogether different areas but they know they need to work towards the blogs motive to make life of users more productive.

So they can work around together to understand how individual works on their field to write best. What points they take , how they approach and what is individuals way of viewing things. This can create a virtual team work between authors and still work towards a common goal.

#4 Goals – It encourages focused work :

If you don’t what you need to do today , you probably would be doing anything all day without any result. This could be devastating for a blog if the authors just don’t know what they had to achieve and it tends to become more of individual growth in a varied way with personal conflicts pouring in.

But if they do know what they need to achieve the personal and diverse thoughts are replaced by Blogs goal. They get more focused on work activities and achievement of the result.

#5 Goals – It makes measure of progress clearer :

When a goal is set and everybody works towards it , its easy to measure how much you have achieved and even how much individual has contributed, understood it which finally gives a clear idea where you blog is.

Conclusion:

The idea is to understand where a blog driven by a team is moving and how much they have understood and achieved. So set your blog goals, set atime line and include authors interests in them.

Importance of Goal Setting in multi author driven blogs by Ashish Mohta originally appeared on Technospot.Net on April 3, 2008, 10:23 pm. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Most of our time went talking to new people along with Amit ( who had been a center of attraction to lot of people who want to start a blog ). Though not all the seminars happening here is interesting to us but eSagu, eSaguMobile – Connecting lab and land. by R uday kira seems to be interesting.

We managed to get the goodies ( A T-Shirt and Bottle ) and Couple of photographs down here.

Live from BarCamp5 Hyderabad by Ashish Mohta originally appeared on Technospot.Net on February 16, 2008, 11:35 pm. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Welcome to the second episode of Audiopress on this blog. This podcast makes a small discussion on the dilemma of people when they are more attracted towards blogging. When is the good time and will you make a carrier in blogging.

One of the ways I had discussed here is to choose a way and not get charmed by initial success. Its a risky business but with good opportunity in future. But like every other business you need to find if both blogging and you fit.

Start with something smaller, grow a little big. Analyze oll pros and cons and then take a final decision. It will be really great if you can comment on this and tell how you felt about both the discussion and the podcast itself.

Is it a good idea to leave your current job for blogging [ Podcast ] by Ashish Mohta originally appeared on Technospot.Net on February 7, 2008, 2:27 pm. Please see our terms for use of feeds.