I wish all of you a very Happy New Year.

Yet another year with lots of hopes; hope for better increment, hope for flat tummy, hope for better environment etc. I am hoping to achieve followings in 2011.

Resolution list 2011

• First of all, regular blog posts, at least one post every two weeks
• Keep upgrading my computing skills
• Restart We Conscious
• Work on at least 2 websites (wordpressable.me and spambase.net) for which I have registered domain names
• Start developing for mobile devices especially for iPhone and iPad
• Keep my place clean and also educate people to do so
• Pursue my hobby of Photography
• Reduce expenses and increase savings
• Reduce my weight to 62KGs with flat belly (I am working hard for this)

What are you hoping to achieve in 2011?

When we think of SEO, we all think of optimizing content and web pages. But images also play an important role in driving traffic to your site.

Here are a few tips from Google Webmasters to optimize images for Search Engines.

Informative image names

If the image names are self explanatory, it increases its visibility e.g., chandni-chowk.jpg instead of IMG456829.jpg. Always use keywords in image name.

Appropriate ALT text

The alt attribute describes the content of an image. This information is used to determine the best image to return for a user’s query. An alt text should be a description not keywords. Filling alt attributes with keywords (Keyword stuffing) results in a bad user experience and can cause the website to be counted as spam.

Content around image

The page the image is on and the content around the image (including any captions or image titles), provide search engines with important information about the image. It is recommended to provide good, descriptive titles and captions for your images. It is good to place images near the relevant text.

Don’t embed text inside images

Search Engines can’t read text embedded within the image. It is good to put content in HTML rather than in the image.

News Feed is your Facebook homepage where you get updates from your Facebook friends, Pages etc.

If you don’t want to hear regular updates from some of your Facebook Friends, you can hide them from News Feed.

Hiding someone from News Feed

Take your mouse to the news item, a X button will appear in the right-to corner of the news item.

When you click the X button, it will ask you to hide the person or mark as spam. Click on Hide button to hide the friend.

Unhiding  hidden Facebook friend

1. Scroll down to the bottom of your News Feed and click “Edit Options.”
2. Remove your friend from Hide section by clicking on  X button against your friend’s name.
3. Click “Save” to save your changes.

More Settings

• You can adjust the number of friends visible on your News Feed.
• Type a name under Show more to add more friends to show on News Feed.
• To hide, use text box under Hide section.
• To edit recommended friends, click on “View recommended friends” link.

I had commented on a photo of my friend’s wedding on Facebook. When I checked my inbox an hour later, there were 22 comment notifications from Facebook.

It really get annoying when you comment on someone’s photo and there after you receive a long trail of emails. But there is a way to stop getting these emails.

Simply go to the Notifications tab of the Account page.

Facebook Notifications Settings

Deselect Comments after you on a photo and Comments after you on a photo album options under the Photos section.

Facebook Photos Notification Setting

This article is relevant to ASP.NET. Knowledge of HTML and ASP.Net is required.

I was working on a project where I had to implement URL rewriting. I was also working on a tool to update a site’s (let’s say a.com) content. The tool was hosted on another domain (b.com). I had to use images and CSS (everything else was in a database) lying at a.com onto b.com to preview the changes.

Let’s see what problems I faced in both the situations and how these were solved using Actionless form. I have given similar examples, not the real situations.

Case 1: URL Rewriting

I was working on URL Rewriting where I had to work with hierarchical pages, something like below.

So the URLs should be:

• http://a.com/products/category1/product1.aspx
• http://a.com/products/category1/product2.aspx
• http://a.com/products/category1/product3.aspx
• http://a.com/products/category2/product4.aspx and so on…

But the actual page exists at http://a.com/products/default.aspx.

There are some server controls on the page as well which raise page postback. For example, you have two dropdowns – one for categories and another for products. When you choose an item from categories dropdown it raises a postback to update the products dropdown to show relevant products.

By default, the action attribute of form is set to the actual page and the path will be relative not absolute, “default.aspx” in this case.

So now, suppose you have opened http://a.com/products/category1/product1.aspx URL and you have picked an item from category. It will raise a postback event and look for default.aspx at http://a.com/products/category1 but its not there and the page will break. If you remove action attribute from form element then it will always postback to the same page and the URL rewriting rules will take care of rest of the things.

Case 2: using one domain’s files on another domain/sub-domain

There might be cases when we have to use images and CSS lying on another domain. There are two options to achieve this – either use absolute path or use base tag. I had to opt for base tab because the IMAGE URLs were saved in the database with the running text (I know I could search and replace them using regex but I still opted for base tag).

Now, when I have used base tag, it will add a base URL to all the relative URLs and it includes the value of action attribute in form tag. Let’s name the domains, the images are at a.com and are being used on b.com. So when the postback event will be raised, it will find the action attribute file at a.com which isn’t there.

To overcome this situation, we can remove the action attribute so that it will always postback on the same page.

Solution

Unfortunately ASP.Net doesn’t give option to change or remove the value of action attribute directly. But a new form class can be implemented by inheriting System.Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlForm class. The implementation of Actionless form is given at this page – look for the section “Handling Postbacks”. You can also download the DLL from here.

Updates in version 1.2:
Compatible with WordPress 3

Why it wasn’t working with WP3

WordPress had introduced Post Types in WP2.9. The default post types are post, page, attachment, revision, and nav-menu-item. WordPress had no restriction on applying taxonomies (category and tag) on any post type but had given the option to select for “post” post type only.

In WP3, the post type needs to be registered with taxonomy to be able to attached to it. The “page” post type is not registered with Category taxonomy so the plugin wasn’t able to save categories for pages in database.

What have been changed to make it compatible with WP3

I have used register_taxonomy_for_object_type function to enable “page” post type for Categories.

I have updated Map Categories to Pages. It has auto-insertion capability now.

New Features in version 1.1:

1. Option for auto-insertion of the Pages on Category pages
2. Option for auto-insertion of Posts on the Pages which belong to the same category

To enable the features, goto the Map Categories to Pages settings page.

Choose the appropriate option to enable the features. It also provides the option to specify Header text and style to display just before the posts list on the Pages, e.g. header=Related Posts&before=<h3 class="title">&after=</h3>.

• header – heading text just before the posts list.
• before – Opening HTML tag (with CSS class or style) to insert just before the post titles
• after – closing HTML tag to insert just after the post titles

Read Assign Categories to Pages in WordPress for more information.

WordPress has different options for organizing posts. One of them is Categories. The categories can only be assigned to posts, not to pages in WordPress. But sometime you might want to categorize the pages as well. Here are a few cases.

1. To display related posts on a page.
2. To display pages and categories in navigation menu in mixed order. WordPress provides the two different functions to display a list of Pages and Categories. But it doesn’t give the option to setup a navigation menu mixed with pages and categories, like the example given below. In such a case you can map pages to categories and use them as category pages. Obviously it will need some changes in the template.
   • Page 1
   • Page 2
   • Category 1
   • Page 3
   • Category 2
3. To display pages on the category pages with the posts.

How to map Categories to pages

Add following lines of code in the function.php of your theme directory. If you don’t have a function.php in the theme directory then you can add it using any text editor. You can also download the plugin which I have made from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/map-categories-to-pages/.

function add_category_box_on_page(){
//add meta box
add_meta_box('categorydiv', __('Categories'), 'post_categories_meta_box', 'page', 'side', 'low');
}

add_action('admin_menu', 'add_category_box_on_page');

It will show the category selection box on the right side on “Edit Page” page.

Template changes

You will also have to edit the page template to use categories. You can use standard category code on your page template. Take a look at http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_the_category and http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/the_category.

Here is a small piece of code to build a page of posts. This example uses the styles from WordPress default theme.

<?php
global $post;
$cats=array();
foreach(get_the_category() as $category) {
	$cats[]=$category->cat_ID;
}
$showposts = -1; // -1 shows all posts
$do_not_show_stickies = 1; // 0 to show stickies
$args=array(
   'category__in' => $cats,
   'showposts' => $showposts,
   'caller_get_posts' => $do_not_show_stickies
   );
$my_query = new WP_Query($args);

?>

	<?php if( $my_query->have_posts() ) : ?>

		<?php while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); ?>
			<?php
			//necessary to show the tags
			global $wp_query;
			$wp_query->in_the_loop = true;
			?>
			<div <?php post_class() ?> id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
				<h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
				<small><?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?> <!-- by <?php the_author() ?> --></small>

				<div class="entry">
					<?php the_content('Read the rest of this entry »'); ?>
				</div>

				<p class="postmetadata"><?php the_tags('Tags: ', ', ', '
'); ?> Posted in <?php the_category(', ') ?> | <?php edit_post_link('Edit', '', ' | '); ?>  <?php comments_popup_link('No Comments »', '1 Comment »', '% Comments »'); ?></p>
			</div>

		<?php endwhile; ?>

	<?php else : ?>

		<h2 class="center">Not Found</h2>
		<p class="center">Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn't here.</p>

	<?php endif; ?>

Displaying pages on Category pages

When WordPress fetches the posts from database, the default post type is ‘post’. So even when you have mapped a page to a category, it won’t display the page on that category page. The post type needs to be changed explicitly on the category page. To change the post type, add following code in function.php.

//call a function just before the query runs to fetch posts
add_action('pre_get_posts','change_post_type');

function change_post_type($var) {
	if(is_category()) {
    	    	$var->query_vars['post_type'] = 'any';
            	//it will change the value to 'any' from the default value of ;post';
            	//can be any, attachment,  page, post, or revision.
            	//'any' retrieves any type except revisions.
	}
}

I would like to share a few posts which I think are useful.

• Tip : Do more with Format Painter
• You can be a victim of phishing by blindly following a link in an email
• Access dictionary quickly from Apple applications on Mac
• Obscene comments on your blog can put you behind the bars
• Use Computer in Eco-friendly manner
• Useful keyboard shortcuts for Finder
• Tip to quickly close dashboard widget

Wishing all of you a very Happy New Year and Merry Christmas ’09.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year '09

This year was full of changes and very busy for me. I was too occupied with many projects. I couldn’t even blog after June 3rd.

I will try to blog regularly in the year 2010. I am also planning to include more topics.

Once again Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and Happy Blogging.