First, he told me that he needs light color theme, I sent him a preview in 2 days. He replied that colors are not good and background is too simple.

I sent him the same layout with changed color scheme, a brighter one. He told me that design was very simple and he can get this design on a much lower price at GetAFreelaner.com,

I ask him what exactly was making the design look bad, but he said he don’t know he needs an awesome design because he is paying good money. He said he needs something like gamesradar.com and onlineflashgames.org. I asked him, since when gamesradar’s colors become light color theme? He replied that I should forget what he said about the color theme and instead make something unique.

Here I thought I should cancel the project, but I decided to give it another try. I designed another mock up, a really unique and web 2.0. I was 100% sure that he is going to like it, but I received the following reply,

“omg the layout is not good at all, i can do that myself. i thought i told you similar to this one http://www.onlineflashgames.org/ ? what happen? are you really design this http://www.onlineflashgames.org/ ? If not please dont waste my times.

check this out http://www.***********.com/ he design very nice arcade template and much cheaper then  you he only charge $300-$800 and i thought you are better that why i hired you

Maybe we work something else”

Then he asked me how good I am at Flash, and other stuff. You see, he’s claiming that he can design a PRO design himself :/

I keep asking him, what exactly is wrong in the previews I am sending him, but he never gave a satisfying reply. I think he found a cheap service provider on some freelance website. I have decided not to work with him.

This way, a guy wasted 4-5 precious days of my life.
Clients from hell.

Glassical is a glossy two column, widget ready and WordPress 2.8 compatible WordPress theme designed for passionate bloggers. I have used the Embedded Nevis Fonts with Cusfon and theme is designed exclusively for Smashing Magazine. It also uses jQuery Corner library for rounded corners. I hope you guys will like it.

Features

1. Widget Ready.
2. Ads on header and Sidebar can be changed via the widgets.
3. WP Pagenavi ready, Just install the plugin and the CSS is already packed with theme.
4. Supports the new WordPress nested comment system.

Links

Theme can be viewed in action at
http://demo.smashingthemes.com/?wptheme=Glassical

Theme can be downloaded from
http://www.smashingthemes.com/downloads/glassical.zip

I took months to complete the application, long lines of codes, and painful hours of testing (I hate testing). However, I am glad that site is now live and stable. I appreciate my visitors to visit the new project, signup and enjoy some online games. OnlineFlashGames.org is the link of the website.

Yep, I love the following web apps.

When coming back from the trip, we lost the bus’ tires in which we were traveling. That was a pretty tough condition, no mobile signals, open forest, 100s of Kilometers away from the place where we can get signals (no chance getting the tires repaired  even there). We tried to stop the load carrying trucks but no one of them was able to help us. After 30 minutes of depression, we managed to get lift with a truck that was already carrying much load. Our driver decided to stay with the bus, and we thrown ourselves into the truck, wrapped a rope around us, and started traveling again. Due to big slopes and nature of the road, that truck was going very slow at around 50 kilometers per hour speed. But nonetheless we were happy that we’re moving forward. After and exhausting 1 and half hour’s time, we just managed to cover a distance of 65 kilometers and our destination  was about 300 kilometers away from that point. Suddenly we saw our bus coming on the road, fortunately, he saw us too. He managed to get the tire from an ambulance. So after 5 hours of more driving, we get back our homes.

Following are a few pictures amongst the 100s I shoot during the journey.

I am currently uploading the rest of the pictures on the flick. You can see the all the images at following set on my flickr.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/designcode/sets/72157615795260500/

By the way, the idiot in the second image is none other than me

Well, they just starts following people in bulk and in return get followers. When they have much followers, they starts removing people from their following list so the count of their followers will be greater than the count of people they follow. So they look kind of big guys. So, I just don’t follow those people unless I know ‘em personally.

PS: That post looks a tongue twister

Choosing the company that is going to hold and save you website data is one of the most critical part. If you really want to grow yourself online and you are serious with your online business, then web hosting is the first thing you should really worry about. You can actually get the good web hosting easily if you have big money but with limited budget, its pretty hard to find the honest hosting. I can still remember my first website, how it gain the popularity and traffic and how it went down (thanks to the cheap hosting). In the last 6 years, I tried several web hosting services, from local web hosting providers to many renowned companies. Most of those were a nightmare. I want to share a few points which I learned in the past  years.

1- CHEAP HOSTING (beware of this phrase)

Most of the people steps into WWW world, search for web hosting with this keyword and they get loads of results. Many companies claiming on their website that offer ultra cheap hosting with excellent support and blah blah. What does that exactly mean? What does they mean when they say cheap? Their service, support or what? Let me tell you one thing, bandwidth is not free. That is bought for money so did other stuff like space etc. You could find many hosting companies offering 5GB storage space and 50 GB of data transfer for just 2$s per month. Trust me if you know about server things, this will look like a joke to you. A few popular one even offer UNLIMITED STORAGE SPACE AND UNLIMITED BANDWIDTH. What they don’t mention in the feature chart is the CPU and RAM usage you are allowed to use. They tell you about this when you see a page instead of  your website, that says

You’re site is suspended due to violation of our terms of our services.

What the hell??? You worked hard to build the traffic for your website and when traffic started to arrive, they put this page. You email hosting support and they tell that your website was using high amount of CPU and RAM.

You need to understand here that you can’t use all the unlimited bandwidth or even 50 GB, because if you’re site is getting that much traffic, their server can’t bear that much traffic, and its time for you upgrade.

Conclusion: Before buying cheap hosting (cheap in terms of price) you should focus on what you exactly needed at the starting stage, not what unlimited stuff they are offering because you’re not going to use their unlimited stuff anyway.

2- Company Existence

These days, most of the guys think that web hosting is a good business so they just jump into this field after buying a dedicated server with CPanel and starts advertising their service on various forums etc. What they don’t understand that web hosting is a very complex kind of business and only pros can manage this business. Soon, the server maintenance and other things starts to become out of their control and you wake up one day to see your website gone from the WWW world.

Conclusion: Better check if the hosting company have a physical address and a phone number so that you have surety that you bought the service from some real world people.

3- Read Reviews before buying

You found a web hosting company, their website is just awesome, cool looking and all that. They’re offering almost all the things you needed. You emailed the support your queries, got reply from ‘em in 1 hour. You are impressed and you think you’re ready to buy. This is where you are committing a mistake, they’re not cool just because they look cool to you. Many people are annoyed with them already. Fortunately, there are many honest websites on Internet that are community driven and have bunch of discussions on web hosting. Webhostingtalk.com, CNET webhosting reviews, webhostingunleashed.com are one of those websites. Before you place an order, do a strong search on these websites to check what other people are saying.

Conclusion: Be patient. See what are the opinions of their customers.

4- Bandwidth

According to this link, Facebook is spending $7.8 Million per year on their bandwidth. Bandwidth is one of the core of the hosting business, 90% hosting companies actually resell bandwidth.

Lets suppose you find a hosting company that is real, now the problem which rises here is that they’ll gonna take good care of bandwidth. At this point you have to be aware that how they charge for the bandwidth. Most of the companies start charging big amount after you have used your monthly quota. For example you were allotted a quota of 300 GB of data transfer per month for lets say 50$s per moth, at the end of the month you have already used 325 GB of bandwidth. Now you’re thinking they’ll charge you a few extra bucks for the extra bandwidth you used. You are terribly wrong. They could charge you 1$ for each extra GB you have used. This is true, I have experience this case in the past. Following is the screen shot of the Invoice I received at the end of the month from my hosting company.

This invoice was a nightmare to me, I thought I’d lost all the profit I earned from my websites. However I emailed the support and asked why on earth they didn’t informed me that I have already used my quota and put the bandwidth exceed page when I used all my bandwidth. They told me that they know that for a customer website up-time is very important and many other reasons, however I end up paying 250 USD, terminated the hosting contract and closed my websites.

Another blunder that I did was not checking my bandwidth meter, not checking the right meter to be more precise. I was checking the bandwidth usage at AWSTATS provided by CPanel and I was good according to that. However the AWSTATS doesn’t show the total Inbound + Outbound traffic. In most of the cases you don’t have to worry about inbound bandwidth as its consumption is usually very low (FTP, file uploads etc) but I was running proxy websites so my inbound bandwidth consumption was almost equal to that of outbound. So together, it made a huge number and huge problem for me .

Conclusion: You should know how much bandwidth you’re going to use and keep an eye on your bandwidth meter and upgrade to the right account before you have to pay the big amount.

5- Are you buying the right package?

If you have bought a package that was smaller than your usage, you’ll know that soon (your host will shut your site). You can’t run proxy or social networking websites with good traffic on a shared hosting. But make sure you’re not buying something that you’ll never use. Like buying a VPS for just running 2-3 directory websites or a small ecommerce website, or you are wasting your money.

Conclusion: Don’t waste your money or website by purchasing hosting services that is bigger or smaller than your needs.

Some Recommended Companies

With all these hosting scams around, there are still companies that take your business seriously. Following are a few web hosting companies that I will suggest based on what kind of hosting you needed. Please note that none of the following urls have any kind of affiliate or referral links.

Shared Hosting:
ExaBytes.com
MediaTemple.net
HostGator.com
A2B2.com
BlueHost.com

Reseller Hosting:
ExaBytes.com
MediaTemple.net
A2B2.com

VPS / Semi Dedicated Server:
A2B2.com
SliceHost.com
LiquidWeb

Dedicated Server:
LayeredTech.com
RackSpace.com
Datapipe.net
A2B2.com

I have used all the above web hosting services either personally or for my clients and I found their service reliable and honest. I hope this article will help you from stumbling into the problems that I faced when I started.

Apple iPhone

iPhone, a multimedia smartphone is a product of Apple Inc. Apple announced the iPhone on January 9, 2007. The iPhone was initially introduced in the United States on June 29, 2007 and has since been introduced worldwide. On July 11, 2008, the iPhone 3G was released. However it is still hard/expensive to get the unlocked iPhone is a few Asian countries.

You can use use email on this phone, use  it as you’re MP3 player, pocket photo album.

WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT?

Well, I think they were the one to come up with the idea. The ultra slim look, sexy navigation, around 15K external apps makes it worth trying. Some other great features are

Ultra Slim (Weight: 133 grams, Depth:0.48 inch)
Bigger Display (3.5-inch widescreen Multi-Touch display)
Good Battery Time (Upto 5 hour talk time, 300 hour standby time)

Nokia N97

The Nokia N97 is an upcoming “mobile computer” by Nokia based on S60 5th Edition, Symbian OS v9.4, announced on December 2, 2008.

WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT?

Nokia, don’t simply makes a hand set, they create a new look, As you can see other than touch screen that mobile have a QWERTY keyboard, all in compact slim silver body. Other great features are

5 Megapixels Camera
3.5-inch up to 16.7 million colours display

HTC Touch

The HTC Touch is a Windows Mobile 6-powered Pocket PC designed and manufactured by HTC. If you read reviews of this mobile, you’re hardly going to see a -ve review. Many of user are proud of using it .

WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT?

Its main, unique feature is a user interface named TouchFLO that detects a sweeping motion and can distinguish between a finger and a stylus. The TouchFLO features, incorporating stylus-free access to a music player, a photo album, a video player and a picture-based contact book.

Samsung Omnia

The Samsung SGH-i900, also known as Omnia is a new mobile phone being released by Samsung Mobile. This phone is Samsung’s attempt to cash in on the new touchscreen mobile phone market. This phone is based on the Windows Mobile 6.1 operating system

WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT?

Samsung Today Screen 1 (alternative home screen UI)
Samsung Today Screen 2 (another alternative home screen UI containing a widget bar and widgets)
Samsung Touch Wiz UI (alternative application menu)
Apart from this, set is loaded with a 5 Megapixel camera.

LG Cookie

With a 3″ full touch screen, no keypad, LG Cookie (KP500) targets the entry-level touch screen market. Due to cut down the price, LG have omitted some high end features that above sets have.

WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT?

Its price, its low in cost if you compare it with other touch screen handsets. This phone comes with Accelerometer motion sensor with support for auto-rotating display and a 3.2 Megapixel camera.

Above is one of the snaps that I took on 13 Feb 09.

Full images at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/designcode/3279802594/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/designcode/3278974301/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/designcode/3279786902/

Catchable fatal error: Object of class WP_Error could not be converted to string in /home/dcing/public_html/wp-content/themes/dcing/category.php on line 52

I thought I would be a common bug, and I can easily find a solution on Internet so I tried search. But I was not able to find a fix for that problem. So I self debugged the code and managed to sort out a solution. Here are the steps to fix the problem.

1. Open wp-includes/category-template.php
2. Search for “function get_category_link( $category_id ) {“
3. Now inside that function, search the following lines
   if ( is_wp_error( $category ) )
   return $category;
4. Replace the above 2 lines with following code
   //if ( is_wp_error( $category ) )
   //return $category;

That should solve the problem. Enjoy WordPressing.