Ashfame | Tech Blog

Nokia N86 Review

Ashfame — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 03:30:12 +0000

Nokia N86 – 8GB | 8MP | ? awesomeness

Today I am going to review my new cell phone Nokia N86. I am so much excited that I actually I want to do a comprehensive review of the phone but that would have to be cut down on to my opinion of the features of the phone. Before I would start, I would say “awesome” and I am sure you will say the same after reading the complete review.

Key features

2.6″ 16M-color OLED display of QVGA resolution (scratch-resistant glass)
8 megapixel autofocus camera with dual-LED flash and AF assist light
28mm wide camera lens, variable aperture, mechanical shutter, geotagging, time-lapse, camera lens cover, VGA video recording at 30fps
Symbian OS 9.3 with S60 3.2 UI
ARM 11 434 MHz CPU, 128MB RAM
Quad-band GSM support and 3G with HSDPA 3.6Mbps support
Wi-Fi with UPnP technology
Built-in GPS with A-GPS functionality and 3 months of free voice-guided navigation (Ovi Maps)
Dual slide design with dedicated gaming/audio/gallery keys
16GB microSD card slot with microSDHC support
Beefy 8GB internal storage
Built-in accelerometer for UI auto-rotation
3.5mm audio jack doubling as TV out port
Stereo FM Radio with RDS, FM transmitter
Standard microUSB port and stereo Bluetooth v2.0
N-gage support plus you get an N-gage game for free
Digital compass
Web browser has full Flash and Java support
Active kickstand
Superb Audio quality

Well that’s a lot. Isn’t it? I will get back to them one by one.

Disadvantages

Image processing isn’t very well tuned at this moment (just scope of improvement, else its good)
VGA@30fps video is no longer top of the line (could have been better)
No xenon flash (doesn’t really matter, believe me)
HSDPA only 3.6Mbps, no HSUPA
Poor display sunlight legibility

Instead of bragging the features it has got, I would first like to express my concern on the disadvantages. The camera is pretty good and the images and video are really good. I will upload the samples of both images and videos. Dual LED flash is good in performance too. Expecting it to have a Xenon flash just because its the latest offering isn’t acceptable for me and that too when the difference is not that much. It doesn’t have HSUPA but HSDPA should be enough and regarding the sunlight, the visibility is poor but how much time is one going to spend standing in the sunlight.

Retail Package

Other than the phone and battery, the retail package included the following:

Charger
USB Data Cable
Two piece Headset (Remote + Earplugs)
Nokia OVI Suite DVD
Some Redeem coupons for OVI Store

That’s pretty much of a basic packaging but it does the job for me. In fact, it will, for many of us.

Design & Construction

It is built on dual-slide form factor and is smaller in size (103.4 x 51.4 x 16.5 mm) as compared to its competitors. It has a volume of 69cc and weighs 149grams. That’s a little heavy but hardy noticeable. Its the power in your hands.

The screen is good but doesn’t match as that of its competitors. The phone has a D pad for operating it which attracts a lot of fingerprints and the same is with the metallic but is quite user friendly.

The ambient light sensor, earpiece and video-call camera are as usually up there.

Sliding up sports a alphanumeric keypad (standard 4-row 12-key layout) and sliding down reveals four multimedia keys which are used for controlling the music playback or gallery. The keypad is not something to complain about. The keys are quite comfortable and I get very decent speeds on it.

However the four multimedia keys are not soft and I guess they should be this way only.

There is an additional slider to lock/unlock the keypad which is something I like in my phone but many have questioned its use. I guess this is a personal choice for the owner.

On the other side there are comfortable keys for Camera & Volume control both of which are just right. Not too out of the design and not too in that they become hard to press.

On the top there are Power key, 3.5mm Audio jack & micro USB port which is used for connecting the Charger, Data cable and the TV out port.

On the back the 8MP wide-angle camera is covered with a lens cover which unlocks the phone and starts the camera when opened.

Around it is a kickstand which makes the phone a viewable screen by placing it on the table. One can even set the behavior that which application to start when opening the kickstand.

Thanks to GSMArena for the flash embed and the pictures of Nokia N86! I couldn’t have taken my own because my only camera is N86 8MP itself.

Camera

Its the Nokia’s first 8MP phone (3264×2448 pixels) and boasts of Carl Zeiss lens with dual LED flash. It has got many options like a digital camera and has a panorama feature too.

I will be uploading some sample pictures & a video too but till that you can have a look at the ones from GSMArena (Just click on the thumbnail to view the original size).

Download a N86 Video sample! I find them pretty much doing the job of a beginner’s digital camera (The Nokia has an aggressive noise reduction for photos and the photos end up with oily look when fully zoomed at 100%)

Processing Speed

The phone is pretty much responsive in everything. Thanks to the 434 Mhz CPU and 128MB RAM. One thing that I like the most is that viewing photos in gallery is an awesome experience. One doesn’t need to wait for the picture to process while scrolling and increasing the scrolling speed rotates the gallery in N-series style smoothly.

Audio Quality

The audio quality of loudspeaker is just enough. Its not loud but I wish it was. I am more of a headphone junky and when I listened to some of my music in the earplugs, I was impressed. It even sounds better as compared to when I plug in the headset into my PC audio jack. That means the phone’s hardware is even better than the PC’s soundcard.

Its sound quality is almost equivalent to the Nokia N97 as their frequency response graph runs very close.

It also has a FM Transmitter which enables you to transmit your playback on a set frequency and then any FM device can play the music. It adds up awesome for Car stereo.

Battery Life

It is powered by a 1200mAh Li-Ion battery and on paper it has some decent standby and talktime. However I am facing a little trouble with this one. I might need to get it checked. My cell never shows up the “Battery fully charged” message and keeps on charging but in the screensaver it shows the battery is fully charged. Still it runs for a whole day of mix usage but I believe it should run for 2 days with heavy usage & GSMArena has reported that too. I will update this section once I am done with my visit to the Nokia Priority as the fault can be anything – charger, battery or the microUSB port. If any other user can share his/her experience it would be great.

Apart from all this, the web browser is pretty good too with full flash and java support. The accelerometer is good too and responsive enough.

Final Verdict

Instead of the fact that I am having some issues with battery backup time, I love this offering of Nokia. I would recommend it to anybody looking for an all rounder phone in range of 20k. I bought it for 20.8k actually from Nokia Priority. They were asking for 21.4k but my friend managed to get the deal in 20.8k. Its totally sexy.

How to use the 960 CSS Grid Framework

Ashfame — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 03:30:11 +0000

My first piece of advice before using any kind of framework is that become strong in your basics, learn to do it from scratch, build it from hand and then use frameworks for cutting development times. They are by no means to be use when you are new to the discipline. Today, I am going to discuss about the 960 CSS Grid Framework.

960 Grid Framework is one of the most popular CSS frameworks used nowadays and believe me it is all you need if you want to build fixed page layouts with the complexity of your imagination layout. Today I will tell why I love this framework and use it everywhere.

About 960 Grid Framework

With 960 Grid, you have a 960px width layout which means that it will run without a horizontal scroll bar on all the monitors running a resolution of at least 1024 X 768 (generally of a 15”monitor). Its a wide screen world and you can safely ditch visitors with smaller screens because you can’t compromise with all the space just to support some visitors with outdated hardware. (They need to act, not you!)

And the development time is so fast that you won’t find any reason of not using it. Anyone can develop a design grid skeleton in under 15minutes. Now isn’t that fast for you?

Other than this we have a choice of either selecting a 12 column layout or 16 column layout. Since 12 is divisible by 1,2,3,4,6 we can have those many equal width horizontal partitions of the 12column layout. Other than having equal width horizontal partitions, we can also have partitions like one consisting of 8columns and other one consisting of 4columns (8+4) and also 3columns layout (5+5+2). The same is with the 16 column layout and hence we need to select one as per the needs.

I will demonstrate how I build the design grid of my last project’s (Need A Project) homepage using 16column layout of 960 CSS Grid Framework.

Here is how the skeleton of the design grid looks like :

And here is the code behind this grid :





NAP Grid







	Need A Project - 16 Column Grid



	
		
			460px
		
		
			460px
		
	
	 
	
		
			520px
		
		
			400px
		
	
	 
	
		
			460px
		
		
			460px
		
	
	 
	
		
			100px
		
		
			340px
		
		
			460px

Explaination & Usage

960 Grid Framework consists of 3 CSS files which we include on the pages (960.css | text.css | reset.css). In the above code, the files are specified on line 6, 7 & 8.

Everything comes inside a DIV whose class is container_16. Inside this DIV, we have lots of other DIVs whose classes are grid_X where X is the width specified as the no of column(s).

We can have grids inside other grids. For example : We would like to break a grid into two parts, then it holds two DIVs each with a class of grid_X/2 where X is of the in housing grid. Have a look at the code from line 24 to 31 and you will get to know how to use it. One thing to note here is that the first or left-most DIV has an additional class alpha and the last or right-most has an additional class omega. The alpha & omega cut downs the left & right margin of the DIV respectively in order to accommodate the grid in another grid.

There is also an class prefix_X which specifies the left margin of the DIV to leave space for X no of column(s). Similarly the class suffix_X specifies the right margin of the DIV.

Well that’s all you need to learn this superb CSS framework. There is also a grid overlap tool which you should try out. The site seems to be down right now but the tool (actually a bookmarklet) is very handy. Check it here. I would suggest you to try out some grid designing and I am sure you will love it. Have any questions or comments, then leave them below.

List of topics of a particular bbPress forum

Ashfame — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 03:30:02 +0000

This tutorial will demonstrate the usage of custom queries so as to show topics of a certain bbPress forum along with Topic starter and Last Poster of inside WordPress. Before you can play around with bbPress information, you need to integrate WordPress with bbPress. After integration you can place this code anywhere in your template and it will fetch information from bbPress tables.


get_results($query,"ARRAY_N");

	if(!$topicslist)
		echo "err";
	else
	{
		foreach( $topicslist as $topicslist )
		{
			echo '';
			echo '';
			echo '';
			echo '';
			echo '';
		}
	}
	?>
	
	
		
		Topics
		Author
		Last Reply by
		
	
	
	'.$topicslist[0].' '.$topicslist[1].' '.$topicslist[2].'

Topics	Author	Last Reply by
'.$topicslist[0].'	'.$topicslist[1].'	'.$topicslist[2].'

This is a very basic demonstration of fetching the data in a simple table. You need to change the forum_id to the id of your forums (Look into your database via phpMyAdmin) on line 12, change the no of topics to display on line 13 and change the bbPress table prefix in query on line 15.

You can also make your titles hyperlinked with the topic slug by fetching topic_slug from the database and generating the URL as per your permalinks setup. Doing this goes beyond the scope of this simple tutorial. You can also fetch topic_time to display the time in another column of the table. Just add CSS classes to style the table via CSS.

Have anything to ask or more to implement. Feel free to ask in the comments! Make sure you check out other tutorials to show bbPress content inside WordPress & the whole WordPress as CMS series.

Show bbPress forum list with posts & topics count in WordPress

Ashfame — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 03:35:17 +0000

This tutorial will demonstrate the usage of custom queries so as to show bbPress forum list inside WordPress. We would like it to display the list of forums along with their topic & post count.

Before you can play around with bbPress information, you need to integrate WordPress with bbPress. After integration you can place this code anywhere in your template and it will fetch information from bbPress tables.


	get_results("SELECT forum_name, topics, posts from bb_forums","ARRAY_N");
		if ($forumslist)
		{
			foreach ($forumslist as $row)
			{
				echo '';
				echo '';
				echo '';
				echo '';
				echo '';
			}
		}
		else
			echo 'Error fetching data';
		?>
		
		
			
				Forums
				Topics
				Posts
			
		
		
		'.$row[0].' '.$row[1].' '.$row[1].'

Forums	Topics	Posts
'.$row[0].'	'.$row[1].'	'.$row[1].'

You can easily style the table via CSS. Just add some classes and you can give it the look you want. If you have a different bbPress table prefix, make sure you change the table name in the SQL query (13^th line). There is more that you can do with this actually. Fetch more things like forum description, forum slug or make the forum name clickable to the forum page of bbPress. Take a quick peek at NAP’s homepage and you will get an idea.

Have anything to ask or more to implement. Feel free to ask in the comments! Make sure you check out other tutorials to show bbPress content inside WordPress & the whole WordPress as CMS series.

Show bbPress content inside WordPress

Ashfame — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 03:30:17 +0000

One way is to deep integrate both WordPress and bbPress so that one’s function can be called into another as both WordPress & bbPress are loaded every time a page is being generated either by WordPress or bbPress. However I am strictly against it as the overhead is not worth it. Its not at all recommended for busy sites because this will amount to increase in resources consumption and degradation in performance.

A good approach would be to mimic the functionality offered by one into another. First of all I would recommend integrating WordPress with bbPress so that they share the same database and then we can use SQL queries to fetch data from the database. The idea is to get the data by our queries and then we can manipulate as per our needs and mimic the functionality of the needed function.

Without deep integration, we can easily display the list of forums with their topics and posts count. We can display recent topics or recent replies to topics. In fact we can do anything we want. We just need to mimic that function and if any help is needed in mimicking that functionality we can always take a look at the source code of the other script.

Here is the list of tutorials which shows bbPress content inside WordPress :

Its impossible to cover some examples here as the post will become too long to read. Hence I will demonstrate the usage in separate queries.

Have any questions? Feel free to ask via comments. Make sure you check out the whole WordPress as CMS series.

How to show Random Items out of a list

Ashfame — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 03:30:42 +0000

Picking up the scenario from my project NAP, that I faced was I needed to show some books with their respective links but I have to pick up only 4 out of the 5 books I had and the picking should be random on each page load.

You might say that php random function is the answer to the problem but I have a few things to talk about.

Using PHP Random function to show 1 random item

If you don’t know how to use php random function to show different images every time with a link then here is how it is done. We will deal with the limitations as we proceed.

We have a list of links in an array $link and the images are renamed with a constant suffixed with the key of the array to which it holds the respective link.

For example :

$link[1] => image1.jpg
$link[2] => image2.jpg
$link[3] => image3.jpg
$link[4] => image4.jpg
$link[5] => image5.jpg

We pick up a random number between 1 & 5 by

and then display it as

.jpg" alt="" />

Showing 4 out of 5 items

This was the scenario in my project that I needed to show up 4 selections out of 5 options. The simple trick failed to show distinct items as everytime it selects a random number between 1 & 5 irrespective of whether it’s already selected or not. To avoid this either we store the number selected on each function call in an array and every time we check the selected number with the array. If the number was in the array then we recall the function till we get a new number. We store it and then proceed.

For example :

 $v)
{
if($v == $n)
{
$flag = 1;
break;
}
}
if(!$flag)
{
$arr[$i] = $n;
$go = 1;
}
}
}
for($i=0; $i<4; $i++)
{
?>
.jpg" alt="" />

Better Alternative

The algorithm would become heavy when a large number of selections have to be made as then every new selection would have to be compared with every element of array. In my scenario I have to made selection of only 4 out of 5.

So instead of randomly selected the numbers of which items are to be displayed, i randomly selected the number of which item is not to be displayed. This was pretty much good in terms of performance.

My Code :


.jpg" alt="" />

I use mt_rand function instead of rand function because it is better in terms of performance.

That’s all for this tutorial. Hope you got what I wanted to say. Have any doubts? Feel free to ask in the comments. Make sure you check out the whole WordPress as CMS series.

How to have multiple widgetized different sidebars

Ashfame — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 03:30:35 +0000

Its pretty much simple to widgetize multiple areas in a WordPress theme. Here in this tutorial I will demonstrate how you can have different sidebars for different pages and all of them being widgetized so that adding content to it is a piece of cake.

Lets say we want to have different sidebars as per categories.

Calling different Sidebars

We call the sidebar in our theme (sidebar.php) by a call to the function get_sidebar();

Now if we want to use a different sidebar then create another php file named like sidebar-two.php or sidebar-three.php, we can call it by get_sidebar(’two’); and by get_sidebar(’three’); respectively.

So we just need to call a function get_sidebar(’x'); and WordPress will look for a file named sidebar-x.php for creating a sidebar.

Widgetize Sidebars

To widgetize a sidebar we just need to call the function dynamic_sidebar() with the name of that widgetized area.

For example: in sidebar-two.php

Similarly do that for all of your sidebars.

Now all of them will show up in Widgets option under your Appearance settings in WordPress.

Calling Sidebars based on Categories

We just need to place the sidebar conditionally by checking for conditions.

For example:

You can also use the category name instead of category ID in conditions.

Similarly if you want to use the same for multiple categories then it can be done like

Now that’s done pretty well in WordPress. Similarly you can do that to widgetized multiple areas in your theme. Have any questions? Feel free to ask in comments. Make sure you check out the whole WordPress as CMS series.

Show custom excerpts of the post in WordPress

Ashfame — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 03:30:52 +0000

When WordPress is used as a CMS, then we no longer wants the homepage to be a chronological order of posts. We would want the homepage to be something which serves the purpose of telling everything about itself. Certainly that should have a section where blog updates are being highlighted either with excerpt or with just titles.

Since in our implementation, we only be having a single section where I would want to use the WordPress loop so we can straight go ahead and use it. Had you been using WordPress loop somewhere else on the page then you would have to use a different object for the WP loop.

Showing links to latest updates from the blog



	
		 0) { ?>

Change the value of count to your choice and there you have a list of latest updates from your blog.

Showing the latest post with an excerpt

I have created a function which you can call anywhere in your theme to do its job of printing the excerpt of the latest post with your specified character limit.

You can change the value of 300 to the limit of characters you want to display.

Add this function in your functions.php file (under your theme folder only)

function ashfame_get_stripped_content($limit)
{
$content = get_the_content();
$words = explode(" ",$content);
unset($content);
$length = 0;
foreach ($words as $i => $w)
{
$length += strlen($w);
if ($length < $limit)
$content = $content." ".$w;
else
break;
}
$content = apply_filters('the_content', $content);
$content = str_replace(']]>', ']]&gt;', $content);
$temp = " (<a title=\"Continue Reading..\" href=\"";
$temp = $temp.get_permalink();
$temp = $temp."\">Continue reading &#8594;</a>)</p>";
$content = str_replace('</p>',$temp, $content);
echo $content;
}

Showing multiple posts with an excerpt

You will have to execute the WordPress loop here to access multiple posts. You can show multiple posts with an excerpt by calling the function of above case inside the loop like this :



	
		 0) { ?>

Change the value of count to your choice and there you have multiple posts each with an excerpt. Have any questions then use the Comments section below. Make sure you check out the whole WordPress as CMS series.

Building a FrontPage using WordPress

Ashfame — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 03:30:11 +0000

This tutorial assumes that you are comfortable enough in designing WordPress themes. I suggest you take the hang of both the methods and decide which one you want to go with. Technically I haven’t come up with any limitation of expanding WordPress capabilities that one may face by using either of the method.

We will require to use page templates in both the methods, so if you don’t know how to create them, here is a good chance to understand how they work and how you can use them. Read this article – WordPress page templates and come back to this tutorial.

Using Page templates

Create two page templates. One for the homepage and another for the blog page.
Create two pages named Home & Blog (You can name them anything)
Make sure that you select the respective page template while creating them to use the custom layout and content as specified in the page template.
Make sure that under Reading Settings (Settings > Reading), the FrontPage is set to display static page.
That’s it. Go check out your homepage and blog page.

Here in this method your posts on the blog are controlled by what you have specified in the Reading settings and in the next method it will depend on the value used in the code.

Personally I use the second method.

Using home.php

Make sure that under Reading Settings (Settings > Reading), the FrontPage is set to display latest posts.
Create a page template for blog and one similarly a home.php file for the homepage
Create a page named Blog and select the blog page template while creating it.
Place the home.php in your theme folder
That’s it. Go check out your homepage and blog page.

For content that you need to update manually like some text or anything else, you can widgetised the area too. Then you can add text-widget or anything else.

Blog Page Template Code

query('showposts=5'.'&paged='.$paged);
if ($recentPosts->have_posts()) : while ($recentPosts->have_posts()) : $recentPosts->the_post(); ?>

	
		
		 by 

		
			
		

		'); ?> Posted in  |

Subscribe via RSS or via email to keep up with the WordPress as CMS series so as to learn what all crazy stuff you can build with it.

Feel free to ask any questions you may have via the comments. I will be glad to answer them.

Page template usage in WordPress

Ashfame — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 04:00:51 +0000

How does a normal WordPress page look like? Header, content, sidebar and footer. What if you want a different layout for a particular page or a set of pages. A different sidebar or multiple sidebar or no sidebar at all? Different styling and arrangement of other things (purely CSS based)? Anything different from the regular layout can be incorporated within WordPress using Page templates.

For example : A regular WordPress page generated from page.php of your theme :

For a special page, you don’t want any sidebar. For which the code of the page looks like :

Creating a Page template in WordPress

Just before the code of that special page, add these lines

so that the whole page template file looks like this :

That’s it. Your page template is ready to be used. Just drop the file in your theme folder with any name. However I would recommend giving the template name to the file name too so that it becomes easy to recognize it.

Using a Page template in WordPress

Now when you are creating a new page, you can select the page template under the Attributes tag on the right side.

You can also make the page use by quick editing the page under Edit pages page.

Go fire up your creativity. Now you can have different layouts for different pages. Have any questions then use the Comments section below. Make sure you check out the whole WordPress as CMS series.

WordPress as CMS basic Setup

Ashfame — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 03:30:13 +0000

Two things you would like to setup before you move on with the series is to select your permalink settings and the way you can setup WordPress to act both as CMS and regular blogging engine.

Permalink Settings (Settings > Permalinks)

Set the custom structure to be /%postname%/

Reading Settings (Settings > Readings)

You can set here what your front page displays. Select the page to display as your homepage if you want simple plain content on the main page and if you want a different layout on that page then stick a page template to the page you are using as a homepage.

Alternatively you can build up a home.php file in your WordPress theme and it will automatically be use as your homepage. You can also build it up dynamically using content fetched from custom WP queries.

If you chose the former then you can select another page to become your blog where posts will appear in chronological order and if you chose the later option then you can use another page template to get your blog by using WP queries.

I will demonstrate the usage in the upcoming post of the series till then feel free to respond via the comments. Make sure you check out the whole WordPress as CMS series.

WordPress CMS Series

Ashfame — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 03:30:39 +0000

I am starting this series so as to demonstrate the capabilities of using WordPress as CMS coupled up with other scripts (like forum script bbPress). The series will begin with the implementation details of WordPress and bbPress in my recent project Need A Project (a site for students looking to improve their coding skills). Then it will continue with how I used WordPress to design my college website JEC, Kukas.

First of all, we will decide how we are going to build our website using WordPress. We will use a page on the homepage of the site. A different page will act as a blog and will show the posts in the chronological order.

For example :

Homepage : http://needaproject.com
Blog : http://needaproject.com/blog
Forums : http://needaproject.com/discussion

Posts / Pages : http://needaproject.com/post-or-page-title/

Follow the tutorial to install WordPress (manually via FTP/SFTP, via fantastico or via SVN) first and then catch up with the whole series here:

If you are a WordPress based developer or want to develop your own web projects using WordPress then you might want to hook up with the series. In fact, I would suggest you to hook up as it will prove to be really helpful. Live examples with demonstrations can’t hurt. Now can they? So Subscribe via RSS or via email.

And if you want to ask a question about any implementation of WordPress and bbPress on NAP, then I encourage you to freely ask here in the comments section and I will cover that in a post.

New Orkut Screenshots & Invites Giveaway

Ashfame — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:52:18 +0000

A few days back, Orkut got a revamped look with some additional functionalities but new Orkut is available to users on invite only. When I checked today then I saw the invitation on my Orkut home. An important thing to note is that one need an invite to use new Orkut. Either you get it from Orkut itself or from some friend who has invites with him/her.

How to know who has an invite?

A pink ring shows up with the display name of any user who is on new Orkut and has got invites.

Check my profile – Ashfame on Orkut

New Orkut Screenshots

Profile Page

Home Page

Scrapbook

Photos (Album)

By now you must be excited to try this new Orkut look. Well I have got a few invites with me to giveaway here on my blog.

How to get an invite?

Tweet about this giveaway on twitter and leave the link to status in the comment. To enable non-twitter users to participate here now one just need to comment here. I will giveaway 2 invites everyday. The selections will be random for each day so you comment the next day for another entry. Go on try your luck!

This contest was ruining the fun, so its over, just leave a comment here and everyone will be invited till I am out of updates. Users have reported that more invitations are given to you once you have used up all the invitations, so keep commenting.

Invitations sent out to the following people :

Luv
Vanshaj
Ashwin
Aditi
Claudio
Steffi
Tanay
Aakash
Rishabh
Nicholas

No more invites left! Hope to get some more soon

Just comment and I will sent the invite as soon as possible. Happy Orkutting!

[bbPress Plugin] How to disable bbPress registrations

Ashfame — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:41:26 +0000

There may be cases where users want to disable new member registrations so as to keep the forum close to the existing members only or its a invite only forum or whatever the case may be. In this post I will demonstrate how can you disable bbPress registrations.

All the registrations are handled by the file register.php of bbPress. So if we just remove the code from register.php then no registrations can take place. But that would be overwritten in a bbPress upgrade so we can make a plugin for that too but checking for an extra thing on every page load is a little overhead that I would want to avoid. Busy forum owners would agree with me on this but if you don’t like to touch the code at all, then you can go for plugin too. Its up to you.

Replace original register.php with this register.php

The contents of new register.php is a single line

Or right click & save this file & then rename it to register.php and replace the original file.

bbPress Disable Registration Plugin

The Code has been taken from a post in bbPress forums.

Download the plugin

If you have any questions about bbPress, then feel free to ask via comments. I love both questions & bbPress

WordPress Optimized WebHost – WpWebHost Review

Ashfame — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 04:00:02 +0000

Selecting the right webhost is crucial for a web publisher as it keep hosting woes at bay and let the publisher concentrate on what is important i.e. generating content. WpWebHost Offers everything one would expect out of a hosting package. The thing worth mentioning about them is that their servers are specially configured for WordPress users so they give better performance as compared to webhosts which are configured for general use.

By optimization I mean that their servers execute the WordPress script (its a php script after all) fast and hence gives a edge over its competitors. And did I mention that they have got great support? I myself always try out new things with WordPress and whenever I need to contact them, I shoot them a support mail and believe me their support is really awesome (I generally don’t use the word awesome easily but that was the first word which came to my mind).

I almost always get the reply on the same day. Whenever I communicate with their staff, I always feel that I am getting personal attention. They are very friendly. When I signed up for them a few months back, I paid almost a week after using their service because I had some issues with PayPal but they didn’t impose any restriction on me. They even gave me a free week of hosting. That’s cool!

Being WordPress optimized webhost they don’t restrict you in using any other script. I would recommend them to WordPress developers too as you will get great help and support from them.

I need to say it. You will love their service for sure. Now they even have special packages for WordPress MU and recently they added a Semi Dedicated plan which is like powering up your site with a VPS, all which are specially optimized for better performance.

One thing that I would like to mention is that when I bought the hosting, I ended up on a IP Address which was hosting two adult sites too. So as not to harm my SERPs I got a dedicated IP Address for myself. I would have taken it anyway but I took it because at that time I had to.

Their hosting will cost you 5USD per month. I highly recommend WpWebHost. Sign up with them and you won’t regret it.