Someone asked me how to make a guestbook in Wordpress.

No, it doesn’t require a plugin.

Simply create a new page (Write Page) in your Admin Panel and call it ‘Guestbook’. Be sure to allow comments so that your visitors can ’sign’ it.

Update: New, More Wonderful Instructions!

Another Update: Wordpress Generator Plugin is a sparkly new plugin that does all the dirty work for you!

I never thought I’d be listening to this kind of music, that is, the dance/electronic kind of music. But Goldfrapp’s CD called Supernature is just too good to ignore. Check out Track 10, “Time Out from the World”.

http://www.goldfrapp.co.uk/

Here are some cool new sites recently added to our directory:

Dekada Otsenta gives us an amusing look back into the 1980’s by offering quizzes on how much we know about the infamous era. All scores are tracked and analyzed statistically.

Some notable questions:

Sino ang host ng “Lovingly Yours, Helen”?
Alin sa mga ito ang hindi konektado sa Jem and the Holograms?
Nakanood ka ng wrestling noong bata pa si Hulk Hogan

Shoppingera is a blog that screams “kikay” right at your face. It’s written by a certain “Phink” and coins words such as “Phinkerfect” and “Phinktastic” for the sake of contextual emphasis. Shoppingera also offers advice on shopping, make-up and reviews on celebrity fashion.

The Dilemma:

1. I’m in the Philippines
2. I’m a blogger using Wordpress
3. I’m on Globe Telecom
4. I want to moblog (mobile blog)
5. #2 and #3 are giving me a hard time doing #4

In this article I will teach you how to moblog if the above apply to you. The following are some requirements you must accomplish before you can proceed:

1. You must own a cellphone that has multimedia capabilities (such as taking pictures).
2. Your phone must be able to send multimedia messages, if not, ask your provider on how to set it up.
3. You should have shell access to your webhost account.
4. Your webhost should allow you to run cron jobs.

I downloaded a modified version of wp-mail.php, which comes with a typical Wordpress installation for the purpose of moblogging but with less features and configurable options. There’s another file called mimedecode.php, which contains several subroutines that the former file needs to run. Download the two files here.

Now, the first thing you have to do is setup a new email address that only you will know about. I created mine through my webhost account panel at Dreamhost.com. This should also work on a Gmail account because they allow remote (pop) access. Yahoo!, on the other hand, makes you pay for this.

Call the email address something weird and personal that’s easy to remember. Some examples:

“ishotthesheriff@domain.com”
“ilikefastcars@mydomain.com”
“iselllivestock@myurl.com”

When you’re finished, access your Wordpress admin panel and click on Options > Writing. Under “Writing by e-mail” enter your mail server (e.g. mail.domain.com, pop.myurl.com), your login name and password. Beside “Default post by mail category” choose the default category to which you want your messages to fall under. I suggest that you create a separate category called “Moblog” (or similar) and assign it as the default.

Next, you have to make Wordpress accept messages that you send through your cellphone. To do that, you need to create a new user aside from your current one. Click on Users > Authors & Users. Under the Add New User heading, fill up the form with a new Nickname and email. The email address should be something like:

63917XXXXXXX@myglobe.com.ph

Replace the X’s with your number.

Then, open up your shell account via telnet (Start > Run > type “telnet domain.com”) to setup a new cron job. Follow these steps:

1. Type “crontab -e” to edit your crontab file.
2. Type “*/15 * * * * /usr/local/bin/php /home/user/domain.com/wp-mail.php” — */15 means that the file wp-mail.php will run every 15 minutes to check your mail if there are new messages to post.
3. Press Ctrl-X to Exit.
4. Press Y to save.
5. Press Enter.
6. Type “crontab -l” to confirm.
7. Close Telnet.

Open up wp-mail.php and look through the options under /* USER VARIABLES */. I stronly suggest that you keep all of the variables intact. Do not change anything if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Start your FTP client. In the root folder of your Wordpress installation, create two new folders called “wp-photos” and “wp-files”. Staying in the same root folder, upload wp-mail.php and mimedecode.php.

Now, send a test message to your “secret” email address through your cellphone. Create a new multimedia message and set the recipient to that email address. Insert a picture of your choice from your gallery. In the message area, type:

**Message Subject*** Message Body yada yada yada etc.

The text in between the *’s will be assigned as the subject of your post.

Wait for the next 15-minute interval (e.g. 12:00, 12:15, 12:30) and see if your test message came through. If you experience any problems, don’t hesitate to ask me right here.

Happy Moblogging!

Don’t get me wrong, I love Suprglu, but so far it’s been giving me a hard time. I added up my XML feed on January 15. That feed had been updated basically everyday, but last time I checked a few minutes ago, Suprslow, ehem, Suprglu hasn’t updated my page even once! I had to delete and resubmit my feed today to see the changes. I actually had emailed them about my problem, but they didn’t bother to respond. In a post dated January 13, 2006 in their official blog, they state that:

SuprGlu graduated to new servers over the holidays and we’re happy to announce that our users’ feeds are now refreshed quicker and more consistently than ever before.

So how long did it take before?

I’m part of a discussion group called SEO Philippines. We discuss things such as SEO (of course!) and other aspects of web development. If you’re a brooding webmaster still learning the ropes, then I suggest you join us. SEO Philippines was created by Marc Macalua (blog @ macalua.com).

SEO (or Search Engine Optimization) is still in its infancy in the Philippines. Especially now that for every minute we breathe (or maybe more) a Filipino decides he or she wants to start blogging. As the cliche goes, Content is King! But not so in the case of someone who doesn’t have a clue what SEO is. No matter how good, often or much you write you need to put on a pair of glasses to see the bigger picture. So join us! We’re eager to learn as much as you do ( I hope).

Join SEO Philippines
Visit the official website of SEO Philippines

Arne Brachhold created a nifty tool to generate a sitemap for Wordpress blogs compliant with Google Sitemaps specifications. His latest release is compatible with Wordpress 2.0.

Upload sitemap.php via FTP to your Plugins folder and activate it at the admin panel. Click on Options > Sitemap to edit options and/or generate the sitemap. Everytime you publish a new post, the sitemap is instantly updated.

Login to your Google Sitemaps and submit the new sitemap.

The Feds have subpoenaed Google Inc. for details on the searching habits of its users in an effort to revive an Internet child protection law that was previously blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court. The government argues that it needs the information to see how often search results included pornographic content.

What are the implications of this? If Google bows down to the request, it will simply put our rights to privacy in danger. Google’s privacy policy states that:

We may also share information with third parties in limited circumstances, including when complying with legal process, preventing fraud or imminent harm, and ensuring the security of our network and services.

I believe that the circumstances do not warrant a real legal process. The only imminent harm that will be inflicted is when Google decides to bare the surfing habits of its users. And we do not know what the Feds will do with the data once it gets into their hands. It sets a dangerous precedent — chat transcripts, VoIP converstations, even webcam images can one day be avenues of prying. The Bush administration had been vigorously, albeit illegally, spying on civillians since the 9/11 attacks. Does it really want to protect children from porn, or is it desperately seeking other ways to rectify its failures in counterterrorism?

Google has since refused the subpoena, which I think is a good business move on their part. They are at their utmost peak — they’re simply the hottest item on the Internet. They do not want to extinguish that by destroying the relationship it has with the millions of people who built them.

Search results for the keywords “v7ndotcom elursrebmem” are rolling in. As I write there are 32,500 results and my previous post on the subject is in the third page (see image above), not bad. I’m sure it will be pushed back further as the SEO’s improve on their tactics.

For those who joined, how are you guys doing?

If I had a quarter for each web designer who’s under the assumption that displaying the line “This Website is Optimized for Internet Explorer” (and its variants) puts a stamp of approval on their hard work, I’d be the richest man on Earth. What appears harmless can actually be a potential turn-off. Not all of your visitors will be browsing your site with the browser you supposedly ‘optimized’ it for. It’s like inviting a bunch of people to a party, but you only allow the ones wearing a purple shirt in. Not cool. And purple shirts? Who wears them anyway?

I test my sites with at least five browsers, plus the old ones still in circulation. With that behind me I don’t have to worry if my sites look good or bad for my readers. But with the emerging popularity of more modern browsers, such as IE 7, Firefox, Opera 8, Netscape 8, the fuss is more unnecessary than it is practical. Bottom line is, if you feel like you need to optimize, go right ahead. But if you say you only optimized for Internet Explorer, dude, you didn’t optimize at all.

The V7 network recently launched a contest to get to the top of the Google Results for the keywords “v7ndotcom elursrebmem” by May 15, 2006, noon, Pacific standard time. Just out of curiosity, I’d like to see how this post does in the next few weeks. The first prize is $4000 and an iPod, second prize is $500 while the 3rd-5th placers receive $100 each. I have no clue what the serious contenders are going to do to win this contest. If you search for nigritude ultramarine (2004’s keywords), some went as far as registering domains containing these words. No, I’m not about to do that!

Montastic is a free site monitoring service based on Ajax and Ruby on Rails, that doesn’t suck, as their tagline goes. What it does is simple — it sends you an email when your site bogs down. Montastic hasn’t emailed me yet, but by just signing up with them I’m sure my sites are in pretty good hands. I know I can’t watch my sites 24/7, but Montastic can do that for me, for now.

Recently I tried a new online news aggregator called Suprglu, a service that allows you to gather all your news sources into one neat blog-looking interface. I signed up and added Alleba Fresh!’s RSS feeds. It’s great because I can see where this service is getting at — allowing webmasters to put all their content into one page to give others easy access to them. What more, Suprglu puts these all together into a single RSS feed for syndication — useful if you have a network of sites and you would like to offer a unified product.

Lately I have been thinking of more ways to vigorously get the word out on new sites added to our directory, and I think that Suprglu added one more to my list. Visit Alleba Fresh!’s page on Suprglu.

I’m giving our blog a major overhaul. I decided to give it another go, from scratch. From now on I will be writing about cool stuff happening on the Internet, focusing on web applications that you might find useful for your website. I look forward to blogging full-time. Hope you’ll tune in.