http://omninoggin.com Elegant Blog Webmastery From The Ground Up Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:35:22 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Continuing the office pranks theme, I want to post another prank done by my girlfriend's sister who works for Disney corporate as an Information Architect. I've seen this prank before, but I have never seen it being done by anybody I know. Kudos Annie! Don't you wish your work ... http://omninoggin.com/personal/foiling-a-coworkers-vacation/ It is my pleasure to announce that I will be joining my development efforts of Project Honey Pot Http:BL plugin with Jan Stepien (the original developer of Http:BL). Jan has already merged my changes onto the Http:BL plugin which can be found here. I will no longer be updating Project ... http://omninoggin.com/wordpress-posts/project-honey-pot-httpbl-is-going-back-home/ I think this version of WP Greet Box is ground breaking enough to bump the version up to 4.0. To be honest, the reason version 4.0 came out so early is because I just found out 3 days ago (via Google Alerts) that I have a new competitor, Referrer ... http://omninoggin.com/wordpress-posts/released-wp-greet-box-version-40/ I've been quite busy with life lately, so I haven't paid too much attention to my plugins. Good thing I had a whiff of inspiration today so I decided to add a few enhancements to WP Greet Box. What's new in this release? First, this release has support for ... http://omninoggin.com/wordpress-posts/released-wp-greet-box-version-31/ What's a programming blog without office humor posts? A boring blog that nobody reads. That being said I would like to share a few office pranks pulled at my workplace (Coral8). Prank #1: Balloons-filled Office First let me share the video of our lead engineer, Aleksey, returning from a one week vacation. ... http://omninoggin.com/personal/employees-versus-office-filled-with-random-things/ To get into the 2008 Halloween programming spirit, I would like to share an email my co-worker, Russell, sent me this morning. Here is what was in the email: One of my friends down in LA likes to put on a "light show" every Halloween... of course light and sound ... http://omninoggin.com/personal/programming-for-halloween-2008/ The goal of this post is to help you increase visitor activity on your blog.  First let me define the term "activity" as anything your visitor does to interact with your blog.  An activity can be a variety of things, but the ones I want to focus on (which are ... http://omninoggin.com/web-design/ways-to-increase-visitor-activity-on-your-blog/ In this post I will discuss some of the web design mistakes that I have done on this blog, and what I did to fix them. A few months ago, I was fortunate enough to get free advice from a friend of mine, Emily Luong, who happens to be a professional ... http://omninoggin.com/web-design/3-web-design-mistakes-that-you-may-need-to-fix-right-now/ I've been quiet for the past week for many reasons, but the most important reason is that I've been working on WP Greet Box version 3.0.  It turned out that there we so many positive responses (and feature requests) on the WP Greet Box plugin that all I could do ... http://omninoggin.com/wordpress-posts/released-wp-greet-box-version-30/ I have been blogging seriously for almost one year. I've learned a lot on the topic of WordPress and blogging from intense online research and trial-and-error. It wasn't until Alex Sysoef (author of a blog I regularly read) gave me the opportunity to preview his Platinum Membership of ... http://omninoggin.com/affiliate-reviews/become-a-wordpress-expert/ Weekend Links for the week ending on 07-25-08 Enhanced Sidebars with Dynamic Content: Visitors tend to ignore the sidebar because most of sidebar content do not change. I've been experimenting with this myself and I was planning to write a similar post but Vandelay Design says it better (for now ... http://omninoggin.com/blogging/weekend-links/weekend-links-3/ Today I would like to announce the release of "WP Greet Box" WordPress Plugin. A plugin that can help you increase your blog exposure and build loyal readership. Description This plugin lets you show a different greeting message to your new visitors depending on their referrer url. For example, when ... http://omninoggin.com/projects/wordpress-plugins/wp-greet-box-wordpress-plugin/ Weekend Links for the week ending on 07-18-08 21 Ways to Make Your Blog or Website Sticky: All of us bloggers have experienced traffic spikes before from social network sites like StumbleUpon or Digg, but how many of the visitors become regular readers? Here are some tips from ProBlogger, the ... http://omninoggin.com/blogging/weekend-links/weekend-links-2/ WordPress 2.6 was officially released yesterday so I upgraded this blog immediately. Here are some things you need to know about WordPress 2.6: New features in WordPress 2.6 Plugin authors should read over PlanetOzh's quick tutorial on how to make your WordPress plugins WordPress 2.6 compliant and upgrade ... http://omninoggin.com/wordpress-posts/upgraded-to-wordpress-26/ Weekend Links for the week ending on 07-11-08 WordPress Template Tags Reference Guide: This is the best consolidated WordPress functions reference guide I've ever seen. Not only does it have a slick interface, the page shows available functions, its parameters descriptions, and example usage. This is a golden bookmark ... http://omninoggin.com/blogging/weekend-links/weekend-links-1/ If you are a regular visitor or commenter of this site, you wouldn't have to worry about this post at all. I hope it didn't have to come to this, but alas the day has come to post the all-mighty comment policy. OMNINOGGIN is a do-follow comment blog. That ... http://omninoggin.com/search-engine-marketing/to-follow-or-not-to-follow-that-is-the-question/ *Update* This plugin is no longer supported/updated. Please see Project Honey Pot Http:BL is going back home. Today I would like to announce the release of "Project Honey Pot Http:BL" WordPress Plugin. Description This plugin allows you to verify all visitors' IP address against the Project Honey Pot database. Using the ... http://omninoggin.com/projects/wordpress-plugins/project-honey-pot-httpbl-wordpress-plugin/ Previously I wrote a post about how to list poison email harvesters. Today I discovered that an unknown harvester/scraper bot has stumbled into my one of my traps. Here is the description of the bot: IP:82.230.123.141 Host: bne75-7-82-230-123-141.fbx.proxad.net User agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; ... http://omninoggin.com/web-development/my-bot-trap-in-action/ Social Homes Widget is a small but neat little plugin that lets you add links to your various social homepages in your sidebar. Of course you can do this manually, but it's a lot nicer to be able to manage this in the widgets section in wp-admin instead of ... http://omninoggin.com/wordpress-posts/adding-more-sites-social-homes-widget-plugin/ I'm sure everybody now knows that the iPhone 2 (3G) is going to be released on July 11th, 2008. I asked a buddy if he would prefer to wait for the gPhone over the iPhone 2 and he humorously responds: "too unproven" "too designed by committee" "like open source" "don't want no open ... http://omninoggin.com/wordpress-posts/iphone-2-3g-compared-to-gphone-compared-to-wordpress/