A common trend which has been seen in the premium theme stores is that though these are good looking themes but because of their nature and design, these themes are slow loading and are not w3c validated, which is a major concern when it comes to ranking higher in Search engines. Such themes are particularly important for small blog owners who want to get attention from Search engines which in most of the cases is the primary source of visitors.

This motivated me to find the fastest WordPress theme and following were the results which you’ll see:

1. SwiftThemes

2. vCandy

3. WP Simpy

4. After Burner

5. TwntyEleven

I did a small comparison among these themes  and here are my results:See Results

I even tested out with TwentyTen and TwentyEleven themes under the same installation by switching themes and found that vCandy did come out to be the fastest theme with lowest loading time.

Plus best of all vCandy is 100% W3Cvalidated. See yourself

Download vCandy

Here is a screenshot of spam-comments which I regularly receive:

The way I see the future it is definitely going to be the HTML5/CSS3 way, with Apple and Google supporting HTML5 and IE9 subjecting to the power of CSS3, in future all the browsers would start supporting HTML5. Though Flash has its own future with open source Paper Vision 3D. HTML5/CSS would challenge flash on all the 2D animation and effects and possibly replace flash in this arena, Flash would move on to higher levels of animation and 3D websites would become more popular.

Many Bloggers must have used the social bookmarking wordpress plugin “digg digg”.

For those who don’t know about “digg digg”.
It is a social vote button or simply the social bookmark plugin used by bloggers.

It display counts for popular social butons such as digg,Facebook, Reddit etc etc.

I installed this plugin two weeks back on my blog. Though the plugin looks great but slowly and gradually my traffic decreased to half.

I was not able to make out what was the reason of this sudden drop in the visits and then two days ago while i was checking out my blog posts i came to know that the page is taking a hell lot of time to open that was the reason of the sudden drop in visitors to my blog.

I deactivated the plugin and my page was opening very fast.
So, what i did was disabled my plugin and to my surprise my daily visitors to my blog are back.

See the screenshot below

“If you haven’t heard about Adapt.js then you are missing a lot of updates in CSS” was the comment of my friend who is a CSS expert. I am using 960 grid in my WordPress themes and websites and still somehow I missed Adapt.js.

Adapt.js is an open source script which is licensed under the GPL and MIT. It is a very light weight javascript 826 bytes and is being termed as “Ajax for CSS” . Adapt has been developed by popular developer Nathansmith who also developed the 960 Grid system.

See usage here | Source at Github Here

Now, I recommend that as most of the CSS designers should follow Adapt.js and use different styling for different screen resolutions, so that the website looks good in all resolutions.

Recently Google with its launch of two major products Google+ and Google +1 has created stirs in the SEO world. Many fear it is going to change how Google searches the web? This is even confirmed when you log in to Google web master central you see a +1 search impact and Google recommends it to put it on your site.

Why Yes AND No?

Google +1 is not like digg or twitter or facebook likes because it is related to your Google account which almost every second person has. Think of how much social information Google has about you via Google+ and everytime you +1 something Google knows it.

There are both pros and cons to this:

Pros

1. Google is able to identify real traffic and detect spams.

2. Google can see who recommends what, therefore more information.

3. Locate from where recommendations are coming, so improve search results locally.

Cons

1. A new quality blog or site has a disadvantage as it might have the social circle to expand and showcase itself with +1′s.

2. It is give rise to more cheap tricks and +1 is not fool proof.

There would be many more pros but more important to me are the cons of +1 impacting search. Popular sites would able to get more +1′s , whereas smaller sites would not. Like we have several services going around for fake tweets, retweets, diggs, stumbles, facebook likes, services for fake Google +1′s has already started, I jot got a mail from someone to get 200 +1′s for $50 and they are 100% authentic users.

Accuracy of search results from the fact that the user is able to find what it is searching for. Searching becomes critical when the user is able to get results from pages from unknown or not so popular sites which serves his aim and purpose.

How much Google would be able to address this issue via Google +1 remains to be seen?

Recently I shifted my site Wackao.com to a new server using the uber cool one click site transfer using cPanel. This is a great feature in cPanel but comes with a caution. The site transfer does not  keep the same file and folder permissions as they should be, which also happens when we manually move the site to another server. So, you should know what all permissions should be given to your theme files and plugin files while transferring your site to a new server. I did this transfer and started getting an error message on the top of my site [see the screenshot].

You will face similar issue if your theme uses timthumb.php , which is used in most of the Elegant themes wordpress themes and some popular plugins such as vSlider.

All you have to do is give 757 permission to cache folder the timthumb is using inside the theme or the plugin.

Another similar issue you may face is regarding uploading of media files,

[square boundary]If you are unable to upload media files on your WordPress blog, just change the folder permissions of the respective folder inside the uploads folder to 777.[/squareboundary]

Hope you find this useful!

World’s most popular CMS WordPress site, WordPress.org has reset all the passwords on June 21,2011.

I faced this problem when I was committing my changes to my plugin and I was unable to do so. I searched on the forums and other authors too were facing the same issue. Not only this, people in other forums maintained by Automatic as bbpress.org and buddypress.org were facing the same issue. Why was there a need to reset all the passwords in WordPress.org? The popular Tech blog Techcrunch states that WordPress.org took this step because of suspicious activity surrounding popular plugins AddThis, WPTouch and W3 Total Cache, this was necessary. They found “suspicious commits” to these plugins and some authors accounts were hacked which posed a greater threat. 2 million people surfing WordPress,bbpress and buddypress regularly would be affected by this rest.

I recently found that after every commit to WordPress.org, I am getting emails of whatever changes I have done to my plugin. This new feature has been added and it would help to catch suspicious commits being done without author’s permission.

vSlider 4.0 Demo

vSlider 4.0 is a WordPress image slider plugin where you can host unlimited image sliders. It provides pretty cool features such as :

1. Selecting images from posts  or using custom images [With image linking].
2. 9 Image transition effects [Rain, Swirl, Random, Curtain, Winding, Alternate Curtain,Alternate Winding,Diagonal]
3. Custom Navigation styles and image buttons
4. Border ,width radius and color
5. Custom Image button placement in both horizontal and vertical format
6. Slide layouts [ Top, Right, Bottom and Left]
7. Container Float and Margin
8. Image Caching
9. Auto Resizing of Images
10. Setting Image quality for Faster loading

With all these amazing features vSlider 4.0 is the best free image slider WordPress plugin available, with multi image slider support and a much improved back-end.
Share your thoughts on this!

1. R-Graphs: Presents host of canvas based graphs such as Bar chart,Bi-polar chart, Donut chart,Funnel chart,Gantt chart,Horizontal Bar chart,Horizontal Progress bar,LED grid,Line chart,Meter,Odometer, Pie chart, Rose chart, Radial scatter chart, Scatter chart, Thermometer chart and Waterfall chart. Free for non-commercial use.

2. Canvas Rider: Interesting canvas based game, a cycle rider has to cross the road and take jumps. The best runs can be saved and challenged by different players. Interestingly you can even design your track .

3. Aviary Photo editor: With Aviary HTML5 photo editor you can edit your photographs on a web browser. Apart from regular features as setting contrast,brightening, saturation, blur etc , it also has some cool features such as pasting stickers [mustache ], using drawing tools and using retro effects.

4. AjaxAnimator: Ajaxanimator allows you to create your own HTML5 based animations for Free. It is a great idea which is in direct competition with popular online animation sites like Goanimate and Jibjab, However, due to poor support it is facing quite a few bugs lately.

5. iGrapher: iGrapher is one of best real time graph application, it is a free financial market visualization tool for charting, analysis and prediction of different stock, currency and commodity markets.

6. Sketchpad: Interesting use of a browser as a paint brush tool. Its features such as gradient, swatches, patterns, shapes,stamps and history tool make it an advance photo-editing tool on a browser.

7. Matchuppps: Interesting HTML5 game, matching the images. Very fast and light , less than 10kb in size. Elegant use of javascript ajax api and canvas.

8. Maze: Interesting HTML5 game, very addictive with various levels.

9. Musical Typing: Did you know your browser can make sounds like a piano? This incredibly simple HTML5 app makes sounds just like a piano. Is someone making an audio editing HTML5 app??

10. Chroma: Another interesting app from 10k.aneventapart . This is a very useful HTML5 app for web designers. Intuitive and simple, this app shows colors based on html5 color code, it also shows all the color codes adjacent to a particular color code helping designers to choose the best color.