Life$trikes.Com

Turn-off Automatic Thumbnail Creation in WordPress

Raghu — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 23:06:35 +0000

By default when after adding images to post in wordpress, 3 copies of the same images (small, medium and large) will be created automatically by WordPress. Those images will be used for thumbnail if theme supports that feature. If you are not going to use those images, then is waste of resources

Disk Space
Backup space
Expensive while using CDN/Storage

After 3 years of using wordpress, I happened to find this while playing with Thesis theme, featured image and thumbnail features. I’m using W3 Total cache plugin with Amazon CDN and S3 storage. I could have saved some money by preventing wordpress from creating thumbnails automatically in file storage.

Stop automatic thumbnail creation

Just follow the steps below to stop thumbnail creation

Login into Admin area in wordpress
Go to Setting > Media
Enter 0(zero) to all the fields.
Save the Settings

To verify that go to wp-content/uploads/current year/month and upload an image from a post. Make sure no thumbnails are created. Now, I have got some cleaning to do (maybe a small script to delete those unused images will do).

How to Select Thumbnail From Facebook Profile Picture

Raghu — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 21:32:23 +0000

Finally, I found the way to customize facebook wall post thumbnail for fanpage. After uploading a profile picture in Facebook (or facebook fan page), by default random thumbnail of your picture will be displayed for all your Wall Posts. I thought, it is not possible to pick an area within the picture to be used for thumbnail, but I was wrong.

Steps to select thumbnail from profile picture for facebook wall post.

Upload the image for facebook profile picture.
Click on the Image (after uploading). It will open Profile Pictures Folder.
Click on Change Profile Picture Button on Top Right side.
Mouse Cursor will change if you move it Thumbnail Version.
Select the desired area within the picture for wall post thumbnail.
Save Thumbnail Version.

This is useful when you like to display just the part of your logo (instead of some random area).

WordPress Database Cleanup – Plugins Tables

Raghu — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 20:11:36 +0000

I started using wordpress at www.HappySchoolsBlog.com since October 2007 and since then I have tried several plugins. In last 3 years, I never had courage to cleanup the wordpress database. Today, I decided to delete (drop) tables in wordpress MySQL database that were unused or from deactivated plugins.

Total Number of Tables Before Cleanup – 54
Tables After Cleanup – 33

It might be possible to delete (Drop) few more tables, but I haven’t figured out which plugins were using them.

It was easy to identify few tables by looking at the table names and then click on Drop under MySql Admin page. For other tables, I searched in Google with

Table Name + plugin + wordpress (example – wp_alinks_settings + plugin + wordpress)

After making sure that I’m not deleting core tables, I double checked with core tables list and dropped the remaining tables.

WordPress Database Backup

I was lazy to install any plugins to backup wordpress database. Instead once per month, I used Account backup option from Dreamhost to backup the files and tables. After seeing Thesis theme getting hacked over the weekend, I decided to install WP-DB-Backup plugin. It was easy to install and create the backup. Going forward, I plan to backup the core tables after once in two days.

Very High Unsubscribe Rate with Pop-Over Form

Raghu — Tue, 25 May 2010 03:59:03 +0000

Once in a few days, I erase unsubscribed users from email list. Every time, I have noticed majority of the unsubscribed leads have signed up for mailing list through Pop-Over form.

I don’t have the exact percentage or other numbers, but right before writing this post, I erased 367 unsubscribed leads. Over 340 leads have signed-up through Pop-Over form.

It will be interesting to track the exact numbers and if there is high unsubscribe rate, I may decide to remove the pop-over option and use inline sign-up form to collect email leads.

Google Adsense Pays out 68% to Publishers

Raghu — Mon, 24 May 2010 15:25:53 +0000

Finally google is sharing the information that was kept secret so so many years – Adsense Publisher Revenue Share.

AdSense for content publishers, who make up the vast majority of our AdSense publishers, earn a 68% revenue share worldwide. This means we pay 68% of the revenue that we collect from advertisers for AdSense for content ads that appear on your sites. The remaining portion that we keep reflects Google’s costs for our continued investment in AdSense — including the development of new technologies, products and features that help maximize the earnings you generate from these ads. It also reflects the costs we incur in building products and features that enable our AdWords advertisers to serve ads on our AdSense partner sites. Since launching AdSense for content in 2003, this revenue share has never changed.

We pay our AdSense for search partners a 51% revenue share, worldwide, for the search ads that appear through their implementations. As with AdSense for content, the proportion of revenue that we keep reflects our costs, including the significant expense, research and development involved in building and enhancing our core search and AdWords technologies. The AdSense for search revenue share has remained the same since 2005, when we increased it.

Convert MS Word Table into HTML Table in 4 Steps

Raghu — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 19:51:45 +0000

Converting Tables in Microsoft Word document to HTML table will create this nasty HTML Code. But, it’s very easy to convert Word Table to HTML table without any junk codes by 4 step process

Word Table to HTML Table

Copy the Table in Word Document to Excel Document.
Copy the Rows from Excel
Open Spreadsheet to HTML Converter Tool
Paste the Data and and Click Tabelize it

Do you know any other way to convert Word to HTML Tables?

Dreamhost VPS – Double RAM for Same Price

Raghu — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 04:40:29 +0000

I noticed Dreamhost VPS pricing change. They have changed the pricing sturucture for VPS RAM Usage and removed Burstable RAM.

Dreamhost VPS – Before

Montly pricing was based on RAM usage.

300 MB RAM would cost $30.00 per month
300 MB is Guaranteed and upto 600 MB is Burstable ( Swap Space)

Dreamhost VPS – Now

With new pricing model, RAM amount is doubled for the same price.

600 MB RAM will cost $30.00 per month
Burstable RAM is not available anymore.

For smaller sites where there is a steady traffic, this would reduce hosting expense by 50%. Adjusting the RAM for traffic increase would get the job done. Also, this move will encourage sites in Shared Hosting to move to VPS.

Tool to Find Other Websites Hosted on Your Server

How to Create Tabbed Conents in WordPress Sidebar

Raghu — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 03:30:53 +0000

There are many scripts available to create Tabbed Contents in wordpress. Some of them are DomTab, Tabifier and idTabs,

Usually, tabbed contents are used in the sidebar to display popular posts, recent comments, tags, categories or archives. I recently came across another tool to create tabbed contents in WordPress using Yahoo Developers Network Tabview.

After reviewing the API and examples, it looks promising and powerful way to to create tabbed contents. I will post an update after giving it a shot.

How to Insert Adsense in bbPress Forum

Raghu — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 18:55:41 +0000

BBpress is light weight forum created by makers of WordPress. It’s easy to install and has the same interface as WordPress. Displaying Adsense ad within bbpress takes about 2 minutes.

Follow the steps to display adsense ad just above and below the Page Navigation

Sample Adsense in bbPress

Steps to Insert Adsense Code in bbPress

Instructions below is for the default theme kakumei.

FTP into directory where bbpress forum is installed.
Navigate to /example.com/bb-templates/kakumei
Open the File topic.php
Find the following line of code that contains php_topic_pages (array…… )
Insert the Adsense code just below that line
This will display the ad above the forum topic, before posts starts
To insert the ad after the posts (before navigation page)
Insert the adsense coede below the line that contains “class=rss line…..php topic_rss_link”
Refresh the Topic in the fourm and you should see the ads.

There are 2 plugins that will allow to insert adsense code in bbpress. If you want to insert the code between posts then use adsense for bbpress plugin.

How to Change WordPress Theme Editing MySql Tables

Raghu — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:27:22 +0000

Follow the simple steps to change the WordPress Theme ny editing MySql Tables(WordPress database). You might run into situations when you have access to only backend.

Change WordPress Theme

Logn into MySQL Database for your site (Example : msql.example.com)
Open the Database for your site ( DB_example)
Open the Table wp_options
Open Browse Tab
Find the option’s template and stylesheet
Edit the value to theme name you want to change (Example : default)
Save the table

If some plugin have corrupted the theme files, using above change, you can set the default theme.