Habitually Good

I am going to be on board the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) which will be launching for the moon later this year. Or, at least, my name will be.

The LRO is NASA’s maiden mission in their Vision for Space Exploration. Launching in late 2008, it will travel to the moon to find safe landing spots, locate resources, and do a whole lot of other nifty things (and if you are interested, then visit the mission site).

So, how did I get on board? Well, it turns out that they are going to put a list of all those people who register with them to show support for the mission, and I just did. Here’s my certificate of participation:

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A few days ago I discovered that your FeedBurner stats may not be reflecting the true number of subscribers that subscribe to your blog feed. I found out that the problem was that most WordPress themes have the RSS links embedded in the templates and most of us forget to change that. Check post here.

However, what about all those people who have already subscribed to the non-FeedBurner RSS feed. How do you get them to move onto the FeedBurner Url? Well, it turns out that there is a way and it works perfectly. It’s a plugin called FeedSmith.

What FeedSmith does is that it redirects every conceivable feed request that comes to your blog to your FeedBurner URL. Cool, so if you have this installed, you don’t even need to change your template as I have suggested in the previous post. Take a look at my FeedBurner statistics since I installed it.

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If you feel this way, you are not alone. There is a lot of comment spam on the Internet these days and blogs which allow anonymous comments (Such as mine) bear the worst of it.

According to Akismet (one of the best Anti-Spam service around) more than 90% of the comments that are left on blogs are Spam. A fact experienced by the blogger who made the cartoon that you see here (click the image to visit his blog). Just to illustrate further how big this problem is, here’s a look at a graph from Akismet’s site which shows the total number of Spam Comments over time:

Scary, right? So, how to minimize spam on your blog? Here are my tips (and these don’t apply to very high traffic bloggers, I am sure, but then which of those visit this blog anyway).

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I have tried my best to keep up to speed with WordPress upgrades over the various releases since I started this blog. But I have been lazy about upgrading minor releases because it’s always too much work.

The scary part is that it is the minor releases which are the most important as they are usually made for fixing security holes in your WordPress installation. Well, now I will be able to keep abreast of WordPress versions because the upgrade process became a whole lot easier.

Introducing the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plug-in. This does the work for you and makes upgrading a breeze (although with a glitch as I will explain below). Here’s my experience with using it:

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I publish my blog feed using FeedBurner. And I always used to think that the statistics shown in my FeedBurner account for the number of subscribers is correct. Well, as it turns out I was completely wrong. And your statistics shown in your FeedBurner account could be wrong as well (especially if you are using a WordPress blog).

Here’s how to make sure that your stats are correct:

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Earlier this year I lost my Google Page Rank. It went from 3 to 0. Now, as the owner of a personal blog, that shouldn’t have mattered to me, but it still felt bad. Later I figured that loosing that Page Rank was not such a bad thing after all because it helped me fight spam in a weird sense.

Well, even though it shouldn’t have mattered a lot, I am still happy to see that my Page Rank has been reinstated. My blog again has a Page Rank of 3 now.

Yipee.

Notice the caps in the title of this post. You can never be too careful when it comes to Phishing. As the Wikipedia link suggests:

“Phishing is an attempt to criminally and fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication“

This is the stuff that makes my dad scared of making online purchases, use net banking, or just trust anything on the Internet. And for good reason too.

Phishing is getting way too sophisticated for most users on the Internet. Large companies like Google and Microsoft continuously keep talking about how to recognize a Phishing trap and how to deal with it. Browsers try and build in anti-phishing measures into their technology to help prevent people from falling prey to phishing attacks.

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A while back, I wrote about the steps I took to speed up a really slow IE7 installation that I had on my laptop. Although I use Firefox most of the time (though I am not very happy with that these days), I do need to use Internet Explorer every so often (there are certain sites which won’t work on Firefox, believe it or not).

Anyway, even after I got my IE7 to speed up after a while, I still encountered a few issues, the two main ones being:

• Images rendered on any web page would look as if they were low-resolution versions. I kept thinking that it had something to do with my Desktop settings somehow.
• Some web pages (such as my banking site) would always give me a JavaScript error. I always thought that it was a problem with the bank site till I saw that my wife doesn’t get that error when she opens the same site on her Internet Explorer.

Well, it turns out that I didn’t know what was causing the problems, but I found the cure:

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Here’s a trick which you don’t use every day, but I believe that every thing you know can come in handy some day. This is a stupid little trick that I discovered quite by chance. I am not sure where anyone would want to use this, but here’s a trick to rename multiple files in the explorer in one go.

Take a look at the screen shot below. It shows a large number of files with different file names and extensions. Now if for some reason, I wanted to rename them all to something else, this is how I would proceed.

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Google Analytics is such a neat tool for tracking how your website or blog is doing. Sure, there are many tools out there which claim to be so much better, and some of them are even free (though most are paid), but I still find Analytics to be a much better overall package.

I was exploring and I found a very cool way to export your data from within Analytics. Earlier, whenever I would need this data, I would take a screen shot of it and then would work with that screen shot.

Today, I was just playing around with the interface and saw the Export Button while on the map overlay button. And guess what, it has a PDF option. Here’s where it is located:

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