SidekickBlog

I just found out that I won the contest I mentioned in my last post.  The prize is a year’s membership at WPMU Dev Premium.  This is great since I was considering buying a membership anyway.  The premium website has very useful plugins that I can use on theindianstartup.com

TheIndianStartup is growing steadily and we hope to hit 150 members soon. We now have several core blogs for startup interviews, startup tools, announcements and press releases etc. and the response from the startup community has been extremely positive.

This website has been an amazing project for me as I went from being a Wordpress newbie, to setting up a full fledged social network with several unique features. The learning process has been tremendous and has been made so much easier by the superb community and the great plugins that are available for free. However, I am fast approaching the extent of what I can achieve with free plugins and support. I could hire a pricey web developer and pay for plugins individually (both hard to do with no revenue stream) but luckily a much better solution is available: WPMU Dev Premium. This is a paid support website for WPMU & Buddypress developers. They also have over 72 premium plugins, & themes (infact they just announced a countdown to their 100th premium offering). Although the monthly charge can be high for amateur developer, the value that they offer is great. I have heard great reviews of their support forums and I look forward to implementing their plugins like AutoBlog and Domain Mapping once I am a member.

My regular readers – all 5 of them :) are probably wondering where I have disappeared over the past week so this is a quick update.  The fact is that I have been neglecting this blog and spending all my free time playing around with a new project involving the new community module released for Wordpress called Buddypress.  Buddypress is a basically an integrated set of components (plugins) that rides on top of a regular WPMU (Wordpress for multiple blogs) install to add all kinds of social networking features (mini Facebook). 

I was already looking at starting a community using Ning or a similar social network creation tool.  Just as I registered the community at Ning, news about Buddypress exploded onto the scene (ok well, it was not that big news but I frequent a very niche area of the web).  After reading up on the features and checking out some existing installs, I decided to go ahead with Buddypress instead for the following reasons:

1) It takes 5 minutes to set up a working network on Ning – Where is the fun in that?  Buddypress gives me the opportunity to take the skills that I am learning to run regular Wordpress websites to a whole new level and if I finally end up making a good website after all the intense research and work of the past several days, it will be an amazing sense of accomplishment.

2) I didn’t like the fact that you have to start paying a monthly fee to Ning just to get their ads of your network and point your domain name to it.  Considering, that I am still figuring out what kind of community I want to build, I don’t want the bills to start coming in already.  Also, Ning pretty much owns the user profiles as they are part of their larger community.  Buddypress, like Wordpress is open source and completely free and lets me use my existing resources to launch a community website that I control completely.

All in all, working with Buddypress has been full of frustrations as it is very new code and still has a bunch of bugs and a lot of illogical default attributes.  But the potential!  I am really enjoying finding innovative workarounds to existing limitations and the support community is extremely helpful and responsive. 

I hope to generate fresh content for this blog from what I am learning while experimenting with Buddypress (I smell a new series of tutorials) but only if I end up creating something substantial with my endeavors.  I hope to also be more regular over here in the near future once I get through the launch issues of the new website.

You can test out my existing work at theindianstartup.com and please send me your suggestions, bug reports at kunal.jain (at) theindianstartup.com (Currently there seems to be some issues with user registrations from non gmail/hotmail email address but I am hoping to work that out soon.)

I just edited the search box at Recipe Mobile to remove the search button that used to appear under it.  The ‘Search’ button takes up too much space and is frankly unnecessary.  

Most internet users know that if you fill in a text box and hit enter, the website will see that as a click on the button tied to the search box.  Some quick searches on Google got me to Bavotsan.com.  Along with with various other PHP tips, the blog also contained a smart way to edit the php code that controls the search box.

The short tutorial on Bavotsan.com uses the default Wordpress theme which contains a file called searchform.php.  However, since my theme does not have this file, I had to look around for the appropriate code to edit.  Since the search box shows up in Recipe Mobile’s right sidebar, I looked in the file sidebar-right.php in Appearance->Themes in the Wordpress admin menu and found the appropriate code there. 

This is what the new search box looks like now.  The text to ‘Type and Hit Enter’ shows up in the search box when it is not being used to educate the few users who might not be net savvy.

Do you create great content on your blog that is useful to a lot of people?  Do you post beautiful photographs on your website?  Then you probably have a lot of people copying text and images from your blog to use elsewhere.  They may or may not attribute it back to your blog by adding a link.  

Tracer is a script designed to let you track this copied content and also provide all kinds of usage statistics for it.  Best of all it will add an automatic attribution link back to your post so that content you have created can result in traffic to you regardless of where it resides.  And to top it all it promises to let you do all this for free.  Definately a must have for all the content creators out there.   (continue reading…)

My favorite desktop twitter client TwitterDeck has just been updated with a lot of new functionality.  Get it here.  If you already use it, the update should auto install.

A good review and guide of the updates is here.