WeblogToolsCollection is now available in Deutsch and in Español. We are planning further feature enhancements such as direct linking from this blog to translated posts and cross posting of news. We will also add a few more languages in the future if these two translations become popular AND readers see a benefit from such translations. The first two languages were chosen based traffic patterns of this blog and past user requests. Since I am quite inept at both these languages, I would appreciate it if a couple of my readers would do me a favor in spreading the word and post the links to these blogs in the respective WordPress Forums along with a small explanation of the purpose. Thanks for your help and please let us know what you think.

The Blogging Essay Competition ended on January 14th but I have been giving the latest few entries some time to catch up in the number of votes. People were still voting on the entries till about a week ago when interest dropped. If you have not read through the entries or voted, I am sure the authors would appreciate your encouragement. I will tally the results at the end of this week and post the winners on Sunday. If I have not said so already, thank you for your participation. [EDIT] Since there is some confusion, we are not extending the competition, but extending the judging time to get all the entries similar exposure to reader reviews.

This blog is now running WordPress 2.1 Ella and I am impressed. This server was running a much older version of MySql and since Ella requires MySql 4.1 support, I could not upgrade right away. I was somewhat apprehensive of upgrading MySql on Plesk and wanted to put aside some time for the upgrade in case things went south. This morning, I upgraded MySql, this blog, all the plugins and performed some much needed tweaking and maintenance. For those that are on Plesk servers and would like some instructions on how to upgrade MySql safely, this post should help. The upgrade was simple, the instructions made sense and were complete, and the upgrade itself went without a hitch. After the upgrade, I tweaked the query cache (sorely missed in MySql 3), upped the key buffer and the thread cache sizes and optimized all the tables. I am satisfied with the […]

There has been a lot of changes at WeblogToolsCollection.com and we continue to try and make the blog as useful of a tool as possible with the least headaches. Here is some important news and some tidbits I would like to bring to everyones’ attention. Some of my regulars might have noticed that Ajay has been getting his feet quite wet recently on this blog. Ajay D’Souza has agreed to be an author on WeblogToolsCollection and will be concentrating on WordPress news, reviews and analysis of plugins, themes, hacks etc. I like his writing style and candor and really appreciate his openness and eagerness to learn. We have modified some of the news posting procedures and will continue to refine and change as requested and necessary. Ajay has been blogging since 2003 and currently runs http://ajaydsouza.com and http://techtites.com. You will find his WordPress plugins, themes, hacks and a regular glimpse […]

Persistent Spam floods have taken over again. I wish these people would quit since it is not only hurting my blog, it is also hurting their own purposes. If spammers realize that if they flood/kill their victims, they do not get the spam on the blog. It is a lose-lose situation. In addition to spam floods, Performancing has been having some serious problems with their servers (I read something about a server move) and that has been causing slowdowns and random problems. I have disabled both for the time being. I have a message in to Chris about the ad problems and I hope to hear back soon but the ads will stay off until things settle down. As for comments, they will remain turned off until the spammers decide to move on. There HAS to be a solution to stop comment floods. For those that have suggested Bad Behavior […]