1) You never post a comment / reply to comments without being logged in to your blog.

2) Users who posted comments in your blog got the white screen, and thought the comment would have reached you; and then they forgot about it.

3) Someone wanted to reach you desparately but you rely on your comments so much that you did not have an alternative option in your blog for them to contact you. Also, chances are rare that someone looked for that option in your blog because they thought you knew about it already.

Sounds bad, doesn’t it? Anyways, don’t take it out on the plugin. WordPress Total Cache, in my opinion, is one of the best available caching plugins out there. It is easily configurable, and does not leave many loose ends for you to cover. It also takes care of the need for having multiple plugins to configure wordpress caching for pages, javascript, css, database and the lot. We’ll take it up in another post, but lets fix you up first.

The Problem

Comments are the lifeblood of a good interactive wordpress blog. In this particular case, when a user posts a comment in your blog, it takes them to a blank white screen. They sometimes use the Back button on the browser and try again, and they still get the white screen. The comment never reaches your blog by the way.

Root Cause

This is what I think it is, because it worked after I cleared my cache – still, I’m no expert, so comments are welcome. When you use WordPress 3.0 or above (that’s where I’ve seen it so far) with WordPress Total Cache (W3TC) plugin configured, you face this error. W3TC has a page caching option which will cache all your pages including wordpress root files and theme files at the user’s machine for faster processing. When you post a comment, the page “wp-comments-post.php” is taken from the cache and not from the server, and it takes you to a blank screen (sometimes dynamic pages send out no output in case it does not get the required variables to process).

The Fix 

In your WordPress Admin page, look under Performance – Page Cache – Cache exception list. By default, you’ll see about 3 files in there.

Add wp-comments-post.php to the list and Save Changes. Next, go to the top of the page and Empty Cache to rebuild the cache. That’s it!

To test this, log out of WordPress Admin, clear off your browser cache, and then try posting a comment. Or if you don’t want to clear off your cache, try a different browser if you have one installed.

Note: For your current users, this won’t make any change unless they clear off their browser cache, or use a different browser. But your new users will not face this problem anymore.

Let me know your comments on this.

Sharing your password with someone else

Imagine that you are on travel, and you have a very important transaction to do online immediately, but no access to the Internet (no, not even Wireless. You’re in one of the old ghost towns in Texas where a pay phone if you get one is considered the heights of technology). The love of your life – your wife – doesn’t know the first thing about connecting to the internet. Your next option would be a friend you trust, to whom you would share your credentials, and ask him to get it done. Your password is now shared, till the time you remember to get back online again and change it. If this involved your bank account password with all your life’s savings, I bet your heart would be beating faster than you can imagine till you change it and make sure everything is in order.

Today’s world demands a lot from everyone in terms of security. This includes making your credentials more complex so that it is not easily guessed, and also to remember more than one set of complex passwords to limit the level of compromise if any. If you work somewhere where you deal with a lot of secure data online, most commonly there would be more than one complex password that you would have to remember.

Trust me, people share passwords with others in one way or the other, to make their lives easier. I know people who share passwords of their social website accounts with other friends, just to make sure that the Cafe game they have been playing online does not run out of food in their absence. There are others who share their email account password with relatives they trust (wife, parents, etc.) to check for important mails in their absence. Of course, people choose with whom they share the password, and which ones – but they do share passwords.

How weak is weak?

Consider that you have a simple password such as “mary” or “joey” (or even add a simple numeric combination to it and make it “mary123″ or “joey123″).  A total stranger can get to your password with some effort if he uses the Brute Force method (using a dictionary of words to keep trying your password until it is revealed). He is only limited by the words that is available in his dictionary of words (and also the length of your password), so the larger the dictionary that he uses, the closer he is to your password.

But instead, someone who knows you very well might turn out to be a greater threat than someone who doesn’t. There are many methods other than the brute force by which a cracker (not “hacker” – a hacker, as per me, would be a person who uses such knowledge for a good cause, such as knowing vulnerabilities in a network so that it can be reported and plugged) can find out more about you, such as social engineering. Of course, such things take a lot of time and effort to learn. So the question of how weak is weak is really not answered – there is no such thing as a 100% fool proof password. The best you can do is to make it more secure.

How strong is my password?

Here’s a small tool which will help you get some peace of mind. Type in your password at “How Secure Is My Password“, and it will tell you how much time it would take for an average desktop computer to crack it. This uses a simple formula – (Number of Possible Characters ^ Password Length) / Calculations per second – and tells you how much time it would take a normal desktop computer to crack your password using brute force. You do not have to worry about trying out a few passwords in there, because the site uses client-side javascript (which runs in your own computer) and so, does not save or transmit the data anywhere else. Try testing out some passwords and see if there is something good you can come up with (something which would take thousands of years to crack).

The above website will not give you the most secure password possible. But for one thing, unless you are a master minded criminal wanted by the Interpol or someone, or you are a famous personality (Britney, is that you?) who has a lot of secrets hidden, you can feel assured that the average joe next door who uses common tools he picks off the internet won’t be able to crack your password so easily.

What should I do to keep my password secure?

Here are some ground rules, though it won’t cover all.

1) Keep it easy to remember, but complex to crack – One example: Think of that old school rhyme “Mary Had A Little Lamb”. Then your password can be MHALL. That’s easy. But tweak it a little, and you get different combos out of it, such as mH@ll, Mh@!!, etc. Your imagination is your limit, but don’t make it so complex that you yourself have to crack it later.

2) Never share, or never again – If you ever had to share your password with someone, think of the situation why you had to do it, and find an alternative to it so that such a situation does not occur again. In the above scenario you read about, you can probably make sure that all your urgent work is done before you set off on your travel, etc.

3) Change your password regularly – High end corporates who follow strict security norms make it a process to change their account passwords every few months. You can do the same by changing your password at regular intervals, so that only you know what your current password is.

4) Never send your password to anyone via chat, email or phone – This is the same as point 2, but deserves special mention. Any email or conversation that you would have with someone asking you for your password can be a phishing attempt, even though it might look official. There are many cases of mails floating across posing as legitimate banks asking you to login with your id and password. (Here comes another danger of sharing your password – even if you are careful, your close friend might fall into the trap and provide your credentials to that site).

(Image courtesy: Flickr, under Creative Commons License)

I was born and brought up in a city which was just a few kilometers away from a sea shore. I have seen the sunrise many-a-times, but my view was almost the same as that which I described above.

But after seeing some of the beautiful photos (such as the ones from 1x.com, Flickr, etc. below), I realized that anything is not just about the object the object and scenario. It is also about the perspective. And some folks have that eye for catching that beauty in the right time and in the right form. Give them a camera, and here you go:

Coffee Rocks - Mel Brackstone

Sunrise from the Golden Gate Bridge - PatrickSmithPhotography

The Valley - Roger Arleryd

Autumn Sunrise - Gary McParland

Manguezal at sunrise - Marcio Cabral

The Valley - Roger Arleryd

(All images displayed here are courtesy to the websites they are linked to. All copyrights of these images are owned by the respective owners)

Mundu TV is a new service from Geodesic limited (already having products such as Mundu SMS, Mundu Speak, Mundu Radio and Mundu Messenger), which enables you to watch all your favourite TV channels on your mobile or your desktop – provided you have an internet connection or a data plan for your mobile connection. Currently there are a list of channels support by Mundu TV which you can watch anywhere, anytime. All you have to do is download and install the application on your desktop or your mobile phone. The service can be used with any GPRS, EDGE, 3G, WiBro, LAN and Broadband enabled connection.

Following are the channels currently supported by Mundu TV, more to be added later.

Of course there is a price. The application itself is free to download, but there is a subscription charge of Rs. 49/- (for any four channels) or Rs. 120/- (for all channels) per month. You get a 3 day trial period after which you can choose a package and pay for continued viewing.

Mundu TV will officially launch this month. A similar product, Tata Photon Broadband TV, charges about Rs. 7 per channel for similar type of services. If Mundu TV is going to stay with the current price tag, it is going to go a long way towards affordable, downloadable, streamable television.

Aimed at students, India has unveiled the basic prototype of a basic $35 touchscreen tablet PC. It is planned that this new model will hit the market by 2011, provided the Government finds a manufacturer.

The laptop will run on a Linux OS, and can do basic functions such as word processing, video conferencing and web browsing.  The device will also be including a PDF reader, wi-fi, 2GB memory, USB, Open Office, and multimedia content viewers and interfaces. There is no hard disk, but will have a memory card much like a mobile phone. It also will have a solar power option at an additional cost.

India had previously rejected an offer from MIT’s Media Lab – a $100 computer prototype built for children of the developing world – as it was too expensive.

Even though there is a lot of skepticism about this project in various parts of the internet, the success of this project is something for the whole of the nation to look forward to.

Visitors come to your website looking for something, mostly through search engines. If you are lucky, it’s one of those first links they click from the search engine results. And if you are luckier still, they are looking for something really specific which is not around on any other website, but they found the headline of your post interesting. If your website throws a “Page Not found” error, chances of that visitor NOT coming back to your website anymore is quite high.

Why do you have Page Not Found errors in the first place? For one, you would have changed the link to your page – knowingly or unknowingly. This happens mostly in blogs if you change your permalink structure to make it more SE friendly, but the old link is indexed by the search engines (which is one reason to find a good permalink structure in the first place). Otherwise, you might have linked to another website’s page where your visitors would find more information; but that page moved. The first one is under your control, but the second one is not.

How to fix this?

There are two ways of looking at this. You can either find all those links and fix them, or you should give some related options to your users. A good website does both.

Using User-friendly 404 error pages

There may not be any such thing as the perfect user-friendly 404 error page. But there are some “404-must-haves” that would help your visitors still stay on your website. The crux of this is given below:

A sitemap link – Would make it easy for people to navigate further on your site. (Sitemap is a page of your site which would contain links to all the important pages and links to your website, organized neatly and easy to navigate).

A search box – Give an option for the users to search for what they want somewhere else in your website.

A distinctly minimalistic look – Lesser number of links and lesser the distractions, the better. The above two (sitemap and search) should give enough options for the user to check out things.

One more important thing that is not to be left out – let your user know that this is a 404 page. I mean, don’t put in all the big jargon about what a 404 is as this can really confuse your visitor (Microsoft’s standard 404 page is already annoying enough).

Ideally speaking, just telling the visitor that “The content you are looking for is not here or has been moved; but you can search for them in the search box below or check out one of the related pages in the sitemap” should be good enough. Once you have this part there, the rest of the task is to simply make it more appealing.

Smashing Magazine has a post about some sample 404 pages that will get you started.

Finding the reason for the 404 – and fixing it

Ok, so the damage is done, someone came to your website looking for something which does not exist. Not every time will the friendly error page save you. If your ship has a hole, what you do is find it and plug it before it causes more damage and sink it.

If your site is small, it’s fairly easy to find moved content or broken links. But this is not always the case when you have a lot of content and a good amount of subsequent traffic. There are some ways by which you can check these pages and close them or find alternatives.

Google Analytics – If you use Google Analytics on your website, then slightly modify the javascript of your Google Analytics code, and you can track the pages missing from your website using the same piece of code. You will get the URL of the missing page, as well as the referring site.

Google Webmaster tools – If you are not too sure about modifying your Javascript code, Google Webmaster tools can help. You will need to add and verify your website before you can start using it. Once you are all set, you can go to Dashboard -> Diagnostics -> Crawl Errors option and select the “Not Found” option to see your broken links. It will catch a good lot of the broken links on your website, though not all, but what your search engine visitors think is worth looking for.

Checking out your website logs – Most webhosts provide tools to their users to check the website logs. You must have seen AWStats if you use cPanel. Amongst a lot of other goodies, AWStats gives you a list of all your missing pages that was ever searched for on your site by someone. You can see it month-wise for the previous months as well, including from which page it was being referred to. You can see a sample below -

Most of the computer operating systems (Windows, MAC, Linux, etc.) has the functionality to automatically adapt an external USB mouse once you plug it, and you can start using it directly. But it’s always desirable to have the touchpad disabled in that case. Sometimes by accident your hand can touch the touchpad and place the cursor somewhere else, which could be a hectic thing to cope with if you do not look at your screen often while typing. Also, in some cases, if your touchpad is too sensitive, you would see your cursor moving erratically, which makes it all the more difficult, making you want to get back to the good old mouse.

How do I turn off the Touch Pad?

1) One of the first things to do – check the user manual which came along with your laptop. Some laptops such as Dell makes use of the function key combinations (Fn+F5) while others like HP has an option to disable or enable the touchpad by holding the top-left corner of the touchpad for a few seconds.
2) Depending on your operating system, you would also find an icon in your computer system tray where you can manage various touchpad settings.

3) Open Device Manager (Click Start > Run, type devmgmt.msc). Expand Mice and Other Pointing Devices, right click and disable the Touchpad entry. (You might not see this option unless you connect a mouse).

4) Want to get rid of it completely? Disable it in BIOS. General way to reach BIOS in a Windows machine is to Press F8 when you start up your computer. The steps for disabling this in your BIOS varies between systems. One of the options usually provided by laptop vendors is to have the touchpad automatically disable once you connect an external USB mouse.

(Image courtesy: Anonymous Account)

Windows 7 tends to be so user friendly that it even figures out what themes you would like to see and work with. When does it figure this out? This is defined when you first start your Windows 7 installation and select the language, time and currency format.

If you would be choosing English and English (United States) respectively. This will provide you with themes and Desktop backgrounds specific to the United States location. Windows also comes with other international themes from locations such as Australia, Canada, South Africa and the United Kingdom.

To access the hidden themes, do the following:

1) Open Windows Explorer, and click on Organize. Select Folder and Search Options.

2) Go to Web menu, select show hidden files, folders and drivers and uncheck Hide protected operating system files (click yes, if prompted with confirmation).

3) Now, type in the following path to the windows search box (Start menu) and click Enter.

C:\Windows\Globalization\MCT

You will find folders related to themes for the other regions here.

4) You can either go in to the folder and just get the wallpapers, or alternatively go to the Theme folder and install it by clicking the corresponding .theme file. Once you install the theme, they will appear under your “My Themes” section and you can install them from there.

That’s all there is to it. If you want more themes, you can download them from Microsoft’s site.

TigerText, a new iPhone texting application, has the option of adding a “self-destruct” timer to the messages. That is, once the time’s up, the message gets deleted from everywhere – the sender’s phone, the receiver’s phone, and also the messaging server. As per the company, these deleted texts are not “legally discoverable” anymore.

The timer can be set anywhere from 1 minute to 30 days. There are also other options of deleting all texts in a conversation, or the “auto self-destruct” – that is, deleting it as soon as the recipient opens it.

TigerText founder Jeffrey Evans says that “TigerText will completely change the way people think about electronic communication. For the first time, you have complete control over what happens to your texts after you hit the send button. It brings safety and peace of mind to anyone who sends messages that are intended to remain private.”

Fairly priced at subscription rates of $1.49 for every 250 messages per month and $2.49 for unlimited messages, TigerText also offers a free-to-try option of 250 messages for the first 15 days. All you have to do is sign up for an account once you download the application and confirm your phone number to start using TigerText.

For TigerText to work, the application should be available on the sender and receiver’s phone. The messages themselves are never stored on the phones. They are kept on the server, and the purging of expired messages happens every minute of the day, as per the vendor. Currently this app is available only for iPhones, while Android and Blackberry versions are already in the works.

How is it different from what you have now?

Well, if you search for something in Google, you would find a lot of websites and pages describing or related to the keyword phrase you put in. Plus, it also lets you know what your friends and family have to say about it. For example, if you’re looking to buy a laptop, you will find a lot of shopping sites holding up their products in a normal google search. But social search can also get you opinions from the pages of your friends or relatives if they have posted about some of the best deals they have found elsewhere.

You can see more on the video given below:

Note: The new feature will be available for all “Signed in” users in “English” – so if you don’t see the social search yet even if you’re signed in, it’s just being rolled out; so you might have to wait a few days till it’s available everywhere.