kinshuk sunilit aint no, dessert if therez no caek

I am looking for a decent collabware that supports intuitive task management, project management, document management and knowledge-base management plus some aspects of social networking for internal employees, specifically for a small business or a startup. So, I have done a brief preliminary research and highlighted the following products for a quick peek, and then will make an informed choice. The list includes:

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In this series of posts I’ll share my experiences with setting up my blog using Wordpress and things to keep in mind while blogging with Wordpress.

Step 1: Installing Wordpress
There are two ways to install Wordpress: either you download it from Wordpress.org and manually upload it on your domain or you use any software installer provided by your domain manager such as Fantastico or a similar solution.

Step 2: Configuring Wordpress
This is the most time consuming process, since everythign you do after installing wordpress is included here. People generally prefer to do some configurations first, but I prefer to finsih all uploading work first and configurations later.

Step 2.1: Installing Plugins
Plugins add extra features to your basic wordpress blog and render it into a powerful publishing tool. Wordpress.org Plugins Directory has an huge list of very useful wordpress plugins.

I am using the following Plugins:

• Ajax Comment Posting: Posts comments and validates the comment form using Ajax By regua.
• Akismet: Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. By Matt Mullenweg.
• All in One SEO Pack: Out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress blog. By uberdose.
• AutoMeta: Automatically generate and include HTML Meta Tags and Technorati Tags based on the full text of your post. By Rich Boakes.
• Awsom News Announcement: Allows you to post news announcements in the area above your posts on the index page (or anywhere else you want). By Harknell.
• Broken Link Checker: Checks your posts for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found. By Janis Elsts.
• Cite This: Citations provider for WordPress By Yu-Jie Lin.
• FeedBurner FeedSmith: Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. By FeedBurner.
• In Series: Gives authors an easy way to connect posts together as a series. By Travis Snoozy.
• Redirection: A redirection manager By John Godley.
• StatPress: Real time stats for your blog By Daniele Lippi.
• WP-DownloadManager: Adds a simple download manager to your WordPress blog. By Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan.
• WP-Flickr: The plugin adds a new tab to the upload panel when writing posts / pages to insert img tags from flickr By Jon Baker @ Clockwork Objects.
• WP-Footnotes: Allows a user to easily add footnotes to a post. By Simon Elvery.
• WP-PostRatings: Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page. By Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan.
• WP-PostViews: Enables you to display how many times a post/page had been viewed. It will not count registered member views, but that can be changed easily. By Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan.
• WP-Print: Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page. By Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan.
• WP-ServerInfo: Display your host’s server PHP and MYSQL information (integrated into WordPress Admin Style) on your WordPress dashboard. By Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan.
• WP-Smartdate: WP-Smartdate automagically resolves relative dates (e.g. “tomorrow,” “this coming Monday”) and adds the date reference in a machine-readable tag. By mitcho (Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine).
• WP Post Columns: Allows you to easily create columns within your posts for a magazine / newspaper style layout. By Sam Burdge.
• WP YouTube: WP YouTube allows you to control all the YouTube videos at the same time. By Jens Törnell.
• WP_HeadNFoot: WP_HeadNFoot is a free WordPress plug-in that help you to simply and easily insert code into the header and footer of a page, useful for things such as Google Analytics. The changes are theme independent allowing y0u to update or change the theme without having to remake the changes. By DCoda Ltd.

We download these from the Wordpress.org Plugins Directory and upload them in the /wp-content/plugins folder in your Wordpress install. Next up, we will be configuring these plugins to suit our use.

I don’t know but the Redmond Area winds don’t seem to be favorable for the Microsoft think tanks… Microsoft, that has always tried to be a market leader and innovator (at least, on the looks of it) has always been an emulator and an imitator :P Be it the DOS, Windows or even Vista UI

And then there is OOXML and well, Shared Source… Fancy this:

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Microsoft kills its ?Get the Facts? anti-Linux site by ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley — On August 23, Microsoft pulled plug on the “Get the Facts” site, replacing it with a new Windows Server “Compare” site. Why did Microsoft make this move now? And is Compare anything more than “Get the Facts” in sheep’s clothing?

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After Microsoft came up with a patent violation claim, it came with a Shared Source concept and well promotions of Open Source… I am a business graduate pursuing MBA.. I understand what business is and what Marketing is all about.. but really.. Microsoft…. What are you trying to do? Fight more important battles!

On a personal front.. I was sitting in class when a friend asked me about the OOXML affair.. and I was ignorant about it… the only thing I could remember was oXML and I lectured her for about half an hour about oXML until she went berserk :D Only later to realize… back home… that OOXML is MS Office Open XML :P

To add insult to injury.. I am writing this blog using Windows Live Writer on a Vista Ultimate PC ;)

IMPORTANT: I do not know PHP, or for that matter any server-side scripting language. This method (described here) is a work around to successfully add your Google Analytics code in your mediawiki installation, based on the article: MediawikiEtGoogleAnalytics/En. I am using Mediawiki 1.9.3 and I don’t know if this works on previous/later versions though logically it should.

When I followed the aforementioned article to add Google Analytics (referred to as ‘gA’ henceforth) on the OSS Camp wiki that I am currently administering, I found that the code is successfully added (there was an error for the “if (!$wgUser->isSysop())” check in the addGoogleAnalytics() function which i commented), but it is nowhere near the </BODY> tag as required for gA to work correctly. So we needed some alternative method. I digged in a bit at the Media Wiki website and tried understanding the Media Wiki flow to understand how the output page is being created. I observed this in the “includes/Skin.php” file:

(around line # 691)

/**
* This gets called shortly before the \</body\> tag.
* @return String HTML-wrapped JS code to be put before \</body\>
*/
function bottomScripts() {
global $wgJsMimeType;
return “\n\t\t<script type=\”$wgJsMimeType\”>if (window.runOnloadHook) runOnloadHook();</script>\n” ;

}

I changed this to:

/**
* This gets called shortly before the \</body\> tag.
* @return String HTML-wrapped JS code to be put before \</body\>
*/
function bottomScripts() {
global $wgJsMimeType, $gStr;
$gStr = $this->addGoogleAnalytics();
return “\n\t\t<script type=\”$wgJsMimeType\”>if (window.runOnloadHook) runOnloadHook();</script>\n” . $gStr ;
}

And at the end of the document, just below the last closing brace “}”, I added the addGoogleAnalytics() function. The modified function is shown below:

(color coding this whole block was a pain and i am lazy)

function addGoogleAnalytics() {$printGoogleAnalytics = “<script src=\”http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js\” type=\”text/javascript\”>\n”;
$printGoogleAnalytics .= “</script>\n”;
$printGoogleAnalytics .= “<script type=\”text/javascript\”>\n”;
$printGoogleAnalytics .= “_uacct = ” ;
$printGoogleAnalytics .= “\” UA-XXXXXX-X \”" ;
$printGoogleAnalytics .= “;\n”;
$printGoogleAnalytics .= “urchinTracker();\n”;
$printGoogleAnalytics .= “</script>\n”;return $printGoogleAnalytics;
}

Substitute the highlighted XXXXXX-X with your code and et voila! the code is working fine, absolutely fine!

Do leave a comment if you find this useful and I do want to credit the original author (at the aforementioned link) for his work, without which I couldn’t have found the solution.