Happy New Year 2009 from nazham.com

I’m already taking leave until 4th January, and will be heading back to my hometown, Kuala Kangsar, Perak today. I’ll be offline, so the updates to my blog will be too for a while. I will try to have updates through Twitter, though.

To EC droppers, sorry for unable to drop to your blogs. I will be back online in a few days.

Happy New Year 2009, and have a prosperous, productive and a happy year. 😀

p/s: To my wife: Happy birthday on the 1st January. (Darn it’s so easy to remember her birthday 🙂 )

Twitux and gTwitter: Twitter Clients for Ubuntu Linux

Following my previous post nazham.com on Twitter, I’ve just beginning to get involved with Twitter.
Below are a couple of Twitter clients that I’ve used in Ubuntu:

Twitux
A Twitter client for GNOME.
Twitux is a lightweight client for the twitter messaging service, featuring time-line auto updating, a tray area icon and notification of new messages.

twitux

gTwitter
Client for tracking and posting to twitter.
gTwitter is a client for posting and fetching updates to the twitter service.

gtwitter

Installation is available through Synaptic Package Manager. Just do a search for the application name, twitux or gtwitter.

Installing Google Gadgets on Ubuntu 8.10

Google Desktop gadgets are interactive mini-applications that can be placed anywhere on the user’s desktop to show new email, weather, photos, personalized news or other desired information. Google offers a gallery of pre-built gadgets for download on the official website.

To install Google Gadgets on Ubuntu 8.10:

1. Download the .deb package.
2. Install the package using the following command:
sudo dpkg -i google-gadgets_0.10.4-0~getdeb1_i386.deb

3. Run the apps using the command ggl-gtk or from the Applications menu.

Autostart:

1. Add a new entry at System -> Preference -> Sessions.
2. The command entry would be ggl-gtk

Enjoy.

Resource: Howto install Google Gadgets in ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex)

nazham.com on Twitter

twitter9
I finally embrace Twitter. Yeah, I know. Sometimes I’m a little bit behind on the social networking trends. So, I finally giving it a go today, and I’m liking it so far.

Twitter

What is Twitter?
From Twitter.com:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?
Because even basic updates are meaningful to family members, friends, or colleagues—especially when they’re timely.
With Twitter, you can stay hyper–connected to your friends and always know what they’re doing. Or, you can stop following them any time. You can even set quiet times on Twitter so you’re not interrupted.
Twitter puts you in control and becomes a modern antidote to information overload.

From wiki:

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.
Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS, or email, or through an application.

Sometimes things are better explained in sight and sound media. So, here’s a video on Twitter in Plain English, from CommonCraft.

Twitter in Plain English

I’m very new in Twitter. It would be great if you guys could share your experience. Any tips? Any cool Twitter client apps (Windows, Mac, Linux, Firefox, etc)? Any good interesting tweets to follow? Please, do let us know. 😀

Creating an Author Page for your Blog (WordPress)

Nazham.com have multiple authors. Wouldn’t it be great if it can display a little info on the authors, along with their list of posts? I’ve created the page for a while for this site,  now just to share with the viewers. Here’s how I did it.

1. Create an author.php page. The page can simply be done by copying your existing archives.php page, and renamed it to author.php
2. Sample code below. Change the layout as you like to match with your blog’s theme.

<!--content-->
<div id="content">

	<!--left-col-->
	<div id="left-col">
	  <div class="post">

	  <!-- This sets the $curauth variable -->
	  <?php
	  if(isset($_GET['author_name'])) :
	  $curauth = get_userdatabylogin($author_name);
	  else :
	  $curauth = get_userdata(intval($author));
	  endif;
	  ?>

	  <h3>About: <?php echo $curauth->display_name; ?></h3>

	  <p><strong>Website:</strong>
          <a href="<?php echo $curauth->user_url; ?>">
	  <?php echo $curauth->user_url; ?></a></p>

	  <p><strong>Profile:</strong>
          <?php echo $curauth->user_description; ?></p>

	  <h3>Posts by <?php echo $curauth->display_name; ?>:</h3>
	  <ul>
	    <!– The Loop –>
	    <?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
		<li>
			<em><?php the_time('M jS, Y') ?></em>
                        <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"
                        title="Permanent Link: <?php the_title(); ?>">
			<?php the_title(); ?></a>
		</li>
	  <?php endwhile; else: ?>
		<p><?php _e('No posts by this author.'); ?></p>
	  <?php endif; ?>
	  <!– End Loop –>
	  </ul>
	  </div>
	</div>
</div>
<!--content-end-->

The code above will display the author’s name, website, profile and the author’s posts.

3. To create the author’s link (maybe somewhere at the post title of your index page), simply put the code below:
<?php the_author_posts_link(); ?>

Resource:
1. How To: Adding An Author Page To Your WordPress Blog
2. WordPress Author Templates