Simply adding a blank/ 0 byte text file named “index.html” will prevent this directory list from being displayed, however another way to disable directory listing is by adding the following line to the .htaccess file in your public_html folder of your web hosting account :

Options -Indexes

That’s it, with this line in place, folders which do not contain index files will no longer show the default directory list.

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Here is a great list that I whipped together of some of the most useful and most popular Wordpress plugins which every blogger should have installed. Enjoy the list.

Akismet - Simply the best Spam protection you can get for handling comments on your blog. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they are spam or not, also checks the trackbacks for spam.

WP Super Cache - An extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests.

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.

WP-PageNavi - A WordPress Plugin that adds more advanced page navigation to WordPress. It does this by adding page number links to your different pages. Using this plugin your readers will be able to jump from the first to the last page and other pages of your blog very easily.

Simple Tags - A plugin does everything related with tagging. With this plugin you can generates a list of related posts based on the text of blog entry. The tags can be used to search your blog and are picked up by blog search engines like Technorati and can bring in new users.

All in One SEO Pack - Automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) out of the box for your wordpress blog, everything you need to get your site optimized for search engines.

Google XML Sitemaps - Simple tool for auto generating sitemaps every time you make an update to your site. This plugin is the best tool to tell Google how it should crawl your blog and where to find everything you want found.

Wordpress Thread Comment - This Plugin is an enhancement for Wordpress’s comment function. It enables users to reply on a exist comment, and the discussion will be displayed threaded or nested.

FeedBurner Feedsmith - Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while creating a randomized feed for Feedburner to pull from.

Wordpress Database Backup - Automated or on-demand backup solution for your wordpress database. Don’t leave home without it!

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DreamHost measure server resource consumption in CPU minutes. This number indicates how much time a processor spends working for host user. All DreamHost shared hosting customers should use less than 60 cpu minutes per day for all their users on their account.

How to find the my CPU minutes per day, DreamHost tell us the way.

First, you’ll need to verify that you have CPU Reporting enabled for your user. This can be done from the ‘Users’->’Manage Users’ section of the web panel by clicking ‘edit’ for the user.

You should be able to access your reports within a day after being enabled by FTP’ing or SSH’ing to your account and switching to the logs/resources/ directory. In there, you’ll find files named .sa.analyzed.0, .sa.analyzed.1, .sa.analyzed.2. Your username will replace . These files are generated by a script that looks at how many minutes your scripts use, then rotates them every day. So the latest file from yesterday will be the .0 file, and the day before will be .1 and so on.

You can also view and download these stats files through the stats url of any of your domains (E.G. http://yourdomain.com/stats/resources )

You’ll only really need to pay attention to the first column, the second column, and the total at the bottom. In the first column is the process name, or the file name. The second is the total CPU seconds per day it’s using, and then the total CPU seconds after the dashed line. In this example, the top process is “view” with 6245.03 CPU seconds per day (or 104.08 CPU minutes per day if you divide by 60). The total for this particular day is 6767.95 CPU seconds per day, or 112.79 CPU minutes per day.

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Open file wordpress\wp-admin\css\global.css, in line 159, replace:

max-width: 980px;

to:

max-width: 1400px;

In line 166, replace:

max-width: 950px;

to:

max-width: 1400px;

That’s it. Before the modification, we can see that the interface of WordPress 2.5 in 1440 × 900 like this:

After the modification, we can see that the interface of WordPress 2.5 in 1440 × 900 like that. It’s so cool, isn’t it.

If you are using the 1440 × 900 display resolution, you can changes the code and make a better look in WordPress 2.5 Widescreen Version.

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• In development for 185 days (6 months 3 days to be precise).
• Changes to 364 files with 54008 insertions, and 29136 deletions for more detail you can view the diffstat output.
• Patches committed from over 110 different contributors.
• Over 1300 individual changes made for more detail you can view a complete changelog.

As usual you can download wordpress at their site, http://wordpress.org/download/. Btw, check out their new interface. They also changed how the wordpress.org site works.

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It seems that tonight(Mar 22) Chinese users could visit YouTube again since it was blocked on Mar 15. I can confirm China Telecom can access it. It was really terrible when YouTube was blocked a week ago. There is no official answer as to why Youtube was blocked for a week period by the Chinese internet regulators. Quite a lot of people considered that it was for the tibet riot on Mar 14.

It may be that Chinese authorities has brought the situation under control,  and Kuo Min Tang win the Taiwan Election too, so they unblocked youtube, but some of the special video in Youtube still can not access. The Chinese authorities constantly prevents access to sites that it finds content or ideas offensive. Chinese users should enjoy Youtube while it’s available because we may never know when it will disappear.

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This is not the first time that Chinese authorities blocks YouTube. In October 18, 2007, YouTube is also blocked temporarily, two week later YouTub became available again in China, but now YouTube blocked again.

The current block is actually a bit more restrictive than the other block, since any mention of the string “www.youtube.com” in any URL seems to be blocked.For example: http://www.google.com/search?q=www.youtube.com (if you are out of China, you should use http://www.google.cn/search?q=www.youtube.com) will not go through, and will get you a “Connection reset” error.

China has blocked access to YouTube in an apparent attempt to stop the spread of video footage related the rioting going on in several cities in Tibet. There were no protest scenes posted on China-based video Web sites such as 56.com, youku.com and tudou.com. The only protest scenes video is on CCTV’s website. Chinese media and international media have shown footage of buildings burning and crowds damaging store-fronts.

China has at least 210 million Internet users, according to the government, and is expected to overtake the United States soon to have the biggest population of Web surfers.

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Instead of duplicating the whole content, you may use just an excerpt in the index, archives and categories pages. The WordPress displays the excerpt of the current post with [...] at the end, which is not a “read more” link. If you do not provide an explicit excerpt to a post (in the post editor’s optional excerpt field), the first 55 words of the post’s content are used.

To use Wordpress excerpt function, you may replace the_content() tag with the_excerpt() when on archive (tested by is_archive()) and category (is_category()) pages and index (is_home()) page in WordPress themes.

Now that you are in the correct section, locate the following piece of code:

<div class="entry">
<?php the_content('Read the rest of this entry &raquo;'); ?>
</div>

You are going to replace that entire piece of code with the following:

<div class="entry">
 <?php if(is_category() || is_archive() || is_home() ) {
  the_excerpt();
 } else {
  the_content('Read the rest of this entry &raquo;');
 } ?>
</div>

Of course, this example uses the WordPress default template, but the same code can be used on most any template if you find the index.php or main index page and the spot where <?php the_content(); ?> is in the code.

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1. Optimize WordPress Permalinks

The most search-engine friendly permalink MUST includes the post title (%postname%) in the link,having keywords in your URL is an absolute must, In your WP admin panel, click on the “Options” tab, then the “Permalinks” sub-tab, and choose the option just below the “Default” permalink option. My suggest permalink structure is /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ or /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html .

2. Optimize WordPress Post Titles

The post title is the most important part of the blog post for many reasons. From your reader’s perspective, a descriptive and compelling title helps them decide if your post is worth reading or not. From an SEO perspective, think about the keywords or phrases people might type into a search box to find your post, and use those words or phrases in your post title.

3. Optimize WordPress Page Titles

According to most SEO experts, the page title tag is one of the most important tags on your page. In most WP themes, you’ll find the page title tag in the Header Template, and the default version ususally looks very poor SEO. I suggest you to use a WordPress plugin so call “All in One SEO Pack” to fix that problem.

4. Optimize WordPress robots.txt

The robots.txt file is used to instruct search engine robots about what pages on your website should be crawled and consequently indexed. Most websites have files and folders that are not relevant for search engines (like images or admin files) therefore creating a robots.txt file can actually improve your website indexation. Here is an SEO optimized WordPress robots.txt file.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /comments/feed
Disallow: /trackback/

5. Use Google Sitemaps Plugin

Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the Google index and get detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google. WordPress user Arne Brachold has made the sitemap creation and submission process fairly simple with his Google Sitemap plugin. This plugin will create a sitemap for you and submit it to Google.

6. Use Wordpress Anti-SPAM Plugin

Akismet is the best automated spam killer that actually gets better as it learns from the whole community marking new spam comments as spam.

7. Use Related Posts

Amaury BALMER’s Simple Tags plugin is a perfect tool to manage perfeclty your WP 2.3 tags, which can show related posts on your post and rss feed. Not only does it enhance your blog’s usability, but it also helps create a dense link structure throughout your site, which makes it easier for the search engine spiders to find and index older blog posts.

8. Use Ping services

Use the Update service function, to inform tracking services that you have updated your weblog. By default, Wordpress pings rpc.pingomatic.com, which is good (if you don’t want to change this, you don’t have to).

9. Make your content searchable

Make sure your navigation bar is present on all pages of your blog. Your previous posts or atleast the popular ones should be linked to all pages so they get spidered easily.

10. Update your blog frequently

Update your blog frequently using all the rules mentioned above and your blog will surely get top rankings in a short time.

If you have further SEO tips for WordPress blogs, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

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FanFou - FanFou is the biggest Twitter-like site in China. It seems FanFou copied almost everything of Twitter, you can use FanFou to update “what are you doing” in less than 140 characters, it supports updating and receiving notification via Gtalk, MSN, QQ, mobile phone and web, you can follow the updates of your friends, and turn on/off the notification of your friends. It already has a wordpress plugin, maxthon plug and other 3rd party add ons. It also has two Twittervision-like mashups that put Tweets on the 3D globe and a 2D map of China. Xing Wang is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of FanFou.

JiWai.de - JiWai.de is the first Chinese brother of twitter: an online service that enables user to broadcast short messages to your friends or “followers.” It also lets you specify which JiWai.de users you want to follow so you can read their messages in one place. Just like twitter, Jiwai supports updating through sms and gtalk. Updating from mobile phones onto jiwai.de, however, compared with Twitter, saves considerable money for Chinese users who want to use twitter-like stuff. To meet the demand of more Chinese users, Jiwai.de also supports updating from some other IMs, including MSN, skype, and QQ. Zhuohuan Li is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of JiWai.de.

TaoTao - Tencent QQ is the most popular IM in China. While Tencent has realized the value of micro-blogging, they launched a stand-alone service called Taotao. Not like FanFou, TaoTao only support updating from QQ and Web. It have no widget support. Since Tencent has the most extensive im user base, and the characteristics of this kind of micro-blogging service also match with profile of QQ’s users.

Other Micro-blogging Site in China:

zuosa - http://zuosa.com
ilaodao - http://ilaodao.cn
komoo - http://komoo.cn
byuu - http://byuu.com
wulog - http://wulog.com
fish - http://fish.sh
laigula - http://laigula.com

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