Can we customize WordPress.com’s template? Yes, you can! But it costs some money!

Actually, having a blog on WordPress.com is only an idea recently popped up, just for a try. I’ve read somewhere else that having a blog on a blogging commonplace such as WordPress.com or Blogger would be potential to pull more traffic. As this commonplace has the feature to roll your blog or your most recent post among the bloggers who registered and blog here. It could be right and it could wrong. Although, I’ve been blogging over my own domain name using downloaded wordpress blog software, but I’d like to take a try here today to start blogging on WordPress.com simply for fun. Currently, I still remain anonymous about who I’m, which I’m gonna disclose after this blog is 5-month-old.

As mentioned, I’ve been blogging on my own domain using downloaded wordpress and I’ve been very used to having blog ads and some other customization for blog templates to make some money out of blogging. The first shock after a few posts on wordpress.com here was the themes and templates allow NO customization. I’ve tried thousands of mouse clicks over the presentation option, switching themes but I failed to find anyway to do it. So, something came up in my mind, oopppsss, what if one day this blog gets popular, then I wanna make some bucks out of it? What can I do if there is no way to customize it? So, I started googling around and I found this post of Lorelle on wordpress. Yes, you can customize it, but with a fee, which costs you $15 a year. $15 per year, sounds cheap, why not if your blog has started making quite a lot from blog ads and others such as ReviewMe, PayPerPost. And it’s simply cheaper than hosting the blog on your own hosting, unless you’re quite a tech savvy, that you have to deal with MySQL and some PHP.

There have been tons of debates out there if to host the blog yourself under your own web hosting and domain or to write on blogging commonplace such as Blogger or WordPress.com. There is always good and bad sides of any of the two. To have blog on WordPress.com is easily to create buzz and pull traffic for a newly start-up blog. Anyway, I can only tell you more precisely once this blog gets popular. I’ll have a blog post to track this back if this blog manages to become the lucky guy, being one of the popular blog in the blogosphere, then I’ll pay the $15 and start adding blog ads here….

Texty, a dead simple CMS??? Yes, so dead simple to create a web page!

Texty was buzzed a few days ago to claim that it’s one of a the CMS (Content Management System) that is dead simple. So I jumped to Texty website, then what I was first presented was the screen above. A WYSIWYG editor , similar to the wordpress visual editor for creating a blog post. So, I quickly took a try and typed some words…”bra bra testt….”. Of course, Texty will then need my email and my password in order for me to be able to save or publish the text I’ve typed.

So, then I proceeded to do that by giving my email and then I chose “Copy Texty”. After all, it presented me the screen of a JavaScript code that asking me to copy to my webpage. And I then use my pico editor to create a new page, then paste the code there and then open up with my Firefox browser. Voila, as shown in the screen below, my first Texty page is formed and it allows to add comment furthermore and the comments posted by users will be saved into your Texty account.

Furthermore, users are allowed to subscribe to comments via RSS feed. Cool? A very easy way to create static web page. Go Texty website and try out yourself, it’s fun!

Apache James Mail Server as an alternative option to sendmail?

Recently, we need to upgrade the email server of our office, which is deemed to be tooooo old and the server hardware seems to be causing of some problem. And there is a need to integrate some spam filtering option into the mail server. I’ve been googling around. I’ve found SpamAssasin is one of the choice of having spam filtering capability to be incorporated into the sendmail on Linux box.

But SpamAssassin seems to be needing lots of PEARL script editing, which PEARL is simply not my cup of tea. Anyway, a thought flashed across my mind of using Apache James email server, as I’ve been a Java programmer and been pretty familiar with the J2EE server side, especially dealing with J2EE and Tomcat. So, I think James could do all the good job that I want. After downloading James, I found it presents pretty much similarity to configure Apache Tomcat. Furthermore, it comes with couple of default Mailets, which one of them, the BayesianAnalysis mailet is something that I’m keen to explore.

The first impression of the Apache James is it gives me the kind of flexibility of developing further mailets for different kind of customization, such as possibility of using Java/J2EE integrating it to our backend system for pulling data from our Oracle DB server. It also gives the kind of flexibility of having user accounts and mail content (Inbox, sendbox) etc to be stored on RDBMS such as MySQL instead on plain file. I like this method better as it shall give better and easier maintenance for any filtering or cleaning or backing up of data. Besides, there are also couple of Web-based GUI interface that allows to talk to the James’ Remote Manager. One of them is yaJamesManager. I’ll need to explore more on James then I’ll come back to post here for further information.

My first impression of Fedora Core 7

Recently, I’ve got myself upgraded to the Fedora Core 7 from the old Fedora Core 3 for my office PC. The Fedora Core 7 definitely gives me much better usability, better GUI, better navigation. But one thing to my surprise, I don’t get the networking part working quite right. I’ve used the network manager (as shown in the picture, that can be selected under System menu -> Network) to set the network card configuration but after restarting or activating, the network interface card gives me the correct network IP address, but  no the default route. Although the default has been set correctly using the network manager as shown in the attached screen. So, what could have gone wrong, a bug in Fedora Core 7. For the time being, every time I restart my machine, I’ve gotta fall back to my old method, the method that I’m so used to, i.e to use the command line to reissue the network IP address setting and also the adding the default route as follows:

ifconfig eth0 10.10.10.252 netmask 255.255.255.0

route add default gw 10.10.10.254 

Anyone  facing similar problem? I’ll try to look for solution for this. It’s a bit inconvenient that every time I have to reissue the command. Although I could have added in into the /etc/rc.d/rc.local for the two lines, but I feel the latest version of Fedora Core 7 shall have taken care of this via the GUI, which shouldn’t leave much hassle for non-power users. I hope I could find some solutions for the patching if possible.

Anyway, another thing that I like about the Fedora Core 7, it allows to setup the ADSL broadband by using the GUI, which is very much easier to do with the much older version that I have to edit a shell script.