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When you started out blogging, you thought about all the core genres you are going to write about or rant about whatever the case maybe, but something that interests you. Over time, those ideas change or get refined. Maybe you branched out. You may have established categories in your blog, some of which you might not be blogging about any more or maybe created a broader area category. How about something that can Condense your wordpress categories, Rename categories , Add categories and also Delete moved categories

Now, you have two options if you wish to convert categories of your WordPress Posts

1. Go to each and every one of the posts you wish to change categories and then modify their categories. This is however very time consuming.  

2. Use a plugin that does the migration of categories for your your WordPress Blog. Say you have around 30 categories .. how about condesing them into around 10 categories.

Plugin Name: Category Converter

Plugin Page: http://armenianeagle.com/2007/01/30/wordpress-plugin-category-converter/

Set up the Category Converter to migrate and convert your WordPress Blog Categories

Step # 1: Download the Category Converter Plugin

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Popularity: 16% [?]

Permalinks are permanent URLs to your posts, articles and other lists on your WordPress Blog. It is the URL used by your blog visitors as well as Search engines. Having an optimal Permalink Structure for your blog is very important for Search Engine Optimization.

An example of a poor URL structure could be

http://www.exampleblog.com/2007/05/18/archives/p=?421

Instead, a more efficient URL structure for a blog would be

http://www.exampleblog.com/category/post-title

If you are a new blogger and wish to optimize your blog, then use the helpful hints and the code required to optimize your blog with an optimal URL permalink structure 

However, for those people who have been blogging for a while, if you just change your permalink structure, you will end up with a lot of broken 404 links. So, how do we do a permalink migration for a wordpress blog and still keep search engines and more important visitors to your blog who might have bookmarked your old permalink structure happy. We use the Permalinks Migration Plugin and change the permalink structure of your blog without breaking the old links to your website

Plugin Name: Permalinks Mirgration Plugin

Plugin Author: Dean Lee

Plugin Page:

http://www.deanlee.cn/wordpress/permalinks-migration-plugin/

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Popularity: 42% [?]

The latest and greatest version of WordPress , WordPress 2.2 has just released. Some of the new features include

1. Addition of WordPress widgets to the core of WordPress and enabled for default themes. WordPress widgets needed to be added as a plugin in the earlier versions.

2. Protection from activating a plugin or editing a file that may break your blog

3. Improved speed optimization to your blog

4. A new Blogger Importer similar to that in wordpress.com blogs which you can now use to import your posts and comments from Blogger Beta without any user interaction beyond entering your login details.

We worked out methods such as the one on TechCounter where we had success importing blogger beta posts to Wordpress, which even though did the job needed some time and patience and sometimes if you did not set your Blogger settings right, you might come across an error or two.

Now all you need to do is upgrade to WordPress 2.2 even if already completed the importing from blogger to wordpress. If you are a blogger thinking about moving to WordPress from Blogger Beta, then look no further. Download Wordpress 2.2 here and then

Step # 1: After installing WordPress on your domain, go to Manage and then Import

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Popularity: 33% [?]

This is really Amazing. USB drives that change shape depending on the amount of data it holds.

These concept USB drives can change their shape depending on the amount of data it holds. When the device is about to blow up you will see the familiar error message on your screen:

“There is not enough free space”

Design # 1: Spongebob USB Drive

The Spongebob will transform in an ugly blowfish when it is full of data.  If you want any of these bad boys hanging around your desk, you better clean up your drive

Design # 2: FlashBag USB Flash Drive with a micropump

When swithched off the flashbag remains pumped up, so you can  estimate with the naked eye how much more pics, books and music albums can be transferred into it.

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Popularity: 16% [?]

How to hide Blogger Navbar in the new Blogger Beta with simple CSS and how to turn off Blogger Beta Navbar

Google’s Blogger automatically inserts a promotional navigation toolbar called Blogger Navbar on the top of every blogspot blog. This Blogger Navbar is 50 px high and is distinctly visible as it covers the entire width of your browser. This Navbar acts as a stumbler allowing people to stumble across blogs. It also features a search bar which returns results relevant to your blog in blogspot.  However, it does not blend well with Blogger themes with only Blue, Tan, Black and Silver as available options besides taking away valuable visitors from yout Blogspot Blog.

So for everyone who shifted from Blogger to Blogger Beta, the new Blogger, here is a simple CSS hack that will let you remove and hide the Blogger Beta Navbar. Just add the following lines of code.

How to Hide the Blogger Beta Navbar in a Blogspot blog

Step # 1: Log into your Blogger account.

Step # 2: In your Blogger account, select Settings.  Then choose the Template tab

Step # 3: Click Edit HTML.  Under the Edit Template section, you will see the blog’s HTML

Under your Title Tag you will see code which looks something like below in green. Add the code in grey for your Blogger Beta Navbar to be gone forever.

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Popularity: 19% [?]

As a power user, there is more than one website I want to launch after starting up Firefox. The only website that opens right now is my default homepage. So how do I set up multiple websites as my Homepage so that they would load every time I launch my Firefox browser. If you are still stuck in stone age and use Internet Explorer, you can and get a better and a more secure browser. Best of all, you get to use the tip which I am going to tell you below

This handy tip from Lifehacker makes it possible.

Step # 1: Go to FireFox Tools menu.

Step # 2: Hit Options then under options select Main or General(for older versions of Firefox)

Step # 3: In the Homepage area, you can enter the addresses of multiple websites all seperated from one anohter by a pipe | as shown below. Here I set Google and TechCounter as my homepages

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Popularity: 15% [?]

Visitors to a site a very picky and suppose your content has drawn their attention enough for them to leave a comment, how do you make them keep coming back for more. People love attention on a personal level. In order to gain return readers and potential subscribers to your blog, how about a plugin that automatically emails a first time commentor on your blog thanking them. Sounds good right. You don’t have to spend half your day emailing each and every one of the commentors on your blog and visitors think that you did and draw them towards your blog.

Introducing the WordPress Plugin Comment Relish. Comment relish is a WordPress Plugin designed to send an e-mail message to users who comment on your blog and who have never commented before. The message that is sent to the users is defined within the plugin’s preferences. There are various tags attached to this such as time stamp, author name, comment etc to allow for information to be included in the message easily.

Plugin Name: Comment Relish

Plugin Author: Justin Shattuck

Plugin Homepage:

http://www.justinshattuck.com/comment-relish/

Download the Comment Relish Plugin for WordPress

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Popularity: 19% [?]

Most WordPress blogs usually have a Show Comments or rather Show Recent Comments option in their WordPress theme. However, you should take this step even further and reward people who comment the most on your blog by displaying their name and their blog/website prominently in a Top Commentators subsection.

Enter WordPress Show Top Commentators Plugin. Using this plugin, you can encourage even more discussion from your readers, by displaying their names and the number of comments they have made recently to your sidebar. You can also link to their site without a nofollow tag if desired.

You can also set the settings on how often the plugin should reset the comment count whether it is from the last 30 days, last month or last year or the default all time option. In case your blog is starting out or you set the plugin to reset every month and it is the beginning of the month, you can set the plugin to display a message instead if nobody has commented yet.

Plugin Name: WP 2.x Top Commentators Plugin

Plugin Page:

http://www.pfadvice.com/wordpress-plugins/show-top-commentators/ 

Download WP Top Commentators Plugin

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Popularity: 19% [?]

Social Bookmarking sites such as Digg and Reddit have turned the world of content aggregation around. While Digg and Reddit remain two of the most popular social networking sites, there are a lot of equally good sites. What these social bookmarking sites do is that they make YOU the king. They do not generate content but instead link to content and which content gets to bubble up to the top is determined by YOU the user.

Why do I need to add social bookmarking?

If you get an article on the front page of Digg, you will bring in an average of 50,000 new visitors atleast to your blog. Think about it, 50000 potential new subscribers … 50,000 new advertisers … 50,000 new means of increasing revenue to your website. Of those, many more will link to your blog, driving up your ranking on Technorati and Alexa.

So, one of your regular readers decides that your article is Social bookmarking worthy. The problem with these social bookmarking sites is that when your visitor goes to add your blog to these social bookmarking sites, the sites make them manually add some components such as the URL of the post they want to add, the title of that post and a description of the post and guess what, by the time your user goes to step 2, he gives up because it is taking way to much time. So, what you need is a WordPress plugin that does most of this grunt work for your blog visitor making it easy for him to submit your post to social bookmarking sites.

Plugin Name: WP Social Bookmarks

Plugin Author: James Pegram

Plugin Page: http://www.realitywired.com/2007/04/02/wordpress-plugin-wp-social-bookmarks/
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Popularity: 18% [?]

The TechCounter linkback program aims to connect with you whether you are an established expert in your field and have been blogging away for a while or for those who are new at blogging and would like to be part of a link exchange program.

Why Should I participate in TechCounter’s Linkback program?

1. For starters, getting a link from another blog helps boost your rank on Technorati and other blogs. If you add me to your Technorati Favorites, I will add you back. Add TechCounter to your Technorati Favorites

2. I am a CEO of a company and also a partner in a VC firm where we are constantly on the lookout for fresh content online. One of our most successful sites is AskStudent, a top Student portal. Staying in this program gives you a fast track to me and under the spotlight of a Venture Capital firm where we can get you started on making megabuc$s the fast way.

3. You will get increased traffic from TechCounter with a linkback and the my other affiliate blogs who are participating in this program.

4. The two other affiliate blogs participating in this program are AskStudent ( a Page Rank 5 Blog!) and ajit1 (Page Rank 3)

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Popularity: 11% [?]