Hah, well you know my Previous Vaio was doing well, but I couldn’t resist the Father’s Day Sale. My Old Sony Vaio VGN-FE770G was getting quiet old, so I thought it is a good time to upgrade. So on the father’s day sale, I went and bought my self a Toshiba, and bought my sister Sameen a Sony Vaio. First I bought Sameen’s Vaio, and then went to buy my toshiba, but turned out I was spending too much, so my Bank put a hold on my card thinking it was stolen. I had the computer on the counter, and I couldn’t check out due to the bank issue. So I had to call them, and get the hold uplifted. But I think my laptop was well worth the price. I am now installing all softwares and slowly migrating to the new one. Old one will now be used more as a desktop (Just sitting)…

Well without any further talk check out my Toshiba

I believe I got a really decent deal.

320GB Hard Drive
Duo 2 Core Processor (64-Bit)
4GB Ram

On the sale it was $799 and then add sales tax which made the laptop for only $851.

Then I bought Sameen’s computer for a $449 which came to $473 with tax.

It have 160GB Hard Drive
1GB Ram

Good for a 10 year old.

Check out her computer

I love these laptops. Specially mine. I just wanted to updated you guys.

Well I am sure many of you have noticed that I have updated the theme for Balkhis to more of a magazine style. I tried to make it lively, colorful and simple. Well in the process of making this theme, I myself learnt about a few plugins and such.

I uploaded this theme this morning and it has been over 10 hours. I have tried to do all different sort of testings, and it has worked out fine. I will be adding more features soon as time progresses. In the meantime, I would like to ask my users for suggestions and feedback.

You guys are valuable to me because you read this blog. How do you like the blog? What do you think I missed out? Your general feedback.

I will be updating pages like advertising, and making money online soon. New ones are going to be added, and I will try to make it more colorful as well.

I will be adding more themes in our wordpress collection. There are some secrets coming as well. I am sure some people will like it as not everyone can afford a custom design.

Keep up and please reply with your comments. If you find any bugs feel free to report those as well.

Whether you agree or not, contact form is a must for blogs because it gives your users an opportunity to communicate with you. I was quiet surprised when I got emails from people asking me which wordpress contact form I am using. I told all of them which one I was using via email, and two of them still came back to ask me how to make it work. Then I thought maybe it is time to write a tutorial post which answers the question how to add a contact form to wordpress.

Well the plugin I am using is called WP-Contact Form which was originally written by Ryan Duff (His site is no longer active). But Douglas Karr did a great job in updating this plugin and making it available for us.

It is a very simple plugin, and you can see it working live at Balkhis Contact Page.

All you have to do is head over to the Actual Plugin Site, and Download the plugin.

Simply Upload it to the plugins directory via FTP.

Go to your blog’s admin panel and activate the plugin.

Then head over to settings, and edit the contact form settings. (If you have alot of plugins then you probably won’t see it there. Read the bug I found in the default wordpress admin panel theme, so you might need to download fluency. Once again read that post for detail)

Reminder: Change your security question and make it interesting. 2+2=4 is a simple question which most spammers can get easily. I am sure not many can get how to spell balkhis backwards. This will cut the spam down.

Now go and write a page, and name it Contact

Just add this contact in the Post text area % %wpcontactform% %, and you will be good to go.

If you want to do it via php in the template php file then use this code: <?php wpcontactform() ?>

Now you have a ready contact form for your blog.

Why should you add the contact form to your blog?

Simple, so your users can connect with you. Even more is if someone wants to advertise on your site or have some question, they can directly contact you.

So add a contact form to your wordpress blog right now.

Well since the blog had so much going on, I never got a chance to post about the other companies that gave me a shirt in Adtech Miami 2008. This is one of the companies that I met at adtech exhibit hall called Media Kings. They are affiliate network but more like email marketing. They haven’t set up for blogs just yet.

But I like their shirt because It is very cool, and it looks good on me. Who am I kidding. I make it look good

Thanks Media King for the cool shirt.

Get your site to be featured here. Check out Free promotion at Balkhis

Well, someone contact me via msn and told me that my Balkhis Contact form is not working. So I kinda got shocked because I was recieving emails from the contest. The person claimed that the security question is misspeled or something. Well anyways, I decided to head over the blog admin panel, to confirm.

Well I went to settings, and I see that there is no tab for the contact form. I got worried at first. I thought maybe the contact form doesn’t comply with this wordpress, but seconds later I rejected that thought because the contact form seem to be working fine. I head over to Uzzz Productions because it is also running on wordpress. I checked the contact form, and It was available there.

I came back to the Balkhis admin panel, and double checked everything and it didn’t work. Stupid thoughts were coming into my mind. Such as the plugin might not be activated, but then I would question myself how is it working if it is not activated. After a while I figured out a problem.

Curious to know?

Apparently I am using too many plugins, and the new wordpress admin panel design doesn’t have an option of going to the next line like the old one did. So alot of your plugins might not even be visible to you. It is not only in just one browser because I tested both IE 7.0 and FF (latest version). Also it is not just the wordpress default admin theme, the Fluency Theme by Dean Robinson also have the same issue.

Edit (June 22, 2008 22:23 EST) – Dean Robinson’s Fluency theme works fine. All you have to do is download the latest version of it. I didn’t know the latest version was out because it didn’t show in the admin panel that there is a new version for that plugin. Hopefully Dean you will add something that tells us users that like all other plugins do. (Now hopefully wordpress will get it fixed also)

I came to this conclusion because it was not available in Balkhis because Balkhis have alot more plugins, and It was visible in Uzzz. Also, when I copied the url and pasted it in Balkhis … The page was there and the plugin was working.

Hopefully this gets fixed.