I was not interested in the 1.8% fall in private home prices in ST headlines. It is the increase in the prices of HDB resale flats that I am concerned about. Resale flat prices went up by 4.2% in Q3 2008.

HDB Resale Price Rose 4.2% in Q3

I will be moving to a new HDB flat in Tampines very soon and have to sell away my current flat.

So an increase of 4.2% in HDB resale flat prices is good news to me. This seemingly small percentage increase could actually translate in to several thousands of dollar; more than enough to cover your property agent fees.

A 4.2% increase for a $300,000 flat will result in an additional $12,600.

Home Prices Index

Looking at the price index chart above, it seems unlikely that the HDB resale prices will continue to go up. If I don’t sell off my current flat quickly, I may “lose” money in 3 to 6 months’ time.

How to Market Your Own HDB Resale Flat

I intend to sell my flat without using the service of property agent.

I have done it before – about 20 years ago when I helped my dad to sell his 4-room flat at Telok Blangah Rise. At that time the buyer also did not use a property agent so I had to help both the buyer and the seller of the flat.

Here’s how I will market my resale flat:

• Put up a website to showcase my HDB resale flat
• List my property at major property portals
• Advertise at ST Property Classifield Ads

The first thing to do when you intend to sell your flat is to visit HDB website and learn what you need to do to “Selling Your Flat” on your own.

You must check out the WordPress 2.5 RC2 Screencast if you have not tried the 2.5 RC1. The screencast gives you a quick overview of the major changes to the Admin area and the Editor GUI.

Don’t panic when you see your site is listed with this phrase “This site may harm your computer” in Google. One of my clients’ blog was hacked and was linked to a site distributing badware.

Click here to view full picture

How To Remove Google’s Warning

1. Identify the offending content or links on your site/blog.

In our case, one of the blog post was hacked. There was some gibberish and links to some sites that distributed malicious software.

2. Remove the offending content and links.

I removed the entire post including all the content and links.

3. Patch or upgrade to latest version if you are using a blog or CMS. If you are using a static HTML, examine your server public folder to ensure there is no undesirable file.

As that was a WordPress blog, I backed up the MySQL database after making sure all the remaining posts are clean. Then I deleted all the files in public folder of the Web server and re-install the latest WordPress version.

4. Visit StopBadWare.org and follow the instruction to request a review.

Get a report on your site – use this URL:

http://www.stopbadware.org/reports/container?reportname=your-compromised-domain.com

Following the instruction on the page to request for a review.

5. Visit Google Webmaster Tools to request reconsideration, get more information at this URL:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=45432

We discovered the problem yesterday’s evening. Got everything done within an hour and requested for reconsideration. Now, in less than 24 hours, the site listing in Google is back to normal!

Web site security is becoming a serious issue and we should always make sure we have the latest patch and version to prevent our sites being compromised.

It would be nice to learn WordPress with video tutorials and I found a site that offer these WordPress Tutorial Video.

However, this site charges a subscription to learn WordPress with their video tutorials. The prices start from US$75 for a quarterly membership.

Paid WordPress Tutorial Video

If you have US$75 to spend and do not like to learn from books e.g. WordPress For Dummies, then WordPressTutorials.com may be for you.

http://www.wordpresstutorials.com [aff. link]

However, I am looking for free WordPress Tutorial Video, even if this WordPressTutorials.com is a great resource to learn using WordPress, it is beyond my budget.

Free WordPress Tutorial Video

Then I found this very comprehensive WordPress tutorial video which you can access for free. There are 35 short videos on how to use nearly every function you’ll ever need to know to publish your WordPress blog. So go check it out now…

http://guide.zeprez.com/wordpress-videos

Just completed the outline for the SEO Blogging Workshop to be held on 22 March 2008. You will learn how to get your blog ranked high in Google and Yahoo.

To find out more about this blogging workshop for WordPress newbies, go visit SEO Blogging Workshop now!

I just realized that I could not use target=”_blank” in the WordPress MU editor. So I search in WordPress MU forums http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/ for a solution.

The answer is in this thread…
[click here to open in a new window]

Allowable HTML Tags in WordPress Editor

To fix the problem, you’ll need to edit this file wp-includes/kses.php as shown below.

Now, you can override the default filter and add in whatever HTML tags you want. I have also added “class” to the “img” tag and “style” to “span” tag

I made several changes to the original Prologue theme which was designed specifically for microblogging. My modified version of Prologue theme is less Twitter-like but more Blog-like!

1. I changed the format of the post title.

2. I changed the post meta.

3. I changed sidebar content.

4. I change the layout of the individual post.

5. I added the Wasabi Related Post plugin code to single.php.

The homepage looks like this…

And the individual post looks like this…

So what do you think?

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If you are interested to use this WordPress/Prologue Modified theme, leave me a comment below.

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You can also download the original Prologue theme here.

I figured out how to install Wasabi WP Related Post plugin on WordPress MU.

You will need to run the MySQL script manually. Instead of…

ALTER TABLE `wp_posts` ADD FULLTEXT `post_related` (
`post_name` ,
`post_content`
)

You can replace ‘wp_posts’ to the database table used by that particular WordPress MU blog, for example, ‘wp_18_posts’.

I have done it for this blog. I used the Peter Bowler’s version of Related Post. It works.

Just tried installing the WASABI WP related post plugin to this WordPress MU blog but realized that it didn’t work.

I think it is due to the different database structures between the classic WordPress and WordPress MU. Anyway, I’ll have to look for another related post plugin.

The most common related post plugin must be Related Entries by Alexander Malov & Mike Lu.

The latest version on Related Entries is V2.0.4. I have been using it at my SEO blog for a couple of years. So I thought it is about time to upgrade to a newer and better related post plugin that make use of tags.

To my disappointment, I could not find a suitable related post plugin after searching on Google for half an hour.

If you know of any good related post plugin, please leave me a comment.

As for now, I think I’ll just stick for Related Entries 2.0.4.

Updated at 11:26 am on 20 Feb 2008
Just found an “improved version” of the Related Entries plugin by Peter Bowyer. Overwrite the exisitng relate-posts.php with the one you download from Peter’s site.