A very very happy and prosperous new year to everyone who is reading this message.

May we have economic stability and peace in 2009.

Google gave me  a good new year gift, a PR. Google updated its PR in last days of December 2008. Knayam got a Page Rank of 2! Surprisingly,a few internal pages also got PR’s. I dint see that coming. Though I was expecting a PR of 3 for my homepage here. But I dint do any updates in December so I guess I missed the chance of getting a higher PR which seems like a tough job in this PR update process.

Well I have to say this PR update seems a little weird to me. Many good old blogs dropped their PR. Many blogs which have many back links, are stuck at 2. So from that perspective, a PR of 2 for my 2 odd month old blog is satisfactory.

My other main blog still remains  to be black listed in Google’s eyes. I wish I got a PR on that.

Knayam has just started and to give it a kick start we have decided to host a contest in association with Wordpressland where in you can win great prizes worth more than $130.

Here is the prize list:

1st prize:

An elegant, fresh and beautiful premium wordpress theme: “Content Press – Premium Magazine/News Style Wordpress Theme” woth $75 (sponsored by wordpressland.com).

The theme is well coded and 100% Valid XHTML/CSS and is ready for easy modification. Theme is also plugin and widget ready. The Content Press premium Wordpress theme also includes a fully prepared theme for bbPress, a forum that ties into Wordpress. (DEMO)

2nd prize:

An elegant, fresh and beautiful premium wordpress theme: “Magazine News – Premium Magazine/News Style Wordpress Theme” woth $49 (sponsored by wordpressland.com).

The theme is well coded and 100% Valid XHTML/CSS and is ready for easy modification. Theme is also plugin and widget ready. (DEMO)

3rd prize:

$5 cash via Paypal (sponsored by Knayam)

4th prize:

1000 Entrecard credits (sponsored by Knayam)

5th prize:

500 Entrecard credits (sponsored by Knayam)

All you have to do to enter the contest is:

1. Make a 40-50 word blog post about this contest at Knayam while also giving a link (no “no-follow” tags allowed) to wordpressland.com.(worth 2 points) Also, talk about wordpressthemes market is getting into the premium Wordpress themes market in Japan with the site wordpressland.com (worth 2 points)

2. Subscribe to the feeds by email.(1 point)

3. Leave a message here (1 point)

So you can earn upto 2+2+1+1=6 points.

You can just leave a message here in this post to be eligible for the contest but that will fetch you just one point. Earn more points for better chances of winning.
Winners will be chosen by a draw by me and the video of the same will be put up on the blog.

P.S. The themes will be the english versions,the same as the demo links and not the Japanese versions.

The contests ends 10 Jan 2009 31 Jan 2009 at 23:59 IST.

P.S. All your links should be “no-follow” free.

Good luck!

EDIT: Contest close date shifted to 31 January 2009 due to really less entries so far.

When i started blogging one year ago, i dint really know the power of wordpress. I only had a few plugins installed. And then over a period of time, i came to know about other plugins and realised the power of Wordpress actually lies in the plugins we can use with it. But i learnt that after some good time of experimentation and expirience.

So here i am with a new blog and setup-ing the new blog is a time consuming job (its not difficult with Fantastico or Wordpress’s own 5 minutes install,but it is time consuming given that you have to select themes and plugins and all). So i had to make a list of plugins which you need when you start afresh with a new blog. These are just the bare-minimum you need. Ofcourse, you still can need others depending upon the nature and target of your blog.

Here they are (in no particular order):

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