The Last Word (Beta)

Facebook applications aren't that social, or useful

2007-12-09T22:55:00.000+05:30

It’s been just about more than a year (if I’m correct) since the release of F8, Facebook’s platform for developers to create ‘social’ applications which Facebook users can add to their profiles and make merry. Just about more than a year later, a browse through the top 10 applications (ranked by use) shows the problem. Well, not so much of a problem; considering there is nothing wrong, but more of a worry. Atleast for me.

You see it? No?

Utterly useless

Not more than 2% of the applications have any ‘use’ value. The only part of Facebook ‘from’ Facebook they use is the userbase. Not their details. Them. These applications are trying to come up with any little excuse to make people invite more people to use them. Take ‘SuperWall’ or ‘FunWall’ for example.

These two applications do ‘nothing’ more than what the native Facebook Wall does not. The only difference? There is no difference! It’s just that people don’t know that their wall can do all those things, and more. And yet, they are top of the list, ranks one and two respectively.

What makes them tick

It seems people flock towards applications that are ‘fun’. Not necessarily useful. Application makersI’ll not call them developers, since they’re just coding; not really developing anything seem to understand this, and are resorting to making their applications dumber, and dumber so that it appeals to the common person. I can give you proof with my very own applications here.

I have three:

So much to do!: This is a simple to-do list tracking application, which allows you to make lists, and show it those lists on your profile.
Photos2RSS: This allows you to get photos from anywhere in Facebook as feed (RSS/JSON), which can be further used anywhere feeds can be used.
Thought for the day: Another simple application to show a ‘thought’ or a quote on your profile. It also lets you tag quotes as favourites, and share them with friends.

Take a quick guess as to the order of ranks based on number of users of those applications. Answer’s at the end of the post.

So, to come back to the point I was making. I don’t know what Zuckerberg’s main motive was to creating the platform, and allowing people to develop applications on it. Maybe this ‘was’ what he wanted. Maybe it isn’t. But on thing is for sure. This defininitely undermines the genius behind the technical proficiency of F8. I can only begin to imagine the kind of work that has gone into it, and the amount of effort that goes into it everyday for maintainence and cleanup. The use it has been put to till date, doesn’t even begin to do justice to it.

Sure, it got more users to Facebook. It added value to your profile, and increased the worth of every user. But from a broader perspective, it hasn’t added ‘anything’ at all to Facebook in itself. There is no application which will make people join Facebook, because it’s true potential is only visible when you use it on the social level.

I’m currently making another application. I’ll be all hush hush about it until I’m ready to release it. It only grazes the ideas I’ve touched here, because honestly, it ‘will’ take some serious brain racking to be able to come up with a concept like that. If someone can, it should be worthy of a job at Facebook itself.

Eitherways, valued at $15 billion plus, Facebook will make him a rich guy ;)

The answer

As far as the answer to the question in the post goes, it’s:

Thought for the day
So much to-do!
Photos2RSS

What did you think? The geek app will have most users? Phsshh… You obviously didn’t read the post properly :P

Wanted: A new look for Google

2007-12-06T12:54:00.000+05:30

All those who are getting a little tired of the lack of things on Google’s pages raise your hands! Now now, c’mon! I know you want to, don’t be shy.

I am quite tired of it to be very honest. Seeing pages like Yahoo's new homepage, or Live.com, it makes me cringe when I have to go to a drab Google page. And unfortunately, it’s not only the search page. Google’s white, a sick green, light sky blue and light red have made their way to every Google service on the web till date. That is the reason I stopped using Docs & Spreadsheet when they removed the beautiful Writely look, Google Reader after I got sick of itIn all fairness, I got sick of Bloglines’ look as well. I opted for the tons better looking, and modestly functional Netvibes over an obvious superior, but downright ugly Bloglines and GReader, and Google.com for my searches after Firefox got it’s own version of the Google.com search page.

A little overdone

I know they became famous of their minimalistic simple design, which was copied by a lot of other sites. It was great for the time it came out, and it works to a limit even now, but I think eventually things should change with time (look at Microsoft and Live.com and Digg). I think this signature Google look has kind of outlived it’s glory.

A look which got 3001 (including mine) diggs is this one, by Andy Rutledge:

And I think it looks ‘much’ better the current one, because it firstly adds much brighter colours, and offers more visual cues than the current one. The other design elements are explained on his page, with a mockup page. This ‘could’ be improved further improved, no doubt. But this is the direction I think Google should be thinking in.

Not enough

There have been silent touches being added to different services, to make them a little more aesthetically pleasing. Like the recent new look of Google Groups, and gentle additions to the Google HomepageThey added (wow!) tabs. But this is not enough. They really need to get their pants up and start to make some serious design decisions. Blogger is the only Google service which looks good. I thought the hiring of Douglas Bowman would open the doors to some much needed visual changes, but it’s been almost a year, and I’m still waiting.

It would be a valid argument if one asked ‘Why fix something which is not broken?’. I’d answer that with the fact that a redesign will bring in more people to use Google services. If you think adding designing elements makes things slow, then you just need to look at Yahoo! Mail. Its new avatar is the perfect proof. Amazingly fast while looking really good. It just depends on what you change and what you add.

It is about time, don’t you think?

Vista doesn't suck! Not with time atleast...

2007-12-01T22:48:00.000+05:30

I’m sure everyone by now has read the infamous Vista sucks… article. I don’t know if it was a deliberate attempt at trying to catch information, or they really believe what they wroteBy the looks of the explanations, looks like the latter is true, but I really don’t think putting Vista 10th on the list of worst things —- and not even of 2007, but all time —- is the right thing. We know Microsoft got a lot of things wrong, but Vista surely deserve’s better.

Personal experience

I’ve been using Vista for about a month now. It is a better operating system than XP, that’s for sure. Integrated search, the memory management, the looks, usage pattern recognition algorithms are all much superior. Sure, something that took 6 years to make should have much more to speak for, but I think this is a worthy product. Not worthy of the $300+ price tag, but worthy nonetheless. Somethings that are wrong with Vista are probably one’s that become clear over time. The hardware requirements are high. 1GB just doesn’t cut it anymore, if you’re a multi-tasker like me (Photoshop, Firefox, Outlook all at once :P). The final cost of using Vista is much higher than the price tag of the OS itself. And one thing that irritated me tons, and still does a bit, is that Microsoft very clearly traded features for performance. XP was ‘way’ faster than Vista has ever felt; even a clean new installed Vista seems like a slug compared to my year old XP SP2. And from what I’m hearing, Vista SP1 doesn’t seem to help issues.

Someone who wants a fast operating system, should certainly have no qualms about how it looks. Hence, turning Aero off should sit decently well with them. I like my OS to look top notch, and hence, would rather keep Aero on. But I can see a good difference when the load starts to mount. Also, I was also re-introduced to the concept of ‘restarting the computer’ after long periods of use to speed it up again. I hope Vista’s garbage collection and repopulation of the memory cache is improved in SP1.

So why doesn’t it suck?

In a single line, I’d have to say because once you get used to it, and with UAC off ( :P ), you will really see your productivity increase. Vista is extremely intuitive. It has made repetitive tasks simpler, and will make you a much more efficient user. From simple things like hitting the windows key, and starting to type to launch applications, to creating advanced scheduled tasks. And after a month, Vista does feel faster than it used to in the beginningWhich I think is because it has understood over a month the applications I use the most, and loads them up in the cache everytime it finds the space.. It’s networking is much better than XP’s, with creation and recognition of networks, and their settings far better and easier. Device installation is a breeze for most of the things, since some or the driver is already present for it. And security … even with UAC off, it seems to be a stable and hardy operating system coupled with Windows Defender (and constant updates from Microsoft).

I’d really say that bar the price, Vista is a good operating system to try out. And I don’t suggest a day or a week for a trial. Give it atleast a month. Get used to the slightly different ways of doing things. Instead of making a giant leap, Microsoft has eased the changes in, so that we can get used to them slowly and steadily. It will take a little time to get used to them. And once you do, you’ll see it isn’t ‘all’ that bad :)

Want to work for Facebook?

2007-11-25T15:52:00.000+05:30

Justin Rosenstein had this to say when he was leaving Google for Facebook (June 8th, 2007)

A couple of months ago, after three years as a Google product manager, I decided to leave for Facebook. I am writing this note to spread Good News to all the friends I haven't already overwhelmed with my enthusiasm: Facebook really is That company.

Which company? That one. That company that shows up once in a very long while -- the Google of yesterday, the Microsoft of long ago. That company where large numbers of stunningly-brilliant people congregate and feed off each other's genius. That company that's doing with 60 engineers what teams of 600 can't pull off. That company that's on the cusp of Changing The World, that's still small enough where each employee has a huge impact on the organization, where you think about working now and again, and where you know you'll kick yourself in three years if you don't jump on the bandwagon now, even after someone had told you that it was rolling toward the promised land. That company where everyone seems to be having the time of their life.

I'm serious. I have drunk from the kool-aid, and it is delicious. Facebook is hiring ambitiously across the organization. If you're an engineer, UI designer, product manager, statistician, bizdev god, general entrepreneurial badass, whatever, and you would even consider considering Facebook as your new place for hat-hanging, please send me a Facebook message. We can have lunch, or I can give you a tour, or we can go kick it with Mark Zuckerberg -- whatever it takes.

It wasn't very long back that Google was voted the best place to work for, and I wouldn't argue with that. Google has been coming up with innovative new ideas, products and things that us geeks will be able to appreciate. Their stock prices have been rising (valued at $750+ at last check), and according to this video, it's a "really" nice place! Putting all those things together, it's not really rocket science to see how amazing it would be work for the company.

Or would it?

Techcrunch reports that Google employees are switching over to Facebook at 'an alarming rate'. Gideon Yu and Benjamin Ling already switched, and Justin Rosenstein is the latest. It seems there is something that is pulling these people away from the 'dream job' they once had, working for Google. It really does seem that Facebook is the new Google, and Google; they're calling it the new Microsoft. I don't know how true that is, but it does seem really harsh. Facebook rather, seems to be the young and fresh entry, which seems to have high ambitions, great energy and the 'want' to do something. Those are qualities every engineer and developer wants in the team he works. Justin's e-mail shows that as fact too. What I wonder is, how much is hype and how much is true.

But by the by, I won't mind a job at Facebook or Google ;)

The whole 'online office' thing

2007-11-24T02:58:00.000+05:30

Sometime between yesterday and today, Sabeer Bhatia (creator of Hotmail) released Live Documents; a service exclusively for Microsoft Office, which allows you to do all the things you can with Google’s and Zoho’s applications, but now with Office. Personally, I feel like this is the tagging thing all over again!

We already have enough players in the ‘office on the web’ market, and very frankly, I don’t think the user count of the existing one’s is good enough for one more to popup. I know people prefer to stick to the desktop versions, simply because they’ve grown used to it, and most of the time they’re on the move and hence not connected. People who use office applications at a high frequency are mostly executives. I’ve yet to meet an executive who lives outside of Outlook, and by default, Microsoft Office. If you’re on a Mac, it has to be iWorkOr by the looks of it, Office 2008 for the Mac. In both cases, you’re offline because it’s faster and you have many more features than a web counterpart.

But most importantly, there is nothing new that these services have to offer, except for the technology they use, which only increases their speed and to a very small degree, what they can do. Google brought in AJAX, and Live Documents is bringing in Flex.

Same goes with Google Documents. I was happy when Writely was Writely. Ever since the change to Google Documents, it just looks and feels so bland. It’s useful for finishing English assignments because friends can get together and collaborate, but I honestly don’t see real world uses of these features. I haven’t even touched Zoho ...

It'd do us all good if we got more consumable services which have scope to grow. But as of now, I’m not even bothering applying for an invitation. Let’s see if I’m wrong on this ....

GUI Elements I like, and one's I don't

2007-11-23T01:54:00.000+05:30

GUI (Graphical User Interface) is such an integral part of our computing lives, I really doubt we stop and analyze the separate elements that make it what it is –– easy and intuitive to use. It has evolved over years, suggestions and loads of empty coffee cups. It’s one problem designers try to solve always, but no matter what they do, there is a part of it which can always be improved. So here’s my little list of the things I like, and don’t like in user interfaces.

One's I like

Check/Radio box: The simplest element. I think it was a natural decider to use this for lists, which would let you select multiple options, or only oneNot many people know, but the difference between the two ‘is’ how they allow you to handle options marking.. I’d really like to see them make checking off more intuitive (shift+first+last to select all in between).
Tooltips: Help without asking for it. I feel very disoriented whenever I don’t know what a button does, and even moreso when the little help box doesn’t popup telling me what it does. This is partly the reason I love Office 2007, where every button on the Ribbon has a briefly detailed explanation of what it does.
Ribbon: This is one of the newest elements, present in Microsoft Office ‘07. It’s probably the perfect and complete alternative to the menu bar. Every option is categorized under one tab, and similar options are grouped into sections. Every button has explanatory tooltips, and they do a very nice glowy thing when you mouse over, highlighting the selected section as well as button. Looks like Microsoft got something right :P
Pie Menu: Last, but my most favourite. This one takes some getting used to, but once you do, it gets annoying when you don’t have it somewhere. The perfect example of this is mouse gestures in Firefox. All it takes it a click, and movement; but movement which is very intuitive (like left for back). I’d love to see this in operating systems, because it’ll be a huge navigation boost!

One's I don't!

Menu bar: I won’t complain about this too much. With the onset of ‘Ribbon’, we can now start to do without the menu bar. Although, this is a better option when conserving screen estate. A retractable Ribbon seems the way to go :)
Heads Up Display (HUD): This is more of a ‘focus on few things’ kinda thing. An HUD is supposed to be unobtrusive to the ‘bigger’ picture, but the moment all those extra stuff start popping up, you can’t not be distracted by them. That’s one of the reasons research is on to come up with a better way of relaying information to pilots through their visors.
Sidebar: This my most unliked element. Having something on the edge of your screen constantly is irritating. Dashboard is a ‘much’ better implementation, although it’d be nice if you could keep ‘some’ widgets always visible. Retractable drawers are also a type of Sidebar, but atleast they’re retractable :)

So, there you have it! These elements are a part of our OS, and now with the onset of Web 2.0, most of them are being adapted for use on the web to make things snappy and more OS like. I’d love to see an alternative to sidebars, especially on blogs. It’d just make things a little more interesting ;)

I haven’t touched on UI elements like modal dialogues, throbbers etc., but they are more of symbolic and rare use elements –– used to signify something or alert people of something. They’re important, no matter how irritating they might get. There’s a nice article from Alex Faaborg about his tussle with going modal or using normal dialogue boxes for Firefox, but it kinda answers the basic question (Would you Like to Redesign ...)

What elements do you like? And what do you don't?

Another return!

2007-11-21T12:42:00.000+05:30

I know my dear and beloved blog has been neglected for a ‘very’ long time, but that has mostly been because of college, and me being a little lazy :P I got caught up in a lot of different things at the same time, and I couldn’t do them all :P But now another semester is coming to an end, so I see some free times, and I plan to make the most of it.

There ‘are’ a lot of things that I’ve been wanting to share with all you guys, and going by my latest feed readership, most of you have hung around! Thanks a lot :) I hope to not disappoint ;)

So a quick update about my Blogger keep current date/time on post script; I’ve fixed it. I think Improbulus sent me a mail a long time back, but thanks to the reasons I’ve mentioned above, I wasn’t able to reply or respond. I got around fixing it this time, and it’s working wonderfully again :)

So, here’s to another return! :)

Facebook downtime, iPhone and my stinkin' exams

2007-06-30T13:39:00.000+05:30

Facebook went down today for a couple of hours, citing ‘maintainence’ as the reason. They were down for a couple of ours for ‘me’. I don’t know about the others, since it said ‘your account is not available’.

This is the first time Facebook has gone down since it released the Platform, and I think we can put some blame onto that. Having to roll out fix builds almost everyday while keeping the site up and running like a jet engine. There are tons of new applications already (I have four), and they’re being approved by hundreds in a day. Every application added gets exposure in the directory, and starts getting more users. This adds to Facebook’s server load.

Platform has been hugely successful, and you can begin to see a visionary in Zuckerberg. Even though any data regarding the application itself (users, referrals, how many adds per hour etc.) aren’t availableThere are some applications which scrape this data out of Facebook, but that’s against Facebook TOS (scraping), so I don’t think they’ll be around for too long., the data and integration options make up for it pretty well :)

iPhone!!

We’ve all heard about it, read about it, and know as much about it without having it as the person who does. The iPhone has been the most hyped gizmo in a ‘very’ long time, and little surprise it comes from Apple. People have been flocking to get their hands on one. Twitter saw increased activity thanks to the people waiting in line busy micro–blogging to get their experience out. The iLoser reached celebrity stardom for all the wrong reasons … with people howling for him to thrown out. But he maintained his place.

Now that the iPhone is out, it’s managed to live upto its hype, and Apple has lived upto it’s reputation. I’m sure Nokia and Blackberrys all across the world are feeling a little lonely right about now (when was the last time they were excited about ‘their’ phone?), although it’s a sad time for anyone ‘not’ in the U.S., since the iPhone launch was U.S. only. They will be announcing a model for the European market on Monday (as per reports), and Vodafone is being touted as the carrier. India, Australia, and all the countries this side will only be graced next year, same time.

I for one am actually glad that Apple’s taking it’s time to bring the iPhone here. It will give them time to iron out the bugs, hardware issues, compatibilities and problems, and give us a more polished and finished product. But the people who ‘have’ got their hands on with it, are surely not complaining! :)

Exams, exams! :(

Yes, the rants of a college going kid continue. I’ve been riddled with exams yet again, which is why my beloved little blog has been ignored so much the past days. All is not lost though. I’ve been keeping busy with a few projects, ideas and Facebook ofcourse. My end term holidays start in just over a week, and I’m planning big things for that this time around.

So! Here’s to a great iPhone for all those who have it, and who’re going to buy it! And I shall be back to blogging full time very, ‘very’ soon! :D

A shout out to Search Suggest users

2007-06-20T12:02:00.000+05:30

It’s been quite a while since I released my Search Suggestions hack. Since then, I’ve seen the number of hashes being created for authorization increase steadily, which means people “are” using it. What I haven’t seen increase, is the number of search “terms” being added to my database.

This can mean one of two things:

You have implemented the hack, but have botched up something in the implementation which is preventing search terms from being added to your account.
You have “not” implemented my hack, and are just sitting pretty with a hash code in my database.

For the first case, if you need help implementing the hack properly, please let me know. I’ll be more than willing to have a look at your code and see where things are being messed up. We all want the suggestions to come up nice and pretty now, don’t we? :)

For the second case, well … if you don’t want to use it, fair enough. Just let me know your passcodes (which you used to get your hashes) so that I can remove them from the database, to prevent them from eating up space :)

Chow!

A small success!

2007-06-14T19:22:00.000+05:30

Checking today (‘today’ being the second day of this application being included in the application repository), I see 400+ users, out of which 4 are friends. These past two days have shown exactly what people meant by the Facebook ‘social graph’ and ‘viral distribution’ of applications. I noticed some applications become big time earners overnight, but a small application like my to–do list getting these many users in 2 days is very, very heartening :)

So, now I’m going to have a look at the whole Facebook development scenario:

F8 Platform

The platform, at its heart is a REST based API. You make simple calls to one URL, with the required details, and the server sends back whatever you asked for after running a few checks to see if you “can” get the data you asked for. It’s quite simple that way. There are tokens, session keys (there are two types, more later), API keys and all the regular boobah that you’re used to seeing. However, it gets interesting when you begin to move away from this REST API.

Facebook is one of the first APIs (that I’ve seen in my short stint with webdev) that offers direct access to their SQL tables. Ofcourse, they call it FQL, but the outcome is the same. You select columns, where certain conditions are matched and validated, from some tables. This not only saves time, but reduces server load, since you’re going to the heart of the data instead of being proxy–ed around.

Finally, there’s FBML, which is Facebook’s version of (X)HTML. It offers RDF–type tags which get parsed by Facebook into proper data wrapped in relevant tags. This is used when your application has a profile presence box, and you need to show stuff in it. You update it with FBML using a given function. Or if you want to show editing options for features for your app. It’s quite cool! :)

Static content is cached by Facebook for faster serving (like images, videos etc.), but most of the load is on the developers servers. All processes happen on your servers, and Facebook only acts as a mediator between your server and the user, so that they can control what comes and goes through.

The development

If you know how frameworks and APIs work, this will be familiar grounds. Even if you don’t, you can figure your way out by getting yourself the REST Clients from Facebook. It’s got functions to do everything, and all you need to do is call them. I use the PHP5 Client, but there are clients available for pretty much every major language used for Webdev today.

It’s been a breeze getting the hang of it (thanks to a lot of help from Stephen, as usual), and just having access to such huge amounts of data is amazing. With all coding projects, you have to figure out how to get around some hurdles. For example, the current system allows the authorization token to be passed to only “one” page per app. That means, you can’t call Facebook from any other page, unless you have an infinite session key to pass around. It takes some figuring out, but once you get the hang of it, you can see a pattern emerging. I personally think Facebook should allow choosing custom pages (via. a “next” query string which they use, but don’t allow access to) to which you’d like to redirect to from Facebook. But oh well …

Pretty much all workings with applications will require you to store data of some sort (if it’s a decent to good app). For that, you’ll need to know SQL if you want to work with relational tables. I use Ning at the moment, which offers a different way of storing huge amounts of data. I am adequately adept at SQL though, and plan to brush up on it since I want to move to my own hosting soon enough, and host my apps from there. You will need to know all this to make an effective application. There are workarounds, sureLike the “X Me” application, which didn’t deal with tables in the beginning, but used to constantly read the current markup in the profile box, alter it using regular expressions, and then put it back. For example, if someone would hide an action, it would set it to display:none instead of actually removing it. I got my info from the maker himself :), but I’d suggest you do it the right way.

The documentation is grossly incomplete, but then which documentation isn’t. If you want help, the Developer’s Discussion Group is always there, and people like me who can help you out. There’s also an unofficial IRC room at #facebook on irc.freenode.org. That’s a fabulous place to get info, “if” the people are in a good mood :P

Final thoughts

All in all, it’s not hard making an application for Facebook, and for people who want to start getting their hands dirty with webdev, this is probably the safest and best way to start. You don’t have to looking for data. It’s all there. All you have to do is call for it :) Also, you should be creative. Don’t try to re–invent the wheel and make something that already exists. Your app will get stifled because the other app will already have an established base. There are so many things you can make, it’s not even funny! Just rack your brains a little … ;)

So, I hope I’ve cleared things out, and hope to see someone from my readers come up with a great application for Facebook :) Let me know if you do!

(P.S. — My app users count went up to 403 while writing this article! :P That’s how quickly apps can catch on :) )

Facebook photos! Who needs Flickr?

2007-06-12T03:22:00.000+05:30

People not on Facebook probably use Flickr as their main image host, because it’s easier to share it with people, tag them, and store them safely knowing you won’t lose them. Flickr, backed by Yahoo!, has surely become an essential part of the netizen’s arsenal of web–services, no doubt that. But, as with everything, there are alternatives which though not as good, are good enough substitutes.

Facebook Photos

Facebook Photos is one of the best “organised” photo collection tool available on the Internet today in my opinion. Sure, it lacks features which people have gotten used to because of Picasa Web Albums and Flickr, but if you’re looking for a simple photo storage service, with decent sharing and commenting features, this one is for you.

The best part is, you’re not bound by features being rolled out by the provider. Applications can enhance your experience, and act as plug–ins, which brings me to the main point of this post. Let me present to you, Photos2Rss!

Photos2RSS

This was an application I wrote initially to take away my dependence on Flickr, especially since I found out the 200 image limit on the free account. The one feature which doesn’t come natively with the Photos application of Facebook is a way to get them out of Facebook. Your photos are sitting nicely in your album, but that way they’re only for your friends to see and enjoy. What if you want to share them on your blog, or some other place? Well, now there is a way …

If you’re on Facebook, add the application to your profile. The application doesn’t add a profile box or anything. It just sits pretty in your list of applications in the sidebar, and you can push it down in the ‘hide’ zone if you don’t want to see the link all the time.

Once you have it installed, it’ll take you to the album selection page. There you can select who’s albums you want to pull out as a feed. If you want a friend’s, you’ll need their UIDThat's the 9 digit number at the end of the URL on the profile page of your friend.. Fill that in, and you’ll be presented with a list of their albums. Along with that, there are options for randomising the pictures, and a total count. You can specify these for further control on how your photos are pulled. After filling in the details, you’ll have to submit once, before choosing the feed format.

There are two feed formats available currently—RSS and JSON(P). RSS is for subscribing to someone’s albums to track it for changes. Say, your friend’s birthday pictures. Whereas JSON(P) is more for use with codes and hacks on blogs and pages. Add in the callback function name at the end and the data will be enclosed nicely in your function :)

Drawbacks and limitations

As I said, this is a little hacky, hence there are some pre–requirements, assumptions and limitations in place for this to work like it’s supposed to. To start with, the photos you want to pull out have to be part of one album, and one album alone. You can pull in photos from different albums, but not using the same feed. Well, not yet atleast. If there are enough adopters of this, I’ll add it inI’ll add it in anyways sometime in the future to find the easiest way to do it, but more users will speed up the process :P.

The second thing is, the application needs to be a part of your list, because that’s the way I’ll get an infinite session key from Facebook for the feed. If you don’t add it, the feed will fail because it’ll need to log in to get your photos out. Like I said, it doesn’t ‘add’ anything to your profile like most of the applications, so there is no clutter :) I don’t like clutter myself :P Once you add it, you can get as many feeds as you want, for as many albums as you want.

These are the only ones for now :) With more complexities, some more might creep in, but I'll try and keep them at a minimum :)

So, I hope you find it useful, and bugs and feature suggestions as usual can be messaged, posted on the application’s wall, my wall, or in the comments here :) Enjoy!

Who said that?

2007-06-08T17:34:00.000+05:30

This seems to have been broken for a while. Blogger changed the structure of the comment form page, hence it wasn’t getting the comment author’s name properly. I’ve fixed it now. A quick re–install will do :)

There isn’t really much history behind this one, except that it was an idea originally put into my head by Avatar, for the old Blogger. Since back then we had the form as part of the post page, and not a Blogger page, a comment quoting system was the ideal thing for a blog like Bloggeratto which needed Avatar answering tons of questions. Back then when I wrote the script, it was so badly broken that I feel ashamed now of it :P

With the new Blogger, that system broke since the form disappeared. Although, the idea is still a good one, and the necessity of having a comment quoting system became very glaringly obvious to me right after my Blogger Smilies post, where I had to answer tons of comments, and reply to a lot of suggestions. So, I wrote this script a long time back, and it’s been through a _very_ long testing phase. I’m going to finally release it for everyone to use :)

It's a really simple script, which adds a ‘Reply’ link to all the comments on the comments page, which you can use to add the body of the comment to the form’s input, with all <BR> tags converted to line breaks for ease of use, and the text itself enclosed in a i[rel=”cquote”] element for easy styling. It also wraps the quote in nice curly comments for you :)

Also, when you click the quote link, a link is created back to that quote, and shown right above the input area. That’s for the unusually large number of comments that you might have to reply to all at once :)

Inputs are always welcome! Cheers! :)

What you waiting for?

Blogger Comment Quote / Reply
All my Userscripts

More bVibes love: Greasemonkey joins in

2007-06-07T16:20:00.001+05:30

Ah! Two updates today :D

While looking around bVibes, I bumped into a post on Hackosphere about remote vibing (?) buttons from bVibes which you can add to your posts. Well, I took it a little out of context, but the effect is pretty much the same :)

With Vibe me later, you can click through to a story from a bVibes page, go through the story, and if you consider it worthwile, vibe it from the page you land on. You won’t have to go back to the story page on bVibes to vote for it. The script adds a (not so good looking, but meh!) small button to the bottom right of your page, which flashes initially to remind you it’s there.

You can use the button to vote whenever you want. Also, the button will only show up for pages linked from bVibes, and when you click through from bVibes. I might recode it to check bVibes for every page you visit … hence make a ‘smart’ vibe button :)

Enjoy!

Links

Vibe me later
All my userscripts

bVibes get some Facebook love

2007-06-07T10:55:00.000+05:30

bVibes is our very own Digg, for bloggers! Created by the elite hacker Ramani, I think it’s something the bloggerosphere needed more than the blogosphere in general. It’s about time Blogger started getting the attention it deserves, and blogs hosted at Blogger the credibility and respect they deserve.

I recently joined up, and it’s picked up quite well! Users are joining up pretty quickly, and stories are being submitted even quicker :P But as usual, enough is never enough! So now, bVibes is getting some love, Facebook style! My recent fascination with the Platform and a mail from Ramani were enough … and we now have a bVibes application for you to add to your profilesIf you’re not on Facebook yet, I suggest you start with that the moment you finish reading this post.

The application basically does what the normal Digg.com application does. It shows the stories you’ve recently voted for in a nice little box on your profile. As things are, there is a half an hour delay between new votes showing up … I might try to fix that, but I’m sure you can live with that :P You can also tell the application how many of your recently voted for stories do you want to show (Digg’s app doesn’t allow this, hah!), or a default of 5 will be enforced. The app also shows how many votes a story has :)

So, do your share of the good work. Show off the posts you think deserve attention right on your Facebook profile, where it’ll be seen by all your friends! Let them get the exposure they deserve!

All bugs, suggestions and feedback can be posted in the comments here, or messaged to me via Facebook. Enjoy!

Facebook has the lead!

2007-06-02T15:32:00.001+05:30

I’ve been obsessing with Facebook for the past week because of the revelation of the new Facebook Platform. What that has in turn done is show me the intricate ways in which Facebook works. How different components come together to integrate themselves to the central goal of Facebook—to keep people connected to each other.

I think Facebook in itself is way ahead of the competition because of their goal. They aim not to have tons of users. Their userbase is a result of constant innovation. They aim to improve the networks that exist, and improve the interactions between the users of the networks. They are probably the only network which emphasizes on innovating, and I think that focus is what keeps them ahead.

Facebook Platform

Some see the platform as going against Facebook’s goal. I felt the same way when it first came out, but as time has passed, and I’ve seen the applications that have popped up, I can guess where Facebook is coming from. They’re not trying to foray into any foreign territory (even if they’ve inadvertently done so). They are trying to make Facebook the one stop destination for all it’s members to find info (about everything) about their friends and the people they know. Applications to track someone’s music, activities and calendar are some of the one’s which have popped up, with some of them becoming very popular. The popularity of applications is thanks to Facebook’s social graph, and what I like to call, the Wavefront effectHuygen's principle states that every wavefront acts as the source of another wavelet. Applying that logic to how news feeds work, when someone adds an application, it shows up in their news–feed, bringing it to the attention to their friends. Their friends then add it, hence starting a new wavefront.. The beauty of this is that the one thing that developers spend most amount of time doing is trying to get their applications to the public. Facebook does that for them, so they can concentrate on building killer apps.

This is very tempting to someone like me, developers, who don’t have resources to consolidate data. Facebook provides the data. All we have to do is use our creativity to use that in ways we think people would want to use them. I don’t see Facebook platform as a detachment from their primary goal. I see it as a natural evolution.

Facebook bloat

Many complain about many of the features as ‘bloat’ and unnecessary, wanting to revert back to the old Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg once said:

Change can be disorienting, but we do it because we’re sure it makes the site better. It may have felt different at first, but things like photos, events, groups and the wall have all made Facebook a more useful and interesting site.

It’s our goal to provide a tool that helps people understand what’s going on with the people around them; all of our additions and changes contribute towards this goal. The new things we’re going to launch will do the same.

And all the current features achieve all this in perfect harmony with each other. I can’t imagine a Facebook without the news/mini–feed. That is truly the major thing that sets it apart. The first thing I want to see when I log in is what my friends have been upto since I last logged in. Who their new friends are, what events they’re attending, what pictures they’ve added, what groups they joined … all those things. If I have to go to each and every profile to check what they’ve been doing, it beats the whole purpose of being part of a network … the information should come to you automaticallyThere was an internal joke here in my hostel, that you remove the feeds, and all the information that Facebook gives you, and you have an Orkut!!

The reason I see the competition not being able to catch up with Fb anymore, is simply because of the path Fb chose and the path the others took. Fb declined the offer by Yahoo! simply to preserve what they had in their own vision. Networks like Orkut have become stagnant, or interfaces to integrations of different services by the parent company, which almost borders on advertisement of those services. Sure, the users are getting all the features that they’d normally want from a network, but they are not getting the ‘integrated’ experience. The different services don’t come together to work together. They are just there working in their own separate modules and cubicles. You’ll never get to know when someone (on Orkut, say) adds a new video or new photo about the party they attended last night. Fb can achieve this by putting two and two together (photos being uploaded after an event the previous day, follows a nice pattern) because the different applications are part of the mothership, and all data finally goes back to a central server, not different parts of the world. That is the key difference between in–house productions and acquisitions. But that is not the point to this…

The point becomes (or remains) that Facebook got a lot of things right, at the perfect time. It helped that the brain behind the concepts was a college kid himself, being able to get into the head of other college kids. And if Facebook continues the same way, there is no–way their getting dethroned as the best social network to be a part of (because it’s just plain and simple cool!)!

A bubble burst!

2007-05-31T21:08:00.001+05:30

The past few days have been rather amazing. If you’re not a ‘geek’, then you probably won’t know of all the things happening, but if you are, then I hope you share the same excitement as me! After a rather considerable lean stint in the blogosphere, the general development sphere, things are back to kicking into top gear. I’ll just list out a couple of things that have got me excited and busy the past few days:

Facebook Platform

The biggest and the best announcement :D They opened up their API completely (it existed, but not with so much power) to developers to sit and make applications that interact with Facebook directly, and it’s different components (alerts, groups, etc.). The great thing is that, as a developer, you get to tap into the the best resource which you might need. People!

Facebook’s insanely large user–base opens up to every developer, and all his applications that moment they hit the Application DirectoryI'm glad they screen the applications that are added to this directory, and are avoiding another Firefox extension–type fiasco!.

This afternoon I finished developing my first application for it. It was meant as more of a test than a full fledged commando application like ‘iLike’ or ‘Photos’. You can check it out here, and if you’re on Facebook (why haven’t you added me yet?), add the application and take it on a quick beta spin :) I want to understand the API and all it’s crannies properly before I actually get down to serious app–ing!

Google Gears!

This happened just today, but I think it’s a very good step. From my end, it seems more like a reflex action to all the hype towards making applications for the desktops and frameworks being released to help developers do so. Whatever it is, it is good! The ability for Google services to go offline with you, and then re–sync when you come back online is something that people will appreciate the more that they use, and realise how much they needed this only once they get used to it. Ofcourse, they have a long way to go with this.

What I am thinking about now is that how is this move going to affect Mozilla’s plans to add ‘Offline Web App’ integration and functionalities into Firefox. If Google directly allows people to take things offline, an added functionality in Firefox seems like overkill, and will add to the ‘bloat’ that many people (and in a tiny voice, me) are complaining of everyday.

There are other great things out there now, sure. But these are the one’s that are of immediate ‘Wow’ to me, being a coder and a developer :P Somethings that you might find interesting are things like the new Microsoft Surface, Microsoft’s Live suite (kind of) in Beta, and others doing the rounds!

Great times :)

300!

2007-05-25T17:15:00.000+05:30

‘The Last Word’ has officially hit the 300 subscribers mark :) This is extremely heartening, considering I have not been posting as frequently as I used to. I’d like to apologise for that, and shift the blame a little on a very stagnant blogosphere and my internal examinations (starting tomorrow :( )

The good news is, that I haven’t lost track of things happening (whatever little is happening), and I will begin posting regularly again after these set of exams get over. Thanks for all the reads! You make my day guys! :)

Cheers!

Making punctuations look good!

2007-05-19T14:15:00.000+05:30

Oops! Comments got disabled by mistake. Re-enabled them ... let me know what you think! :)

Recently, I’ve been rather taken in with smart punctions, rather than the dumb normal ASCII ones. You know, the straight dumbOpposite of ‘smart’ is? ;) quote marks (" and '), or the normal ellipsis made up of full stops (...) ? HTML has predefined special entities to draw these rather nicely, but we don’t use them normally because most of us don’t know about them, and Blogger natively doesn’t convert the characters. Typing them out manually can be such a pain, and you need to remember so much more stuff.

So, I worked up a quick Greasemonkey userscript that adds a nice little link in your row of buttons (in the post editor), which you can use to quickly convert all your punctuations to what they should be. Since there is no way of creating a “plug–in” for Blogger, anything which needs to affect a post directly needs to be tackled at the post editor level.

The script is ‘smart’, as in it understands when to use a left curly quote and a right curly quote. It also changes hyphens to what you want them to be. A single or a double ‘–’ generates an en–dash (–), whereas a triple ‘–’ generates an em–dash (—). To know which one to use where, and other punctuation marks, look up the A List Apart article. I referred to it while making this.

Known Bugs and License

Since this went through an extended testing period, and some live testing (I guess you could call it that) on Userscripts, and there hasn’t been a complaint or a request, I’ll assume there to be no bugs :) Except for some weird behaviour when it comes to apostrophes and quotation marks :P And like everything else, this script is licensed under an NC–ND Creative Commons License.

The name for the script is taken from the excellent SmartyPants project, by the oh–so–creative John Gruber. So a big thanks goes out to him for coming up with the idea. I had sent him a mail regarding using of the name and the basic concept. I never got a reply (it’s been about 2 months now), so I took it as a yes and published this :)

Get the script!

Pseudo–SmartyPants for Blogger
All my Userscripts

The reason behind the action: Your motive

2007-05-13T14:14:00.001+05:30

I’ve been looking at various sites the past few days. Sites that keep people like Arrington and Om Malik busy. Sites that keep PostBubble up and running. Sites that we hear about all the time, and just go around to have a look because of all the hype created. There have been quite a lot of these since the ‘startup’ times, but how many do you see still being counted among the ‘big guys’? I think the reason can’t be bottled down to sustainability measures…

Stick to your basics

This whole topic came to mind as I was reading about Facebook’s rise up the ladder these past few years. Out of all the network’s, Facebook is the one which has really caught on. There were networks before Facebook, and there have been attempts after it, but you don’t see mention of them as regularly, do you?

I think one of the reasons for this is that unlike other networks, Facebook is always looking to grow. Not just in it’s user base, or number of page views/hits. They want to grow technologically as well. They want to enter forays others haven’t. For example, the whole concept of a mini–feed is something “extremely” new, and it’s worked so well. Of course, it didn’t start off initially the way it was supposed to, but after a few refinements, it’s something that almost defines Facebook.

An API! When was the last time you saw a social network allow piping out of the data from your account? It’s like the perfect way to build applications that works with the greatest resource — people, based on an established platform which does the hard work of getting you the data. Keeping people together was the only thing Facebook started with, and went on building around that, implementing whatever they thought sounded good. And look at where they are now.

In all facets of development

Whenever you create and develop a project, you always have “something” in mind. It’s that something which you shouldn’t lose focus of no matter what stage of development you are at. Everything you add, implement, should have a purpose, a reason. That purpose or reason should complement your initial “something”. Wonton features won’t help your application, or your time, because just like you, people expect features related to the core reasoning of an application.

So, keeping all those things in mind, next time you come up with a game plan, or are asked to join in the development of the “killer–new–app”, look for one word that probably doesn’t get as much attention as it should — focus!

Templates for sale!

2007-05-11T00:13:00.000+05:30

Seeing as how I have been putting this off for quite a while now, due to various apprehensions, I’m now going ahead with a plan I announced a while back. I’m going to start dedicating more time and energy to something that I love doing. Designing web pages! But not just any web page :) Starting now, I am going to start making some beautiful templates for the new Blogger, which will immediately go on sale (the moment they are through testing) for anyone who wants to use them. This will be ‘almost’ freelancing, and the earnings will go into buying myself a hosting, and get down to some serious web–app’ing! :)

The price for the template will be decided by the amount of effort I have to put to get the template out the door. They will not be high at all, something in–between the range of $10 to $25. You’re gonna simply love the $25 ones, because those will take the longest and come out the prettiest! Now, I am no professional, but I am sure you’ve seen my works in the past. So I’ll let them talk for me :)

Ofcourse, hacks will be included with the templates :) And you get to pick which ones you want! But hacks as much time and effort (if not more) as the actual designing of a template, so if it goes beyond a certain point where I’m having to go out of my way to add something in, I’ll let you know. If you really do want it, a little extra charge will get it for you. The prices will be negotiable for these, so you don’t need to worry about hidden costs anywhere.

I’d like to clear out a few things before you begin mailing me about this.

Every new owner of a template will have his/her blog listed on an exclusive page linked to from my blogs, with a short description about the blog. Perfect way to get your blog ‘out there’.
I am a busy person, so if I can’t get back to you immediately about a template modification, don’t think I have ditched you. Wait for a few days, and I will surely get back to you. If you can do the necessary changes on your own, nothing like it!
My templates will work like they are supposed to only in Opera and Firefox. I have never bothered with Internet Explorer, and never will, so please don’t ask me to fix it for that. As far as Safari goes, I can’t do anything because I don’t own a Apple, so can’t test it on that. If someone is willing to help me port them, however, or buy me an Apple (preferably the latter :P), contact me and we’ll negotiate something. I will also try and make them as resolution independant as possible, but results may vary from template to template.
These templates are not going to be ‘lightning fast’, and they’ll depend quite heavily on pictures/images and scripts (because of my hacks). Which means, they might be a little slow for <56Kbps speeds. Broadband users won’t see any change however. I’ll remove anything which you might not need however, to increase the speed. There will be no reduction in cost for this however.
I can’t offer a lifelong maintainance promise for my templates. I will probably quit with this after a certain point of time. Whenever this happens, I will let my users know well in advance.
None of the templates will have any built in ads, or any pre–decided place for them. We all hate ads, don’t we? But something can be cooked up for you (no extra cost :) ) Also, except for a small design credit at the end of the page, there will no other mention of my name or my blogs prefit anywhere in the template. All the rights will be transferred to you, with a clause of ‘no re–sale’ of the template or any part of it.
All templates will be microformat and CSS standards compliant. I can’t make them XHTML compliant for the reasons I have stated in this post. Nonetheless, I will try my best.
Request for clones of templates from other blogs can be shot off to my inbox. I will have a look, and discuss with you the pricing and the other formalities. I leave it to you to get the permission from the owner of the other blog to use (or clone) his/her template.
I will try and entertain requests for custom templates, depending on the time and effort again required to come up with it. Throw in a mail with an attached image of what you have in mind, and I will get back to you if I need furthur clarifications.

So, I hope all the terms are agreed upon? I will edit the terms whenever necessary, so keep this post bookmarked for future reference! Cool? Great! So, let’s reveal the first template up for grabs. I call this Dark Cherry. It’s got a mysterious and dark red and black colour combination, with hints of other colours thrown in for a truly amazing contrast effect. It’s got a sidebar, and is divided into a 5 panel layout. The header, the posts (top–left), the main sidebar (top–right), comments / other info (bottom–left) and secondary sidebar (bottom–right). For more info, check out the linked blog for a live demo!

Getting 'em while they're young

2007-05-06T16:36:00.001+05:30

It’s truly rare to see a young coder/hacker. While I started when I was 16, not everyone is ‘geek’ enough to do so. Partly to do with this is the whole not cool factor, but a good part is to do with the fact that languages are many, most of them not being easy to learn. If you target a learning group of say 13–15 years old, try and find me a tutorial on the web which caters to this group, and can get them programming quickly, even basic programs un–helped.

Not rocket science

It’s a known fact that kids learn the fastest when they’re young. So, not aiming for these young kids is making everyone lose out on so many potential coders, we probably cannot imagine. Given the right language, training and a friendly push, everything falls into place. Even if it means starting out with BASIC, or LOGO. It’s not particularly rocket science, and doesn’t take much to understand when someone starts getting interested. Advanced concepts like pure Object oriented programming can be kept for a later date. Don’t tell me they won’t understand int i = 5; …

Hackety.org has released a version o.4 of a Ruby starter’s guide. It’s basically a friendly way for kids to learn the basics of programming, using Ruby. Ruby has pretty straightforward reading–English type syntax, so it makes the learning curve flatter. I downloaded the guide for myself, and am mighty impressed by the sheer simplicity (while not compromising power) of Ruby. I’ll surely be looking more into that, later … :)

Get it rolling

We need more efforts like Hackety Hack, which aim to help out and start early with the teaching thing. Once the concepts are in place, other languages become easy to understandNot learn though. I think Ruby is a good language to get started on since the syntax is simple, but not to continue using if you want to progress with learning concepts. Acquiring the knowledge of a language and the basic concept just needs a bit of time and practice.

Kids have more time than grown ups do … sadly!

The fight for desktop superiority

2007-05-01T17:58:00.001+05:30

Unless you’ve been living under a frozen rock in Antarctica, you’d know about Adobe Apollo. Now, welcome Silverlight! Microsoft’s answer to Adobe, but in the other direction. Silverlight is to the Internet, was Apollo is to the desktop. While initially it didn’t seem cut out, features being revealed slowly but steadily are hinting at a pretty decent enough framework for developers to work with to get people moving towards the Internet. The question I ask here is, “Why are Microsoft and Adobe headed in two different directions?”, and “Is it really worth all the trouble?”

Living in a browser

Weren’t we hailing Web OS, rich Internet applications, stable and asynchronous data flows just a few weeks (or months) back? There were talks of how the only application a person may need on his/her PC would be a decent enough browserMy constant advocation of Firefox might get a little annoying, but in this case, it is necessary because if people argue that Internet Explorer is a decent browser, they will not be half wrong. But IE is a very good RIA killer if you ask me., and Internet applications will help perform the daily things that people presently depend on desktop applications for. Google Office, aims to provide a useful and feature–full online office suite as an alternative (a.k.a replacement) to Microsoft Office. There are countless online image editors (with Adobe’s Photoshop for the web on the way), and many other applications which we have been so used to using on our comfortable desktops. So then why going back to desktop applications, and why not push the Internet application scene further? I’ll try and answer why …

To say the least, the Internet still offers many restrictions when it comes to privacy concerns. When people start bellowing down the doors to a bot scanning one’s mail for ‘contextual’ advertising purposes, you know you’re close to seeing everything. How can these people then trust services with really sensitive documents that may contain goodness knows what from their personal or official lives. The moment you put something up on the Internet, you’ve given away a good part of the privacy away. That is a well known fact. What depends is how is that loss being put to use. But that is not the point here. The point is that people will probably never be able to trust a web service (even with the name Google) enough to let it handle their data. The name ‘Microsoft’ will not help reduce their concerns.

The online storage scene is only now beginning to gain widespread acceptance with services like DivShare coming up which offer a lot of leash when it comes to uploading and storing/sharing files. Google’s rather liberal storage spaces for their different services shows exactly how cheap it has become to save large volumes of data. This will still take some time. There were forecasts of a time when the online copy of your file is the one which is under regular use, and local copy (on your hard–drive) is actually your backup, instead of the other way around. That prediction is a little far away as of now.

Apart from privacy restrictions, the Internet as a platform is in quite a tough spot. There are too many people trying to standardise it in their own way, and failing miserably. The whole XHTML concept is the best example of this. The everyday user wants something that works, and doesn’t care (usually) about how it works. Also, development for the web has only recently hit a peak (as the aftermath of the Web 2.0 boom), as small time desktop developers, seeing the easy and forgiving nature of Internet development languages decided to try their hand at it. If you bring that same ease to the desktop, which is what people are ‘used’ to develop for, why won’t they come back? With that, give them the option of keeping their applications (desktop and online) in sync with each other, and you have a sure winner. That said, Microsoft’s move might tilt the scale, because like it or not, Microsoft happens to define standards wherever it goes. However, the Internet is not really Microsoft domain, so who knows …

That doesn’t mean …

I’m not saying that no–one should develop for the web. Heck no! Without Internet applications, we are all pretty much doomed as the Internet is. What I ‘am’ trying to say is that people'People' here are not alpha–geeks, but everyday users, who use Outlook to check mails and a browser to just search and surf much rather work with their desktop applications rather than try and make a shift to their online counterparts. It takes the local geek to introduce them to that world, and show them the advantages of getting used to it. Everyone has their preferences and their individual comfort levels. Companies like Adobe and Microsoft understand this, but they are trying to go two different ways because they both see this differently.

Internet companies should try and bridge the gap between online apps and local ones, so that whenever someone tries to shift, they aren’t disappointed by the lack of features and shift back. When Google’s Spreadsheets came out, complaints of severe disappointment were ringing loud and clear through the corridors of the web, with people saying that Google was losing their touch and (…wait for it!) … they were out of creativity! If Google has made the first impression, things would have been on a different peak today. They are recovering though, and more and more people are beginning to use Docs and Spreadsheets as collaboration tools, and easy access to their files from anywhere I’m glad they are :)

What’ll be interesting to see is if Adobe can actually beat Microsoft at it’s own game, and get a definite upperhand on it’s operating system by having the majority of the applications being developed using their framework, and having them running on Windows. Or will Microsoft gain Internet dominance as well as desktop superiority, and truly change things to a true monopoly. I’d just love that! :)

Do feeds make blog pages useless?

2007-04-25T19:59:00.000+05:30

Around the time of this post, I saw an unusual rise in the number of visits to my home page. Now, being the home page, it usually gets the highest number of visits, but recently before I wrote that, number began to drop. When that post went up, it again rose significantly (more than a 200% increase to be exact) which surprised me. Further inspection revealed it as the work of a single link to the home page I had put there to show a demo of the TOC.

This little detail shows how many people actually visit the post ‘on the blog’, rather than read it in their feeds and let it go. The problem doesn’t lie with the blog, I’m sure. Just the convenience of having to see just the post content in a way you’ve become accustomed to, surely lies heavier than having to click over to a blog page to read the post. It’s understandable, but that does put a question mark on the result of the effort authors put into making their blogs look good and adding functionality, amongst other things.

There are many blogs out there which look absolutely amazing, have a reasonably high readership and viewership, and impressive subscriber counts. Then there are blogs which have great content, stunning subscriber counts, but look terrible and have moderate to low viewership. I believe TechCrunch might face this problemThis is absolute 100% speculation. If there are statistics that are against and which disprove what I think, please let me know., because its looks are nothing compared to its content, so people might prefer to stick to reading it in their feed readers rather than come to the page itself. This might also be the reason why TechCrunch posts’ number of comments are not even significant in comparison to the number of readers.

So, does it really make sense to sit and design your blog to perfection, only to be defeated by the one thing that you cannot afford to stop?

The point

The biggest reason I think people take time to work on the looks and functionality of their blogs is to attract more viewers and people to come, have a look, stay for a while, leave a comment or two, and then if they’re up to it, subscribe to the blog. A subscribers count is something that gives a much more accurate idea of how popular a blog actually is, and a high number usually impresses people more than the look. So how important really is the design of the blog?

Quite a bit I’ll say. The first impression of any page you visit is generally summed up in your brain within a 20^th of a second of seeing itBBC news article, and that is a very small number. So, within that much time, you (very) obviously cannot gain anything of the content of the page. So the only logical deciding factor is the ‘look’! But we also know that looks don’t make a reader–base. It is the content which ultimately decides how many people keep coming back.

The verdict

Looks and functionality are important. Definitely. Without good looks and effective features, your pages have a handicap. And it probably won’t reach it’s full potential of readers. That’s why designers experiment so much with innovative ideas, and new layouts. Who knows what might clickThere was a brief period where the 3 column template was a rage, and everybody ran to get one. It’s on the outset I think, but I can still see a lot of blogs sticking to it.?

Very recently, Rick from FeedBurner wrote about the implications of partial–feeds on click–through’s to your blog. He said that it doesn’t make “any significant difference” to provide summaries. The number of page–views will remain the same. He speaks from factual statisticsFeedBurner handles more than 660,000 feeds! You can be sure he knows what he’s talking about., but I’d still like to know why that is the case. Why don’t people participate in discussions, or provide their views and outlooks on topics? Isn’t that why you subscribe to blogs in the first place? To get and give opinions?

As a blogger and designer, I’d like you to speak up and raise your points. Do you prefer a bad looking blog with good content to a good looking blog with decent content? Do looks even matter, or is it content all the way? I’m sure there’s a balance lying somewhere just out of sight…

Pixel perfect!

2007-04-24T13:01:00.001+05:30

Alright! If there are people going ‘What? Again?’, then it’s completely justified … but I was beginning to get a teensy–weensy bit sick of all the gold all over the place. I realised I can never settle for anything which doesn’t have my basic colours (the ones here) for too long. I anyway cannot settle with one look beyond a few months! :P

So, this is what I aiming at initially when I set out to make Golden Summer way back in December–January, but got severely sidetracked and went nuts with it. A simple, minimalistic template which really pushes attention to the post, while not making the whole place look too drab. I switched over to using simple and plain colours, ones which you’re probably used to seeing on pretty much every blog these days. The layout in itself breaks away from my previous two layouts, to go back to the header, post left and sidebar right normal that Blogger has gotten us so used to.

This is (as usual) not the final product, but a work in progress. I’ll be moving around widgets here and there to see which one fits the best where. I also might take this whole thing out because I have a couple of more templates in the bunk, so if I begin to like them, you might get to see them as well :P

Some of you might notice that this bears a lot of resemblance to basic Wordpress theme layouts. The truth is, I have begun to like the simplicity of those templates, and their ability to be simple, and yet strikingly concise. You can really throw anything at them, and they’ll hold up pretty well, while still looking nice and simple. I wanted to capture that essence in a Blogger blog. I had to hack my way into a couple of things to do that though, and you’ll see them turn up slowly in the next few weeks as I tinker around further.

A few things might still be ‘gold’ around here. That’s because I’ve reused them to keep things not looking out of sync. They’ll be fixed soon enough. Let me know what you think! :)

Firefox: 3.0 and future plans

2007-04-19T23:57:00.000+05:30

It just so happens to be our favourite browser. With more and more vulnerabilities showing up in IE7, it’s pretty much a no brainer selection. Coders love it, designers love it even more! With such a strong past backing them up, Mozilla plans to make some serious headway with Firefox 3.0, and in a way, redefine browsing 'again'!

InforWorld reports that there are hosts of new features planned for Firefox 3.0. You can read the whole list on the article there, but I want to take up just two of the features which sound extremely promising, and as these things go, open up a whole new door of possibilities for geeks! :)

Databases and offline web app-ing

The article says that Fx 3.0 will likely contain a feature which makes working with web applications offline, possible. Scratching your head? Ok, I’ll take the example from the article, since it’s something people can relate to. Imagine having GMail functionality, offline. You can write a mail, and save it. When you next go online, Fx 3.0 and GMail will work together to automatically send that mail. Pretty much what your desktop e–mail client does at the moment. Now isn’t that cool!

What this effectively does is take away an active Internet connection as the restriction to a lot of things. Maybe Blogger will work with this as well, with you being able to store posts offline while on the move, and transfer them to your blog (published/drafts) the moment Firefox discovers an active connection. This feature is almost an answer from Firefox to features like the in–built e–mail client in Opera, the blogging and photo–uploading tools in Flock and any other feature which integrates a web service application natively into a browser. Personally, I think Mozilla has been freagin’ brilliant at coming up with this! It sure makes me want to add sexy to the browser’s name ;)

The next feature, will appeal mostly to people who know how to use it. That, for the record, does not include me for the most part. They plan to integrate SQL Lite into the browser, albeit in a rather small form. It is going to be used to query content from the browser’s content cache. The immediate use Mozilla sees for this is a vastly improved ‘history’ and bookmarking system. However, there is a good chance this might ‘not’ make it into 3.0. That is not really a problem. Just the fact that such a feature is being developed, is pretty much enough at this point. I can see a lot of load–from–cache and history–extend extensions coming up to use and beat this feature black and blue. This also moves Firefox closer to what Mozilla ultimately plans for the browser, to turn it into an information broker. Maybe they could change the way existing variables are handled in Firefox, allowing Greasemonkey scripts to become a little more robust and share data between scripts? (Hey! Just saying!)

Looking good indeed!

The next version is slated for a ‘07 second half release. Ideas and features such as this make the next release one of the bigger ones yet. I didn’t see anything about the much spoken about Places, and am guessing they are going to chuck that idea, and make everything searchable (the latest toy of the application world) using the embedded SQL database. It’ll surely much more user–friendly, since the first attempt at using Places didn’t go so well, and people still complain whenever they have to use it.

So the next thing to do is keep fiddling through their nightly builds and see which one of them show hints of these features. Or else, wait and watch how the news unfolds. Something tells me this is going to create a wave as big as the lull we see at the moment! :)

C'mon people! Link to your sources!

2007-04-14T12:10:00.000+05:30

I spoke of how backlinks are better than trackbacks, and somewhere in the discussion that followed (and from a link I posted), the topic turned towards how trackbacks are as good as dead today.

I won’t go as extreme as to say that trackbacks are dead. But I will say that they are surely being underutilised, which is why their existence seems to be fading away. This is because more and more bloggers are either becoming too competitive and not linking to the source of their stories, or they are just being plain ‘ol lazy. In either case, it is not good for the blogosphere, because links are what keep things rolling and moving. A non–linked topic is as good as a dead topic. And we don’t like that too much, do we?

How to kill a post

Trackbacks aside, a simple link to the post by putting a ‘Quote from so–so’ is enough. Linking provides a wider viewpoint on the topic you’re discussing. Different opinions lead to discussions, discussions lead to comments. It all forms a wonderful chain. CopyBlogger writes:

…the most relevant bloggers in your field will be your competition.

And that is the most correct thing anyone ever said. Also, by not linking to other posts, you’re practically isolating yourself and becoming an outcast in the blogosphere. What goes around, comes around, and you might end up with no blogs linking to you as well.

Even something as small as a blog roll can be enough to get in the good books of bloggersI’ve seen it happen! My blog, not listed on certain blogs for a long time, miraculously showing up a few days after I add them to my blogroll., and should be one taken as a ‘must–have’ for your sidebars. This is pretty much what folksonomy is about, to guide your viewers to relevant content. In the process, you’ll get them to like what you write and how you write since you give them complete info and more content to read and increase their knowledge on the topic you talk about.

It’s mine I say!

If you think that by denying links to other blogs, you’re keeping viewers to your posts, then you couldn’t be more wrong than the mouse in front of me who thinks it can take me on in a fist fight. What you are effectively doing is reducing interaction and keeping the viewer unsure of the ‘truth’ and ‘tangibility’ of what you just said. Links turn statements into facts, since something said by four people means more than the same thing said by one. If your blog is visited by many people who don’t say anything, then the purpose of sharing your opinion is defeated.

You don’t dictate the blogosphere, and if you don’t link, doesn’t mean someone else (most of the time more successful) won’t. You’ll just end up marooning yourself on some remote island in the blogosphere, and getting out of the rut will just become harder everyday.

Digg doesn't impress me

2007-04-09T07:39:00.000+05:30

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for the concept, and the implementation as well. I am not one of those who is predicting the death of Digg as the behemoth that drives traffic throughout the Internet. I think for what it’s worth, Digg is doing a rather good job. But, it’s the people who need to realise and understand what ‘news’ actually is. Short of riddling this post with screenshots of the various Digg front pages at the time of writing this, all I can say is that the stories hitting those pages are not impressive.

I actually find a few articles to read from Google News, but none from Digg. None to hold my attention for more than the description atleast. Digg has repeatedly said that they “love their algorithm”. It is what drives Digg and keeps spam away. I guess they need human intervention now to make things work properly, a la Slashdot.

Quality, ‘and’ quantity

A site like Digg doesn’t have problem coming up with the numbers, and quantity of posts. They have goodness–knows how many hits in a day, out of which I’m sure 20% are new articles being submitted. I wonder how many people actually check the ‘upcoming’ section. I rarely do, relying on other people’s sense of judgement in pushing a story to the first three pages. However, seeing the stories hitting those pages, I’ve started going through the upcoming section as well, just to be sure than it’s not me and Digg is actually losing it.

People will Digg just about anything. The Digg darlings are stories about Apple and Linux. However, anything out of the ordinary will also begin to attract diggs. This results in rather strange stories showing, and hence, pushing out the ones which really deserve some attention. For example, this story, and this oneThis story actually spun me off to this story, so it wasn’t a complete waste! :P and finally this one. What a big waste of time those stories are, I cannot even begin to explain. And yet, they’ve all been front pagers. I’m not ‘not’ impressed for no reason...

Digg started off as a Technology news site. I believe they were the best thing at the time. The whole concept of democratizing the web to allow the people to decide where to drive traffic, was actually amazing. But, Digg deciding to open their doors to various other topics was asking for trouble. Thankfully, the voting system keeps maximum stories off the front page, but even then, the ones that make it surely don’t seem to live up to Digg’s reputation.

Conspiracy theory

In the very recent past, there have been many stories about how Digg’s credibility is more compromised than is immediately apparent, and article defending that. But at the heart of it, we all know how and which way things will turn unless some pro–active measures are taken to fix things. Digg removed their top digger’s list, but brought it back—although rather silently—because the motivation of making it into that list was the reason a lot of people would Digg quality stories. With the list gone, there wasn’t anymore reason to really digg articles. This was all amidst the story of companies paying the users in that list to digg their stories so that they’d make the front page.

Ofcourse, there have been premeditated and intentional steps taken by rival companies to dethrone Digg, which have forced Digg to take decisions and steps which haven’t really worked for their popularity. But at the end of the day, Digg still stands as the one source which drives traffic to news and new happenings around the Internet, even if weird stories don’t impress me. It won’t be easy to take them out of that spot, but just because they’re nice and snuggly, doesn’t mean that the quality of their news will go down.

I again call for human intervensionI’m sure a few out of the 10+ board members can put in jury duty, if the result is Digg again churning top quality stuff. I’m sure it’s worth the effort, because there is nothing like having a human decide what to show others. Any other means will also be welcome. But things surely have to change. It’ll be interesting to see the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ :)

Programmer to designer

2007-04-05T13:25:00.001+05:30

I think every person who has wanted to get their hands dirty in code, should rethink their strategy and what they want to ultimately end up as. I have said before that ideas will ultimately mean more for hacks than the implementation and the code itself. This, as I’ve experienced, is not just restricted to web application programming. The ultimate “design” is of more interest to a concerned person than the actual implementation itself.

Ideas are what make you creative. Learning to code isn’t so hard, as all it takes is a book and enough hours. It’s how you can apply that knowledge to complement your idea which forms a basis of how good your programming skills are. But before that, you need to have the idea, a clearly thought out plan to execute. Just knowing how to write code doesn’t cut it.

Anyone who has asked me how to get started with programming, has been replied with one question — “What are you planning to do?”, and later followed up with an algorithm, not the code. I want people to understand why something is being done. I want to teach them how to look at a problem, and break it down for them so that they can implement in their own way. From experience, I know that this works much better than handing out individual chunks of code for people to plug in and use.

Here in college I have a subject SDOOP which, very simply put, teaches us how to tackle software development, how to “design”, and not program, a software. Becoming a designer is the ultimate goal. Creating a diagram, a schematic for programmers to follow, and implement in their own way. We are taught to come up with the fastest way of connecting different parts of the software, so that no matter what the code, the algorithm pushes the program to be easy to implement.

Aim for the idea and the working, not the mumbo–jumbo.

Plans, lazyness, delays and more galore

2007-04-04T00:01:00.000+05:30

Hello there! Yes, as you would have guessed by now, the previous post was intended to be an April 1^st joke, and some people (thankfully) fell for it. In turn, it showed the amount of support The Last Word and I have from you guys, so kudos! And Thanks a ton! :) Not beating around the bush however, the reasons for the lapse of posting in that post were real. College just became a little more hectic, all of a sudden, so I’ve barely had to time to get online. My Miranda has not been touched in a week, making some friends rather angry, and I’ve tried to stay on top of all my mails, replying to them sometimes at 3 in the morning just to let people know I’m still alive :P

But that will be coming to an end soon enough, and I should be back in full form after that. However, to get things a little more, let’s say, “electric” around here, I’m going to share a few things that I’ve been thinking on the past week in boring physics and chemistry lessons :) These are more like ideas for the coming weeks.

A new home

This is the more tentative of the ideas. I’m planning to take The Last Word out of Blogger hands, and put it somewhere more under my control. Translated, that means I want to get my own domain space, begin dawdling in web application programming, and get my own domain name. Now considering I’m not a working fella’, and I don’t have that kind of money, I’m planning on beginning a little side work. One which (I hope) will be helped by you guys (my readers) and anyone else who is interested. Stay tuned for more info on this.

In case you want to donate some money, you can do so from the button on the right. Donations will definitely speed up the process of moving out :)

A new frequency

No more wonton posting about stuff that doesn’t matter so much. But then again, I’m not moving to a Phydeux3 type schedule, definitely! But I’m going to slow down. Partly because of college, partly because of other commitments. Also, I want to post quality content … better than what I’ve been putting up till now. I promise a post a week minimum.

For smaller, more frequent updates however, you can subscribe to my Twitter, which I update almost once a day with latest news that I think is worth noting. I might throw in some random updates from time to time (“I am “so” not sleepy!”).

A new name?

This one is under heavy scrutiny from my overworked brain at the moment. I want to make the name of my blog sound more technical, yet abstract. “The Last Word” somehow doesn’t cut it anymore for me. I have a few names running around my grey cells, with some of them sounding really nice. However, a new name means a new location, which means existing links will all break. I could try and work up an Oldblog redirection for Blogger, but that will still take out my page and technorati ranks.

And, with the new name should come a big change. I’ve revealed in the past that I’ve wanted to move over to Wordpress … so if the name change happens, this might happen too. But those are both big “might”s. I’m a little torn on this one …

So! That’s where my heads been roaming around these past few days. Let’s see how they fall into place. I have a lot of work on the side as wellOne of them being a software called the ‘Bunk–o–meter’ which I plan to develop to keep track of lectures attended and bunked, exam marks required to keep expected GPA … basically the complete toolset for any college going kid!. The Bloggerosphere has been quite silent recently … seems like a haunted city if you ask me. Nothing from the other bleets as well. I hope all that subsides quickly :)

You can ofcourse, drop in your comments on those ideas, if you think they can be re–planned to work better! I’m always one for suggestions :) Cheers!

Let's call it a day

2007-04-01T20:33:00.001+05:30

There comes a time, when decisions have to be taken, things have to be said, and bags have to be packed. One realises that things are just not how you think they are, or should be. You have to hand in the keys …

You would have noticed the lapse of posts these past few days here. Plus, no post from me saying “I’m still here!”. The reason is workload just increased tons, and I’m finding it hard to balance work and blogging/coding (coding == play in my life), which is the reason you haven’t seen any new hacks after a sudden burst of userscripts. I have two exams coming up, which are taking up all my time, and after these, I have more assignments and college duties on the horizon. I guess the fun days are really over this time.

The decision

It's for this reason, that I’ve decided to take The Last Word down. It was a hard judgement call I had to make, because it was frustrating my as to how I couldn’t come up with new posts. Hitting a creative block is the worst thing that can happen to me, and now that I have, workload from college is keeping it blocked.

This is the second time I’ll be taking a hiatus, but unfortunately, it seems like it might be the last time. I am “again” anticipating a come–back, but it won’t be anytime soon. Unless something “huge” happens in the Blog(ger)osphere, ofcourse.

I plan to release the last few hacks along with a few posts that I had pending in my drafts, and by the end of this week, wrap things up. I want to apologise to all my readers for this, it was a really nice to be a part of the community for so long, and get all the support! Thank you!

Also, thanks to all the bleet who have helped me learn so much more about the ways of programming, the Internet and just generally working as a group and a team in getting things done. Finally, a hearty thanks to Avatar! I’ve probably said all I could say, without meaning even a tenth of what I’d want to. I wish him all the best with Bloggeratto—whenever it may surface—and in all future Internet and Blogger endeavours. As for you, my readers, I wish you all the best with your blogs and all the Internet–related–things that you might enter into the future. Maybe some of you would have gained enough insight from the Last Word and aim to become one of the bleet yourself? :)

The last (really) word!

So, I’m going to stop blabbering now, and leave you with a song … Take care, and cheers!

Alive (Pearl Jam)

“ … Son, she said, have I got a little story for you
What you thought was your daddy was nothin’ but a…
While you were sittin’ home alone at age thirteen
Your real daddy was dyin’, sorry you didn’t see him, but I’m glad we talked...
Oh I, oh, I’m still alive
Hey...oh...

Oh, she walks slowly, across a young man’s room
She said I’m ready…for you
I can’t remember anything to this very day
‘Cept the look, the look...
Oh, you know where, now I can’t see, I just stare...
I, I’m still alive
Ooh yeah…yeah yeah yeah...oh...oh...

Is something wrong, she said
Well of course there is
You’re still alive, she said
Oh, and do I deserve to be
Is that the question
And if so…if so…who answers…who answers...
I, oh, I’m still alive
Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah ... ”

Getting people to switch to Firefox

2007-03-30T00:16:00.000+05:30

I have been doing my share of the ‘good work’ by introducing people to Firefox, and the world of extensions, themes and more convenient browsing. It’s not ‘as’ exciting as getting people to switch to an Apple :P, but it feels good to see a fellow person give up Internet Explorer forever, and you hope that this is another chain of switches you startedYou know how these things with non–savvy people go. You tell one, and they find it really cool. Then next day it becomes a small talk topic (sometimes to just show them as being more cool than the others :P).

I looked in at MarketShare today at the browser trends, and Firefox’s share has grown to 14% from February last year. This is really good considering how many peopleBy people, throughout this post, I mean non techies. there are. Also, Firefox is a change–over browser, not a default one. Taking all those into consideration, 14% is a very positive number. Firefox 3.0 is not far away either, with features filled up to the brim (always a darling with new adopters). Mozilla and extension–ers make our job easier everyday! :)

Another reason why the share of IE is high is because mods like Avant and Maxthon build on the shell, and add a lot of features that Firefox and Opera have. This removes the incentive of ‘new’ features to make the switch. I wish there was a way to see what share of IE users actually use the bare naked IE. That would sure wipe the smile off a lot Microsoft faces.

My most recent experience of getting someone to switch was a few weeks back. Though it was initially a resounding ‘No!’ to start with, the mention of the words ‘better security’ and 'no spyware’ opened a door. I then went ahead to show little features like search suggests, search by name (I skipped the part that it exists in IE as well) and finally threw in the kahuna of extensions and themes. It sold rather well :P This was my second or third time handling a non–techie actually, and I learnt a few things on how to make the 'sale'.

I guess IE really has become extremely familiar to people. But atleast we’ve progressed away from calling IE the Internet. But Firefox’s clean and simple initial interface (compared to IE’s row full of buttons) does land in a good impression. IE sits well also because people don’t want to go to the hassle of having more than one application to do the same thing. They use the ‘why use Photoshop when we have Paint’ logic. It takes someone to ‘show’ them that Firefox is better. I don’t think there are many people who switch all by themselves. Also, once switched, they aren’t many who go looking for features. They use the brute force ways from IE on the new browser, until you show them that there is a better way to do it.

I know from my statistics that majority of my viewers use Firefox (even Apple viewers). That may have something to do with the fact that IE refuses to load up my search box, and stops midway. In the past I used to worry about that, and try to fix my templates to at least render (somehow) in IE. I guess it would increase my readership, but I doubt it’ll be a significant rise. My feed readership is 3 times my daily page views. So as long as the feed reader renders properly in IE, my posts will reach everyone :)

There is of course not a shadow of a doubt that IE can never be better than Firefox, or any other alternative browser. The underlying code, and it being closed to any kind of extensibility (easily codeable by people) will see to that. That is also the reason Opera is sitting at less than 1%. Closed doesn’t work that well, especially if you’re closed to suggestions as well.

Twittering away!

2007-03-26T21:08:00.000+05:30

If you have looked around my blog lately, you’d have noticed the ‘Aditya is…’ widget that I added to the right. I recently took it out, because I gave the updates a new purpose, but no points for guessing that it was powered by the latest fad on the Internet and what is being termed as ‘micro–blogging’ – Twitter. Twitter tries to answer the basic question … or actually, let’s ‘you’ answer the basic question, ‘What are you doing right now?’. But of course, used creatively, Twitter can be an amazing service which is accessible from something you carry around all the time. Your cell phone!

Staying connected

This is probably the best way to stay connected with a lot of people at the same time since mobile phones and IM. A single update to your Twitter, will fire off multiple messages to all those who follow you (on Twitter) with that update. I admit to not using Twitter to it’s ultimate potential. But that’s only because I cannot use it with my cell phone since the number to send a text message to is an international number for me (Twitter is based in UK). Regardless of this, I have tried to get my phone activated, but it hasn’t workedA mail to Twitter support also has reached to no particular end. This is something bad, since customer support should be the best thing about a site which has so many users..

But I have seen people updating from their phones, and I can imagine what a convenience it would be. The concept of constantly updating statuses was first introduced (to me) by Facebook. It has a nice module at the top right of the home page, which you can use to change your status. It gets reflected on all your friends’ mini–feeds. People have been using Twitter to keep friends and family updated on their latest trips and travels. The top bloggers (with the likes of names ending with Arrington and Malik on the bandwagon) used Twitter to keep their readers constantly updated throughout their run of SXSW '07.

Twitter isn’t a new thing however. There have been others like it, like Dodgeball. But for some reason, Twitter has really caught on like a wildfire on the Internet. With widgets and extensions getting into the play as well, staying connected was never so simple (and addictive!) :)

Bye bye to privacy

One thing that Twitter doesn’t have an option for is to remove people from your follower’s list. This can give a whole new meaning to the word ‘stalking’. That’s why, and this applies mostly to non–adults using this service, one should be careful when posting updates, and should use discretion while revealing current location, or what they’re doing. We’ve had enough of MySpace news about all this.

So, while this is an amazing service, it still has flaws. The lack of good customer support is one of them. Now, I want to see how far this actually goes to begin bringing people closer together, and trying to answer the basic question that you try to answer about your friends and family, ‘What are you doing right now?'!

Add me to your friends, and see what I’m upto the whole day :P
Happy twittering :)

Further

RIP Twitter (2007-2007)
Why is Twitter so slow
The post–its of blogging
Three innovative ways to use Twitter

Time for new friends to reveal themselves!

2007-03-23T00:32:00.000+05:30

Update: I have opened up the comments for the next 24 hours, and cleared away the moderation. Which means your comments will show up without any intervention from me as soon as you post them. I hope to not get spammed ;) This is because I am going to be taking part in Shutdown Day (24 March), so my computer will be off for the next 24 hoursYou will get to read my experience next week when I return!. The first day of de–lurking hasn’t been that satisfying … let’s see if tomorrow does the trick? Cheers!

From last year, when my blog surfaced, to today … my readership has gone from 18 to 270. Now that’s a freakin’ huge jump! :) I’m very thankful to all the people who come everyday to read whatever I have to babble about, but there are many more who like to stick around in their feed readers, quietly read a new post, and not say anything about it. I know some posts are too random to comment on, but surely you can leave something on some? ;)

Who are you?

So now, I’m going to take some time off to let you, my prized readers, show yourself. You might not have joined in the discussion about anything, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to know who you are :) Through hacks, opinions, reviews, suggestions and what not, there are so many different people who come here, and for many more reasons …

The term given to this process is de-lurking. ‘Lurkers’ are those who come around for a visit, but don’t leave any comments because it’s already been said, or they don’t have anything to add. Now, I know that it’s not the celebrated ‘de–lurking’ dayI plan to make this a regular feature of the blog however, and from next time, it’ll be on the designated day!, but let’s do the opposite of that this time around … It’s ‘de–lurking’ time! :D

It could be a simple “Hi”, or an elaborate “Hello”! It could be in English, or any language you’re comfortable with. It doesn’t really matter. I just want to get a good idea of who the people are who actually take time out to read what I write. I’ll try and not add my two cents in the comments and break the flow. Leave your name, a brief introduction about yourself, and how you bumped in here––apart from anything else you might want to say––in your comment. Since there are about 270 subscribers, I hope to see atleast 70–75% of that number of comments. Let’s see how many people come out of their closets by coming Monday. I promise to release another hack if you manage to hit those numbers!

So! Show yourself! :) Let’s see who you all really are!

Not another library!

2007-03-22T10:32:00.000+05:30

Today I bumped into FrogJS. It’s another photo gallery ‘unobtrusive Javascript’ library, which can be used by people to make a Javascript driven animated photo gallery on their pages. My question is simple. Do we really need another one?

The whole list

There are enough libraries out in the field today. Prototype being the more famous and widely used one. Then there are the other players like mootools, SimpleJS and jQuery. These extend Javascript as a language. Individual libraries which add effects and other bling bling to your pages include moo.fx, which uses mootools as it’s base and script.aculo.us with Prototype for it’s base. Then for picture management there is the very famous Lightbox JS with Prototype as it’s base, and script.aculo.us for effects, and now FrogJS using the same. Phew! See what I mean?

It is not a question of which one is better, or faster, or smaller, or easier. It’s based on what ‘use’ you have of a library. There are many (and I emphasize) things in Prototype that go completely unused by people, but they still prefer to use it because it has a ‘few’ functions that help them get the job done faster. It makes more sense to just copy them out, or write your own (like I do). Otherwise, take time to analyse and learn what each library has to offer, and then use them as per your requirement. Don’t go for one because everyone is using it. Pretty much all the libraries offer the same things. ‘mootools’ actually makes things faster because it’s so small, so many people should look at that if they don’t have too many hardcore OOP uses in their scripts. If you do, Prototype is probably the way to go since it has some pretty amazing classes and objects handling.

I went skipping on from Particletree to a nice extension of Prototype, which contains even more teensy weensy functions which we all want and use, albeit with longer drawn out codes. For example, functions to work with cookies and such. It extends an already jam–packed and very useful library! :)

SimpleJS seems like a good deal for very basic use, with small file sizes and independence from any other framework. But it doesn’t offer anything too big, which someone working with a library might be looking for. jQuery on the other hand seems very interesting, with small (compressed) file size and seemingly lot of uses. I’m definitely going to look more into that one. I want to move away from Prototype, but my ‘Search Suggest’ requires script.aculo.us, which uses Prototype. Together, they add about 60–70 Kbs to every page. There is not much difference in time due to caching, but it’s still a heavy deal.

Pick and choose

There seems to be no real perfect choice, or quite a balanced on either. I think libraries can truly be a great addition to your arsenal, but only if you know how to make full use of them. That can always take time, and you need to stick with one to get to know it properly. I’ve used Prototype ever since it came out, in some form or the other, and I still don’t know all it’s uses. So you can imagine how big it can be. I might as well stick to it, because a few of the things I use on my blog need it anyway, and it’s filled to the brim with all the functions one will ever need.

What do you think about the libraries out there? And which do you think is better than the rest?

Apollo: Java re-invented

2007-03-20T13:08:00.000+05:30

I had a few other posts waiting to be posted, but this news just deserves priority! When I first heard of Apollo, I wasn’t so excited as a lot of people have been. I was more of the thought that since Adobe just likes to do things their way, no matter what, Apollo will be nothing but a fancier version of Java. I’m glad to say, that reading everything post release, I was right … for the most part.

The similarities end at the ‘cross–OS runtime’, because Apollo aims to become what Java couldn’t. Apollo is going to take what we already know, leverage it to the OS, and hand the controls back into our hands. What this simply means is that, everything you could do with the Internet, is now available for you to do with your own computer. I had written about seamless integration of offline and online applications. Keeping that in mind, this seems like just the thing I was looking for! :)

Why the Java analogy?

For those who don’t know, Sun Microsystems developed Java as a higher level language, which aimed to be completely object–oriented (it does this freakin’ well!), cross–platform and relatively easier to work with compared with lower level C++/C and the likes. But there was a problem. Working with Java meant learning a whole new language. Those familiar, will know that Java’s (only?) failing is its monstrous syntax linessystem.out.write just to write ‘Hi’ on the screen? Don’t get me started on higher functions!. I’m no expert though, and while it is the most popular programming language today, I think it can be seriously improved upon.

This is where Apollo will succeed, since it works by using existing web languages and technologiesHTML, Javascript, CSS, Flex, AJAX and ActionScript (non–web). PHP isn’t supported, and no plans have been revealed yet to do so. I guess one will have to use AS to bridge that gap should the need arise. I don’t know about Flex, so I guess that could be useful too!, and let’s you write applications using them. Web languages have been under heavy use since the Web 2.0 boom, and there are ‘many’ people who know it and use it in everyday life, with more and more beginning to join in the fray. If nothing more, a simple HTML interface to a Javascript backend, with Apollo’s stream controls should be able to help in developing simple and task specific applications. I can sense a Textmate for windows :)

Restricted freedom

This will, however, not be for newbies, surely. You’ll need to be adept at using existing technologies to be able to get your hands dirty with Apollo. You’ll have to be familiar with the basics of a how compilers and memory based languages work. But I think Adobe would have life much easier for everyone. So much so, that the first application that comes to mind is a ‘desktop dashboard’ of your Blogger. It could be synchronised whenever you’d go online, but for the times you were offline, changes could be saved locally, and then using the Blogger ATOM API, upload all the changes to your account. This might be one of the most uncreative uses of this however … :P So you can imagine the possibilities.

So, while Apollo looks and feels amazing, a true analysis can only come when people start to use it and get a feel for it themselves. But mark my words. This is going to be big. So big that next generation applications will be made off Apollo type frameworks. And yes, Apollo is surely going to generate some spinoffs and libraries. But ultimately, if application development becomes easier, why not? :)

Search your blog from Firefox

2007-03-19T18:50:00.000+05:30

A hack to start this lovely week off! Well, not a hack really. You can call this a Native Blog Search for Firefox, without the AJAX :P Steve’s post about adding microformats in your blog gave me the idea (a little late though) about ways in which we can integrate our blogs with Firefox. The various new features in 2.0 make playing around with them a lot of fun :)

Firefox 2.0 supports Open Search, and when detected, it automatically highlights the search box button, and from the drop down list, you can add the newly discovered search. You would have seen it on Wikipedia, or Live.com … and now here, on this page!

You want it?

Add this one itsy bitsy line to your <head> area:

<link href='http://phpplay.ning.com/Open Search/openSearch.php?blogurl=blog_url&name=blog_name&icon=url_to_icon' rel='search' title='blog_name' type='application/opensearchdescription+xml'/>

Replace the parts in green with the respective details. Note that the blog URL has to be just your blog URL, without the trailing slash. For eg: http://lastword.blogspot.com—nothing more.

After note

While this is a cool thing to have, and gives your readers a faster way to search your blog for anything they want, there is a stupid side effect of this. Searching through this won’t add to your Search Suggest pool. This makes the Search Suggest slightly useless, but hey! I’m all for options :P I plan to fix this in the future though. Will give me something to do when I really don’t have anything else ;)

Search away! :P

Jscripts down. Repeat 'JScripts down!'

2007-03-18T13:33:00.001+05:30

If you’ve been coming around the page in the past few days (and I know you have, yay! for stats), you’d have noticed rather strange behaviour on the page’s part. Dates don’t show, the TOC on the left doesn’t work. My Twitter status isn’t working, and nor is the post list at the bottom. Not to mention my search.

This is because Stephen’s Jscripts has gone offline. What’s strange in that, you ask? Well, the strange bit is, he didn’t take it offline. It seems like Ning goofed up somewhere. I haven’t seen or heard anything of the same from others either on Google or the various discussion forums. My own applications are running pretty healthy, so I don’t know what the problem is.

I’ve alerted Steve to this, and he has fired off an urgent mail to Ning to get this problem resolved as soon as possible. Ning Blog mentions an outage tonight for maintenance. I hope they solve this little glitch, and bring my poor little blog back to life!

Sorry for the inconvenience!

Update: Steve points out the Ning problem being addressed, and has come up with a (temporary?) solution. If possible, donate some funds so that he can upgrade his Ning account to Pro, which will enable more applications, bandwidth and storage.

I’ve temporarily switched over from JScripts to my Googlepages account. This is so that atleast the page looks normal again.

Manage your uploaded photos

2007-03-16T22:09:00.001+05:30

As posted on Blogger Buzz and noted by Phydeaux3, Google has now finished the merging of Blogger photos, and Picasa Web Albums. That is just the base of the story however. If you start to look into it a little more closely, you'll see how much this helps our case, and why we love Blogger/Google so much!

All those pictures!

The first thing to notice is that every blog of yours automatically gets its own album. The album is populated with all the pictures you've uploaded using that blog. This offers a perfect interface to add more pictures, find and reuse old pictures, see what all you don't need anymore and (wait for it...) delete pictures! Yes! We all know that the space offered by Blogger isn't unlimited. If you look to the right, you'll see a '1GB (and growing)' message. Now, since it doesn't mention individual blogs, we have reason to believe that your Google account itself gives you a 1GB to store your pictures, all your blogs combined. That's not a lot of space if you think about having big blogs. Hence the ability to delete pictures becomes more important.

The next important thing, as already noted, is the pictures JSON feed. You can get a URL to 'all' your pictures via. a tasty JSON feed, which can be used to show them as a widget in your sidebar, or anywhere you see fit. This is not really helpful for a blog like mine, but if you do maintain a photo-blog, then you'll see how this comes into play. Won't it be nice to show a bunch of family pictures from your photo-blog on your main blog? :)

Those are the Blogger specific Picasa goodies. If you see their What's new page, you'll see that they've added features that is slowly moving them closer to Flickr. But I don't think they have the 'it' factor yet, with Flickr offering ~~unlimited storage (with just a bandwidth restriction 100MB/mo, which is hard to reach anyway)~~ -- Edit: As Phydeaux3 points out, Flickr does put a restriction, which slipped my mind. But it still offers many more features than Picasa. However this sure is a move in the right direction.

Getting things together

It's becoming more and more obvious that Google is working nice and hard to integrate their various features into each other, which can move to serve a few immediately visible purposes. The blatant first one being 'visibility'. By integrating services, they're increasing exposure to all their services. You remember how Blogger shows a Google Docs integration notice when you publish? Like this:

They know that Blogger is now one of their most widely used services after GMail (or maybe the other way around), and even GMail has those top row 'corner bookmarks' thingies. So it's becoming more and more obvious what they're upto now. But hey, I'm not complaining. All this is making life much more convenient for all of us, and the only thing which I can see that's remaining to be integrated with Blogger is Measuremap (if they ever get around to doing that). They recently integrated GTalk with their personalized homepage as well, so it's an all round effort.

This is some mighty good development! :) Let's see how far and deep this goes...

Links (14 March '07)

2007-03-14T15:07:00.000+05:30

Crazy 3D Menu: This page and menu on it is absolutely 'cool'! The links all point to downloading applications and songs, but it's more fun to move your mouse all over the place and see the menu react! Good stuff :)
MiniAJAX.com: A page listing some great AJAX demos, and links to the originating sites, so that you can put them in your pages. A good page to bookmark!
Snipshot: Adobe are trying to make a Photoshop for the web. The industry isn't very responsive to that right now, but if you want a free, simple and good image editor online, try Snipshot! You don't need any plug-ins to work with it (as far as I know)!
2007 Saleen/Parnelli Jones Limited Edition Mustang: A beautiful car, made even more irresistible! You have to check this one out :)
Mac Google: I only wish the original Google would be like this...
DivShare: Share unlimited amount of files, with as many people as you like. I have no clue how DivShare sustains themselves, but this service is absolutely awesome for storing, backing and sharing files!
Apple Vs. Microsoft: The Last Word on the war between Apple and Microsoft!

You wanted suggest, you got suggest!

2007-03-11T12:27:00.000+05:30

I'm going to start off this week with a teeny weeny bang. Let's make this a little dramatic (it's by no means a small thing):

After I released the Native Blog Search, there was a lean period where I was playing around with extending it. It was a good thing, ofcourse, to have your results show up in your page without any hassles of page reloading! But, I also wanted to know what exactly people were looking for on my blog when they came. This served a simple single purpose. To see what people liked to read. It was then that my mind shifted to Google Suggest and how it worked. I didn't do as much research behind it's working as Deepak did, but I guessed out a pretty simple technique which would work under any circumstance. I needed a database to store my data, but I didn't know how to code for a database back then. So I used simple file-handling techniques. It was rather messy, but it got the job done.

However, very recently, I learnt how to work with the Ning Content Store (thanks to Steve for putting up with me on this), and though the process got started by a completely different hack, the requests to release 'this' particular hack was at the back of my mind all the time. So I didn't waste much time (ported it over 6 hours) getting things into place.

As with things like this, there is always the issue of security. I've come up with a rather secure 'token' system (according to me), but it still can be broken through quite easily. The next most secure thing to do is to get a Ning account if you want to use this as safely as possible, but I guessed you wouldn't need 'that' much security for simple search terms :P So, with all that history and working, let's get down to actually implementing this little devil of a hack :)

Getchyo' token!

The first thing to do is to get your security token. It'll be used for every transfer of data, and keeping things separate. Start by going to the page, and follow the instructions.

It'll tell you if the password you've used is already under use. If it isn't, you've got the hard part over :P Remember, there is no easy way to hide this token. It isn't such a big deal, but if you're rather possessive about your search queries, you might as well try and alter the way you add in your token in your page script. Add the following lines to your head area:

<script src='http://jscripts.ning.com/id/3229487?minify'></script>
<script src='http://aditya.vm.googlepages.com/scriptaculous.js?load=effects,controls'></script>
<script src='http://aditya.vm.googlepages.com/searchsuggests.js'></script>
<script>
token = 'insert_token_here';
blogname = 'insert_blog_name';
</script>

Replace the red 'inserttokenhere' text with the alphanumeric token string which you got in from the application. The second variable holds the URL name of your blog. For eg: 'lastword' for this blog. So, now that you have all the required scripts in place, you'll have to modify your code for the search box. If you use my Native Blog Search, then you'll have to change the ID in the main function to cath the value (for the search) from the ID of search-query if it is not set to that. Otherwise, find your the code for your search box, and replace it with this:

<form id="query" action="javascript:submitSearch()" class="search-form">
<input id="search-submit" value="Search" onclick="javascript:submitSearch()" type="submit"/><input id="search-query" autocomplete="off" accesskey="S" name="search-query" size="25" type="text"/>
<div id="nss_options" class="nss_options"></div>
</form>

<div id='nss_options' class='nss_options'></div>
<script>
new_script('http://phpplay.ning.com/getByTags.php?xn_auth=no&token='+token+'&callback=add_val');
check_post_data();
</script>

The DIV is the element which will get filled up with the results whenever you start typing. You can switch the tags' positioning around to get the required look, but don't change the significant attributes like the id or onclick. This is pretty much all you have to do. You can style your suggestions ofcourse. These are the definitions you can put in your <style> area:

.nss_options { } /* the container DIV */
.nss_options ul{ } /* the actual list of suggestions */
.nss_options ul li{ } /* each list element */
.nss_options ul li strong { } /* The matched highlight part */
.selected{ } /* The selected suggestion */

That's it! If everything went well, you should be able to start searching :) Your results will only show up after your first search ofcourse, but you'll see your list getting nice and populated in a few days if there are many people using the search box on your page.

After notes

I'm again going to bring up the lack of security of your search terms. I can see them, because I own the application. No-one else can see them, unless they use your token to catch your search terms. But they'll be effectively populating 'your' search terms, so it makes no sense for them. But who knows what whim catches who :P

Secondly, the code I've provided right now has a buggy way of removing terms which don't return any results. I plan to work up a better method soon. It'll be updated in the main include however, so you don't need to worry about updating your scripts.

Since this hack is hosted up at Ning, your search terms appearing is completely based on their uptime. They should not be going down anytime soon, and as per what has been discovered (if it's true), their downtime shouldn't affect output from the applications. But either way, they'll be back up in less than 24 hours, so your suggestions will show up again soon! :)

Needless to say, this hack uses the oh-so-heavy Prototype.js library. I've minified it however, which should shave off about 10-12 kbs. It also uses Script.aculo.us, but since I'm loading only two files from it, it comes to very small file size. Totally, it should be around 60-65 Kbs added to your page size. Moo.fx doesn't have an auto-completer built in, and people have developed ones for it which I don't really like. I am eyeing the one developed and demo-ed at brandspankingnew, and plan to eventually move to it. But at the moment, this serves the purpose really well, and I've been testing it for over half a year now :) Quite reliable!

Credits

Ah! Credits ... This is going to be the first one I'm going to write actual 'credits' out for :P Here's the list:

Stephen - Always the helper. He literally taught me how to work with the content store, and about 70% of the PHP I know at the moment. So, this release would have been close to impossible without his help. Thanks mate!
All my viewers - I actually had lost all interest in releasing this hack, as I've stated in some blog's comments. But thanks to interest still being shown in it by bleet like Deepak, and the initial burst of requests from people who liked it, I couldn't 'not' have ported it! So thanks a bunch guys!
Avatar - as usual, without whom I'd never have really started hacking mainstream! :)

So yea, that's the list (small as it is), and I hope you enjoy a trouble free search suggest experience. If you have any problems, the first thing to do would be to shoot an e-mail off to me with your token / password. If you've forgotten your token, send me your passphrase and I'll send you your token! Anything else, should be addressed in the comments as usual, since I want everyone to benefit from each other's doubts. I've also added a 'digg' button at the top (as seems the latest trend), but only for this post. I'm not submitting this myself, and want 'you' to submit it if you feel it's worth it :)

Also, this hack (like all others on this blog) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License.

Hacks for the heck of it

2007-03-09T00:10:00.000+05:30

The new Blogger brought a lot of new features. We (the bleet) were a little worried about the future of hacks, and how Blogger's features would make a lot of past hacks useless, and make future hackery difficult. Now that I look back these past 2-3 months that I've been following the new Blogger, hacks for it, and the new generation of hackers, I must say I'm a wee bit disappointed at the situation, and that our fears have come true to some extent.

No longer can I see a Commentosphere, or one to use or extend my favourite hack, the Native Blog Search. One of the best hacks (and I shall call it one), and one of the very few I sincerely revere as a 'hack', has been 'Neo', the complete blog hack by Ramani. There was serious dedication, and work behind it. Not to mention the idea. And 'those' are the qualities that actually make a hack, a 'hack'.

Scripts to clean your room

A lot of hacks today are mere 20 line functions that work on a feed from Blogger, and print out all it's contents. My hacks suffer from this lack of innovation as well, with possibly only the Custom Dates script being something I'd like to call a proper hack. All the asynchronous post and labels loading, fancy pants recent comments or posts, are pretty much commonplace. There isn't anything new, something that would make someone sit back and actually appreciate the work, wonder in awe at the work behind the script.

It isn't the lack of skills, but ideas that I believe should be blamed. That said, I come full circle back to the point I had made back when Blogger went into beta. It'll soon become not what you can code, but what you can think. Coding is just a small aspect of a hack. Coming up with the concept, the design, the functioning, everything, takes a lot more effort than typing out syntax. A hack I'm working on at the moment is seriously taxing my reserves, and with college, it just gets harder. In the end, if it sees the light of day, it'll be worth it though. I can say it's on the same lines as the 'revolutionary categorising hack' that Avatar had revealed to everyone (back when Bloggeratto existed :P). I hope to break my monotony with that!

A little boring

As Avatar rightly said, Bloggeratto went off the stage at a particularly right time, because the entire Blogger scene seems to have been lulled into silence. When was the last time you saw something big pop out on radar that got the community buzzing? More than half a year ago! Isn't that bad? There is nothing worse than having a stagnant community. Here I am enjoying Blogger being ranked the topmost blogging platform, and there Wordpress is celebrating the onset of version 2.1 of their platform, with more improvements.

I have discussed these views with people in the past, and they've agreed that the concept of a 'hack' has somewhere gotten lost. What we come up these days are simply mods (or some other term Avatar came up with :P), where we take an existing source, and just modify it to show something different. It has reached a point where hacks are mere plugins, that people keep adding to their blog to change something or show something. They don't 'do' something, or not something really worthwhile anyway. Also, all the services which were offering JSON(P) feeds, are now also offering widgets for one-click addition into Blogger. This severely reduces things that non-creative hackers can achieve.

We need to 'create' a source, not just use one. Every one of the great hacks in the past has either created the source, or used an existing source in a way no-one thought of using it. We need to look at information from a different angle, look for data where it is least expectedFor example, did you know that the expanding of posts in your 'Manage posts' section is done via AJAX, and that Blogger has makes a call for that? What if one wrote a PHP script to catch that call's data, and use that for something like Asynchronous posts?. Build functionality not ordinarily or easily available. We need to Put the freezer at the bottom!

The target users shouldn't necessarily be complete newbies who don't know a thing about code. One's code should surprise long time coders into thinking thoughts on the lines of 'Why didn't I think of this?' or 'That's fantastic! This is something I could really use!' And it's not hard to do if you keep your eyes open. I always try to get the method, the way of thinking, or the idea out if I'm not making a hack. By doing that I hope that someone else will catch on, and using my idea come up with a hack for it, or better.

So stop re-inventing the wheel, or even trying to change it's shape. Try and invent a new rim, or an axle! :P The community, I'm sure, is looking out for something absolutely fresh!

Google Reader list custom widget

2007-03-07T00:21:00.000+05:30

Edit: Big 'oops'! If it didn't work for you before, try the new code :) Also, updated the order of codes. The widget changes markup to be XHTML (phssh) standard, which doesn't work well for any code going in them :( See the updated implementation.

I was looking at the Google Reader widget which shows your reading list from a particular label. It's quite a useful little widget, which doesn't need any work from you, is automatically updated, and gives a good idea of what's keeping you interested! But there is one tiny problem, and it's one I have with a lot of Google services. It simply looks terrible!

Doing it my way!

To overcome that little glitch, I went ahead and wrote my own little script to create your custom Google Reader reading list widget, one that can be styled, and modified to show more content that what the current Reader widget shows. I really didn't have anything worthwhile to do last Sunday afternoon, so I thought of writing this :P I will explain every aspect of the parts (and it's commented) which you can change, so that you can have a proper widget which does what 'you' want it to do! :)

Add the following to your <head> area:

<script src='http://jscripts.ning.com/id/3484647' type='text/javascript'/>
<script>//<![CDATA[
userID = 'user_no_here';//your GReader ID number you can get from the original reader widget
readerLabel = 'web-2.0';//the label
count = 5;//how many posts?
showSummary = 1;//1 for yes, 0 for no
showCredits = 1;//show the 'by so-so' line, 1 for yes
window.addEventListener('load',function(){new_script('http://www.google.com/reader/public/javascript/user/'+userID+'/label/'+encodeURIComponent(readerLabel)+'?n='+count+'&callback=makeWidget');},true);
//]]></script>

The following is the style template for the different elements in the widget. I've commented as to what is what. Change them to suit your blog's template:

#ReadingList { /* The container of the whole widget content */
 border:1px dotted #BDB76B;
 padding: 10px;
 width: 200px;
}

div.block { /* Individual items are held in one block each */
 border-bottom:1px dotted whitesmoke;
 padding-bottom:5px;
 margin-bottom:5px;
}

a.title { /* Title of the item */
 font-size: 8pt;
 font-family: Verdana;
 text-decoration: none;
 color: #BDB76B;
 }

a.title:hover {
 color: Orange;
 border-bottom:1px solid #EEE8AA;
}

div.summary { /* Summary of the item (in case you want one) */
 color: Khaki;
 font-size:7.5pt;
 font-family: Arial;
}

div.byline { /* Credits/By line of the item */
 margin-top:5px;
 color: #EEE8AA;
 font-size: 7pt;
 text-align:right;
 font-family: Tahoma;
}

Make a new HTML widget in whichever section you want to add the reading list, and copy paste the following lines as the content:

<div id='ReadingList'>
</div>

That's it! You're done! :) I still haven't been able to wrap my head around the One Click Widget thingy. It seems a little painful to set up if you ask me actually, so I am not bothering. I hope my instructions are clear enough :) You can actually try and overwrite the styles of the original Google widget too if you don't want to go through setting up my version, but you won't get the customisability of showing names and summaries.

The original Google Reading List follows this heirarchyA '.' means class, and '#' means id. The symbols are what you'll use to style them in your <style>.:

div#readerpublishermodule0.reader-publisher-module
- h3 (for the title)
  - ul
  - li (each li holds one item)
    - a.i (title of the item)
    - div.s (byline text, contains another link)

If you'd like to see more content/or something I missed out in the custom reading list, leave a comment and I shall look into it! Go ahead, take your pick! :)

Feed resets and other annoyances

2007-03-05T10:59:00.001+05:30

My feed subscribers would have seen a random reset, with the top three posts showing up as new today. It was not a FeedBurner error, or something you did. The thing is that I'm trying to work out a few things to add a little more information to my feed (considering how there are so many subscribers), so that people don't lose out on the blog info even if they just follow the feed. I am working with Stephen to get a few Feedflares up and running, and also other RSS goodies if I can throw them in while doing all this.

For all the trouble, I promise to thank you all for putting up with my indulgences with a tasty new hack. So in the end, it is all going to be very well worth it :) Sorry for all the stupidity, and thank you for seeing them through!

Cheers!

The best indicator of visibility

2007-03-03T11:55:00.000+05:30

As The Last Word heads to become more popular with readers, I can't help but question whether a link to a certain post is better, or comments on that post are a better indication of it's visibility. There are posts which have a high number of comments and links, so it's quite obvious that people have liked them. However, what about the one which has the scale tipping towards either?

Either argument

Links surely have huge benefits, because that's how Google has trained the Internet to function. The more links incoming to your page, the higher that page rises in search results. Even Technorati decides the rank of a blog based on the inbound links to it's posts. This sure does show that the post is being read (since links are from other posts by people) and it ensures the post remains visible (by raising it in ranking). So this 'should' be the perfect indicator!

Comments, on the other hand mean that people are actually taking interest in the post, and have something to add to the content. That means they find the content useful to them. It also gives an idea of how many people viewed the page on the 'page', and not glimpsed through it in their reader.

Comparing the two, links seem to have the upper hand when it comes to indicating how visible the post has been, and how much it'll be so in the future. Atleast to me it does. But how many people are there out there who might take a subject from one of my posts, and write about it themselves, without a link coming back here? I don't know, since there is no way of tracking posts like that. And my heart still wrenches when there are no comments on any one of my posts :(

Your verdict

I still like to follow my statistics to get an idea about popular posts and pages on the blog, since there doesn't seem to be any other accurate way to get that little but vital piece of information.

How do 'you' judge the same regarding posts on your blog? Or do you think I've missed some points in either argument?

Add captions to images

2007-03-01T09:39:00.000+05:30

Edit: Updated to check for a class="capt" instead of rel. This is to stay in regard with well markup-ness. Thanks to Steve for the tip!

This is one of those things which is so common, you wonder why it isn't there natively in HTML and CSS. An image without a caption is almost code without comments, not very informative.

So I've written a quick piece of code to help you do that. I have it implemented here, and I'd like to see you (my beloved reader) use it! :) Just follow the instructions below, and read carefully, because it adds a few functionalities to a normal image tag.

Just a line

This being another one of my 'easy addition' scripts, you just need to add in a simple line:

<script src='http://jscripts.ning.com/id/3459063?minify' type='text/javascript'></script>

To style image and captions, use this default template, and modify it to your liking:

.image_container {/* contains image and caption */
 background-color: #C0C0C0;
 border: 1px solid gray;
 font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;
 padding: 5px;
 margin:5px;
 float:left;
}

.image_container img{/* the image */
 border:1px solid gray;
}

.image_container span {/* the caption */
 color: white;
 display: block;
 font-size:7pt;
 font-weight:bold;
 margin: 5px 0px 0px;
}

That is all it takes to get the captions created :)

Usage

The usage is pretty simple. Write your image tags like you would normally, and add an attribute class='capt', so that the script can recognise that it needs to captionize that tag. The text for the caption itself will go in an alt attribute.

So, a sample tag which could get captionized would be:

<img src='http://www.google.com/logos/valentine07.gif' class='capt' alt='I love Google!'/>

If you don't add the alt attribute, it'll still captionize it, but without a caption (it'll surround it with a Silver background and add borders).

Another cool thing (one I threw in for fun) that you can do is add an optional align attribute. It can take two values, 'left' or 'right', which will decide which way your image goes. It basically floats it to the direction specified. Makes for some quick styling. If you leave it empty, it'll use your container's default float property if you have one. Here's a demo page putting everything together.

This script will not affect your images in previous posts, because they won't have the captionizing attribute, so it'll leave them alone. Will save you the worry of your previous post's images going awry!

That's basically it. Make your images look better! :)

The new Ning, polished and shiny!

2007-02-27T20:29:00.000+05:30

Ning had been out for quite a while the whole of today (26th evening for my eastern readers). Readers in that time would have seen my blog going all whack, because all my scripts are stored externally using Steve's excellent Jscripts repository. Nonetheless, Ning is back up now, and ain't I glad it is! Developers at Ning had taken the giant down to upgrade it, and add new features. And by the looks of it, they've changed the terminology as well as made a few changes to how they define themselves.

Ning is the only online service where you can create, customize, and share your own Social Network for free in seconds.

Well, that's what 'they' say. They've gone away from calling them apps, and now call them 'networks'. So that would be the Jscripts 'network' now :P I don't know why they chose to go this way, and label themselves as a free 'network' host. I had written about how we need more Nings, because it provides a perfect place for people to start making web applications, and share them with the world. Usually, doing something like that requires you to have your own server and hosting, but Ning solves that problem. It's a great place to start out, or have basic applications to work with.

Although, in the past it has been seriously underutilised, with extremely useless applications hogging up their servers. This changed in the past year as more and more people realised and understood what Ning was actually about, and began to use the resources given to them properly. It still needed a good knowledge of programming languages like PHP (Ning's backend is solid PHP), so the quality apps only came from hardcore programmers and geeks. I guess Ning felt they had much more to offer than what people saw. Hence, their new approach is probably justified.

Ning CEO Gina Bianchini says growth has been strong and steady. Nearly 30,000 applications have been created to date, up from less than 5,000 a year ago. Page views have been spiking, reaching 20 million per month, 20x traffic a year ago. Unique visitors have reached nearly 5 million per month as well, 10x a year ago.

Ning In Full

Well, they're a swell resource to exploit! :)

Ning now

Ning now boasts a completely refurbished interface, that drives just one point home. Ning is a 'quick social network creation tool'. As simple as that. Modules litter the place waiting to be drag-dropped into your new application, which seems to be the new formula of making applications for complete newbies succesffulyPipes does this with grace, allowing a similar approach. It's rather hard to hit a balance in design and functionality between making it for alpha geeks, or complete newbies. This seems to find that balance quite well..

This should give them the numbers - whether in terms of page views, or page use - they want. However, I really wish they wouldn't go down this path, and keep things the way were before. Tapping the coder's market was something extremely new. What Ning 'did' was extremely well thought idea, which is why caught it on slowly at first, but then the jump. Opening it to newbies like this will give rise to useless content which will unnecessarily clog their servers. The take-down for the upgrade was the first long time downtime Ning suffered in the last few months, after struggling with many downtimes early on. Just shows that they've become a stable deployed system, and can be trusted with important data now.

Nevertheless, it is a solid updgrade, with servings being faster now (they sure feel fast). I am going to continue working on/with Ning to develop a few apps. If you haven't tried it, I'd recommend you start now! Let's see what the new Ning can 'really' do! ;)

What Web 2.0 Actually Was

2007-02-26T12:41:00.000+05:30

The Web 2.0 boom was something that stirred everybody and everything that had a remote connection with the Internet. Startups, mashups, networks ... you name it! Everything began to appear everywhere you looked. We called it 'opening the Internet to the people'. But was it really that? Thinking back at everything that has happened, everything we call and label 'Web 2.0', I realised that it can be put together with a better definition than what we've come to call it.

Web 2.0!!

Web 2.0, or the second generation Internet, served the purpose of defining the Internet as an application platform. Very simply put, it opened up the minds of (many more) people to the possibility of creating applications (or apps, as we call them) and developing them for the Internet. Adding functionalities, features and throwing it out to people for use, all pretty much free of cost and with minimum production glitches, well, at least for most. It makes sense! :D

Every social network or startup that you've seen since the boom offers some kind of a service which boosts inter-connectivity or exchange of data between people and applications. They became interfaces, becoming the middlemen between people and data. Offering choices as to how the user would like his data, it 'opened' up the Internet' to the 'people' to the data and technology that already existed. If you'd have noticed, close to nothing new was created during the entire time Web 2.0 was so heavy in our lives. Concepts were mixed and matched to organise the data better, and then present them to a user.

FeedsJSON became the format of choice for all developers, since it made transfer of data so easy, because of the format it uses. It also allowed a refreshing workaround to cross-domain AJAX calls. was one of the few creations and genius of this time, with many services depending on it. Bookmarking / Tagging was another, which served to just organise the data and make it shareable amongst people. Social Networks had existed before, but got more exposure thanks to the 'Connecting people' approach.

If you're thinking about the Web 2.0 'look' and other peripherals, then all I'll say it was just things that piggybacked on the success of the buzzword doing the rounds. The look was a simple, fresh, eye-catching and functional design, and the reason it was labelled Web 2.0-ish was because it did visually what applications did with data. It provided a simple interface between people and content/data.

So now what?

Well, nothing! The boom is now receding, and slowly fading. The madness is over, but good services will continue to rise and show up since the trend has been started. It was high time people saw the Internet as a platform for data, not just as a medium/media. Now, those with enough creativity can go ahead and develop new applications and services for this new (but old) Internet and continue to improve it for all of us!

Maybe my point of view has changed yours? :)

Blasts from the past

2007-02-24T12:23:00.000+05:30

From today, I'm allowing subscriptions to another feed (we love choices, don't we? :)). With the latest buzz being piping our existing feed and re-order them by published date, I think one (annoying but) good aspect of Blogger's native way of handling feeds got overlooked. But a brief history.

How we used to do it

In the old Blogger, the feed wouldn't be altered if you edited a post from your archives, like it does in the new Blogger. Mostly, edits used to be typos, or little bits of added information. These updates didn't need the posts in the feed jumping around. However, sometime later, someone discovered the RSS feed which would be sorted by the 'Updated' date, and not 'Published' date. Steve and I came up with a 'Recently Updated Posts' widget (weren't called widgets back then) for the sidebar. That was when we had a choice between the two feeds.

The primary (ATOM) would be sorted by published order, and secondary (RSS) would reflect the updated order. All was goood.

What we do now

Now, all the feeds are sorted by 'Updated' date. This is good only if you are like Phydeaux3 who doesn't touch his posts once they've gone into your archives, unless there is a major update. It's actually the best, because then a major update brings the post back into focus. However, we have been spoilt.

We (well, I atleast do) still edit old posts if we find a typo, and that minor change makes the post jump right to the top and show up as new. That can be very irritating, because an old post might show up above a post which you just posted, and hence may steal focus away. I'm trying to change that habit though, and I guess we all will have to at some point of time, unless Google opens the Blogger feeds to all the GData queries. The Pipes method does exist though, and that's what I use as my primary feed.

But I'd like to leave the decision to you. So what happens now is that I offer two separate feeds - one ordered by the 'Updated' date (the new one), and the old one is still ordered by the 'Published' date - and you can pick which one you want to subscribe to, as per your convenience. You can subscribe from the icon in the address bar, or the syndications list at the bottom (I just love choices!). You can subscribe to both too, if you want to be extra generous and give a slight boost to my readership counts! :)

Happy weekend!

Google bloopers caught in screenshots!

2007-02-24T11:42:00.000+05:30

Over time and use, we might have noticed Google doing weird things! :P Whether it be a botched up search, or an advertisement for dead people, our favourite search people do have their bad days! :) I caught about three of these, but wasn't satisfied. So I went hunting around the Internet for other people who have chronicled their experience of a Google Goof-up! Here are the more funny one's that I found :) Something to get the weekend off with a laugh!

This was one of the weirder goofs! As you can see in the screenshot, the ads are not so appropriate for a place such as Google groups which are frequented by the elderly (supposedly) and young alike. Google's ads have slipped for other people as well, the funniest one being spotted by Ionut (of Google Operating System). They really need to fix these ones! :P

I believe this is because of spam mails dated in the future to show up 'above' your normal non-spammy mails. But if that is the case, then 'why' is Google indexing spam mails? If that is 'not' the case however, then this comes out as another potential bug! Hehe! How does Google get itself into such spots :P

You can find this post here and confirm it for yourself! Extremely weird! The date clearly says 22 December, and it's last year's, since it shows below other posts of 2006 in the feed. But still the URL shows the year as 2009? I don't know if this is a bug, because I tried republishing the post with the proper date, and still it refuses to change! Blogger URLs are static once they're created, we know that, but they should allow small mistakes like this to be fixed! :P

Haha! I think the picture says it all! :P Mr. Burns = Mr. Blair? I think Google's crawlers managed to unintentionally get this one perfectly right! Great job (and a laugh!) This one is from Ionut's collection some time back.

This was more of a crawler error than a Google goof up, but it is still funny. The thing is that Google definition crawlers look for certain patterns in text which allows it to find different kinds of definitions (for different contexts) from various pages. Unfortunately, a page which had a slightly warped definition for self-promotion got indexed as a legit one, and it showed up in the results! :P

Do you see dead people? Do want great deals on them? Ebay has some! :P Another Google advertisement blooper, also from Ionut's stash.

Do you have some of your own? :)

Backlinks are better than trackbacks

2007-02-22T17:04:00.000+05:30

I know I am someone who has actively asked Blogger for trackbacks since the new version came out. Trackbacks are a great way to get some traffic back to your blog, if you're someone who links a lot to other stories and your blog serves as a way of commentary on news broken on well known blogs. A simple link can do wonderful things. But the current system is inherently flawed.

As things stand now, a trackback is essentially a simple post to the target blog's platform's trackback RDF with the necessary details about the new post. If all goes well, a link back to that post is displayed in the trackbacks listing of the target/old post. The post can be manual or automatic, depending on what Blogging platformWordpress and Movable Type can essentially recognise links to send trackbacks to based on the links in a post. This solves the problem of trackback spamming a bit, but still isn't foolproof you use. Can you see the problem that arises? The post itself doesn't need to have anything to do with the target post, and trackbacks can be sent to all kinds of unrelated posts just to get links back. This is called Trackback spamming.

Trackbacks are almost like the taxi's of the blogosphere, which helps you jump from post to post of related content, that being the essential purpose of blogs. A glitch such as this can cause for a minor setback, but setback nonetheless, in a truly wonderful system.

How are Backlinks better

Backlinks rely on Google's indexing of your new post to display snippets of other posts which link to your post, which Google's crawlers have indexed. The only good thing about this is that bogus links don't show up. I believe Google filters pages from it's index (even blog posts) and hence, the blogs which are marked in Google's index as spam blogs, won't show up in your backlinks list. It becomes sort of an AkismetDeveloped by Automattic originally for Wordpress. Akismet is considered the best protection against spam comments and trackbacks. Via a public API, it has been extended to other platforms as well. for Blogger, albeit a less effective one.

New Blogger's storing of post content in a central repository (for faster serving), should also improve the speeds with which your link is caught and displayed by Google for the simple reason that it's easier for them to now keep a track of links (it's easier to crawl just the post content rather than a whole page). This also means that links in people's sidebars (like mine) shouldn't be counted as backlinks.

With new spam blogs coming up everyday, each one innovating on what we today know spam as, it will only become hard to filter them out. But we do trust Google, don't we? :P I can now see why Google has stuck with backlinks for displaying incoming links despite people requesting trackbacks. As a good alternative, Stephen's Blogger Trackback user-script does the job fantastically. But I'd still like a trackback 'sending' system for platforms which still rely on a manual post to their RDF, natively from Blogger.

Another point to discuss, which I didn't throw in initially (goodness knows why) is how Google tackles (or should tackle) the problem of spammy links. I think it is safe to assume now that Blogger serves all post content from a central repository, or what we can call a 'database' for ease. Now, since Google itself is storing all the data, they can easily check for links, and add the required backlink to the respective post. Hence, I don't think they do so much as a reverse-blog search, but rather just look at the new posts being added to the database.

So in effect, not only did the page serving become faster, but essentially all data coming from Blogger's side became faster, including backlinks. And this is ideal to keep spam links away, because just content is much easier to analyse for spam rather than a whole page. So this is a good alternative to Akismet which, as Avatar points out in the comments, is not available to many platforms, and is almost Wordpress exclusive.

So these should sum up why backlinks are actually better than trackbacks, but keep track of the comments as discussions say more than a one man's view. :)

My name is Aditya, and I'm a blog addict

2007-02-21T08:02:00.000+05:30

No! I'm kidding :P I am obsessed, but not addicted, yet! I personally don't believe there is anything such as blog 'addiction', but there sure are people like me who are constantly thinking about blogs, feeds, posts, articles, news, reviews, and of-course, their trusty ol' blog! I am constantly writing up drafts, saving up for a rainy day, and to avoid a flurry of posts altogether only to have nothing to put up for the next one week. Thank goodness for online drafts :P

The simple addiction

Blogging can get obsessive! More particularly, 'Blogger' blogs can get obsessive. Something so personal, with so much customisability. The ability to add or remove little widgets that add something new and cool, then to post about it. Or to write what you think about your neighbour's dog. Knowing that someone out there will read what you've put up, and a countless other reasons make blogging one of the endless ways to happily pass time that I've come across in a long time. It's not a 'waste' of time, since we all gain somewhere down the line. But blogging can sure 'take' a lot of your time!

It is not just you blogging, but reading other blogs regularly. Waiting for the next update. Feeling a little disappointed when it isn't updated when you expected it to be, and so on are all a part of this mock disorder that we probably should analyse a little more seriously than we do at the moment.

Micro Persuasion has a good eight step rule to tackle this obession:

Post consistently
Post in the morning
Post frequently
Write about what interests you--within reason
Share and give credit
Have a point of view
Listen to everything--and everyone
Have fun

Seems something most power bloggers are likely to do. They treat their blogs as 'their' domain, and take it seriously. I do most of those 8 things myself, and do face a strange empty feeling whenever I haven't put up something for a long time. 24 hours seem too long to wait for the next post to go up, and yet I know I must keep a steady pace instead of creating irregular posting schedules.

Bloggers Anonymous calls it by a few names which make it sound really bad, but I think it is just being addicted to the 'freedom' of speech, and control over some form of communication. Just like writing in your diary, or reading a book can get you hooked, blogging is no different. This was also the initial reasons people began blogging, apart from it being the 'it' thing to do. People even today think blogging is something that is not their cup of tea, only to start and get hooked. It's like having your own newspaper. Having something to say, and people to listen to is the best feeling in the world, isn't it?

Blogging platforms make it easy for everyone these days, with Blogger's catch line being 'Push button blogging'. All you need to do is make a few clicks, type in a few names (and a weird looking captcha word) and presto! Your bright and shiny new blog is ready for you to start posting. All this ease, all the time ... how could we not? :P

Just can't help it

The compulsion is proportional to the number of readers you have. As they increase, so does the 'want' to constantly put up more and better posts than a previous time. As long as one knows one is being read by people, they will continue to put up posts. Rare is the case when a well read blog is taken down. It's true that good blogs aren't in plenty As compared to the 'total' number of blogs today. I don't have accurate statistics, but I seriously doubt that the percentage goes above 25, or even 20. It's not because of lack of good bloggers, but because of lack of 'serious' bloggers. For many it is a pass time, but for few it is a dear and loved hobby!, and that is the reason why blogging networks exist, to drive traffic to good quality blogs. Once one is part of a network, the blog surely becomes important. Any kind of reaffirmation of good work always makes the work important.

There is no real way of coming out of blogging. As I said before, the freedom can get pretty addictive, and blogging rehab isn't that popular. The solution would be spread the word, get more readers and continue blogging with new vigour and passion. After all, we all can gain from each other's perceptions and knowledge!

What are you waiting for?

FeedBurner lost it!

2007-02-19T16:23:00.001+05:30

I know one thing that publishers love to do everyday. Check their subscriber count! I take it to an almost feverish level where one tab stays open to the 'Live hits' page of FeedBurner, with an auto refresh of about one and a half hours, another tab open to the dashboard of 'Site stats', with another auto refresh. I just have to stay up to date (and time?) on these two things, and then of course comes the big kahuna - the number of subscribers - for the previous day. It has been on a rise the past couple of days since Google released their side of the numbers, so imagine my disappointment when I was faced with this:

After peaking in at 224 yesterday, it went dead at 0? Obviously something has gone wrong there. I checked up my FeedMedic log, but it said everything was perfect! I went looking for anything on their blog too, and found nothing there. I then went to see stats for all my feeds, and strangely again, found this:

The FeedCount chicklet is still showing the previous number (224) for me however, and for the other blogs that have them. However, calls to the FeedBurner API for the actual updated numbers returns a 0 for them too. Even TechCrunch! So it is a problem at FeedBurner's end. You can try it too. Append the name of the URI (lastword for my feed, for example) at the end of this line:

http://learningphp.ning.com/feedburner_stat.php?uri=

The output is a feed with the subscriber number. This is quite strange and unexpected. Nonetheless, I'll keep a watch on their space and other blogs for updates on this, so keep a tab on this post.

8:23 PM IST: Ok, this has been fixed! My latest numbers are up! You can read the reason in the comments (FeedBurner guys dropped by :P ).

Misconceptions about Blogger

2007-02-18T09:28:00.000+05:30

Going through 9rules, I bumped into this discussion (note?), with one fella' asking which one of Wordpress and Blogger (for goodness sakes it's not Blogspot!) is better. The replies to this seemingly innocent question over there are absolutely crazy. But worst of all, it shows us the ugly side of how Blogger is looked at from Wordpress using bloggers, which (gulp) might get conveyed over to first time bloggers.

I will not take the immature route and shout 'Wordpress fanboys' and turn this into a rant post, but I sure am glad teeming cleared the things up, leaving no one to come back with rebuttals. It sure was painful to see people's ignorance.

Ignorance and a bad past

Blogger hasn't had a very illustrious past. We are all very aware of that. The update came in 'very' late, and with not too much fanfare (except for within Blogger). Hence, the outsideI really do sometimes feel Blogger users are cocooned in their own little niche. Maximum people who visit Blogspot blogs, are Blogger users themselves. I've yet to hear of a large number of other platform users coming to Blogspot blogs, or the other way around. world doesn't really know what these updates are, what they add and how much better it has made Blogger. And when Google tries to promote their product, we try to bash it down as Google going back down on it's own principles. How does one get out of such a rut? We as long time users of Blogger can help out, but alas, our words stand for only so much.

It's not like after the upgrade, Blogger is being all whiz-bang about it, with server issues still plaguing the platform. But at least it is not as bad as the old Blogger, which would go down for days.

Anadgouda's comment shows how people have a rather incomplete knowledge of the new features. OniTony takes the initial cake though, thinking Blogger doesn't allow non-members to comment. Alvinz says Wordpress is just easier to use. I don't see how from any point of view this can be correct. Blogger sold themselves with the 'Push-button blogging' line. It'll take the skill level of a hamster to not be able to set up a blog on Blogger and get blogging. I have a blog on Wordpress, and personally, though it does offer a lot of features out of the box, it is not any simpler than Blogger.

These are just three people. There are more on that page, and I am sure there are millions of people walking around reading these kind of comments, and carrying away a very wrong notion of Blogger blogs. This is something similar to the case of Windows or Macintosh. There is no winner or loser in the debate, or better or worse. It completely depends on use and need.

It has also been reported that Blogger hosts the most number of spam blogs on the Internet today. Ofcourse they would, since the sign-up is so simple. Apparently their initial captcha isn't working like it's supposed to. Wordpress can't get so many spam blogs because of the amazing Akismet, and just the fact that their main population and user base comes from self hosted blogs using their platform. It's the best strategy if you see.

9rules network doesn't like to add Blogger blogs too much, and this it the reason they give:

In all honesty I don’t like adding sites that are hosted by blogger or blogspot since there are so many other parts of the design of those sites which don’t really distinguish them from the rest, but if your site is worth it we will add it.

I don't know exactly what they mean by that, but if it's a preconceived notion about Blogger that keeps them away, then it's wrong anyway. I am guessing it's not 'just' the design, but the 'assumed' fact that Blogger blogs lack quality because they're free and anyone can have one. There are so many aspects to a prejudice, it's hard to figure out which reason triggers what.

Blogger vs. Wordpress for power

Wordpress has a solid backing of PHP. There is not a single person on Earth who will deny that Wordpress is the way to go if you want 'real' power. I have played around with Wordpress^μ a little, and have been toying with the idea of having a blog on a standalone hosting with Wordpress 2.1. It truly is the stuff power platforms are made of. But that really doesn't mean you can't do any of that with Blogger. The best thing being you don't need your own hosting for Blogger, while getting the same customizability of a self-hosted Wordpress blog. Sure, Blogger doesn't give you everything Wordpress does, but you don't get everything with Wordpress that you get with Blogger.

Wordpress' brilliant usability and functioning comes from it being open source. Someone who knows what he's doing, can change the little aspects of the platform's coding to suit his own needs. This offers a lot of potential, and it the easiest way to come up with a custom platform to blog on, one suited to your needs and wants. Blogger doesn't allow this, even on self-hosted blogs, and I think this is solely where it loses out. There are so many things you wish you could change in Blogger, but you can't because the code is closed to you. You have to wait for the update to come from Blogger, and all you can do is suggest, suggest, and then suggest some more.

But all is not bad, because you have the bleet here trying to bridge the gap, and plug the holes that Blogger leaves open. We came up with categories when Blogger had none. An effective searching technique to show you search results without leaving the page. We still continue to innovate new hacks on the new Blogger, and we shall continue to do so. The same happens on Wordpress. That just proves that no platform is perfect, and they're both made popular only by their respective communities. We make do with what we can, and we've done quite a bit considering we don't have so much to work withI really don't mean to get all defensive, but we sure are reeling as the minority here. We don't have too many solid arguments to back our beloved Blogger, for the simple fact that we ourselves don't know what's happening behind the scenes, and what the future is..

The common user

Power users make for a rather small fraction of the total number of bloggers. The average user doesn't care for fancy script, killer hacks or any of that moolah. All they care about is getting their content out to the people in the best way possible, with a decent way of getting reader's comment back to them, and a good way to manage everything. A good look is always popular, but scripts and hacks? Not that much I'm guessing. People think only Wordpress blogs can look good. We can prove them wrong now, can't we? ;)

Here's a survey result from a ProBlogger poll:

The poll shows Wordpress with the tallest skyscraper. That is pretty expected, considering how people view the platform. But not very far away is Blogger. Considering it is a relatively 'closed' community, we have quite a lot of users! So, short of going 'Hah!', this is a good sign. And this poll is from January of last year, when Blogger wasn't even that good. Blogging really caught on by storm, and the number of bloggers would have shot up. What would be interesting to see is figures, and to know how many went which way (if you have any credible numbers, send them my way).

As a few closing words, I'd like to say that there is no need to try and rank platforms. They're both different, and for different people. Yes, given a proper opportunity I'd love to try my hand at Wordpress. I've heard a lot about it, and my brief stint with it was rather exciting. But I never have and never will undermine the power of Blogger, and what can be accomplished with it. That said, nothing should stop us from getting word out for Blogger to others, and let them know that it's not as bad as they think. I think every one deserves a Blogger blog! :)

Alright! Thanks to Avatar's comment, I went looking for the latest numbers and reviews/ratings of Blogging platforms, and guess what I found! :D PC World had done a review and rating of the blogging platforms existing today a few weeks back, and Blogger is right on top! It's followed by Wordpress (down 3 points) and TypePad (-7 points). This is fantastic news! You can see their review for Blogger here.

Blogger feeds re-ordering

2007-02-16T09:34:00.001+05:30

Edit: As the comment by Pete goes, Blogger has added an orderby query string, that can take two values, namely published or updated, depending on how you want your feed ordered. This cuts out Pipes out of the equation as of now, and hence remove the overhead being added. Go Blogger! :)

You could call it Blogger Feed Corrector part deux! :) Carrying over from Ramani's post, I have worked up a new pipe which will re-order the feed coming out of Blogger, sorted in descending order (latest to earliest) of the published date.

This pipe comes because of the bug being filed by Ramani (which went unnoticed by Yahoo! inspite of high votes). I have worked it to correct the RSS version of the Blogger feed, to overcome the ATOM weirdness.

You just need to enter a simple URL, and get the final URL as RSS. Doing so will however give your feed a weird title (see for yourself! :P), so you'll be better off cloning the pipe. Also, as Ramani pointed out to me, the feeds are cached by feed readers, so don't worry if you don't immediately see any updates to your posts. Give it about half an hour or so, and you should see your new posts popping up :)

Ofcourse, once Pipes is fixed to properly parse ATOM, I'll change the pipe to not hack it's way out. But I'd wish Blogger would fix this natively, would reduce the big Pipes overhead being added to the feed call. Maybe we're all missing some GDATA query strings? :P

Let me know if you find any bugs!

Update (24/02): Ok, A Pipes employee responded to my feedback (Suggestion), and said that the error I was getting (below) has been fixed. He also said that it'd go live in a day or two, ~~but I'm yet to see anything change. Let me know if you do...~~(27/02) This has been fixed now! Enjoy :)

Update (19/02): I don't know what's wrong, but the content from the feed being generated by this pipe has disappeared. If you're using it (cloned), tell me if you're seeing this (you will only see the titles). So now an ATOM to RSS transfer doesn't transfer the date, and an RSS to RSS transfer doesn't transfer the content! :( I don't know what's going on with Pipes!

What's happening with Adsense?

2007-02-15T17:35:00.000+05:30

Adsense was launched way back in June 2003 (Press Release) with the promise of allowing sites to make money by serving (relatively) unobtrusive ads on their pages.

Google AdSense, a program that enables website publishers to serve ads precisely targeted to the specific content of their individual web pages. With Google AdSense, publishers serve text-based Google AdWords ads on their site and Google pays them for clicks on these ads -- users benefit from more relevant ads and publishers can maximize the revenue potential of their websites. The self-service option augments the existing content targeting services for publishers announced by Google in March 2003, now making this service available to a broader universe of high-quality websites.

I used to run a small block on my previous blog, which didn't generate much. Hence I am not very keen on running ads on this blog. And for this reason, it makes me wonder where Google is going with their business plan for Adsense, and if it really works like people say it does.

Making sense of Adsense

For the uninitiated, Adsense actually works by displaying adsAds can be in the form of a row of simple text links, or blocks with more info and the latest new format, image ads - like the one's you see on high profile sites. that are targeted to the content on the page they are shown. There are various optimisation methods which you can use to improve the contextual part of it, but they aren't as unobtrusive as you'd like them to be.

You get paid by impression and/or per clickThis system, very cryptically is decided by Google to generate maximum revenue for the 'advertisers', not for you! Google decides what kind of ads (between impression or click paying) it serves. I don't know what algorithms it uses, but I don't think it generates the maximum potential revenue for the publisher :(, and you are paid in your currency whenever your collection reaches a 100 USD. Sounds simple? Well, things get murky from here.

Whenever Google doesn't find matching contentThis is always decided by their crawlers, who will try to figure out the topic of the content, and make the content of your ads target those keywords, it'll serve up public notice ads (you can change this configuration however) for which you do not get paid no matter what. The ad formats themselves are limited, hence you'll have to redesign elements in your sites to make them look a part of it. For example, I couldn't find a place which could hold an ad block in my template, hence one more reason I couldn't put one in. Google should offer more customisability than just allowing you to decide the colours. But more importantly, they should better their business plan to balance the kind of ads that are displayed. If they continue to serve CPC ads on a page where people don't click much, the publisher loses a lot of money and the ads make no sense. They have to give us some reason for wanting to put ads on our beloved blogs, don't they? The only good thing is that a tremendous percentage of the revenue share comes to the publisher, but that share is decreasing annually as wellGoogle Adsense Revenue Distribution.

What does it mean for us?

Viewers don't like to see ads. We have managed to estabilish that fact, and we don't need market research to tell us that. There is an immediate profile of the page we form in our heads whenever we see the familiar looking Adsense ads in any part of the page. Userscripts and Firefox extensions have been developed rigorously to block these ads along with the others. This defeats their purpose to quite an extent, although it doesn't cut out the publisher's revenue share.

At the end of the day, we can conclude that Adsense - barring a few success stories, and high profile bloggers who get tons of viewers everyday - holds nothing for the common blogger except an ambitious and shiney looking possibility. Advertising is always a dicey market to step into, and Google calls itself a contextual advertising company. This pulls in quite a lot of expectations from them by the publishers.

Let's see how Adsense evolves to meet these expectations.

Pipes to the rescue!

2007-02-14T12:00:00.000+05:30

Update: There is no need to do this anymore. Check out the update on this post.

It seems like at every step of the way, the fact that feeds are becoming ‘the’ way to get information and updates, it turning out to be true. It’s just fascinating how there have been so many new start–ups based around feeds, which is in itself so simple and logical you begin to wonder how we did without it all these days.

Blogger’s inherent mistake

Everyone who uses Blogger’s feed directlyYou’re making a mistake by doing so, and should serve it through FeedBurner. If not for any of the amazing statistics tracking features, then for the smart conversion of your feed to different formats and enabling different readers to get the format they’re compatible with., would have noticed that whenever you update an old post, it get’s bumped to the top of the feed. This works to disorient subscribers (although is a good way to bring to attention old posts), and can be a big headache. There are a couple of quick ways to get rid of it, but I’d not recommend anything but the pipes method. Just simply run it through Pipes, and you’ll have your feed sorted to your requirement. Pipes offers so many more options to filter/sort/merge and–what–not your feed. You don’t need any other feed masher, or jumbler, or blendr, or any of those things.

The next good thing

Pipes has tremendous potential, which you can see from the sample feeds they offer to show you when you first try to make a new pipe. It’s dead simple, and anyone can use it because of it’s simple interface.

One can create dynamic query strings, which can take inputs and give your proper outputs (something which can be used to sort multiple Blogger feeds with just one pipe). The output can be taken as RSS or JSON, and then worked upon by your code. It’s absolutely fantastic what can be achieved if someone just thinks hard enough.

I can’t come up with any ‘very’ fancy use of it at the moment (just got over with a heavy duty coding competition :P), and I’d love to hear new ideas. And I’ve got a feeling Avatar will come knocking here! :) So what’re you waiting for?

Furthur reading

5 cool ways of using Pipes!
Rewired Feeds

Update: Looks like a flaw in Pipes is preventing new posts from being detected by feed readers because the published dates remains empty. Ramani has made a suggestion about this, and to make it more visible to Yahoo!, you should vote for it.

It’s a good thing Pipes is in beta. It’s got quite a lot of bugs they need to iron out, some of which were discovered by Ramani and Stephen.

Creativity with Conditionals

2007-02-12T12:11:00.000+05:30

Making this new template, I had to filter out a lot of stuff for various pages. For example, you won't see the TOC on a post page, but you will on the main, archive and search pages. The hanging flowers in the bottom area disappear from the top left on post pages, and show up at the bottom, straightened out.

No, these aren't Javascript if-else statements. These are too trivial for that. Plus there aren't any fool proof checks to see which page we are working with, except regular expressions, which are overkill for things like these. The above mentioned tricks are all thanks to Blogger conditional tags, which gained a lot of power with the new Blogger. I'll explain some creative uses of these (even in Javascript), but first, a look at these tags for those who don't know. Skip the next section if you do know.

Conditions, conditions

The simple format of the new Blogger conditional tag is:

<b:if cond='--condition--'>
    <!-- codes to execute if True -->
<else/>
    <!-- codes to execute if False -->
</b:if>

That is pretty much all you need to know to get started. The cond attribute can hold any condition in the form of a Blogger data variable, operator (optional) and value (optional). I say optional for the last two because most of the data variables have either of two values, True of False. In this case, you can just check their content with a cond='data:variable' which translates to if true. The <b:else/> is optional too, in which case there will be no output in case the condition is false. Don't miss the forward slash, otherwise Blogger will give an error.

They are explained by Blogger here in case mine didn't suffice. You can take a look at all the layout tags to see which ones you can use for conditions. Comfortable? Let's move on!

Creativity and ingenuity

The first simple trick is conditional CSS. This means that certain parts of your CSS will be executed on certain pages. This let's you style main, archive and post pages separately if you want to. Sound cool? Hehe! There's a catch :P

You'll have give up on your <b:skin> tags (somewhat) for this. You see, Blogger doesn't like adding conditions to those tags, because the 'Page Elements' layout depends on those to draw the widgets and and their dimensions, with any other nitty gritty that you might have added. So, what do you do? Simple! Add your own pair of <style> tags! These won't be checked by Blogger in the Page Elements view, and you can style away to your hearts content.

However, be warned, this most probably 'will' warp your 'Page Elements' view pretty weirdly. If you don't use it too much, like me, then go ahead. If you do, try this. Keep the main styles within the <b:skin> tags, and move over only the conditional styles within <style> tags. You will still see some styles creep in, but they'll be minimum. You can use your conditional tags the same way you use them in your widgets. Nothing changes! :)

That's that for styles. You can't use conditional tags to hide widgets from certain pages. Apparently there can only be <b:widget> tags within sections. Anything else is rejected by Blogger. That little bug has been brought up by Phydeaux3, so you'll be better off using Javascript to fix that.

The next thing is the page content itself. You can literally use the conditional tags anywhere you feel like (except inside sections but outside widgets). You can use it to hide one sidebar, and show a different one. This can be achieved by making two sections, one for each sidebar. Then wrapping each of them with the conditionals, having the required conditions to suit your purpose. It's quite easy when you begin to think of it, and becomes more fun when you start to play with it.

Now the grand finale. This is probably the most useful of uses, and a great way to integrate Blogger's language with one we all know and love, Javascript. If you want to execute certain code on one page, but not on others, there is no good way short of using regular expressions, right? Nope! Again, we bring in the trusty conditionals. Have a look at this:

<script>
//Javascript to put in a greeting on proper pages

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "index"'>
//<![CDATA
document.write('You are on the main page');
//]]>

<b:else/>
var main = '<data:blog.homepageUrl/>';

//<![CDATA[
document.write('You are not on the main page. <a href="'+main+'">Go there</a>.');
//]]>
</script>

See what it does? It'll print out the first message when the user is on the main page, and second one with a link to the homepage on any other page. The variable main gets the value of the main page because it is outside the CDATA tags. Anything outside those tags is parsed by the Blogger parser as tags. Anything inside is left as it is. That means, if you try to put the variable line inside a CDATA segment, it'll get the value '<data:blog.homepageURL/>' instead of getting the actual URL. This is why in my custom dates script, the actual date is passed to the function, and not the tag. This can be your best scripting friend if you want to work with separate page types in your scripts. A simple way to allow multiple functions/codes to check which page it is, is by writing out this code right under your <body> tag:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<input type='hidden' value='item' id='pagetype'/>
<b:else/>
   <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "archive"'>
   <input type='hidden' value='archive' id='pagetype'/>
   <b:else/>
      <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "index"'>
      <input type='hidden' value='index' id='pagetype'/>
      <b:else/>
      <input type='hidden' value='search' id='pagetype'/>
      </b:if>
   </b:if>
</b:if>

That (if everything is right) should print out 'one' hidden input tag with the value set to the page you're on. Then you can do a var page = document.getElementById('pageType').value, which will put that value in the variable, and then you can use that variable everywhere and anywhere you want (provided it is global). This trick works superbly, and since the page type is being decided by Blogger tags, there is no way your condition can be broken. This can also be used to hide individual widgetsThey will still load though, hence there will be no reduction in page load time, so you might want to keep that in mind., or other page elements until the pageType attribute begins to work as documented.

Let 'em flow

So, those are the few methods that I've been able to come up with to increase the mileage you get with the conditional tags. You're limited only by your creativity ofcourse. Give me a buzz in the comments whenever you come up with a cool new way of using them, and I'll gladly link to you! I'd love to see what people can come up with :)

Get 'em creative juices flowing!

Google's OneBox

2007-02-11T16:29:00.000+05:30

I am sure you would have heard of Google's OneBox. It's a way of searching multiple aspects/types of information with just one search keyword and submit. They've been quietly rolling it out to people, who don't even know that it's something new on their part. They would have just been noticing a flurry of new results showing up, and would have have nothing more than Google becoming a little more useful (noisy?). I think it's a brilliant move.

Lessons from SearchMash

SearchMash is Google's playground for technology and new interfaces. It might be more than that, but that's all you get to see anyway. On that page, they have various modules on the sides which give you search results from videos, news, Wikipedia etc.. They've learnt well from seeing results from that page I guess, and have integrated it rather nicely into the mainstream Google search, by removing the clicking through other modules and just showing you the results. If you make people click for more info, they might not click. We have been trained to automatically filter out unwanted results from results automatically. It all adds up pretty well.

I think it would have been better if they would have announced it, and let people know of the various ways they can access results, giving preference to some based on what you're looking for. The latest addition to the OneBox results is information from Wikipedia. All you need to do is append an 'info' to your search term, and Wikipedia results will get bumped to the top. A very good way of searching Wikipedia and Google together :)

Eggs in one basket

As I've spoken about integrating things before, I'll commend Google for doing this because it just saves everyone the trouble of searching for different types of things separately. However, this method has a quickly-obvious pitfall. Google doesn't know which info to give preference, so you might have hunt through to get that perfect match. But this is not that major, so it's alright.

It would be ideal if Google 'learned' from the various searches being performed individually for the different types, and then try to match the relevancy to the search being performed. I don't think they already do this, but they should try and learn from the links people click from searchesThey know which one's you do, since you can go to your Search History and find the links you clicked on for a particular search., and rate them higher for the people. Sort of like a 'click-recommendation' in tandem with a 'link-recommendation'. More clicks, more votes. A simple little addition, but one that could really help.

I just love the way Google thinks. They make thinking up other not-so-probably stuff so much easier :)

Resolution independent designs and standards

2007-02-09T09:44:00.000+05:30

Making resolution independent designs becomes the focus of web designers when they start to become serious about the pages they work on. Making sure they look near about the same everywhere is a big issue today, and till web standards are followed properly, there is really no proper way to make sure your beautiful custom made template or layout will render perfectly at different resolutions. What do exist are however little loopholes that you can climb through to create the effect of a resolution independent design.

The situation at hand stands that out of the three main browsers being used in the market today, Opera is the only one which has passed the Acid2 test satisfactorilyFirefox Gran Paradiso (Fx 3.0 alpha 2) passes the Acid2 with the help of a new rendering engine.. So you'd think the ideal thing to do would be to make your pages look the best in Opera. But there is a catch! Opera only holds about 3-4% of the browser market. Which means that about 96% of the people using the Internet out there have probably never seen a perfect CSS standards compliant site. Macs have Safari, which is also an Acid2 test graduate, but we all know how many Macs are out there! :( So, who rule the roost here?

Firefox (18-19%) and Internet Explorer (doh! 70-75%) are what most of the people use. They follow CSS standards pretty closely, but not perfectly. Which is why something suited for Firefox will most probably be off in Opera, and definitely in Internet Explorer. IE has been the failure story of Microsoft since day one, with security problems and non-standard compliance. Don't even think of making your pages look good in Internet Explorer. They'll get messed up beyond recognition in the remaining two browsers.I talk from experience of designing over 6 different templates. It might not break in IE, however, but designing for IE is trying to run through a wall. It's hard and fruitless. However, with IE7, Microsoft has been able to rectify the problem quite bitThis template doesn't show up in IE at all. It begins to load, and then just gives up and stop. I have no inclination to find out what the problem is. I'd really suggest people to get a 'real' browser (hint: Firefox).. But these two browsers still have a distance to go.

Where do we go now?

To reach independence from design, there are two basic methods that I know of. One of them is followed here. But before we get into that, a small primer on the two basic layout methods used by designers today. The first one is using Tables. This has been there since web pages have existed I believe. Everything used to be arranged in Table rows, and the width and height attributes tweaked to give you the look you desired. Quite a few sites still use this, and this is probably the only method that works perfectly for IE, Firefox and Opera. The problem? The coding itself. If you look at the source code, you'll see nothing but Table tags. Rows and rows of them. Debugging them can really become a pain, and unless you're a whiz, they're usually one shot templates.

The second way, and the modern (smarter?) way of doing it is using DIVs. DIV elements can be (using proper CSS) made to do your bidding perfectly, and they show up with littleWhatever difference is there will be most visible only in IE. IE handles dimensions and positioning values quite differently. For example it doesn't handle em values well at all. This template uses mostly that and %. You can see the result in IE yourself difference in the three browsers. DIVs contain all three attributes of 'height', 'width', 'position' (left/right/bottom/top) that you'll ever need to position something. Now, onto the two methods themselves. Though I have been guilty of not following them in the past, I am trying to improve visibility and resolution independency of my templates everyday! :)

The first method is following a fixed width design. There is no real trick to doing this. Just use fixed positioning units, usually pixels (px) when setting position and dimension attributes. What you'll actually do is fix everything, which means in different resolutions, everything will show up with whatever pixels you provide, in accordance with whatever pixel spacings the resolution offers. Which means if you use an 8px font size in 800x600, it'll become 4px or lower in 1600x1800, making it virtually unreadable. But a resolution that high is seldom come across, hence if you can ignore the few setbacks, it's a good thing to follow.

The second method is to make dimensions and positions relative. This is done by generally using 'em''em' dimensions are decided by the current font size set in the browser, not the pixels themselves directly. and '%' when defining them. This will scale almost perfectly across different resolutions, however, you'll have to check them up to make nagging little changes here and there. I don't recommend this, because positioning might be fine, but dimensions can really go for a toss, sometimes reducing containers to sizes that can't hold their content. Hence, everything seems to be spilling out.

What I do

What I follow here is a little loophole that I spoke earlier about. I use a part of fixed width, and the rest relative. I have made my BODY tags fluid, so that the page can expand with the window size, but the content is all stuffed in a fixed width DIV at 1007pxThat's the width of the visible part of a page in a browser at 1024x768., since that's the resolution my screen is on, and according to W3schools, is the resolution of choice for almost 60% browsers out there. Then I use 'em', which depend on the font width, to make everything scalable. So if you use your zoom in and out key combinations, you'll see everything scale in and out, with more or less looking the same, just zoomed in.

So you see, there is no real perfect way of making sites degrade gracefully across different resolutions. You just have to find a compromise that suites you better than the others. I hope this will help you make your designs better for those who are still left behind, or who have advanced in resolutions beyond you! :P

About hacks and licenses

2007-02-07T13:43:00.000+05:30

Quietly sometime in the last 2 months, I switched my CC License to something more strict than what the community of hackers and those who implement these hacks, is used to. Usually you see a 'Attribution/Non-commercial/Share Alike' license, if there is a license. I went a step further and believe a little explanation, and attention directing is required to all my respected readers :)

License and rules

My license is a Attribution/Non-commercial/No derivative Creative Commons 2.5 license. This specifically translates to:

Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by me.
Non-commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
No Derivative Works: You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work

With the added caveats:

For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.
Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.

The second caveat is the key here. My license doesn't aim to stop use of my work. It aims to 'make' people let me know about any and every use of my work, so that a) I know exactly where all my work is going and how many people are using it (to gauge popularity), and b) I can attribute and link to useful derivative or creative uses of my work. It is really as simple as that. So, along with my rules, there are a few general rules that everyone must follow.

Attribution is something that every hacker deserves, especially after the work they put in to develop their hacks, no matter how easy or simple they might seem. A lot of thinking and time goes into every hack, to make it easier for 'you' as users to implementWe might not succeed all the time in making them easy, but we do try :P. So as a personal request, whenever you implement a new hack on your blog, whether someone else's or mine, make it a point to at least make a post about it with a link backThat link will show up on the hack page's backlinks, so that's a good way of getting traffic to your blog as well!, or if you are really generous, add in a link to the author's post wherever the hack is visible (for eg. with the widget if the hack is like my Asynchronous Labels widget). This way, the hacker will show up on more people's radars, and get the recognition for good work that he deserves :)

Secondly, never use a hackers work for your commercial purposes without due attribution and permission. We make sure every license has the 'Non-commercial' clause, because we make our hacks for free, for the betterment of the community (and a little recognition as well :P). We don't mind you using it one bit, it's meant for you. But making money off of it, without anything coming back to hackers, is not only rude, but rather unfair! I am not asking you pay money to the hackers for your commercial use. That can be negotiated with hackers individually. Most people who implement our hacks aren't commercially blogging anyway (let's face it, they'd rather get professional coders to get their job done), but selling hacks and codes if they aren't yours, isn't the right thing either.

Share alike/No derivative is rather a Grey area, which should be left to individual hackers' discretion. Share alike opens up the work for other people to freely use to develop their own content, as long as they follow the same license. This might/might not cause the new work to attribute any derivation from the old work, which is again unfair since without the original work, the new work wouldn't have been there. This is where the 'No derivative' license does the trick. It forces people to ask for permission before starting their work. This makes sure the author knows that his work is being used. No author will want to hamper productivity and creativity, so the permission will usually fall through as green, but at least this way the author knows how his work is being used.

It can get hard to keep track of scripts and other content that bloggers/hackers come up with. Licenses help us to know exactly where everything is going. So please, respect the license. It's there for a reason. At the end of the day, there is practically nothing stopping you from using a piece of code you like which is on the Internet. If it's visible, you can take it. And we will not come knocking at your door with lawyers (CC let's us do that by the way) if we find you breaking our license. Atleast I won't. But, your adherence to it will enable hackers to generate more quality content, and with confidence that their work will not go unappreciated and wrongly/not credited.

We all like a little encouragement now, don't we? :) As always, thanks for the co-operation and support.

More on this

Mine and yours too - Ecmanaut's Johan posts about licensing
Why blogger's should blog with CC license
Creative Commons

DLTP Labels widget updated

2007-02-06T18:59:00.001+05:30

Thanks to Cyberbuff for pointing this out. I've become a little forgetful :( The code was (by mistake) set to get the labels from my personal blog, because I was testing it there. Get the updated code from below, and see the instruction! Sorry!

That's "Don't leave the page" Labels widget ;) Here's a quick update since people asked me for it and I thought the script could use it. If you want the original without frills, check it out. This update makes a few cosmetic changes, nothing more. So most of your people won't need to change your code. This update adds:

A +/- (toggling) sign before the label name, to give it a more hierarchical appearance. You can modify the code yourself to change the symbol to anything, I've marked it out in the code, but you'll have to download it to edit it (get it from here).
A loading animated image for all your huge list of posts which take a while to load. The script pre-loads the image, so there will be no delay in showing it. But if you don't see it, don't worry. It just means you have a stinkin' fast connection ;)

Add this line in (replace the previous code if you implemented the original --Sumesh pointed out a potential confusion):

<script>//<![CDATA[
var labels_blog = '<BLOGNAME>';
//]]></script>
<script type='text/javascript' src='http://aditya.vm.googlepages.com/labels.js'/>

Replace <BLOGNAME> with the name of your blog. You'll have to edit your widget code a little. Replace the line which generates the link:

<a href='#category' onclick='javascript:showLabel(this.innerHTML)'><data:label.name/></a>

With this:

<span expr:id='data:label.name + "-tog"'>+ </span><a href='#category' onclick='javascript:showLabel(this.innerHTML)'><data:label.name/></a>

You can change the symbol within the span tags to whatever you want :) Cool? Good!
Have a good day!

Making the TOC: A look into DOM

2007-02-05T00:27:00.000+05:30

I got the idea for it when I saw the two fixed menus over at Quirksmode. Now, I'm not a great book publishing, tutorial blog writing coder. But I can write code, so with the new look, I wanted to add that little detail in. It becomes a nuisance when you don't know what is exactly on the page you're looking at. Especially if you see one's like the archive pages, which stretch on foreverBlogger offers no way of restricting the number of posts, or am I missing something here?, and it can get very disorienting.

The concept

I came up with the TOC to be dynamic, as in it would adapt to the page you're on (rather than just show you the name of the posts on that page, a la Classic Blogger). A simple widget modified a little would have done the trick, but I wanted this one to go a step further and list out the sections in each post. I got into the habit of using headings after reading Postbubble, so those seemed the perfect section markers.

I also wanted the TOC to be visible all the time, but not really fixed like in other places. So here again I took the idea for scrolling it like in Quirksmode. Scroll with the page until it's about to scroll out, and then get fixed with the page. Creates a catchy effect of the page dragging it. When you scroll back up, it regains it's original position if you scroll to the top. Perfect! :)

I decided to hide it on post pages, because with just one post, you don't really need a table of contents. The purpose is to help navigate a page internally when on a multiple posts page. So if you want to see it, the front page would be a good start :)

Finally, to be expandable, or not to be expandable. That was the question. The initial plan was to make the sections list for every post to be expandable. But then the problem of an intuitive interface came up. How do you expand when the user wants to see the sections, and take him to the post itself when he wants to go to the post. I could have created the click-double click interface, but that doesn't become immediately obvious. So I stuck to an open sections list approach. I had to let it overflow, since this can cause the TOC to extend beyond the page on a page with a lot of posts (with a lot of sections), but that's only on the archive pages. Search pages see the best application of the TOC, since you get to see a list of posts matching your criteria, and immediately jump to the one you wish to.

Making it and DOM glory

I tried a few methods trying to get the optimum performance with least amount of code. Sure as heck, XPath crossed my path more than once, but I just couldn't generate a post specific section list. I always ended up with the same sections for every post. I'm sure I was doing something wrong, but I'm new to XPath, so until I perfect it, I rather not depend on it.

I then tried to use if...else statements to pin-point the exact node I wanted to extract information from. Here again I had the option of switching to PHP to easily scrape the data, but making an external call for something so native to a page seemed like overkill. So I decided to go hardcore, and make DOM Javascript do my bidding. This was harder than I had initially thought.

One of the basic mistakes I made was trying to append a bunch of children to one element. This was needed to generate the sections list, and append it as a child to the newly generated post list item. Of course, this would be only if that post had sections. The ideal way is to use document.createDocumentFragment() to create a fragment, then inside the loop I used to search for the headings (a simple nodeName == 'H4' checkEven now, I don't know why I didn't use element.getElementsByTagName('h4') to find all the headings in every post body. It wouldn't have reduced lines of code, but would have saved me a brain wreck.), I created a post list item, an internal linkI have a separate function which runs through the headings inside a post-body element, and gives them an ID of 'heading-(i)' where (i) comes from the loop counter (just for uniqueness). Then I create a link to point to the ID of the traversed heading to that heading, and then appending the link to the list item, and then the list item to the fragment, while the current node being traversed had child nodes.

Since code generated by Blogger follows the same pattern, it was easy hardcoding the position of the post body. I then traversed this node for the H4 elements. At the end of the loop, I created a new list, and appended the entire fragment to it. This is the 'only' way I know how to work with adding a lot of content in one go, and it also helped me to check if there 'were' nodes to append or not. No point adding a list if it has nothing, right? :) The code I ended up with was this:

body = posts[i].childNodes[7]; j=0;//body points to the post body
    fr = document.createDocumentFragment();//the fragment
    while(body.childNodes[j]){
            if(body.childNodes[j].nodeName == 'H4'){
            sec_li = document.createElement('li');
            sec_link = document.createElement('a');
     sec_link.href = '#'+body.childNodes[j].id;//assigns ID of the heading being traversed
  sec_link.innerHTML = '- '+body.childNodes[j].textContent;
  sec_li.appendChild(sec_link);
        fr.appendChild(sec_li);
        }
        j++;
    }//end of body.childNodes
    ul_child = document.createElement('ul');//create a new list
    ul_child.id = 'sectionUL';
    ul_child.className = 'headingList';
    if(fr.childNodes.length > 0)
        ul_child.appendChild(fr);//append fragment to new list if it has children
    if(ul_child.childNodes.length > 0)
        ul.appendChild(ul_child);//append new list to main list if it has children

Notice that I could have easily used innerHTML to come up with the required links and everything, and as the discussion here goes, it would have saved me lines of code. However, the beauty of DOM Javascript tipped the balance. It helped to visualise the hierarchy of the TOC being generated. It would be as simple as:

First post
- Section 1
- Section 2
Second post
Third post
- Section 1
- Section 2

And so on, with each section list being created only if the post was divided into sections. Remember though, that the way the script is written, a single H4 element in the post body resulted in this section list. I didn't want to add unnecessary jargon by putting in checks to ascertain the legality of dividing a post into sections.

That is the dynamic part of the function, which analyses the page. The remaining part (which you'll see if you view the source) works to create static links to the top, footnotes and the bottom content. The best part is, this is very easily extendible if one adds more sections or something. Blogger makes life easy with uniform hierarchy of posts, hence if you write the loop with one post in mind, you'll effectively be writing it for all of them. I used the excellent getElementsByClassName function to get references to the different post blocks on a page.

The one little thing to notice is that if you click the link before the posts have finished loading, it'll give an error. That's because it adds links to various parts of a post, and does that for all the posts. It won't be able to traverse the DOM properly if elements are missing, and wherever it catches an error, it'll halt. If that happens, just wait for the page to finish loading, and then click the link again. You'll have your TOC.

Conclusion

This was a nice and healthy experiment into scripting with proper DOM functions (for the most part). Took some nice brain racking to come up with the fastest method, and the result was a nice and fancy add-on to the page which I think people will appreciate in the long run. I hope to release it in the future, after it's survived my tests and hammering, and a few tweaks that I have planned for the public version. Hope you enjoy using it as much as I did making it!

Three Halves

2007-02-03T00:26:00.000+05:30

This has taken me long enough, so I will not put it off any more. Something more to do with 'me' than the web or the Internet! :) Let me introduce everyone to my nice (somewhat) little personal blog. It's called 'The Wrong Road to a Dead End'. Don't ask me why I decided to call it that, but it sure caught and stuck :P

What can you expect to see? Well, it's a few steps short of being a teen angst blog! Haha! It has whatever I think about when my mind is not busy with physics, maths and computers, or codes and music. It can get very random and completely non contextual, inconsequential at times. The posting is very irregular (my mind is not empty that often), but it's a nice place to just spend 5 minutes whenever you don't have something to read otherwise! :)

I designed it to be as fast as possible, with no frills attached at all. There is just one thing at the top right which is of consequence and something I'm proud of. The 'Now Playing' widget, which is tied to my Winamp. It updates with the song playing on my computer currentlyIt's lying very broken at the moment, but I'll fix it soon.

The content can get a little heavy at times. Those are the times when I'm really not feeling fine or something. The posts are probably the best indicators of my mood. Its content is very honest, and is absolutely 100% me. So you've been warned. It won't have what I did that day, or how the dog next door is so cute. All that is too trivial for me, and I'll throw those in in the middle of posts if it is of any consequence.

Three halves?

As for the address 'Three Halves', there was a little thought behind that too. If you've noticed, people sometimes make the mistake of describing something by saying 'one half this, one half that, and one half something else', to which we quip with 'three halves'? But if you see, that's when the person is concentrating on the content, and not how they are explaining it. That's the approach I follow on my blog. I think about what I'm talking about, and not how I get it out to the people. I leave the perceiving to them, and their judgement :)

You get the idea. You'll see the rest there. So pay 'me' a visit! :)

If you feel it's worth it, you can subscribe to the feed from here, the syndications' list, or from my personal blog itself!

Linksharing (Jan - 1st week Feb '07)

2007-02-02T00:59:00.000+05:30

I've always wanted to be able to share little interesting pages that I've come across the Internet in an unobtrusive and compact way. Short of adding a widget for it and overcrowding my sidebar, this is the most creative way I could think of for the moment :P So, here are a bunch of pages I bumped into in the recent past, or one's I thought you'd find fun:

ASCII art generator: Does what the name says, and beautifully too! You can see this example :)
Funny windows error messages: I don't know how many of these are true, but they sure are funny!
John Mayer - Neon: That's not that easy to play, though I can at a slower beat. Great song nonetheless!
iPod is introduced: Apple music even 2001, and the first ever iPod introduction.
The Daily Wtf?: This one is genuinely funny! You have to see it :P And don't miss all the comments either!
Optimus Keyboard: Something I'd love to see see the light of day. It's just gorgeous!
Google Rounded corners: Want rounded corners? Why not get 'em from Google? Check out this link to to build the rounded boxSubmit and get the box code, then replace the different URLs for the corner images with the Google corner image URLs! You won't need to go hunting for a filehost :P

Design and Hack testing, and Google server woes

2007-02-01T17:45:00.000+05:30

Though the new Blogger has made loading blogs faster, I guess it still has a little more way to go to be handle multiple requests for a page. This is most evident when you're trying to test a new design or a hack, which requires you to constantly preview and reload a page. I don't think is inherently a Blogger problem, because I noticed that requests to Googlepages (my choice file host) were taking long to get completed as well. As I write this, blog feeds have taken a hit. I don't see them on any blogI've checked Phydeaux3, Blogger Hacked, Hackosphere and my blog -- blogs which rely on feeds..

This brings up the question as to what 'is' actually the bandwidth and space that we're offered from Google when hosting at Blogspot. There have been estimates in the past, but I'd sure like a solid number to work with here. Avatar will have them, but he's a little busy on his own these days! :P

Atleast, the server doesn't refuse connections if you overshoot their requests per minute/hour/whatever barrier. It just slows down, which is a more desirable result than a downtime! But then again, it can't take too much server load if you're just having to serve text. As far as I know, all our post content is stored in a database, and is injected into our template by a faster (with bigger capacity?) server and shown to us when the page is requested. It can still get on my nerves when I need to go to bed but the pages won't load fast enough so that I can add that final touch to the CSS or code.

Is Google really ready for a GDrive any time in the near future? I doubt it.

Google Operating System is facing the same outages. I wonder what really is going on with Blogger... :(

Updates

1-Feb (7:49PM IST) Update: The feeds are still being a little moody, but they're slowly starting to reveal themselves. As Deepak points out in the comments, the Blogger Help Group is flooded with people posting encounters with a 502 server error page. I've managed to avoid it till now, but it sure can't be good.

(11:34PM IST) Update: For a small 5 minutes, I was greeted to this nice little message. I couldn't post, view my dashboard, or do anything else. It seemed like everything with the domain name of 'blogger' or 'blogspot' was down. It seems to have vanished now, with all feeds and Blogger related stuff back online in perfect shape! Strangeness of the highest order! 8|
But it's good everything is back!

A new build?

'Don't-leave-the-page' labels widget

2007-01-31T19:16:00.000+05:30

Onset of labels sure did kill off the greatest playground of hackers. No more hacking with Del.icio.us to get a list of posts tagged or 'labelled' under a particular category. So what do we do now? Find ways of making Blogger Labels asynchronous ofcourse. There are quite a few hacks out there that do this nicely, but I just had to do it my way :)

The hack

This little code creates an asynchronously loaded list of the posts classified under a particular label, sorted by last update time, and shows it right below it. You can see it in action in the sidebar on the right. Click on any one of the topics. It also removes the list if it's open, and you can open up more than one category at one time. I was experimenting with a few functions I made and DOM functions, so this should work in all modern browsers without too much hassles (I don't care about IE).

The elements are all lists, so you need to just create a CSS class for postList, and style it as you see fit. I haven't included code to show a 'Loading...' type message because this is quite fast, so many people won't get any lag time. I've managed to integrate it with the Blogger Labels widget, so you just need to make a little change to the widget code. Yes, you'll have to expand the widgets (sorry!).

The code

Wrap the following in <script> tags and put it in your <head> area:

//<![CDATA[
function $(){
  for( var i = 0, node; i < arguments.length; i++ )
    if( node = document.getElementById( arguments[i] ) )
      return node;
}

var _id = '';
function showLabel(name){
    _id = name;
    if($(name+'-expanded')) {
    $(name+'-expanded').parentNode.removeChild($(name+'-expanded'));
    $(name).style.textDecoration = 'none';
        }
    else {
    $(name).style.textDecoration = 'underline';
    var script = document.createElement('script');
    script.src = 'http://<BLOGNAME>.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/summary/-/'+name+'?alt=json-in-script&callback=makeList';
    script.type = 'text/javascript';
    
    document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(script);
    }
}

function makeList(json){
var d = document.getElementById('Label1');
var i=0, j=json.feed.entry[i];
var list = document.createElement('ul');
list.id = _id+'-expanded';
list.setAttribute('class','postList');
var frag = document.createDocumentFragment();

  while(i<json.feed.entry.length){
    j=json.feed.entry[i];
     var t_link = document.createElement('a');
         t_link.href = j.link[0].href;
    if(j.title.$t.length>37)
        t_link.appendChild(document.createTextNode((j.title.$t).slice(0,37)+'...'));
    else 
        t_link.appendChild(document.createTextNode(j.title.$t));

      var title = document.createElement('span');
     title.setAttribute('class','postTitle');
         title.appendChild(t_link);

    var li = document.createElement('li');
    li.appendChild(title);      
    frag.appendChild(li);
    i++;
      }
    list.appendChild(frag);
    $(_id).parentNode.insertBefore(list, $(_id).nextSibling);    
}
//]]>

All you need to do is replace the <BLOGNAME> with the name of your blog. I'll explain the various parts of it at the end, so that you can change it to suit your needs. The next bit of code is where it gets a little ugly. Expand the template, and then go looking for your Labels widget. Once you find it, replace the entire widget with this code:

<b:widget id='Label1' locked='false' title='Topics' type='Label'>
<b:includable id='main'>
  <b:if cond='data:title'>
    <h2><data:title/></h2>
  </b:if>
  <div class='widget-content'>
    <ul class='elegantList'>
    <b:loop values='data:labels' var='label'>
      <li expr:id='data:label.name'>
        <b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:label.url'>
          <data:label.name/>
        <b:else/>
          <a href='#category' onclick='javascript:showLabel(this.innerHTML)'><data:label.name/></a>
        </b:if>
        (<data:label.count/>)
      </li>
    </b:loop>
    </ul>

    <b:include name='quickedit'/>
  </div>
</b:includable>
</b:widget>

Do this only if you're widget hasn't been tinkered away from the default Blogger widget, which should be the case in most of the situations. That's it, you're done! :) Reap the benefits!

Explanation and further tinkering

This uses the dynamic script tag method to get a list of posts from the label feed. It then proceeds to form a list out of the post titles, and then using my home-made method of inserting a node, puts the list after the node specified by the 'id' of the parent node of the clicked link.

It also slices the post title to keep in within 40 characters, so that it doesn't wrap to the next line and take up unnecessary lines in your sidebar. You can change this by changing the '37' in the if statement, and line following it. However, this number should satisfy most cases. To style the list, as I said before, define a CSS class for ul.postList and then proceed to style the lis under this.

Once again, this will not work on a preview page, so you'll have to save it and then test it. I hope you get it working without too many hassles!

Unveiling: The Last Word (Gold Edition)

2007-01-30T13:56:00.000+05:30

I am still keeping the blog in beta, because as has become quite obvious, changes will keep coming and going! There are a few changes I've made to the layout, and the way the blog functions now.

There is more than one post on the main page now for one, so less clicking. I've also revamped the bottom area. It'll contain the comment on the post pages, and a list of recently updated posts otherwise. The sidebar makes a return, with ~~three widgets for now~~ Updated to five - A colophon and the blog archives. The 'Topics' widget ~~will be updated for asynchronous loading of the post list of a particular label~~ has been updated with this new hack. I'll release it soon. I've removed smilies, they were becoming a little distraction. The hack still exists though, so no need to worry there :)

A good side-effect of the building from scratch is that I removed things that were unnecessary, and that's made the loading much faster. Also, as a friend pointed out, this is not exactly the 'minimalistic' that some people might have thought. To be very honest, while it had started off as minimal, I just kept on adding things which I liked, and ultimately ended up with this. This is by no means the final product, and my bad habit compels me to keep making small changes here and there. ~~I am aware that the codes for my hacks don't show up properly. I'll be switching to a better way of displaying them, so I had to take out the old version. Please bear with me~~ This is now fixed. Thanks to Dan Webb for the excellent code highlighting script. I've had my eyes on this one for a while :)

I think is a nice warm template to welcome the spring and summer time (it's a little far away, but I like to be prepared :) ). Hope you like it!

Another design change

2007-01-28T23:32:00.001+05:30

You might have noticed some sluggishness in my posting. Posts are few and far apart (although they're generating quite a lot of traffic :) ). That's because I'm home on my college vacations (1st semester got over), so I'm busy with family and friends!

Don't worry, work is going on behind the scenes as well! :) I promise a 'completely' new look and more posts in the coming weeks. People might say that this look is better than 'that' one, but I am making a change for a good reason! I'll give just one clue to the new look ... 'minimalistic'. Hehe! :D

So, do not worry! All is good here! I will return in full glory very soon! Thanks for hanging around.

P.S. While you're at it, fire of a few hundred more mails to Avatar, will you? I don't know what it'll take to get Bloggeratto off it's ass! Maybe your mails will do the trick?

A date to behold!

2007-01-22T16:53:00.000+05:30

I have updated the code with a much cleaner one, which can be changed easily if you want to alter the order or anything else. If you have one, you don't need to update, but first time users might as well take the new one.

Also, if someone has trouble finding the correct date format, see the picture below. It's the second last format in the list :)

This was something that I wanted to have when I saw it on Lifehacker. Their dates look, well, different, and I thought it'd be really cool to let your dates stand out than the normal one line dates that Blogger forces us to have. It is basically a function that takes in the Blogger date as an input, does some fancy splitting and slicing, and outputs the day, the month and year in it's own seperate line, or if you like it, as a picture. There is a catch to the niceness.

Before you jump in

If you want to use pictures, like I have, you'll have to put in some time and photoshop work. Since there is no scripted way of generating pictures (not without much hallabaloo at least), you will have to make the picture for all days, months, and a few years. That means, you will need a picture with the numbers 1-31, month names January to December, and a few years from 2006-2008 (or from whenever you started your blog). This can be quite a job, so I'll suggest you go with the first method.In case you want the pictures, you'll need to modify the document.write statement to output image tags, with the source set to in a format of url/"+array-element+".png. This will generate an image for every value held in the array. That will take a bit of template modding as well, with some knowledge of CSS to make the styles. Don't say I didn't warn ya! :P

The code

Let's get hacking. Begin by changing the date format output of your dates from the blog settings. Change it to show dates as '23 January 2007' (with the spaces, no commas). Then put in this bit of code in your <head> area:

<script>
function date_replace(d){
 var da = d.split(' ');
 day = "<span class='theDate'>"+da[0]+"</span>";
 mon = "<span class='theMonth'>"+da[1].slice(0,3)+"</span>";
 year = "<span class='theYear'>"+da[2]+"</span>";
  document.write(day+mon+year);
}
</script>

Now, you'll need to find the place where the date tag is in your template. The date tag looks like <data:post.dateHeader/>. You'll have to replace that line, and anything else within that <b:loop> tag, except the conditional statement (<b:if>) with this:

<div id='post-date'>
<script>date_replace('<data:post.dateHeader/>');</script>
</div>

That's all you have to do at the template hacking level. The next to do will be to define styles for your newly generated date. Your three parts of the date are held in three <span> elements as you can see from the function up there, with the class attribute set to 'theDate' (for the day), 'theMonth' and the 'theYear'. You can style all of them the way you like it by defining classes in your CSS named as div#post-date span.theDate and so on. You should set a display: block; to begin with so that they all come up in a seperate line. Other CSS style attributes can be applied as per required. The parent element will be styled with a div#post-date to hold the background. It can be a picture or a simple colour, it's up to you. Here's a sample CSS definition which you can use in case you're lazy:

div#post-date {
  display: block;
  float:left;        /* set this to right if you want it go to the right */
  padding: 1em;       /* to keep the text away from the edges */
  background-color: #555555;  /* you can change this to hold a picture, will make it look nicer */
  border: 3px double gray;   /* a border to make it look nice */
   }

div#post-date span.theDate {
  display: block;       /* to put this in a different line */
  font-size: 3em;       /* to make the date stand out */
  background-color: transparent; /* to let the background show through */
  color: white;
   }

div#post-date span.theMonth {
  display: block;
  font-size: 1em;       /* smaller compared to the date */
  background-color: transparent;
  color: white;
   }

div#post-date span.theYear {
  display: block;
  font-size: 1em;       /* smaller compared to the date */
  background-color: transparent;
  color: white;
   }

All that will go within your <b:skin> tags in case your wondering. If you know what you're doing, go around and play with the attributes to get what you'll actually looking for.

That's pretty much it! It'll be a little hard to use images with this for those who don't know Javascript, so if you want, I could modify the function for you to output the images. You'll need to give me the URL to your images though. Do 'not' use Blogger Image hosting to upload your pictures. The path is never constant, and this function requires that the path always be constant, with only the names of the images changing. The names themselves should be 1.png, 2.png and so on for the days, January.png and so on for the months and 2007.png for the years. All in the same format! You'll need to make 31+12+1 (atleast) = 44 images. I did it twice :P Once for my old blog, and then again for this new one. I'm beginning to not like this look too, so a third round might be imminent!

But now you know how to get it done! So go ahead, make your dates look great!

State of broadband in India

2007-01-19T16:23:00.000+05:30

Going through GigOm, I bumped into the article which states that BSNL will be launching a 2Mbps broadband connection in the country this year. If that claim itself isn't ridiculous, they say that that the price will be Rs. 250. That's roughly $5.62, which is dirt cheap even for a government funded company. What's going on here?

Well, the catch is that one has a (terrible, I must say) download limit of 1GB a month, and use above that limit will be chargeable at 90p ($0.02) per MB. As the article at Sify rightly states:

A K Sinha, Chairman and Managing Director, BSNL added that the limit for corporate customers would be enhanced to 4GB. In other words, you can check your emails at a blazing pace considering that’s what you can do to stay within the offered download limit of 1 GB – 4 GB.

Telecom's own boom

India saw a telecom boom in the past two years, with a meteoric rise of Bharti A private company which initially launched the landline service 'Touchtel', and later moved to acquire the mobile-phone solutions company 'Airtel'. It now offers both services under the brand name of 'Airtel'., and introduction of big time players such as Reliance and Tata into the info/telecom market. Offering competitive prices for quality service, these companies quickly ran over the existing estabilished company VSNL Virtually the sole Internet provider to the country for a long time. Even now, the major companies pay a share to VSNL to use their servers to gain access to the Internet, so technically, VSNL remains the biggest Internet provider in India. completely. Now, the preferred company is Airtel for residence as well as corporate Internet solutions. I use Airtel myself, and am very happy with them. The rates and speeds are very good, with speedy complaint clearance. I have never tried Reliance, but I haven't heard good things about them either, so can't say much there. Whoever the provider however, the speed fluctuations prevent any proper productive use of the Internet Things like gaming, video-conferencing, downloading genuinly huge files. My speed is 128 Kbps, and a 600 Mb movie takes a whole night. You can imagine the rest. I'd sure love to be able to connect to a gaming server in the US to kick some butt, (I'm a CounterStrike buff! :P) but that seems a far cry at the moment.

BSNL itself has had quite a bad run uptil now. People have rushed in to take their relatively cheap plans and have come out cursing the after sales service and server downtimes. It is pretty much expected from a government company, hence this move now seems extremely ambitious.

Predictions galore

Sify predicts the year 2007 as the year of the broadband in India. I'd love to agree with them. At the moment, broadband is classified by the TRAI as any 'always-on' connected above the speed of 128 Kbps. I believe the international definition starts at 512Kbps. The scene is pretty dismal, but our lack of infrastructure, and preference being given to spread technology first to the rural areas and then to the urban parts seems to slow down the progress that we could have made. But we're slowly getting there with attempts such as this.

If nothing, this will actually push the other players to improve their services to challenge BSNL's user base. This is ofcourse, only good news for everyone (including me)! :) I'd love to see my speeds hit 512+ Kbps :D The existing monopoly lies with Airtel, so the first change will definitely come from them. An upgrade in the connection speeds will see a lot of more participation in gaming, start-ups and other Internet related stuff that the international market has gotten used to, coming from India. We don't lack the ability, just the infrastructure. Maybe even an upgrade to our technology to go for WiMAX, and make it simpler to provide fast Internet connections to remote places? WiMAX has high initial costs, but in the long run it will benefit. It also seems to be the more practical thing to go for at the moment.

Good times? Let's wait and watch, 'the year of the broadband' just got started! ;)

The almost perfect source

2007-01-17T00:58:00.000+05:30

With the launch of Wikiseek, a formidable new player in the field of search engines has shown itself. Wikiseek is probably the best 'specific' information search engine we have today, or it atleast has the potential to be soon.

Though it is considered basically a replacement of the in-built search for Wikipedia, it is definitely much more than that. By offering on the fly suggestions via. tag clouds, top matches for your search from Wikipedia, and links to external pages linked in the article pages, Wikiseek presents itself as a great place to start your searches for information on specific topics.

It is not, however, a place to search for news or opinions or applications or just random things. That is Google's playground. Think of Wikiseek as your search through a library and all it's information, with handy links to external sources which people have found usefully related to the result articles. This works to remove spam and bogus SEO'ed links that plague our top search engines today. An all round win win solution for people :)

It will be formally announced today, but you can ofcourse go ahead and give it a trial run. There is an extension that enables a Wikiseek search inside the normal Wikipedia search toolbox. A visit to the Wikiseek page will put the blue glow in your Firefox search box, to which you can add Wikiseek by clicking on the down arrow and selecting the 'Add Wikiseek' option. It's creator 'Searchme' has said that they'll offer more search engines in the future. Now I don't know if they plan to make an integrated search environment, but they sure seem to be on the right track. Revenue from the searches will go to the Wikimedia foundation, which will really help their cause in keeping quality information free!

This will also help bring much wanted attention to a great repository of information, Wikipedia, in a big way. Wikiseek will ofcourse improve over time, but this sure does promise a lot for a brand new product. If you've always wanted proper and formal information and articles on topics the way encyclopedia's present them, or if you're just looking for content for a project or a research, this is a great place to start your search.

A microscope on Microformats

2007-01-14T10:01:00.000+05:30

Reading through my feeds, an article about how Microformats might be integrated into the next release of Firefox caught my eye today. If you remember, Microformats is present in the current latest stable release of Firefox, as a means of getting 'dynamic' bookmark titles. But that is all there is to it as far as Firefox 2.0 is concerned. Reading a little deeper into this new concept, I discovered a whole new way of creating relational data content, by following simple and standard semantics. What's even better is how easy it is to start creating Microformat content. It takes nothing more than giving standard values to a few attributes in your HTML markup! But first, a little more about Microformats.

The term Microformat was given to semantic mark-up by Tantek Çelik and Kevin Marks during a presentation (or sometime after) on 'real world semantics' at EtCon 2004. It is just a standard format to present data so that services, applications, bots etc. can detect them, understand them, and do whatever they're programmed to do with the values they find. For example, the following is a sample block of code for an hCalendar microformat.

Going back home for vacations
13th January '07 (12:15 AM)
(January 13- February 10)
Gurgaon, Haryana
I'll be going back home after my end semester examinations. I've been missing home for quite some time, and want to get away from this hectic college schedule quickly.

And here is the code for it:

<div class='vevent'>
<span class='summary'>Going back home for vacations</span>
<span class='dtstamp' title='20070113T1215+0530'>13th January '07 (12:15 AM)</span>
(<span class='dtstart' title='2007-01-13'>January 13</span> -
<span class='dtend' title='2007-02-10'>February 10</span>)
<span class='location'>Gurgaon, Haryana</span>
<span class='description'>I'll be going back home after my end semester examinations. I've been missing home for quite some time, and want to get away from this hectic college schedule quickly.</span>
</div>

If you have any of the microformat recognition extensions installed (I've listed two that I know towards the end of the post), you'll see a calendar event popup listing out that event. If you use one which offers you actions to perform on the recognised content, you can do so, which in this case will be adding to 'your' calendar this event to be reminded of later. The same can be used for different types of data such as contact details (called hCard), or reviews (hReview), social network (XFN) and Lists/Outlines (XOXO). The complete list can be found here.

Ofcourse, any type of data can be turned into a microformat, as long as it is recognised as a standard, and everyone is not cooking up 'their' version of it. It is there to help us maintain a standard, so that building applications to work with the data held by these formats becomes simpler. It'd be as simple as finding a block of code with the specified attributes, and getting the values of the other attributes as well as the contained text. It can be seamlessly integrated to look like a part of your page, while the hidden microformat properties is only for those who want it. The information can be anything from stock prices to package tracking. The point is to allow easy access to content. As Alex Faaborg puts it:

The general model is the user travels to a particular site, and then proceeds to enter data (classified add, review, list of friends) for a particular purpose. Your information is scattered all over the Web, and you have to pick which sites you want to use.

The combination of blogging and microformats is now reversing this model. Now, your information remains in your blog, and the Web sites come to you. For instance, if you want to sell something, you can blog about it using an hListing, and a site like Edgeio will find it when it aggregates classified advertisements across the Web.

I've been looking at the prospect of having a microformat for blog posts over the internet. Stephen has already stated pretty strongly about how the XOXO format is great for creating templates, which can make working with them (and the data they hold) much simpler. I will top that and ask for a standard outline to hold all post data in. That way, whenever we look for post details, it will be the same for a Blogger blog or a Wordpress blog (and many other blogging platforms out there). The sharing of data becomes tons easier! I realised this while developing my way of loading creating expandable posts asynchronously. Default Blogger templates already follow a pseudo-microformat (I don't know if it was intentional or not), and hence, if you've not modified your template too much, or followed the standard naming of classes, your blog is already following a microformat for your posts. Any information now can be scraped right off the page as and when it might be required! There has been a proposal for any kind of listing to be presentated in a microformat called hListing however, so one's interested might have a look into that.

Currently, as I said earlier, Firefox is the only browser which handles microformats natively, and that too only for dynamic titles for bookmarks. However, a couple of extensions are there which detect and present actions based on microformats found on a page. The one I use and recommend is Operator by Michael Kaply. This is a very useful extension if you wish to completely integrate Firefox with the current known microformat standards. It detects the data, and then presents you with ways of using that data. For example, on this page, you should see two microformats. One is my label, and the other is the calendar event written above. Operator will give you options to search Flickr, Del.icio.us and Technorati for this tag, to find related content, or add the calendar event to Google Calendar. Makes my job that much easier! :) The second extension, called Tails Export by Robert De Bruin, does pretty much the same thing, without the integration with other applications. It works by 'exporting' your microformats to known file types which can be used in other applications.

The functions of these extensions will eventually be integrated into the browser natively, and hence make it something of an 'information broker' as some people out there are calling it. The web browser, in general will look do all the information collecting 'for' you, so that all you have to do is click and collect.

This graphic from Mozilla sums up their plan for integrating this new standard very well:

Since microformat are such an invisible, yet solid way of presenting little bits of shareable data, I think it has the potential to reach where feeds have today, since they technically present the same thing; a simple way of sharing data amongst applications. Practically any data can be turned into a microformat, as long as there is wide generation of it. With some touting the new year as one for Microformats, I am somewhat agreeing with them. It 'could' be the next big thing! I am going to begin to use it in places where I think they're necessary. My little contribution in building a smarter, more semantic web! Seems fun and useful! :P Install one of those extensions, and discover a new way to work with information for yourself!

Connecting applications

2007-01-11T09:57:00.000+05:30

Recently, working on my personal blog (I'll be releasing soon enough :) ), I had a little itch to make a automatically updating 'Now Playing' widget, which would automatically take the data from my Winamp, and via some fancy scripting, show it on the blog along with little additions like the album cover art. I did get it done, but it kind of opened my mind to the complicated nature of creating an interface which would allow an offline application to converse with an online one. I say complicated because I am not much into that side of programming yet. I will someday, but until then it will seem to be quite a daunting task.

Make it friendlier

There exists a standard for pretty much everything on the web today. Why not have standards for offline applications as well? It'll help in having a protocol which will be common amongst communications of a particular kind. For example, to transfer secure data, a different method of obtaining data securely could be developed which would be common to all applications, but when an insecure data needs to be transferred to a public social application on the web, a simple interface should allow that to happen without getting ones hands dirty too much.

I know that once I try and learn that side of programming, I won't find it so 'high up there'. After all, a certain amount of knowledge must be involved with getting anything on different platforms to connect. But still, I know it can be made easier if developers just reached some sort of an agreement. Something like a script.aculo.us for the offline applications. A library which helps you get your job done faster. Pre-existing templates, which can be easily integrated and used.

Make it fun

By taking out a majority of the coding, it'll allow people to think more, since the time required to code it out is cut down. This will see a rise in applications which are more usable and useful. At the moment, I am talking with little knowledge of this side of cross-platform (not in the literal sense) development, hence the predictions. But I have seen the use a platform like Ning has been put to. I also know it's potential. And here, the problem isn't lack of resources, but a lack of ideas.

I'd surely like to see more attention being paid to data transfers between such applications. If done correctly, we can actually have a proper online version of our own desktop (security and data intact), to control our computer remotely! Currently, companies like Google and Yahoo! offer APIs which let us use their services in (semi) offline applications. All that is good, but what if you could reverse the process? What if you could program your sticky notes to be auto-synced with your blog? Or maybe have an updated feed of the songs you play on your favourite media player? I'm not being creative enough, but think of the possibilities! :)

There are applications which are constantly in touch with online servers, which we use everyday. Our very own operating system is the perfect example. Those tiny little upgrades it keeps downloading from time to time? Yep! It has to send data for that, doesn't it? Why not use the sending mechanism, make it easier to implement in applications, and let the people's mind wander? Hehe!

What use can you think of having your applications talk to each other?

Looking back at '06, on to '07

2007-01-09T20:16:00.000+05:30

It has surely been an amazing year for blogs, the Internet, The Last Word, and me. Looking back now, I'd really like to chronicle all the things that made a difference and I'd like to share with everyone.

What started off as a relaxing 'try-out slowly became a lovely and fulfilling hobby. Yes, The Last Word graduated from humble beginnings, as a way for me to share my thoughts with friends and people who bumped in, to a full and complete review and reflection (thank you Jen) blog through which I now share everything I think and know about the Internet world around me, programming and designing. I have introduced quite a few hacks and user-scripts [Pg 1 & 2] which have been implemented and used by many people. Just knowing that someone out there is benefitting from my work is enough to make me work for 'one' more hack :) Nothing like a little encouragement to keep you going!

Towards the middle of the year, when the old blog surfaced as a mainstream blog thanks to inputs and help from Avatar, I didn't expect to get so much viewer-ship and support from people. I guess I chose a more lucrative path of becoming a 'hacker' for Blogger, which made it easier to be spotted on the radar. I quickly took the opportunity to convert a generic blog to a theme related one. I had to give up the freedom of writing anything on my mind for that, but now on looking back from here, the change was nothing but a necessary growing step, which I'm glad to have taken at the correct time.

Through codes and scripts, I came to make friends in the community who are now my good friends over the Internet. They know who they are, and my sincere thanks to each and every one of them for making the year such a wonderful learning experience, and taking me from being just a kid with a penchant for codes to the status of 'Young gun' (thank you Phydeaux3!). I formed a satisfying partnership with Stephen and we created quite a few innovative hacks together. Now that we're both in college, we don't get to brainstorm like the good ol' days anymore. But I sure hope to reach the same peak of ultimate hackery with him in the future.

I learnt that certain methods work, and certain don't, when it comes to getting your point out to the world. But nothing works if you talk without any authority on your subject. I learnt how to write 'to' the people, something which I didn't know. I was too used to writing for myself. This was again explained to my by Avatar. Subtle changes brought more people to read my blog for articles, and not just a new hack. Even now as I check my statistics, my feed subscriber-ship shows a solid 140 subscribers. So close to new years, and many people out enjoying with family, it is a very encouraging number :)

My attempt at going commercial ended in quite a big thud! I wanted to take up designing for people as a small side-profession, but I guess I lack the creativity to generate a lot of innovative content quickly. I might try my hand at it again in the future, and hope to have more encouraging results then. But at the moment, there are no prospects of me taking up anything related to the Internet as a profession or a commercial hobby.

Together with Avatar, Bloggeratto came into existence. Although he gives me credit for the quick development of the blog, plus a permanent link to here, it has been completely his brainchild and hardwork which has put it where it is today. I did nothing more than place a few codes, and give him a few CSS tricks to put in! I wrote some codes specifically for Bloggeratto, which are now lying tattered and broken, begging for a rework. The task rests in my 'To-do' for the new year! More so now because Bloggeratto will be resurfacing soon in a new avatar! :P

The biggest turnaround was the onset of the new Blogger, and my hiatus from blogging. I entered college, and things became hectic. I left at a time when the magic was just beginning, and sadly missed the best part of it. But still, the moment I got a chance to make a return, I took the opportunity again. Trust me, there was a time where I had decided not to return to blogging, because I realised how much of my time it was eating up. Even now, as my examinations are going on, I take every break time I get to write out a little bit. But again, encouragement and questions with ideas from Avatar and many people out there who had implemented my hacks compelled me to make a fresh start. What better way than to switch to the new Blogger, and design a completely new blog?

The new year seems promising enough. Hopefully Blogger will keep things rolling at their end, and I will continue to share my thoughts and articles with you the way I have all of last year. And hacks! They will pop their heads every now and then to make your blogging experience simpler and more fun!

Hello 2007!

Bloggeratto wanted to play world of warcraft all day!

2007-01-08T18:05:00.000+05:30

Haha! Sorry about that Blogger! :P

You would have noticed Bloggeratto suffering some downtime recently. Speaking for Avatar here, I am to say that Bloggeratto is not dead! It's very much alive, and is just undergoing a little renovation work. All comments can be directed to this post, and Avatar will be more than happy to reply to them. Please don't bombard the poor guy with hundreds of e-mails!

So, stay tuned! It'll be back ;)

While you're waiting, why not look around here for a while? It's good, I 'promise'! :)

Blogger Smilies!

2007-01-07T17:07:00.000+05:30

Posts can become dull and boring when no emotion comes through words. After all, blogs are meant to be a 'personal' medium, which goes from people to people. What better way to portray emotions than use emoticons and smilies? Blogger itself doesn't give us a way of doing such trivial things, which is why this is another little script which I ported over from the old Blogger to the new one. It uses simple Regular Expressions to replace the text version of the emoticons to their pictured cousins!

There is nothing much for you to do here actually. You just need to include this one line in your <head> section:

<script src='http://aditya.vm.googlepages.com/addSmiley.js' type='text/javascript'></script>

And you're done! :) The script assumes the content of your post is housed in an element called 'post-body'. If it's different, then just add one more line under that line:

postBodyClass = '';

The script will be called once the page finishes loading, so that it doesn't hamper with the page load times! The emoticons are housed at my Google Pages account, which should be able to handle the load pretty well. They're tiny cute icons after all! So enjoy your emoticonified posts!

Major Update: Seeing as how people wanted adding in more classes (or classes that I wasn't offering by default), I have reworked the script (quite a bit) to fit in probably all kinds of situations. But, in doing so, it is a little more complicated to implement if you want to customise it 'beyond' my default settings.

Everything is handled within arrays now. I have pre-programmed the function to add smilies in classes of 'post-body', 'entry-content' (as asked by Stephen) and 'comment-body'. These three should suffice 'most' cases in Blogger. However, if you don't fall under any of these, you can make a manual function call at the end of the posts widget in your template. Yes, you 'will' have to get your hands dirty for this. So, supposed your template code for your posts look like this:

<b:section id='Blogposts'>
  <b:widget id='Blog1' locked='false' title='Blog Posts' type='Blog'/>
</b:section>

Your function call for 'addSmiley()' will come after this. Now, within the '()', list out all the entry containers you want to add your emoticons to. So, if you want to add smilies to say 'post-author' and 'post-notes' as well, your code now becomes:

<b:section id='Blogposts'>
<b:widget id='Blog1' locked='false' title='Blog Posts' type='Blog'/>
</b:section>

<script language="javascript">
addSmiley('post-author', 'post-notes');
</script>

And this comes 'after' the </b:section> line above. Followed? Good! I'll restate that this is 'only' if your emoticonizing content does not already fall under the classes of 'post-body','comment-body' and 'entry-content'.

Another update: Deepak, has come up with a userscript that makes adding emoticons and other basic rich editing features easier to add in your comments made in Blogger. Go catch it at Blogger Hacked

Update: Ramani has listed out the CSS required if you see borders around your emoticons or they appear to squashed up. Also, I had forgotten to list out which emoticons are supported. The general ones are as follows:


:) or :-)  
:( or :-(  
:P or :-P  
:D or :-D  
:$ or :-$  
;) or ;-)

Hope this helps! :)

Feature requests for the new Blogger

2007-01-05T13:34:00.000+05:30

Living with the new Blogger for about a month and a half now, I want to make my own 'Please include these Blogger' feature requests post to Blogger. As I noted here, I can't find the feature request page from Blogger, and hence am lead to believe that once again they have removed it to avoid tons of feature suggestions pouring in from people. Although when they 'did' launch the new Blogger, they said that labels was the 'most requested' feature. I wonder how those requests reached them :P So here is my list of requests from Blogger.

The more immediate concerns

Trackbacks: This is one thing that Blogger has lacked right since the beginning, many people complaining and trying to find a workaround. Stephen came up with the Blogger Trackback pinging userscript, but why not have it natively in the post editor? How hard would it be to take all details and send 'one' XMLHTTPRequest to a 'user' specified URL? Not very, especially since Blogger can provide all the data it needs to work with. We need to hack our way to get the data to make our workarounds. Do the math! Also, that is only outgoing. What about incoming trackbacks? I know Google is proud of their search (which is used to track the backlinks), but why not stick to the standard everyone else seems to follow?
Custom fields: This is my 'personal' request to Blogger, and something I will be genuinely very thankful for if they add it. It would be the ultimate addition to the post details, as it'll be a way to hold data 'associated' with the post, but doesn't have to be a part of the post. Maybe you'd like to share a little anecdote about the post you made? A summary? You can display these on the main page with a 'Read More' type link, and show the whole post without this part on the post page. Throw in a special keyword in there to distinguish for something. Ofcourse, I have much more powerful uses in mind, but this is one of the basic ones which could be used by everyone!
Documentation: I know Avatar will agree with me on this. The new Blogger though boasts a powerful new template language, it lacks the one thing that will allow us to effectively use it. We know what variables are there, but don't know the exact tree it is held in. Which is why I ran into trouble when I tried to recode the Archives widget to show it in a drop down box. I got it workingLook at the sidebar at my test blog. It works, but I still have to use Javascript to make every option work, don't know why standard HTML attribute doesn't work., but after some playing around with different possibilities. We can all avoid that if we just had the proper explicit documentations.

Not dire, but not unimportant

Comment Editing: How many times have you seen a comment which is perfectly fine except for that 'one' thing which you wish you could remove? Phydeaux3 had found a way of doing so for the old Blogger, but that is broken now, and no method seems to be that obvious at the moment. But again, why try to play cat and mouse, and not have it straight from Blogger itself? Giving the blog author complete control over all 'posts' on his blog (whether it be his posts, or others postsI don't know if the method has changed in the new Blogger, but Jasper's script in the old Blogger worked by loading up the comments ID with Blogger's native post editor.

This showed that comments were also treated as a type of 'post' by Blogger. Probably they've changed this, which is why this method is broken now.) is something Blogger does for team blogs, so why not add comments into the 'editable' list?
XHTML Strictness: Most of us don't adhere to XHTML 1.0 Strict standards (I have covered this topic in-depth this post), and code incoming from Blogger is not even close to adhering to HTML standards. Only they can fix that, but they aren't. It has remained straight through the old Blogger and the update. The first step would be to put rules in the template editor, which would cause atleast some retribution. Then extend that to the post editor. We can't follow strict XHTML in the post editor, because most of the time we end up adding elements with in-line styles, or scripts and codes. Whenever you upload an image to Blogger, the code inserted follows absolutely 'no' XHTML specification. Hence, the first move would be to convert everything to CSS classes, insert them by default in the template with all the other paraphernalia Blogger inserts automatically, and then use references to them in the codes they generate.
Search feed: We have most the feeds that almost every mainstream platform offers todayFeeded to the teeth. Ironically however, the one feed we don't have is the 'search' feed for the blog specific search. This might be a little server intensive, I don't know. But it sure is a requirement, since it can be used to keep track of keywords appearing in posts. It can also be used to power hacksI think Google might be trying to cut down these 'search' hacks, and want people to use their Google AJAX Search API more to get things done. The cause could be anything from not wanting to load up their servers, to unifying data generation for searches. Personally I think Google should give 'us' the choice of how we want our data.. But only if it exists in the first place.

I am not undermining the update! It has been some solid work from Blogger. But the release definitely seems hurried, especially now that it is out of Beta. That generally means all the nitty gritties should be fixed, and people should get all the stuff they want without too much trouble. I won't go to the extreme Avatar did, but I will say that Blogger has some loose ends to tie up before 'I' begin to call this version a truly 'power' platform.

Phydeaux3 has posted up a request for a way to get native stats from Blogger. Personally I had thought that the new Blogger would also mark the re-launch of one of Google's most highly awaited acquisitions, Measuremap. This didn't happen, but I believe that it will be integrated into Blogger, and it is meant for Blogger.

Let's hope it happens... We could surely do with the fantastic stats!

Also, Google has integrated Blogger with their Documents and spreadsheets (you can see the link on the page after you publish a post), so you can straightaway post from there! I don't know what's the use though. They could just improve the post editor now, couldn't they? :P

Stars and arrows: A look into unicodes

2007-01-04T01:24:00.000+05:30

I have recently been experimenting with unicode characters on this blog. You would have noticed them next to links, at the end of the footnotes and very recently, the bullet icon for the label under the title. I use three glyphs at the moment, the outbound arrow (↗) to symbolise external links that open in a new window/tab, the hooked left arrow (↩) for the link back to the text and the star (★) which just looks good next to the labels. If you can't see them and/or the characters in the brackets, you should get a browser that does. The perfect option is Firefox which has really good support for unicode characters.

I took some inspiration from John Gruber's Daring Fireball for my choice of characters (the hooked arrow and star), and realised that they actually work better than little icons which people go to the first chance they get. The main advantage is that modern browsers can render it choosing a font for unicode characters quite easily, which means you don't 'need' icons when a good looking character will do! There tons of glyphs to choose from. You could refer to the list at Wikibooks for a complete chart of the characters at your disposal (there are many, you'll need patience).

The occasional problem of cross browser rendering will surface. Every browser chooses different fonts to show their unicode characters. Which is why it is good to check how certain characters are rendered. One workaround for any problem could be to specify your own list of fonts to try and pick for a unicode character containing element. On this blog, I use Tahoma as the main font, with a font size of '7.5em' I've been told off for this many times! I just can't get myself to have a bigger font size! It just looks too ugly to me!, but when a unicode character is rendered at that size, it becomes too small. Hence, I've had to manually increase the font size for them to '8.5em'. 'Tahoma' is an almost complete typeset, and a modern browser is mostly able to 'fill-in' empty characters by finding a font which has the characters. You will have to do some testing to see which one works for you. You can do this by using 'class > element' selector. This will not work in Internet Explorer, but the same goes for the character itself. I doubt unicode characters show up at all in Internet Explorer. My solution for that is to get a 'real' browser! As simple as that!

As a designer, it helps me remove unwanted graphics from the page, and keep things simple. Especially if one uses a monochrome colour combination for the text (white and dark gray for this blog), it works best to keep it looking uniform and clean! Go ahead, give it a whirl!

Get listed a little quicker

2007-01-03T13:04:00.001+05:30

I wanted to quickly throw in a post about how to get your blog changes listed in Google's Blogsearch a little faster than normal. You can do this in a few ways. You might know all this, and might not. If you do, well, congratulations! If you don't, read on! :)

Around the beginning of October I believe, Google released their blog pinging service to the public. It basically provides a little documentation about how to manually tell Google crawlers that your blog has been updated, and they should come running and scan. Google already monitors all top pinging services automatically, so chances are these methods won't help your cause too much. But, it's always a good idea to do it yourself, if not for the viewers, then for your peace of mind.

So, the first way and the easiest, is to hook up to Google Blogsearch using Feedburner. They have a service known as 'Pingshot' under their 'Publicize' tab. This lists out various services that Feedburner can automatically ping for you whenever it checks your feed and sees an update. This is the most powerful thing you can have, with having no work to do on your own, and from personal experience, I can tell you that this does increase your feed readership. Feedburner checks your feed every half an hour, which might be too long for some people. Hence, Feedburner also provides a manual way of pinging them, so that they ping all those services quicker.

The second and harder method is set up your own REST call to Google Blogsearch, or an XML-RPC ping call. These will immediately send off their crawlers to your page (or sooner than normal! :P ) These are slightly harder to get going, especially since Blogger lacks a native pinging mechanism. The documentation can be found here if you're interested!

I personally prefer using Feedburner, since it automates the task. I'd never want to manually go fill up a form after writing a long 'long' post. Too much of a brainwreck! And, tries to manually ping Google using the form they provide didn't yield any results You can see the list of latest crawled pages here. This is updated very quickly, so don't wait too long between reloads, or else you'll miss your site (if it gets there!), so best of luck with that!

Get pinging and get noticed! :)

Here's another reason to start using Feedburner for more than offering your feed in all the formats as requested per services. Feedburner now offers site statistics, for free! Yep! And it's quite good, and shows incoming as well as outgoing links. It shows how much traffic has come in from searches, and how much from other sites. All you have to do is add a small Feedflare code to your template to track the stats. The code they offer contains the post permalink tag from the old Blogger, so change it to data:post.url when you put it in. You can hide it later using CSS if you don't want people to see it. They update the stats every 30 minutes (like their feeds). However, there is no per page statistics in the free version. For that, they ask you to upgrade to their Total Stats Pro. But this is good enough for anyone not professionally into blogging, I think. Go ahead, try it out!

Advertisements where you wouldn't expect them

2007-01-02T04:06:00.000+05:30

The latest buzz doing the round of all the 'well-known' bloggers is how Google has begun pushing it's own services. Unfortunately or not, this is true. If you do a search for anything which has a remote connection with a service Google offers, you'll see an advertisement pop-up right at the top of your search results, offering you a link to that service.

Some look at this as Google going against it's own principle of 'Don't be evil' and that they are beginning to reach the fine line between breaking their own principles in favour of getting more people to use their services and up their ante in the stock market.Arrington sees this as the the beginning of the end to Google's goody-goody impression on people. Blake Ross looks at it as Google going completely against it's principles, and Om Malik is trying to find answers. My question is, 'Is it really that wrong?' Google like every other company deserves to promote their own products and services, even more so because their's are 'comparatively' better than the competitors. Why 'wouldn't' someone want to try out a Google product/service over others? Google is just trying to be more visible to people. With it's influence and reputation, this might be a threat to other companies wanting to foray into the fields Google already has a strong hold in, but it's not like Google is actually 'trying' to kill off the competition. True, Google's 'tips' (as they are called) appear above everything else (including results from your Desktop index file search) but they are only for a few noted products like Blogger, Picasa and Google Calendar. Advertisers ads are in their proper place on the right, and search results follow immediately below the tip.

As pointed out by CNN, Google's ads and tips are virtually invisible as compared to flashing banners and animated pictures used by companies like Microsoft and YahooBoth use 'huge' advertisements all over their pages, including something as simple as their mail services. They don't allow a POP access, which means you 'have' to see those ads if you want to see your mail. Google still allows you to kill out the invisible ads by using a mail client.

This also applies to search, with Google offering a cut down version of their search through their AJAX Search API which shows no ads (as of now). This doesn't seem like the tactics of a company really 'pushing' their advertisements., and they don't offer alternatives either to get a minimal version without the ads. I don't see what there is to complain really.

Advertisements have always been a part of media. Wherever people go, ads will follow. Wherever 'ads' can go, they will. It's as simple as that. Google's ads 'should' take precedence over others, especially because their services are reliable. Except for a few slips (Google Answers for example), no application has failed it's users. If you search for blogs, it's pretty understandable that you 'might' want to start blogging. A tip to help you get started with the best free blogging platform isn't that bad, is it? It 'might' be a little unethical to put their own products before 'everything' else, but that little detail can be ignored, because of the fact that we love Google! Even Facebook is doing it, the only social network to remain free of advertisements till now!

I guess all this is the reason of the tag line Google became famous with. They capitalised on the fact that bigger companies were 'using' their status and power to monopolise their content (even if they were bad) over others. Now that Google is trying to do the same, people are drawing comparisons between what happened then, and what is happening now (even if Google's products deserve a first look). It doesn't make so much a difference to the common person, I'm sure. They'd just ignore the tip, probably because each of those products has been covered and reported as front page news when they were released, so it's quite plausible that even my grandmother would have seen it. If it really bothers you, get Adblock and add the filter.

This is the simple point that I argue. Google offers us the choice, which others don't. Why do we then still tell them, 'Don't be evil'?

Google has now taken down (maybe temporarily) the tips. I noticed this when yesterday searching for ways of having an offline calendar sync with Google Calendar didn't show the tips to sign up for GCal. I say maybe temporarily because this might be a response to the negative feedback of many bloggers, including influential ones like Arrington (who discovered the take down as well) and Blake Ross. There has been no official announcement, let's wait and watch what Google has in store for us.

I thought they had removed their tips. What is this new thing now?

I've seen one of this, and an advertisement about blogging with Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Atleast, these are still unobtrusive, and not as much in the public eye as the previous 'tips' were.

Blogger Beta and XHTML, a no go?

2006-12-31T19:53:00.000+05:30

One of the things that had plagued us during the time of the old Blogger was the invalid mark-up that Blogger forced us to use so that it could work. When Blogger Beta was announced, this was one of the things that I had genuinely thought could be worked around. When I saw the new template language of Blogger, relying on a more XML based structure, and the errors it asked us to constantly check before we could preview or save our pages Most of them are tag nesting or Blogger Layout tags gone awry. Seems like a start to making Blogger pages more XHTML valid. It still doesn't catch inline styles (not allowed in XHTML) and wrong use of data tags, which could save us hours of head banging later on if you plan to make the switch to XHTML., I was happy that now we could have well formed XHTML Not that it is a prerequisite, but keeping in the mind the various uses and advantages, it is always good to stick to something a application is looking to receive, rather than give it a jumbled up mark up to sort through first. valid templates.

Unfortunately, that's not been the case.

For whom the bell tolls

I had done some serious testing of Blogger templates (both default and custom made) for a hack that I have been developing, and the results were pretty bad. None of them strictly adhere to the standards, and many give multiple errors. I know for a fact that their can be no 'perfect' check to test our templates, since they contain practically all data (scripts/style/mark-up) in one place, but some level of standard (better than the current one) should be enforced by Blogger's template editor. The reason I blame Blogger a bit apart from people is because many of the things Blogger auto-inserts (like the Navbar) don't follow XHTML standards, and you can't do anything about it. You can't remove it, and hiding doesn't make a difference since the code is still there. It is in the long run that having well formed HTML, and even a valid XHTML mark-up will show its advantages. What advantages you ask?

To begin with, because XHTML follows the guidelines of XML, it becomes much easier to work with them in other applications other than a web browser like search engines. RSS feeds are plain XML, and see how useful they are. Extend them to web pages, and you can imagine how much more functional they become. They become more 'accessible', and easier to understand for programming languages. It also enforces clean coding habits, which improves readability and correcting. XHTML demands the seperation of style from content, hence no inline styles to be used if you want your document to be valid. W3C lists the main advantages as:

Extensibility: As an XML application, XHTML is extensible by definition. This makes future changes to the language much simpler in comparison to the process of changing HTML. Most browsers are already XML-compliant, so adding elements to the language is simply a matter of changing the document type definition and namespace. It's no longer necessary to wait for browser developers to implement support for new elements.

Interoperability and portability: A properly structured XHTML document can be reformatted for use on a variety of display devices, including cell phones, PDAs, and other handheld devices. An XHTML document is also interoperable with other XML tools and applications.

So how does one start making their templates XHTML valid? Well, there are some rules to be followed. It is not a 'whole new language' and the rules aren't that different from what you have been following with HTML, just more strict. For example, values for attributes must be put in quotes, like color="#FF0000", and no colour names. Empty tags (like br and hr) should be implicitly closed by putting a forward slash before the angular bracket like <br />, and so on. For a complete list, you can refer to W3C's documentation, but a brief beginner's list can be found here.

Following standards isn't hard at all, just takes a little bit of effort. Other platforms like Wordpress and Expression Engine do offer a higher level of standard strictness by formatting posts and comments automatically, which Blogger has yet to equal. Blogger should help us tidy up our work more than it does at the moment, and Blogger users/template designers should try to keep this in mind and stick with a 'more' valid mark-up. It'll ensure that your pages and designs survive longer, and are more functional/usable in the long run.

Now if only someone from Blogger were to read this, they could do something about it!

Microformats - the next big thing in automatic content recognition and relation, is majorly helped by proper systematic and semantic HTML, or XHTML. Suppose you have added the contact information of someone you blogged about. Any of the microformat recognition extensions (Tails, Operator) will recognise the relevant details if the details are semantically marked-up, and offer you quick links to save them if you choose to. Map locations to whatever application you use for maps, contact information to your contact list, and so on! Cool, ain't it? Here's a good starting point if you want to know more!

Tag, I'm it!

2006-12-30T01:42:00.000+05:30

As it turns out, I've now been tagged by two people. The first, good friend and a hacker in his own right, Efendi. And the other is our very own Avatar, staying on top of everything with the word 'blog' in it! He demanded this post from me, and I shall comply. Although a good friend had made a post Things you didn't know about Aditya Vikram Mukherjee on these lines quite a while back, I guess I could add some more to the list :) So, here's my list of the five things you didn't know about me :)

I'm one of the biggest music freaks you'll ever get to know. I play five different instruments, and I sing. People say I can dance as well :P I can play the Piano, Keyboards (they are different!), bass, guitar, a little bit of the drums and (one I don't count) violin :) I listen to 'anything' rock, and anything else, you should think twice before recommending it to me. Very strict and hard headed that way.

Until 3 months ago, the only computer I had used on a parmanent basis was a 7 year old HP Brio, with 64MB RAM, 800 Mhz Pentium 3, 10 GB HD space and Windows 98 SEThese specifications were amazing for the time and price when we bought it in January 2000! The Brio series isn't meant for home use, and I think it has been discontinued since then, with the merger of HP-Compaq and the Presario's and Pavillion's taking over.. I used to design my sites, write my scripts and work with that configuration. Heh! Yep, it can be done!

I began coding only a year back. I knew a little of Javascript, but whatever I know, I've learnt it through writing hacks and coding for pages that I made. Now, I know 4 languages, and one at a basic level. Javascript, HTML & CSS (I'll count them as one), Java, C/C++, and beginning with PHP :)

I love reading fantasy novels and story books. A few good examples would be everyone's favourite Lord Of The Rings, Dragonriders of Pern, Harry Potter and Eragon. However, I'm 'not' a fan of Harry Potter as a lot of people are. I think after the fourth book, it lost the shine and glow of a quality story. LOTR seems eons ahead in terms of quality, and out of the new books, DOP seems the most promising!

I am completely self taught in almost all the things that I do. From learning those instruments, to coding and designing. I have never undergone any 'proper' formal training of any sort. Sometimes, that's a bad thing since you don't know what's the right way of doing something. But it sure gives me pride to be able to say that :)

There you have it! Five things you didn't know about me, which now you do! I'm not very good at revealing stuff about me, but it sure was fun remembering all those things, since they have somehow been pushed to the past now :) I believe the process now is to tag five more people? This one will be a toughy, because I want to tag people who will actually write about themselves! :P Heh! So here are my taggies:

Phydeaux3: One of the nicest people around and my good friend.
Singpolyma: As Avatar said, 'the' hacker of our times! :P
Ramani: One of the most creative hackers around!
Deepak: The newest coder on the scene.
Gregory: The man who's hack (Freshtags!) got me into hacking the first place! :)

Warning! You have been tagged! :P

Making designs work for you

2006-12-28T03:21:00.000+05:30

What is the first thing that catches your eye when you land up on a page? The text? Maybe second. The page title? Close. It's something that's so natural and background-ish, that you've probably never consciously paid attention to it. And that is the mark of the success of the developer. Yes, I'm talking about the design of a web page. If you sit in awe of how a page looks, 9/10 chances are you won't pay much attention to the content, and something else will strike you, distracting you away from it. It's happened to me tons of times, whenever I land up on a beautiful looking page! I see something, then I run off to figure out how it was done. By the time I get it, I've already forgotten what I went to that page originally for. You see? The purpose of the page was defeated.

So! How do you design a page that will keep visitors on it, and make them focus on the content? I'm glad you asked!

Why candy? Why not eye-lollipops?

The first thing you have to understand is that the more flashy, the more distracting. Sure, it's really nice to put up a few things that look beautiful and attractive. Like a really nice background wallpaper, or a shiny widget here and there, maybe a cool little script! But the keyword is few. Never over do something that you can do without in the first place. Analyse the function of something (a graphic/content element), and see if it's dispensable. If it is, don't add more than one of it, in case you really want one.

Your design should divert attention to your content, not away from it, as I said before. So any element you add, should compliment the content. If it's a flashy object, put it as close to the content as you can, so that there takes place what I like to call, an attention flow or transfer. That's when the eyes gently pass from one thing to the object close to it. It's pretty easy to achieve, and I'm sure you've faced it sometimes too. It's time to use that on your viewers.

Realise which spots viewers see first.There are many tutorials on the web which help you pinpoint the 'hotspots'. A few resources to start with are Eyetracker, Web Page Hotspots and Eye tracking. This is important, since you'll want to place maximum content in those places. One good strategy would be to use attention catchers to maintain the flow of attention. This will give you the pleasure of using your eye-candies, and not compromising on viewer attention. It's the perfect ploy! :D And it works to maintain that continuity in your page, and will cause people to read everything and then move onto other things.

Use nice and strong colours to highlight important parts of the content. It doesn't matter if it might break the attention. That's what you're trying to do. Take them out of the monotony of reading simple content, by giving them something related, but not expected! And make sure their attention goes towards it :) It's a tried and tested method.

Simplicity goes well too! You can actually make things as simple as possible, in which case your text will definitely stand out and will immediately catch the viewer's attention. The perfect example for this is Daring Fireball. His site is a beautiful dark gray, with light coloured text on it. No frills attached. Your attention goes straight to the content, and stays with it! If you don't get besotted by the look, you can call it a near perfect design! :)

You must have your greens

Alas, there is no real substitute to good and proper content. But lack of good content can be covered up for to a little amount by coming up with an eye pleasing design, since it'll make viewers stay that much longer, and hence (hopefully) cause them to see something they like. Don't try to substitute for lack of content with good design though, that is sure to fail.

Happy designing! :)

Update: This is 'not' something that you should do. I am sure you don't need to be told that :P I found this off Digg.

Need a guide?

2006-12-27T00:50:00.000+05:30

A couple of weeks back, I read an article Cybernet News about a search engine which offers the user the choice of searching 'with another person'! Now, as expected, this got me a little apprehensive. It's not like we are searching amateurs, because we have been searching without help since we can remember! But not to come up with judgements before I checked it out, I went ahead and asked for a 'guide' (as they call 'em) while searching for a Psychology paper due in a couple of days. The results, honestly did surprise me! :)

But first a little background. ChaCha (Yea! That's the name...) was started by two entrepreneurs, Scott Jones and Brad Bostic. It is actually a 'deep web' A part of the web filled with databases and document/files which normal search engines do not look into. There are many other engines which search the deep web, like Complete Planet and Incy Wincy. search engine, although the guide I was with couldn't confirm this. Guides mostly use ChaCha's own engine to come up with the results for a user, and if they aren't satisfactory, use other engines (Google seems to be the first choice).

The guides themselves work from home, and are paid on the basis of how the user rates their 'performance' after the session is over. ChaCha monitors the search records as well, so it's pretty hard to rate unfairly. The guides are given, well, guides from ChaCha to help them search more effectively. These aren't the normal guidelines you're used to finding on the net. I'm guessing they're optimised for the ChaCha engine, and tells them how to get the 'best' out of it. They have their own community too! :) ChaCha, as an engine without the guide seems to be pretty evenly matched in the field of deep web search engines today, so nothing earth shattering there. Now, my experience with ChaCha.

Mission: search with guide

You make the choice of searching with a guide from the front page, which is an interface made all too popular by Google! :P You enter your term, and instead of hitting the normal search button, you click 'Search with guide'. You are taken to a page with three columns, the left most being a chat box which you use to communicate with your guide. The middle is for the results that your guide finds for you. The right most is for ads. Now, I began using it with Firefox 2.0, and for some reason the results being sent by the guide weren't reaching me. I switched to IE7 and it began working.

The guide took some time, because she was getting the generic results of Universities offering Psychology courses. It was certainly different this time around since I didn't have to see those results. The guide didn't post them to me, so in a way, the guide is an effective 'filter' for irrelevant results. That definition got stronger as the session continued, and the guide admitted to not getting proper results. She posted links to online libraries and databases I had never received in my searches however, and hence I discovered some new sources of content next time when I'm looking for things. We, however, reached the verge of giving up and ending the session, that she sent me a link to a paper submitted by a Professor which was probably the best reference I could have gotten off the Internet. I was quite happy with the end result, with the session being much more of a success than I had hoped for. I am more inclined to believe that I got lucky and landed up with a good guide, because subsequent guides haven't been that accurate as the first one! :|

The Last Word

ChaCha is definitely a novel approach, which believes in simplifying solutions. Where Google and other biggies crank out research on killer algorithms If you remember, Google recently bought an algorithm to improve their searches by displaying the exact data that matches the search query, and a few more things (Article)., ChaCha puts people in because the smartest processor out there, at the end of the day, is the human mind! Although this does make the experience slow (I had to wait for half an hour to get that one accurate link), and hence shouldn't be used for mission critical tasks, or when you're on a short time leash. But then again, if you are on a short time leash, you won't be searching anyway.

Not forget that ChaCha is very young, and it will only grow and become better from now on. With the engine as well as the guides gaining experience, it can only improve. Although, they'll need a 'lot' of people serving out to people if this method of searching catches on. Eventually they will have to have algorithms to help guides search faster and easier. Plus, with pioneers of tried and tested methods like Google on the stage already, I don't know how much the prospect of a novelty can drive users to it. After all, Google 'is' now synonymous with search, followed by constantly improving and well funded players like Microsoft and Yahoo! (even if they are bad!). It'll be a fight for ChaCha definitely, but it's service like nothing else in the field!

Go ahead! Give it a try, and tell me how it went! ;)

Update: This is not as unique as I thought. Qunu seems to offer the same thing, but offers 'experts' to help you out. I have yet to try out the service, but it does 'look' more modern with it's shiny graphics and nice pictures :) I bumped into it while looking for good skinnable Jabber clients, of which it gave me a nice list. Note that I didn't search for it on Qunu, but Google. This means that they probably store consolidated 'answers' pages of past queries. Cool!