Nilesh's Weblog

March 04, 2006

Photoblog Map

Yesterday I installed a cool 'photoblog map' in the Photoblog's Archives section. It allows you to see photos region-wise on the world map. To start with, each dot on the map links to a page containing thumbnails of photos taken in that region. Mark Zemen has made it real easy for anyone to use the photoblog map on their blog. All you need to do is create a template for generating the XML file that feeds location info to the flash map. It took me five minutes of work in MT to do that.

January 15, 2006

Blog Mela - Sankranti Edition

Welcome to the Makar Sankranti / Pongal / Lohri / Bhogali Bihu / Bhogi / Sakarat / Kicheri edition of the Bharateeya Blog Mela. Isn't that amazing? Seven different names for a festival. It happens only in India.

Apologies for the delay. Blogging has been pretty low this week and I had to spend quite some time scouting for the best and unique ones. Not to mention, that 24x7 blogmela, Desipundit, makes my life more difficult :-). But as anyone can agree, it is all fun in the end. So now that the Sun has begun its northward journey, let's begin our journey into blogistan.

Searching for something
Akshay Mahajan is out on the streets of Mumbai searching for the Byculla Soufflé. And the best samosas in town. Ram talks about his visit to the historic Ajanta & Ellora caves. Varnam writes that the recent discoveries in archaeology may just prove that Indians are the oldest farmers.

Books and related
On what is the one of the firsts in the Indian blogosphere, Sonia Faleiro podcasts an excerpt from her recently launched book The Girl. Amardeep Singh points out the recent additions of Indian-oriented works at Project Gutenberg, the free online ebook project. Vikrum Sequeira reviews his recent read - Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality.

Tech peck
Arnab Nandi lists his reasons for not liking the new Intel Macs. Michael Parekh talks about a non-obvious solution to managing the tons of gadgets and their accesories you have in your drawer. Amit Agarwal has a nice photocasting guide for those unfortunate to not own a Mac (Photocasting is the photo equivalent of podcasting). Veerchand Bothra talks about the mobile industry crying foul over piracy. Notice how they all come up with the same failed solution to counter piracy. And you'll know the losses they project will have a margin of +/- 50%, once you read what Rashmi Bansal has discovered.

On current stuff
Samanth expresses his dissappointment over the Hindu appointing their "internal independent ombudsman". Ashish points out the problem in Tavleen Singh's fallacious arguments in support of free irrigation. Aks analyses the larger trends in how the CAT has evolved.

Naveen Mandava talks about the archaic real estate laws in the country being a major hurdle, rather than politicions, to the boom of the economy. Nitin Pai wonders whether cricket has ever helped India-Pakistan relations. Nandan says it is not the monetary compulsions but maintaining the old lifestyle is the reason why bar girls refuse to go out of news.

Spaceman Spiff proposes an idea for eliminating caste based discrimination, thereby removing the need for reservations. Shivam Vij has an interesting discussion on the possible conflict between labour reforms and reservations in the private sector. Gaurav Sabnis hates the word 'caste' itself.

Society, culture and related
"Objective art is meditative art, subjective art is mind art" - Karamadude attempts to explain these words of Osho. (I'd tend to agree with him.) Neelakantan says Shubh Labh epitomises capitalism more than anything else. Crystal Blur writes about a terrible disease on the loose, especially in the recent times - Sanctimonitis. Curious gawker writes about the irony of Indians celebrating on the inclusion of Hindi as a terrorist spoken language by the US. Sakshi Juneja informs us about celebrities participating in the Mumbai Marathon.

There we are. This week's short and sweet blogmela. Enjoy! The next blogmela will be hosted by Spaceman Spiff.

January 07, 2006

Nominations for Blogmela Vol 4 Issue 2

nilesh.org is happy to host another blog mela, ten months after the last one here. Nominations for 2006's second blogmela are now invited. The usual rules plus one apply:

1. All blogs must be written by Indians or must have an Indian connection.
   
2. All blogs must be written between the Saturday 7th January 2006 and Friday 13th January 2006 (ah!). 14th January is when the mela will be published.
   
3. The posts can be of any type except personal journal entries. You can nominate yourself without any guilt.
   
4. Nominations should be the permalinks to the post. Please do not nominate entire blogs. Link the post in the comments section but do not paste the whole post. You can even mail to me (mail AT nilesh.org) the link to the post.
5. Your site must not contain any pop ups or pop unders.
6. Vote for shutterbug.nu at the Indibloggies in the photoblog category. ;)
   

If you are intrigued by blog melas, visit the previous blog mela published by Harini. And a compilation of recent blog melas. Enjoy!

October 16, 2005

"The MBA Mafia"

Inspite of all the current hype which was built around the IITs the reality is that the IIT graduates have not served the country's interests the way they were expected to, because, they were rare commodities in the Indian market for engineers. Most of them were available floating around freely in America or some rare ones in the Indian MBA market. The reality also is that IIT education has nothing to do with the IT revolution and success stories in the Silicon Valley. Agreed many of the people involved in top positions in Silicon Valley might be ex IITians but it is the knowledge they acquired over the last 20 - 30 years and the entire shift in focus that they under went in their career after leaving IIT that helped them reach where they are today. Even today the software part of education at IIT is not world class. In fact it is a pity that they tied up with a private education company to spread the IIT, Kharagpur and IIT, Delhi certified courses through a shady arrangement with them (by setting up something called CEP, a private body with a managing director inside the IIT Kharagpur campus and FITT, another private body with a managing director inside the IIT, Delhi campus) in an effort to confuse the students that they were getting something from IIT.

So you ask who is this person so jealous of the IITs? There's more --

Looking at things around I am forced to feel that this country today has a mafia operating in the field of MBA education. A group of people with vested interests who want to keep this simple common sense education limited only to a few so that their starting salaries can be artificially jacked up to anything between Rs. 6 lakhs and 10 lakhs per annum. If they are so good then why don't our public sector companies too employ them and revive instead of going on sale. Why don't  we produce 2000 MBAs in each of the IIMs with such phenomenal facilities, acres of land and huge buildings? It is not done so that companies get intimidated by the huge infrastructure, in which just about 150 to 200 students are made to feel in the ninth clouds, and get compelled to pay astronomical sums of money. These schools therefore create an artificial scarcity and capitalise on it. If the number of students are not artificially and unnecessary limited the salaries perhaps would come down to Rs. 1.2 lakhs per annum at the maximum which is their actual worth and with more better quality MBAs the growth rate of our country might break the 2% to 3% barrier which the current number of highly educated MBAs have been able to give the country.

 

And then you ask again, who is this so jealous of the IIMs? Given the latest events in the Indian blogosphere, you should be quickly able to guess. Yes, its our respected professor and economic 'guru' Arindam Chaudhuri on his off-track, hypocritic train of thoughts!  Its fine to have more management institutes around the country but throwing mud at the institutions that have made India famous for? Nah! And don't you talk about "phenomenal facilities"! And well, its not just coincidence that Rashmi & Gaurav are IIM graduates, is it? And does anyone need to explain who is the real MBA mafia here?!

For the benefit of those who are clueless about this online drama, here is a gist. A few months ago, Rashmi Bansal, the editor of JAM magazine did an expose on the shoddy practices of the IIPM. Gaurav Sabnis came out in support of Rashmi on his blog and put in his opinion. IIPM, instead of clarifying their side, launched a smear campaign against Rashmi. IIPM was not happy about Gaurav's personal post either and surprise, surprise, served legal notices to both Rashmi and Gaurav for defaming IIPM through their blogs! And then the whole thing just exploded in the Indian blogosphere. There was an outburst of angry emotions on all the Indian blogs I ever knew. Desipundit has it all listed. The current episode has ended with Gaurav voluntarily resigning from his company.

Hats-off to a smart, rational, fearless girl for exposing the facts. Hats-off to a guy who stands up for the truth, his freedom of speech and great concern for his employer. Given the same situation, how many of the rest of us would stand up for our principles?

For those who are still wanting to join IIPM because they rank in the top ten b-schools in India, keep in mind that they were booted out of the Outlook Top B-schools list for various reasons.

October 14, 2005

Now Showing!

April 10, 2005

Mid Day Metro

I am on Mid Day Metro Mulund Edition. Nice to see my photos in print. Makes me feel happy that they look so much better than the web. These people have professional equipment to scan photos and slides. No wonder the print medium has so much impact. My former boss called up immediately to congratulate me!

March 31, 2005

Shutterbug at the Photobloggies

I am so so pleased to know that shutterbug.nu is the Best South East Asian / Indian Photoblog at the photobloggies. Thanks again to all of you who supported Shutterbug. So here is the complete list of winners -

• Best American Photoblog - Orbit1
• Best Canadian Photoblog - Daily Dose of Imagery
• Best European / British / Irish Photoblog - Chromasia
• Best Latin American Photoblog - Momentanea
• Best Australian / New Zealand Photoblog - JinkyArt
• Best Chinese Photoblog - DownDream
• Best Japanese Photoblog - yamasaki ko-ji
• Best South East Asian / Indian Photoblog - Shutterbug
• Best African / Middle Eastern Photoblog - Kosoof
• Best Writing of a Photoblog - verba.chromogenic
• Best Black and White Photography of a Photoblog - chromogenic
• Best Animal Photography of a Photoblog - Ephemera
• Best Abstract Photography of a Photoblog - Deceptive Media
• Best Studio Photography of a Photoblog - Orbit1
• Best Photojournalism of a Photoblog - joe’s nyc
• Best Landscape Photography of a Photoblog - A Walk through Durham Township
• Best Toy Camera Photography of a Photoblog - Making Happy
• Best Street Photography of a Photoblog - Daily Dose of Imagery
• Best Portrait Photography of a Photoblog - Orbit1
• Best Kept Secret Photoblog - Superhero Journal
• Best Photoblog Design - rion.nu
• Best Under 18 Photoblog - FerociousCheese.com
• Best New Photoblog - joe’s nyc
• Photo of the Year - A Walk in Durham Township
• Photoblog of the Year - Daily Dose of Imagery

March 20, 2005

Shutterbug

ShutterBug.nu gets rolling again. I had never stopped shooting. Only stopped blogging. The Blogmela has brought interest back, enough for me to make a post. I somehow want to sustain that interest.

March 13, 2005

Celebrating the Indian Blogosphere

Welcome to this week's edition of the BlogMela. I am already in the wee hours of Monday morning for a Sunday issue so let's not waste time with pleasantries. Here we go -

First, the blog news of the week - Mediaah, our best media blog, has been served with a legal notice by a Media biggie. They have been forced to shutdown but they promise to be back online in a different form by the first week of June. We all wish well for your third round, Mediaah! DesiMediaBitch has the story and Nilu has a few suggestions on how we can do our bit for Mediaah. The least you can do is sign this online petition.

Saket Vaidya is peeved by the way Indians worship superstars. He narrates a wierd experience he had in one of the malls in Mumbai when he found some 'champas, chamelis and chamans' walking into the mall amidst heavy security.

Eroteme lets us into his room and reminds us of those days when we clean up our rooms only to discover things we were supposed to do long back. Then what you get is an information overload. Lots and lots of things to do.

Neelakantan is impressed by Deccan's 0.5 grand offer for an air ticket not because of the price but because they are inviting a whole new segment of travellers to flying.

Bollycat or Wobblycat? Gaurav Sabnis points to an Indian site which is supposed to be a database of plagiarisms in Bollywood. Dissapointingly it turns out that the site owner needs to check facts before proclaiming that Lagaan is a copy of Victory.

Saurav Sarkar attracts our attention to the fact that Narendra Modi is about to make an appreance at the Madison Square Garden in NYC on March 20th. He urges NYC Indians to be a part of the CAG protest against the man. Modi sure was the 'chief abettor' in the Gujarat genocide and he should be made to feel shameful about it.

"The Great Ocean Road had a tourist radio frequency that tells tourists about the places while they drive". Sumeet Singh describes his wonderful trip to the 12 Apostles of Port Campbell in the US of A. How I wish I was there!

Ammani gives a very brief but beautiful description of a woman who lived all her life for her family.

Gaurav Meshram has just discovered that he's been addicted! I had the same feeling some years back. I still haven't been able to shake that off.

Kingdoms of Tomorrow. Sachin Nair has an analogy for multinationals. The bottomline, he says, is that we never really did evolve, nature ensures that we follow the same path but it changes the playing field thus helping us to think that we have evolved overtime. Very interesting!

Satellite townships - do they have a role to play? or are they in existence just to decongest big cities? That's what Patrix is pondering over after his visit to Cresskill in NJ. Hmmm, they are also called counter magnets.

Surya questions the popular notion that NRIs can help India by living in India. She explains how the 'Non-Returning Indian' can be a capable ambassador of India to the world and how NRIs are partly creditable for the changed perceptions of India in the last few years.

Kiruba wants you to know that money from Google Adsense is for real. That's because he's being paid for real. That's great! Now get going and register on Google.

Atul Arora narrates a playground incident about his friend Munna Kabbadi's football adventure. Its really funny - मुन्ना कबाड़ी और पत्थर से टक्कर!

Young and Fearless. Amit Varma observes these qualities in young Pakistani cricketers on their media interactions. On the other hand, Indians lack the burning desire to win. How true!

Xena's with an interesting short story - Ruse x Truce. It ends nicely. As with most of you, I too like stories with nice endings most of the time. Makes you feel good about life.

Finally Nivas reviews Aldous Huxley's The Brave New World. He relates the almost prophetic descriptions to where our world is heading. What catches me about Nivas's description of the novel is the Matrix-like future being presented in it. And that from a book written in the thirties!

Hope you liked the variety of posts for and of Indians this week. Do drop in your comments. Cheers and enjoy your week ahead!

Update: The next Blog Mela will be hosted on Kiruba's weblog.

March 08, 2005

Nominations for the Blog Mela

Update(Sunday evening): Hello there! The mela should be up in a few hours. I am working on it

Hello bloggers! The Great Indian Blogmela is back on nilesh.org. Calling for your nominations on the best and the greatest posts this week in the Indian blogosphere. Most of you know the rules but I'd like to reiterate the guidelines -

1. All posts between March 6 and March 12 are eligible, including these days
2. All posts should be made by Indians or should focus on India.
3. You can submit any type of posts except personal journal entries.
4. Deadline is by the end of the 12th, Indian time. The Blog Mela will be posted on the 13th.
5. The nominated posts can be linked as a comment to this weblog entry. Do not paste your whole post in the comments. Someone actually did that on last week's PHD BlogMela.
6. You can even mail me (mail AT nilesh.org) the link to your post. Do not mail the link to a whole blog.

And your time starts … now!

January 06, 2005

Bharateeya Blog Mela: Calling for Entries

Sorry for the interruption. Calling for nominations of the Bharateeya Blog Mela! The rules are here again -

• Posts must either be made by Indians or must focus on India or Indians.
• Send in permalinks to the individual blog entries only, not just the URL. If the permalink is not working, send me the title and date of the blog entry.
• You can nominate your own posts or someone else's
• You can submit any type of posts except personal journal entries.
• Drop it as a comment to this post.
• The entries have to be dated between January 1-7.
• Please send your nominations to me latest by January 7, 8 pm IST.

If you are new to the mela, here's a brief, albeit dated, FAQ. And here's a dummy's guide too! The last Blogmela was held on Madmanweb and the one before that on AnarCapLib. The next Blog Mela will be hosted at Chaoszone.

Six Apart acquires Livejournal

Hot as it can be, the news is SixApart has acquired Livejournal. Om Malik broke out the news yesterday. Here is Mena's explanation of the acquisition.

December 27, 2004

The nth Bharateeya Blog Mela

Update(21:00): Due to cascading reasons, the nth Blog Mela has been postponed to the (n+1)th Blog Mela. I mean Madhu is hosting the current Blogmela and I'll host the next one on 7th January.

Read More (228 words) »»

November 24, 2004

Contest - The Best Indian Business School Blog

So here we are, nearing the end of the contest. I am not in any of the winning positions. That's fine. I know I was at the top for the most number of days, almost eight. It would have helped in getting a 'stability' award. The important thing was I got to learn a lot about Google's way of ranking content.

Apart from the usual - semantic markup, number of links, site pagerank, etc. that are necessary, freshness of content also is very important. Freshness, in turn, depends on how frequently you update your site. Sumit had some concerns about his site not being indexed. Actually Google indexes your site completely once a month only. Rest of the time, it only indexes the linked pages. During the course of the contest, there were some discrepancies also. This page managed to stay in the top results without any content and without any updation! Google has its strange ways. The constant reshuffling that happened can be attributed to the fact that all the top results were more or less of similar importance for the keyword. So slight changes on any of the pages pushed it up or down. Also inspite of having a higher pagerank (6) than any of the participants, I am nowhere in the top. This goes all the way to show how pagerank is not the only factor in Google's ranking criteria.

As for me, let me take solace in the fact that I am among the top in Google's search results for some common keywords. So much for ego-surfing. :)

November 10, 2004

The Best Indian Business School Blog

Update: This is a sticky post till Nov 25th. Obviously for the contest.

Here comes the Nigritude Ultramarine of the Indian Blogosphere. Sponsored by Google, ISB has introduced an online contest to find the first site in Google for the phrase "The Best Indian Business School Blog". That…is not what I would call my weblog. In fact, I am in no b-school either. But, what's the harm? The name of the contest is Searchlight. Now in case, you feel the urge to help me out, add the following code to your weblog post, unless you too are participating -

<a href="http://nilesh.org/weblog/">The Best Indian Business 
School Blog</a>

Dhar, is that you? Google, ISB, SEO …?

June 07, 2004

The New MT Developer Network

Its only the developer network that's keeps MT from being relegated to dark corners of the web. For a company which is so heavily dependent on this community, alienating it should be sacrilege. Yet, the Movabletype.org developer forums remain deserted by the company. To actually experience that, try posting a question to the forum and look at the responses you get. You can hardly find a 6A employee on the forum. Its only the community all over the forums. So this time, they are setting up an ‘official’ developer network and giving away free developer licenses in the hope that developers keep working on MT. I might too, if I am ‘accepted’ as a developer. Apart from this, I am really groping for an incentive to develop a plugin or maintain existing plugins on MT. Ok, so does that mean I'll work for MT only if I get it for free? I never said that. Earlier, I was thinking of buying the discounted MT 3.0D. But then how long does that license last? What when I need to buy a newer license? Will it be cheaper? No, I predict. My only issue is the high cost for a basic version of the software, which is still not solved by the free licenses. Beyond my reach and beyond the reach of most Indians. Ok, End of rants on MT3.

May 29, 2004

Wordpress - The Road Ahead

Matt talks about the developers' plans for an upcoming Big Release of Wordpress. He does mention about multiple blogs and other enhancements to the plugin architecture. Which is exactly what keeps me from moving over. The Big Release is hopefully not a Big Wait.

May 16, 2004

MovableType Free?

On the 13th of this month, Sixapart announced the launch of Movabletype 3.0 developer edition. And guess what? Personal edition price - USD70! That for a version which yet does not support heirarchical categories. And what about the free version? Yes, that exists, but look at the restrictions - No more than one author and three weblogs. What? I cannot create more than three weblogs on my MT installation? Notice the difference. In the paid personal versions, they talk about 'active weblogs' number limit. In the free version, it is just plain 'weblog'. Now that means I cannot even create a static blog (without any posts. I do that for managing static pages on my site). So much for the commitment to a free version. Hmmm, I have been beginning to like TXP off late.

Update(11:00 PM): Thanks to all for pointing out the error. I really missed out on that post on 6A. Meanwhile kottke also agrees, the new licensing mechanism is really confusing. And yes, I'll wait for the discount code to see how much it works out to. I have been waiting to pay for an MT license since the time they announced the development of MT3.0. But sorry, I am still not going to shell out USD70 for this version. Mark Pilgrim sums it up. All said, Wordpress and TXP are still excellent alternatives to MT, I find, TXP especially for a photolog; not for ShutterBug, as it uses the most complex MT templates I have ever made.

April 08, 2004

Shutterbug.nu

The moment I have been waiting for the last six months has finally arrived! Presenting the all new Shutterbug.nu - A Photoenthusiast's Log (or backlog as some of you would call it).

Planning to put up a redesign for the last six months, I was struggling to give a new face to the old photolog. To come up with a radical change in design, I had to go through at least 3 complete redesigns till I was thoroughly satisfied with this one. Minimalistic design is a principle I have always liked in websites. Its the same reason why my weblog sports a simple yet functional look. It doesn't mean one should not have colorful designs and flashy effects. It does mean that design only that much as necessary. You may not necessarily agree with my viewpoint. Which is why you may not even like Shutterbug's design. Fine with me. Why no colors - because I get bored with a particular colour over a period of time. Black, Grey & white are eternal. The design elements are minimalistic, with clear demarcations .

The photolog is arranged in three clear sections - Features, Panoramas and Archives. Features are collections of photos based on one theme or location. Panoramas need no explanation. Archives contain entries posted individually. The entries are sorted by category and date for easy traversal. Another observation you may make are the easy-to-remember URLs. Note that most of the entries have been made pre-dated to their original dates because of the huge backlog (a year's photos) I had with me. I'll try to maintain continuity while posting all future posts.

Most of the photos I have taken till date are using my SLR (Details here). I recently bought the digital camera so photos from the digital camera might increase in the future. This is another reason why my posts aren't and won't be very frequent, say once a day. Photos taken from the SLR (which is my primary camera) do take time for processing and digitizing.

So browse the new photolog and the comments are available for your feedback. Do put in your comments. Enjoy!

October 16, 2003

Blogs on WAP

So finally there we are, RSS feeds on the mobile! Blogstreet has launched the RSS2Mobile service yesterday and they already have a fan in me. Now I can keep track of blogs while on the move too. One suggestion I would like to give them is to make available a bookmark facility so that WAP users are not left with typing long urls to access RSS feeds of blogs they read. All you do is create your bookmarks using your login on Blogstreet and later access these via WAP. That would really be the icing on the cake. For now, you can access any blog (which has an RSS feed) using the following url -

http://blogstreet.com/wap/t/<RSS feed url>

e.g. to access my blog's feed, you access this url -

http://blogstreet.com/wap/t/nilesh.org/weblog/index.xml

Go, have fun. BTW, they are planning to integrate this service with their existing RSS subscription model which is good, though I would prefer a bookmarks thing.

October 15, 2003

Taken

The good news is that Blogsnob, IMO, one of the best textad sharing systems has been taken over by Kalsey Computing.

October 03, 2003

Mela Dynamics

So here we are, one of the largest democracies trying to emulate democracy in blogsphere. And why not, if you observe the BBM's egalitarian approach towards showcasing the best posts and discussions on Indian Blogs, you will easily conclude that this is the only way that ensures equality among all blogs. Quite in contrast with the west, where the most popular blogs get even more popular.

I had this all the time in my mind and often wondered how equality could be achieved. While I was trying to ape the western way, in reality only a simple solution existed, like the one Ashwini proposed and which led to the BBM ball rolling.

It feels very good to see that we are constantly reviewing the direction that Bharatiya Blog Mela is heading and check to ensure its very basic tenets remain in place. And it should so. No matter how big the Indian blogsphere gets, we should stick to the simplicity of BBM. At the same time we should not discount that Dina has good intentions in focussing on development for the 31st Bharatiya Blog Mela. So let's all put in nominations for these topics also.

September 16, 2003

Bharateeya Blog Mela

Indian blogging has really moved up in content quality in the last 6 months or so. We, as a whole, have distinctly matured from the i-had-my-lunch-at-four posts to more serious issues. People are discussing a plethora of topics on their weblogs as you can see from the 28th edition of Bharatiya Blog Mela. Mahesh has done a very good job of presenting it the way he has. Way to go, Indians! Still, I feel we should let the Bharatiya Blog Mela remain the unique way it is presented, each edition being passed on from blog to blog. And I would love to host one of the editions.

July 10, 2003

Blogs.com

I successfully imported all my existing MT posts to Typepad. Seems smooth to me. Except probably mobile blogging. I tried to post using my mobile phone but posting by "confirmation messages" failed to work. And I guess there are some problems with the Style Editor on Typepad. Some of the changes I did, didn't reflect on the Index page. Otherwise, the whole thing appears so familiar - just like Movabletype. It feels great if one is a novice in blogging. You wouldn't have to see any code to whip up a cool looking blog having great content. ;-)

July 09, 2003

A million bucks up for grabs

That's it. My blog shares stock are up for grabs. I have no interest whatsoever left in playing on Blogshares. Except the investments in my own blogs, I have decided to release the rest to anyone who wants. Give me a reason and the money is yours - as simple as that. Ofcourse no one gets the whole booty. Check my portfolio and ask if you find anything interesting.(Update: Don't mail me guys, just put your comments)

May 27, 2003

Easy Game

How can a person like me, so naive to the stock market, manage to register growth of more than 20,000 % at Blogshares in just ten days and increase his worth from $500 to $102,000? It just doesn't feel right. :-)

May 15, 2003

New MT Clients

Its nice to see two new MT-specific offline blogging clients. SharpMT and Zempt promise full MT feature support including the new text filters and keywords. While I was able to run Zempt successfully, SharpMT crashed and refused to run. With Windows' wierd messages, I gave up on it. Zempt, meanwhile, is definitely usable even at version 0.2alpha. If you can see this post, it works. Looks like its time to move away from w.bloggar. Though w.bloggar is currently the best of offline publishing tools.

April 03, 2003

The quote

A man recently said -

I logged onto the internet and thought about posting something on my blog. I continued to think about it for a little while. Eventually I decided that I wouldn't post anything.

I spent sometime thinking if I should post this thing. First I thought I shouldn't. Eventually boredom took me over and I posted this.

February 26, 2003

Blogupdates

I seem to have missed some interesting developements in the blogworld off late( apart from the Google Blogger thing) -- Like Dave Sifry's enhancement to the top interesting blogs; Blogstreet's Visual Neighbourhood (though I couldn't quite figure out the use. Something using Geo-tags would have been better); Dave Winer's idea of identity systems on commenting; Daypop's Top Word Bursts; Popdex's trackback aggregation; The new text-formatting plugins of MT 2.63; Ben Hammersley, Sam Ruby and Ken are worried whether in the near future, blogs will talk to each other more than we talk between ourselves. I do feel the same, reading these other *back concepts (apart from trackback).

Photobloggies

While I am glad that I was nominated for the 2003 Photobloggies, I know why I didn't make it to the finals - Lack of fresh content. Got to move my a**. :-)

January 25, 2003

The Bloggie Effect

That some blogs nominated in the 2003 bloggies also link to me, struck me only now because I am getting a constant stream of hits (not large in number though) from them. Whatever... The other effect that the bloggies had on me is the renewed enthusiasm to work on the Indian Blogsphere, the enthusiasm, which was not lessened but rather kept on hold for the last few weeks.

January 24, 2003

Vote for Blogsnob

BlogSnob has been nominated for the "Best Weblog Webring" in the Fairvue Third Annual Weblog Awards. I put in my vote. Put yours too. One bad thing about the awards though - Popular sites which have already won awards earlier, shouldn't be nominated. New blogs should get some chance.

Busy

Quoting Holovaty quoting Craig Saila - "A good estimate of my workload level is the density (or frequency) or my entries here." That's all I need to say for now.

January 14, 2003

The All New and Fast Weblog

Presenting the all new nilesh.org/weblog. Or so... nothing much visible on the body. You need to do look under the bonnet. I have done a complete recoding of the weblog not only to lighten it up but also to add new features. Here are the new things on Nilesh's Weblog -

1. No Tables - pure XHTML 1.0 and CSS based layout. Finally I managed to eliminate tables after many attempts. The purpose is to seperate design from content.
2. No GIFs - Again after several attempts to remove gifs and spacers from my site design, I have finally moved all my images to the more superior PNGs and JPEGs. Well, it's a matter of a few more changes to remove all remaining traces.
3. Text Sizing - Now with the help of the buttons on the left side menu, you can increase the font size of the page text. That is if you have felt the need to using glasses to read this weblog. And your preferences get saved too. So you do not have to change font sizes again and again.
4. Print Styles - If you do a print preview of any page of the weblog, you'll see that the distracting banner and menu disappear and what you get to print is pure content.
5. Clean Degradation - Older browsers which used to see jumbled up text will no longer see that way. But then, they won't see any style also. I have hidden the design from 4.x browsers.

Now that I have finished one task of my big list of new-year things-to-do, you probably won't have to wait longer for the next one. No, it's got nothing to do with hum*blog.

December 24, 2002

Dial-Up Revelations

If you are conscious about the time you spend on the Internet, specially when you are on dial up, you would definitely prefer pulling RSS feeds from sites that you read regularly. I prefer that too, even if I care less about the time I spend on Internet. Megnut has lately discovered the importance of providing RSS feeds to your readers, with not just excerpts but complete posts. Well, just last month, I had updated the RSS feeds of my weblog to versions 1.0 and 2.0, to include complete posts. These feeds replicate the main page with the same number of posts as the page. Who knows, someone like Megnut sitting far off in some remote place may be reading it using an RSS reader.

December 19, 2002

BlogTimes to Use

Jordan T has used my plugin MTBlogtimes for what is its ideal purpose - To analyse blog patterns over months. And look how cool it looks.

Blogger Freshly Updated RSS

Looks like Evhead has heard various people talking about putting up an RSS feed for recently updated blogs on blogger.com. You can find it here - fresh_rss.xml. Blogspot users can feel better now. We only hope the various indexes use this RSS file for good use. Anyway, guys, with respect to the Indian bloghome, I am almost done with a rough layout. I'll put it up on the site for your review. Check this page today again. Meanwhile read Steve's (of WayPath) comment on the Indian Blogdex discussion.

December 18, 2002

Link Diffusion

What could be more funnier? Here many of us are discussing about Indian indexes and there blogdex made a note of it at number 88 (at this time). It is the power of networking.

December 12, 2002

The Third Person Thing

The Third Person Thing(TPTT for you acronym freaks), as Nilesh had named it the first time he encountered it when Satyen was randomly walking on snow, seems to be a strange psychosocial behaviour in which an individual gets immense pleasure by referring to himself as a third person. He comments on his thoughts as if he is able to read his own mind and narrates it to the audience, which in turn, gets more pleasure reading it. Nilesh wouldn't call it a mental syndrome as Arnab mentions. It is rather a complex social behaviour, which is nurtured by the almost riotous feedback from the audience. It means that both the writer and the reader mutually exchange the virus before it spreads. There is nothing one can do about it. For that matter, nobody wants it to die. You can see some early sightings of this behaviour here and here. Anyone finding any new sightings, please post the links for everyone's benefit.

Popadex

Popdex doesn't seem to be all that exciting. First, the website ratings (or Popscore, as Shanti calls it) haven't been clarified. At present, the top site is shown to have 6 links to it. Not that many. Second, it seems Popdex is only a prove-something site. Shanti is out to prove that a link spider can be put up in a few days. Third, she says "I must make a disclaimer that this site is just a side hobby." Enough to put the last stone on the grave, which isn't too far. Nevertheless, the second point is perfectly valid. That anyone can put up a current-events news & link spider in a couple of days. Not to mention the ease of LAMP in setting up the whole thing.
Update: Shanti is a He and not She as would be given to believe. And also he isn't an Indian, He is a white American. :-). Kribs found that out.