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I have upgraded now to WP2.3 but this time it wasn’t smooth as last time.
First of all, the one-shot automatic upgrade provided by this plugin stopped before completing the job (when it had to upgrade database). After which I used its step-by-step and started from beginning and hence had to activate plugins myself
Second, due to some enhanced security stuff, I could not log in to wordpress. But I initially thought it was a forgotten password issue - due to my recent nightmarish lost-pwd cases that I would highlight sometime - I reset the password after lot of breaking my head. (But it was very easy actually)
But I was still unable to log in, because it was not the case of wrong password in first place ! So after breaking my head again, I commented out the security code. ( I feel it was not working as it intended to)
There are many changes in 2.3 of which, the tag thing has broken my existing wonderfully working UTW tagging system, & that is frustrating. I even imported the old tags but the “modifying theme to make it work with tags” and breaking the earlier working system is highly irritating.
In advance wishing you all a very happy Ganesh Chaturthi.
Ps: Some posts coming soon. Also sharing lot of things on link blog
Pps: What do you think of new theme ? Click on those tiny pics on top to change the look.
# As said earlier, I am not daily-digest-posting my del.icio.us links on this blog. Instead I strongly beg-recommend-request-urge you to subscribe to this feed : http://feeds.feedburner.com/Lens/Convex - this will contain the google reader shared items and selected items from my notebook. Together now it is a complete link feed I could wish for. If you want to have a look at the page, it will be redirected from this easy url : http://rkblogs.net/blog/link-blog ,
# As is obvious, the email updates, from the blog will not include the links as was happening earlier. Feed readers request you to subscribe to above feed.
# Waiting for feedburner integration of Twitter daily digest and Reader link blog available under link splicer. How do I get heard ?
# The feed will be a mixture of all things that interest me - numerous blog posts from others, tech news, this and that and all. Be warned but do subscribe !
# Finally I can now use del.icio.us for what it is - bookmarking, instead of link blogging.
# Notebook (combined with this) is actually much more and I am possibly using it to full capability Just for the sake of completion here is my public page and here is the feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Lens/Window ( However, subscribing to Convex feed is enough, the notebook updates will be available there.)
# Not subscribed to Convex yet ? my last reminder, request - Do it now !
Undoubtedly one of the most awaited and most useful plugins is here finally - a plugin to automatically upgrade the Wordpress. No lazy procrastination anymore.
Here is what it can do for you
1. Backs up the files and makes available a link to download it. 2. Backs up the database and makes available a link to download it. 3. Downloads the latest files from http://wordpress.org/latest.zip and unzips it. 4. Puts the site in maintenance mode. 5. De-activates all active plugins and remembers it. 6. Upgrades wordpress files. 7. Gives you a link that will open in a new window to upgrade installation. 8. Re-activates the plugins.
The plugin can also can be run in a automated mode where in you do not have to click on any links to go to the next step.
Among other changes to this blog, del.icio.us links are discontinued to be posted as blog entries. As I am using feedburner, del.icio.us links are being sliced there to the main blog. So no more blog entries and thus saving little space on my database How I wish some arrangement like that could be done to my twitter udpates too! Also I wish, I could change the frequency to weekly rather than daily. Ah ..wishes…if wishes were horses…
Installed odiogo plugin for audio feed. On my last post about talkr there was a comment from Odiogo that I could try odiogo and hence I am trying it. Now you can compare both talkr and odiogo for sometime. Any feedback would be appreciated !
*****
Among the lows, still haven’t had time to write few posts thats on my mind. Still haven’t found a way to fix the repeated entries (its only a repeated display and not actually repeated entries though) and still have not been able to figure out why twitter updates often repeat same tweets or as is happening now it does not even update, or to make it post at the Indian end of day or to exclude reply tweets from the post.
*****
And if you haven’t already heard, Windows Live Writer is being used by lots of people. With plugin options and all, it has been the best offline blog editing tool I have seen. It is terrific and just what I wanted - I could save a copy of my blog in my computer and not bother about remembering where I save them, could write/edit in a feature rich editor, that too proper blog editor, rather than in boring notepad, could save on multiple clicks by logging in etc.
Some posts are repeated ..This has resulted after WP upgrade. Actually it is the side-effect of a hack I had done earlier to achieve something else. Now I am not able to figure out what… It was a plugin if I remember correctly, but can’t see it now (but its effects are there)…
Also, hope you don’t mind about the two captcha stuff, which might be little irritating and intruding, but it has reduced the spam little.
The twitter updates started behaving erratically (again possible due to some change I made which did not result as I had wanted), so is disabled now ..Also wanted to exclude the username posts in twitter from appearing on blog, once that is achieved, it should be back.
This is a software very close to my heart. Because this is the very type of program I wished I had or I wished I wrote/developed for my own use1 There is a personal reason for this.
My father has, many say, the best memory and knowledge about the relatives in our entire circle of relatives that I have encountered. He not only remembers who is related to whom, his brain has, most often than not, other details like their names, their order in the children’s queue, their education, their occupation and in some cases their history of places lived. This is huge and complex data considering that he would not have met/seen them at all - for me, unless there is a face I can not associate a name to it and remember it. And when he talks with his father-in-law (my grand father) another power house of information of his generation, the observers of the conversation not only struggle to keep pace connecting the dots but gasp in awe at the knowledge present and ease with which that is recalled. Many times it has so happened that a person meeting my father for the first time would introduce himself & within minutes from my father he would be enlightened with new knowledge of his family tree and how they are related to someone else.
As for me, I struggle to recall the name and the way they are related even though I would have met them in a function just an year ago. And those I haven’t met are hardly remembered by me. Memory, visualization and ability to recall - I am average, if not bad, at all the three.
So I had this plan of making my father fill out the tree for my reference. And the best way to do it would be on computer so that it would be easy to search, distribute, add/edit contents and most importantly to visualize. I tried using freemind, a mindmapping software, but I alone doing everything would be hugely time consuming and I dropped the idea.
Now comes Geni - a super cool application - with a very easy user interface and features. Since it is a web application, now I can get my other relatives to contribute and finally realize my wish.
Geni promises to be more than just building family tree and few social-networking features are quite fun. And that makes it sort of family-networking site. There are few issues but I hope they get resolved over time. Very prompt and helpful team responds to queries. They have an option to export the content ( which might come handy if they wish to shut down or if they wish to stop free usage - I wish neither happens), printing option - both of which I have not tried out. They have even won Webware 100 awards. Some of the improvements that are almost necessary are - making it work offline with the help of google-gears or suchlike, easy merging of two people, mail-to-all email holders/ mail to those who are editing the trees, import of the tree etc
If you are interested check the site out and let me know what do you think.
And by the way, in their forums, there is a fun topic to list which celebrity are they related to and I found one related to Ralph Waldo Emerson!! Hi there! And another topic tries to find out about the biggest family tree owner and one replies 1800 and 33000 to go !! I was pleasantly surprised to know they were researching from 1990, and that many like them are interested in family tree and archiving that in software. And I had thought there would be no takers for my program and only I had such interests!
[1] I had started doing a stand alone app but what I am going to talk is revolutionary compared to my idea. I even tried to use freemindmap for family tree purpose!
Posted by Rk on 3 July 2007 at 7:55 am under Fun, Tech. 1 Comment.
Yahoo! pipes was announced back in Feb but somehow I had not tried it. Desperate to mix and play around with feeds, I tried few services like FeedBlender, rssmix and finally with much resistance tried out Pipes. But soon I liked it so much that I spent lot of time trying out various things and had fun. The interface itself is artistic/aesthetic, before even thinking about the use. Rss mixing, I am sure, is just one of its functionalities and looking at it only as an rssmix alternative tool is injustice to its power.
I have put together almost all feeds related to my online activity (blog, cocomments,twitter,picasa,delicious) here. I was feeling proud about my brilliant idea of redirecting my blog’s feed to the above feed, but it is somewhat stupid. Any guesses why ? It may not serve any major purpose now apart from the fun of experimentation and having things at one place.
Here is what visionaries say about Pipes: Tim O’Reilly :
Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output.[..]This is something I’ve been waiting nearly ten years for.[..]hey allow developers to use two websites in a way that their creators didn’t quite intend, which extends them and makes them more useful. But mashups have generally been limited in their scope, pairwise combinations with their output typically being simply another web site. That is, the pipes and filter mechanism had not been generalized.
But perhaps more significantly, to develop a mashup, you already needed to be a programmer. Yahoo! Pipes is a first step towards changing all that, creating a programmable web for everyone.
Using the Pipes editor, you can fetch any data source via its RSS, Atom or other XML feed, extract the data you want, combine it with data from another source, apply various built-in filters (sort, unique (with the “ue” this time:-), count, truncate, union, join, as well as user-defined filters), and apply simple programming tools like for loops. In short, it’s a good start on the Unix shell for mashups.[..]Pipes can simply be used as a kind of “power browser.” [..] For example, you can build a custom mashup to search for traffic along your own routes every morning, or a news aggregator that searches multiple sites for subjects you care about. All you have to do is start with one of the existing modules
There’s also another key accomodation of social functionality: Pipes is pretty.[..]Is Pipes going to be a success? In many ways it already is. It lets Yahoo unequivocally be first at something, and if you count the broader market of web-based application development tools, it lets Yahoo be best at something, too. It’s innovative, exciting, and well-done.
It takes effort to explain the significance of a new product when the immediate benefit to consumers may not be so obvious, and the awkwardly named “pipes” from Yahoo! is no exception.[...] It works like a visual procedural programming language with the output of the process dropping out at the bottom, in the form of text output, RSS, SMS alerts of even JSON. You can use feeds, user input or other pipes as input.
The beauty of the application is with its simplicity - a user can take any sources, user input requests or the above mentioned module and drag+drop them into place and then connect the pipes. Within minutes I had built an application
More than just RSS mixing, it allows you to manipulate the data at a granular level, eg. translate data, scan for location metadata within the feed source, limit items in the feed, sort the items in the feed.
I had registered for twitter way back in December. For the unknown, it constantly asks you to answer one simple question “what are you doing” either at the site or from IM. It allows you to follow/subscribe to see what your friends are doing. Thats all, no big deal. In short it is like the status message shown on gtalk. Or say orkut self scraps + friends scraps at one place.
But after hanging around a little (2 minutes), I had no idea why it would make sense or how it was supposed to work or any clue why one would use it. I have my blog for my updates and twitter was like self-scrapping in orkut 1 . And then there is always orkut itself. And I did not want to give one more url related to me to others when the subscribers on this blog itself is 31 2 — hey thats a good news by the way. Hello every thirtyone !!
Kept hearing a lot about it but I kept ignoring it but finally, recently understood one key factor which I think makes it work (more than any other reason) : its sms alerts in US - to send or recieve twits - which will instantly deliver the updates to “what are you doing” to those who follow you. Suddenly it makes sense to me5 :). Call it mobile-blogging or mundane updates or whatever, its success is quite huge !
In India, alternatives are present like Webaroo [via] but none are offering free sms I know thats too much to ask for but I somehow feel, if such a service comes up 6, it would be a hit like orkut, among my peers - some of who are lazy to read/write blog.
I guess none of you are on twitter, add me as friend when you join To help you start with, here is starter guide. Huge resource list/help here. Thats it for those with short attention span. Rest can continue reading.
What I personally think is that - its a damn good integration of various features and it is different for each one depending on how you want to use them. Its like digg for some, its like blogging for some, its just social networking with its connectivity being instant - sms/im. Or for some it could be a combination of all these.
Social networking like orkut, for me now is huge time wasting - unless you are using it while in office! - in the sense that there is no value gain, but among my friends attitude like mine is rare. Even generally, orkut has not died! Today you might understand orkut but I remember when it came about, most of my friends did not join for almost an year - there was “whats orkut?” from everyone (or probably it was totally due to different reason). But today everyone gets the idea with orkut. There is no reason twitter can be any different. In fact it could be more catchy since there are different ways to use it, you need not always log in, the plugins will still operate from office even in twitter is blocked, sms/im interface will let you be in touch even when not using office internet.
Coming to blogging, again, I know lot of people who are lazy to read blogs. For them since all their friends updates is available at one place, it helps. Those of you who are too lazy to have a blog or those of you who are clueless what to update on the blog, this still will work for you. from here
1. Twitter is easier to use than Blogger was and had a lower barrier to entry.
2. Twitter has more ways to update (web, phone, IM, Twitterific) than did Blogger.
3. Blogger’s growth was limited by a lack of funding.
4. Twitter had a larger pool of potential users to draw on.
5. Twitter has a built-in social aspect that Blogger did not.
6. Twitter’s 140-character limit encourages more messages.
7. More people are using Twitter for conversations than was the case with Blogger.
Media companies such as the BBC , The New York Times and Al Jazeera are trying out Twitter as a way to send headlines and links to stories. The campaigns for presidential candidates John Edwards and Barack Obama also have Twitter profiles, with thousands of “friends” and “followers” who check out updates.
You’re missing the even bigger opportunity for marketers: people are telling us WHAT THEY USE and WHAT THEY LIKE. If you can listen and learn to engage people on Twitter you’ll find a marketing goldmine here. If I were really smart, I’d hire a team to categorize each Twitterer 24-hours-a-day. I’d start building a database of behaviors shared. Someone say “changing the diapers.” Well, now we know they have a newborn at home. What could marketers do with THAT? TONS!
Ev jumpstarted the blogging revolution and tried to do the same with podcasting until Apple jumped into the ring and squashed all the competition. Twitter is his well deserved second home run.
There are several cousins of twitter on the same model like dodgeball,(acquired by Google), groovr but a little more famous is jaiku which came a little late than twitter but it includes lot of other things including an important difference - allows feeding to be imported on mainstream. 7
Jaiku is like blog posts+Twitter stream+Flickr photos (hey, thats what my yahoo pipe is also!) . Here are differenceexplaining links.
Jaiku is more of who you are than what are you doing which is twitter..[..]Where Twitter has evolved into almost a chat room, Jaiku has evolved into a Lifestream.What’s the difference? Well what you chat about and ‘do’ is only part of the picture. There are also photos, bookmarks, blog posts, music selections and more - each of which are not found on your Twitter stream. In fact I have seen many argue that they should NEVER be found in Twitter. Twitter is for human updates about human things.
“
Blogging is like putting up stalls in an exhibition and speaking the mind blindfolded. Some people enter the room, listen to you and/or converse with you. Chatting is exactly like chatting over a cup of coffee. Orkut scrapping is like, peeking into neighbour’s house to see if he is there and to talk to him, if he isn’t there to leave a note. Emailing is posting a mail to someone. Twitter is somewhat a combination of some of these in the sense it allows multi way communication cum broadcasting plus more.8
My final take:
As with any social communication tool, this tends to be addictive, time wasting, interfering, distracting but again as with other services, its quite fun, could be put to use, great way to keep in touch, neat microblogging utility, an unbelievable good combination or orkut+sms+blog+digg, and if you follow me on twitter, I shall follow you
Right now I am twittering in vaccum, come join and hear me And this is my jaiku lifestream.
Ps: Ah!, this is the length of posts that would do justice to Talkr ! But you can’t follow the links then. Lots of useful links there, let me know how many you clicked.
Footnotes: [1] I always wondered why did they not plugin the blogs within orkut - either create a new one or to link to the existing blogpost, rest of the footnote grew enough to be a post! [2] according to Feedburner 3 - which again I had an account long ago but never used it until Google announced to buy it over. Feedburner, I guess that time did not provide email alerts or something, due to which I used Feedster -which gave lot of options. Now feedburner lets me connect feedster for email alerts and after google buying it I thought I can remember one less uname/pwd and logged in now. Now this blog’s feed is redirected to Feedburner feed (via the plugin) and fed to you!! So there, all for you, my dear 31 readers . Now click that ad there or at least leave a comment for my this selfless act! [3] I know there is some noise there, I should not have tried various feed services with my own feed. Now there is no way to delete it. [4]Have you seen FlickrVision? [5]also, as you know I am a huge fan of sms [6] Inactiv in Karnataka gave such a service but one thing lacking is a web user interface [7]there is twitku which integrates to look up to updates from both accounts. [8]Who would have thought The Trueman Show could get real and practical ?
I have now put talkr plugin which automatically converts my posts to audio so that one can listen to it. Again, not that I blog often or that I have posts to be listened or the audience, for all I care, it might be very sporadic as usual now that I have finished my old posts. But experimenting with the site and trying out plugins is my favorite big time passtime.
Talking of talkr, I initially thought converting to mp3 was the ubercool feature of Documents sharing site - scribd.com. I thought thats the fastest way I can convert my posts to audio (or even to pdf ) ! But thats just a side effect and actually its youtube for docs and quite wonderful documents and email forwards kind of documents are available. A very web2.0 site that it is, I liked the most was its interface and the flash paper format. Just the interface makes me use it
If only there was a plugin to
1. (Automatically) Post the blog posts to scibd from my account
2. Link to the bottom automatically the mp3 link of that document.
Anyways came across talkr and odiogo services which do the auto conversion to audio. So you would find audio link ( unfortunately at the bottom of the post ) thanks to this plugin. Do listen.
I would have liked if we could choose between male and female voice though.
Recently Orkut has been doubling up as feed reader. But the real meat is getting scrap book updates through feeds. It might not make sense to some of you but for a feed junkie like me, it is super stuff1 . I feel one of the prime differences between other leading Social Networking sites and orkut is the absense of Feed support in orkut. And no one has real clue why Google does not give as much as importance orkut deserved, from the beginning. It took a loooong time to be able to use Google login to orkut accounts and the no donut problem was a surprise when it came from Google!
Coming to the main topic, here is how you can get the rss feed of your orkut scrapbook. [via TechBuzz]
Use the URL given below, but replace {uid} with your Orkut user ID
http://www.indian-tv.com/orkut.php?uid={uid}
Your Orkut User ID can be obtained by logging into Orkut and clicking on the profile button on the left.
.
And here is how you can get Rss feed for the communities in orkut.
More than the touch screen (which we had already seen earlier) what impressed me was the way the devices interact. Placing a credit card would enable to make payment from it, placing a camera would get those pictures, communicating with phones/music player - that was super cool.
Few more posts lined up. New theme.
Tighter comment control - if you have commented and it does not show up,let me know.
Wanted to try my hand at designing a theme - but it looks quite tough and would take a lot of time. So giving it up now.
Want to re-order and change the categories structure.
Some of those to whom I have set up email-reminders, let me know if you wished to be removed from it or let me know if you are not getting them - ah! this is little ironic, anyways.
Feeds broken, links broken, unable to comment, comment about site’s theme, any other suggestion, let me know.
Finally managed to bury down the link posts, hidden from main page. Similarly have managed another Blogmela category. Intention is to keep only the original, long writing on the main page. Just so the new vistors are not confused and decide never to return! And hopefully the main feed should carry all the posts. So there will be frequent updates (hopefully) in the feed and the main page looks calmer! Also, the email alert subscribers might get more mails (if it bothers you, let me know).
The line between blogmela and link-blog is very thin, but I just wanted to keep them separate. Also a way to keep my comments at one place. Of course, the source is already present filter blogs or the social bookmarking sites. With these here now, no more emailing links.
And as updates, there are few posts in drafts, which would be converted to posts soon. Nothing much happening otherwise to update.
This post has been in my mind’s draft since many days.
Like many others, I too started my blogging at blogspot. At that time it was the best one available and very easy to start off. As long as I type and publish it looked all fine. But as I looked around and saw the features and wanted them on my site, when I started changing templates etc the real problem started. My annoyance and frustration increased logarthmically and after a point I just stopped blogging until I could find a comfortable place. After that, it was wordpress and the love just grew !
Whenever I was asked of suggestion to create a new blog, I still continued suggesting blogger, for the starters, because hosting wp is still a problem, where as with blogger it is click and start.
Those who did start their blogs after a couple of days, when they started comfortable, started changing the look. Hey, its easy –go here, click there and you are set. No problems so far. Then the query was to put links in sidebar. Hey thats easy too — create a tag yourself, put this here and paste it there, publish and you are set to go. And any minor hiccups, hardcode it again. You change the template, hard code it again.
All this before the world was blessed with wp.com. And once that happened, I predicted a premature death of blogger. It was not to be. But now I had 2 suggestions.
Those who got ahead with wp, the above queries were solved in a flash. But now queries got different - “I want like this that is on your site”. Importantly, calendar, categories, extra stuff in sidebar. It was impossible in blogger or it was a pain to do this in blogger. Then I started suggesting only wp - links, categories etc managed in a flash, but one thing remained a pain in wp too -sidebar management.
Even in my standalone WP installation, theme independent sidebar management was my dream requirement. Few weeks ago, sidebar widgets have arrived and it is just perfect and it is what I refferred to as last nail in the coffin of blogspot! (Infact why it was not taken up from the beginning is a mystery considering that few of my seimologic plugins worked on all themes without my effort)(And one thing is still pending is the javascript ability in widgets, right now it is only text or php).
And looking at these widgets (del.icio.us, text,rss,shoutbox), I remember using all these without the power of plugin/widget and feel that I should have started late..now it is so painless!
The new widgets‘ list is growing very fast and the oppurtunities are unlimited ! I have decided that I will use only widgetized themes anymore.
PS: There is now a web2.0 service called labelr which manages categories for blogger, for those still with blogger. But to them also, I suggest one click import in wp.com.[This again is so hasslefree, I had to manually do all that :(]Talking of labelr, as Scoble said earlier, name ending with r seems to be a trend..and I have a perfect web2.0 compatible name - ravikiranr
I reluctantly, finally upgraded to WP20 (201 to be accurate). It proved to be much seamless contrary to my apprehensions(I was mainly concerned about the breaking of plugins). Even though I use DB backup plugin, I also download the backup. To my shock, the database has grown thrice in size since previous backup, and with weak connection it meant I had to wait long time before I could proceed (that would be next time I am free at home in Blore…)
Problems:
All my plugins worked just fine except the Adhesive which required an upgrade. But the page redirect that was fine earlier broke down now. I tried all possible solutions on .htaccess side but later came to know that the problem lies in the way the pages’ url treated in wp201 which is different from earlier. I am yet to fix this.
I wanted to change the way the link posts are treated - to disappear from main page but to be present in main feed. I wanted to do the fix in main index.php and after many trials I found a workable solution that worked fine on a wp201 in my another test blog but it failed here. The posts either appeared at both places or disappeared from both places, both the times failing the logic[as I understand] of the code. After much hairloss, as it stands today, the link posts will not appear in main page as well as in main feed. So if you are interested, you need to go here for the link posts, and this will be the feed only for links posts. But I intend to make it work the way I want (either using a plugin that was all the way with me from beginning but I did not make use of it or by using Asides or taming the index.php itself) but not immediately.
Another major nagging issue is that theme switching requires one additional F5 (refresh). Since there is no update of the Theme Switcher plugin for WP20 and since it is already present at “Plugins that work for WP20” list, I do not know if I am facing the issue for some other reason or it is an issue with plugin/wp20.
Along with the upgrade few other changes are installed on blog such as few new plugins/themes which should give me/you more power/ease and make this place look prettier.
Update2: More issues. I am facing issue with sidebar when ThemeSwitcher is activated along with Semiologic and even otherwise in other themes. Some strange behaviour. So no theme switcher
I had been wanting to do this “How-to” and “about feeds” post for quite sometime now. I wanted to do it coz I am tired of explaining each person separately (each of those whom I suggested/forced to start a blog or each of those friends who find it difficult or forget to visit my site).
You’re familiar with e-mail, right? You read it as you receive it. Well, feeds are similar in analogy. For receiving and reading your email, you’d either need a software client (like Outlook Express, Outlook, Eudora or others) or a service (such as Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail or others). Similarly, for reading site feeds, you’ll need a feed software (like FeedReader, Greatnews, FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, Newsgator or Sage extension for Firefox) or a service (such as Bloglines, My Yahoo!, Newsgator Online, Newsburst or Kinja online).
All these software (or services) will have an option to add new feed. Click on it (or select), cut and paste the feed link from the above list and your software or service will query the site for new posts and sync it in your client. So, actually you’re letting your software or service pull the latest posts, news from websites for you. Simple, eh?
If you read a lot of websites in the conventional way, i.e., via a web browser (like Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox or Safari), then change that habit, let your software (or service) notify you of new things instead of you checking them out everyday. That way, you save precious time and also read more content rather than just browsing.
With blogs and sites that get updated often, including your favorite newspapers, feeds are becoming a standard method of offering content to their readers without requiring any details from the readers like their email addresses.
What are those colored buttons that I see on websites?
You mean those orange or those blue ones? Yup, those are the feed links. And don’t worry about the color or XML, RSS, Atom, RDF written over them. XML is the technology feeds use to provide you the updated content and all those terms are the derivatives of this technology. Some clients don’t support all types of feeds, in which case, you may try the alternative feed, if available. Generally, most clients (software or service) provide a minimum RSS and Atom support.
Feed links spit out junk code
A common phenomenon that I’ve been a victim of, before I understood how feeds work. Feed links are not meant to be actually clicked. Since the code that you actually see is a machine readable language and is really meant for your software to sync and interpret it for you. So, the next time you see feed links, copy them instead of clicking on them and use them in your feed reader software (or web based feed service).
What software, service do you recommend?
FeedDemon is my favorite feed reader software and I have raves for it, but that doesn’t mean that others aren’t good, especially if you’re looking for something free to start with. Greatnews seems to be a wonderful free alternative. Among the web-based feed-services, I like Bloglines.
I can read the feed, but it looks so pale compared to the website
Well, look at it this way: if the content is more important to you and you want to read the updates regularly, then consider the feed. If instead, you love reading them on the website in its full graphical glory, you could always use the article link and open it in your web browser, but keep yourself automatically updated via a feed reader. Sounds fun? Thought so.
Any other advantages of using a feed, besides updates?
Well, the speed for one. If you’re on a dial-up network, you’ll appreciate the download time. All the posts on certain clients are actually downloaded and saved as cache, so you could read them offline too (just like your e-mail). In addition, you’ll also be doing site owners a favor by reading their content via feed that has lesser bandwidth requirement.
And in my site itself(with semilogic theme) there is a link that explains about feeds:
What is this feed thing everyone is talking about?
It’s a standardized format that lets you subscribe to a web site using a tool called a news reader or aggregator.
The orange XML and RSS buttons are scarecrows meant to put newbies off let you locate feeds in one quick glance.
Why should I care about feeds?
The reasons you should care about feeds reportedly are:
* You want to be notified of updates from the many web sites that you read without visiting them one by one
* You prefer to read your favorite web sites from one convenient location without any interface clutter
In practice, the reasons you should and do care about feeds are:
* You want to be notified of updates from the many web sites that you don’t trust enough to reveal them your email address
* You want to reorganize the raw information that is available for syndication as you see fit
What are XML, RSS and Atom anyway?
It is all meaningless to you ? No worries …most self proclaimed experts have absolutely no idea of what they are talking about either.
In short, though:
* RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and Atom are two XML (eXtended Markup Language) formats that are competing one another
* XML — and Web Services — is the latest means to clutter IT resources, by letting you do the same thing as ODBC (Open DataBase Connectivity) and RPC (Remote Procedure Call) in a less efficient manner
History-wise:
* Dave Winer reportedly invented RSS and syndication
* Apple reportedly innovated by using RSS feeds to create active desktops
* Microsoft released an Active Desktop with — *cough* — Windows 95
Standards-wise:
* There are a dozen incompatible flavors of RSS and Atom that are labeled as standard
* RSS is a standardized XML format that does not comply with the recommended XML date format
* Some geeks report that Atom is better than RSS, but noone really cares
* RSS will prevail in the end; simply because it is adopted by Microsoft
Protocol-wise:
* Feeds use a dumb protocol that is equivalent to setting up a distributed denial of service attack on your own web site
And in practice:
* Many feed subscribers are automated web sites set up by spammers who republish your content alongside ads (spam blogs, or “splogs”)
As already explained, feed readers are basically two kinds - web based readers or installable softwares.
The benefit of using web based readers is two-fold:
* A web-based service means your favorite feeds will remain available when you change computers
* Search engines (will) provide tools to organize feeds by topic and relevance rather than by site and date
Among the web based, the popular one and the best for beginners is bloglines:
What is a “feed”?
It’s a Web product that allows you easily to see (and read, if you wish) what’s new on the Web sites and Web logs you visit most often.
Why can’t I just visit these sites myself, one by one?
You can. This way is easier. Your Bloglines home page will tell you at a glance when there’s nothing new to you on a site. It’s a very systematic way of keeping up and keeping track.
Is Bloglines the only such service or the best such service?
No and I don’t know. It works well for me and it’s free.
How do I get started?
To get started, go to the link for detailed Quick start guide.
These days almost all websites (which change over a period of time, irrespective of their content or type-text/pics/audio) provide RSS/Atom feeds.
Once comfortable, see these too: Top 10 RSS Hacks Taking RSS beyond headlines
Looks like there are no surprises from WP2.0, as has been mostly discussed, the improvements are underhood.
No surprises considering we have already seen wordpress.org.
There are default plugins like Akismet (but I already have spam karma) and Backup manager which too is already in place in my current stand.
Been hearing lot about incompatibility of current plugins, I am crossing my fingers and hoping that my plugins do work.
Last two days saw me pondering and arguing over full text feed vs partial text feed here. Today I find that Scoble too raised the concern. His comment space show the argument in full light where full text as well as partial text is finding support. Those who support partial text feeds are looking at the business model which relies on people visiting the site. The alternative could be to embed ads in feeds , but it is only a suggestion but not practical.
Other recievers who support partial feeds are those who follow heavy traffic sites and also those who use phone to read the blogs (so that they can discard if it is not interesting).
There is also a concern of commenting after reading the feeds, a concern we discussed sometime ago.
Update:
The link posts from del.icio.us have been moved out of main page(might work for only one theme). They would now appear on page/link Link Blog.
Blogrolls/Links are added. Contact me and About page added and more importantly subscriptions buttons there!
As usual new themes and changes made.
If you have visited to this site via http://rk.negimaki.com , it will cease to exist after sometime. So please remember the new url rkblogs.net.
This would be the new feed (RSS 2.0) : http://rkblogs.net/blog/feed/.
Also this post is to test sticky plugin
Commenting now should be easy as “AJAX commenting” plugin has been installed(which means, if it works fine, the page should not reload for commenting)
If the plugin works, this post is going to be on the top for few days. Regular posts continue below.
Yeah! As I told earlier, reading and browsing took more time and I got lazy to blog for few days. Now with the help of this automatic posting, (as can be seen in the earlier post), there would be a guaranteed post as frequently as I browse! [And inspite of that if there is no post, it would indicate that I am terribly busy or have lost access to internet] I am not technically “blogging” that way, but hey, the site would be active, what say ?!
I had the del.icio.us plugin doing the same job –updating the links I used to bookmark in the sidebar. But it was present only in one theme and I never got enough patience to copy it to all. Also it went unnoticed many times as it is just an update on the site and would not show up in the feeds or hint that it has changed.
Of course, again, I got help from Pradeep and Steve to set up this automatic posting.
There are many link blogs (like Desipundit), but some regular bloggers too dedicated one post for such links they came across in the week. I particularly follow Chug’s Links for A Sunday Morning (like this one)and Patrix’s Linking Park (like this).
..I am not very happy with the Web Clip feature introduced by Google in Gmail. I am not understanding the very need of this feature. For blog updates I would have gone to Google reader(well I did not like that software too..but it is a different topic). And when they did introduce web clip, they could have made use of the feeds I would have already had there. If the feeds too are in this place why should other things remain separate? I liked Gmail for its simplicity as just an email client. I prefer it remained that way.
On the other hand the new feature of viewing word/pdf documents as HTML without opening the application is a neat feature. And ofcourse, Google transit looks useful. If they want it to do for Indian cities for buses, coupled with the power of Google earth, they can dynamically locate a route which has less traffic and which has less potholes.
Posted by Rk on 9 December 2005 at 3:29 pm under Tech. 4 Comments.
Sometime back this site got installed Gallery 2 which is much different and advanced photo management system than the one I had earlier.There is better integration with WP via a plugin. This also required me to look out for few WP-G2 themes so that the themes look similar to both on WP and Gallery.
Thus I had to move away from my favorite “Fast Track” theme. I tried with few other themes and I disliked some that were liked by the visitors. Thus after much deliberation I put up the theme switcher plugin that will allow the visitors to change the look of the theme on the client side.
It is a very beautiful thing I have seen and had instantly liked it long back but the reluctance to use it comes only from the repeated customisations that I need to make on all themes and of course I had wished to retain to right to decide the way my site looks for everyone. However, since multiple themes would make my site look different and better on each other’s system, I gave it a nod. However as usual, the ignorant visitors to my site never made use of it (and came up with complaints). As usual, what the heck, I will continue it running.
My favorite themes are Falling Leaves,Express Yourself and
the older one Fast Track (waiting for WP-G2 theme of this).Infact I like almost all themes from wpthemes.info.
Let me know your favorite. Also, let me know if you come across good WP-G2 themes.
So now, I have a not-very-easy task of tidying up things to make certain things look similar on all my plugins.(Let me know if you have any opinions or suggestions). But the work requires certain patience and certain time. When I do have time I became lazy and just end up reading stuff on net rather than cleaning up things back home.
Meanwhile I jumped to buy a domain for myself (took suggestions about where,what,how from Pradeep and Anil). Some small work has to be done after which it would be completely operational. This blog continues to host on Negimaki. Steve has been of great help and support everytime I have faced issues and Negimaki offers more than I need for hosting.
Now, due to some unavoidable reasons I am not getting access to the internet which has put all the work on hold. Hope to fix up things soon. Update: The new url related work is all done. So please update your bookmark and RSS feed. Do visit the blog at least few times at least to value the time and effort of themes and plugin developers. And before I forget, since all the themes are borrowed from professional designers, if you see (I have seen) something not working on IE it is probably a browser related issue and so please use Firefox
I had been searching for a single user CVS tool for personal usage from a long long time. Finally I seem to have got a just right kind of software for me.
Requirements : Single User CVS tool; For Windows; No client-server hassles; FREEWARE.
I met these in RCS Pro. I just installed it. Its easy to use though the usage is little different from the all powerful Clearcase that I use at work. There I checkout-edit-checkin, here I edit-checkin and checkout is required only if I have to undo the changes. Of course branching, graphical version tree are absent in RCS but that would be asking for too much for personal usage.
There is a good integration (menu item and differences) for Word,Excel etc!
While browsing when I find something interesting to share with people it is always difficult task to copy the hyperlink, paste that in an email and then sending those to the friends. I often forget that I would have copied some link earlier.
Of course there is del.icio.us (and a simple firefox plugin) through which not only can I bookmark for myself for the later use, I could ask my friends to keep a tab on that so that they would know what am I finding interesting. But there is a problem here. Unless they check out what have I bookmarked, not only will they not know about it, and also I never get to know whether they did see it or not. Also I feel the need of sharing particular links with specific people. Not all links would be relevant to all. Few days ago I had asked Pradeep about the possibility of such a topping/plug-in for del.icio.us. To see my exact requirement being answered by another software is a relief and a good feeling!
Here comes Stumble Upon (via Nbk). I reluctantly started using it but am happy with it now. The features are all simple. It adds a toolbar on the firefox using which it is easy to send the link via email in one simple step. Along with an addition of the comment. Of course for my bookmarking I can mention that “I like it” and it gets recorded.
There is also networking in the form of friends and fans. The preferences/settings/profile user interface is simple and easy, thanks to javascripts.
Whats more..there is a Stumble button which keeps taking you to different pages of your interest (which you can choose from a number of groups like the communities in orkut) and it can get addictive! I found few repeat pages, but I guess that will improve over time. I know few people, who wonder about my addiction to browsing and tell me that they do not know what to see on the net. We are from different worlds. Parallel lines. They never see what I see and I can never see what they do not see!! They do not know how to spend time on internet and I get news ways to keep myself glued!
As with any software, my needs would never get complete. And here I would have liked maintaining mailing lists (to ease sending links).
Got something to say ? Use comment space.
You could like to subscribe to the blog feed( http://feeds.feedburner.com/Lens ) and my link blog feed ( http://feeds.feedburner.com/Lens/Convex ).
Just for the sake of completion here is 
