Lens

Hey! Looks like you are a new visitor, you may want to subscribe to my Lens RSS feed. Or my shared links Convex RSSThanks for visiting!

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.

So not very happy with this upgrade.
**

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.

Go here for the release site (and I got it via). I have uploaded and activated it but not yet tried it.

******

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.

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 !!

Distractions, I say! Back to topic.

But twitter saw a huge increase in numbers during SxSw , later they had scaling problems, analysis of increase in numbers showed it increasing at a rate higher than blogs. And now it or its cousins have become a hit. See this site to visually see the updates to twitter acorss the globe - TwitterVision ⁴. There is one with a photo messaging. . And digg+twitter = truemors.

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.

Here is my twitter page, twitter feed. You might have observed the pretty thingy on the sidebar too. Once I upgrade the WP, using Twitter tools plugin I will think of integrating in some other way.

Lots of support sites to twitter have born of which - email to twitter and firefox plugin twitbin are my favorites. Other firefox twitter tools.

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.

I don’t think in recent times anything has generated as much discussion as the twitter - especially the opinions being diagonally opposite to each other- one swearing this has been the most stupidest and other saying this was being waited for. One saying most unproductive, time wasting-distracting tool to another explaining how it could be put to use

Twitter can be distracting, but it can be useful. It’s up to you.

to explaining how you could be industry expert to how smart men use it.
One swearing its death is around the corner (208 comments) and its just hyped up and other claiming this will long last -(or that twitter to this decade is what email/sms/blog was for previous decade). There will be either an article or an application (either useful or just for fun or “most bizzare app for twitter”) every week or other. ( Even those that I have not linked to are on web, too lazy to search and link)

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.

Here are links to twitter tips and tricks , twitter-blog integration tools.
And here is a description to micro blogging and twitter

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.

On a post that says how twitter is a hot cake to be bought over now, Scoble points to the immense advertising oppurtunity

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!

Those who are still reading, here is some more info. One of the people behind twitter is the same who created blogger.

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.

From

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.

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.

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.

Before I finish, Semiologic and K2 and Skippy plugins are just great.

Till later …

Update: Let me know if something is broken

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

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).

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