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# 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 !
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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.
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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.
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.
Many times, I feel so good when I read something that is so close to what I would have said otherwise. I will link to certain such items.
Last few days/months, I felt I am spending too much time online, and too much online-time is spent at Orkut, Chatting, Reader, Digg, del.icio.us, reddit, Desipundit, Blogbharti, Indianpad, putvote - you got it. My reader itself not only has too many feeds, but also too many updates. I feel guilty to mark it as read without reading it and to catch up would take enormous time. There are also days where I literally get fed up of catching up. After hours of spending on the net (browsing, chatting, orkutting), the net gain is so less and I feel I haven’t done anything all that time !
Reading is deep, involves the brain and leads to learning. Browse can often be very shallow with very little learning.
Anyways, coming back to the topic, I have almost stopped orkutting and chatting. I can not stop reader - but will clean up the feeds to include only feeds of friends and important news. I am liking this utility which will combine many feeds into one so that I can mark “mark all as read” in one shot
Coming back to where I started, I liked this post, for it conveys what I wanted to say a lot better. Excerpts:
My next activity would be to do away with Orkut as well. I’ve been on it for 4 years, but all of a sudden I feel so sucked into it. Making new friends aren’t really worth it and I just will have to show my attitude. A stinking one at it, like one of the readers whom I’ve never met, told me on chat sometime ago. It helps. People come and they GO too. They say good things. They throw crap. They are opinionated. I do all that too. But then it will have to just stop someday. …
It is just a phase. Will life be more exciting if I’m away from Internet? Away from all the Information overload.
Of course one difference is that I am still not fed up with “my own” blog or blogging. I would let this continue and I have always seen that blogging does not interrupt my life.
I have to continue, because it is my ranting ground.
Wasn’t life simpler when I was way back in college? When mobile phones were a luxury. When surfing the internet would cost a bomb. When your needs were less. When you had more time to read and watch good TV shows. When you had more quality time with family and friends. When your life was within a circle that you ran around it oblivious to all the filth outside the circle. When the words “best friends” really meant something. When you just have ten bucks in your pocket, yet go and eat with your friends, order for one chilli parotta and share it, order one pepsi and fight for it. When long drives meant, riding a two-wheeler against the wind and feeling so accomplished. When branded clothes were just for commercials, while you can wear anything off the street that makes you look like super star. When library meant book library and not DVD library. When piggy bank meant saving up for summer holidays. When temple visits meant something divine and not a formality. When street cricket and seven stones were religious rituals in the evening, while Playstations and Xboxes were for the westerners. When treats for friends meant tea shops and bakeries. When the rains were the best time to sit and chat outside the classrooms, getting drenched, and staying home complaining of sickness. When the nights were meant for dreamless deep sleeps. When early to wake up and early to sleep was order of the day. When I wrote stories in college notebooks and not on computer. When I painted using oil paint and not Photoshop.
Life was much better, then. With little in life. With more happiness.
I have been thinking about the blogs getting orphaned after the owner’s death. Am sure, readers do not have any type of personal contact with most of the bloggers they read. So they would not come to know about any sad happening. They might keep checking on the site or the empty feed might remain in the reader. Sad.
In our embedded systems, we have a concept called “Watch Dog timer“.
A watchdog timer is a computer hardware timing device that triggers a system reset if the main program, due to some fault condition, such as a hang, neglects to regularly service the watchdog (writing a “service pulse” to it, also referred to as “petting the dog”).
Unfortunately, there is no way to reset the human life. However I found an analogy to this in Wordpress and a variation of this concept would let me achieve what I want - To announce my death to my blog readers.
It works like this. Wordpress has “post timestamp” feature, where if you set the time in future and publish the post, the post automatically gets posted at that time. So I can do a post called
“Hello Readers, I think I have left on a journey to heaven. Unless there is internet access from there, it is unlikely that this blog is going to be updated Be good. Cya soon “
or anything you would want to tell your blog readers. And set the date to say a week or a month in future depending on how frequently (for sure) you are going to access your blog. So, like watchdog servicing, before that time, pet this timer - change the time to next interval and publish. In the unlikely event of your death, after the interval, you would be announcing the news of your death in an unique way. Blog can thus serve a purpose even after your death.
There are few risks :
1. If the server is down and you can not re-schedule the time and server wakes up. Then you would be getting to hear condolences and reactions to your death !
2. If you estimate/usually access the site within a normal time frame but unfortunately if you could not do it.
PS: I expected to get dugg for this wise idea, alas.
Few blogs from blogspot in my reader have not been showing the updates for the last 3 or more months. Is it because of blogspot migration to new interface ? I don’t know. Blogger update resulted in either marking the old posts as new or not updating the feed at all.
For a person who doesn’t visit the site second time if it does not have feeds, this is terrible.
Also, if you (those who are on my blogroll) have updated your blog and haven’t got my comment, let me know. Your feed must have broken.
Like last year, I will look back and ahead.
>>Read 10 (at least) novels/general books. And at least 4 technical books
Ha! I think I failed on the count of general books but almost made more than the target in technical books. To be frank, I did not read the complete books, but at least it was better than previous year. Watched lotsa movies.
>>Wake up before a fixed time in the morning – any day/any weather/any going-to-bed-time
Pretty much there….except on few days. And those few days is either because I sleep late or I am not at peace (the first one is not a valid reason as it had been covered in the goal but second one is a reasonable one)
>>Visit/ spend time with “relatives”
NA now….
>>To *reduce* money spent on movies. Instead watch “plays” and invest in “books”
Partly success…like last time, books are being bought.
>>Go on at least 4 tours
Failed, but went to 2
>>Take food at same time everyday.
Failure
>>Donate blood at least 3 times.
Passed
Goal Settings:
>>Most importantly, try to achieve previously set goals.
And to keep this in mind.
>>Come out with a concrete plan and roadmap for what I want to achieve in long term in terms of career.
Well, its quite a long time since I actively posted anything. I love being busy. I love sleeping. Both of those do not mean the same Various reasons I can think of for not jotting down, but finally all explanations is saying one-n-only reason in different ways. That reason is something else took priority or interest over blogging.
But I did plenty of bloggable activities and have decided to dedicate few posts. So posts, some of them old, will appear here.
There are some changes in the site, notably for visitors is the inclusion of ads. It is right now very disorganised and looking not too clean, but hope to clean it up sometime. I am also aware that the ads this blog might attract might not earn me anything (because I write only about my life or about movies), yet I just wanted to experiment. So if you visit the site, click on these ads and help me in my experiment! For me the major change is the change of the host from negimaki to weblogs.us. As of now there are lot of uptime issues with weblogs.us, but hope it would get better soon. Negimaki is an excellent host but I wanted few more liberties than I could get over there. Among other changes on the site would be to experiment with whole lot of themes and plugins.
So what was I upto all these days (that could be blogged about) - I watched lotsa movies (as usual) - some of them as a part of Chennai Film Fest, read few books, went on a goa trip, read read and read on internet.
Looking ahead, I have some thoughts to make this space meaningful and pretty regular.
If sleep or something else does not take a higher priority, then. For now, posts are following.
Got something to say ? Use comment space.
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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.)
