Monthly Archive for July, 2007

Okay, release announcement! crowd around people:

I finally managed to make the remote downloading work, wasn’t too difficult. Turns out there’s a small problem with oneclick now, plugins from anywhere can be downloaded, except wordpress.org

I don’t know why, entering the URL of a wordpress.org’s extend plugin doesen’t allow it to work, downloading from any other regular page works out.

Anyways, i’ll post the download links in a few hours. I need some sleep.

This kept me busy for a while, finally got it working right, so putting it here along with the code page, hoping it’ll help somebody somewhere.

Should really dump more code here, come to think of it, should really write more code. Sigh :\

Anyways,

I was on the infamous orkut and out of it long before it was big in kharagpur (and it’s gonna be the same with facebook too), but one thing it all had is an “about me” section. A few of my friends decided to stick to the minimalistic-is-cool philosophy and write nothing at all anywhere. A lot of people wrote undiluted, unquestionable crap.

Song quotes from shitty punk-emo songs (boulevard of broken dreams) or the lamest inspirational quotes(the type you see on those ugly posters sold on the roadside[non-indians can ignore this]).

I tried to write something initially, but whatever I tried came out a little confused, unflattering, and quite frankly just plain gay.
But now I’m realizing the importance of being able to Describe yourself in only a few sentences. Most people, especially my minimalism loving friend don’t seem to be able to understand this.

My question is: If you’d ever have to make a quick introduction of yourself over email, letter, or anywhere where words are involved, can you do it?

A single few lines that give an unflattering, clear, concise picture of what you do, what you like, and what makes you stand out.

I spent a few minutes trying to get a standard “about me” section, and here are my drafts after a little while.

I am a 20 year old IIT undergrad, studying in Kharagpur, India. I dabble in usability, aesthetics and design. I play the bass, do endurance running and am a vicarious reader. I love coffee, intelligent conversation, and listen to a lot of music, particularly thrash and melodic death. I am gifted with an eye for patterns, a ear for music, and the ability to think out of the box. I am vegetarian, spiritual, and Libertarianistic in my political views.

hmmm…. needs more work. I’ll finish it up later then. Tired after a night of redesigning.

My blogging history
I started my first blog on blogspot, like everyone else, “Thought Outflux” at prototypeangel.blogspot.com (it’s still there if you care to look), and wrote the standard “feelings” crap over there, like everyone else did.
I moved to wordpress, and didn’t know about wordpress.com, but went to another wordpress mu site.

After a while I lost the blog in an accident, and decided to move on to hosted wordpress. I got an account at frihost, and worked with php/mysql for the first time, and soon after, bought a domain name and started posting on it.

Chronology of Posting
I was caught up in the “Techblog” craze once upon a time. I was writing small articles on howtos, etc, and used to occasionally get some good traffic. I was careful not to digg too many of my own stories, or stumble them, etc.

Eventually, I felt I needed to stop trying to monetize, and make a humble personal blog, and started off in that direction and it seemed to work fine for me. Soon after I realized I’d like to write some tech based articles, but I wanted to keep this seperate from my personal weblog, so I got hold of PingPulse.

Right now, I just post small tidbits, and a small section of my many thoughts. This is again to see for fun, how I was a few years in the past, and how my style of writing, presentation and my emotional maturity has increased over time immemorial.

On blogspot and other things I don’t like:
I hate blogspot. Period. The reason is simple. There are thousands of voices in the world today, and all of them want to be heard. Often, you need a rough benchmark or an indicator of what’s a better voice to listen to, or which should be taken more seriously. If you have someone with “arbitramblings.blogspot.com” or “myname.net”, which would you take more seriously? (turns out the blogspot site does exist. goes ahead to prove my point)

Though there are plenty of good reading material on blogspot, no even slightly experienced blogger would ever, ever take one seriously. Save a few exceptions that started on blogspot and stayed there (like digital inspiration, etc), almost all of it is noise.

What annoys me more than anything else is the titles people give to them. Try searching for “blogspot and ramblings” on google, and you see the nearly two million blogs with “ramblings” in the title.

Ramblings is not a real english word, or at least wikipedia doesn’t seem to have it. Also searching for it is hard under blogspot noise.

On TechBlogs
I’ve always seen techblogs like any of the other big fads. While I appreciate the patience and dedication with which some people write, one thing annoys me: there’s no major skill involved. No programming language, no embedded systems, no technicalities, nothing. Anyone can do it, and when anyone can do it, I get skeptical about it.

Think about it, several people go through years and years of training to write software, design hardware, test things, market them, etc, etc, and here you have anyone… nearly anyone, with a good idea of the current happenings in technology giving their two cents and people actually listening.

On My hype ideas
I always used to build blog-castles in the air. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt it’s that: If you have something good enough, people will come to you. you don’t need to go looking for them. I’ve had a few surges in traffic. I wrote a good article and people started to come. Biggest of all was my OneClick plugin for wordpress, which gave me more than 120 incoming links, lots of traffic and about 5 measly clicks on adsense, after which I removed the adsense blocks.

I believe, or it’s my strategy if you will, to write things that’s not there elsewhere all around. If you write about “five useful greasemonkey tools to enhance google reader”, it’s something people’ve already read. Otherwise finding new downloads, tools, utilities, etc, is what can make a lot more people want to come in.

[Update]I decided to enter this part in Rishi’s “Blogging Strategy Contest“

Ultimately, perseverence is the only thing that will pay off. Wether it’s in relentless writing, learning a programming language and writing opensource software, testing out unstable operating systems, all that is painful comes with pleasure, all that is with risk comes with due reward.

I’ve been featured!!! sniff I never get featured.

okay wtf?

turns out, there’s this “Top Indian Bloggers”, and I became the “blog of the day” for about a week now. Been sending me some traffic for a while actually. I wonder who nominated me in the first place.

Anyways, doesn’t seem like much of a list, as some really good indian bloggers are missed out in their respective categories.

And almost all the links are blogspot based weblogs. Now I really want out.

[Link]