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Having tags for each post on your blog is one of the best ways your readers can find the content they need. That translates directly into more loyal users, better referrals and ultimately, more quality traffic.

The Monthly Archives listing is almost useless for visitors. Put yourself in the shoes of a first-time visitor to your blog. What does he/she care about what you wrote in January 2007? But if your blog were about, say, Gardening, a user would definitely find posts tagged Rose or WateringTechniques useful. The visitor wants to primarily browse by content, not by timeline. My Archives page, for instance, lists my posts by tags first and by month later.

I recommend a three-level tagging technique that, in my opinion, will help visitors locate your content much better. While these tags may have a tech bias, it can be used, almost without any change, for blogs on most topics.

In essence, you describe your each post using three sorts of categories: Type, Technology and Product/Firm.

Each post can contain multiple tags from each sort. First, what type of post is it? Is it commentary on a recent development? You might want to tag it “News“. Or an opinion piece on something you feel strongly about? Tag it “Opinion“. Second, what aspect of the topic is it about? From the Gardening analogy, if you’re writing about how to better water your rose plants, you’re talking about “Watering” your plants. Or you might be talking about gardening “Equipment“. Third, have you made references to products or companies? “Trowels” or “Gloves“, or the name of a fungicide are what make it to this third sort of category.

Here are some of the tags I use for my posts (in no particular order):

• Type: HowTos, Editorials, Insights, Predictions, Trends, Off-topic
• Technology: RSS, Mobile, Internet Social, Blogs, Video WiFi, Affiliate, SEO, Policy, Email, Spam, Marketing, Telecom, VC, Broadband, OpenSource…
• Firms/Products: Linux, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Sun, Opera, Twitter, Apple, Firefox, Safari, Outlook, Thunderbird, Vista, Nokia, Facebook, iPhone, Gmail, IBM, Novell, SQL, Thinkpad…

Example 1: “The iPhone question – and why Arrington is wrong” was, briefly my opinion about why a certain Mr. Arrington was wrong about the impact that Apple’s iPhone would have on the future of mobile technology. Here’s how I tagged it: Type: Editorials, Insights. Technology: Mobile. Firms/Product: iPhone.

Example 2: “HOWTO: Google Reader Power User Guide” was about how to read your RSS feeds more effectively using Google Reader. Here’s the tagging: Type: HowTos. Technology: RSS, Social. Firms/Product: Google.

The three-category technique is based on my estimate that visitors searching for content will typically have one of these three intents – either they want to search for all HowTos, or all Trends. Or they are looking for articles about specific products: Firefox, Google. Or, finally, they’re looking for posts on the technology itself – RSS, Blogs, or the like.

From my experience blogging for four years, I’ve discovered that it’s worth investing time and effort to tag (or re-tag) your blog posts. Your readers will love you for it.

Speed up Windows XP and Windows Vista, tweak performance, free up disk space, and optimize your computer.

Everyone complains about how slow their Windows computer or laptop gets. You do too. Here are some simple changes you can make to dramatically improve things.

Note: While there are a hundred ways you can squeeze more juice out of Windows by changing settings in the System Registry, that is beyond the scope of this article. These tips will probably account for 80% of the performance improvement you can possibly get; the registry tweaks will get you the final 20%.

Free up disk space

Turn off System Restore
System Restore creates a “snapshot” of your computer every time you make changes to the system (install programs, update device drivers, more). Should things go wrong, you can “roll back” the system to the last-known good configuration. This is great in theory, but you’ll probably never use it. Just don’t go about installing random applications, and you can safely turn it off and reclaim disk space.

On Windows XP, System Restore is located in Control Panel -> System -> System Restore. Select the “Turn off System Restore on all drives” option. On Windows Vista, navigate to Control Panel -> System. Click on “Advanced System Settings” and then on the “System Protection” tab. See screenshot:

Turn off Disk Indexing

Windows creates a database of all your files so you can do fast file searches. My advice is to leave search to a good desktop search application like Google Desktop. So turn off disk indexing.

Open My Computer, right-click on your Hard Drive icon (C: or D:) and choose “Properties”. At the bottom of the dialog box that opens, uncheck “Index this drive for faster searching”. and click on “OK”. In the dialog box that opens, select “Apply changes to drive C:\, sub-folders and files”, and click on “OK”. See screenshot:

Delete hidden monsters with WinDirStat
Use WinDirStat to clean up files that are occupying space on your drive but are hidden deep in sub-sub directories. Manually searching for all these files is practically impossible.

WinDirStat displays a “Tree-map” view of your entire filesystem. Each file is a colored rectangle. Larger files are larger rectangles. All files in a directory are again arranged as a single rectangle. So the directory rectangle size is proportional to the size of that sub-tree.

For instance, here’s a view of my C: drive:

I can see that there’s a large file in the bottom right-hand side of the tree-map. It happens to be a file in the “MSOCache” folder. Running a quick check on the Internet for “MSOCache” reveals that it contains installation files for Microsoft Office, which can be safely deleted if you have the installation DVD. Deleting the MSOCache folder will free up 550MB on my hard drive – and I hadn’t known that it even existed.

Of course, as always, beware of what you delete.

CrapCleaner
Automatically cleans up your reycle bin, web browser caches, temporary files that have accumulated in your system for months, and lots of other lint that occupies needless space. On typically sluggish computers, I have cleaned up over 1GB of this sort of trash. See screenshot:

Now for the standard stuff, which everyone all too often forgets:

Uninstall Programs from Control Panel
In the Control Panel, under “Add/Remove Programs” (XP) or “Programs and Features” (Vista) look for:

• Multiple music and video players, browsers, chat clients, photo editing software
• Trial versions of programs
• Games you don’t play anymore
• Multiple toolbars for browsers: Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Real, StumbleUpon, and countless others

and get rid of them all. While uninstalling,

• Select the “Complete uninstall” option if there is one.
• Select the “Delete personal data and settings” option if there is one.

Keep only a minimal set of applications that you use regularly. Once you’re done, navigate to the Program Files folder under C: and remove the folder for the application you uninstalled – Uninstalling often doesn’t automatically remove this folder.

Uninstall Microsoft Office components
If you don’t use Microsoft Office applications like Project, Access, Visio but still have them installed, get rid of them.

• From the “Add/Remove Programs” (XP) or “Programs and Features” (Vista), look for “Microsoft Office”
• Click on the “Change” button against the entry for Office
• In the subsequent dialog box, select “Add or remove features”, and deselect the components you don’t need

Don’t install language files
If you run Windows in English, there’s usually no need to install support for additional languages. Whenever you install an application, always make sure you choose “Custom Install”, and deselect the “Support for additional languages” option. For instance, here’s the ‘Custom Install” dialog box during the WinDirStat installation:

Speed up Computer

Defragment your Hard Drives

The oldest and least followed trick in the book. Windows can locate and access files faster on a defragmented disk. This means a noticeable difference in performance, for no cost at all. Run Disk Defragmenter once every couple of months. Set up your laptop defrag to run during lunchtime, or your desktop overnight. Disk Defragmenter is located under Start Menu -> Accessories -> System Tools.

On Windows XP, you can choose which drive to defragment, and there’s a graphical bar that shows before and after defragmentation views of the drives on your disk. On Windows Vista, Disk Defragmenter is rather opaque, with just a “Defragment Now” and a “Modify Schedule” button. See screenshot:

Stop Applications from loading during startup
Having too many applications start automatically when you turn on your computer slows down your startup time, hogs system memory and slows down overall performance. Keep only the ones you need.

• Under Windows XP, go to Start -> Run and type “msconfig” in the box that pops up
• Under Windows Vista, go to Start and type “msconfig” in the search box at the bottom
• Choose “Selective Startup” in the System Configuration box
• On the Startup tab, deselect the applications you don’t want automatically started when you switch on your computer. You’ll be surprised at how many there are.

Use Lite applications

• Use Foxit Reader in place of Adobe Acrobat Reader
• Winamp Classic in place of Winamp Modern
• OpenOffice 2.4 in place of Office 2003/2007
• VLC Media Player in place of Windows Media Player
• CDBurnerXP or IMGBurn in place of Nero Burning ROM
• Windows XP in place of Windows Vista

Store your documents on a separate drive
The “My Documents” folder is usually on the same C: drive as the rest of the Operating System. This means more frequent fragmentation of your drive, leave less space for your system’s paging file and reduced performance. Moving your personal documents to another D: drive will both improve performance marginally and protect your documents should you need to install Windows on C: drive again.

With these simple tips, you avoid doing anything dramatic to harm your computer, and also get surprising gains in free disk space and in performance. Think of it simply as keeping your computer in shape. You owe your machine that.

If you’re the kind who keeps track of information on the web by subscribing to RSS feeds, chances are things aren’t entirely satisfactory.

You’re probably swamped with an ever-growing backlog, yet reading your feeds takes too long. You’re annoyed at several feeds repeating the same news item. And your feed list looks like one chaotic mess.

Surely this wasn’t the way it promised to be – you thought you could wade through information effortlessly with RSS.

A few simple techniques and just a little but of discipline, though, can get you back in business. I’m assuming you’re using Google Reader.

Adding feeds:

• Subscribe, as far as possible, to blogs that do filtering for you. For example, instead of subscribing to several of the “official” Google blogs, I merely subscribe to “Googling Google”, “Google Blogoscoped”, and “Google Operating System” – they’ll give me all the news I need to know about Google, and other rumors/previews as well.
• Add feeds liberally, but label them smartly. If you see an interesting website add it to your feed list, but label it immediately.
• Label according to use/function, not topic. Labeling your feeds “politics”, “tech”, “humor” is no use. Something like this makes more sense:
  • A “News” label for your online newspaper/Google News feeds.
  • A “Daily” label for other, topical feeds you read once a day.
  • A “Evenings” label for humor blogs, cartoons, and the like.
  • A “DB” label for websites that spew information you’ll only need to refer to once in a while (techies, I’m talking Engadget, Ars Technica, Gizmodo and the like). Use Google Reader’s search function when digging out info later. (Thanks to Steve Rubel for this one.)

Processing feeds:

• Read different labels at different times of the day. From the above example, you’d read “News” as soon as you come in to work, “Evenings” to unwind, and so on.
• Use the “List” view. You can see more headlines that way, so if you don’t want to read it, there’s no need to scroll through it to reach the next item. Also, you don’t have to wait for images to load.
• Use “Mark all as read” liberally. After scanning 20 news headlines and reading 4, for instance, make all 20 read. The other 16 never mattered anyway.
• Use keyboard shortcuts. At a minimum, “n” and “p” are “next item” and “previous item”, and “u” hides/shows the feed list pane on the left.
• View entire labels instead of clicking and viewing individual blogs. For instance, simply click on “News” and sift through all your headlines – what do you care what order they’re in or what feed they came from? They’re all news.
• Star actionable posts. Once you’re done reading, see all your starred posts and take action for each of them.
• Go offline! The offline feature (at the top right of your GR page) downloads your latest 200 feed items. Then disconnect your computer from the network, and read through your feeds without distraction.

Maintaining feeds:

• Friends’ shared items can be useful/amusing. Or they can be a pain. Hide friends whose shared items you don’t want to view.
• Use the trends view in Google Reader to see which feeds you don’t read any more, or ones which haven’t been updated in ages. Unsubscribe from them.

Work smarter, not harder.

So I hopped on to the Twitter bandwagon. Here’s my Twitter URL: http://twitter.com/rahulgaitonde.

My latest Twitter posts are also visible on the top of this blog’s sidebar.

I’m going to use Twitter as a true microblog – to record quick thoughts that don’t deserve a complete blog post per se. Maybe I’ll aggregate a few posts and make one blog post out of them every couple of days or so.

I’m using a combination of Tiwtterlicious and twitter.com to make and read updates. Does anyone have a better Windows/web client to suggest?

(This post is a follow-up to “Why did Mowser fail?“)

An iPhone in every hand will not ignite a mobile web revolution. That much is certain.

Both Michael Arrington and Russell Beattie make this mistake. Perhaps that comes from living in a echo chamber for too long – both likely have iPhones, are heavy web users on their devices, have friends who have iPhones, and therefore think all would be well if only everyone had one like them. Arrington is shockingly naïve when he says “…it will be much better to push prices down so that today’s iPhone is available for next to nothing in the third world.” Of course, I bet he hasn’t lived for too long in the “third world”.

Blaming puny hardware and tiny screens as the primary causes for poor mobile web adoption is thinking along very narrow lines indeed. As I outlined in the previous post, we could build much better applications today, using hardware and screen sizes available today – we aren’t building software that’s good enough because we haven’t yet understood how people use the web on their phones.

But that’s not all. Russell points out that “…in the US 85% of iPhone owners browsed the web vs. 58% of smartphone users, and only 13% of the overall mobile market” and uses that to conclude that as iPhone reaches more users, all problems will vanish (“better devices and full browsers”, as he says).

That’s not necessarily true and it more likely isn’t. iPhone targets a specific segment of the mobile user market – users who were likely to be heavy users of the Internet on their phones – people who would use their phone to browse the Internet. (Not that these users purchased a phone just for the Internet experience). It will continue to capture that market as it’s introduced in more countries.  Therefore it’s unlikely that those numbers Russell quoted would jump up substantially if everyone had an iPhone.

What does iPhone mean for the future of the mobile phone? I predict that while it’ll be a strong influence on broad design principles, it’s unlikely that every phone of the future will be like iPhone. For instance, Apple has shown how to design software that truly takes advantage of a touchscreen. More phones will have touchscreens in the future than they would have if it weren’t for iPhone, but maybe not with pinch-drag features. More phones will have full-screen applications. More phones will have smarter menus and make more data available across applications. And so on.

But the verdict is clear. It is designing better software, not praying for better hardware, that will truly get the mobile web rolling.

According to Mowser’s founder Russell Beattie, the “Mobile Web” is dead. As is his startup Mowser.  I think he’s partially wrong. Russell hasn’t quite figured out how the Internet on mobile devices is likely to work.

Mowser is (was?) an intermediary between a mobile browser and the web. It processed a “regular” web page to display better on a mobile browser (which is the way Opera Mini functions). It made money by inserting its own ads into these rendered pages. Apparently things didn’t work out. There weren’t enough users (and porn made up 80% of traffic), and hardly anyone clicked on the ads.

Which isn’t surprising. Because that isn’t at all how users interact with the web on their mobile devices.

Above all, Intent drives all usage on the mobile phone. Users don’t “browse” or “surf” the Internet on their mobile phones. Rather, they access particular services with a definite intent.  That means that as things stand now, a successful mobile web application would best be a native phone application that pulls data from the Internet but does the rendering locally. For example, a mobile-based Facebook would work best as a native Series 60 application (for Nokia phones) – or a cross-platform Java app.  When a user’s travelling and wants to Facebook a bit, he/she could launch the Facebook application, and it’ll connect to the Internet in the background, pull your mini-feed and other paraphernalia  and display that data on your screen. That way, the application doesn’t need to pull display code (HTML et al) making it faster and the user enjoys a much better experience (including all the AJAX-y effects you want).

The reason a native, single-purpose application will work is because 90% or so of the time, a user wants to interact with only a handful of web applications, but wants a kickass small-screen experience with them. I can imagine shortcuts on my Nokia web-capable phone that say “Gmail” “Facebook”, “Orkut”, “Yahoo Messenger”, “Google Reader”, and “The New York Times”. Which mean “Mail”, “Chat”, “Network”, “News”, “Feeds” (and “Maps”). How many more applications will a user need most of the time? After all, your average user has one email account, one social network, one chat app – you get the drift. (Think how much better the Gmail mobile application works than the web-based m.gmail.com)

Russell is right when he says that applications without a PC equivalent will not work. Take News, for instance. It’s cumbersome to navigate the New York Times on a mobile screen. (Even with iPhone’s pinch-tap-drag-flick wizardry. Admit it. It’s OK.) So I can imagine an NYT mobile application that displays headlines by category and a 5 or 10-line summary for each item (like a partial RSS feed). You can star an item on your phone. When you get to your PC, you click an “Open on Computer” button on your phone application, and Firefox pops up on your computer, opening your starred news items in tabs so you can read them in full. Does that sound better than reading an entire newspaper online on your phone? I can also imagine mobile “portals”, like the Yahoo one Russell pointed out:

Finally, monetization. Of course users won’t click on “interstitial” ads on their Phones. As above, intent is key. And relevance becomes even more important when both bandwidth and screen real estate are at such a premium. The only way someone could monetize ads on a mobile phone is if the ads were relevant to the user’s physical environment. (In a mall? Get ads about offers at stores in that mall. But in the middle of a tiny web page? Not on your life.)

In a follow-up post, I’ll talk about why both Russell and Michael Arrington are mistaken when they latch on to iPhone as the device for the future.

So my Thinkpad’s hard disk (a standard Hitachi 2.5″ 4200 RPM 80GB HDD) died Saturday evening. It began making ghastly noises all of a sudden, signaling imminent mechanical failure. I shut down the computer immediately, and on restarting, a BSOD informed me my boot volume was un-mountable.

I haven’t tried to recover any data yet, but that disk contains my entire music collection, and pretty much everything from my IIMK days. Tremendous loss. However, lessons have been learnt.

I’m going to use this post to chronicle how I’m getting my laptop functional again, the applications I use – both on the desktop and online, and strategies I’m using to move as much data online as possible.

Recovery

I had an external 120GB HDD (the same Hitachi make), which I plugged into the Thinkpad. And installed my copy of Windows Vista on it. After that, I downloaded and installed several Windows Vista device drivers for the Thinkpad R50. It took me about 4 hours from crash to a working (but data-less) machine.

Local Applications

What I installed immediately afterward. All of these are freely download-able applications, most of which I’ve been using for several years now.

• Firefox 3 Beta 5
• PowerPro 4.8 – shell control software
• iTunes 7.6.2
• OpenOffice 2.4
• VLC Player- all-in-one media player
• Nokia PC Suite 6.86 – interfacing with my N73
• Filezilla FTP client
• Paint.NET – midway between MSPaint and Adobe Photoshop
• Foxit Reader – lightweight alternative to Adobe Acrobat Reader
• WinRAR – archiver par excellence

The installers for all of these are now on my SanDisk 2GB USB pen drive (along with all the Thinkpad Vista drivers). I’m going to update these every six months. It’ll take me far less time to get back on my feet in the event of another crash.

The Online Life

Although I was a pretty heavy user of Web-based applications, it’s going to become a way of life now. I’m now going to move as much data as possible online (except for large files like MP3s and videos), given that I usually have access to a high-speed connection – at home, work and on my phone.

PIM – Email, Scheduling, Contacts and Notes

All my email from 2004 onwards is in my Gmail account. I forward email from my RahulGaitonde.org and IIM Kozhikode mailboxes into Gmail. I also used Gmail’s ability to import email via POP3 to pull old email from these accounts too. I had also configured Thunderbird for Gmail via IMAP, but will be using Gmail’sweb interface exclusively now. To send email from other accounts, I use Gmail’s ability to use a custom “from” address.

As an aside, does anyone know of a good Series 60 email client – with IMAP support – that I can use on my N73?

I’ve used Google Calendar extensively, right from its launch. I have three calendars – one for Work, another for Birthdays and Anniversaries and the default calendar for miscellaneous, casual events. I used to sync these calendars with Thunderbird using GCALDaemon, which I highly recommend.

Contacts is where I’ve got a problem. Outlook (and then Thunderbird) used to be my repository for contacts. Over the years, I had built up an extensive database of email addresses, phone numbers, blog URLs and work addresses, and used to sync this database with my N73. Thankfully, that syncing means my contacts are safe.

However, I’m not sure what my future setup will be. Most probably Gmail’s contacts will be my repository. But I don’t know how I’m going to sync that with my smartphone. I’d love to hear suggestions. (I hear GooSync’s paid service can do this)

Google Notebook is my trusty scrapbook. Although I don’t think much of the interface and its questionable integration with Google Bookmarks, it works well enough. I’d use it even more if it had an Offline mode (say, through Google Gears). That’d bring it close to MS Office OneNote (which is an excellent piece of work).

Finally, I use Google Bookmarks through the Google Toolbar, but ever since I’d started using the Firefox 3 Beta, my list of local bookmarks had grown – because you can now tag them and search them using the Address bar. Those recent bookmarks were lost in the crash – ironically, just days after I blogged about the need to integrate Google Bookmarks with Firefox’s local store!

Staying updated

Google Reader is the answer. Apart from friends’ blogs, I follow:

• Tech News and Opinion: GigaOM, Techcrunch, NY Times Bits, BBC’s dot.life, Startup Duniya, WATBlog, Google Blogoscoped.
• Tech Lifestyle: Lifehacker, Lenovo’s Design Matters
• News: RSS Feed for my Google News

There are several other technology bloggers whose blogs I subscribe to. For news and other non-tech material, once a fortnight, I’ll check up on the Economist and BusinessWeek.

To stay in touch with what I find interesting, visit my Google Reader Shared Items page, or subscribe to it via RSS.

Photos

Thankfully, I’ve been fairly regular uploading pictures into my Flickr Pro account. I have about 500 photos on Flickr now, tagged and categorized. In the future, Flickr will become my primary photo repository.

Blogging

RahulGaitonde.org is hosted on Wordpress 2.5 using TheWebBrains‘ hosting service. I’ve been with TWB since 2004, and they haven’t let me down.

I use Filezilla to manage files on the remote server. Here are the Wordpress plugins I use:

• Akismet for spam filtering
• FeedBurner’s FeedSmith to redirect my Wordpress RSS feed to a custom Feedburner one
• Twitter Tools for integration with my Twitter account
• Random Redirect for readers with some time on their hands
• Wordpress Database Backup
• I also have a list of my Google Reader Shared Items on my sidebar. The code for this is easily available through your Google Reader page.

Web traffic monitoring for RahulGaitonde.org is done through Google Analytics. Again, something I’ve used since it was available.

Office

I’ve always used Google Docs and Spreadsheets whenever possible, right since the Writely days. Most of term papers, plans, databases have been composed, created and stored on Google Docs – so they’ve survived the crash.

Whenever I don’t have access to the Internet, it’s always OpenOffice (although Office 2007 is a splendid piece of work, and at least three years ahead of OO.org). From now on, any document I create with OO.org will be imported into Google Docs as soon as I’m connected.

Issues

That’s the rosy bit. But what about my music collection and videos? I can either back them up on external storage (which I don’t trust right now), or on DVD (cumbersome adding files and preserving albums), or on remote bulk storage like Amazon’s S3 (bandwidth too costly in India). So large files are a problem.

What about file formats such as PDF and ZIP? Miscellaneous settings and configuration files? Right now the plan is to back them up manually, periodically, on RahulGaitonde.org. But that’s far from ideal; there are too many such files.

Finally, the volume of remote data is already so much (4+ GB in Gmail alone) that downloading all that data locally (should the need ever arise) is impractical. What if I need to move from Flickr to, say, Picasa Web Albums? Or what if I need a few dozen photos to take with me on a USB pen drive? It’s extremely cumbersome to download assorted photos, even in batch mode. It’s the same for documents, spreadsheets, notes, email.

It’s clear that making the move online is adopting a fundamentally different lifestyle – which implies moving back offline is a major task. It’s one that I’ve been driven towards by my recent massive loss of data. The move has been made easier because I was already half-way there. In the weeks to come, I’m going to cross the other half and go completely online.

Questions? Suggestions? Comments? Do let me know.

With support for tags for bookmarks in Firefox 3, perhaps we should start thinking of integrating the two major bookmarking services – Google Bookmarks and del.icio.us with Firefox’s local bookmarks. The thought struck me as soon as I read this on Techcrunch today:

Whenever I use del.icio.us I simply save Web pages from the plug-in on my browser, and rarely actually go to the site. I’d estimate that my ratio of saving things to going to the site is 10 to 1, maybe even 20 to 1.

Quite right; I save to del.icio.us for a number of reasons: reading articles when I have time later, archiving howtos, and so on. But the web interfaces of both GB and del.icio.us aren’t very well-designed, and don’t lend themselves too well to retrieval. So “social bookmarking” is, in practice, a one-way street for several of us.

Enter Firefox 3’s AwesomeBar. By adding the ability to search bookmarks by tags, it is already a readily-accessible, ubiquitous interface to your bookmarks.

Those words to the right of each URL are tags for local bookmarks

Prima facie, it’s a look-no-further solution to the major current online bookmarking woes.

Though, of course, it takes the “social” out of social bookmarking