Archive for the 'Blogs' Category

Pieces of Blog

December 26, 2009

Joshua Schachter of Del.icio.us fame on how the different parts of a blogging system could be decoupled and run off specialized web applications: authoring by desktop apps, storage of raw posts and hosting on Amazon S3, templates by WordPress, feeds by FeedBurner and comments by Disqus/others.

If you run a self-hosted WordPress/Movable Type blog, you’re already there. Instead of S3, you’re hosting it on your hosting provider’s space (which could well be S3). In fact, this is how rahulgaitonde dot org works.

Now Joshua only alludes to this, but these pieces aren’t coupled loosely enough to move to plug out one component and fit another in. For example, I can’t take the Feedburner RSS component out and replace with another – my RSS feed URL is tied to Feedburner. I can’t move my template transparently between Blogger and Movable Type.

Back in May 2008, I had similar thoughts about separating the email interface from email storage:

There is a market for start-ups that provide only an interface for existing email. For people who are willing to pay for (cheap) storage of their email and for bandwidth. Users will be able to migrate from and to such services without needing to copy huge amounts of email to their new email provider.

I wonder whether in the future we’ll eventually build such a decoupled email system, or find an alternative to email altogether.

HOWTO: Tagging blog posts to boost blog traffic

April 28, 2008

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.

Now on Twitter

April 16, 2008

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?

Moving to an Online Life

April 14, 2008


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.

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.

Gmail - Custom

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).

Google Notebook

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:

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:

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.

Windows Vista and the "blogosphere"

March 2, 2008

Just finished watching an episode of the GigaOM show with Dan’l Lewin.

When OM asked Dan’l why Vista was “everybody’s favorite whipping boy” and “what happened”, Lewin’s reply was that “the blogophere happened”.

Which is probably hitting the nail on the head. In 2007, everyone who had an issue with just about anything with Vista could blog about it – and the blogosphere would take it up and amplify it, via Digg or del.icio.us, among others. As is human nature, far fewer people blogged about things that they had liked about Vista. As a result, the perception of Vista quickly became that of a buggy, bloated animal.

Things were very very different back in 2001 when XP was released. There were far fewer blogs and viewers. Technology websites (the only ones who did any sort of rational evaluation of Vista) got far more readers as a percentage of Internet content than in 2007.

Similarly, Vista’s development was also very public. So when features that were originally slated to ship with Vista (WinFS, for one) were subsequently dropped, there was tremendous coverage and criticism from the blogosphere. Contrast that with the days of Windows 2000 (and XP), when very few ordinary users knew (or cared) about the development of the operating system. It’s insights like these that periodically wake you up to the power of the democratic web.

I’m also amazed at how good Apple is at keeping its development efforts secret. At the same time, Apple’s products don’t have to have interoperability with the sheer number of devices and software that Windows does.

One of those negatives of popularity, I suppose.

What I want most from my RSS reader…

February 1, 2008

… is the ability to add (and view) comments for a post.

Right now, I still need to navigate to the website (out of my RSS reader) and comment in the little form at the bottom of the page. That is *so* old-world Web!

Of course, several blogging platforms (WordPress for one) offer RSS feeds for comments, but having separate feeds is non-optimal for two reasons. One, comments are only useful in the context of the parent post. Viewing it as an independent feed doesn’t fit in with that. Two, it still doesn’t solve the problem of adding comments.

An RSS reader is still a one-way street, funneling content from several websites into one location. Ideally, all of a user’s interactions with a website (read/write/view) could be done via RSS feeds. Because, after all, that was the intent of publishing a feed in the first place – to save the user the tedium of having to actually *visit* the website.

Imagine. Posts. Comments. Advertising. Live chat. All through the RSS reader.

Why don't Indian CEOs blog?

March 31, 2006

Just came across Basab Pradhan’s Blog via Sambhar Mafia. So he’s one of the rarer breed on the blogosphere today – the Indian CEO Blogger. Apart from Rajesh Jain, there are almost no Indian CEOs blogging. First, Basab’s got a few good articles straightaway – one that wonders why Navi Mumbai’s rise has to be the result of Mumbai’s meltdown, or an intersting one about why passengers hurry to disembark from a plane at Bangalore airport, but not at Delhi airpor t!

Back to the question I raised – why we don’t have Indian CEOs blogging – and don’t even get started on “American CEOs don’t blog either” – there’s nothing that says our CEOs ought not to blog if their American counterparts don’t. But why would Management blog? An CEO – that is, top management – blogging, can be a very effective form of market differentiation. Apart from conveying to everyone where the company’s headed and why, a CEO blogging gives the impression of a very open organization – and that can be a very powerful tactic. Indians perceive India Inc. with awe, but also with a certain degree of detachment, almost like a form of “us and them”. Who wouldn’t want to know the real Naresh Goyal, the real Sunil Mittal, what Nandan Nilekani’s thinking these days? Jerry Rao of mPhasis writes fairly regularly in the Indian Express – rarely about the IT industry, mainly on policy matters and reform. That, in my opinion, gives both Jerry and mPhasis a human face. If Jerry were to start blogging about matters in his industry as well, it would work tremendously in his, his company’s and his customers’ favour. Imagine Naresh Goyal writing about global aviation, business trends and his vision for India’s future, and Vijay Mallya on the Indian alcohol/airline market, Government policies, how the industry is subverting the Government’s ban on alcohol on TV via smart advertising, about serial entrepreneurship…

There’s a huge audience for these blogs, certainly. There are far more Indian bloggers than I ever could have imagined – the Indian blogosphere is a healthy and vibrant community. Most of them have good content too, so they’re definitely right-thinking, rational people. Besides, businesses of most companies today aren’t limited to India. If a company’s products and services have a global market, it follows that readership for Mr. CEO’s blog will be global too.

By the way, a few American tech company do have a blogging “face”. For instance, Microsoft has (like him or hate him) Robert Scoble, Yahoo has Jeremy Zawodny and Russell Beattie, IBM has Ed Brill for its Lotus product line, Novell has Nat Friedman , Miguel de Icaza, Sun has Jonathan Schwartz – that’s helped each of these organizations build up a community following. But here’s the opportunity for us to race ahead and build a vibrant online thought community with perspectives from our corporate leaders!

"Blog" in Word 2002

January 4, 2006

If anyone needed a reminder that blogs have caught on only recently, take a look at this:

This had been typed into a Microsoft Word 2002 document!