DesiPundit » Blogging Tools

6 Features Facebook Could Use

IdeaSmith — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:46:59 +0000

Do you like the new look of Facebook? Vijay comes up with some ideas to make this popular networking service even better.

Vanity URLs for Profiles

It is possible (and fashionable) for people to carry their Twitter URLs around in their heads, on their visiting cards or even in their heads (so they can shoot unsuspecting strangers with it). With Facebook, the only way I can tell someone about my profile is by giving him my email and/or asking him to search for me.

A simple URL like facebook.com/user or user.facebook.com or even facebook.com/members/pages/user will go a long way in opening Facebook up.

See Also: India-related Tweets: Use #india tag to add your tweets

Protecting your Blog from Phishing Attacks

Patrix — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 16:13:45 +0000

First, disable your site, bring it down temporarily. The last thing you want is for more people to be scammed by a hacker who compromised your site. You can do that by disabling all access to all the files within your website. If the website is running on unix/linux you can do a “chmod -R 000 ” (Refer to the chmod tutorial here). For those using cpanel, go to the file manager and change the permissions of the document root for the website.

Semantic Overload’s blog was compromised by hackers who installed a phishing attack code in his site. Luckily he caught it in time and offers advice on how to fight back and protect your site.

See Also: India-related Tweets: Use #india tag to add your tweets

Selecting Web Hosting for your Blog

Patrix — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 15:45:19 +0000

While many hosting providers provide free domains, I believe it is always better to buy your primary domain individually rather than tied to any hosting plan. That ways even if you have to switch your hosting provider anytime, you need not worry about the domain.

Sanjay offers advice on selecting an ideal web hosting service for your customized blog [hat tip: Kiran]. Although there are plenty of blog platforms available for free, there is nothing like owning your content, selecting & tweaking your theme, and then constantly fretting that it doesn’t vanish overnight (backup, backup, man!)

Update: Manu provides more pointers and factors that you should consider while selecting a hosting provider.

See Also: India-related Tweets: Use #india tag to add your tweets

Changing the Dateline

Patrix — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:30:20 +0000

Chetan has a nifty fix to make your otherwise uninteresting dateline linkable to your archives.

See Also: India-related Tweets: Use #india tag to add your tweets

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Why We ‘Follow’ on Twitter

IdeaSmith — Mon, 26 May 2008 08:12:50 +0000

Are you on Twitter yet? If you are and wondering about the behaviour of that curious bunch of people known as ‘Followers’, Sampad Swain has something for you. A survey among Twitter users about their Follow/UnFollow decisions reveals some insights on what people like and dislike about other people’s tweets.

See Also: India-related Tweets: Use #india tag to add your tweets

Panicky Hitch-hiker on the Information Highway

IdeaSmith — Wed, 21 May 2008 14:19:07 +0000

DesiPundit Lekhni finds that moving her blog to her own domain is an unimaginably daunting job.

Lekhni’s Two Rules of Themes –

(i) How a Theme looks on the website has no relation to how it looks on a Demo;

(ii) How a Theme looks on a Demo has no relation to how it looks with all your widgets after you have installed it on your blog.

Having faced exactly the same thing about six months back, I completely empathise with her plight. What’s more, someone suggested to me that putting up a post about it would be useful feedback for developers. I didn’t get down to it but I’m glad Lekhni did. Now let’s all us non-techies keep our fingers crossed for tech-salvation!

See Also: India-related Tweets: Use #india tag to add your tweets

A guide to Twitter

Lekhni — Wed, 07 May 2008 14:01:05 +0000

Rajesh has a great post that talks about Twitter – how it works and what’s special about it, innovative uses for Twitter and how it can be useful to corporates. Oh, and it will certainly help bloggers reach out to other bloggers and readers!

Just for Fun – a random update from me, late evening, sometime last week “Sindhi Kadhi + Rice = Heaven” generated immediate response from not just Twitter but also Facebook friends (my status updates are linked to my Tweets and get automatically updated every time I write anything on Twitter). People were writing in from Bangalore, Delhi, Switzerland asking me to share the recipe, which I did over a few dozen Tweets. Soon more people joined the conversation over private messages, Facebook and email. Lots of thank you messages followed and many promised to try the recipe. A couple of them have, in fact, already done so – yes, it was fun and I might just do it again sometime. Not to be tried recklessly for fears of being termed spammer.

See Also: India-related Tweets: Use #india tag to add your tweets

Gtalking on Twitter

IdeaSmith — Mon, 05 May 2008 07:46:42 +0000

If you’re one of those people bitten by the Twitter-bug, Aalaap’s post on mating Gtalk and Twitter, is a must-read for you.

Now enjoy your Twitter followers’ shock and awe as your Google Talk status messages get pumped (piped? fed?) into Twitter automagically.

See Also: India-related Tweets: Use #india tag to add your tweets

After Installing WordPress

Patrix — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:30:04 +0000

WordPress is a powerful blogging engine and most of the time, works right out of the box. But what should you do if you want more? Taruns lists a few must-do things after you first install WordPress that will extend its capabilities [hat tip: Sheila].

See Also: India-related Tweets: Use #india tag to add your tweets

Social Media Marketers

IdeaSmith — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 11:47:10 +0000

Self-styled blog marketing guru Gaurav gives us a quick round-up of the players on social media marketing scene .

The Indian players offering social media marketing services can broadly be divided into three categories –

- Digital advertising agencies offering social media marketing services with a focus on virals, social network apps, social media campaigns etc.

- Public relations agencies/ practitioners offering social media services with a focus on online reputation monitoring and social media outreach etc.

- Prominent bloggers offering, basically, corporate blogging consulting services and workshops.

See Also: India-related Tweets: Use #india tag to add your tweets

Test-driving self-hosted Wordpress

Lekhni — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 18:56:15 +0000

Are you thinking of switching to self-hosted WordPress on your own website? Would you like to test-drive it on your PC first to see how it works? Head over to Tarun’s blog then – he has step-by-step instructions for you!

See Also: India-related Tweets: Use #india tag to add your tweets

Creating a Mobile Version of your Blog

Patrix — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 17:21:00 +0000

Considering the ubiquity of accessing the Internet on your mobile, it is imperative to create a mobile-friendly version of your blog.

Amit Agarwal offers a ten-second solution with the help of Google Reader. Chetan Kunte takes it a step further with a simple PHP index file or better still, a WordPress plugin.

See Also: India-related Tweets: Use #india tag to add your tweets

Be a Google Reader Ninja!

IdeaSmith — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 09:52:05 +0000

Organizing information well might be a quick-and-easy solution to the information overload on the blogsphere. Shyam has a nine-step program to becoming a Google Reader Ninja.

See Also: India-related Tweets: Use #india tag to add your tweets

Twitter Twitter

IdeaSmith — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 04:18:37 +0000

Gaurav Mishra is hosting what might be the India’s first Tweetup (Twitter Meetup) on December 29. Here’s where he tells us more about the Tweetup and seven reasons on why one should sign up for Twitter.

Blog meets are so passe. I want to do a Mumbai Twitter meet. Anyone interested?

See Also: India-related Tweets: Use #india tag to add your tweets

The Quest for More Blog Subscribers

Patrix — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 08:34:19 +0000

Patrix has made some neat suggestions to increase and retain your RSS subscriber base:

Don’t display your RSS count button if your subscriber base is less than 100… People often like to read what other people are reading and a small subscriber count may turn them off or might seem as if your content isn’t worth subscribing. When you have a large enough (subjective) subscriber base, feel free to flaunt it around.

Increase your RSS feed readers

See Also: India-related Tweets: Use #india tag to add your tweets

DesiPundit’s biases

Patrix — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 18:24:04 +0000

Now for some Friday levity. One constant grouse against DesiPundit’s variety of links is that there isn’t any. Does DesiPundit link to the same blogs over and over again?

Thejo digs into the stats and comes up with some detailed and surprising results. More details of his results and methods over at my blog. DesiPundit Reader Survey results coming up soon.

See Also: India-related Tweets: Use #india tag to add your tweets

Indian blog directory

Ash — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 23:37:27 +0000

Puneet writes in to inform us of Indiblogs.org, a listing of indian Bloggers from all over the world.

Desipundit used to have a wiki list of Indian bloggers. Unfortunately wiki.com reinvented itself and we lost our wiki page. Apologies to all who had already listed their blogs … please do list your blog on Indiblogs.org.

See Also: India-related Tweets: Use #india tag to add your tweets

v9y — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 14:51:16 +0000

जीतू ख़बर दे रहे हैं कि ब�?लॉगर अब हिंदी (नागरी) भी लिखने लग गया है. अब बड़ी आसानी से, बिना किसी बाहरी टूल की सहायता के ब�?लॉगर से हिंदी में प�?रविष�?टिया�? की जा सकती हैं. और चू�?कि इनप�?ट का तरीका फ़ोनेटिक या ध�?वन�?यात�?मक है (काफ़ी क�?छ आइट�?रांस से मारा ह�?आ), हिंदी में टाइप करना न जानने वाले ब�?लॉगरों के लि�? तो यह वरदान से कम नहीं.

Jitu points out that Blogger has started Hindi transliteration input in its editor. Which means that anyone can type in Nagari (the script for Hindi) straight into the Blogger interface without any external tool. The tool uses a phonetic input method (very similar to iTrans – without any credits though) and people not knowing Hindi typing in traditional methods can also type easily. Blogger provides more help on this.

See Also: India-related Tweets: Use #india tag to add your tweets

Are you being plagiarized?

Abi — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 15:32:36 +0000

A new blog called Got Copy? alerts us that a blog service called ByIndia is hosting a bunch of fake blogs with almost entirely plagiarized content. Each of these blogs is so brazen that it even uses the original blog’s title! And, no, DesiPundit is not a victim — yet …

Polite Indian, whose blog is among the ones plagiarized, raised this issue; in the comments section, Trevor Longino, a ByIndia official, blames it on a “malicious coder’s spyder”, and says they “have fixed the situation”. They may have ‘fixed’ the blogs that have been flagged by Got Copy?, but a cursory check led me to some more:

Kitabkhana, and here is the fake blog
Gautam Ghosh — Management Consultant and the fake blog
Blank Noise Project, and the fake blog
Reality, One Bite at a Time, and the fake blog
MBA Aspirant from India, and the fake blog
Education in India, and the fake blog

As I said, I took only a cursory look, and there are probably many more where I found them. But I’m also sure these fake blogs — and others that you may find — will be removed in due course (the last three are already ‘disabled’!).

Clearly, ByIndia’s blogging platform needs a mechanism that allows even a casual reader to flag offensive and plagiarized blogs so that the company catches them before the blogosphere does. I have e-mailed to the company with this suggestion. I’m yet to get a response; if I get one, I will post an update.

Thanks to Krish for the alert.

See Also: India-related Tweets: Use #india tag to add your tweets

Blogging: The Not-So-New Trend

Vulturo — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 13:59:27 +0000

The folks at Weblog Tools Collection are running a Blogging Essay contest and the first entrant is an essay which looks at blogging as a phenomenon and has some great pointers for people wishing to start a blog for the first time.

See Also: India-related Tweets: Use #india tag to add your tweets