The following blogs have been accepted for inclusion in the DesiPundit Community:

• A Wide Angle View of India
• Agelessbonding
• An Academic View of India
• Antidote
• Business Musings
• Ceteris Paribus
• Cynic in Wonderland
• Dappan Koothu
• Historical Alleys
• India…from the eyes of a Non Resident Insider
• Just Speculations
• Let’s Put Da
• Maddy’s Ramblings
• Me and My Camera Obscura
• Outlandish Musings
• Pandey dot ru
• Pragmatic Euphony
• Purple Foodie
• Remains of the Day
• Review Room
• Bong Cookbook
• Scaling New Heights
• Soliloquies of an Opinionated Mind
• Tales of South India

Invitations will be sent out shortly to these bloggers and if they accept, you will soon start seeing their shared posts in our Community section. Thanks for submitting your nominations.

Update: All blogs have been emailed the invitation. If you are one of the above and haven’t received it yet, let us know.

We are seeking nominations for new Community Members for DesiPundit. Community members can choose selected posts from their blog to appear on DesiPundit so no more tipping us off to linking posts. You cannot self-nominate your own blog but instead nominate your favorite blogs.

How to nominate:
Continue reading this post

If you may not have noticed already, we have a small feature on our sidebar powered by Skribit. If you scroll down below the Search box in the sidebar, you’ll see a tiny text box asking you, What should we link to? See the image on your left. If you want DesiPundit to link to certain content (subject-wise), then simply enter your suggestion. Keep it short, obviously. Pssst…see the floating suggestions tab in grey on your right? You can use that too.

You can already see two suggestions made by readers. If you agree with them then click on vote. Similarly other readers can vote on your suggestion as well and we avoid redundancy. If a suggestion garners enough votes, we’ll definitely consider linking to the suggested content more often that we currently do. We’re trying to keep ourselves appraised of what our readers are interested in reading and asking for hat-tips only results in increased self-nominations so hopefully this will give us a better and more generic idea.

We are having some problems in pulling in excerpts from our Blogger and WordPress.com Community blogs. Self-hosted blogs are fine. This problem cropped up after we upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. We’re trying to figure out a solution so apologies for the inconvenience until then. Hopefully, the titles will be interesting enough for you to click through.

Feed readers rejoice! We have eliminated that extra click you needed to make before reading the original blog from the Community section. You will no longer be directed to our site before clicking through to the linked post. Hopefully, you will click more often and read more from our Community bloggers. The comments link in the feed footer also directly takes you to the original blog’s comment box.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t drop down to our site occasionally to vote up a link that you like although we’re trying to figure out a way to do this inside your feed reader as well. Thanks to a bunch of readers who provided us with valuable feedback for making this change.

The Memory of a Closure

It takes a closed door to evoke memories of times when it used to be open.

Pushkar

[click on image to enlarge] Selected by Anil and Arun. Join the DesiPundit India through Flickr group to see your photos here. This group is administered by Akshay Mahajan. Other notables are:

Distance

From a distance most things look beautiful, and like with things you can’t easily reach they look alluring as well.

Machhan

It has been over a week since we launched our new design and the feedback has been positive. We’ve continued to update our site and added more details on the new features:

• We have a new method for tipping off either your self-nominated posts or to submit a post from another blogger. We no longer need you to email us your link but instead use deli.icio.us to tag the post. All submitted links are also displayed on the site. You can use a similar method to share other content like interesting news stories or non-desi blogposts. These links – Bookmarks – are also displayed on the site.
• The About DesiPundit page has been updated. All Community Members that have accepted our invitation and submitted their RSS feeds are now listed here. In addition, we also display five members chosen randomly from the list in the sidebar.
• There are hazaar options for subscribing to the DesiPundit feed and you can choose one or as many as you like. We are working to resolve the partial feeds dilemma.
• We removed the Forums due to lack of interest and need for high-maintenance. There are plenty of topical and focused forums out there.
• We have new banners so feel free to download them and display them on your blog. And those Tshirts too

I hope you are enjoying the new look and experience. Feel free to contact us for anything specific you have in mind.

This message goes out to our 3000+ feed readers. Like any blogger, we hate partial feeds too. But we had to switch to partial feeds on DesiPundit yesterday. Let us explain why and then I hope you understand. DesiPundit has always believing in sending readers away…to the blogs we link to. In our previous model, we provided short excerpts and provided the link to the source which you dutifully clicked through from our feed. In our new model, we asked community bloggers to create a category called ‘DesiPundit’ (although some have been creative) from which we extract the category feed. We use this category feed to syndicate their posts and display excerpts on our site with a link that says, Continue Reading. Clicking on that link takes you to the original source.

However, the posts from our Community bloggers are displayed in full in our feed. That means, you no longer have to click through to the original blog we linked and can read everything off the DesiPundit feed. We don’t think this is fair to the blogger. After all, why would anyone agree to be a member of our Community if our readers are not visiting their blogs or not subscribing to their feed? Any attraction or incentive to be on DesiPundit is lost. Hence the partial feeds on DesiPundit.

Of course, if all community bloggers create a partial feed for the DesiPundit category using FeedBurner, we can get around this problem but then you assume everyone uses FeedBurner or knows how to or even wants to. Even if one community blogger does not have partial feeds, we’re back to square one. Some bloggers just want to write and care less about the technical details (unlike some of us). We rather figure something out at our end without asking our Community bloggers to do anything more than creating a DesiPundit category, writing posts, and tagging them for sharing on DesiPundit.

That said, we are not resigning ourselves to partial feeds forever but are actively looking for solutions. The ideal solution would be for partial feeds for the Community feed while retaining full feeds for other categories within the Entire Site Feed. Until then, we apologize for the inconvenience due to partial feeds and we hope that based on the title and excerpts provided, you click through to read. If there are any solutions you are aware of, we are all ears. Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Update: We finally managed to figure out a solution. Posts from the Community section are now partial and rest of them are offered in full. Thanks for all your suggestions and inputs.

Welcome to the new and hopefully improved DesiPundit. We have made some changes to make DesiPundit more sustainable in the rapidly evolving and growing world of Indian blogs. DesiPundit is now served in three flavors – Community, New & Upcoming, and Featured.

Community – These are a collection of invited Indian blogs that have agreed to share the best of their posts with DesiPundit. These bloggers were invited based on basis of previous links on DesiPundit and voted on by the DesiPundit board (most accepted; some didn’t). These bloggers are known for their consistent and quality blogging and are well-known in their own right. They tag selected posts on their blogs for DesiPundit and our hamster in the wheel picks them up for display in the Community section. This gives them the bloggers the freedom and ability to select which of their posts they wish to share with you, the DesiPundit readers who have the convenience of reading their best posts at one place. Of course, keeping in tune with the blog etiquette, we share only the title and the excerpt of the posts and you have to click through to read them in full. We’ll accept applications twice a year from bloggers who wish to join the Community. More details on this later.

New & Upcoming – These are posts from bloggers who are not in the DesiPundit community…yet. This section can be best described as the original DesiPundit where a select bunch of contributors will links to desi posts worth sharing. However, this section may not be updated as frequently as before due to reduced number of contributors. In the future, we may invite the oft-linked bloggers in this section to be a part of the Community so they can decide for themselves which posts might interest DesiPundit readers.

Featured – These are kinda like the best of both the previous sections and lets DesiPundit contributors highlight certain posts that we feel deserve a second look (or read). Our weekly Friday Photo of the Week will also be displayed in this section so will any frequently-updated posts on breaking news like we did for the Mumbai Terror Attacks or the IIPM Fiasco. This might be the least-frequently updated section of the three but I would suggest keeping an eye on updates at least once a week.

As you might notice, there are other new sections on DesiPundit – Forums and Bookmarks.

• Forums is a discussion section where you can register and start a thread on anything you wish to discuss be it current affairs, tech probs, or merely rants. We hope readers will engage in stimulating discussion and refraining from turning it into one of those Rediff Comment Boards. We are still working out the chinks and regular discussants will be upgraded to moderators. The five latest threads will be displayed on the front page sidebar.
• Bookmarks is one of those easy to use link aggregators. If you see any non-blog link that might be interesting to share with DesiPundit readers, you use del.icio.us to bookmark it (assuming you’ve a del.icio.us account) and tag it with ‘fordesipundit‘ tag along with other tags. It will appear on the Bookmarks page. We envision this page to be a treasure trove for interesting links and perhaps inspiration for something to blog about in case you’re suffering from an acute case of writer’s block. No voting, no moving up or down, no comments; just a simply link-dump for you to browse around. Of course, it would help the reader if you edit the title and add a little summary to give context to the bookmarked link.

Our Resident Experts – Baradwaj Rangan and Ashutosh – have their latest posts featured on the sidebar so that they are just a click away. I hope you continue to enjoying their musings on Movies and Science respectively.

Other goodies include photos from our DesiPundit – India through Flick group (displayed in the sidebar) from which we select our Friday Photo(s) of the Week and the Most Voted & Most Viewed posts (displayed in the footer). Yup, we still want you to vote on the links you like. These votes may decide who will make it to the Community or who will be asked to leave. Our DesiPundit store still awaits your clicks and orders. RSS feeds are available for any and every section of the site so feel free to subscribe for all or some contents on the site. We’ll have a full menu of options available soon.

Last but not the least as the cliche goes, we have to feed our hamster to keep him running at the wheel. Although DesiPundit is a labor of love, the hosting providers do not accept that as compensation for space on their servers. We’ve removed all text link ads and Adsense ads from our pages and instead are relying solely on 125×125 graphic ads (max of 6 for now) at the top of the sidebar. The rates are extremely reasonable and if you want to buy a slot, please email me at Patrix [at] desipundit [dot] com. You can advertise your product or your blog. If you know of someone who might be interested, then please let us know.

Unfortunately, as a part of this change and refocusing of our offerings, we had to let the Indic sections go. I’m sure there are plenty of dedicated Indic aggregators like Gilli and Akshargram that do a magnificent job of bringing the best from the respective Indic blogospheres.

That’s all, folks! Hope you enjoy this new avatar and keep reading DesiPundit.

For folks connected to the Twitterverse, you have one more ‘person’ to follow – DesiPundit. This Twitter feed will contain links to DesiPundit posts and occasional important updates. So if you use Twitter more often than your RSS feed reader, you might want to follow DesiPundit.

More importantly, you can send tips to DesiPundit using the @desipundit (replies) or d desipundit (direct message). We’ll give credit in form of a hat-tip to your twitter account unless you specify otherwise if we publish your shared link. Hopefully this will make it easier for people who don’t want to go all the way to our contact page to send us tips.