Stand up to Cancer

I have recently installed the Socialvibe widget , to help out the cancer victims. It does not require any contribution from anyone’s part , all it needs is a mouse click .

Lets help in raising funds for cancer treatment  , simply by clicking on the Social Vibe widget on the right .

First WP Post with LiveWriter

Normally I have been posting using the WP web editor or Scribefire. Today I thought why not give Live Writer a try.

Let me see how this post comes out.

Microsoft Surface computing SDK – no international rollout yet

In my earlier post I had discussed how surface computing can revolutionize the retail industry. I had also illustrated the same with some examples. Both of the examples have turned out to be real , the Microsoft / Sheration tie up .

Recently I had contacted the Microsoft Surface computing desk for the SDK and found out that the SDK is not for international rollout. It is only available to PDC participants, and US / Canada residents.

Why WordPress blogs – an afterthought

I am a Google fan, and I love GReader, GMaps, GMail, Gdocs, mobile Gmail. I dont remember the last time I was not using Google for search ; in fact that is the only toolbar I have in my browser  . That also let me going with Blogger for more than 3 years. Recently I have left blogger with a PR 3. Crazy that I deleted all the blogger posts after the import.

Then I read some posts that Cutline ( the theme I am using ) has been sold, theres no tool for importing WP posts in blogger ( Draft blogger has one, but one needs to specify a XML file ) ; looks like there should be RAID 0 for blogs too These are all shivering; aren’t they.

Then I found out why people have moved to Blogger from WordPress. I have discussed some of them in my earlier post ; so thought I would post the one that really brought me to WordPress – SEO friendliness.

What most people miss out when comparing blogging platforms is the way search engine looks at the blogs. Now I am not a great web site analyst ; but after 3+ years into blogging I have learnt a fraction of it. Once I had typed a misspelt my post heading, and there was no way to change the post title URL in blogger. I had to make a repost of the entire post for the spelling change in the URL. In wordpress you just need to edit the permalink; and you are all done. There are more, incoming links , trackbacks, outgoing links, and many others add up to the PR. Blogger has backlinks but I never saw anything coming up within 3+ years, with WordPress less than 15 datys old for me there are some incoming links – now aint that awesome. There are third party tools available which does the needful , with WP its out of the box.

There are more in blogs other than posts.

My blog gets listed in Microsoft Tech Ed 2008 Blogs

My blog has been listed in the Microsoft Tech Ed 2008 Technical In Depth category.

I searched for “Sujay Ghosh” ( without the quotes ) and clicking on the link takes me to this blog.

Dipity – twitter with a new look and source

I have been using Twitter for quite some time, and I find it pretty useful.  Twitter is simple to use, has lot of clients, my favourite being Twhirl . I feel that if the mashup interface could have been made more friendly, it would help us a lot more. There are more mashup comparisons in my earlier blog.

A couple of weeks back , I chanced to get upon Plurk , it is similar to Twitter, but has a nice UI , the responses are threaded, but it has improved . But the UI is not that effective, so I use it seldom.

I was using FireEagle today , and came across Dipity. I created a account, and at first look it had a nice UI for the time line, and one could also add events. The better part was that one can Add Sources , like Twitter, FriendFeed, WordPress, Last.fm and all of them would show up in the UI . Thats a neat work, and the user does not need to get log into each service and get the updates.

The features provided are cool, but Twitter shall still rule, as Twitter has a large fan base, and has lots of clients . Another application Twistori shall probably combine both the features of Plurk and Dipity, lets see what they have to offer.

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Moving from blogger to wordpress

I have recently moved from my previous blog to this wordpress blog. I have not imported from my earlier blog, as I want it to stay as it is. It was my first blog, it helped me in letting me know that a blog is not about writing posts, lots of things go behind making a good blog.  For someone like me, who never worked on html / javascript I learned a fraction of that too. .. remember the post-footer and div things.

It is an excellent platform, endless ways for extensibility, and supported by most of the blog world. But there are some things missing which a professional blogger would look for. I guess WordPress peeps the post there.

WordPress is awesome

Today I was playing with the WordPress posts and widgets , and I found it has LOTS to offer. One of the reasons of staying at blogger, was that I could add widgets by adding Java/HTML scripts. I thought I could acheive that only in WordPress.com by buying some credits … but today I found the solution.

While playing with the widgets I found a widget called Text ; with a description saying for HTML . I thought for a moment ; and then burned my WordPress blog feed in feed burner; and pasted the code …. and it was working neat.

So some of my doubts with WordPress are over, even though editing CSS still remains paid. Now I am waiting to hit up my next post.

Should I stay or should I go – WordPress vs Blogger

Could not think of a better post name – the post name is one of the greatest hits of The Clash.

I have started blogging on my blogger blog for quite some time . Blogger has given me the liberty to add various scripts and widgets to my blog – thus letting me change my blog theme now and then and adding widgets for the better. My blog currently has a PR of 3 and I think blogger has still lots to offer.

A couple of days back I also enabled podcast for my blog, well things are fine with blogger. But for a couple of days I am getting the feeling that starting of a wordpress blog would be better. In fact I started this blog around two years back , but what kept me away from continuing at WordPress was the fact that I could not edit scripts, neither could I customize it. So I was there posting here with some general stuff, and giving my favourite blog much attention. So as a beginner to blogs, Blogger was amazing…. well it still is. Well so far so good; an amazing experience, fun, lots of widgets – cool stuff ; overall an excellent platform for bloggers to start on.

One of the things which was holding me blogging at WordPress is the lack of professional themes. Well a couple of days back I found this theme – it was professional, elegant and had the best look from all of the featured themes. I am also starting to realize the basics for a professional blog – comments,feeds, useful widgets – and WordPress offers all of those – adding a few more widgets like online presence,music player would be nice – takes the boring times away.

I guess WordPress has everything, and with the acquistion of Intense Debate, comments are likely to get more interesting. I also have Intense Debate in my blog; but I guess with WordPress 2.7 rollout, things shall become better.

Just feeling nostalgic, should I stay at Blogger, or should I go to WordPress – even though somewhere WordPress is peeping the post.

Google all set to conquer the web

After Google’s flagship product , its search engine ( no marks for guessing that right ), Google has gained poularity for its other free products , specailly the GMail . GMail has soon become the favourite web mail … I guess its probably the leading one now … even though there were several other email providers which had started a decade before Gmail had .

Close to the heels of GMail there came Google Docs, Orkut and Google Page Creator…. there are many but these are the most commonly used – I have tried with Google Sites, but I get an error everytime. They have all become quite successful and recently Orkut has exposed its OpenSocial api for developers to build gadgets … something Facebook was having earlier and still has .

But Web 2.0 probably had lots of more to offer .. there was competetion from different quarters … user generated inputs ( Twitter ), virtual socialization (Vivaty, Vside) .

So I guess Google started acquistions …. Jaiku , a similar tool like twitter has been acquired by Google . Google completed the circle this week, by launching Lively , something similar to Vivaty.

In fact Vivaty and Lively were launced to the public on the same day. Both Vivaty and Lively needs a player to be downloaded which I dont like, there are virtual networking sites which work directly on Flash, ( Minilife ). I dont know what are is the architecture behind Lively and Vivaty .

But with I guess if these are RIA applications , then SilverLight or Adobe AIR would have been needed for installation , well these are my guesses.

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