Happy New Year

Wishing you lights, laughter, love,
good health and prosperity this
New Year

Have a great year ahead.

Tsunami and two years later…

It is two years since the tsunami wrecked havoc in the lives of millions of people in about a dozen countries in South Asia. India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand were the most affected. Even today, the repercussions of this incident lives on.

News Article

Blogger Beta is now New Blogger

Blogger is out of Beta. Now there is an Old Blogger and New Blogger. Not all accounts have been migrated, but the work is in progress. I have moved to the new Blogger a couple of months back.

Just a few observations about the New Blogger. The bad ones first.

1. No backup facility for my  posts.
2. I cant read the Feed of my own blog even though I am logged in. My blog is only for authors and when I want to get to the feed all I see is an XML file saying “Unauthorized”

The good ones are of course listed on the Blogger site and there is a feature tour which helps in understanding the new features.

My post – First result on Google

As I was going through my blog stats, curiosity got the better of me. I Googled one of the search terms that made a user land on my post. I got the shock of my life. My post was the first result on Google.

Again I did a very human thing – Googled all the search terms. One term was the fourth in the list of results returned by Google. I am very happy that my post landed first in the search results. Obviously in a few days it might not retain its place. Until then, it is something to cherish

And this prompted me to do one more thing. I would start posting about things users search for. That way it could be mutually beneficial.

And for the envy of others, here are the screen shots

Windows Live Writer

Ok, here I have the Windows Live Writer. A small desktop app that allows you to compose your blog entries and upload them to your blog service. Surprisingly, it supports other blog services like Blogger Beta and WordPress.com apart from Live Spaces. This post would be a test post. Let me see how all the features come out on the blog.

The app provides a full featured WYSIWYG editor which has almost the same features of Blogger Beta but a little more than WordPress.com. The only thing I miss in WordPress.com visual editor is the capability to add color to text. It may not be that important but it helps most of the time. I have tried to Quote this piece of text

The app has spell checking included. You can keep a post a draft, open previous posts from your blog and do a lot of other things. Hyperlinks and images can be inserted just as easily. I am a bit skeptical about the categories part which is names as keywords and tags. Let me see if the category comes out properly

Update: As expected the categories did not come out properly.

A few images of Windows Live Writer.

OpenID

Today I got my OpenID. OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. Ok. Now how does that help? There are so many sites out there which accept OpenID to login. The list of sites that accept OpenID are listed here. These include the most popular livejournal and Technorati.

To get an OpenID you can go to MyOpenID and register. There are a few other websites that offer this service.

Once you get your OpenID you can login to any site that supports it. Technically, this is equivalent to a Single Sign On but for various sites. I still have not found a compelling site that uses this technology. But in the years to come, this technology might pick up some speed.