You guys know that I am crazy about blog design and themes etc, but I am not a designer.

I realize, that blog designing is not just about colors and header images but lot of other things, including information architecture and user experience.

I do follow a lot of blogs by wordpress designers. I enjoy reading about their experiences and experiments ; I get to learn a bit about blog layouts, blog architecture and blog designing ( at least I know these terms.right? )

I get enough inspiration from them, especially when I read something like this.

“You might find this difficult to believe…
But 2 years ago I didn’t own my domain name, had never touched a piece of WordPress code and knew nothing about blog design. In other words, everything I’ve done with WordPress and blog design in the past year has been self taught, using trial and error.”

So, it’s possible to learn wordpress designing and coding if you want to. But I was too lazy to try it out myself. Still, after following their blogs for few months, and trying different themes almost on a daily basis, I have learned enough to judge a wordpress theme, even though I can not design a theme on my own.

[Read more →]

It’s been a long time since I did a tag post. Thanks to “My Chit Chat” , and Liju here is one again.

Eight things I am passionate about :

1 My Love
2 My Dreams
3 Internet
4 Music
5 Books
6 Journalism
7 Friends
8 My Blog

Eight things I want to do before I die:

[Read more →]

Yes, here is a new feature on Google docs. Add Youtube Videos to your presentations. You can insert one or more YouTube videos onto your slides and play the videos while you’re presenting.

Its been a long time since I have done a presentation. Anyway, I will be doing my next presentation on Google docs. Well, if I ever get chance to do one. If any of you guys are using Google Docs presentation, and would like to comment on how useful this feature is, you are most welcome to drop a comment here.

Another feature they added recently, is Speaker notes. If you do now know what speaker notes are, on a presentation, this is what it is. “Seasoned presenters keep their slides simple and use slides to help illustrate their points, not to present all of their information. They jot down their talking points, examples, and supporting evidence in speaker notes”

So, if you were looking for this option in Google Docs, its there now, try it out !!

News Source

Yahoo! is getting ready for something like Google Adsense. Well, its not a “new news”, I know. However, If you do not know about it yet, check out publisher.yahoo.com. I am just wondering when they are actually launching it. Just curious. I tried to check that out but, I got a response saying that Its still under Beta version and I think it’s been in that stage for long time now.

Question for you : Do you think, if Yahoo! launches their program soon, do you think its going to gain popularity ?

I have one reason to say it may. It has paypal as a payment option, which will attract non-us publishers. Google’s checks takes ages to arrive and get cleared. But, with paypal, things get faster. However, Google can add paypal anytime, and Yahoo! may loose that advantage too. Or Google might look at acquring paypal too lol !!

Yahoo! should concentrate on bringing new publishers in. I think they can try something like what they did with the Wordpress plugin. They can concentrate on wordpess ( self hosted ) publishers and bring some easy tool. Or they can offer good referral rewards.

[Read more →]

I was wondering what will Google’s response be, when it comes to the Yahoo! Microsoft deal. I came across this post which has some interesting points and it gives a clear idea about what Google’s concerns are, about this deal.

Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies — and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.

Yes, that is a serious concern. Microsoft is always for copyrights, making the PC costly, making the computing itself costly.. and it kept it away from masses for a long time. Now, do you see low cost laptops entering market with Linux OS on it ? don’t you think it could have been much earlier, if Microsoft’s approach was different ?

Another question

Could the acquisition of Yahoo! allow Microsoft — despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offenses — to extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the Internet? In addition, Microsoft plus Yahoo! equals an overwhelming share of instant messaging and web email accounts. And between them, the two companies operate the two most heavily trafficked portals on the Internet. Could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors’ email, IM, and web-based services? Policymakers around the world need to ask these questions — and consumers deserve satisfying answers. [Read more →]

A few updates on what’s happening around. First of all, I’ve bought a bike. Its a news indeed right ?. Funny part is, I am learning driving on it and I will try for my driving license after that. So, please welcome my new bike

New design for the blog, this design brought the sidebar widgets back, something which I was trying to do for a long time. Background image change can happen sometime later. Tried a manual installation of wordpress 2.2. Well it worked after a long try.

Ann celebrated her birthday. Happy B’day Ann. !! There is another B’day on the way. Not mine, if you guessed so sorry. Will tell you all later.

Its been a long time since I posted something here…. and today seems to be a good day to post one… you know why ? I am going to login today… ( ?? ) … yes I will start taking calls from today. After a long training period.. today is the D day … I dont know.. excited ? tensed ? happy ? confused ?…. anyway it is good..

Today I got enough free time to browse … I was going through my friends’ blogs…. the thing is I came three hours early for work. I had no idea that my shift had been changed. Good.. its been few days since I logged in to check all the other blogs of the group…. Arunis doing a lot of blogging these days .. ( coz he got married ?? ) I think he has gone ahead of me in stats..

Still I dont have a specific subjuct to blog on…. may because I was all tensed and confused till now.. and still is a.. bit .. foundation level training.. assessments..process training.. training assessments.. internal assessments.. hmmm now I can start taking calls.. and still an external assessment is pending.. I think I will get time to relax now.. so hope I will come back to active blogging.

My friends have already started saying.. if you are looking for dinsan … either he will be with his phone or infront of a pc .. browsing.. still its hard to do something on blog from those pcs’ .. its from the library that I get chance to do some blogging.. ..

Now that I am trying to bring my reading habit back .. I will have some more things to share with you. ( I dont know what happened to me I used to be a book worm.. but now .. )

Waiting for something more..