Shankar Ganesh

Wanna start a blog? Can’t afford domain & hosting? There are a lot of websites that allow you to create a blog for free, here are two with their features compared. Hope this serves as a reference for any one who wants to start a blog.

Blogger.com

• Fast Sign Up: You can create a blog in just 3 steps!
• Multiple Blogs allowed
• You could make a blog private so that it is accessible only by the people you choose
• You could have multiple authors on your blog(s)
• Built in labeling (tag like) system for easy categorization of posts, and you could also access archived articles easily
• Lot of built-in templates (themes) to choose from, and you could get more from other sites. Editing your theme is possible with the HTML Editor built in.
• Easy to use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) Editor for composing blog posts
• Free Photo Uploading facility, upto 1 GB
• Widgets or Drag and drop page elements for easier arrangement of items in your blog’s sidebar
• You can post to your blog by sending an email, and this can be configured from your Dashboard settings
• Mobile Blogging is also possible: Type the post in your mobile, send it to go@blogger.com

WordPress.com
This is another free and a very usable blogging platform, and here are it’s features:

• Like Blogger, sign up is swift and really fast
• Beautiful themes to choose from
• HTML Theme editing is not possible, you cannot use scripts on your blog
• Sidebar widgets can be easily configured, just by dragging and dropping
• Easily configurable Flickr, Meebo widgets for showing up your stuff on your blog
• A great stats system that tells you how many visitors came to your blog, where they came from, and what posts are popular
• Private blogs possible
• Comment Spam protection: WordPress.com protects your blog from countless spammers, who try to bash your blog with unhealthy comments
• Import feature: If you previously had a blog on Blogger.com or other such services, you could easily transfer those posts to your WordPress.
• Upload limit of 50 MB for your photos and other files.

Other than these, there are also many other free blogging sites like LiveJournal and others, but Blogger and WordPress are most preferred

Spotback is a kind of a social bookmarking site that aggregates popular items in the web according to user ratings:

Spotback gives you a rating widget which you can incorporate anywhere – on your blog posts, pages, pictures and others, and give visitors and readers an opportunity to rate them.

Now, Spotback has gone ahead to release a cool plugin for WordPress that lets you to easily implement the rating widget on your blog without any hassles.

The plugin comes with a custom widget designer, which allows you to customize the widget with ease. Choose whether you want a star, slider type rating widget or any other.

This plugin is also widgets compatible.

Go to the Spotback Rating Widget WordPress Plugin page to grab it now!

All of these need Firefox + Greasemonkey to work.

Gmail Integration

Google Reader + Gmail Integrator
This [tag]greasemonkey script[/tag] integrates [tag]Google Reader[/tag] with Gmail, saving you one extra tab. One of the best greasemonkey scripts available for Google Reader. An improved version of the script is here.

Google Reader Folders on Gmail
This script adds a little box on your Gmail page that lists the folders on Google Reader and also the number of unread items. Screenshot on Gmail:

Google Reader Search

Read the rest of this entry »

Vivien of Inspiration Bit is conducting a group project where you can participate by writing about your sources of inspiration.

Here’s where I derive my energy from:

People & Personalities
When I hear the stories of great men, and women, I’m inspired. I respect and admire a lot of people and it’s really interesting to hear their real life stories, how they battled odds and ends to reach the status they’re now. My greatest inspirations are Linus Torvalds, Sergey, Larry, Abdul Kalam, and more…….. the list goes on.

Dreams
Well, I dream a lot. In fact, I dream too much. I dream of what I want to be in my future, what I can do tomorrow and stuff like that Dreams propel me to drive forward in someway or the other.

Quotes
LOL, Don’t laugh , quotes have something in them. I love to collect quotes. I have a big notebook at home where I jot down quotes I love. There are a hell lot of them. And it’s really interesting to collect such quotes, read them and share them with friends and others. When I read such quotes, I’m motivated. So these ‘quotable quotations’ are an another source of inspiration for me.

Well, that’s it from me. Sorry for the poor writing style

If you want to share your sources of inspiration, go ahead and join the group project now!

Blender is a completely free and open source, 3D animation program. Blender is cross-platform, and is available for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, FreeBSD and others. Blender has a unique user interface, that may confuse a newbie. Mostly all functions can be accessed via Keyboard shortcuts, and it has many workspace themes. And also you have transparent floating widgets for assisting your 3D modeling tasks.

A complete list of features in Blender 2.43 is here for you to check out.

Wikipedia says: Blender was used in the Spiderman 2 Movie, in the storyboard department. Even more, the Blender team has made a short film called Elephants Dream, and I’ve even watched it. I guess it was supplied with a Digit Magazine CD. Watch the movie right here. Many more movies created using Blender are listed here.

Here’s something that was created with Blender:

Source: Blender Gallery

Wanna learn Blender? Get a book in their eShop and start right away!

It’s really very simple.

Type: [Name] [Space] Born into the Google Search Bar

For example, to know Einstein’s birth date, type Einstein Born and you get his date of birth instantly:

Born is an advanced Google Search Operator.

Schmedley, a start page that was launched earlier this year, is currently being improved rapidly.

Schmedley prefers to call its homepage widgets ‘Schmidgets’ and it’s released recently a schmidget that checks your Gmail messages, and those for AOL Mail, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail are expected soon.

An SMS schmidget is expected soon and support will be added for international gadgets, the team says. A reference schmidget is also in the offing, that helps you to search Dictionaries, Wikipedia and other such sites. Tabs feature for the start page are also gonna be out soon, so watch out if you’re a Schmedley fan.

What’s different here?

Though Schmedley is currently not as feature rich as other start pages, it still looks promising and eye-catching. Schmidgets have a Mac Look. The interface is simply amazing. If you like Schmedley, why not you participate in the survey to suggest new features?

Schmedley Start Page

Just see this:

Nice, isn’t it?

How about this?
[Source]

Cool again.

These are all called Stick figure animations, and are pretty easy to create. In a stick figure, everything is represented by straight lines, as Wikipedia defines it.

You might have probably seen this on your television. Know what? You could create such simple animations very easily with the help of Pivot StickFigure Animator.

This software allows you to create a previewable chain of stick figure frames, and you could add up your very own stick figures and spice up your animations.

Pivot StickFigure Animator software can still be used professionally, or you can use it just when you’re bored for time pass.

Pivot StickFigure Animator Homepage

News Blog started the Alexa Redirect Train very recently.
This is a good way to improve your Alexa Rankings and Technorati Authority.
Wanna Join the train? Just add 3 more links and spread the word through your blog!

• Alexa Redirect for News Blog
• Alexa Redirect for Web 2.0
• Alexa Redirect for Madhur’s Blog
• Alexa Redirect for Blog of Ehsan
• Alexa Redirect for Technical Blog
• Alexa Redirect for Byte of Technology
• Alexa Redirect for Life Rocks 2.0
• Alexa Redirect for Shankar’s Tech Blog
• Alexa Redirect for Brown Baron’s Blog
• Alexa Redirect for Windows Tips
• Alexa Redirect for Inspiration Bit
• Alexa Redirect for Freakitude
• Alexa Redirect for Technix Update
• Alexa Redirect for Techlivez
• Alexa Redirect for The Thinking Blog
• Alexa Redirect for Web Desinet
• Alexa Redirect for My Sites Advisor
• Alexa Redirect for Digital IT Blog

WordPress is a wonderful blog platform. As an administrator, every time you wanted to reply to a comment in a post, you had to go to the individual post page to respond.

Better Comments Manager is a plugin released by Keith Dsouza of Techie-Buzz and it allows you to reply to your blog readers’ comments from inside your Admin control panel itself, thereby reducing the task of moving to individual post pages to respond.

Have a look at this screenshot:

Notice something different? There are two new options in that comment: Reply, View All

Clicking on Reply, you can directly post your comments on the post from inside your dashboard itself.

What’s View All for? View All sorts all comments made on a particular post. I was waiting for such a feature, never knew where to get it, now it’s there, thanks to Keith

Download the Better Comments Manager Plugin for WordPress now!