It's been a long time since I blogged last and much longer time since I blogged about "my world". lost touch with myself, lost in these reviews and stuff...well more of them will come, but time for a self-realization post. :D

Nowadays most of my time has been wasted online...ah well! why wasted you ask? well utilization for some is wastage for others. In one way there's lots of information and cool stuff that I've been inundated with and hardly being able to keep track of. best that I did was mark a lot of these stuff as bookmarks in my del.icio.us page.

I have incorporated a javascript feed from the site on one of my blogspot blogs, which shows the latest 10 links added under the Links section. no need to manually create a list of favorite links...coz favorites change :) Most people i see don't tag their entries...and in course of time will realise that their collection is just too humongous and tags are a quick way to narrow down the scope of the search/browse. Initially it might have been difficult, esp. for sites which are not saved by anyone else. But in majority of cases, they are saved and appropriately tagged, so all ya gotta do is just click n select any of the popular/recommended tags. I'd prefer to go with the popular ones...so a search on those tags are more likely to return relevant results from other users atleast, if not yours.
A related thing is blogrolling, which confused me, till I tried it out finally on my blogspot blog. It's just the same as the del.icio.us feed but specifically for blogs (or sites with syndicated feeds). Blogrolling.com, a tucows company which is most popular for serving blogrolls has a limited free version and my experience with it wasn't very satisfactory. it allows you to import an OPML file, which is basically list of RSS/ATOM feeds which is interchangeable between news aggregators. Now the service is so dumb that when you place a blogroll out of these feeds into your blog, it puts a list of links to the xml feeds which most browsers don't handle well today. M$ is supposedly working on a way to handle feed links, the URL's would be feed:feedurl...can't track down the URL but read it loong back on the IE blog, when there were discussions on what new features are being planned for IE 7 and further versions...Atleast they have incorporated tabs and RSS. I feel even though firefox is more popular among the alternatives, it'll do well for IE to see Opera as the ideal coz it is an alternative that is spun off a centralized production process with lotsa controls and a focus on studying usage patterns to bundle appropriate helper applications, which the open source browser forget to, in the name of freedom.

Surprisingly I had been using a service (Bloglines), but never discovered that the site itself itself provided the blogroll feature. Here I could choose to show n number of all the feeds or feeds from a particular folder (created in my account). My public profile of bloglines is here. The blogroll is not site specific and if anyone requires, just browse the public feeds page and let me know which folder you'd like to sync....the full feed won't be available, there are a few loose ones, but i'll pack them under misc. folder soon.

While I'm on the topic of web feeds, the feeds (from my bloglines collection) that have kinda become my favorites out of my collection are : -

1. All feeds under friends' blogs folder...for obvious reasons


2. Dilbert comic strip...practically funny


3. Boing Boing...my source of all those "where do u get such cool (not to forget...weird) sites from?"


4. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot..."Context is for the weak" , humor in real life, a la bengali style :)


5. Rediff...so far seems to be the only indian news site that syndicates it's content


6. TheInquirer...for it's tongue-in-cheek reviews and news bits. what's more captivating is their amazing ability to convey the news in least number of words

. Check out my bloglines profile to get the links to these sites and read some of their latest content.

Another exciting thing that I tried out was setting up a drupal powered website. What was most exciting was at almost 10% of the time I needed to code from scratch my project website for NIO, drupal helped me put up a community site in so much less time, and with more cool factors and oomph! i haven't seen anything more beginner-friendly than this. One can come up with large scale sites easily using the drupal engine. It's easy coz almost all configurations of how the site appears and behaves can be done graphically. Your web browser becomes the administration/control panel. The only thing that needs to be done manually is setting up the database consisting of over 50 tables (don't worry they give the sql file which u can import into your database.) Again in most cases, this can be done from the web browser using PHPMyAdmin. In very rare cases, where you can afford a dedicated host, you'd get shell access and access mysql's command line utility and follow the drupal installation instructions which are for such an installation. Once you create the first account (admin) you are presented a huge switchboard of options...click, flip, blip....your time starts now! As time passes, you may need to tinker with more and more options, fine tune existing options and customize it more to the tastes of your audience or to the focus of the organization for which the site is being developed. Thanks to Kavita Ma'am for taking time to show me through NIO's drupal powered site's configuration. The ease is simply unbelievable, but is really helpful, especially for all those non-IT organizations which understand the importance of having a prominent presence on the web.

Guess I'll talk about drupal this saturday...hopefully it might help some people, but before that there's a slight technical difficulty that I have with it. Somehow the link to the "Access Controls" settings page has got hidden and I just can't find out how to re-enable it. Possibly going thru the code would help, but it's not a toy project of 100 lines. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Also let me mention that I'm using Drupal 4.5.2 which runs on PHP 4.2 with MySQL as backend database and Apache server to host the site. I tried an installation on IIS server using Ensim pro control panel, it's just so archaic and the phpmyadmin installation didn't have an upload feature for importing the sql file. not to forget it was 2.5.0 ...version way too older than what we used in 2004-2005 for our BCA project.

got a book called catch-22 from "The Reading Habit" shop in miramar. trying to improve my reading skills. :D