TheAnand

Oops, It just turns out that I am 52% Geek! What I feared has come true! I don’t know if its good or bad. But I just answered a few quiestions, out of which most were crazy quesitions. How Geek a Geek are you?

52% Geek

Do tell me your percentage of Geekiness!

Something off the regular topic, I am almost finished doing my new design, TheAnand 2007. Its once in a year that I completly re-design my homepage and spend the rest of the year tweaking it. But this time the redesign couldn’t have happened at a more worse time, the Google PR update time. I lost a PageRank playing around with the site structure and design. Too bad, maybe the next update will be kinder to me

I found this new idea for power blogging last month, and I wanted to test it before I let you know if it really works or not. When I started blogging some time back, I usually sit for some time and think about the topic to blog and research about it and then blog about it. a very time consuming process, right? My initial target was a blog post every 3 days. But I could not reach that target with this type of process being followed.

It has been a good 15 days since I got on board the Technorati Link Train, the results I must say have been simply super I must agree. I ranked somewhere near the north of 1,000,000+. There is a debate going on if this is good for blogs and if its okie to game the Technorati rankings, nothing concrete seems to have come out of it yet, and technorati does not seem to mind this kind of exchanges. Here are the results after I got abroad the Technorati Train:

Absurd? Unthinkable? WTF!?

If eveything goes well, soon we will have a new, hot and fresh Internet, or whatever it is going to be called. It promises to address all security, mobility, spam and every problem that has been coming up since the start of the Internet on the second day of September, in 1969. This is what some professors and researchers in the USA want with the support of the Big Uncle Sam Govt. Even European universities and some other private universities and organizations like govt. defence departments are believed to be following this pursuit for the new-age Internet.

Using the last weekend for optimizing blog a little bit more, I decided to install some nice plugins and useful tweaks to make the blog more easier to share and use. Here is what I did this weekend.

One thing I learnt was that with the mistylook theme that I am using on this blog, the single.php file is the main index template and not the page template file. Any changes you want to make, youw ill have to make it in the index.php file.

Come this spring and you will be presented with TestFreaks, which will bring you reviews from all over the world about the hottest gadgets and consumer electronics. It will contain the lastest reviews and more about the latest gadgets andconsumer electronics. Currently in alpha testing, it is getting ready for its big launch by the spring of 2007

I wish it was true. But I am still a long way from there.

I found this little tool on the web where I can create wired front cover for entertainment purposes only. I created one just to see how it looks. I am pretty impressed. I filled in some close to impossible headlines to make it amusing.

Want to be featured in Wired Magzine? Create your own cover page complete with your own picture and share it with your friends. Have fun creating your own wired poster

Thats a lot of “Blog” word on the title!

As I wrote a review about King Nomar a few weeks ago, I was talking about the various competitions on the blogosphere. Its a wonderful way of getting feedback about your site and gettting some linklove on the way. I found BlogAboutYourBlog.com today while surfing the net in some forum. He is currently running a blog review competition giving away 10$ for the best review of his site. And the second best and the third best are not be dissapointed as they too will receive about 5$ each. So here is my review of BAYB.

I have been using a broadband connection for the last few months. I am happy with the speeds I have been getting with my Airtel Broadband. Besides using it for emails, blogs, orkutting and other things. I was thinking about what to do with my unlimited connection. Here is what I use my Broadband connection for:

1. Online Radio: I hear a lot of radio online, mainly since I don’t prefer listening to the same mp3′s time and again. I usually hear trance, techno and hindi remixes. My search for the perfect internet radio player ended when I found the BoomBox Internet Radio. Though it came bundled with some spyware called SpinCasino, it is a very useful little program which helps you find the best radio stations streaming out there.

Today I was thinking of marketing my blog a bit with free blog directories. I was looking for some nice directories to submit my site to when I found King Of The Blogs site. The site was interesting with a PR of 4. But unfortunately this was what I found:

Another hack. But what got me thinking was the business behind this. They have the front page of a PR4 site, they can as well sell it off to someone to include a url into it. But it may screw the advertised site, it will also bring in a flood of traffic. Hey, I think I should stay away from John;s Blog, it’s making me think evil.

I first this term from John Chow’s blog. I first thought it was some really nice sounding tagline for his blog. But as I found out from John Chow’s blog. I really have to see how far am I from reaching the dotcom mogul status.

To be considered a Dot Com Mogul you must meet all the follow requirements.

• Your income is made from the internet.

Right now, my income comes from various sources online and offline. Business, freelancing, as an executive and some share trading. No Check

A lot of bloggers are putting up contests and prizes for reviewing their blogs. And the King Nomar of Netherlands has a prize for the best review of his site. And it is not polite to disobey the King!

Nomar is a 20 year old guy from Netherlands, a starting web developer who is online to make some money off the internet. And as far as I can see, he is pretty successful at that. He has already crossed the payout amount of Adsense, and is successfully making money off some sponsored reviews of other sites and has bought some nice business websites related to gaming and hosting.

Web 2.0 essentially means me, I mean you, that’s us!

The concept of Web 2.0 is basically user participation. If you have seen the video I had posted earlier, you must know what the whole Web 2.0 bubble is all about. Its all over the internet, web 2.0 design, web 2.0 content, web 2.0 this and web 2.0 that and web 2.0 everything! But as a part time designer and full time internet lover, I am most concerned about how to market my site and gain some exposure and in turn get some decent traffic. But hey, that’s the dream of
every blogger and site owner.

This is what I found on the official blog of the Yahoo! Mail Beta. It looks like Yahoo! has started integrating the Yahoo! Mail and Messenger into its new Yahoo! Mail Beta. If you are not using the all new Yahoo! yet, you should read my earlier post about how to get invited to the beta Yahoo! Mail.

The new integration looks awesome and definitely got me hooked since I now use the Trillian Messenger for my chat. This new combination of Mail and Messenger of Yahoo! is already implemented by Google for its GMail and GTalk applications. But the Yahoo! has done things sleek and sexy if I may say so! It is a very much blended look and it now has the feel and look of a desktop on a browser.

During the time I was trying to get a hang of all this “blogging” concept, John Chow’s blog was one of the first blogs I started reading. I honestly forgot where I got his URL from, but the fate was kind enough to let me stumble upon his blog. After all like poles attract as someone said, evil attracts evil! His blog which earns 3000+ in a month is a great inspiration for bloggers like me who earns 7$ in more than a year!

Starting from yest. this blog was on a maintainence stage. I updated the WordPress to the latest 2.1 Ella, which is an important upgrade as per the WordPress team as it included important patches and fixes. Then I changed the colors of this blog and “personalized’ this blog a bit.

Upgrading WordPress was as easy as installing it, hats off to the development team there! The documentation was self-explanatory and easy for anyone to follow. Following that, I changed the header image of the MistyLook theme as many blogs used this theme and as I said earlier, I “personalized” this blog. The header image now is the instrumental cluster of my favourite car – Mercedes Benz. The other colors were changed according to the header.

If you have not got into the new Yahoo! Mail Beta yet, now is the best time to do it. It is a very hip and rocking mail client, very different from anything provided by anyone. Here is a cool tip to get your self into the new beta with a little bit of hacking.;-)This is a cool little trick by which you can Join Yahoo Beta, without an invitation1. log in to your yahoo mail account2. on the top left, besides mail button, there is one down arrow, click there…3. go to option

4. on the left panel, click on account information

As we near the end of another year in the 21st Century, I thought it is the right time to publish a set of must have plugins for the best browser ever – Firefox.

1. Adblock: This essential plug-in helps in blocking unwanted advertisments from displaying in the web pages you visit.You can use filters with wild cards or even regular expressions to block complete banner factories. Very useful if you use a pay-per-Mb connection or a slow internet connection and really lack to patience to wait for all those ads to download.