RutSum

The Indian Blogging Community has long been growing since 2005 and has now emerged into a powerful source of new media. Opinions, reviews, poetry, fiction, updates, cribbing, pictures, videos, music, sports, jokes, technology, money, issue-based-writing - We’ve seen it all. What the Indian Blogging Community lacked (till now), though, was an active platform for live discussion and mutual support. The community is no longer merely a community. The Indian Blogger Forum aims at uniting the creative forces of the country at one place- to discuss, to learn, to speak out and to simply have fun. So jump on..

Register at the Indian Blogger Forum

The Indian Blog & New Media Society is organizing another event for enthusiastic bloggers in the capital, at the India Habitat Centre, after the much successful BlogCamp hosted last month.

Venue: Gulmohar Hall, India Habitat Centre, Lodhi Road, New Delhi

Date: 28th-30th June 2008

Time: 6:30-8:30 pm

Registration: There is no attendance or registration fee. You can register on the spot, or in advance by sending a mail to ibnms.in@gmail.com. You may attend one or more sessions.

Scheduled Sessions (Quoted from the official website)-

Session I, Saturday, June 28
Blogging Technology: How To Set Up And Manage A Blog

What is a blog? How to set it up on platforms like Blogger, Wordpress etc? How do you get your own domain like www.myname.com? Hosting on your own servers. Custom options. Adding photos and videos. Adding subscriber sign up boxes. Using tools like LiveWriter. And more…

Session II, Sunday, June 29
Marketing Your Blog

How do you make your blog more visible? How do you generate greater traffic? How do you get comments on your blog? What is SEO? How do you generate advertising for your blog?

Session III, Monday, June 30
Benefits Of Blogging For Executives, Businesses And Professionals; How To Make Money As A Blogger

Using blogs for personal and corporate branding. Engaging with stakeholders through blogs. Using blogs as a PR and communication tool.

For more information, the organizers can be contacted through the official page.

The new Dashboard has failed to please me. It was supposed to be ‘light’ on the eyes, but all it does is just sit around and grab attention.

One feature that I find is good that plugins can be upgraded directly from the Dashboard. Also, there is a media manager, which can come handy for images and videos. Though nothing can replace what Flickr offers, currently.

The option to edit the post slug comes after sometime, after Wordpress automatically saves your post for the first time. And that option is now above the space where you are supposed to write your post. Other options like Timestamp and publish status have got an upgrade, they have been moved up in the right toolbar. The ‘post author’ field has been moved down, below the post. The Save, Save and continue editing, and Publish buttons have been moved to the right toolbar. It has a big ‘Preview This Post’ button too, which will come handy.

Tags are now predictive, you have to wait for the tag to appear though, it is not instantaneous. Overall, there is nothing much that excites me in this new version. I am looking forward to getting the Fluency Admin theme for my Dashboard, but it currently works for only Firefox and Safari, so I’ll consider it later when they support Opera too.

Techcrunch has an interesting article on the rise of click fraud activities in 2007, which declares 2007 as the worst year for online ad monetisation. The stats even state that “one out of every three clicks on a Google or Yahoo ad is fraudulent.”

The most shameful part is that India is the largest single source (4.3 percent) of online click fraud activities. This just proves how we use our ‘overly’ intelligent Indian minds - which is the major reason Indians aren’t respected; even online. People want to earn money from us, by uncovering the talent over here, but all they get in return is a bunch of untrustworthy bastards who are always ready to stab you in your back for your money. We Indians don’t realise that if they spend half of the time spent on thinking of different cheating systems, on making your website/blog more useful to the internet, or spend time in writing quality content and building sustainable traffic, then you could earn much more, and that too - cleanly!

All of us very well know about the TOS, still we try to outsmart the system by using various methods. But in the end, you can never earn as much using cheating as you can by spending time and working hard on the monetisation of your site.

Other countries which are just behind our footsteps are - Germany (3.9 percent), and South Korea (3.7 percent).

I was convinced that for hosting the images on this blog, Gallery2 was the best option I could get for free. It’s not the first time I’ve been let down by an open source project. Gallery was developed by Bharat Mediratta, who is, for a change, Indian, and so I thought that this would actually be good.

I’d not jump to conclusions and say that Gallery sucks or is buggy. But it certainly isn’t newbie friendly at all. I started facing problems with it since the moment I downloaded the package. Though they do provide an installation guide, but it lacks the trivial things which should have been included; not all people who install this on their servers know how to use SSH or use chmod to change file permissions.

I spent a lot of my precious time in configuring and installing Gallery. No sooner than I completed the installation, I faced another problem - URL rewrites. There was a clash between the Wordpress URL rewrites and the Gallery URLs ( I installed the WPG2 plugin). Some of my post page URLs began to redirect to Gallery pages; others were giving 404 errors. I spent another 2 hours to figure this out. I did reach somewhere, and I solved most of the problem when I got stuck at a point, where I just couldn’t get the Gallery URL rewrite plugin to stay enabled. It just disabled itself moments after I enabled it. All the errors seemed quite random, with no whatsoever reason.

This was more than I could take, so I gave up. I realised that it just wasn’t worth all the hard work. Currently, I’m using a Flickr free account to host my images. Though the free limitations are a pain in the a**, as soon as I have enough money, I will upgrade to a pro account.