In the physical world, most people lock their doors, buy car insurance, and take other precautions to protect themselves from harm.

Linking all the special stories together.

After joining my new assignment, I decided to commute to my office which is a good 15 kms from my residence by the Delhi Metro. The first day itself was baptism by fire.

Things are achanging at Drishtikone for better readability. Also 7rcr.com and SAPprofessionals.org have got a redesign and new life. Check out.

I was a little surprised to get a click in from the xpenser stat site.. and I went to check. I had written a post on the benefits of xpenser. And I found that many of the readers had clicked on it and went into the xpenser site. In fact 114 clicks went in from Drishtikone..just one below labnol... and far above lifehacker!!

So, my endorsement of a site was pretty successful for that site :-)

(click on the site for a larger view)

Want to know the stats of this site? Here is table of stats which shows that no. of visits are now in the range of 30k, the hits are around 350k, and some 10,000 unique visitors visit Drishtikone monthly.

Inspired by Ray Richard's blog, I am introducing a new series - BlogBazaar Sampling - where I will bring to the readers some interesting links from my RSS feeds that form my blog bazaar! Here are some interesting links for today:

GigaOm reports that Thunderbird - the email client from Mozilla is being spun out as a separate company. "It will receive $3 million in seed funding from the Mozilla Corp. David Ascher, currently CTO and VP Engineering of ActiveState will run the new venture. The new company will be a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Corp."

I have been blogging for some years now.. I started by doing some blogs on blogger from Google and then moved to MovableType. After a brief tryst with b2e, I finally settled on Drupal. There is a lot of talk these days on "pro-bloggers" - people who blog as a living! There are many .. and the mecca for all of these is Problogger. Darren Rowse has really helped a lot of bloggers to make money.

finding a niche is critical to making money while blogging

I personally believe that to make money - realistically become a pro-blogger - you really need to do the following:

1. find a niche - 3 categories give the best results (technology, entertainment and personal development)
2. be very focused
3. be regular and original

Now, I know this. However, personally, I like writing on different topics.. and yet I want to retire from work and take up full time blogging! The question is HOW? I just cannot write on just one topic - for the simple reason that I like so many things from Finance to Spirituality to Politics to Science to Movies! So, do I have a future as a blogger?

How we approach our sites and where we "reside" says something about us and who we are. I did not quite realize that the social networking sites would end up revealing our "class" and our background. But a new study has revealed that people from similar demographics tend to flock to similar social networking sites.

A long-term research project has revealed a sharp division along class lines among the American teenagers flocking to the social network sites.

The research suggests those using Facebook come from wealthier homes and are more likely to attend college.

By contrast, MySpace users tend to get a job after finishing high school rather than continue their education.

Yesterday, I went to a local desi movie rental store with a friend. He had to rent a movie. As we were looking through the movies, we saw this caucasian lady walk in. She seemed European to me and was looking for "Lage Raho Munnabhai". Obviously, the first thought that occured to us was - do non-Indians also watch movies? Specially Europeans - who we all imagine would be hollywood fans automatically!?

Well, I have seen on many of my trips to different cities, when I take a cab it is often someone from Africa. Most of those folks have been brought up on the staple of Bollywood movies. I have met folks from Azherbaijan and other Central Asian countries also be knowledgeable about Bollywood. The car service I use for my business travel in Houston is owned by an Iranian.. and he was brought up on Bollywood movies too.

Unbeknownest to many of us, Google has been revving up its blogging platform - blogger or blogspot! Blogger was always the first - and permanent for some - blogging platform for almost all bloggers at birth! Later most bloggers moved on. Few reasons were:

• no categories

• tardy update routine

• not enough features

Well things are achanging there. Blogger has come out with a Beta Blogger - which from my initial review is just awesome!! I love the thing because:

Blogosphere has a new member - Iranian Prez Ahmadinejad!  He has started bloggin' now!  The only problem is that his blogging software is not really upto snuff .. as yet!  Try the URL below and it gives you an error!  Can anyone please take him through a crash course in Blogger or Wordpress?  Its probably easier to build a nuke then to get a blog working!  It takes a lotta efforts guys!  And everyone laughs the bloggers off!  Huh!!

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Web log also requests that readers participate in an online poll asking if they think the United States and Israel are "pulling the trigger for another world war."

Guys - just wanted to let you know that I have been using midphase as my host. I looked around a lot and found only midphase to be close to my requirements. I wanted unmetered disk-space because my last host siteground.com had repeatedly disconnected me with even simplest of wordpress sites because of the "load" factor! But I also wanted to get at least 10GB or close to 15 GB at a price that was preferably less than $10/month!

Midphase is the only one that satisfies the criteria!

If you want to start your own website - like mine.. or with features that you can see in SAPprofessionals.org

Finally the upgrade to Drupal's version of 4.7 is now done - for all practical purposes. The entire thing was accomplished by my friend Divya at Nimbupani!! This was important for these reasons:

1. I had screwed the heck out of the last version - so it had a lot of broken things backend - which also made it slow!

2. The new plug-ins and themes are coming for 4.7 only.

3. I had to do it sometime.. so why not now... and get it over with!

You will see that the site has become a lot faster and now I have two blocks up at the top with some news from other sites... useful addition.

Drupal is my CMS of choice. IBM's has chosen Drupal as its blogging platform and here is a piece to explain why? The post here does a very good comparison! What do you think?

Guys Try this option to earn money with your blog from Text Link Ads.   It is worth it.   I tried (look at the left sidebar at the top - very unobtrusive ads yet paying) and I have started making some chump change good enough to pay for my blog's hosting! Yeah yeah.. it peanuts.. but man, something is better than nothing!!

Seriously, try it!

Just click on the banner above and register your blog to be considered by the TLA folks to place ads on your site. They generally are pretty quick at replying back. And in case they think that your site is not ready for it.. they will email you back when it is ready - like it happened to me!

As far as ads go, I think Chitika and TLA are the best for bloggers!

Here is how a chitika ad looks and every click counts!! So, do me a favor just click on it while you are reading ;-)

although I like their cool new look multi-product banner..

What Say??

Btw, here is another post link that gives details of a Wordpress Theme with inbuilt Adsense that somehow meshes into the theme (same font and font-size)... nice thing to know.

(tip from Aaman at desicritics.org)

<!-- Tag links generated by Zoundry Blog Writer. Do not manually edit. http://www.zoundry.com -->
Technorati : Adsense, Theme, Wordpress
Del.icio.us : Adsense, Theme, Wordpress
Ice Rocket : Adsense, Theme, Wordpress
Flickr : Adsense, Theme, Wordpress
Buzznet : Adsense, Theme, Wordpress
43 Things : Adsense, Theme, Wordpress

Everyone - I just wanted to introduce my business related blog called BusinessMusings.com- which has business related posts. For some time it was off the air due to some mess by my old host. But from here on it should be just fine.

If anyone who wants to write on business related stuff wants to use this platform, please do not hesitate to email me at businessmusings@gmail.com with your profile and the topics that you would like to write on and I can add you in.

<!-- Tag links generated by Zoundry Blog Writer. Do not manually edit. http://www.zoundry.com -->
Technorati : blog, business
Del.icio.us : blog, business
Ice Rocket : blog, business
Flickr : blog, business
Buzznet : blog, business
43 Things : blog, business

The most used blogging platform is Wordpress. In fact I am also using it for my BusinessMusings.com site (am moving it to a new host and it should come up soon). I always thought that it would be great if someone could create a comprehensive list of all the themes for WP. Finally here is a Comprehensive List of the WP themes. Great Resource!!

The theme that I have used for my BusinessMusings site is named Kiwi! I have seen lots of themes on various platforms but this one beats EVERYONE of them hands down!!

Here is an image of the Kiwi-themed site:

I used GIMP to create the banners on every page and inserted them to look really good!!

So, if any of you are contemplating using WP for your site, please do go ahead with it and use any the nice themes that people have created in the list above!

Here is a nice podcast of an interview with Kiruba - designated as India's no. 1 blogger by blogstreet - on different aspects of blogging. He discusses his attempts at work-life balance (in terms of blogging) and how he sees blogging evolve in India as well as how to get interviews with people like Guy Kawasaki - he has an interview on his own blog with Guy.

Good educational stuff for most amateur and senior bloggers.

Ok.. Just when I thought that I had done my evaluations on the blogging clients, I get an email from Zoundry's team to join in their beta program. I had written to them earlier but hadnt gotten any response. Now, what this does is - it includes not only Amazon links as easily as it is done with Elicit.. but also gazillion others from buy.com, brookstone etc. The only catch is that we share the revenues with Zoundry. No probs for me. As for the Chitika ads? Well I have copied the code for it in my Google notebook link at the bottom of my firefox browser - which allows me to just click there and copy+paste it in Zoundry's html area. Simple.

Just a little message. Today the RSS Subscribers crossed 400! For me its a big figure. All those of you guys and gals out there who get Drishtikone feed on RSS.. THANKS!

I had bought this new blogging client called Elicit. It does a lo of stuff but somehow it is having a lot of issues while posting. For some reason, the coders did not put a simple functionality of a posting button!! What happens is that the when you click on "Save and Publish" it places the post on a calendar to post at a certain time. And the logic is that when that time occurs, the post will be published.

The problem is that it works sometimes and doesn't at other times! All of my posts today - except for the Bikini Birthday (which I had written last night and scheduled for this morning to be published and it DID!) - none of my posts got published! The time on the calendar would come and go and nothing would happen! I would shift it again. Again the same result. Finally I used the Qumana to do the needful!

Another major negative - I use Drupal as my blogging platform and Elicit does not support it. I use the MetaWeblog API which does publish the post but does not support the categories.

I have used the following blogging clients at one time or the other:

• wbloggar: Great light-weight basic kinda client - but does not support categories for Drupal.
• Zoundry: Great one - no ads
• Qumana: Great one again - has ads but they are adgenta ads.
• Deepest Sender (extension of Firefox): Simple ones - no support for categories or any ads.

Over the past I have seen some sites that are working in this area - but this seems more professional and better placed. Do you have a blog? Want to publish stuff in a book form? Here is the way to do it!

Guys... to pay for my website expenses I use basically ads from Chitika mini-malls and now I will add some text-ads too! I have made some little money from chitika and hope to do better using the text-ads.. at least they promise more. I am attaching a link of both below so that you can go ahead and sign up if you have a site for yourself. Mind you that text-ads site is very selective - they only choose sites which have a high hit rate on them.. so when I got my invite today.. it was obviously a sign of strength og higher visitor activity! Already the RSS sign-ups have shot up to close to 240 in such a short time..

The morning started early 3 am - got ready and while I was checking my mail waiting for the car service driver ... I overshot the time of 4 am as my laptop time was a little off from the main. Last time, the owner of the car service company had sent a new guy - his old friend who had joined him as an employee. This dimunitive balding elderly gentleman is an Iranian - from North Iran - whose family hails from Azherbaijan. He stills has some family there. So, he can speak at least two languages fluently - Turkish and Persian (Farsi). He is an interesting character. Since he is new to the business he is diligent and is always trying to outdo himself. Doublechecks everything and makes sure every small thing is taken of. And in that extra effort seems fairly nervous at times. But he is a good presence to be with.

Another of those forwarded notes - but one that makes me VERY nostalgic!! :)
===============

According to today's regulators and bureaucrats, those of us who were kids
in the 60's, 70's and early 80's probably shouldn't have survived, because
our baby cots were covered with brightly colored lead-based paint which was
promptly chewed and licked. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles,
or latches on doors or cabinets and it was fine to play with matchboxes!

When we rode our bikes, we wore no helmets, just chappals and fluorescent
sticker on our wheel guard.

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or airbags - riding

Here is a good list of steps for creating a good web content based web site!

There are 14 steps here. You will have a terrific site if you do all the steps. But one of the great things about the Web is that you can build and grow continuously. So pick something and do it. Incremental improvement is better than stagnation.

Adminimizer Toolbar - The easiest tool for updating your Blog with Internet Explorer 6

Archangel Weblog - a new, full featured weblog application. Written in PHP and using a MySQL database backend, Archangel Weblog is easy to install, easy to configure and customize, and easy to use for most anyone