I’ve been on Twitter for a long time, but I never really knew what to use it for. Until Facebook introduced mobile updates, I used it as an easy way to update my status. But that was unusually constraining on what I could and couldn’t use it for (since all Status updates had to fit the format “Nishant is…”). So I always knew that I wasn’t really using it the way I should/could.

But my experience following the twitterings of some folks, and my meeting a number of avid Twitterers over the weekend at a Techset cocktail party at the Gansevoort, has made me rethink how I am going to leverage Twitter going forward.

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I’ve been long enough in the professional world to know the drill of how to exchange contact information. Usually it’s an exchange of business cards, with the occasional email address or cellphone number written on a napkin thrown in. However, at this event, all I heard was “you can follow me on twitter at…” or “my twitter handle is on my business card”. I felt so web 1.0!
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Anyway, I’ve decided to try and leverage Twitter as my micro-blogging platform. No more having to wait to get to my computer to write a full-fledged blog post (blogging by email feels too clunky). And no more trying to figure out how to think up complete sentences, suitably composed paragraphs, and lucid thoughts. For things that need only a few words and possibly a link, Twitter does the trick better than anything I know. The ability to do it all by text message is pretty convenient too.

So the upshot is, there is going to be one more way to follow my random musings. If you are on Twitter, you can easily follow me by visiting my profile and clicking on “Follow”. If you don’t want to sign up for yet one more social thingamajig, then you can subscribe to an RSS feed of my twitter postings here. I promise to try and keep it interesting (For a sample, check out the “My Lifecast” widget in the right sidebar of this blog for my most recent tweets).

Now if only Twitter manages to stay alive…

In this internet age, new parents have another task to add to their already long to-do list – ensuring the proper presence of their kid on the web. Arav is well on his way in this regard. His arrival has already been noted not just in this blog, but in Ranjeet’s blog as well. His photographs are on my website already, as well as on my flickr and facebook pages. And we have already registered his email address and domain name.

Now that I have adjusted a little to my new life schedule, I have been able to spend some time to make a major structural change to my website, forced on me by his arrival. Tanu recommended the change in anticipation of the many, many photographs we will be taking, and the desire of the grandparents and cousins to get to them easily. I have broken out the albums related to our family life (which will now be dominated by Arav) into a new section of my website. The section is called ‘Family Scrapbook‘, and the latest album in it is a set of photographs from Arav’s first full week at home. It is definitely the first of many. Check it out.

Shelfari is this web 2.0 social network for book lovers that allows you to build a shelf of books you are reading or planning on reading. It allows you to post reviews of the books you read, and connect to people with the same interest or get an idea of what people with similar tastes are reading. It is kinda cool.

I have been maintaining my book shelf on Shelfari for a while now, and installed a shelf widget on my blog a while ago. Shelfari recently updated the widgets they have with some really cool looking new options. I couldn’t resist updating my widget to a new one that fits in nicely with the look and feel of my blog (it’s a black oak bookshelf; check it out on the right). What do you think?

One thing I did realize: I am not reading as much as I should.

Read this really interesting article in the [tag]New York Times[/tag] this morning about a parents foray into the world of [tag]Facebook[/tag]. Until recently, you could only join Facebook if you were in a school and had a school email address. This effectively limited Facebook membership to the “young” crowd. But a few weeks ago Facebook decided to open membership to other people, allowing anyone to join. Then, based on the email address, you can automatically get connected into a community.

So if I joined with my work email ( …@oracle.com), it would automatically put me into a network with other oracle folks. Pretty neat idea, and the features of Facebook definitely seem to be better than [tag]Orkut[/tag]. But seeing how I already am part of a pretty good business-oriented social network ([tag]LinkedIn[/tag]), this really didn’t feel that interesting to me. And I don’t think I will convince everyone on Orkut to jump ship to Facebook. One can only hope that the Orkut folks start upgrading their features.

However, the article did point out another themed social network that sounds interesting. According to the article, [tag]care2[/tag].com is a site for social activists. Sounds interesting, I’ll have to check it out.

[tags]Social Networking, Web 2.0[/tags]

This weekend Tanu and I went to meet up with some family friends of ours who turned us on to this [tag]social networking[/tag] website called [tag]Orkut[/tag]. A site that is in the same vein as [tag]MySpace[/tag], it apparently has a huge following outside the US, including India. Which is the real reason why we were talking about it. Apparently all of T’s cousins (and she has a LOT of them) are on it. So we decided to check it out.

Surprisingly, it turned out that Orkut is related to [tag]Google[/tag], having been the invention of an employee at Google. It doesn’t seem to be promoted on the Google applications page, being still in Beta. Obviously, you will need a Google account to become a member (one more way in which Google is trying to become the premier Identity Provider on the web). After joining, I found it to be pretty basic in nature. After all the complaining I did about MySpace, I found Orkut to be even more basic in the features it offers. The security controls around one’s profile are pretty difficult to understand, and are not flexible at all. You are only allowed to set up the controls on a few specific fields like birthday and email address. The capabilities around setting up interest lists like movies, sports, etc are pretty standard. It is still unclear as to what capabilities are available for skinning your profile page (which if you recall was a very ugly hack in MySpace, but was still possible). The capabilities are not really developed, except for an integration with Google Talk (google’s chat application that I mainly use from within gmail). There also seems to be some rudimentary integration with other Google services, like YouTube and Picasa Web Albums.

Add friends turned out to be an interesting exercise. It took a while to figure out a foolproof way for me and Tanu to connect our accounts. I couldn’t find her by doing a search, and actually had to invite her for Orkut to detect that her email is already in the system, and then I could add her. Adding other friends were not that hard. So maybe this is a case of privacy actually working. It will probably take a few more days of experimenting to figure out if it works. My biggest worry of course is spam, since I really haven’t put any personal information other than my name in.

We’ll see how it goes. But I guess that this proves that the social networking thing is not about features or ease of use, but a herd phenomena. Essentially you go where everyone (you know) goes.

[tags]Web 2.0[/tags]

Having set up my blog in [tag]technorati[/tag], one of the things I felt like doing was putting a [tag]tag cloud[/tag] on my page. A tag cloud is a special way of displaying the [tag]tags[/tag] that you are using on your site. It displays them in variable sizes, with the more often used tags being bigger and therefore more prominent. It is a neat way of visually communicating almost instantly what you are talking about most, and I had seen a number of blogs sport a tag cloud. So I decided that I must have one.

The tag cloud on technorati was a simple javascript to put into my sidebar. Alas, it didn’t work for me. The code gives absolutely no control over it’s appearance, and I couldn’t use a stylesheet to style it. Also, the width seemed to not work properly. The result was an ugly white block of text, one tag per line, that looked horrible. So that came off in a hurry.

I then proceeded to search for tag clouds. I found a really neat one at “Warping On“. But it said it required [tag]Wordpress widgets[/tag]. Having no idea what that is, I proceeded to research that. Turns out that widgets is a neat little plugin from a group at Automattic that allows you to put dynamic content into your sidebar. But to use it, your theme has to be widget-enabled or widget-ready. Looking at their instructions, I got a little daunted. I am still not comfortable with the whole theme coding thing, and having just spent so much time perfecting the skin of my blog, I wasn’t about to rip it up again. So that killed that idea.

As of now, I still haven’t found a good way of getting a tag cloud onto my blog easily. We’ll see how it goes.

[tags]Tech, Web 2.0, Blog customization, Blog skinning[/tags]

I figured that the best way to get my blog out there was to become part of the tagged blog universe. For that, I started to explore various [tag]blog search engines[/tag] and [tag]folksonomy[/tag] websites. Without a doubt, the best known one out there is [tag]Technorati[/tag]. I was already part of that world with my professional blog. So I decided to add “Demerzel’s Echoes” to the Technorati universe and get started [tag]tag[/tag]ging.

Claiming my blog on Technorati

The first thing I noticed was that there was no way for me to create a chinese wall between my professional blog and my personal blog. If I claimed my personal blog using the same account I used to claim my professional blog, they would get linked, and people would be able to cross-over. Not what I want. If someone makes an effort, they could figure out a link between the two, but I don’t want to make it easy for someone. So I ended up creating a new account on Technorati. Not ideal, but manageable.

Wordpress Technorati plugins for Tagging

Claiming my blog was really easy. The harder part was figuring out how to get the tags into my post. I started searching through the Wordpress plugin codex to find a way to integrate Technorati with my blog. There are a large number of choices, but the documentation is a little hard to digest. The information you get from the codex page is never enough, and you have to go to the plugin page to (hopefully) understand the detail of the plugin. Even that is not always good enough. In the end, I installed the “[tag]Simple Tags[/tag]” plugin. Installing the plugin and following some instructions to customize the toolbar for writing a post means I can now easily tag words in my post by simply selecting the text and clicking on a button. The only caveat: I have to switch from the WYSIWYG visual mode to the code mode to get the tag buttons. Still not what I wanted, but close enough. Once I had that installed, I was up and tagging in no time.

Favorite Me!

Adding the “Add to Technorati Favorites” widget to the sidebar was a breeze, thanks to code that the Technorati website provided. I decided to modify what they gave me by replacing their default image with an icon and text link to keep the look and feel of my “Subscribe” box consistent.

[tags]Tech, Web 2.0, Blog customization, Blog skinning[/tags]

Having gotten my blog up and running, I figured that the next logical thing was to somehow connect it to the [tag]social web[/tag] that is all the rage now. I figured it would be a a simple task. But I was quickly overwhelmed by the array of options. So I decided to start with something simple: [tag]Photo Sharing[/tag].

I spend way too much time on my photographs. My website has been lovingly prepared with all the care that my wife says I should give her. And while I plan on continuing to maintain my website as my medium of artistic expression, I did want to find a way to integrate my photographs with my blog that would not require me putting in additional time (I agree with Tanu, my website takes up enough time).

Photo Sharing on Flickr

First I had to find a photo website with good features in the social sphere, and everything pointed me towards Flickr.

[tag]Flickr[/tag] makes it real easy to upload and manage my photographs. Besides uploading through the browser, it gave me a desktop uploader tool that I can use to upload a whole bunch of photographs (a very useful feature when I am uploading a trips worth of photographs). I was even to set up a way to upload photos from Picasa (which is what I use to manage photos on my desktop at home), but that relies on the “upload by email” feature, which is slow and annoying, and prone to failure. I am surprised that there isn’t a better integration between [tag]Picasa[/tag] and Flickr available as a plugin.

Photo Badges & Slideshows

The Flickr APIs mean that there are a host of widgets/gadgets out there ready to use. My research revealed two main ways to display photographs from Flickr – badges and slideshows. [tag]Photo Badges[/tag] (because of their small width) are more appropriate for sidebar displays, while [tag]slideshows[/tag] are better for displaying photographs as part of a blog post or page.

Flickr gave me a pretty decent badge right away, and that is what I have in the sidebar to the right (showing photos from my “From My Travels” set). I loved that all I have to do is manage the photographs in the set and the badge will automatically update with the changes.

Alas, I couldn’t find a [tag]slideshow widget[/tag] that does the same. The best slideshow site I found out there is Slide.com. It makes it very easy to connect to Flickr, select a photo set and use it as the basis for a slideshow (they also support other photo stores, like MySpace). They have a decent array of formatting options, and they give all the necessary code to embed the slideshow in a post. However, after that things started to get complicated.

Firstly the slideshow, once created, is fixed. Updating the photo set doesn’t have any impact on the slideshow, which to me indicates that Slide is copying my photographs over to their servers from Flickr (not a true mashup in that sense). Secondly, the code generated by Slide doesn’t sit well with Wordpress. If I paste the code in and save it, it works. But if I now go back and edit that post/page without touching the slideshow code, something gets screwed up and the slideshow doesn’t render properly. I put a slideshow on the “Travel Addict” page of this blog, and every time I edit that page, I have to retrieve and re-paste the code for the slideshow. It is getting to be pretty annoying. If anyone has a fix for this, I would love to hear it.

Blogging Support

One of the better features in Flickr is the ability to [tag]photoblog[/tag] directly from within Flickr to your Wordpress blog. You can setup your Wordpress account credentials within Flickr, and every time that you see a photo you like, you just have to click the “Blog This” button. You can write the post within Flickr and submit it, and it shows up in your blog right away.

That is also the problem. The post doesn’t always look the way you want it to look, and the fact that it shows up immediately means that you have to immediately go to your blog to edit it. Kind of ruins the benefit of blogging from Flickr. So I started to look for a solution to the problem and found the “Flickr Draft Post“plugin. The activated plugin recognizes posts coming in from Flickr and saves it into your drafts instead of publishing it, giving you time to get back to it for editing and publishing at your convenience.

It also took some debugging to get my blog set up. For some reason, the Wordpress type for the blog selection didn’t work. Moveable Type worked better for me.

[tags]Tech, Web 2.0, Blog customization, Blog skinning[/tags]

Having figured out how to use the [tag]wordpress theme[/tag] editor to modify the theme of my blog, I arrived at a different idea on how to make the look and feel of my blog my own. I was going to design my own layout and look and feel, find a pre-existing theme that has most of the same characteristics, and then customize that theme after deploying.

I spent a few days designing my blog layout. Having just gone through that exercise for my [tag]MySpace[/tag] page, which I had since shut down, I decided to use that look here. It was a pretty good one, and had most of the characteristics that I wanted – clean layout, few colors with a dominance of black (which fits in with the color scheme of my website). I also liked some aspects of the boxed content layout so prevalent on MySpace. So that got me to a basic look for my blog.

I then proceeded to search for a theme that was close enough to what I wanted. The colors didn’t really matter in this. What mattered were the characteristics of the theme:

• 3-column layout
• Horizontal list of pages in the site (automatically generated and not hard-coded)
• Archive Calendar
• Categories list and Recent Posts list
• Search box
• Clean, boxy layout

I didn’t find any themes that had all of these, but I did find one that was close enough. I applied the theme and proceeded to go to town on the stylesheet and sidebars in the theme editor. The original theme didn’t have a [tag]page banner[/tag], but that was just simple HTML in the header.php file. Soon enough I was closing in on my vision for my blog.

Interesting sidebar: In editing the files for the theme, I found that some of the files contained hidden links to an adult website. Turns out that this was how the theme designer was making money from the creation of this theme. Everytime a page on a blog that used his theme would be launched, it would hit the adult website, earning his account money. Sneaky. Something to watch for when you download and apply a theme.

To customize the stylesheet, I simply loaded a page from my blog and looked at the source code. Sure enough, most of the content was suitably tagged with classes or ID’s. This made it very easy to navigate the existing stylesheet and make the necessary changes. Once I got the hang of the overall style structure, I was able to add my own classes to the stylesheet, and use it where necessary.

Creating the [tag]horizontal list[/tag] of pages at the top was the most challenging aspect of this process. This is because the macro that returns the links returns it as an unordered list. This restricts what you can do with it with regards to layout, and also forces you to deal with the differences between IE and Firefox (the two browsers I test against). A valuable resource for trying to format lists that helped me immensely is “[tag]CSS Design[/tag]: Taming Lists” by Mark Newhouse.

Anyway, a few more tweaks and I was closing in on my design. However, there were still some things missing. The theme I downloaded did not have the “Recent Posts” section in it. So I had to search for Wordpress macros. And since I was there, I decided to look and see what other useful macros I could find. I found that documentation for the macros was a little uneven. Some are well-documented, while others are missing key pieces of information. So after a while I gave up. Thankfully, the recent posts macro is pretty easy to use and well-documented. Once I had that, I was good to go.

Next up – adding some cool widgets to my blog.
[tags]Tech, Web 2.0, Blog customization, Blog skinning, blog layout[/tags]

Now that I have my blog up and running, I wanted to talk a little bit about the experience. If you are anything like me, you want your blog to be an accurate depiction of who you are. It should mirror your tastes, your aesthetics, your ideas. My previous attempts at setting up a blog on blogger didn’t take, as it never felt like my own. This time I decided to host my own. So after setting up my [tag]Wordpress blog[/tag] (which was a breeze thanks to the control panel provided by my host [tag]Go Daddy[/tag]), I set about trying to make it my own.

The first thing to do was to find a theme. Wordpress is really cool in that it provides a very open framework by which to customize the look and feel of your blog via it’s [tag]wordpress theme[/tag]s concept. This is a complete contrast to the experience I had with [tag]MySpace[/tag] (see my previous post, “Extreme Makeover: MySpace Edition“). And the number of themes available out there is enough to cover all tastes. At the minimum, it is enough to get you started.

So I proceeded to troll through the various theme collections that were out there.

The Wordpress dashboard sent me to the Wordpress.org themes page that had links to a few websites that got me started. But nothing I found there quite gelled. Just to get going, I ended up selecting the “[tag]Neo-Sapien[/tag]” theme by Small Potato. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but it was cool, and worked for now. The image is a little silence of the lambs, but I put in my own anyway. That was my first go.

But it wasn’t exactly what I wanted. So a few days later, I started messing around with it to see if I could mould it into what I wanted. That’s when I discovered the real power of the [tag]theme editor[/tag] (Your Wordpress dashboard -> Presentation -> Theme Editor). If you know some HTML and CSS, and can understand enough to copy-paste the php macros, the theme editor allows you to modify the files that make up the theme in order to change the appearance of your site. You can make little tweaks, apply the changes and see what the effect is. That gave me quite a few hours of fun. And gave me the germ of an idea about how to make this blog my own.

Look for my next post on this topic, as I talk about how I came up with a theme to my specifications without doing all the work of creating my own theme from scratch.

[tags]Tech, Web 2.0, Blog customization, Blog skinning[/tags]