.NET From India

More Access to Dotnet From India

I have added two more ways to access the blog.

1. If you would like to hear the posts rather than read, or if you want to carry the posts as a MP3, then now you have a way to do it. If you look at the RSS feed, you now have an option to listen to the post. That allows you to download that post as a MP3 file and this is iPod compatible.

2. Get alerts in you MSN/Live Messenger when there is a new post. You will now find an option to subscribe to Windows Live Alerts on the left. Or you can subscribe by clicking this link.

Blog Design Changes

One of the things I wanted to do is change the design of this blog. The last design change was done 2-3 years back and as time went, there has been small additions of html here and there. I wanted to do a major redesign of the whole blog to take out dead code and also give it a new look.

Over the weekend I went about doing the changes. This time I have tired to see if I can get all I wanted by not having to use Advanced templates. Though the new design is not complete, I think I have most of the main peices in. Will be tweaking it here and there over the next couple of weeks.

Let me know if you like or hate the new look....

Busy Days..

I have not posted anything new for the past few days. I had a few busy days at office and I have also been working on getting new version of the India Stock Quote Component done.

I am adding the facility to also query the NSE India site and also restructuring the code. I hope to upload a new version of the component and maybe a new release out sometime this week.

Local Cooling

I found a neat utility called LocalCooling, that basically adjusts your power settings to optimize it to help save energy. I have always had a weakness for green technology and this seems to be a easy way to save some energy. I put it on my Laptop and my laptop is now optimized to save around 13 W. Already in a couple of days I have saved 1/2 Gallon of oil..:)

Dotnet From India Search Provider

This site has had integrated Google search for a long time now. Based on yesterday's post, I decided on implementing a custom search provider for my blog.

One of the problems I faced was that the google search link is actually very long and it uses query strings to pass parameters. IE seems to evaluates the search url as html, the & in the url will result in an error. It took me quite some time to figure this out. Once I replaced this with & everything worked fine.

Distributed Logging

One of my free time project is a small library to handle distributed logging. I have created a codeplex project that has the version 1 of this library called DistriLog.

Written in VB 2005 and SQL Server 2005 compact edition for the local database. The central database is SQL Server 2005.

.NET from India Show

A lot of travel has made blogging a difficult thing in the last month or so. But I have also been working on a podcast based site called the .NET from India Show.

The aim of this is to have a series of podcasts, most of them in the format of interviews with other experts on topics related to .NET and other Microsoft technologies. The first episode of the show, where I discuss Project server 2007 with Madhu is now available.

Currently I only have a wma version. Will try and see if I can get a MP3 version uploaded later, if I get a free wma-to-mp3 convertor somewhere.

Ad Supported Applications

I have an idea for an application that is focused on some india specific needs for which I don't see an application out there that fits well. My current thought process is that I will create this application and then maybe offer it free, maybe with some kind of Ad support for the hosting and other costs. This is not a pure web app, but rather a smart client kind of application. For a web site, I know that Google Ads work out very well, but what about a smart client applications?

Before Google Ads, you had to be a very sucessful site with millions of hits to get some kind of Ad revenue. But now even sites like mine with a few hundreds of hits a day can make enough to cover my hosting costs. Is there an equivalent for the smart client/desktop space?

I know that the big games developers sell Ad space on their games, but what about smaller application developers. Also I want to be sure that this is not of the spyware type, but rather non-intrusive text or graphics based Ads that will not invade the users privacy and that will not scare users away. Has anyone tried something like this before?

Blogstars contest - Is it good for Indian Tech Blogging?

Microsoft announced a couple of weeks back about a new contest that they were holding called Blogstars. This a India specific contest, aimed at improving/supporting technical blogging in India.

At first looks, I was quite interested. I believe that technical blogging in India is still very low. Though blogging as such has grown by leaps and bounds in India, there are few, indepth technology blogs by people living in India (Please note, I did not say Indians).

A second look and I felt something was just not right. So this post is about the positives and negatives, I could see. It would be interesting to see other peoples views on this too..

Pros

1. Indian Tech blogging scene could do with help this could be it.
2. Provide recognition to good tech bloggers, who are currently not well known
3. This can be something that provides the needed initial momentum to get some good people to start blogging.
4. Create a new generation of Microsoft technology blogging out of India.
5. Spur people to blog on their use of Microsoft technology, that helps create more information on the web, thus helping the developer community.

Cons

1. Blogging is all about sustenance. Since this contest make no difference between a new and long running blog, it actually favour new blogs. So you can start a new blog, register for the contest, produce good posts for 8-10 weeks, win the contest and then stop blogging for the rest of your life. Since a blog that is there for a long time will have technical and personal posts, it is easier for a new blog to be considered more focused and so win.
2. It is more than a week since it was announced, but I don't see any blogs listed in the blogroll yet. That is indeed very worrying for me.
3. The panel of judges named are well known speakers and very knowledgeable (I actually know all the three very well and have great respect for them personally and know that they have tremendous passion for technology). But except for Venkat, none of the others (Sanjay, Praveen) seem to have updated their blogs recently (Also the updates to their blogs seem to be quite infrequent). And the worst part being their bios on the site does not even mention their blogs except for Venkat's.

So that leads me to ask the question, is this a about tech blogging or just technical writing? If it was about technical writing alone, wouldn't it be easier to have an competition for technical articles?

Final Thoughts

This is a good move Microsoft. But if you really want to help technology blogging,

• Get this going and get the people who are competing listed on the blogroll.
• Get a few good bloggers also into the panel  or get some kind of voting (by bloggers??/technorati??) mechanism to choose the winner. 
• Add some way to look at awarding sustenance too, as according to statistics, over 80% of blogs started do not last for more than 3 months.

And am I in the fray? As of now NO. Why? Because, I think I would rather let new talent be recognized instead. [But I will not say no to a link from any other blog or the Microsoft site ;)]

(Posted using Windows Live Writer Beta on Windows Vista RC1)

MapStats Analysis

I use the services of BlogFlux for email subscriptions to this blog for quite some time now. They also have service called Mapstats that allow you to look at your visitors with geographical information.

Ahmed had recently posted an analysis of the browser and other stats that they track with Mapstats for Blogs reader.

You can see the actual stats here.

I am actually suprised at the number of IE7, considering it is still in Beta.

Here is the browser type details for my blog

(This post was penned a few days back, but was not correctly posted as Typepad went down when I hit publish. So it remained as a draft till I found it today)