.NET From India

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)

Indian Government’s new anti-terrorist strategy

The Indian government just came up with a new idea for fighting terrorism. Ban the Blogs!!!

If you are in India, there is a high chance that you will not be able to read this post, unless you are using a proxy. That is the special gift to you from the Indian government.

There has been a big reaction from bloggers and extensive media coverage, but nothing from the IT companies. Not even a whimper of protest. So if it does not affect their revenues, they do not mind?? Well it does affect their revenues, since it gives a very negative view of India internationally and in the long run it does affect their revenues.

Just waiting for the government to ban the internet , as the next anti-terror measure.

Update 20-July: It looks like they are going to remove the blanket ban, but my blog does not still seem to be accessible

IT Career

I just posted the first post on a series of post on my thoughts about IT/Software as a career on my personal blog.

A Personal Blog

I have started a separate personal blog at http://manand.typepad.com/thoughts_from_india/

This will be mostly non-technical, basically my thoughts on anything that catches my fancy. This blog will continue to focus on the technical stuff and everything else goes into Thoughts From India

Mention in FT

I was suprised to find that there was a lot of hits to this site from Financial Times.

Following the link lead to a story on OfficeLive and I was pleasently suprised to find DotNet From India mentioned there.

They actually had a link to my previous post on OfficeLive. I am not sure if this was on the print edition or the online only edition.

Some Press

One of my other blogs Indian Consumer got some good press today from The Telegraph, Calcutta.

Article - Helping out, virtually

New Adverts on the Blog

If you are reading my blog on the web, you would have noticed this new advertising system I have up there apart from Google Ads (On the left panel).

This one is a new system called eminimalsl by Chitika.

These are new visually compeling Ads focusing on products. Thier API is quite flexible and you can actually choose what set of products make sense for your site. And they also have a good referral program.

You can also get this these on to your site if you are interested using the button on the left panel below the Ads or follow this link. (using me as referral)

Posts via Email

I have been using Bloglet to help people receive my posts via email. In the past few months, I have found that bloglet does not correct send out mails. So I am giving a new service called Blogflux a go.

This service currently only sends out the title of the posts, but I have been talking to them and they do have plans to send out whole posts once they have stabilized a bit.

My blog supports nofollow

Ok, I did not do anything..:-)

Typepad added support for Goggle's nofollow tag and hopefully that will rid me of any comment spammers. As of now any URL given in the comment posting form, automatically gets a nofollow.

I am not sure if URLs posted inside a comment's body get a nofollow too. I sure would like that to happen, or spammers are just gonna move their URLs into being part of the post itself (I dont have a problem as my blog doesnt support HTML comment;-)).

Escape from Comment Spam

Google and other searche engines now are going to support a new feature that offers a means of reducing comment spam. A new "nofollow" attribute, when used, stops search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo(These two search engines have already accepted to handle this attribute) from following the link into the final page.

Quite a few of the blog providers have signed up to implement this, which means it does not make any sense to comment spam.

More information on this is available in this Google Blog post.

Are Computers Fun??

I have been pestering Deepak Gulati to start blogging technical stuff apart from his poems and photos. I even convinced him to co-author this blog for all of 2 posts..

Now atlast he has bitten the bullet and started a new techie blog Because Compters are So Much Fun.

Deepak, your author login for this blog is still enabled and you can jump in whenever you want..:-)

Asia Blog Awards - Deadline Extended

The voting time for the Asia Blog awards has been extended till Jan 4th. You can vote for Dotnet from India under India Blogs here.

Currently .NET From India is in second Place..

Advice to CS Students from Joel

Wonderful advice from Joel for CS Students. Holds good for Indian students too.

During the tech boom, CS degrees had record admissions. But when I meet students at UG meets, I find they are not interested in programming but rather choose the degree due to job prospects. When the tech boom burst a lot of them were suddenly without a job. The admissions started coming down. Now that the technology space is improving, the admissions are going up again. But if you are into it for money, you are facing a very difficult life ahead of you...

Asia Blog Awards - Update

I was suprised to see that I am in the second postion in the Asia Blog Awards.

So if you do read this blog often and like it, do vote for this blog. You are allowed to vote once a day.

Note: There is an IP based check to enforce the once a day rule. So sometimes you may find you are not allowed to vote if you are behind a proxy and someone else used the same proxy to vote.

Asia Blog Awards

I have been nominated in the India Blog section of this year's Asia Blog Awards. Please do vote for me here.

You are allowed to vote once a day and the voting is open till Dec 31st.

IndiBloggies

The IndiBloggies 2004 is here. This is an indianized version of the Bloggies.

I was very suprised when I was invited to be a Jury member for the IndiBloggies this year (Which means I cannot nominate my blog :-( ). If you are interested in having the jury have a look at your blog use the nomination form avbl at the site.

Weblogs and Books

An interesting post on the impact of weblogs on publishing.

I would say I think it makes a lot of sense that you get so much information for free that you may not think of every buying a book. But in weblogs the information is spread out and you need to collate and create a logical structure out of that information. The editor and the author of the book do it for you. So if you want free information, you still need to work for it.

Helping the Small Blogs...

There are by some estimates more than a million weblogs. But most of them get no visibility in search engines. Only a few “A-List” blogs get into the top search engine results for a given topic, while the majority of blogs just don’t get noticed. The reason is that the smaller blogs don’t have enough links pointing to them. But this posting could solve that. Let’s help the smaller blogs get more visibility!

This posting is GoMeme 4.0. It is part of an experiment to see if we can create a blog posting that helps 1000’s of blogs get higher rankings in Google. So far we have tried 3 earlier variations. Our first test, GoMeme 1.0, spread to nearly 740 blogs in 2.5 days. This new version 4.0 is shorter, simpler, and fits more easily into your blog.

Why are we doing this? We want to help thousands of blogs get more visibility in Google and other search engines. How does it work? Just follow the instructions below to re-post this meme in your blog and add your URL to the end of the Path List below. As the meme spreads onwards from your blog, so will your URL. Later, when your blog is indexed by search engines, they will see the links pointing to your blog from all the downstream blogs that got this via you, which will cause them to rank your blog higher in search results. Everyone in the Path List below benefits in a similar way as this meme spreads. Try it!

Instructions: Just copy this entire post and paste it into your blog. Then add your URL to the end of the path list below, and pass it on! (Make sure you add your URLs as live links or HTML code to the Path List below.)

Path List

1. Minding the Planet
2. Luke Hutteman’s public virtual MemoryStream
3. Mohammad.Abdulfatah, Chronicles Of
4. Anand M, DotNet From India
5. (your URL goes here! But first, please copy this line and move it down to the next line for the next person).

(NOTE: Be sure you paste live links for the Path List or use HTML code.)

New version of SharpReader

A new version of SharpReader, 0.9.5.0, is available for download.

Luke blogs about the changes in this version.

Indian MVP Bloggers

During my talk on Blogging during the Advocates Day, I got a list of blogs that the indian MVPs maintain. So here is a list of Indian MVP Blogs.

Blogs maintained by Indian MVPs

Blogging And Privacy

I also did a session on Blogging (Terminologie, how to get started etc) at the India Advocates Day on Sunday. One of my fellow MVPs raised the question of privacy of the information that is in the blog. His point was that people usually do not think about the millions of people who can access your blog and so get to know a lot about you. His cited the example of one of his friends who went for an job interview and after the interview the interviewer asked, "So how did your wife like the perfume you bought for her??".

I really think it is a very good point. Most new bloggers forget about google power and the wide spread of the web. My take on this is, I always keep in mind that whatever I blog is out there for millions to read. Once you start thinking of that, you automatically kind of find what is OK and what is too personal to go into your blog. In the end it is a very personal decision each person has to make. How much of himself is going into his blog??

Comments in Blogger

Blogger has now added comments to its blogs (atlast). Anyway, they seem to want you to either have a blogger id to post or be completely anonymous. If I log in and post the comment reflects my blogger nickname and site, while anonymous means there is no name at all..

I understand that it is necessary to have protection against comment spam, but this is too drastic. Why do you force me to have a blogger id to post a comment? Does Google want to show a high number of blogger members for its IPO.

I would prefer if they have maybe a comment registration system. I would gladly sign up so that I can comment at blogger based blogs.

New Typepad Logo

Typepad has changed its logo..

Met Sanjay

Sanjay Vyas had come down to Polaris for a session on .NET for the senior management. I was not there for the session as I had some pressing work, but met up with Sanjay later over lunch. Had an enjoyable talk with him and as usual he was singing praises over C++ :-)

MVP Summit Photos

Some of the photos I took during the recent MVP Summit has been uploaded to a new photo album I have created.

MVP Summit 2004

(Note: I have not yet labeled all the photos. Hopefully will be able to finish off everything by next week)

Tamil New Year day

April 13th was Tamil New year day. So I went off to spend two days with my parents to celebrate the new year. Me and the team here in office are going out on a small two day tour over the week end to Munnar. So this is proving to be a week filled with travel...:-)

Pictures from the MVP Summit will be up hopefully by today evening my time....

A Belated Tamil New Year wishes to the readers of this blog

Back in India

I got back late yesterday night after a tiring journey back - 12 hour journey from LA to Taipei...:-(.

Since this blog always had stuff from me, there was no mention about the author in any of the posts. This created some confusion when Deepak started posting. So now I have changed the templates to have the name of the blogger in each of the posts....

A few Guest posts are on the way...

I have invited Deepak to put in a few techy posts in this blog as he would like to keep his other blog non-techie.....

MVP Summit

I am starting off for the MVP Summit@Redmond tonight. Have a 18+ Hours journey ahead of me now...:-)

You may be seeing very few post in the next 1 week as I try to force my brain to absorb all that new technology that is going to be on display..:-)

And hope to meet all those, whom I know only via Blogs, in real life.

Scarcity of Posts

I have not posted anything for about 4 days now. That is mostly due to a overload of work coming up suddenly and having to do some stuff to get my US visa processed etc. Hopefully should be back in action from later today...:-)

China Bans Typepad Sites

It looks like China has banned access to typepad sites. There was some posts in the user forums on this, but it seems to be official now. Glutter has more information.

1000 Visitors in a Day

More than 1000 people (page view count, 400-600 is the avg page view count I have) have visited my blog in the last 24 hours. Mostly for the Java Desktop post...:-)

And thanks to Rory for linking to that post, thus making sure that it remains at the top of "Most Interesting Post" in this blog.

Traffic...

People seem to want to know about Java crashing...:-)

That post has been receiving a tremendous amount of traffic today. My site averages around a hit every half hour and today it is averaging a hit every 3-4 minutes....

More on Blogging

I have previously talked on how Blogging is changing the way I make friends. I see it in action again now. I have met Sanjay off and on at various MS events over the years, but we never got to talk a lot, maybe a hi here or there..

But after he started to blog, I have become a regular reader of his and we have exchanged mails and have been IMing with each other for sometime now. I find that we share a lot of common interests and this whole friendship was built over blogs. Though we had met before, it was really the blog that created the common thread that started things off. I think Blogs are a much easier and better way to do social networking that something like Orkut (I still go there once in two days and I still find my friends circle is increasing every day...:-)

Google News via RSS

GoogleMania has a RSS feed for Google News.

The page is in Spanish (looks like Spanish), but the feeds are in English... :-)

Comment Trails..

Thanks to some MT help from Sanjay, I have modified my template to have comment trails. Hover over the comments link (should have atleast 1 comment) and you will see what I mean..

Blogs and PageRank

Scoble has blogged on how links from him will increase a blogs PageRank and about google power.

But does having a high PageRank help a blogger? That depends on why you blog.

If like me you just like to share information and get new friends (and Readers) then PageRank really does not help. PR just makes it easier for people to find you during a google search, by ranking you higher. But how many people search for a blog to read in Google.

Most people who search via google are looking for answers, not thoughts.

When I search for blogs to read, I use either a blog directory or people's Blogrolls (also feeds.scripting.com).

So I am sceptical of whether having a higher PageRank really helps you have more readers. It does help you get more hits, but readers, that is a different thing altogether.

SharpReader with ATOM Support

Luke announced a new version of Sharpreader with support for ATOM...

I subscribed to my first ATOM Feed today...:-)

FeedBurner Update

I posted about FeedBurner a yesterday. Now it seems to be up and working. So I have added two links to two of my Burned Feeds. One using the special Mobile options. Check it out. One of the feeds is really my ATOM feed served as RSS.

Sanjay, this may be the easiest way for you to get a RSS feed...:-)

I find the whole idea cool....

Indian Bloggers

I added a new Blogroll list. These are other Indian bloggers I read, who do not write on .NET or even technology. I read some of them, because they are funny or they talk about local issues etc...

Sharpreader support for ATOM

Luke just posted on SharpReader's support for ATOM in the next upcoming version...

Good, now I can subscribe to all those Blogger blogs....:-)

Typepad having problems

Typepad is having some hardware probelms. This may result in this blog being slow to load or be down for sometime till everything is fixed up.

SuperCharge Your RSS Feed

FeedBurner is a new service that lets you add functionalities to your RSS or Atom feed. This adds stuff like statistics tracking for the feed, making it better mobile compliant and also making it browser friendly(via a default XSLT, as blogger does for its ATOM feeds).

I have created a new feed for .NET From India, but there seems to be some problem as it is not working yet. The service is still in pre-alpha (this word seems to have gained wider usage after Longhorn and all that hype around it..;-)) and so I suppose we can expect the service to be down for maintanence and updates quite often.

My Feedburner feed is here:

(via Scoble)

AdSense

Google Adsense seems to be down today morning for more that 1/2 hr. No ads were being served out nor was I able to reach the login page....

But seems to be OK now.

I am 76% Good

Sent my blog thru Gematriculator. The final decision is I am 76% good...:-)

(via Tejas)

Licensing this Blog

I had some free time today and went ahead and setup a creative commons license for this blog. You can now view the license by clicking the icon that appears in the bottom of the right sidebar.

I also learnt that RSS feeds can also have this license and so added the necessary tags to the RSS 2.0 feed. If my RSS 2.0 feed seems to be broken, this maybe the reason. Mail me and I will see if I can fix it.

Blogging for Geeks

I was just talking to Sriram on other Indian bloggers out there and about some other blogger Chennai, about whom I had written. He asked me if I had met him, but I really had not. I just came across his blog and just kept reading since I found it interesting. that it...

Take the case of Null Pointer, Deb is a java guy and in a normal case I would not have even got to meet him as our paths will not cross in real life. But due to blogging, we have got to know each other and we even link to each other...

I even find that we kinda share a lot of common geeky interests with Deb and with many others too, whom I have never met.

So the community that has got created via blogs seem to be unique in a way that it is not really bound to a technology, but rather common interests of all kinds (being a geek and ofcourse the love of blogging itself). And it allows unusual combinations like a person who works on .NET and one who works on Java...:-)

Virat Blogs

Virat a member of CNUG Students is now Blogging. I am working with Virat, Vivek and Sriram on trying to do some super cool stuff for CNUG Students...

Welcome to Blogosphere Virat

Blogging Karma??

Sanjay Vyas talks about Spiritual Income. I would say the easier term is "Satisfaction"..:-)

It is just today that I found that Kingsley Jegan reads my blog, becoz he left a comment in one of my previous blog entries. I also read his blog, but am not sure if he knows it. I makes me happy when I find that some whom I know(as a fellow blogger) also reads my blog.

Why not use feeds.scripting data to create a kind of guest book for blogs. Something you can put on your blog that says, the following people subscribe to this blog, something like a reverse blogroll...

TrackBack Spams

I was just thinking today about comment spams and it just flashed why is there no trackback spams. I googled around and found other people are talking about this. But my idea was, if I can find sites that talk about my topic and are highly rated by google, if I trackback to them I get a link point from each of them. Which means I go up google's page rank system. This means I get listed higher.

So Can Google's PageRank System be manipulated using Trackback Spams?

Help with HTML

Every blogger has to do things with a little bit of HTML. Even if you are not an expert, you always had to put in a tag or two.

One of the things that I often use are the HTML special characters to show the lesser than and greater than symbols.(< and >)

This site has a full list of special characters and equivalent codes you can use.

A very useful reference....

More on Ads

Deb commented in one of my previous posts that he would not mind adds in a RSS feed as long as it is clearly seperated from the content and the quality of the blog is good enough to live with some ads.

The problem for most bloggers, with ads is that the click thru rate is dismal. We go to a blog, read the posts and just move on. Google Ads are now so widespread that we have got used to just ignoring those and not clicking on any of those. RSS Ads solve the problem of how to reach those who do not read your web based blog, but will the click thru rate be any different??

Why is RSSAds a good/bad idea?

Well I posted about this new company that was creating a way of posting Ads in RSS.

I know a lot of my readers use my RSS feed and rarely visit my site. So most these readers do not see the Google Ads I run here (which I hope will help me pay for hosting this blog, but at the current click thru rates, I think that is a difficult proposition). So if I am able to serve Ads to my RSS readers to, there is a higher visibility and maybe a higher click thru rate. Say, click this ad if you find this post useful kind of thing...:-) So it seems a good thing from a publisher point of view.

But as a reader(I subscribe to a miniscule(compared to Scobles 1000+) 74 blogs only) I have my apprehensions. I read so many blogs, because I find value in them. Do I want to really have Ads mucking around? I really hate those adds that the free email providers tag along to your mail. Will these RSS Ads too be a distractor? But I have got used to ignoring those tag lines at the end of an email, so will the same thing happen for RSS Ads too??

Lets wait and see...

Six Tips to write better RSS

Six tips for better RSS feeds

(via Scripting News)

Ads for you RSS feed

After the tremendous success of Google Ads(I run one of those myself on this blog), now it is the turn of your RSS feed to host adverts. A new company RSSAds is trying to create a ad system for your RSS feeds. They are still in beta as of now..

Internetnews has an article - Is Ad-Supported RSS the Next Big Thing?

(via Early And Adopter)

Unable to Use Site Meter

The sitemeter code seems to be not W3C compliant. So I have to remove it from my page.

I have mailed the webmaster there, lets see if I can get it working again later.

Want more Traffic for your blog??

John Porcaro(he is a part of XBOX marketing in MS) has created a new traffic generating idea for weblogs.

His secret traffic generating idea:

Make your Weblogs comment spammer friendly...:-)

Blogger Supports ATOM

DeepakG just IMed me with the info that Blogger is now offering ATOM feeds for all of its free accounts...

Another major move in the RSS vs. ATOM wars???

But one cool thing about the blogger ATOM feed is that they have put in a good xslt in the feed so that reaching the feed via a browser, still results in a readable page..:-)

Share OPML

Share Your OPML! is a new service by Dave Winer, where you can share your OPML list(blogroll) with other bloggers.

And according to this I have 5 subscribers (for the www.dotnetindia.com and the manand.typepad.com domain put togethere) for my RSS feed...:-)

Welcome to Raj

Raj Chaudhuri from MS India has started a new blog. He has done it without let