.NET From India

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..:-)