Happy New Year people. My first post for the year 2009.

The biggest question which comes across a blogger is what to do when you have nothing to blog? Well, most of the bloggers encounter the this problem unless they do not copy articles from others’ blogs or run some sort of news bulletin. Below I’ll discuss how to find such ideas which will help you blog!

My previous post was about on how to get inspiration when you are to blog. Well, the ideas apply here too. An inspired blogger is who writes wonders. An uninspired blogger is the one who needs inspiration for blogging.:P

The first thing as inscribed in the previous post, keep trying to renew your knowledge. It refreshes your mind and a clear mind knows whats the best to be done/ written . Reading others’ blogs, posting and reading forums, going through news, current affairs. You need to be updated if you wanna blog without any obstacles in mind. You surely don’t want to sit blank when you trying to blog.

Now if you really out of ideas, write about how to blog. Well, that’s what I actually usually end up doing other than saving hundreds of drafts and then deleting them. Don’t think hard, or you’ll get stressed, stay clam. When relaxed try to think again. As said earlier don’t hard but don’t stop thinking either. Try to increase your thinking potential. Expand your imagination to a never ending extent.

Google is your best friend. I always keep telling this to everyone. Always keep googling something or the other about your topic. Every time you type in the keywords your intention should be to learn something new. When you always have something new, you will never be out of ideas.

Keep blogging! Keep trying to blog even when you are out of ideas or are confused with so many ideas stuck in your mind. This helps you gain experience and will certainly help you out next time when you to try to blog. Well, blogging is the best way to learn about blogging. xD Practice makes a man perfect.

Never even think of copying! It doesn’t matter how much you like an article, no copy and paste, please. Well, people tend to do this thing and this tends to lead you to your blog’s end. Originality is what is appreciated. An 100-words original article is a billion times better than a 1000 words article copied from some where.

While writing a weblog post, be true about what you blog. Never try to make up things. You should have a genuine opinion about the damn topic. Writing about anything or everything really doesn’t work. Never go off topic. Everything should be related to your website’s theme. Never go blah! blah! until its your personal blog and it is about you!

Writing about your experiences helps. Public likes reading about people’s experience. Even I do. And that was from my experience.

At last I’ll say that never even think of quitting. That makes you a damn loser!!And if you are thinking of a come back. Ah! That’s gonna be difficult.

What’s your opinion about this?? What do you do when you’re out of ideas. Please do consider sharing.

P.S. I missed Page Rank this time. No problem, I’m sure to get it next time.
My alexa rank shot up to 78,547 yesterday. Yeah! yesterday’s rank. I know its awesome! Big bloggers watch out. Here I come!

Everything needs some inspiration, from somewhere, to be done! The same thing is with blogging. You have to get a little inspiration from somewhere to continue blogging otherwise it becomes a tedious job. Well, I too get bored sometimes and don’t update my blog from days or weeks and I end up in tens of drafts saved still waiting to be completed and published.

Best way to keep yourself ready to blog is by keeping yourself updated about the happenings on internet!! This way you’ll always be able to find some material for a good post!! Reading others’ blogs is also a good way to rejuvenate your knowledge. A good blogger should never lack ideas and should try to blog regularly.

Well, I will not suggest writing long posts instead keep them filled with valuable stuff. 200-400 words should be fine. A post longer than this is a hard time for both the reader and the blogger. First few lines do leave an impression and they should be carefully written.

You should let yours ideas to flow. You should be able to pen down your ideas on a piece of paper/blog. Let me tell, this is the most difficult thing. This happens with me too often, and sometimes I feel like having a plugin which could copy paste the article from my brain to the blog. Unfortunately, you have to do this on your own, no such plugin yet!!

Hope my post inspired to start blogging! btw, What do you do to get inspired to blog?? Please do consider sharing.

Divyun

If you want to be a webmaster, there are few things you got to know before hand. Webmaster has to manage between quite a lot things which help to him to manage the site!!  This article is about “What’s important to a webmaster and why??”"

Below, I’ll try to list all the important things for a webmaster!! So here it goes

1. Time

Time is the most important thing for a webmaster. Webmasters who lack in time usually end up in quiting but yeah!! some idiots like me do continue and end up in creating a hotch potch!! lol xD.

From my exprience:

I am a 15 year old blogger who is currently in Class XIth which is one of the most important years for you as a student. Its pretty hard for me to come online an post daily. So what’s the result:-

It took me more than 5 months to reach to this position. And my position is that I can’t concentrate on SEO, promotion or looks.

Conclusion:

If have time by your side, you surely will do better than me and maybe faster.

2. An internet connection

Believe it or not, but you need fast, “a no trouble” internet connection.

From my experience:

Once, a few months ago, my internet connection broke down and stopped working one day! My site was new and needed my attention, but unfortunately, I couldn’t update my site for around a month!! and I had to end up getting a new connection.

Conclusion:

A fast internet connection is a must and an asset for a webmaster.

3. Skills

Well, you should how to use your computer and internet. It should be difficult for total newbie to manage. So I would suggest you to play with your computer and internet until/unless you know quite a lot. Once you reach the saturation point, you’ll know it yourself.

4. A good social background

Knowing a lot of people helps a lot. If you are good at asking people to visit your site, it should be enough for you to get started.

From my experience:

I know a quite a lot people, but I am not good at asking them to comment or at least visit my site. I have been trying my best to get a little social.

Conclusion

Interact with more and more people which will help you create a traffic base for your site.

5. Principal amount

You need something to get started or you’ll end up trying hard to earn that principal amount in vain.

From my experience:

I started without any money. So I wasted a lot of time in getting the starters. If you don’t have money, then you need time in exchange.

Hope the article was pleasing. Please do consider commenting.

Now that the ver. 2.7 is finally out, It’s time to step up and upgrade your wordpress blogs.
I will suggest you to use the automatic upgrade plugin. It’s quick and easy. As a proof, you may have a look this blog working great guns.
Its like I would suggest you to use this plugin but recommend you to do it manually. ….err… Hope that I don’t get too confusing.

Piracy affects open source in several ways. Below is my one hour hard work discussing few points about open source, piracy and its affect on open source.

What is open source???

You heard about open source softwares like wordpress, linux, audacity, etc. Well these softwares are free and the their source code is readable and available to all.

A free software may not always be open source. Some softwares run under there own propriety licence and the source is closed(and are known as closed source). Similarly open source softwares may not alwas be free. If you are a blogger and use Wordpress then you should know about the Revolution templates. They are now open source but are paid.

How does source code helps programmers?

Well, using the source code, programmer can modify and distribute it in his/her own way. But you gotta keep the copyright license.

“Piracy”??

Most of us are familiar with the word “piracy”. If legal words are to be used out here, I mean “Copyright infringement”. The word refers to illegal or unauthorized use of some kinda of material in a way it violates the owner’s rights. In short words, piracy means stealing or simply a crime.

Some popularly pirated softwares are Mircosoft Windows, Adobe Photoshop, vBulletin, etc.

How does piracy affects the free and the open-source?

Let’s start with examples.

Case 1 Are you a graphics designer?? If you are, you must be familiar with Adobe Photoshop. Now, I can bet that more that half of the designers would not have heard about GIMP. GIMP is a free open source software alternative to Adobe’s Photoshop.

Case 2 ~ 90% people out here are still MS Windows users. Linux is

1. better than Windows.

2. is free and open source.

3. has hundred of sub distributions.

4. it has better support professionally and from a large community.

From the above two cases it is clear that piracy is killing the scope of the open source softwares. Well, if you’ll surf the internet, you’ll find hundred of such examples.

These days piracy is widespread and is done on a large scale. You’ll see markets full of pirated items which you could get for free or for <1/10th cost of the original. This has become a business of its own. Today on every corner of a street, you’ll be able to find somebody selling pirated stuff.

Use of pirated softwares are not only illegal but they cut down the market of the open source softwares. When user can have a paid expensive software for free why the hell in the world would he/she use a open source software? The person will not even try to find a free alternate to that software. Some of the examples are listed above.

Open source getting popular??

Well, actually in the past few years the open-source has taken the lead in few sectors.

For example, wordpress is a software used by bloggers to host their blogs on their own. The software is open source and rules the blogging market.

Another one, Mozilla Firefox is best the internet browser out here and is going great guns is ready to take over Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (closed source) as the most widely used browser. Adding to competition are Opera and Google’s Chrome.

Does piracy affect the Giants??

I suppose, not much!!

An example again. Adobe Tools ( like Photoshop, DreamWeaver, etc. ) and Windows are widely used and pirated. But I don’t think Adobe or MS minds this at all. Actually Adobe/MS doesn’t have much expectations from people whom they know can’t afford the software.  Their main target are large companies which buy their products in bulk.

Now the biggest question- Encourage piracy or open source? I’ll say, ” Its on you. . . . . “

P.S.

This is the biggest post of mine so far.

MyBB went open source a few days ago. It was under a propriety license but free.

MyBB is a free open-source alternative to vBulletin. btw, my site http://webmasteropia.com is made on MyBB :cheers:

Wordpess 2.7 due 10th Dec 2008.

I am happy to anounce the launch of webmasteropia.com. Its my first webmaster forum, though I have worked on a couple of them earlier.

Here is the link:

http://webmasteropia.com

THE BASICS - Part 1

Introduction

This chapter will make you familiar with few terms which constitute the basic knowledge required for creating or getting started with websites.

Part 1 will include the discussion about the following terms:

1. Web Hosting

2. Domains

3. Web Pages

4. Scripting languages

HOSTING

What is meant by web hosting?

Web hosting allows you to make your site available to anyone using internet. Your website can’t accessed without being hosted on a webserver.

Kinds Of Hosting

1. Free Hosting - Hosting on a shared server(i.e. many sites on one server) with all the basic features. This is what you should prefer when starting.

2. Paid Hosting

1. Shared Hosting - Similar to free hosting but may have advanced features.

2. Dedicated Server - A server dedicated to your sites, you get a server on lease and you may use it to your own wish but under some conditions.

3. VPS (Virtual Private Server) - Its like a virtual dedicated server on a big server.

We’ll discuss about “how to use” in the following chapters.

DOMAIN NAMES

Domain names are specific identity or address to your website. How do they work? We’ll discuss this in the following chapters.

WEB  PAGES

It is a document which is suitable for the internet can be accessed through a web browser when hosted on a web server. They are generally created using html and css.

SCRIPTING LANGUAGES

These kind of languages are used to add functionality to web page. They help you create dynamic sites.

What are dynamic sites?

Using only html would create sites which will be static, ie. there will be no changes in your web page unless you do it manually. When dealing with dynamic sites, you can pages oe part of pages using a scripting language. You see popular posts plugin in the sidebar of this site, it updates the stats automatically as soon as somebody comments on a post. Posts are arranged according to the decreasing number of comments automatically.

Hope you got your dynamic means.

What is meant by functionality here?

You should have seen some web sites which allow to register, login , logout, etc. and that is what I mean by functionality.

Continued in Part 2 . . . . . . .

Introduction

This is gonna  be series of tutorials which will help you become a full-fledged webmaster or will surely get you started with this.

The Reasons behind this tutorial

I have a large amount of relatives, quite a big family. There is a cousin of mine known as Shivohm Gupta who wanted me to create a website for him similar. But vow! I am not a freelancer. After I used my right of refusal, he asked me to give instructions on how too do this on his own. Instructions on IM err…… So that’s what motivated to me to right this series.

Prerequisite knowledge

You should how to use internet and your computer, of course. As we’ll start from basics, nothing is required. But if you know any kind of language like PHP, javascript, etc. well and good. Don’t know what do I mean by languages here- don’t worry, we’ll discuss about them too.

I really don’t know how long will this be but I will surely compile this in a form of ebook but later. I might create a audio version too. Remember, I might!

Part-I coming soon

What is Automattic?

For a straight answer to this, I would they are the creators of wordpress. Their projects include:

• bbPress - Forum Software
• Akismet - An anti-comment spam system capable of integration with many blogging platforms and forums.
• WordPress MU - A multi-blog community system built on WordPress.
• Ping-O-Matic - A pinging service.
• Gravatar - Globally recognized avatars
• IntenseDebate - Commenting Tools

With Wordpress 2.7 on just around the corner and 3 betas already out, wordpress 2.7 is looking big.

But today I want to write about another press which is budding under Automattic, its called Buddypress. I have tried it and have to say that it works great.

What is Buddypress?

Well buddypress is a set of plugins which transform an installation of Wordpress MU(multi-user) into a social networking site.

Features(from buddypress.org):

1. Extended profiles- The extended profile component allows site admins to create specific profile fields for site members to fill in.

2. Private messaging- BuddyPress private messaging works like internal site email. Members can message people on their friends list as well as forward and reply to received messages.

3. Interact with friends- Members of a BuddyPress enabled installation can be connected together by one member adding another as a “friend” and then the other member accepting the friendship request.

4. Groups- Groups in BuddyPress are a gathering of members, blog posts, photos and any other user generated content.

5. The wire- The wire is a place where friends and other members can come along and post messages to a specific piece of content within a BuddyPress installation.

6. Activity Streams- Activity streams aggregate all of your activity across a BuddyPress installation. All of your friends activity is also recorded so you can check what others are doing on the site.

7. BLOGS- Allowing multiple blogs and multiple users per blog is a key feature to WordPress MU. BuddyPress preserves this functionality.

8. Status updates- Status updates in BuddyPress will appear on a member’s profile page. A member can update their status as frequently as they want to.

9. Photo Albums- Members of a BuddyPress installation will be able to create their own photo albums. These albums can be shared with friends and groups.

When will this wonderful plugin will release?

As stated on the site, it should release by the end of this year, 2008.

What does all this mean?

THIS MEANS THAT YOU CAN USE WORDPRESS AS A SOCIAL COMUNITY LIKE ORKUT, MYSPACE , etc.  ENJOY!!!!!!

Sorry for such a long title.

What you see written up there is pretty much true but unpopular. Most of the times webmasters tend to just change the nameservers which take days to propagate,and this becomes pain in their butts. Now written below is a faster way to do it.

The answer is A records. Yes, they usually take only few minutes or sometimes hours to take effect worldwide.

What are A records?(from Wikipedia)

They return a 32-bit IPv4 address, most commonly used to map hostnames to an IP address of the host.

How to implement them?

First of all, check whether your host provides you with Dns facilities. If they don’t, you should try editdns.net.

Steps:

1. Note the shared ip address of your hosting account. If you use cpanel then the ip address written on the fronpage. If you don’t use cpanel, then just do a dns lookup of your host’s nameserver and get its IP address. You can use network-tools.com for this.

2. Add the following three A records to your domain:

(a) yourdomain.com - ip address you noted in the above step

(b) www.yourdomain.com  - same ip address (without this record www.youdomain.com won’t work)

(c) *.yourdomain.com - same ip address (without this you won’t be able to create sub-domains using your hosting account. “*” means a wildcard entry)

You are all done and your domain will be working in a few minutes or very rarely hours.

Advantages of using A records:-

1. Faster propagation of domain.

2. You have control of other records like MX, CNAME, etc. instead transferring your controls to your host.

3. Gives you ability to use services like google apps, live domains, etc. to the full extend.

Disadvantages:

1. You won’t be able to use email accounts at your host till configure your MX records or you always have option to use google apps whcich is free.

2. Just one as far as I remember

Note: You need to use AAAA records if the ip address is IPv6.

Enjoy!