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

Well, That’s me!! xD It took me quite a lot days to complete this article.

This post is my story till date on internet. I won’t mention everything but I’ll write about people, experiences, articles and everything that have influenced me. This is the first time I’ll write about myself except the “About US” page on the divyun.com.

Well, I have been into the webmastering thing from past three years now. At first I did not devote much time to this. It was like once in a two weeks. I started doing a few experiments and started creating silly sites using MS FrontPage! A little research and I knew what hosting was and how to use a free hosting account to host your site.

My interest started increasing. And by the end of the year, I  knew how to set up sites on sub-domains of hosts. Second year started with me searching about the best free host and a place where I could get a free domains. I still did not use my computer daily!! I was in 10th std and too much computer would spoil my studies. I continued my research when I finally came across a few sites like http://co.cc, http://uni.cc, http://dot.tk, http://net.ms, etc. I was to much into aliens that time. I had booked all the domain names- alienfriends.co.cc, uni.cc, etc. Some of them might still be there!!

By the start of 2008, I am through with the technical knowledge. I knew what was DNS, hosting, domains, etc. I could set up anything. But still, I was only with a silly html site. ..err.. Then came my exams and my internet usage became negligible!!

As soon my exams ended, I was on to my computer and within a few days, I became a computer freak. It was only me and my computer- day or night! 16+ hours computer every day. When did I sleep?? Don’t ask!! During this time, I had great experience, made new friends which I am usually accustomed to. Then, I came across Guru Lakshman Tomandro, the main brains after hyperwebenable.com, a site I promoted for him long time ago!! We parted ways due to some reasons.

Around March, I came across hostbidder.com. The site provides free domains and is a wonderful webmaster forum. I have spent hours on the site and learnt quite a lot of things.

I started out with my blog( yeah! this one=> http://divyun.com) during May. That day, I started learning for real!! I came across things called CMS and have messed up with most of the top ones, like Drupal, Joomla, e107, etc. Forums(MyBB, vBulletin, SMF, phpBB, etc.), social networking scripts(elgg, buddypress, people aggregator, etc.) blogs(wordpress, bloggers, moodle, etc.)! I am left with nothing as far as I know!! :S I can install any software(wordpress, joomla,etc.) and config it as well.

I am good enough at the SEO too, I have read quite a lot about it in e-books!!

I had another blog at aliengang domains but later shifted it to Divyun.com.

During all these months, I destroyed, created a lot of sites! A list:

1. Mahajansons.com

2. Aliengang.com

3. Aliengang.net

4. FutureIITians.com

5. Divyun.com

6. Webmasteropia.com

I also worked on a few sites as an admin to help a friend, webphorum.com.

A few people who influenced me:

1. Swastik: Well, I worked with the guy on webphorum.com and we are currently working on webmasteropia.com together!!

He’s a year older to me i.e. 16. We both study in 11std and live in India.

He’s quite an impressive guy! I would say he has great marketing skills and is great at the SEO thing! His blog at splitstack.com is a delite for young entrepreneurs. The Selling Machine- this is the title I gave him ’cause he has sold more than a dozen sites, I suppose.

2. Hector Oma- I won’t lie, but this guy inspires me to blog! He blogs at Rauru.com and is great friend. His blog is a paradise for webmasters/to be specific bloggers!! He was at wephorum with us.

I have other friends but only the above two were worth mentioning!

Some “pain in the but”-

You think I’ll mention them? But I have quite a lot of them!!

btw, the title states it right, I have done no professional course but I learnt evreything on my own. I am a SELF PROCLAIMED WEBMASTER. A detailed story of my experince would take more than 70 pages but I’ll finish in 700+ words.

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

Well, this one is gonna be a really short one!

If your domain registrar doesn’t provide you with dns facilities then the best option is to use a service like editdns.net.

You’ll get the rest of the info here. http://hostingfu.com/article/redundant-and-free-domain-name-service-editdns-everydns