FSLog » Sites

Skribit: Suggest topics to write about

cnu — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 08:01:22 +0000

Skribit is a product I found out today in news.YC. I think this is one tool which is essential for bloggers like me who can’t find interesting topics to blog about. This product will help solve the problem of writer’s block by engaging the community into the blog’s content.

People can suggest new topics which they would like to be covered or they can vote on topics already added by other members in the community. It is non-intrusive and takes just a simple sign-on (they have openid too) and adding a widget to your blog. A very simple idea.

So, if you want me to write about any particular topic, just use the widget in the side bar and suggest new topics.

Setup WordPress on Nearly Free Speech

cnu — Sun, 11 May 2008 06:22:03 +0000

Yesterday I moved this blog over to NearlyFreeSpeech.net hosting, which I think has a great hosting plan for almost everyone. You only pay for what you use. The disk space is a bit costly than others ($0.01 per MB), but that cost is due to the numerous backups they take. The bandwidth cost is great, just $1 per GB. And there is no fixed cost for each month. I wanted to move FSLog to NFS, and finally did it. This is a small tutorial on getting wordpress installed and the various plugins I have used.

After you have setup an account with NFS and setup a site, you will be given the site details – like FTP, SSH, etc. I prefer using SSH if available, as it is faster to download and install directly than to get it on my machine and uploading it again.

Just ssh to the site and download the latest wordpress tarball and untar it

$ wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz $ tar -xvzf latest.tar.gz

If you want to setup the blog at a subdirectory, just rename the ‘wordpress’ folder to something like ‘blog’. If you want it to be at the root of the site, just move all the contents of the wordpress folder to the parent directory.

Then visit your site http://your-site.nfshost.com or the domain if you have registered one.

It will guide you through the install process which is very easy. You just have to give the MySQL database details. You may need to temporarily give write permissions to the public folder, so that the installer can write a config file.

After this, login to your admin page and remember to change the password from Users menu.

Plugins

After you have your blog setup, its time to get some basic plugins installed. You can get more functionality by installing these plugins.

All you have to do is just download the zip files to the wp-content/plugins/ directory and unzip them. The plugins I have installed are:

WP-SuperCache: This caches your blog’s contents as plain old HTML, so that your server doesn’t have to process and fetch all the data from the database. Previously the install process was a bit difficult, but now it has become very easy. Just unzip and activate.
reCAPTCHA: Prevent comment spam by using CAPTCHA for your comments form, also help in converting books to electronic format.
WordPress.com Stats: Track your popular posts and other statistics by using the wordpress.com’s stats.
Google Analyticator: Google Analytics is an excellent user metrics analysis tool with bright colorful charts and best of all, it is free. This plugin asks just for your Google Analytics’ UID.
Feedburner Feedsmith: Feedburner is a great service for your RSS feeds and I have been using that for this blog for a long time. This plugin is now the official plugin and it automatically redirectly your feeds to the FeedBurner link.

These are my list of plugins. So, what are the plugins that your have?

twit.el – Tweet from emacs

cnu — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 18:25:17 +0000

Now I can post to my twitter account from emacs (my favorite editor). Just install twit.el and you are ready to post to twitter, check recent tweets, etc. Download the twit.el file to some directory in your home dir (I have it in my .emacs.d directory) and then add the following line to your .emacs file present in your home directory.

(load-file "/path/to/twit.el")

After doing it and restart your emacs, just press M-x and twit-post and type in whatever you want to and press enter. It will then ask your twitter id and password – which gets saved for the entire emacs session. It is a very basic authentication and is not secure.

By the way, FSLog too has a twitter feed. You can follow this feed to get updates when I post here. Thanks to Srid for this tip.

Arichuvadi – Tamil Tutorial

cnu — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 20:00:42 +0000

NRCFOSS has released a online tamil language learning tutorial called Arichuvadi. It is nicely thought out which has the english version of a sentence with its equivalent in written tamil and spoken tamil. All the voices are in ogg format. They now have partial alphabets in 3 languages. People can also come forward and add lessons.

Blogrush – New traffic exchange program

cnu — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 16:28:49 +0000

Blogrush is a new traffic exchange program which promises to bring in targetted reader to your blogs. All you have to do is register for the program and you get a widget that can be pasted on your blog. Everytime a visitor visits your blog a credit is added to your account – which means that your blog will be showed on other blogs. The interesting thing about this is there is a great affiliate program which goes down to 10 tiers deep. Early adopters of this program are sure of benefiting from the exponential growth.

Jottit – Aaron’s new startup

cnu — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 15:05:43 +0000

After Infogami and Reddit, Aaron Swartz has a new startup called Jottit along with Simon Carstensen under bitbots.net. It is similar to Infogami and is a plain vanilla wiki. You can easily create a page for yourself by visiting the site and typing out some content. You will be given a random page which you can claim later and also change to a sub-domain. It is written using web.py – and excellent python web framework. I wonder what will be business model for this and whether it will be able to stand up against spammers who brought down Infogami.

Ubuntu usability analysis

cnu — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 03:59:30 +0000

The Open Source Advocate has a thorough usability analysis of Ubuntu and tells us what makes it “ready to use” for us. He takes each step for completing an operation and categorizes them into Very Easy, Easy, Medium, Hard and Very Hard. He also explains what can be made to improve the user experience.

in pictures: Image based tutorial

cnu — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 05:56:37 +0000

I got mail about a nice website called in pictures from Chris Charuhas. It is a nice site having tutorials about using Office, OpenOffice.org, Dreamweaver, etc.

The interesting part of this is that it is fully based on pictures. All the tutorials have nice explanations with screenshots explaining how to do every step. They are easy to understand and I would like to see more such tutorials for other open source softwares. Their press release says that they would bring in more tutorials for programming languages like PHP, Perl, etc. I would also like to see tutorials for other applications like Gimp, Evolution, etc., for the normal user.

Maybe this mode of teaching will help bring in more people to FOSS world.

Elephants Dream – Movie in Blender

cnu — Sat, 20 May 2006 04:49:52 +0000

Elephants Dream is a movie made using open source tools for production. It is done primarily using Blender which is a great open source tool for making 3D modelling and animation. You can download the movie in various qualities and it can be viewed in VLC Media Player or MPlayer. The project files are also released under the Creative Commons License.

Unofficial Python Tutorial

cnu — Wed, 17 May 2006 04:38:30 +0000

Here’s an Unofficial Python Tutorial which is wiki containing the documentation of the Python language. Changes and comments made here will be used to improve the official tutorial over at python.org.