Life Rocks 2.0 » Blogger http://www.nirmaltv.com Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:08:23 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Blogger Adds Subscribe to Comments by Email http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/10/26/blogger-adds-subscribe-to-comments-by-email/ http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/10/26/blogger-adds-subscribe-to-comments-by-email/#comments Fri, 26 Oct 2007 08:41:28 +0000 Nirmal http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/10/26/blogger-adds-subscribe-to-comments-by-email/ Google seems to have started improving the free blogging platform- Blogger. Yesterday they have implemented Subscribe to Comments by Email functionality in blogger. The comment subscription feature allows readers of a blog to receive an email each time a comment is made to a particular post. You can subscribe to a post’s comments by clicking the “Email” link next to “Subscribe to comments” on the post page.

Blogger Subscribe to Comments

In order to subscribe to comments, you need to log in to Google account. Comments are sent only to verified Google Account so that someone else can’t use this feature to send you email you didn’t sign up for.

Confirm Subscribe to comments

If you want to unsubscribe to a comments, just click the unsubscribe button and confirm the action. Subscriptions to comments are per post basis.

Confirm unSubscribe to comments

This is definitely a good move my Google to improve blogger. Another thing which need improvement in blogger is the commenting form. Hope that Google has some new features for that too.

Image Credits to Blogger

]]> http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/10/26/blogger-adds-subscribe-to-comments-by-email/feed/ 11 3 Improvements for Blogger and Wordpress.com http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/08/21/3-improvements-for-blogger-and-wordpresscom/ http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/08/21/3-improvements-for-blogger-and-wordpresscom/#comments Tue, 21 Aug 2007 05:00:28 +0000 Nirmal http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/08/10/3-improvements-for-blogger-and-wordpresscom/ There has been lot of debate among bloggers on which is the best free blogging platform. Wordpress.com and Blogger stands out as they have lot of features compared to others. Recently Kevin from Blogging tips conducted a competition on which is better- Blogger or Wordpress.com. Here I’m not going to debate which is better because both has its own advantages and disadvantages. I’m listing down 3 features which I would like to add/improve in Blogger and Wordpress.com.

Wordpress-Blogger

1. Blogger:

  • Comment form: Blogger has a very bad commenting system. I should say that its commenting system always discourages readers to express their opinions.
  • Ability to create pages and categories: Another feature sadly missing in Blogger is the ability to create pages like contact, about etc and also categories. Currently only labels are allowed in Blogger.
  • Better trackbacks integration: Most of the blogging platforms support trackbacks from other blogs, again a feature missing in Blogger.

2. Wordpress.com

  • Advertisement Support: Advertisement are not allowed in Wordpress.com blogs, this is a great drawback as many of the bloggers want to make some money online through their blog posts.
  • Theme Editing: Although Wordpress has better themes when compared to Blogger, the fact that editing themes is not allowed makes Blogger superior in this aspect.
  • Support for Plugins: Support for Plugins in a much needed feature as we know that Wordpress is famous for its plugins.

If you like to add any more points to this, please share it in comments.

]]> http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/08/21/3-improvements-for-blogger-and-wordpresscom/feed/ 35 New features to Blogger-Blogger in Draft and Video Upload http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/06/14/new-features-to-blogger-blogger-in-draft-and-video-upload/ http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/06/14/new-features-to-blogger-blogger-in-draft-and-video-upload/#comments Thu, 14 Jun 2007 07:35:35 +0000 Nirmal http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/06/14/new-features-to-blogger-blogger-in-draft-and-video-upload/ Blogger has announced new feature of Video upload to blogger posts and this can be tested at Blogger in Draft. Blogger in Draft is something like an experimental laboratory where you can test the upcoming features of Blogger. Video upload is first feature of Blogger in Draft.

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If you want to try out this feature, you need to login to http://draft.blogger.com/ with your blogger ID.

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The upload video supports AVI, MPEG, Quick Time, Real and windows media with a maximum size of 100 MB.

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]]> http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/06/14/new-features-to-blogger-blogger-in-draft-and-video-upload/feed/ 11 Orkut Verifying E-mail Frequently http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/04/14/orkut-verifying-e-mail-frequently/ http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/04/14/orkut-verifying-e-mail-frequently/#comments Fri, 13 Apr 2007 20:18:31 +0000 Nirmal http://nirmaltv.com/?p=185 I have been seeing this message too frequently on Orkut Orkut and I have already verified my e-mail 3 times in the past week. I guess this is part of removing spammers from all Google services. Recently, Google has been blocking few Gmail and Blogger IDs which they believe are spammers. Unfortunately one of my friend got tagged as spam. Google is also removing objectionable content from blogs as reported by Amit.

I think this a good move by Google and lets hope that Orkut stays beautiful. :grin:

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]]> http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/04/14/orkut-verifying-e-mail-frequently/feed/ 2 Life Rocks to Life Rocks 2.0-The Journey http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/03/17/life-rocks-to-life-rocks-20-the-journey/ http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/03/17/life-rocks-to-life-rocks-20-the-journey/#comments Sat, 17 Mar 2007 07:44:29 +0000 Nirmal http://nirmaltv.com/?p=141 I should say it was a quick decision to move my blog to own domain. I had no plans of purchasing the new domain until last weekend when I went home (Kochi). I browsed through couple of sites which were giving domains at low cost. One such site was Netfirms, which was offering domains as low as 4.95 $ per year. I just went through their offer to get more details about this offer. They were giving only 25 MB storage space and 1 GB data transfer per month. I knew it would be too small space they are providing, but still I went on to purchase it. I just checked the availability of my domain and found that it was available.

After purchasing the domain, I had very little idea about hosting and how to go about it. I had read about Joel Caleb’s experiences in purchasing the domain in Freizeit forum. So thought I would mail him and get the details. His help was really useful for me in getting the hosting space. So I got the 200 GB hosting space and 6 TB bandwidth space. I installed Wordpress 2.1 in my server and created an account. After this I uploaded a few themes to the themes directory. I selected a few themes from the list of 84 beautiful themes listed by Smashing Magazine.

Next was the big task of importing all the posts from Blogger. Initially I had moved all posts from Blogger to my free Wordpress account few days back. So I thought same would be available here also. But to my disappointment, only old blogger was supported, thats without the Google login. So I was not able to import it.

Another idea struck in my mind and what I did was to import all posts to my free Wordpress account and then create an xml file for all posts using the export feature in Wordpress. Then I imported this file to my server using file upload and I could retrieve all my previous posts to my new server. There are also other ways to retrieve the posts as mentioned by Joel Caleb in his blog

Next it was time to customize my theme and add all the widgets and other stuffs which were present in my previous blog. It was little difficult for me this time as all the files were .php, but I managed to edit it and give a new look for my blog.

What really amazed me is the number of plug-ins available for Wordpress and many of them were really useful ones. I installed quite a few of them and my new blog is up and running with all the features. Technically I should say its in Beta version or Life Rocks ! 2.0 Beta as it would go for few more changes in the coming days.

For all my readers, thanks for supporting me and hope to get more and more suggestions and feedback. Please spare a few seconds to update links to my site and also bookmark this new site.

I would like to thanks Joel Caleb for his immense help in getting me this domain and his technical help in hosting.

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]]> http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/03/17/life-rocks-to-life-rocks-20-the-journey/feed/ 5 How to add recent comments widget in Blogger http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/03/12/how-to-add-recent-comments-widget-in-blogger/ http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/03/12/how-to-add-recent-comments-widget-in-blogger/#comments Mon, 12 Mar 2007 09:14:00 +0000 Nirmal http://nirmaltv.com/?p=135 Hackosphere has developed a widget that lets you display the last comments made on your blog. This widget was made quite a few days back, but I came across this widget yesterday while reading Priya’s Blog. You can specify how many comments need to be show (default is 10) and also the number of letters to be displayed in each comment (defaults to 100). This was developed soon after Blogger announced that they support blog feeds in JSON format also.

I have made my recent comments block on the right hand side of this blog. If you have not used this widget and interested in using this one, Click here to get the code developed by Hackosphere.

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]]> http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/03/12/how-to-add-recent-comments-widget-in-blogger/feed/ 6 Is owning a domain necessary for successful blogging? http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/03/08/is-owning-a-domain-necessary-for-successful-blogging/ http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/03/08/is-owning-a-domain-necessary-for-successful-blogging/#comments Thu, 08 Mar 2007 09:12:00 +0000 Nirmal http://nirmaltv.com/?p=131 Of late I have been reading lot of blogs and almost 70% of them are hosted on paid domains, be it personal, technical or business blogs and only 30% of them are using the free blogging platforms like Blogger (the one I’m using), typepad etc. So does it mean that having a paid domain is needed for a successful blog?

Here are some of the quotes about having a paid domain for blogging.

Jakob Nielsen, in his post Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes states that

Having a weblog address ending in blogspot.com, typepad.com, etc. will soon be the equivalent of having an @aol.com email address or a Geocities website: the mark of a naïve beginner who shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

American Blogoshere says,

If you have a highly successful blog on blogspot you are building up an asset for Google and not just yourself. They also have control of your site’s fate instead of you.

Yuga in the list of Seven deadly sins of blogging says;

I like to take emphasis more on the first bullet point there — using free blog hosting services like BlogSpot, IMO, takes away a huge amount of credibility from your blog especially if nobody knows you, and much more if you hide your identity by not having an about page or even a contact email.This all gives the impression that your blog is all about those AdSense and Chitika ads plastered all over your blog stuffed with showbiz keywords (or cancer, sexy nude pictures, mortgage, credit cards, wow gold for that matter). And, btw, if you really believe you can earn some considerable amount cash from your Adsense, please do re-invest some of it back to your blog by getting a domain and hosting.

I agree with American Blogoshere that when we have a successful blog, why give the credit to others. In that sense getting a paid domain is better. But I beg to differ with Jakob Nielsen on the view that having a blog ending with a blogspot domain will be considered as beginners and will not be taking seriously. I have been reading lot of popular blogs, the A-List bloggers who are still using the blogger domains to host their blogs. Further having a blog on blogspot domain doesn’t always mean that your blog is full of Adsense, stuffed with credit card ads and sexy nude pictures. Also having your blog hosted on blogspot doesn’t mean that we cannot have a about page or a contact Email. One thing which I felt good about paid domains is that we can have complete control of the settings (like design and pages) of the blog and we also get more space to host our files, other that these I couldn’t find any other relevant advantages of having a paid domain.

Although I’m very much satisfied with my blogspot domain, I’m planning to get a domain for me. Its not because of any of the reasons listed above, but for the fact that I always want to have control of the UI and pages in my blog.

Comments welcome.

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]]> http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/03/08/is-owning-a-domain-necessary-for-successful-blogging/feed/ 1 Blogger vs Wordpress http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/03/06/blogger-vs-wordpress/ http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/03/06/blogger-vs-wordpress/#comments Tue, 06 Mar 2007 04:40:00 +0000 Nirmal http://nirmaltv.com/?p=128 It has been 1.5 years since I started using Blogger as my blogging platform and I should say I’m pretty happy with their service. Recently I read lot of articles pointing out the disadvantages of using Blogger when compared to Wordpress. To investigate how better is Wordpress compared to Blogger, I decided to get a Wordpress blog for me. My new Wordpress blog is nirmaltv.wordpress.com. Since the Blogger service is completely free, I’m just comparing the free service offered by Wordpress with Blogger.


Firstly, one good thing I found for Wordpress blogs is that new pages can be added to the blog, but this feature is not available in Blogger. This is a feature I really wanted in Blogger, may be they will implement in future.

Secondly for creating a new post, I think Blogger is better than Wordpress because they offer lot more options on font, size and colors. Although color and font options are available in Wordpress, one has to code this manually in code section.

Another important thing about blogs is the presentation and in this section Blogger scores over Wordpress. One can edit the CSS and templates in Wordpress only if we purchase the CSS Custom. But in Blogger we can add and edit the CSS and widgets. Moreover the widgets available in Wordpress is limited. Option to Edit templates is an important feature as we can improve the presentation, rather than using the default template. (The default templates offered by Wordpress is better than the ones offered by Blogger).

Other features I found good in Wordpress is the categorization of posts. This is not available in Blogger, although one can display categories by editing the template code. Another one is the calender option, where one can see all the posts for the particular day using the calender.

Wordpress has lot more option than Blogger currently, but since custom CSS is a paid feature in Wordpress, I still think that Blogger can catch up with Wordpress by implementing lot more features.

And since I give lot more preference to layout and presentation, I still prefer to use Blogger and suggest Blogger as a free blogging platform for starters.

Comments welcome.

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NB: Image credit-Bin-Blog

]]> http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/03/06/blogger-vs-wordpress/feed/ 9 My blog indexed in Google and Yahoo ! http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/02/27/my-blog-indexed-in-google-and-yahoo/ http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/02/27/my-blog-indexed-in-google-and-yahoo/#comments Tue, 27 Feb 2007 06:47:00 +0000 Nirmal http://nirmaltv.com/?p=123 Today I did a search for Life Rocks! in Google and Yahoo to check whether my blog is indexed or not. Both of the searched showed that my blog has been indexed. I got the tips for indexing the blog from here. I read this post and found the blogger doesn’t allow the blog to be indexed by default, so I made some changes as per the suggestions given here

I don’t know how much time it took for listing the blog, since I didn’t follow all the steps mentioned here.

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]]> http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/02/27/my-blog-indexed-in-google-and-yahoo/feed/ 4 How to make your blog popular http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/02/15/how-to-make-your-blog-popular/ http://www.nirmaltv.com/2007/02/15/how-to-make-your-blog-popular/#comments Thu, 15 Feb 2007 06:43:00 +0000 Nirmal http://nirmaltv.com/?p=115 This could be easily the most discussed and authored topic in many of the blogs. This is not just the repeat of what others have written about this topic, but here I’m presenting what I did to increase the popularity of my blog and attract more visitor and readers.

  • One of the important things for attracting people is to have a good template and design. Lot of websites offer good templates and we can also edit these templates to suit our needs.
  • Update your blog with new posts everyday, if not everyday at least update frequently (this is what I’m trying to do). You can write about your life or anything which is interesting. More of the readers tend to visit recently updated blogs.
  • Make feeds available for your blog/website.
  • Display your Email address, maybe some readers want to contact you.
  • Submit your blog to popular blog search like Google, Yahoo, Bloglines, Blogarama, Technorati.
  • The blog should load in the least possible time. Many of the first impression are made by the time the blog takes to load.
  • Check if there are any broken links in your blog, fix them.
  • Submit your blog to other sites which promotes blogging like
      • www.mybloglog.com -This is a very useful site where one can make a community of our blogs and join other communities. More the communities you join more visitors to your site.
      • www.spicypage.com -This is another site which I joined recently. Here we can vote for a site, add comments and also there are different categories in which the blogs can be listed
      • http://worldblogcollection.blogspot.com - This is another blog where we can list our blogs under different categories.
      • www.fuelmyblog.com - Also called as the great wall of blogs, here one can display the blog in a square which is currently free. Once we select the square where we want to show our blog, we can add the screen shot and a brief description to our blog.
      • www.bloggerforum.com- Join blogger forum and show ur blog.
  • Visit other blogs regularly and posts useful comments, so that the readers will visit your blog too.

These are some of the tips to improve your blog. For more tips and tricks, visit these pages

1. http://blogandpingtutorial.blogspot.com/
2. http://blogging.isgreat.org
3. WeblogHits
4. Increase Blog Traffic

If you find these tips interesting, please do post your comments and suggestions

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