Roaming in Blogosphere

How would I know that you visited my blog... and that you have a blog too!? And how would I be able to diplay an advertisement of my blog on someone else's blog, thereby attracting more readers to my blog?

These questions are answered by Entrecard. Once you are part of Entrecard community, surfing on blogosphere becomes easy and you get to know good blogs, and your blog becomes known to many people. Here is how to get started. Let's say you have read the previous article on blogging and got the Feed burner installed on your blog, and your blog looks something like this:

Visit Entrecard.com.

Entre card is similar to a visiting card. And more colorful, picturelike a visiting card, more people will it invite. Entrecard site requires you to have a logo of your page of the size exactly 125pixels by 125 pixels. To do this, I found a nice image in google image search, and re-sized it to 125x125 pixels using paint. It has an option to stretch and skew an image. If you don't get a suitable image right now, you can come back later to it, and have a text EntreCard to begin with.
Fill in various details, if you have an image ready, upload it, else select Text only entry card option.

Once you are in, go to Get Code. Select any size shape of your Entre Card you would like to have. I like the Vertical ones. They save space on your website, and kind of trendy!

Copy the highlighted code. Goto your blog, sign in, goto customize, Edit Html. Look for the place where you put your Feed burner code. Next to the place where "About Me" is located.

Paste your code above (or below if you wish), and click on preview. Ooops! If you have done everything correctly so far, then you should be getting this message:

I spent my few precious night hours on this bug, a week ago. Then I gave up and typed in google, " The reference to entity "type" must end with the ';' delimiter." Google was helpful, and gave me this answer: http://base.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=63199

In XML files, the ampersand will cause an error, unless it's part of a valid entity reference, such as ""." Please use "&" instead of "&" to indicate an ampersand. Aah, what a relief!

So go back to your Edit Html window. find out the "&" symbols, and replace them with "& amp;". And click on preview. Wow! Your Ecard should be on your website! Don't forget to save the template before exiting... :)

With your EntreCard ready, you can start roaming on Blogosphere. Find someone's blog with an EntreCard first. You can visit mine! Click on the "drop" and notice the window changing to "Thanks!" :) Follow some more blogs through the clicking on the image on the EntreCard.

Having done this, come back to your EntreCard Dashboard. You would see some stats there. For each visit and drop, you get one E-credit. For advertising the widget on your site(which you just did) you get 8 ec. And so on. Soon people would advertise on your website(get a picturesque entre card) and by sanctioning their advertise on your website for 24 hours, you earn more ec s.E.g. The owner of the site the peanut butter blog sent advertise to my dashboard. I liked the blog, so I approved his ECard Advertise. Now, the logo on my site changes to his logo, and his site will be advertised on my page for next 24 hours:

When you have sufficient ecredits in your account, you can go publicize your blog by advertising it on other pages.
Further info on EntreCard website should tell you how to earn money from EntreCard usage!

Happy roaming on blogosphere!

ps. This is my second article entry for Bawa's Blog Competition!

Troubleshooting in html

Ok. So, being a reader of Blogsutras I am sure you would have opened a gmail/ blogger account, got a blog template, and started blogging! So let's say you have got these basic things done, and your blog looks something like this:

Now those who happen to visit your fresh blog may not visit again, but if they like the first post, they might want to be able to get updates automatically. Utilities like Google reader get the new info on any sites and give it to the reader. To make it easy for your readers to subscribe to any such utilities, you need to have a feed on your site. Go to feedburner.com. Give the url of your blogpage, and click next. Choose RSS and click next. Give username password and email address, and Activate your feed. Click next until you get a page like this:

Go to Publicize your feed, and click on friendly graphic link. Choose standard feed icon. Now comes the tricky part... Go to the box where you see the html text to be copied to your template. It will be something like this:

Copy that html... Dont need to understand much, though its not much difficult! To put it in your template, open a new browser window, sign into the blogpage, goto manage layout and Edit Html. There will be a jungle of html syntax and instructions! Don't get baffled. Click on the editing window, and with Ctrl+F or from Edit-> Find, search for `About me'. You are likely to get a result like this:

Check the enlarged view of above image for better clarity. Insert your html as shown below:



Click on preview, and hurray! You will see the Feed icon on your blog page:



Don't worry if you don't see the icon at the expected location below "About me", just change the location of your feedburner text so that it doesn't come in way of <> pairs.

p.s. This is my article entry to Bawa's competition on Blogging tutorial!

night sky of the World

Above picture shows how much city light is emitted in different parts of the world at night... recorded by some satellites. More info is here:- night sky in the World. interesting, isn't it!

Guru Poornima

Guru element is that which guides our lives. Mother is the first Guru. All the teachers who have taught us something, carry that Guru element within. Guru Poornima is the day to revere all of them, the entire tradition of teachers, masters of wisdom that gives right direction to life. They are our Beacons of light.
Guru Poornima is also a day of the devotee... to feel grateful for what he/she has received, how the life has changed. Its a day to recollect last one year and see how much progress one has made in the journey of life.
Today, on the occasion of Guru Poornima, sleep with a feeling of being taken care of, with a blanket of grace!

… in love …

(I am ) in love (with you).
(You are ) in love (with him).
(They are ) in love (with each other).

In all these expressions, what is common is being “in love”! And that is what makes a big difference. People take so much pride in saying “I love you”, to the person they love. Of course it is needed to be said, but know that you are not doing any favor to that person by loving him or her! When you are in love, what is happening inside you… A certain consolidation of life force energy, certain sensations that are very pleasing, a certain pain of longing also, a certain feeling of oneness or belongingness…
Of course the other person may have been responsible or a cause for this to happen inside you, but what we forget in the process of being in love is what is this happening inside us. We label it to the other person, and when next time that if the presence of that person doesn’t cause that experience we have within, then our love for that person weakens…Observing what’s happening inside us, gives strength to the love we have for others. Then it can’t be taken away by events or circumstances, people and emotional outbursts.

Whether you know... or don’t know!

This article is merely an obvious restatement of the fact that “Jane tu …” simply rocks!

Its such a good make... got me back to my college days… A cool group of boys and girls who share the days of college, which pass by so fast, that one doesn’t know how it passed. When Aditi asks Jai‘s mother,"How did so many days pass!?", she says, ‘on phone, beta!’

A fantastic way of telling a story inside a story is so nice… the girl listening the story exemplifies the audience, that is you.

I wasn’t understanding what I liked about the hero, and as Mahesh pointed out, its simply that he doesn’t do any heroism! He is simply there, playing his character naturally.

I would love to make such kind of a movie!

In fact more of such movies are needed, where I can feel it’s just me there, not some director moving the characters fancied by some whimsical script writer!

And there is so much talent available in all youth in India. It needs to be rightly portrayed.

Lightness to live life, fragrance of love, emotional depth and bellyful laughter make “Jane Tu” a fantastic watch! Especially at PVR Forum on weekdays 10 am!

Rising up

The road from Forum to Koramangala Water Tank Circle, in front of Saint John’s Hospital, is very wide now. 4 trucks can go side by side. And its one way. So you can drive at 60 if your breaks are alright. I was returning after a late night movie and I was driving at 60, because my breaks are alright. I wondered, “How life has changed. I used to struggle for Autos at such times, few months ago. Now I have bike.” Its amusing how life flourishes when you are doing simple good things. I recalled following words of wisdom by His Holiness Sri Sri Ravishankar.

~*~

Negativity needs an Anchor.

Negativity cannot remain without a support.

Positivity, happiness can be without any reason.

The mind goes on trying to find support for its negativity. It looks for a hook to hang its negativity on - if not this person, then that thing or that person and so on.

This perpetuates the maya!

The creeper of negativity needs a support in order to grow. But negativity or aversion for even one person can guarantee a one-way ticket to hell - you need nothing else!

All negativity is a pointer to move to the centre and broaden the vision to the cosmic intelligence.

Instead of focussing your attention on support for your negativity, look at the seed of negativity.

With meditation, silence, kriya, the source of negativity is nipped at the root.

~*~

Nature of life is like a flame, to move up. All you have to do is give some space for yourself, and let go off the anchors that you yourself have put in the ocean called world.

Skyview!

True to my religion, Physics, I thought an article on Astronomy and Astrophysics is a must! What you see above is how the sky looks like in a less than a degree field of view in a region of Large Magellanic Cloud, our next door galaxy. The image is taken by Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope.
Isn't it unbelievable that in that small part of the sky there are so many stars! And its so very beautiful. As if there is a Diwali in that galaxy, and all those are houses with diyas lit up on their doors.
And another amazing thing about sky-view is that, when you look in different directions, you are actually seeing light that originated in different times from those stars, so there is a temporal information encoded in the picture! What you see is a spatial collage of different pasts in various directions..

Prof. M. Prakash

It was first week of first year in the college, a post lunch class and a boring lecture going on. Suddenly one nice young and matured person in jeans and t-shirt walked in and took permission from the teacher to tell us a few things. He went to the board and drew a triangle and two vertices of the triangle, drew a perpendicular to the next side. then he said, that if I draw the third one also, they will all pass through this common point!

It was quite amusing to me! He said same is true for angle bisectors and medians. You can learn more such interesting things about Geometry, Algebra, Number Theory and Combinatorics, in our classes for Regional Mathematics Olympiad in Bhaskaracharya Pratishthan.
That was my first meet with Prof. M. Prakash. That very evening I joined the classes in Bhaskaracharya Pratishthan, and my visits to this Maths institute continued for next two years.
I learnt lot of interesting Maths from Prakash Sir. After his MSc in Maths from IIT Kanpur, he has been teaching Olympiad Maths to all young students. Several of his students went on to win Gold Medals in International Mathematical Olympiads!
He tought us so many techniques of problem solving, and one day he said to me,"Abhay, mind works faster than hand." And he showed a way to find a solution by just thinking, rather than doing elaborate analysis.
I was selected in Regional Maths Olympiad and then joined the classes with Prakash Sir for Indian National Maths Olympiad. It was an amazing two month training that I underwent. A box of unknown things was opened. Unimaginable things were revealed and understood.
I expressed my interest in pursuing Physics to Prakash Sir. He immediately recommended me Feynman Lecture Series.
He opened a door for amazingly incredible thing called Science to me!

The Ultimate Hitchhikers Guide to Galaxy

"This is a humanoid from Planet Earth speaking...
All Planet Earth members are hereby informed of the Ultimate Hitchhikers Guide to Galaxy, in case they want to go for shopping and such stuff in other planets, and want to do it in a hitchhiker's way!"

Ha ha ha!
Much more fun to read this book by Douglas Adams... Its giving me a laughing time for last one week!

The Wiki entry speaks lot about it, which I will leave on to you to explore! Also check Bawa's blog entry.

Enjoy!

Tasty Bytes, Nature Fresh and Cool Joint

Tasty bytes
A hotel which gives you what its name promises! Tasty bytes is a very nice homely like food joint in JPNagar. You get hot parathas, chapattis, various vegetables and variety of desserts. If you are couple or quadruple, you can sit there and enjoy the food, for more people take a quick parcel! They have two outlets.
Nature Fresh
This is a Juice and Sandwich junction in the same lane as Tasty Bytes... Good news is that its one of those rare joints in Bangalore that is open even till 11:30... Awesome juices, fruitsalads and sandwiches!
Cool Joint
Who in Bangalore’s central area Jayanagar won’t know Cool Joint! My favorite for sandwiches, juices and ice creams… Check out their “Jungle book” combo! Decorated delicious delight!

YES!+

Youth Empowerment and Skills Workshop:-

This is a one week program that has changed my outlook to life. It turned me inwards, brought out the hidden potential in me. YES!+ gave me tools and techniques to manage my emotions, enhance my fitness, improve my concentration and sharpen my awareness.

It gave me strength to influence the environment, instead of getting influenced by it. I developed new talents, like dancing! I started taking more keen interest in various aspects of life. My observation became quick and minute detailed. My perception became clear and confusions disappeared. My expression became natural and authentic. Life became a stress free game!

For more details about YES!+, visit www.yesplus.org

Berkeley physics course is now available!

I love Tata McGraw Hill Publications... they bring out the best of the books in the world to Asian students in an affordable price!
Now they have revived the Classic Physics textbooks:- the Berkeley Physics Course:

Vol 1 Mechanics
Vol 2 Electricity and Magnetism
Vol 3 Waves
Vol 4 Quantum Physics
Vol 5 Statistical Physics

These books will tell you the Graduate Physics in the most precise form! They give you the scope and limitations of the theory presented. The third volume Waves is filled with ample illustrations and experiments. The exercises given will sharpen your skills.
Second volume on Electricity and Magnetism, the Nobel Laureate Purcell has described in a diagramatic and a very illustrative manner, how accelerated motion of a charge gives rise to electromangetic radiation...
Learn Physics from the Best!