Moving to Wordpress

Its time to move to Wordpress. Not that I've many issues with blogger, even though blogger is way behind times - no trackbacks etc.(I noticed it has just started automatic pingbacks with link text).

This blog has a decent Google page rank of 5, and low but reasonable traffic (Alexa rank of about 840000) as of now. Building everything again would be fun. I've already moved all my old posts to wordpress blog.

The new Reverberations blog is at http://brajesh.wordpress.com and the feedburner feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/Reverberations.

Fixing RSS - II

Scott Karp is tackling two different extremes. On one hand there is ignorance about ubiquitous RSS feeds among most of Internet users, and then there is issue of information overflow with too many feeds for some. Fixing one of them may even worsen the other pain.

Dave Winer talks about 'River of News' mode of feed aggregation. Which is a great idea to fix the feed abundance problem, but has its drawbacks. 'River of News' model seems to be too news-centric, which is okay if you are aggregating news and blogs. Syndication is not just about news.What about syndicating a wiki, or a novel, or may be research data or online learning material, which you won't wish to miss in the 'conveyor-belt sushi'. The no-brainer is to separate the two - a river and a pond.

I'm yet to use Dave's aggregator, but the idea is compelling. Google Desktop's web clips come close to the idea - though Dave insists on a web interface, a desktop interface would be nice. But it's what I think it is, I'd still need a pond-type aggregator.

Is Google going p2p?

Sharelive used to be a file sharing site. Now it resolves to Google's page. Is there anything to read like Google's p2p plans or it's just a site rip off.

Censorship : Google Censured

'Do no evil' or 'Do less evil than others'. Pre - China Entry Google on Censorship-

“Google does not censor results for any search term. The order and content of our results are completely automated; we do not manipulate our search results by hand. We believe strongly in allowing the democracy of the web to determine the inclusion and ranking of sites in our search results. To learn more about Google’s search technology, please visit ...”

And now,

“It is Google’s policy not to censor search results. However, in response to local laws, regulations, or policies, we may do so. When we remove search results for these reasons, we display a notice on our search results pages. Please note: For some older removals (before March 2005), we may not show a notice at this time.”

*Google logo by Paul Bubel.

Fixing 'Really Simple Syndication'(RSS) for good

No one knows what “syndication” means, unless you’re talking about I Love Lucy reruns. Syndication is a publisher-centric, geek-centric term. For most people, it’s Really Simple Huh? Most people don’t even know that syndicate can be used as a verb!

And then there are issues at the other extreme too - the problem of abundance of RSS feeds.

Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 suggests this three step solution

1. Call it “subscribing”
because 'subscription' is something most people are familiar with

2. Encourage everyone to get a reader
because most people either don’t have one or don’t know that they have one

3. Use the iTunes model — Search, browse, recommend, remix
an Amazon-esque “people who subscribed to this also subscribed to…”

I would add,


4. One click subscription
The way we do it now is just too geeky. No wonder only 4% of Internet users know what RSS is.

So what will it take to 'feed' them RSS. Either,

1. Wait for Microsoft to fix this - for those who think that the little blue 'e' icon is THE Internet, or,


2. Make it easier than browsing itself, as easy as e-mail. (RSS integration in Outlook is soooo (a))

We'll see!

Hyperwords : Cool Firefox extension

With Hyperwords, all text on the web is interactive (not just the links): select your text and search, lookup, email, translate and so on.

I like it already. One of the reason being, it also includes Clusty as one of the search engines along with Google, Yahoo and Alexa(duh). It has the usual Web 2.0 blabby features- tagging, blogging and all that. And it has some 'more useful' features as well. It is going to be a truly addictive firefox extension. A 'thumbs up' from me.

Just one issue: It doesn't work with textbox, I would love it to.

.NET : Smooth Scrolling Panel

Windows raises ThumbTrack ScrollEvent while dragging Scrollbar. And if your System Visual Effects are optimized for performance, window contents are updated only when scollbar stops ( unlike browser)- that looks ugly and annoying.

To solve this I just substituted all SB_THUMBTRACK messeges with SB_THUMBPOSITION. Not very pretty, but works. The following code is in C#.

public class ScrollPanel : System.Windows.Forms.Panel
{
   private const int WM_HSCROLL = 0x114;
   private const int WM_VSCROLL = 0x115;

   protected override void WndProc (ref Message m)
   {
      if ((m.Msg == WM_HSCROLL || m.Msg == WM_VSCROLL) 
          && (((int)m.WParam & 0xFFFF) == 5))
      {
          // Change SB_THUMBTRACK to SB_THUMBPOSITION
         m.WParam = (IntPtr)(((int)m.WParam & ~0xFFFF) 
                    | 4);
      }
      base.WndProc (ref m);
   }
}