Link Diary: March’ 09

This centrestage link is from my friend, Hypermom, who wrote about women driving in Bangalore.

Manofroma has written a very informative post about a beautiful young woman whose body was found in the coffin in Appian Way. Nothing new about perhaps finding a body in coffin, only her body was as fresh as it must be 15 centuries earlier. Manofroma invites an ‘Indian perspective’ on the same.

March 23 was death anniversary of our martyrs Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev. Jai Hind: Proud to be an Indian reminded us on their blog. This is their last year’s detailed post.

For humor, here is a clip called ‘If Three Stooges were Makers‘ from Daily Cup of Tech. Go on visit his post to laugh.

Meanwhile, Vikas has started another blog on river rafting in Rishikesh, hop over his blog to read his adventures in detail. It was a nostalgic experience for me. 🙂

Finally, polling for MovieManiax Awards is still on. Vote now.

Results for MovieManiax Awards will be announced on 7th April.

P.S: This is the shortest link dairy post I have ever done.

July: Link Diary

Let’s first begin with my post on Its A Free World, I have few questions about CFLs that I would love to have answered from you. There are three questions in this tiny post (tiny from my standards :P) .

I started looking up tumblr blogs for a friend, I ended up with few nice cartoon blogs. Here is one: My Life in a Cube and Garfield minus Garfield. There’s more you can look up here.

cartoon via My Life in a Cube

I then hopped to Postsecret, and was intrigued to see new postcards there. Here are two new:

                                         Postcards via Postsecret

List of Search Engines and April Fool Hoaxes

Yesterday I wrote about Annual Day without Google. I faired okay without Google as I used Searchmash and Sputtr that do throw up results from both Google and Yahoo.

I am linking here two search engine compilations that I came across on web after posting my list of search engines:

• List of top 100 search engines courtesy Alt search engines web site. It is sister site of ReadWriteWeb.
• Country specific list of search engines

Now a list of April Fool hoaxes:

• Top 100 April Fool hoaxes
• Google, G-day prank
• Virgle, prank by Google and Branson in search of adventure in open-source planet 😉
• Google prank from last year: Gmail paper
• Job posting at Google Copernicus center
• Google Romantic Beta

Thanks, Harsha, for the google prank links! 🙂

20 Search Engines That You Can Use

I wrote in my personal resolutions post that I will do some link blogging, that is share some knowledge about links that I know about. Here is first link blogging post about various search engines that you can use. If you have your own experiences to share about any of these search engines, your views are welcome. 🙂

Alternative Search Engines to Google

Search Mash

A compact sear engine that will bring you results from all: blogs, videos, music…with a single click. You can play the video right there in the sidebar of your window by clicking the video thumbnail.

Search Crystal

You can compare the results of your search from various search engines like Google, Yahoo, flickr, msn, ask in the same window. You can add this as a widget in your blog, web site. It is available on Facebook as well.

Sputtr

Search everything in one place: Google, Snap, yahoo, stumbleupon, del.icio.us, Twitter, Flickr, Newsvine, Amazon, ebay, Cnet, imdb, and so on. I am tired, can not possibly list all of them together. Make this your homepage.

Quintura

It is a visual search engine, you can deepen your search using the tags that appear as word cloud. There is also a version available for kids.

How to Reuse Your Laptop to Make Money

I came across this interesting video courtesy Recycling Supermarket. This video by Hank Green at ecogeek.org is doing several rounds on the Internet. It has some innovative ideas how you can safely disassemble your laptop, reuse some parts, and yet sell some to ebay for money.

I am really not sure if I could pull it off, but if someone could they would not only protect environment from fumes emitted from battery, but also earn some money and yet help a non-privileged to have a low-cost laptop courtesy their laptop manufacturer.

Here is the video:

Reuse your laptop

Also read:
Recycle mobile phones for children in need
McDonalds waste to power buildings

Web 2.0: What’s That?

In my zeal to educate myself, I found out about Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 is neither complicated nor technical. Web 2.0 is about collaboration (read wikis, blog), syndication (read RSS, feeds) and mashups (read flickr and maps). It is inexpensive way of sharing information such as, say google spreadsheets. The advantage is that it enables the user, as they say the information flow is “bottom-up.”

You may read more about it here.

Check out this interesting video to explain the differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.

Web 2.0

P.S: I can’t believe I added a technology tab in my blog!

I am Technologically Challenged

I am tired of being technology-ignorant. I am not even talking about complicated programming. I do not even have knowledge of HTML, I just about know some basic tags for bold, italic, paragraph, list…that’s it.

Now I have never aspired to learn such technical things before, but it is causing me few problems in blogging and web-surfing.

My tag cloud from wordpress does not show all the tags I have in my post. Other day Ramesh pointed out that he was not able to click the Pakistan tag in the tag cloud on this page. I had no clue how to correct it. I got rid of it.

I have no idea how I can make StumbleUpon work for me. I have seen people using it. Ashish has a column called “My stumbles” in his blog. I use del.icio.us, why do I need stumble?

Other day Ish posted an entry titled “Social Bookmarks for WordPress.com Users.” I downloaded the files he provided at the end of this post. Though I thought understood how it works after reading his post, later I didn’t know how to use the files he provided. Those files are still lying unused in my laptop.

Not only this, I like to list the categories/tags on the right hand panel of my blog. I could not seem to find an option for this in the last theme. Or is it just me, other day I realized it took me entire month to remove the restriction that allowed only wordpress members to comment in my blog.

I do not how RSS feed works. I have tried to read about it, somehow I don’t know how to subscribe to it. Recently, it has been easier to subscribe since I started using Google reader.

This video from Common Craft helped me understand the underlying concepts of RSS.

RSS in Plain English

But I still do not know if anyone can subscribe RSS feed for my blog or how to manage RSS feed for my blog? Do I need to do something about it?

We can now include scripts in wordpress, how? I do not know practically how to use it for my benefit. Most people include “Digg it” logo on their post, thought I want to, I can not due to my ignorance. Some bloggers include colorful text boxes to present quoted text. Me? I have no idea how to do it.

Now, there is so much hoopla about Web 2.0. What is it? I do not even want to google and read technical nitty-gritties. There is something in me that simply refuses to dwell into technical nitty gritty unless explained with creatively as done by Common Craft. May I find a way to deal with this.