Friday, March 30, 2007

Synopsis, Magma lawsuit comes to an end!

The lawsuit between Magma and Synopsis has finally ended. It was a long battle which was being closely watched my EDA industry. With this, one can hope the two major companies would move forward focusing their energy on consumers. More details of the news is here.

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Cartoon from toondoo

In Cricket pose

Address changed again !

My domain address has changed again! But the bad news is: after changing, I am still finding it difficult to redirect my site visitors to come here. Also, there would be some old links, which I would be removing and it may take more time than I would prefer.

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

yahoo mail announced its API!

Yahoo mail today announced api for their platform. Only yesterday, they had announced that they would be allowing infinite space for their users. They are already the leader in web-mail service but the interest in this service was on a decline ever since gmail came. With these announcements, yahoo is simply showing they are pretty serious about webmail service. Api announcement is sure to create a lot of buzz and we can hope see a lot of development here to integrate yahoo mail platform with other services. One example of its yahoo mail mashup with flickr is here. In a few days, we would definitely see some other interesting applications!

google notebook has an upgrade!

Google notebook is an application from google to essentially jot down all that you get while browsing the web. I use it extensively to note down the sites and some data that I find while surfing. It is not as good as other competing products but still I trust google for developing its applications over time. Thankfully they have updated its interface making it easy to sort as well as add new notes! The new interface it slick and is a lot more usable. I hope in future they will work towards integrating it well with other google products!

ToonDoo - create comic strips on web!

ToonDoo is a new site which allows users to create cartoon strips very easily. This is yet another web product from Zoho. Here is the TechCrunch coverage . Zoho is pretty serious about developing web-based products. They have some very good ones which stand out against similar products from Google. But with this new application, they have shown that they want to create products for large variety of users. ToonDoo works fairly well, you can easily integrate your own picture with the body of a cartoon :) , easily create comic strips with a lot of choice! Although having some speed issues, this product will definitely capture another group of audience for Zoho.

Monday, March 26, 2007

Twitthis - a widget to announce your site/blog among twitter users!

twitthis is a new application/widget for your blog/web-site for users to announce it among their community. This just reinforces the way twitter is growing! After the recent blog hype that twitter created, such widgets would only sustain it!


Thursday, March 22, 2007

Tumblr: A great way integrating all your blogs, flickr, del.icio.us tags!!

Tumblr is great way of maintaining your blogs. Here you can write your own posts, or import posts from other blogs, flickr, del.icio.us , or other places. All in all, great way to combine all your blogs, flickr, public del.icio.us tags etc. Even if you don't post regularly on your blogs, it always seeks updates from all the sources you have allowed and keeps itself updated. It is in a primitive stage where it does allow users to play with its interface as much as normal blogging sites allow you but just one feature of integrating several accounts brings it apart. Even if you don't have much to write you can post something here. Here is my tumblr site: http://tumblr.kumar-anurag.com/
You can configure tumblr to point it to your site, as I have done for mine. So, that's an added advantage!
So, whether I post on http://blog.kumar-anurag.com or http://picture.kumar-anurag.com or http://www.flickr.com/photos/anruagkumar , it imports it all and shows them on http://tumblr.kumar-anurag.com

Friday, March 16, 2007

Spotback: A nice widget for blogs!

Widgets are a great way to add third party content to your site. Spotback is a new one in this arena which works great for rating the posts. I had added the widget some time back and ever since it has been working great for me! It allows users to rate your site and tag them to use in future. Moreover, they can easily read posts which have been rated high by viewing the recommendations or the ones recommended by the site owner. You can also view the tagged items. Simply a lot of good nice features in a small widget which adds a lot of interactivity for the end users! It is still in beta, so one can hope to see more features coming with time!

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Google chat for personalized homepage!

Google has launched a widget for chatting from personalized homepage. This is a great feature since such widgets can also be plugged into blogs and personal websites. It would go a long way in making g-chat all the more popular. Also, while chatting I can see a calling link. Although this feature is not working for me now, I hope something like this is coming in future. Does this mean google would make happen allowing talking from the browser itself?

Refresh tag on Google Reader!

It was always a pain to refresh the "subscriptions/inbox" in Google Reader. Thankfully they have now included a refresh link to update the links being shown. Thats a good improvement and shows that they are constantly working on enhancing the user experience and are listening to their users!!

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Code insertion in a blog!

Here is the code which can be used in blogger to publish a piece of code.
Simply paste your code before </div> ofcourse after removing "insert your code here!".

<div style="width: 400px; height: 400px; background-color: 000000; color: ffffff; overflow: auto; padding: 4px;">
insert your code here!
</div>


Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Customize gmail with greasemonkey !

Greasemonkey is powerful way of customizing web-pages in your own way. You can create your own scripts on top of greasemonkey to do wonderful things with the web-pages. userscripts.org provides an online database of such scripts. For testing, I have brought some changes in the already available script for customizing gmail. The script is here. Using this script, you can give a whole new look to gmail. You may try it if you have greasemonkey already installed on your firefox!! A number of other scripts are available on userscripts.org

Friday, March 09, 2007

site24x7 : A site tracking website from Zoho !

http://site24x7.com is another product from Zoho which has come out of beta. The product checks how your site is performing, its response time, changes in the look of the site etc. It gives some good reports. This is a good application which can work help webmasters well along with traditional site tracking applications.  I have configured my blog to work with this product and would update this post about its performance. Although the concept is useful, the site has unnecessary and clumsy javascript where a more simple look was easily possible.


Update March 11: The configuration had not went well. The default 15min. is pinging not available to free users. I have again configured it and will see how it performs!

Create a Favicon for your blog!



As you would notice, my blog now displays my picture in the title bar (not visible in old versions of Internet explorer), shown in this post. Such images are called Favicons. To create your own image in the title bar (favicon), here is what you can do:

Upload .ico and .png formats of the image you what to show up in title bar to some website.
I have uploaded them here:
http://favatar.myfavatar.com/anurag.png
http://favatar.myfavatar.com/anurag.ico

Copy paste the following code between head and /head in the template of your blog:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=df64h8xp_82hb4tqd


To do it easily, use http://www.myfavatar.com !!

Thursday, March 08, 2007

Translate your blog-post!!

I have added a new feature to the side bar to translate the web-page to a language of your choice. You can easily do it by adding the following code:

Code has been moved here!

Don't forget to replace my web-page with yours :)
Hope it works well! When your audience is global, you should ensure that they view the site in a language of their comfort!




via: chen

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Tumblr making quick improvements!

A few days back I gave a look into tumblr. Initially, it did not impress me and I rejected it as yet another blogging site. But as I see, it is making quick updates. I started using it when I saw them allowing configure tumblr for my domain. Here it is! Now, they have added another feature to import RSS from your other blogs, flickr, or del.icio.us . This makes the page more lively and tumblr a good destination for blogging small/casual posts. I hope to use it in future!!

Monday, March 05, 2007

Feedblendr: another feed blending/piping site!

Feedblendr is another feed blending site, something similar to Yahoo pipes. Although there are some good reviews for the site, I could not find anything which could distinguish them from other players in the market.

Friday, March 02, 2007

Online notebooks revisited!

A number of companies have been working on developing online notebook. Notably, Google notebook is a good application for joting down data found while browsing. Zoho has also announced a notebook. Although not released, it's features look promising. Now, a new website skrbl has also come up with something similar. It does come with some difference -- you can scribble on the editable page. Unless they collaborate with some major web player, their applicability looks limited.

Results of my name search !

I have always been curious about the way search results show my name. I was always disappointed the results of google. I never found their results showing me. Interestingly, yahoo fairs better on this count. search for www.anurag.com shows links to my blog and mybloglog profile very prominently. Now, that is not fair since they are giving a lot of priority to their services like myBlogLog, but in this case, I need not worry :)

Taking it easy!


DSCN6553
Originally uploaded by Anurag Kumar.

Having some rest !

Rishikesh


DSCN6579
Originally uploaded by Anurag Kumar.

Ready for rafting !

Rishikesh


DSCN6560
Originally uploaded by Anurag Kumar.

Here are some pics from my Rishikesh trip last weekend...