A New Look

I know it has been more than 15 months since I last posted anything in my blog. In fact, my family themselves were wondering whether I am maintaining this blog anymore or not. I don’t know why, but something has now woken up within me and I have decided I will put up  a minimum of one post per week. Yea, I know this is a very heavy commitment, but let’s see if I can keep up with it.

To start of with this, I decided to change the looks of the blog. The previous version was kinda dull (IMO).

Not only that, in the name of experimentation with code, I had made massive changes to the default templates that I literally lost what was changed and what wasn’t. I also messed up the commenting system. With new Facebook Commenting plugins, I decided, I wanted to enable it, but cos of my code changes, I didnt know how to do it. If you do not know how to correct it, change it – followed this principle and BINGO… the new theme helped me to get back my Facebook comments.

Anyways, let us see how I try to keep up with my latest challenge. This will not be like Matt Cutt’s 30-day challenge. This will be Deepak’s Weekly Challenge.

 

 

Newspaper ads and its relevance today

Was checking out todays edition of ‘ The Hindu’ and noticed a quarter-page ad for Emerson. There were two things funny about the ad:

1. The ad was about saving business in Brazil. What is the point of putting up an ad in an Indian daily about Brazil? We are in a country where we are not even bothered about own natural resources. Does the company think we will jump in to save Brazil???

2. Was happy when I saw a bar-code in the ad. Immediately fired up my Android phone’s bar-code reader and scanned it. It took me to a page which didn’t open. It had a server error in the mobile module of the site:
http://www.emerson.com/nbdmobile/defaultnbdb.aspx

A company that spends such huge money in a newspaper ad, shouldn’t they have checked everything. I feel this is money down the drain…

A clean Blog – looks better

I have linked my Twitter account to my blog and whenever I tweet, it shows up as a post here. Earlier I thought it is cool as I can now update the blog through Twitter. However, I realized that the posts aren’t under my control and I have to log in here to modify the post-titles and stuff like that.

And I felt that the home page was always cluttered. Today, I took the decision to remove Twitter updates from my homepage. But I had a problem. These tweets are under a separate category. I don’t wanna unlink them. I just don’t want those tweets in my Home Page. After searching through WordPress docs, I came across this wonderful plugin -“Advanced Category Excluder“.

All I did was install the plugin, then in the plugin settings, removed off the ‘twitter’ category from showing up on my homepage…

Presto…. a clean home page …

🙂

How can you not enter your website here?

I was playing around with my new android phone & as usual was inside the Android marketplace. I noticed Calvin’s app there and went inside to install it.

Once done with the installation, I noticed that there is no website listed under the developer’s details. This app has been downloaded more than 250k times.

What a waste of screenplace real-estate. The developer had left the website as the default one, which is example.com. Am thinking how much traffic us lost to his potential website. Hmm

I think I will drop him a line about this. Let’s see how this goes.

P.s. this post entirely written using my new HTC desire.