I was searching for some good online backup solutions to store my documents, ever since I found that DocSyncer was dead. I came across a wonderful service called DropBox, which I am currently testing to find out whether it will suit my requirements or not.
DropBox is currently in private beta and I have some invites left. If you need an invite just drop a comment here with your email address. Thanks Jigar for the invites.
The nice folks at WPCandy have come up with a great idea to dedicate a day to thank everyone behind WordPress and also to encourage WordPress fans to blog about WordPress and share their favorite tips and tricks.
Today (July 1st ) is known as the unofficial WordPress day, where fans from all over the world can thank the people behind WordPress and also can express their love for WordPress. They are also running an event and have some nice giveaways. All you have to do is to let everyone know why you love WordPress by leaving a comment at WPCandy or write a blog post about WordPress.
So instead of writing a post explaining why and how I love WordPress (which I have already done), I thought of sharing some information which will be useful for people who are interested in WordPress. So here we go.. 
Sometime ago Weblog Tools Collection published a list of Twitter users whom you can follow to get updated information about WordPress.
Nowdays I use FriendFeed more than Twitter (I have to confess this sometime). So I tried to find their corresponding FriendFeed usernames so that I can subscribe to them. The following is the list with their real names first, followed by their Twitter user names and then followed by their FriendFeed usernames.
The following are some of my additions to the list which was not originally published by Weblog Tools Collection.
I will try to keep the list updated and let me know if you feel I need to add someone else to this list. Till then happy FriendFeeding and my heart felt thanks to Matt and the team for an excellent product without which this site may never exist
DocSyncer, the service that allowed users to sync their documents with Google Docs have shut down their doors since they couldn’t find a viable business model.
The way in which they have shut down has shocked me more than the fact that they have shut down the service. 
Don’t get me wrong. I am not here to criticize or accuse them for shutting down. After all they were still in beta, (which means, use at your own risk). But I was rather annoyed that they didn’t even bother to send an email to the users, so that they can be prepared. It seems that they have posted a message in their website, but the users will visit the website only when they have to recover some documents which were already synced. The majority of the work was done by the desktop client and it is still running in my system tray, without giving any clue that the service was already shutdown.
I was one of the early adopters of the service and was so pleased with the service that I even wrote some tutorials about it. I have some critical documents which I update on daily basics. I wanted a simple solution to backup these documents and retrieve them based on date. DocSyncer was the perfect solution for me. I installed and pointed it to the directory in which I kept these documents and the client automatically backed up the documents to my Google Docs account.
A couple of day’s back I wanted to retrieve the document and tried to access the DocSyncer website but found that it was down. After a quick search in Google, I found that DocSyncer was dead. Last time I received an email from them was on April 22nd, when they announced pro account. This is not the first time I was affected because a service which I was using shutdown its doors, but I would have really appreciated if they could have sent a simple email saying that the service is going to be shut down.
Anyways, thank you Cliff Shaw and DocSyncer team for an excellent service which I was using for the past couple of months and my best wishes for your next startup.
If anyone from DocSyncer is reading this, then can you please let me know whether it is possible to opensource DocSyncer, at least the client alone?
Meanwhile my search for an online backup system continues and I am planning to have a look at Windows Mesh and Dropbox. If anyone knows a better solution, then do let me know.
It’s time to clean my camera, which has been idle for quite some time now. I am going to take part in the Chennai Photowalk on June 15th.
This is the eighth edition of the Chennai Photowalk which is going to be on both June 15th and 22nd. We will start at Panagal Park in T.Nagar and proceed in an easterly direction down Thyagaraya road, and end the walk at Residency towers. The initiative is by Chandrachoodan Gopalakrishnan and you can get more information from his blog. You can also browse photos of the previous photowalks in Flickr.
For me, this is the first time to be part of a photowalk and so I am really excited. If you are in Chennai and ready to sacrifice a Sunday evening, then please do come. You don’t need to have an expensive camera; there are people who are going to shoot using their mobile cameras itself.
Update: You can find the photos which I took during the PhotoWalk in Flickr. There are lot of teddies out there
Yvui, my 17-year-old-wannabe-geek cousin has achieved something really admirable. He has become the first Indian to be on the Techmeme Leaderboard.
His stat’s blog - thestatbot which he started last month is currently at position 76 in the Techmeme Leaderboard (as I am writing this blog entry) and has already been mentioned by TechCrunch. It is a remarkable achievement for a blog which is less than 2 months old. Congrats Yuvi and all the best with thestatbot.
Today WordPress (the blogging software which I love) has turned 5. I have been running this site on WordPress for nearly two and a half years now. Thanks to Matt and the other developers for a wonderful product.
PS: Frequent readers of my blog would have noticed that I am not very active these days; things are going fast in my personal life and the posting frequency will soon be normal.
If you are following the articles at Slicehost, then you may notice that PickledOnion uses nano as the default editor. I somehow like vi more than nano (not ready for a debate ) and was looking for a way to make vi the default config editor. After some googling, I found how to do it.
I am writing it down here so that all I have to remember is that I just need to search my blog if I need to do it again in future.
Okay the command you have to use is (I am assuming that you are not logged in as root, which is the recommended approach)
sudo update-alternatives --config editor
And then press the number corresponding to the editor which you want to use. Below is the screenshot of how it looked in my slice.
Like 2006 and 2007, I am going to participate in this year’s CSS Naked day too. This year the date has been changed to April 9th.
If you are wondering what is CSS Naked day, then this is the definition from the official site
The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good ‘ol play on words. It’s time to show off your <body>.
If even you want to participate then register your site in the official site and then strip the CSS from your site. If you are on WordPress then you can use this plugin.
Happy stripping
The wait is finally over. The most waited version of WordPress, Version 2.5 is out. WordPress 2.5 was in the making for nearly 6 months now and it has lot of new features and most importantly, changes to the admin screen. You can also view the screencast discussing the new admin pages from the WordPress development blog.
I am going to update my installation now and this blog might appear clunky while I am doing that. I have installed WordPress using svn so it is just a single shell command for me to update. Thanks to Joost, I converted my installation into a svn installation when WordPress 2.2.2 was released.
By the way this will be my last post using the old admin screens, I will post my experience with the new admin screens in a couple of days. Meanwhile if you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, then I highly recommend you to update to WordPress 2.5. Happy upgrading
Recently I got some MP3 audio books from a magazine CD. I wanted to upload them to my iPod so that I can listen to them during my compute to office. But then I found that these were in MP3 format and not in iPod audio book format.
The main feature of the iPod audio book format is that the iPod can remember the last listening position and also we can adjust the reading speed in case, which is not possible if it is in MP3 format.
I started looking for a program to convert MP3 files to iPod audio book format and found an excellent program MP3 to iPod Audio Book Converter. It is free, opensource and the best part is that it works.
Download the program and install it. Once installed start the program from start menu and then click the Add button.
Select the MP3 files and then click the Open button. (You can also press shift to select multiple files)
Arrange the files in the correct order and then click the Start Conversion button. You can also edit the tags if you want.
The program will ask to specify the file name and once given it will start the conversion.
Once the program finishes you can add the file to iTunes and then sync it with iPod. Happy Listening
You can download MP3 to iPod Audio Book Converter from its download page.
You can also get some free Audio book from AudioBooksForFree.com
Personal website, blog and play ground of Sudar Muthu, a web and WordPress developer from Chennai, India. Read more about me >>
