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Year End Stats for 2007 (Graphs)

Published Jan 2, 2008 | In API's/Mashup, WordPress

When I published my year end stats, little did I know that numbers alone doesn’t matter much, unless they are presented in an easily-to understand manner.

So here I am representing the same numbers but in a much more understandable manner, with some support from the excellent Google Chart API, which I learned during pipesCamp.

Number of posts

You could see that the number of posts has almost dropped by 40% in 2007. There were 64 posts in 2006 where as only 38 in 2007. One reason for this is that lot of unexpected things happened in my personal life which took me away from the computer and the other reason is that I got busy and free time became a rare commodity for me. So this is an area where I should improve.

Number of comments

Again, as with the number of posts, the number of comments was also less by around 40%. There were 394 comments in 2006 but only 220 in 2007. This also includes my own comments; maybe I should represent my comments separately.

Average number of characters in posts

This graph clearly shows that average number of characters in my posts. Even though I have written fewer posts in 2007, the average number of characters has increased, which is good (which also means that I have become very talkative 😉 ). This is very good and is also motivating. In 2008 I should keep up the length of the posts and at the same time should also try to increase their number.

Total number of characters in posts

This graph clearly shows that even though I have written fewer posts, I have almost written the same amount of characters in 2007 when compared with 2006, which is again motivating.

I have really become addicted to stats now and will try to dig more deep into my blog to unearth other valuable information when I get some time. This explains why everybody was soo fascinated by Yuvi’s cool graphs.

Meanwhile you can also publish your yearend stats by using my Year End Stats WordPress Plugin. So what does your yearend stats speak about your blogging habit? Please leave a link to your yearend stats in the comments so that I can have a look at it.

PS: I would really love to see how Yuvi has scaled up this year. May be Yuvi, do it when you find time in between your exams.

Posted in API's/Mashup, WordPress | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Year End Stats for 2007

Published Jan 1, 2008 | In WordPress

Publishing year end stats seems to be the new fashion and so here are the year end stats for my blog.

  • Total number of posts in 2007: 38 Posts
  • Total number of comments in 2007: 220 comments
  • Average length of posts in 2007: 3048.03 Letters
  • Total length of all posts in 2007: 115825 Letters

By the way this is very low when compared to my previous year (2006) stats

  • Total number of posts in 2006: 64 Posts
  • Total number of comments in 2006: 394 Comments
  • Average length of posts in 2006: 1813.16 Letters
  • Total length of all posts in 2006: 116042 Letters

I guess it is right time that I start writing more on my blog. So here goes my first resolution for the year 2008, write more in my blog. 🙂

I have also created a WordPress Plugin called WP Year End stats which you can use to get stats for your blog.

Wish you all a happy new year 🙂

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Embedding Flickr Photos in WordPress

Published Dec 30, 2007 | In Events/Conferences, WordPress

I found some great photos on Flickr which were taken during pipesCamp, which I attended last week. I tried to embed them in this blog, but couldn’t figure out how to do it. I have to admit that I am not a Flickr power user. I have been trying for almost an hour now and so I thought of seeking the help of my readers.

Can anyone please let me know how to get the HTML code from Flickr to embed individual photos in other websites? I don’t want to hotlink directly to the picture but want to get the HTML code like youtube. I know picasa provides this option. I could even get hold of a screenshot of the HTML embed code in Flickr, but the author is discussing about a different issue.

So any Flickr power user out there who can help me?

Meanwhile you can check out the pipesCamp photos directly from Flickr.

Posted in Events/Conferences, WordPress | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Back from pipesCamp

Published Dec 24, 2007 | In API's/Mashup, Events/Conferences

As planned, I attended pipesCamp yesterday and it was really worth the time spent. As planned, I took Yuvi with me and he started to click his camera on the way itself, and he got some 35 – 40 snaps before we could reach there. (Yuvi, I know that your computer has crashed, but I am waiting for your photos to appear in Flickr as soon as possible. 😉 )

I meet lot of cool people there and true to the unconference style we had a couple of presentations about Yahoo Pipes (and some slides from the official Yahoo pipes team itself) and then some open discussions about pipes and blogging in general.

Then towards the end of the day we had “hackday” kind of competition and we were given 60 minutes to design/code a pipe and then 3 minutes to demonstrate the demo. Myself, Yuvi and Harish got together and created a pipe called “Ego Search“. (Harish, thanks for the laptop 🙂 )

Ego Search is a pipe for finding out how popular you are on the web, based on search results from popular search engines. The popularity chart is drawn based on the number of search results that point to your blog or domain name for your name. And if your name is say ‘xyz’, a 100 point popularity rating on the graph says that you are the most populous ‘xyz’ that the search engine knows. You can try out the pipe in this url http://pipes.yahoo.com/sudar/egosearch. We also had some great pipes like MTC Mashup created by other cool people.

On the whole the first ever pipesCamp went very well. I will post links to photos and videos once they are available.

By the way anyone planning for the first ever WordCamp in India?

Posted in API's/Mashup, Events/Conferences | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

pipesCamp

Published Dec 21, 2007 | In Events/Conferences

The guys behind hover.in (more about it later) are organizing a one day unconference event called pipesCamp for Yahoo Pipes hackers and hobbyists in Chennai. Yahoo Pipes is an excellent and useful tool from Yahoo.

I am going to save some typing by copy/pasting information about Pipes from the Pipes home page.

Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.

Like Unix pipes, simple commands can be combined together to create output that meets your needs:

  • combine many feeds into one, then sort, filter and translate it.
  • geocode your favorite feeds and browse the items on an interactive map.
  • power widgets/badges on your web site.
  • grab the output of any Pipes as RSS, JSON, KML, and other formats.

The event is taking place on December 23 and you can find more information about the event from its home page. There seems to be lot of interesting things planed for the event including a hackday type event.

So if you are Chennai then make sure that you don’t miss it. The event is taking place at

Hotel Shan Royal
85, Poonamallee High Road,
Near Koyambedu Circle, Chennai , India

And here is the place on Google Maps.

I am planning to take Yuvi with me, so you are sure to get some interesting photographs too 🙂

Happy Piping.

Posted in Events/Conferences | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

WordPress and MySQL character encoding

Published Dec 18, 2007 | In Database Programming, WordPress

Recently I moved my WordPress blog to a new server. I took the dump of the old database and imported it into the new MySQL server. Everything was fine except that I stated getting some strange characters in my posts. For instance I was getting (Nov — 3rd — 2007) instead of (Nov – 3rd – 2007).

It took me lot of research and googling to find the solution and so I thought of sharing it here so that it would be helpful for others who might face the same problem.

First I raised a support request in WordPress, but didn’t get a reply. After some googling, I found that it was due to wrong character set in my new MySQL server. Instead of having utf8 as the character set the MySQL database server was running in the default latin1 character set.

I changed the character set in the MySQL my.conf file and also in the wp-config.php file of WordPress and re imported the tables. Even this didn’t solve my problem. Later I found that there were certain characters in my wp-posts table which were encoded in latin1 character set even though the table is set to utf8 character set.

I then exported the table using a tool called Heidisql (which is by the way an excellent alternative to the command line MySQL client). I then opened the sql file in a text editor and changed all instances of latin1 to utf8 (basically a find/replace). I saved the file and imported the tables again and the junk characters are gone. 🙂

So the lesson learned the harder way, KEEP EVERYTHING IN UTF-8, ABSOLUTELY EVERYWHERE, FROM DAY ONE. You’ll be glad you did some day.

Posted in Database Programming, WordPress | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

3:11 – My Photo

Published Nov 12, 2007 | In Photography

As promised, here is the photo which I took as part of the 3:11 PM event.

Sudar's 3:11 PM Photo

You can also view the file at smugmug

Description of the Photo

I took this photo from the terrace of my home in Old Washermen Pet (Chennai – 21). I have been watching these brothers for some time. The younger brother was trying to fly a kite, while the older one was teasing and discouraging him. The younger one was trying for more than an hour in the torching sun and finally succeeded. Next time I needed that extra push, I am sure to view this photo. 😉

I wished I could record the whole incident as a video.

Posted in Photography | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

3:11 PM – Defining a moment in Chennai

Published Nov 3, 2007 | In Photography

Note: If you are from Chennai and interested in photography please proceed. Others might not be interested in this post.

A unique photography event is talking place in Chennai to capture one instant of this metropolitan forever. It is called 3:11 PM and this is what you have to do. When the clock strikes 3:11 PM today (Nov – 3rd – 2007), stop whatever you are doing, and click, shoot, snap, capture or photograph that moment, just hold that one instant frozen in a picture and send it to the 3:11PM team. There are no requisites to do this, other than that you be in Chennai, whether it be a fancy SLR or a VGA mobile camera, get the clearest, cleanest shot you can that will suggest what you were doing or what was going on near you, in our lovely city, at that one instant. This is not a competition and so there is not going to be a winner or a looser. It is an event and all are just participants.

If that suits your passion, go ahead synchronize your watch, and be ready for the moment and snap it. Once you have taken the photo attach a note, in fewer than 50 words, with your name and where you were when you clicked that snap and upload it using this procedure.

I have to go to Santhome today for a small work and I guess I will be in near the Marina Beach at that time. You can see me in action with my camera.

Thanks Aswin for the info

PS: Planning to take Yuvi with me. 🙂

Posted in Photography | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Get the current time for any city using Google

Published Oct 9, 2007 | In Google/Yahoo

In addition to fetching fresh results and following cricket scores, you can also now also get the current time for any city by just searching in Google.

All you have to do is just type time followed by the city name

Eg: time Chennai

Google Time Query

You can also search by typing the time zone

Eg: time central

Google Time Query

Next time when I have to send a meeting request to my clients (who are in US), I can save a few seconds by doing a Google search rather than changing the timezone in my computer clock to find their current time.

More details in Google friend’s newsletter. Thanks Phil for finding this.

You can also check out my Google Search syntax complete tutorial or the latest additions to Google Search Syntax.

Posted in Google/Yahoo | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

My new Computer

Published Sep 24, 2007 | In Gadgets

I brought a new computer as planned after my recent computer crash.

Thanks guys for the recommendation and here is the configuration of my new computer. (If you are weak hearted then stop reading. 😉 Yuvi is already envious 🙂 )

Ok so here it goes

Processor

Intel core 2 quad Q6600 2.4 Ghz, 8 MB L2 Cache, 1066 Mhz FSB. This is the latest one which is available in Chennai.

Motherboard

I wanted one with support for DDR3 RAM so that I can upgrade my RAM to DDR3 once it is available in Chennai. In P35 chipset only P5KC supports it. After much search I got hold of one. But later I found it to be faulty and so finally I settled for P5k-VM with only DDR2 support.

RAM

Since DDR3 RAM is not available in Chennai, I didn’t have any other option apart from DDR2. I had 4 slots in my motherboard, so went in for 4 GB of DDR2 RAM (800 MHz)

Graphics Card

Since I am not an avid gamer I settled in for a cheap GeForce graphics card. Model number is GF 8500GT PCI with 512 MB RAM. The only criteria which I looked for was DirectX10 support.

Monitor

I went in for a ViewSonic 19 inch wide screen monitor. The wide screen allows me to view 2 windows simultaneously without shrinking them.

DVD writer

I didn’t have much option for DVD writer and I went in for the standard 20X Liteon DVD writer.

Hard Disk – HDD

Here comes the big one. Can you guess what is the storage capacity of my computer? I have crossed the GB limit. It is 1.11 TB. Yes Terra Bytes. 😉

I bought one 500 GB Hitachi HDD and two Western Digital 320 GB HDD’s. I am going to use one 320 GB HDD as a dedicated backup drive. More details later. 🙂

So far it’s been a thrilling experience and even Vista seems to be running fast. Below is my Windows Experience Index (Max 5.9).

  • Processor: 5.9
  • Memory (RAM): 5.6
  • Graphics: 4.6
  • Gaming Graphics: 5.1
  • Primary Hard disk: 5.7

I am yet to get used to Vista’s interface and I am busy installing/customizing software’s for my computer. I am yet to get the data from my old computer and so things are little haphazard now. I will share with you my experience with my computer once things have settled a bit.

PS: Do you know the name of the cabinet? It is called Sivaji. 😉 I couldn’t control laughing after hearing the name. (You need to be in Chennai to understand this)

Posted in Gadgets | Tagged , , | 12 Comments