AVINASH 2.0

Random Pearls [I] On WordPress, Blogging, Mobile Web, etc.

Once you complete designing your mobile website using this online tool, you can easily publish it on any free/premium hosting account with FTP access. The tool has pretty powerful features and still, they made it available for free. I recommend it to anybody who either wants to create a powerful site for mobile devices or learn more about standards compliant mobile web design.

Visit W3C Mobile Web Initiative to learn how to design sites for the Mobile Web.

[tags]WordPress, Blogging, Mobile Web, How To[/tags]

c|net’s iPhone Approll: The iPhone Apps Directory (Bookmarks)

c|net’s iPhone Approll is a wonderful place to find reviews and listings of any and all software for the iPhone.

Topics include:

Doesn’t this list include almost all the important categories? ;) So what are you waiting for? Go and try some of the applications that you’ll discover by visiting c|net iPhone Approll, i.e., if you are lucky enough to own an iPhone.

[tags]iPhone, Apple, iPhone Apps[/tags]

SeeqPod – A Mind-blowing, Playable Music Search Engine

SeeqPod is a new kid in the Web 2.0 city, highly focused on the music niche. It’s a music search and recommendation engine for the people who spend hours listening to and discovering new music tracks.

SeeqPod travels the web indexing all the music files it finds, and then offers them for playback direct from the original location. I’m afraid that because of this feature, SeeqPod is gonna teach all the website owners a good lesson who store music files on their domains.

The home page is simple and easy to navigate. SeeqPod has a flash widget on its homepage that displays a sample of current music being indexed by its engine. I gotta say that SeeqPod is all Flashy inside. I enjoyed my 1/2 hr trying its many cool features that I’ll discuss about in this post.

SeeqPod Homepage

Now let me show you something that I found inside the member’s area:

SeeqPod Member’s Area

As I mentioned earlier in this post, the SeeqPod Member’s area is Flash powered but I really liked the way my Firefox browser stayed calm. Normally, Firefox starts acting up if you feed it any heavy Flash-food.

SeeqPod member’s area has two columns. You’ll be using the left column to either search your favorite music tracks or discover new music. The right area hosts audio and video players as well as your music playlists. It seems like you can create unlimited playlists.

If you have an account, you can create, save and share playlists. SeeqPod also allows you to add all music tracks included in the search results to a playlist. Later if you don’t like any music track, you can remove it from your playlists. Cool, eh?

SeeqPod Music Search

SeeqPod Search Results

This ‘Playable Search’ is made possible through biomimetic search & discovery technology, a method that mimics the way the human mind might use context to make and recall associations, an approach which relies on context by finding the hidden relationships in digital content and data.

There are so many options available for music tracks that you might faint! SeeqPod offers numerous options for interacting with a track. You can share your playlists with others. Whenever you want to add the playlist on your blog, just click the ‘Embed’ button available in the right column and SeeqPod will present you the code. You can also buy some tracks on Amazon.

SeeqPod Music Track Options

Add to Playlist

Easy, no?

SeeqPod not only indexes music files, it also tracks music videos hosted on many video sharing sites like YouTube, Veoh, etc.

SeeqPod Video Player Screenshots

Press the video button to watch the music video of any particular track. If video is available for any track, SeeqPod will let you enjoy it.

Videos from two different video sharing sites. You can expect videos from many more video sharing sites.

If that was not enough, SeeqPod also has a SeeqPod Media Search, Recommendation and Discovery Services (SMSRDS) API that offers public access to its technologies. SMSRDS enables third-party developers to easily integrate SeeqPod technologies into social networks, ad networks, and other consumer applications, and improve their user’s experience in new and novel ways.

Now, see this:

SeeqPod Audio Player

I’ve collected 8+ songs in my playlist while I was writing this post. If this site doesn’t get sued for helping the music piracy rate grow, many people will be spending more time downloading music tracks than listening to last.fm radio.

[tags]SeeqPod, Music, Music Discovery, Music Download, Web 2.0[/tags]

Ajax Category Management Plugin for WordPress

It’s been months since I last posted anything about WordPress so my blog really demands at least one WordPress related post. This time, I’m gonna write about WP Cats. Sorry, dog lovers!

Well, don’t get sidetracked because this post is not about any animal. WP Cats is a WordPress plugin that aids in mass category management. If your WordPress powered blog has too many categories, WP Cats will make managing mass categories a breeze. This plugin augments the Manage Posts screen with Ajax controls that allow two-click adding and single-click removing of categories from individual posts. I’ve been using this plugin on this blog for months and find it pretty useful.

See these screenshots:

Your Manage Posts page looks like this after activating the plugin:

You can assign new categories to any post by clicking on the ‘+’ sign:

If a post is tagged with only Uncategorized, this tag will be removed when any other is added and this is something I really love about this plugin.

You can download the plugin from the official WP Cats page.

[tags]Ajax, WordPress, WordPress Plugins[/tags]

Improve Text Readability in FireFox (Anti-Aliasing in Firefox)

I’m writing this post for everybody out there who uses FireFox. If you liked the font Anti-Aliasing in Safari when it was made available on the Windows platform and want to achieve something similar even in Firefox, you’ll find this article useful.

Our Aim:

The main aim of this article is to guide you how to achieve Anti-Aliasing in Firefox and any other Windows application that respects Windows GUI guidelines.

The Required Steps:

First of all, if you already haven’t enabled ClearType font, enable it:

Right Click on your Windows desktop >> Properties >> Appearance >> Effects. In the ‘Effects’ window, there is a checkbox “Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts:”. Make sure that this check box is enabled. Currently, this check box should show ‘Standard’ as the default option. Select ‘ClearType’.

That’s it. Click ‘OK’. Back in the “Display Properties” window, click the ‘Apply’ button. You should notice a change in the way fonts appear on your screen as soon as you apply the new settings. Click ‘OK’.

Now if you launch Firefox and visit any website, you’ll notice a wonderful change in the way your browser renders fonts.

ClearType Off

ClearType Enabled

Notice the difference?

Now, to tweak it even further, you need to download and install the Windows XP Power Toy ClearType Tuner utility. I hope that if you properly tweak the ClearType font settings on your system using this utility, you’ll be able to achieve anti-aliasing for all the applications that run on the Windows platform. Windows 2003 users don’t need to worry because this utility works nicely even on a Windows 2003 powered workstation.

[tags]Readability, Firefox, Windows, ClearType, Tweaks[/tags]

MyBlogLog Mass Messaging Update

This is just a quick post to let my readers know that MyBlogLog has finally heard the voices of all the people who were against MBL’s new community messaging feature and wanted an option to opt-out of community messaging. Now, if you go to your MyBlogLog EDIT PROFILE area, you’ll find the option to opt-in or opt-out of community messages.

If some of you don’t have any idea what I’m writing about, read my previous post on MyBlogLog Community Messaging.

To be honest, I had started to lose hope because they made huge delay in adding an opt-out option even after making a statement like this:

3) We’re not going to make any immediate changes. We released community messaging last night and an hour later there was some pretty vocal criticisms. It’s pretty tempting to just start making changes left and right in an attempt to make things better. But that way lies madness. We’re going to leave it in the wild for a week, let people give us feedback, and make some decisions. And in case you’re creating your posting schedule for next week, we’re going to give more weight to the things people say after living with it for a week than people who see it and respond today (positive or negative).

Anyway, I’m glad that they at least heard our voices. There are still a few things that require heavy modification (e.g. they should make all the community-messages private if they really want to control SPAM) but as far as I’m not getting tons of unsolicited emails, it’s fine with me.

[tags]MyBlogLog[/tags]

StumbleUpon New User Profile (Beta) – It’s Da BOMB!

A wonderful news for every StumbleUpon user! If you already haven’t noticed, StumbleUpon has redesigned its UI. The new UI is damn sexy but you gotta visit this page to wear the new skin. ;) The new look is completely Web 2.0ish.

There are so many new feature additions that I need to spend sometime playing with the new UI before I write a detailed article on the new look and feature additions. A few main additions/changes that I’m able to see right now are:

As I’ve already written that I need to spend more time playing with the new UI design, I’ll soon be posting a more detailed review. Stay tuned.

[tags]StumbleUpon, StumbleUpon New Profile, Web 2.0, StumbleUpon Redesigned[/tags]

Time to Sing The Pownce Song – Invites Available

Yeah, boy! Mr. Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, wrote the Pownce song and now people are singing it. Though I’ve read about Pownce on all the big and small blogs, I’m yet to test how it works for power users of Twitter and similar services.

This week, I’ll be writing a detailed review on Pownce and how it works but before you are able to read the review, I’m giving you a chance to try Pownce. Most of my readers should be aware that currently, Pownce isn’t offering open membership. You can only be able to register if somebody invites you to try Pownce.

I’ve 5 invites available. Leave a comment if you wanna try Pownce. :)

P.S. Eric of Young Go Getter was kind enough to send me an invitation. Thanks, Eric!

[tags]Pownce, Pownce Invites[/tags]

MyBlogLog Mass Messaging – Swallow SPAM or DIE

Surprised by reading the heading of this post? If you are really surprised, visit the official MyBlogLog blog and read their recent announcement about the newly added Community Messaging feature.

Read what they did:

we added one other feature that you will probably love. Due to popular demand, we have made it possible to send messages to your entire community in one quick step.

Yeah, right. Popular demand? Only they know! They completely forgot that their new feature addition (i.e. Mass Messaging in one quick step) is going to create a big trouble for many MBL members who hate SPAM and commercial promotion games. Trouble? But wasn’t this new feature addition supposed to be a life-saver for MBL members? Please be calm! Have some drinks while I explain why this new mass-messaging feature is a big pain in the a**.

MyBlogLog Since January 2007:

1). If you have been a MyBlogLog member since its early days, you know how nicely spammers abused it and how MyBlogLog folks tried to hide their sin by banning some people. Later, Shoemoney got unbanned when his fans/buddies started writing against MyBlogLog. Eric accepted that he screwed up but notice his words.

2). This past March, MyBlogLog team started limiting its members to join only 15 communities and add 15 contacts during any day. Why? According to them, it was the solution to get rid of spammers. Great! Maybe one of my readers will explain how spam and spammers can be controlled by taking this step.

They also announced that they’ll set up a comment approval system where community members can automatically post messages and everyone else’s comments gets queued for approval. Is this feature live yet? I dunno because I still see people posting spam on my MyBlogLog profile page and there is *ZERO* option to block ‘em.

In my opinion, MyBlogLog needs a strict comment moderation system (similar to WordPress comment moderation).

3). Now they release this Mass Messaging feature and say that it was a ‘popular demand’. And let me tell you that this feature allows any MyBlogLog community owner to send promotion messages to all the community members in just a few seconds. So far, I’ve received total 42 messages both in my inbox and over at my MBL profile page. Wanna see an example of these promotion messages? Here you go:

To read more spam messages, you should visit my MyBlogLog profile.

Now if you go to Eric and ask what should you do to stop spam, they’ll suggest to leave the spammer’s community. Another nice way to hide your sin, no? ;-) Learn these tricks from these MBL guys, will come handy someday. :D

When a few people, including me, Meg of Blogpond, Ilker of The Thinking Blog and Andy Beard of Niche Marketing left comments over at the official MyBlogLog blog to let the MBL folks know that their new feature release sucks and is an invitation to spam, they posted another post that was a slap in the face of every MBL member who has joined more than 300 communities.

If you have joined 300 and more MBL communities, it’s time to visit their official blog and ask why didn’t they write in their ToS that everybody who joins more than 300 communities may get insulted in the future. If you don’t write against this Mass Messaging stuff, they might never stop insulting their members.

I say, they built a platform to discover new, interesting blogs and join the communities. By asking to leave communities everytime someone sends a promotion messages, what are you trying to prove, Mr. Eric and the whole MBL team? What are you trying to prove by making statements like this:

4) So far, the majority of criticisms come from people in 300 or more communities. They are worried about the potential for spam and heck, I hear you. I’d be worried too. I’ll leave it for other people to debate why someone would join 5,000 communities and focus instead on pure numbers. The vast majority of our users belong to a couple dozen communities that they have a genuine interest in and wish to take part in. I’m not going to get all Spock on you and talk about the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few (or the one), but it does impact our thinking.

Are you trying to prove that your own creation has become a big trouble for you? Are you trying to prove that you’ve a no-talent team that can never come up with a solid idea that really works?

To the readers who think that I’m the only person who is being red and yellow on this new mass-messaging feature release, you should visit the links provided below:

1). MyBlogLog New Features: The Abusive And The Incomplete – Andy Beard

2). Community Messages on MyBlogLog – A Spammer’s Delight | Blogpond

3). MyBlogLog messaging system and why I think it sucks | Yack Yack

4). Marsh | disassociated.com

5). MyBlogLog’s New Messaging Feature [added - 03:46 PM (IST) GMT +05:30] – Lis says that the newly added messaging feature has to be her least favorite out of the recent MBL feature announcements.

6). New Community Messaging Feature at MyBlogLog – [added on 12:05 AM (IST) GMT +05:30] – Christy of Writer’s Reviews has written a post explaining why she dislikes this new MBL mass messaging feature.

7). Think Twice Before You Launch A New Service – MyBlogLog | Smart Wealthy Rich – [added - 07:26 PM (IST) GMT +05:30] – Mr. Jonathan has written a cool post explaining why MyBlogLog Mass Messaging feature is not good for your health.

8). Read what Mr. Sterling of Chip’s Quips has to say about this Mass Messaging feature. [added - 04:16 PM (IST) GMT +05:30]

9. Does Anyone Like MyBlogLog’s Community Messaging Tool? A wonderful post written by Michael Garrett over at Profy. You should read this post no matter if you like or dislike MyBlogLog’s newly launched community messaging feature. [added - 08:57 PM (IST) GMT +05:30]

10. Snoskred’s Commitment Not To Spam Via MyBlogLog – Yet another intelligent post. [added - 09:02 PM (IST) GMT +05:30]

11. MyBlogLog Community Mass Message SPAM Controversy – In this post, Alex makes some valid and highly strong points. A must read for any MyBlogLog member. [added - 03:38 PM (IST) GMT +05:30]

12. MyBlogLog Is Now Promoting Spam – An article written by Matthew C Keegan of The Article Writer. About the Mass Messaging feature, Matt writes, “What could be a good idea is really a bad one”. [added - 07:19 PM (IST) GMT +05:30]

13 MyBlogLog: Enabling Spammers – A wonderfully written post by Sephy. He explains how the mass messaging feature can be used by scammers. [added 06:38 PM (IST) GMT +05:30] latest addition

More to come. I’ll keep you up-to-date for the next one week. And while you are active on this blog, head over to MyBlogLog Suggestion Board and vote for an option to opt out of community messages. Please. It’s good for every cool MyBlogLog member.

BTW, what do YOU think about this new community messaging feature? Don’t you think that there should be an option to moderate these messages before they make their way to our MyBlogLog profile pages? Please do let me know if the new messaging feature is a life-saver or a pain in the a**!

Update: Shoemoney a.k.a. Jeremy Shoemaker, according to his comment, is still banned. I’ve started digging deeper and will be posting a detailed post on MBL’s SPAM-Rich history. You’ll be able to read this post soon after MyBlogLog team posts its final decision about Mass-Messaging feature over at MyBlogLog blog. Stay tuned.