What is RSS? RSS is a political party – no, wait. I’m not thinking about that RSS. I am talking about the good RSS here – that is Really Simple Syndication. Or Rich Site Summary. Or RDF Site Summary. Yes, that one acronym have four(that I am aware of. I am sure that there is many more) different full forms. They don’t call it ‘Really Simple’ for nothing.

The Party(not the happy kind)

I always liked RSS – we have been good friends as kids. Yes, RSS is the name of an Indian Political Party(IPP) – but I cannot hold that against RSS. Its not its fault that some politicians took its name as well. For my readers who are not Indians(Really? I got international readers? I thought it was just me and my mother), RSS(Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) is a famous party in Indian. You must have at least heard of one of its members – Nathuram Godse. Yes, he is the guy who shot Mahatma Gandhi. And he was a member of RSS. To be absolutely fair, he left RSS before he shot Gandhi. So, in summary, RSS is a famous Indian Political Party. And it is not the RSS we are talking about.

Anyway, let me reiterate – RSS is not RSS. I mean, RSS the web technology is not RSS the Indian Political Party. I just wanted to make sure you got the message – I don’t want you to make the same mistake I made. The other day, I saw a parade with people holding RSS flags. And since I preferred RSS over the Atom format, I tried to join in. Big mistake. I really don’t want to talk about what happened next.

Why this Post?

I’m trying to increase my subscriber count. Since this is a non-technical blog, most of you readers don’t know what a feed is. No, it is not something that you eat. What I am trying to say is you don’t know what RSS is. No, not the political party. What about Atom? No, I am not talking about a very small particle. Why can’t the people choose unique name for these? Like ‘mugabo’. Or ‘franious’. Its not that hard – as a matter of fact, its down right easy. I can do it all day long. See – ‘magoti’, ‘neoor’, ‘mella’, ‘loral’ and so on. But when they choose names, it had to be some word that’s already in existence. Why? To make me work harder at explaining what it is. Its a conspiracy, I tell you.

But I digress – back to the point at hand – RSS. RSS is a way to simplify collection of information on the web. But I am not going to explain it more – the guys at Common Craft can do a much better job than I can ever hope to do on my own…

In conclusion, subscribe to my feed…

http://feeds.feedburner.com/BinnyvaBlog

Or if you still don’t know what RSS is, you can subscribe using your email address…

I’ll be checking my RSS stats tomorrow. I expect to see a spike in the numbers – from 2(me and my mother) to 3(me, mother and you).

As with any other guy with a finger on the shutter button of a camera, I too get delusions about my artistic talent. Put a camera in my hand, and suddenly I think I am the best photographer on the planet. But the fact remains that my artistic skills are well hidden within the recesses of my mind. Very well hidden. If you need any proof, I designed this site. One anyone sees that site, they will understand the truth about my artistic capabilities – that I have none. By the way if you are a graphic designer, don’t visit that link – they have an adverse reaction to my designs. I have seen one designer drive nails into his eyes to get that image out of his head. So before you decide to visit that site, remember – once you see something, there is no way to unsee it.

The only person to say something nice about my design was, not surprisingly, my mother. When she saw the site in question, she said something to the effect of “Ooh, green. I like green.”. Diplomatic, my mother is.

Back to the point at hand – me and a camera. Its a Canon PowerShot A460 – my partner in crime. Its a good camera for its price range. But then again, what do I know – I have only had experience with this camera.

Like many other talentless hacks with cameras, I also want to inflict my “beautiful” photos on the unsuspecting public. And flickr provides the perfect opportunity for this. Lo and behold my flickr page. Its has only a few images right now – but there will be more.

I would encourage leaving comments. I have heard a lot of comments about my works in real life – I am waiting for a few comments from the virtual side. Mainly because few of the real life comments were positive. “Atrocities against art” – one of my viewers called it. But then again, what does those uncultured ruffians know about photography?

Cochin

Recently, I tried to upload an image to flickr – but flickr managed to kill it totally. So I thought that I will upload it to this site…

Click on the thumbnail(it shows only a small part of the image) to see the whole image – but be warned – its a 2 MB image – it will take some time to be downloaded. But its worth the wait – especially if you live in Cochin.

This is an example of how two wrongs make a right. My photography skills are in the negative – as is my skills with a graphic editing software. But put both together, like I did, and you get something positive. So, -10x-10 = +100. I love maths – especially now that I don’t have to study it anymore.

For those who are curious, the image was created by clicking 10 photos and manually stitching it together using GIMP.

Fine print: About the copyright for this image, its in Attributions-Share Alike Creative Commens license. So, if you want it, feel free to take the image, modify it, use it on your site, sell it, etc. But please, don’t hot link – its a 2 MB file, and I don’t want my servers stressed out because of it.

Blogcamp

So, why suddenly, the intrest in Cochin landscape? I was always interested in Cochin – I just did not have a digital camera earlier. I have been a citizen of Cochin all my life. Citizen of Cochin – is there a better word for that? Cochiner? Kochies? No – not good enough. Yes – I got it – Kochen^*. Citizens of Cochin(plural) will be Kochens. Its got a good ring to it.

Anyway, I have a renewed love for Cochin and all the Kochens in it now – I have to leave it for a day to attend Blogcamp Kerala. I am homesick already. When I reach the boat, I will be too busy being seasick to be homesick.

So, in short, I will be at Blogcamp Kerala – if any among you are attending as well, be sure to say Hi. I like to meet the people I torment.

By the way, the blogcamp is in a House boat. I like the idea. I think its to make sure that the audience don’t leave. I hear they will release piranhas into the water once they start. Piranhas and Crocodiles – crocodiles add a native touch to the arrangement. Thoughtful.

* Note: For the non malayalies in the audience, sorry about this. Its a Bi-Lingual Pun that cannot be translated easily. Only malayalies with a firm understanding of the native slang will get the joke.

Binny VA is an expert freelance programmer from Cochin. He currently runs a lot of blogs related to technology and programming details of which you can find at his homepage. He is also an editor at DMOZ directory (TCL/TK). We thank Binny for sparing time for this interview.

Technology/programming blogs by Binny VA

The other bloggers interviewed so far are…

• Kerala Blog Roll by Manoj M Prabhakaran
• Nishant’s blog by Nishant Hariharan

As I said in the last post, I now have six sites. But having six sites is not enough – it must have content. To pressurize myself to create the content, I have created another site – BinnyVA.com.

BinnyVA basically aggregates all my feeds and shows them in a calendar. The idea is to use this calendar as a Seinfeld Calendar. Don’t know what a Seinfeld Calendar is? Here is an except…

… get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.

… for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. “After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”

The difference is that my calendar is virtual and public.

All I have to do is ‘Don’t break the chain‘. Make sure that each day has at least one post in it. Its going well for the last 2 months.

A word of warning before you use this method for your sites. Although the quantity of post goes up, the quality may come down. If you have not created a post by 11 at night, you will be forced to write something – and that something is often below par. It happened to me more than once.

It goes without saying that my calendar has another benefit – Google Juice. Each and every post on all my sites have at least one link from an external site. That can’t be bad.

On a related note, there is a combined feed of all my feeds – powered by Yahoo Pipes.

If you have already subscribed to my Bin-Blog feed, I apologize for this post – this will be redundant for you. For those who don’t read my other blog, I have 2 things to say to you…

• I have a new blog/site – LinDesk(Linux on the Desktop)
• Subscribe to Bin-Blog site too

LinDesk is created so that I don’t have to dump all my Linux articles on Bin-Blog. What, you didn’t know I use Linux? How long have you been reading this blog?

Anyway, now I have six blogs…

• Bin-Blog
• Bin-Co
• BinnyVA
• OpenJS
• LinDesk
• Txt

/me thinks I am heading for a burnout.

One thing to consider here is that I am the single author – there are no other writers, no guest writers(yet). Yes, I am a freelancer, so I have enough time to write the content – but still having six sites puts some pressure on you.

What do you think? How many blogs should a guy have? One? Two? Multitudes?

Problogger Darren Rose thinks that having many blogs is a Bad Thing – do you agree?

If I subscribe to just one feed that will be the del.icio.us Popular Feed. That would give you an idea about what is happening on the net at this time. If any post gets promoted to the frontpage on Digg, that will show up here. If another post got a lot of attention on Reddit, it will appear on this feed.

Before you subscribe to this a word of warning – this feed has a lot of updates. Around 20 to 50 per day. That will easily overwhelm you. But there is an easy way to overcome this problem – Firefox. Just subscribe to the feed using the Live Bookmark feature of Firefox.

This is how I did it…

• Open the del.icio.us feed – http://del.icio.us/rss/
• Subscribe to it using Firefox’s Live Bookmark feature.
• Move the bookmark to the ‘Personal Toolbar Folder’
• Now just click the bookmark link see all the links.

I did not go through all the entries – but I went through many. My favorite one was Top 5 Youtube Movies that will Change Your Life!

You have to see ‘Double Slit Experiment‘ and the ‘Visualising the Tenth Dimension‘ videos – its will blow your mind!

For the last few days my feed reader was filled with Top 5 post – I will miss them. Some links from my feed reader…

• Top 5 ways to display your RSS Feed Subscription Link on your blog
• Top 5 ways to love your wife
• Top 5 Image Hosting Services
• Desktop Software’s that keep me productive
• Top 5 Linux distributions
• Top 5 ways to increase comments on your blog

See all the submissions for this project.

Since I have a lot of WordPress sites, it will be more easier to manage if I use the same version everywhere.

I will let you know after the upgrade is over.

Update: Done! Let me know if you run into any issues

I get this in my Bin-Co site. It has a feedback form that uses Ajax to post the comments. It will function even if javascript is turned off(Graceful Degradation). If a bot is using this form, it would use the non ajax part – while most human(with the exception of people with very old browsers) will use the ajax version of the script.

Now about the spam messages I am getting. I am getting these spam comments for a while now – there will be a slight change in the message and the email id – but you know it is from the same source. These are the things that I noticed were odd about them…

• They do not have any links in it
• It uses Ajax version to post the comments
• All the comments have an AOL email address – like laura@aol.com – the id changes – but the email provider is always aol.com.
• The comment talks about a link – but no links is present(eg “What do you think about my sites?”)

What really baffled me is the fact that it is using the Ajax version of the script to post the comment – I did not think that there are bots capable of such complicated processing. Maybe it is riding on a browser engine. Also no links are there – how could the poster benefit for these?

An example of this type of spam…

Really good site, and a pleasant suprise[sic]… Good Luck!!! What do you think about my sites?

Have you had any experience with this kind of spam?

The good news is that it was an accident – a stupid accident, by the way, but still just an accident. I really had trouble believing our government would intentionally block thousands of blogs without a very pressing reason. Unfortunately, many Indian bloggers have jumped to the conclusion that it is the case. Many were of the opinion that government banned blogs because they were used by terrorists. Basic FUD.

The current problem in the Indian blogsphere is the procedure adopted by DoT to block sites – they can say that some sites must be blocked and the ISPs have to do it – there is no controlling procedure for this. That means that they can block, say, DesiPundit and not give any reason for why it was blocked. This scares a lot of folks – and with good reason.

In most cases, censorship on the internet is counter-productive. Case in point – the ‘blog ban’ we just witnessed. This ban was aimed at blocking 17 sites(list given below). However due to the publicity the ban received, the banned sites are receiving hundreds of times their normal traffic. It is mind-numbingly easy to get around the current form of censorship – all you have to do is use an open proxy to access the site you want to visit. All that the government does is annoy the surfer a bit. Now China’s model of censorship is better. I am not saying that China’s censorship is a good thing – just examining it from a practical point of view. China uses firewall based censoring – this is very easy to go around. But they then take it to another level – they control the search engines – so people cannot search for some phases like ‘democracy’,'freedom of speech’ etc. Even more powerful form of censorship they use is the terror approach – if someone publishes something they don’t like the government puts them in jail. Huge human rights violation – but it works(atleast better just banning the sites).

Anyway, now it is over. It united many people. Some even managed to find humor in it. We got mentions from many big sites like Digg, Slashdot, Wired, Boing Boing and more. I am sure we got some new visitors due to the ban – even though they lost the existing traffic for the banned period.