Hearty Surprise

Which one of the following can you identify instantly or remember longer ?

 a.  Hearty Surprise

 b.    

Majority will vote for option b. It is normal tendency to remember pictures/faces than words . Most creatures depends on its eyes for living.

In the virtual world where we identify ourselves only through ip adresses and  psuedo-name, and in the blogosphere where millions of us lurk , it is even more difficult to relate to a person.The only way to capture attention is through avatars or online pictures.

Avatars can be any picture and need not be your photo or your family portrait. It could be funny, cute, beautiful, attractive, sexy , logos or just anything you like.  There are 100 reasons why some people do not put their photos. And since I fall into that category I  dare not comment if it makes better sense and instant bonding with your readers if your face is there (Forget the fact I don’t want to scare people with my fantastic face !!!)

Avatars may also represents our personality. We are judged by how we present our self. Similarly our avatar gives a hint of what we are but this may not be 100% true. So enough of all talk about avatars, let us get into action.

How to display my avatar in other people’s blog ? 

Step 1: There are many plugins available that help to display the picture of the commentator. The one I’ve signed for is gravatar which stands for globally recognized avatar.  All that I need to do is register at gravatar.com and upload my image along with a email id which I normally use when making comments  ie we tie the image with the email id. You may have noticed that in most blogs we are required to provide an email id when submitting comments.

Step 2: To display my image in other people’s blog that blog should support gravatar image display. If it does, then my  picture will be displayed everytime I make a comment.

How to display commentators avatar in our blog?

Step 1 : To accomplish this , it is not mandatary that I should signup with gravatar. But I should install the plugin  in my blog.

Step 2: Some of the Gravatar plugins and its variants are found here. Choose the one which best suits you and follow the instruction to install.

http://site.gravatar.com/site/implement

http://zenpax.com/

http://skippy.net/gravatars

Step 3: Note that  some plugins allow us to display the image in other sections such as recent comments and also  in every posts too. So decide where you want to  see the pictures so we dont flood our blog.

While currently my avatar will be displayed in other blogs I am yet to install this plugin for the benefit of my readers.I’ll update you once I’ve done.  Till then start recognizing me when you see the beautiful heart.

Popularity: 15% [?]

For close to an hour Feedburner let me have a Merry-go-round at my expense. It is open to debate if  that is my ignorance or Feedburner’s user friendly page with no help or hint.

Since RSS feed and Feedburner(the new toy accquired by Google) should be in the inventory of all virtual beings, I decided to incorporate the famous Orange icon for the feeds and give my friends the pleasure of subscribing and reading my posts fresh and hot from the burner. This is my first handshake with feedburner I sincerely followed every step required for the registration.

For those of you wondering what feed is cooked in the burner, here are some pointers

1. Web feed is a method to distribute online content and the technology to do it is called RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication

2. People can subscribe to the feed from their favorite websites/blogs and use  feed readers to check for latest posts and collect the contents for reading

3.  Feed burner help to publicize the content and enable people to subscribe to blogs/websites and also provides statistics to analyze our subscribers.

Registration and Feed Burning

I had already installed and activated the Plugin for Feedburner through the plugin admin panel. Our fireman at www.feedburner.com says “Start FeedBurning Now. Type your feed or blog URL below”, So I follow these steps

1. Type my blog address  http://heartysuprise.com/blog and click on the ‘Next’ Button.

2. This takes me to the 2nd page where the 3 feeds already in my wordpress blog were identified and I was asked to choose one for feedburner.

3. I selected RSS2.0 and clicked ‘Next’.

4. In the registration page, I entered the Feed Title, Feed address(this is where others will find your feed in feedburner.com) along with  username and password for an account with feedburner. Then click on ‘Activate Feed 

Congratulations !!! My feed has been activated. Satisfied with my progress I eagerly explored the home page which displayed my feed information and number of subscribers. Obviously the number of subscribers were 0.

Boss, it is hardly 5 seconds since my feed was burnt and so it is no surprise to see a ‘0′ there , besides I am no champion of blogs that people were queing to subscribe to my post (that I wish to become one is a different story).

I see the famous orange button in front of my feed ‘Hearty Surpise’. It was grey and not orange.Like the blackbox of the cockpit  is orange and not black. Contradiction is a way of life. Traditionally we have been made to believe anything grey is ‘greyed’ out meaning not navigable. But I took an exception and clicked on the grey button. Surprise no 1, I could see my feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/HeartySurprise.

It was a joy to see the feed contents but that lasted barely few minutes until  I started to look out for ways to announce the world  that they can subscribe to my feed.  So I have to get a chicklet or an icon to do the job.

Where is the feedburner chicklet I desperately want to chew ?

Upon reading the net I found that it is in the ‘Publicize’ tab. Now where on earth is that ? There is no hint about that in this page.Clueless I hover on the feed title and it says “Jump to Analyze tab for this feed” and I click on it. Surprise no 2, instead of some analysis/ statistics page I was taken to the login page and that was not expected. The login page only 3 fields, one for username, one for password and the third is a checkbox which says ‘ Remember Password’.  So I start my merry-go-round now:

Round 1    : I typed my user name/ password and press ‘Enter’ key , the page refreshes but I am not taken into Analyze page.
Round 2    : May be I keyed the password wrongly so re-enter and press ‘Enter’ key. Page refreshes but no progress.
Round 3    : Ok , must be I accidently pressed the caps or shift key. So toggle caps lock and type my username/password carefully.  Login page smiles at me again.
Round 4   : Well, I should not hit the ‘Enter’ button but click onthe ‘Login’ button .  Success atlast. Though now I can’t repeat it but I’ve never logged in at the first attempt yet.

Remember I have clicked on the feed name to be taken to the ‘Analyze page’ but ended in login page at Round 1. When logged in now, I was thrown back to the same opening page which showed my feed name and subcriber count as 0 . So I click on it again, now back to the login page.

Round 5-7 : <Start Loop >Retype username/ password. Get rid of  temporary internet files, cache and cookies  <End Loop>. All this time I see the ‘Remember password’ checkbox but don’t use it since I don’t like to save passwords.
Round 8      : Successful login but back again to home page and not Analyze page. Click on feed title again , Loh, back to login page again.
Round 9-13 : Even after 5 round of  cleaning ritual there is no success. My cranky brain thought that may be the password is too lengthy and it is truncated, so I requested for password change.
Round 14     :  Type username/new pwd , login to home page again.Click on stats, back to login page.

Next, like all (un)seasoned users, I check out the forum, not much info about this but only points to the quick reference page where it tells that chicklet is found at ‘Publisize’tab. Now I  began to get impatient.Where on earth is the ‘Publicize’ tab and how to get my feedburner chicklet ?

Round 15     : Finally I give up my pride and click on the ‘Remember Password’ button at the login page and enter my user name and password . Enter home page. Then Click on feed title ‘Hearty Surprise’. Thank God , I was forwarded to the Dashboard  and see 5 tabs Analyze, Optimize, Publicize … but  quickly skip the other tabs and click on ‘Publicize’ and there on the left panel is  the ‘Chicklet Chooser’. That ends my treasure hunt for the orange chicklet.

For the benefit of others who wish to know what more to be done to get the chicklet on the blog 

1. Choose either one of the standard feed icon  or one amount the other aggregators like google,yahoo,newsgator etc available there.

2. Get the html code generated at the bottom of the page.

3. Identify a strategic position on your website for the icon and paste the script in your blog/website templates. 

4. Upload the pages to your host ,refresh and smile if you see your treasure icon.
         

Some of you may say that I should have tried my cookies option of the browser. It is enabled. But I am not sure if there is something else that should be enabled. I am using IE 7 on Win XP. Why not drop a comment and enlighten me?

So now you see the nice orange square on my blog brought after so much effort. Why don’t you subscribe to hear more of my adventures at  Hearty Surprise ? 

Tags: feed burner , feed reader , rss

Popularity: 35% [?]

Do you know Wordpress 2.2 has been released this week , 15-May-07 to be exact ?

I know it is a fast paced world , but my head went dizzy yesterday. I am one of the latest blog wannabe - reading and learning  how to be part of the brain and mouth of the virtual community the honourable ‘BLOG’ .  So I went hunting for information (not really , it is an information overload on the internet) on blog tools, gadgets, niche topics and finally Wordpress.

Thus I finally settled down with wordpress 2.1.3 which was only 4 months ‘young’ when I was playing with it last weekend . Convinced and happy about the experience I was about to rollout , and ‘bang’ comes this news.  Wordpress 2.2 (getz) is released with new user features and widget capability.   It is named in honour of the saxophonist ‘Stan Getz’.

God, I thought 4 months was new, but now I have someing newer. So what do you think I did ? Yes, I started my blog on Wordpress 2.2. I just couldn’t wait to hear the problems and issues of this release, just jump in and manage as it comes.   

Here is the roadmap from Wordpress team

With such a roadmap , I just have to go along with the wind !!!

Popularity: 9% [?]