Just noticed that Google now displays its new look by default. So the new look seems to be officially “the look” now.
Couple of days back, the Google bookmarket mentioned in my previous posting stopped working. I had a feeling at that time that Google was going to launch its new look pretty soon.
Also seems that Google updated its database again sometime back (around Mar 27). Before that, I was getting old search results for some particular search strings. Now the results are showing up fine (read – “what I expected :)” )
Also checked if Google’s new look is appearing in Danvine.com’s Icapture. The new look is appearing there too. More info is here.
MT bookmarklets and Trackback.
Testing Media Temple’s bokmarklet feature. Not sure if it is really that useful. The only advantage seems to be that I need not copy-paste the URL.
TIME.com: Voices On Broadband — Mar. 29, 2004
3/30/2004: It seems I was wrong. MT bookmarkets are in fact very useful, especially for trackbacks. I am still learning though. I am pinging one of the entries of my blogspot blog and in fact, it works – like a charm!
A nice tutorial about Trackback is here.
Google’s New Look
I do not know when Google launched it’s “New Look”. I had read about it in a Webpronews newsletter sometime back. I came across it today on another computer and searched for it on Google (but, of course 😉 ). Here is what I got.
It seems that Google has not made the new look standard. But if you would like to preview it, you can use drag the following bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar, go to Google and click on the bookmark.
toggle google look <- drag this link to your bookmark bar (maybe IE only).
More info is here. Some screenshots are given below.
Google Default Look:
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Google New Look:
| enlarge (111 kb) |
Google vs. Yahoo search results.
Came across this online tool which compares search results in Google vs. Yahoo. It is available here. Came to know about the tool from an article on webpronews. A cached page of the results for the keyword ‘maisnam’ is here. Just realized that the results in the link above are not ‘cached’ because they are generated by a flash sript on their server. So here is a screenshot.
Pretty nice tool. Try it out.
Plone
Installed Plone today on my WinXp Pro machine at home. I was already using port 80 for Sambar and port 81 for IIS. So, I had to use port 82. It is working fine. It seems to be really powerful and has a lot of features. But I am not really sure how useful it will be. The greatest drawback is that you need admin rights to your own machine. For people who just have webspace with hosting companies (and not admin rights), they will not be able to use Plone. I feel that MovableType is much better (I am using it for this blog). Also, you might want to try put PHPNuke.
I might be wrong about Plone though. Right now, I have not figured out a way to keep the contents on a remote server. Comments/ suggestions are welcome.
I know that the UTK-SIS website uses Plone. That’s where I came to know about it.
FeedWrapper.com
FeedWrapper is a website where we can generate code to syndicate multiple RSS feeds into a webpage. I tried it out and the results were quite satisfactory. Here is the syndicated web page that I created. The feature seems pretty cool to me.
RSS Feed Aggregators
Tried out some RSS Feed Aggregators today.
Pluck seems to be good. It gets integrated with IE and automatically detects .xml and .rdf hyperlinks. However, the feed seems to be randomly ordered. The timestamp displayed is the one when the feed was added to the list. So, I have a bunch of feeds which display the same timestamp i.e. 6:13 am. Maybe the ordering will work for future updates.
Also tried out BlogStreet’s Info Aggregator. The nice part of this feature is that you can add rss newsfeeds and these will be delivered to you via an IMAP account. I have set up the account but the feeds have not come in yet.
More about this later.
SMS to Reliance mobile phones.
Update (Sep 2 2004): Since this page is getting lots of hits, I have decided to summarize the information from the comments below.
– SMS to reliance mobile phones can be sent from the internet using www.smscountry.com . But it is a paid service.
– SMS can be sent to reliance mobile phones using the format 91+mobile_number@ri.irisme.net .But the email has to be sent as an email message from a mobile phone. The message will not be delivered if it is sent from a normal email account.
– Direct SMS from US mobile phones to reliance mobile phones in India does not work in most cases.
Original Post (Mar 9 2004): For the past few days, I have trying to figure out a way to send SMS to Reliance mobile phones in India. Finally succeeded today.
SMS can be sent to Reliance mobile phones using the service from SmsCountry. It is a paid service. Outgoing SMS is charged 3.2 cents (Rs 1.49) per SMS. Incoming SMS is free. A useful feature is that message notification can also be received at a specified email id. I have set it up such that the email id is that of my cellphone. So, when someone sends an SMS to me through SmsCountry, it goes to the SmsCountry Inbox and also to my cellphone. So, it is like sending an international SMS from India at local SMS rates.
Rediff Mobile (i.e. upgrading your basic rediffmail account) is also good for sending SMS to mobile phones in India. However it does not work for Reliance mobile phones.
Rediff SMS2India does not work for Reliance mobile phones. In fact, it did not work for most mobile phones I tried to send SMS to.
Strange, but I am able to send SMS from my Cingular mobile phone to Reliance mobile phones in Calcutta but not in Delhi.
CS Home Area Quotas
UTK-CS home areas have quotas from today. I was highly over quota and and had to spend a lot of time backing up by data and deleting the unused files.
Also learnt that the UNIX command for deleting a non-empty folder is
UNIX> \rm -fr dir_name
-f option for force.
-r option for recursive.
Cooked Chole today after many many days.
Perl Script for redirection mapping
Wrote a small Perl script to create mapping of blog archive files from my CS account to my current blog. The mappings have been created because a lot of pages on my old blog are indexed by Google. And I do not want those search results to produce a ‘404 not found’ error.
For example,
http://www.cs.utk.edu/~maisnam/blog/archives/000007.php (old)
will be mapped to:
http://blog.maisnam.com/archives/000007.php (new)
The script is available here for download.
I have modified the script to just suit my current needs (Because I am so lazy! 🙂 ). Right now, I have only about 40 files in my old blog. But the script will work for any number of files in a directory. There are some bugs to sort out though. Guess I will work on it later.