This post should not be considered as just a mere rant. This actually works for job interviews and in my experience of the few that I have attended, it has certainly got the positive attention of the recruiter. So, how does it work? By definition, blogging can be at different levels – personal – which is focussed on personal likes/dislikes etc and hence, is already driven by some niche. The other end of blogging is – professional blogging – which is primarily done by people who earn their bread and butter by means of blogging. Such are writers who majorly write about specific areas – such as  Technology, Blogging, Making Money Online, Entertainment, Television, Pop culture etc. They are the next generation of press reporting, and arguably pose a threat to the traditional news reporting. Such is the impact that News reporters and the likes have resorted to Blogging online. So, coming back to the question is how does Blogging add value to one’s resume?

Let’s deal the sections separately. First up – personal blogging.

Personal blogging is about finding individuality and one’s own personal interests and chronicling them. It can be a mere note about a day’s random event or a personal comment on a political event. A recruiter is interested in the specific skillset that a candidate brings to the table. But in addition to that, recruiters are also interested to see the all-round personality of a candidate. Blogging as a hobby infers a person’s ease at expressing oneself, command over language and written communication skills. If he/she is a podcaster or a vlogger, the communication skill goes beyond just the writing board. A keen interest over a particular topic also reflects personality and knowledge. These are indeed plus points which go in favour of the candidate.

Next up - Professional Blogging.

Pro-Bloggers, as we like to call ‘em, are often well connected in their niche networks via social network groups and hence, know more of their business closely. For e.g. tech bloggers participate in various events, expos and discussions online and offline to interact with their peers and seniors. Also, they market and advertise their own small venture and have a crystal clear view of their business model.

The question is: Where and why would a Pro-Blogger go for a job?

Most pro-bloggers, because of the fact that they earn their living via blogging, are offered jobs in publications or their online versions because of their body of work and also because of their contacts, and the audience that the blogging medium targets which traditional media cannot.

I hope this post has been helpful and has inspired you to churn out some good posts, and in case you still do not have a blog, seriously, go start one. Let us know when you do.

Cheerio!

Image courtesy: JustinBess

It seems like a moment of triumph. Seems like what started as a silly hobby, and having fought many obstructions and other temptations and having not given up after almost 3 years of blogging, has finally paid off. I got my first interview published on an e-mag called Pakspectator.

It is an online magazine encompassing different topics and they feature interviews of writers, passionate bloggers, webmasters et al. I believe that I belong to the second kind. They contacted me and I couldn’t help say anything but yes. Very soon, they replied me with a long list of questionnaire which included questions on my blogging experience etc.

An excerpt:-

Is there anyone from your past that once told you you couldn’t write?

Oh yes many, including my English teacher back at school. I never gave standard answers which were marks friendly.

If you could pick a travel destination, anywhere in the world, with no worries about how it’s paid for – what would your top 3 choices be?

New York- Big Apple

Cupertino – Home of Apple

Tokyo – Home of Jap-Anime

How bloggers can benefit from blogs financially?

There are ways to generate income through blogs. Though I do not blog professionally, and haven’t made a reasonable income from my blogs, there are bloggers who make their entire living from it, and even make a killing. I am still searching for the answer to this question myself.

Is it true that who has a successful blog has an awful lot of time on their hands?

It might be true, and might not be as well. I blog whenever I can. It does not come across as a hindrance to my work (may be the other way around is true). But I do know of people who have very tight schedules but also regularly maintain their blogs which are successful as well.

Leaving aside the bandwagon of celebs (read Bollywood celebs) who cash in on their celeb status to catapult their online presence, there are in fact people with demanding careers who also blog and do a commendable job at it too.

You can read the full interview here. I feel so elated and a bit like a snob as well. Good going Sujoy!!!

Cheers!!

It has been a good 6 months since the launch of Techkeyla. And well, I was very happy with the O2-20 Theme that I had for this one. But it has been here since day one. And well, the itch for a change in the theme had been troubling me for quite some time. It actually began when I saw the Underscore theme of Upstart Blogger. I loved the simplicity of the Theme, the Underscore in the Title, and the clean white background. But then, I had issues with its Post Width and its sidebar size. And then, I saw Chris Pearson’s Cutline 1.3 -3 Column Split. Instantly liked the whole simple layout, white blackground and well, the rotating header image. The theme is widget ready.But needed some changes to be done. The original theme can be downloaded here. ( Download Link ) And well, did the following changes.

Edited the Header Images. Created a few customised ones with GIMP. Front Page: Kept the theme of my previous Techkeyla intact for the Front Page header. It shows the 3 pillars of what TECHNOLOGY is today. Apple – Google -Microsoft. Moving on to the Single Post page, I included the gadgets that rule the web space today. From the iPhone to the 360, PS3, Wii, Guitar Hero et al. Now if you were to browse through a category, archive or a tag page,  the header would then show a mix and mash of images ranging from the Safari Browser to Mac OS X Leopard, to Ubuntu, Firefox, Opera Browser and well, the Android (I couldn’t find the picture of the logo) and finally the GIMP logo (through which I made all the images).

Changed the 404 page. Check it out by going to

http://techkeyla.com/<anything gibberish>.

You are in for a nice drink on the house. . Made some more changes with addition of Adsense, the MyBlogLog widget, and now I have a few more things to figure out. Firstly, the archive page as I have had a lot of articles by now (not many by the normal blogger standard) and well I am yet to figure out what’s the deal with Sitemap. Have to include the RSS (although I believe there are still not enuff people who subscribe to my site, but then the RSS icon is a mandatory thing these days). Apart from that I am pretty much ready with the version 2.0 of Techkeyla.

Tell me if you like it. Next post: Things to consider while choosing a theme and how you make it suit your needs. And there are a lot of sites which can actually help you with a lot of resources. From widgets, plugins, themes and simple code changes which can make your blog go from being a normal plain jane to a Marilyn Monroe (not Manson). Shall include the links, till then, lets drink to the new Techkeyla. CHEERS!!

Sprout is an online content creating tool which enables users to create sophisticated multimedia web content on the fly in a very quick and easy way. It is as easy as probably MS Paint. Just drag and drop. Sprout is for free and the best part is you can just go ahead and create your sprout without signing up for an account. The signing up does come into the picture when you want to save your sprout, publish and manage it. We’ll cover all those steps here in this post. But first, let’s build some demo sprouts and check out how cool they are. Go to the official website here, and click on Get Started. You will get the option of just go ahead and start building your sprout, or sign up for an account. I’ll first create a few sprouts just for the testing purposes.

So, now you’ll be on a page where there are a few templates to choose from. And well, you can choose to start from a blank slate as well. You can preview each template to choose one suitable to your tastes or just go to a blank slate if you experiment with all the options. It is all in flash, so do remember that you would require a Flash plugin to your browser (Flash 9 is recommended on the website). And yes, it supports only IE 7 and above, Firefox 2.0+, Safari 3.x +. Cool, so we have given a title to the project, and it is now at Step -1: Creation of the Project. I have chosen a blank slate and am building a sample sprout for this post titled Techkeyla (surprise!!).First, you can choose a suitable size of the page. The options available are just more than enough and you can choose from standard Youtube video sizes to Adsense head banner sizes to even full pages of 960X800. I have chosen a Youtube video size as I am including it in the post itself. Now you can add some really cool stuff. Right from Google Charts to Videos to Slideshows. And even polls and News Feeds.I’ll add a slideshow and the images that I have used are from my website itself. You can really go nuts with the options that are available, and creating flash based widgets have never been so much fun and easy.

Next up, is step 2: Saving and then Publishing. So, I guess, it’s time to create an account. And now that it is done, I can go ahead and publish my Sprout entitled-Techkeyla . It’s just another flash slideshow, but you all know it is so much more than that. Hope you like the slideshow which is a journey of my past posts in images.

And yes, these Sprouts can be published across many platforms viz. Facebook, Orkut,Bebo, Blogger, MySpace ,you get it. I’m really looking forward to creating some really cool ones . Hope you enjoy sprouting as well.

There has been a notifier above my dashboard for quite some time. Initially, I had just ignored it. But it was quite some time now and I thought, a Sunday afternoon would be good to upgrade to the latest WordPress version. I had a 2.3 version running and had plans of upgrading to the latest 2.5 version. So, the first thing I did was search on the instructions. Apparently I didn’t need to search for it. I clicked the link to download the new version from the WordPress page and it redirected me to a page, with links on the official guide to Upgrade. It even contained links to fully install the new version or upgrade to the new version. I’ll be telling you the instructions in as detailed steps as possible, but first, let’s first consider why it is necessary at all to take the pain of upgrading.

Firstly, I heard Blog indexing websites like Technorati are leaving behind sites which have older WordPress versions. Apart from that, there is the obvious reason of trying out something spanking new and be a member of the New League of the New WordPress users. And yes, the new Dashboard is a welcome change. Although, there are some flaws and shortcomings which I’ll discuss eventually. So, anyway here are the steps to upgrade to WordPress 2.5.

Step 1: Ensure that you have backed up your WordPress DB. How to do that? Check out my post on it here and the things to remember while backing up post. Keep it ready, just in case anything goes wrong. If possible keep a back-up of your wp-content folder. This is very necessary as you might need it in case you deleted it by mistake. Also keep a copy of the wp-config.php file. This contains the information to connect to your DB. This shouldn’t be a problem as the new WordPress folder will have a wp-config-sample.php file. Anyway, so you should have all your back-ups ready.

Step 2: Download the new version of WordPress 2.5. Extract the Zip or the GZ file to your local machine. The WordPress Folder now has the same directory structure as it stands in your Root directory. Ensure that the Zip has extracted properly, and that the wp-admin and wp-includes directories are proper. These are the only directories you’ll need to copy/overwrite on your current root directory to Upgrade your wordpress.

Step 3: Go to your plugins console on your WordPress Dashboard. De-Activate your plugins. This is done as some plugins might not work with the new version. Once the upgrade is done, you can activate them one by one.

Step 4: Use an FTP Client (I use Filezilla) or if you want to go the old school way of using shell commands, you can do that too. Delete the existing wp-admin and the wp-includes directory in your server. No second thoughts. It will be just fine.

Step 5: Upload the new wp-admin and wp-includes directory from local machine. Once it is done, hit the URL of your website/blog to check if it is functioning properly. However, your DB isn’t updated yet to the new version, so your blog might look a bit chaotic or funny, depending upon the theme.

Step 6: Upgrade your WordPress DB. How do you do that? Just go to your Dashboard. Or hitting the URL of your Admin console. (e.g. http://xyz.com/wp-admin.php) It will now show you a page that your WordPress DB hasn’t been upgraded and there’s a link to do so. Hit the link, give it a second and voila, your DB is upgraded. Typically, you’ll be logged out. Login to your Admin console again, and welcome to the “ALL NEW WORDPRESS 2.5 DASHBOARD”.

So that is it. Congratulations! You’ve just upgraded to the 2.5 Version. I hope that your transition was as smooth as mine. Peace!

I use a very few of those Facebook apps…NOT. I actually use quite a lot of them. Right from the different walls, to the Addicted to TV Series , and Flixsters and iLike etc etc. But I was glued to BlogFriends due to the wonderful functionality of letting your Blogposts known to your Facebook pals. But of late, I hadn’t seen any updates of my posts on my page. I wondered what was wrong. The latest post that was showing on BlogFriends was a post that was written on 28th March -
Saturday Night at Bangalore circa March 2008. This had already got on my nerves, when I saw even Flog Blog wasn’t updating my RSS feeds. I went to the app page of BlogFriends to find out that they have decided to let it all go DOWN. As in forever. The notification available on the app page reads:

Blog Friends is closing
Dear Blog Friend, We’re very sorry to announce that Blog Friends is to close down.

When i-together raised some seed funding back in the summer of 2007, Benjie, Jof and I fully anticipated taking Blog Friends onto great things, and we worked as hard as we could to make that happen.

Although it appears simple on the surface, Blog Friends is actually an unusually complex and resource-intensive application to maintain and grow. It also is pretty original in the way it combines your extended, fuzzy social network and your interests as filters for your blog recommendation River.

Because Blog Friends was so original and quite ambitious, we had no way of projecting accurately just how many users we could welcome before our solution began to creak. We hoped for 100,000. It turned out that 20,000 was closer to the mark. And now that we have around 27,000 users signed up, Blog Friends has been brought pretty much to its knees (as you will have noticed from the increasing frequency of the error messages you may have been seeing).

For the full screenshot go here.

Yes, I ran into troubled water yet again. My webmaster decided to shift my server to a new one, and hence had to go through the process of backing up my blogs, and getting them up again from scratch. It is indeed a pain, at least it was for me. I made a whole list of blunders and I screwed up badly. The result, my blog went offline for a whole 3 days. How frustrating it is to find your blog’s main page set to a white background displaying “Error in establishing database connection”. So this is what you should actually do when you backup your WordPress, and get ready for setting your blog on a new server.

Things to remember:

Have your wp-content folder in wordpress backed up , including your uploads, images, plugins and themes. I forgot to do it, and my last minute panic was a definite qualifier for the YouTube humor Video Awards. If you DON’t do this, what you’ll end up seeing is your lovely blog set to the default WordPress Classic theme. Trust me, it HURTS.

(I am not mentioning the other details involved with shifting of the DNS or namespaces etc. My assumption is, that you have your URL ready and directed to the server where you are about to setup your already existing blog.)

So, here we go. First, as mentioned in my previous post, have your backup database ready. Ensure that it has been properly downloaded and that the file isn’t corrupt. Try opening the SQL file in a text editor like Notepad or Wordpad and you should be able to read the contents. The SQL contains your DB Name. Remember this is the DB name which you are gonna use.Fine, so we have the server ready. Upload your WordPress folder to your desired directory. (This process includes changing the name of your config.php filename to wp-config.php and also mentioning the Username/Password used to access the DB, as well as the DB name mentioned in the SQL) Now go to your CPanel and go to MySQL Databases. You should find it under the Databases tab. Now create the Database with the exact name as mentioned in your SQL File. Create the user ID with the name mentioned in your config.php file and give it the same password.
P.S. Don’t forget to associate the user to the given DB , or else the “Error in establishing DB connection” error message will keep haunting you. (Experience speaks.)
So, Username/Password set and the DB is created. Next up is phpMyAdmin.
Go to phpMyAdmin and hit on the Import link. Browse to select your backup SQL file and hit Go.
Have patience and wait for the process to be successfully completed. Once this is done. Your blog is almost ready to hit the road.
Try hitting your URL now and you should be able to see your website in the classic wordpress template(which everyone hates).

Now it’s time to upload your uploads, themes, plugins and images if any to the wp-content folder. Have some more patience and give some time for the changes to start showing. Especially if the uploaded themes aren’t showing, try logging out from the FTP browser and your wordpress admin console and logging in again.

With all of that done properly, I think your blog should be back in the Game in no time.
Some kicks for my technical ignorance would be welcome.
P.S. I forgot to backup my logos in the FIND ME HERE section. Am trying to make it all up again.

It is quite essential to regularly back up your blog data. More so when you are hit with a bad weather in your servers. That is when you see the whole world crumbling down. Imagine me, when my servers crashed and I had no access to the c-panel and neither could I ftp to the servers as well. And yes, I was without a single back up of my more than 30 posts on Techkeyla, and another 50 I believe on OneKnightStands. That’s when you actually start re-reading your posts, in a state of hallucination that is. So to avoid such levels of trauma in the blogging world, back up is a must.

Now there are quite a bit of plugins in WordPress which offer similar features and facilities. I found this one to be quite simple to use, very fast and with all the necessary tools needed. It is called , shockingly WordPress backup, and the link is here. http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup/

How to install: Download the zp file from going to the link here. Extract the zip file to a local folder and have the php file uploaded in your plugins folder of your wordpress folder. It should be inside :wp-content.
Now once it is uploaded, go to your WordPress admin console and go to the plugins tab. Hit Activate to activate the plugin and voila, job is done, but not yet. Next is to actually back up your DB. So, go to Manage–> Backup.
It should now show you a page with Backup options as to where you want to back up. The options are – On the server in a folder, download it to your local machine, or email it to a specified address.
Besides these, you can also set the Scheduled Backup. Most of us have daily posts, so an hourly backup doesn’t make much sense.A weekly backup also might face the risk of running behind a couple of posts. To be noted: You need to give write permissions for wp-content folder to enable Back Up files to be saved.
P.S. Do a manual back up once in a while, just to make sure that your data doesn’t vanish if your auto-backups fail.

Tip of the Day: If you have a Gmail ID, which I believe all of us do, set the filter for the given mails sent as backup attachments and you’ll have an arranged inbox of your backups. And the backup files are in a gun zipped SQL, and have convenient naming conventions and their date of backup can be easily identified . Happy Blogging!

Thanks to Brajeshwar for all the help in backing up my blogs.
Pics Courtesy:Jbiljr