If you know anything about web-design, at all, then that word would strike fear into your heart the way being caught with a Britney Spears CD would strike fear into the heart of a self-professed fan of “real” or “good” music.

Basically, Myspace was probably among the first ever social networking sites, which allowed members to make profiles and post comments on each others’ pages. It also, unfortunately, allowed people to customize their pages, which resulted in pages that were bloated, had shiny, flashy text in weird fonts, crazy backgrounds that took forever to download, and pages that were so full of random crap that they occasionally ended up crashing browsers and massively increasing loading times.

In retaliation (not only to Myspace, but to the “let’s spice up our websites by putting random, shiny and unnecessary things” attitude), some smartass in 1996 decided to make this page. It is the complete opposite of everything mentioned before.

In my humble opinion, it sucks*.

It is not remotely witty, barely funny and rather mild in its attack on the Myspace school of web-design. The only good thing about it is the strength of retaliation in terms of web-design. Plain white background: check; simple black, left-aligned text: check; no images, no link, no nothing: check; BORING: check.

Times have changed. We now surf a web that has become a lot more conscious of how it looks. People are paying crazy amounts of money to have pleasant web-sites, and while there is still a lot of unnecessary content seeping into websites every now and then, for the most part, websites are now a lot more internet-friendly in terms of design, content and loading times. However, one thing should be noticed. If you go check out that page, and follow the link at the very end, you will see how popular it is by the number of times it has been translated into different languages. I think it goes to show the extent to which flashy websites were irritating people once upon a time.

*well, ok, it doesn’t suck, but it’s not as good as the hype surrounding it.

This post was originally published on my blog, Thought Overflow | For poetry and more of my writing, check out my website at Gurdit.com.

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However, I must say that I’m beginning to get bored with the current layout of the site. I’ve also been thinking that I should put my writing on my own site rather than leave it all on Storiesmania. I’ve been thinking of ways of implementing this, and I think I’ve got a good enough idea now (I just spent the last OB-3 class thinking about it!).

Therefore, I can announce, with pleasure and pride, that over the summer, if all goes well, I will be redesigning the site, automating major portions of it and facilitating the ability to post my writing, and allowing readers to post comments, and possibly even to rate the writing out of 5 stars.

This post was originally published on my blog, Thought Overflow | For poetry and more of my writing, check out my website at Gurdit.com.

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While I will not attempt to try and decipher its lyrics for you, “Garden” is a song with absolutely amazing guitar riffs and Eddie Vedder’s voice is more than perfect for that song. When it starts playing, and your heart is already happy, it feels like this song makes you want to be in love.

And that’s exactly how I felt.

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PS: On a thoroughly unrelated note, I have decided to change my blog’s tag-line from “Dedicated to the Invisible Audience” to “Music | Life | Love | …and the lack thereof”. Cheers.

This post was originally published on my blog, Thought Overflow | For poetry and more of my writing, check out my website at Gurdit.com.

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1. Ads were not always pretty.
2. Depending on the content, unwanted ads could pop-up.
3. I used to log on every day to my Adsense account and see if I had made any money that day or that week, and many disappointing weeks went by when I made just a few measly cents a week.
4. I realized that the content of my site was more important to me. The content and the design. Ads and pure design could not go hand in hand.

I’ve never really regretted my decision to take off ads, although I admit I have been tempted to put them back on. I don’t know, I just might in the future. But ultimately, what satisfies me is the fact that I know I am not blogging for ads. I am blogging because I like to write and I am writing what I want without being concerned about what keywords I’m using or what my Page Rank is or whether my site is efficiently optimized for search engines. And that is what gives me freedom and pleasure in blogging.

Today, I came across a software that goes against everything that blogging means to me.

Behold WP Robot!

What does it do? I quote:

WP Robot is a powerful and easy to use autoblog plugin for WordPress weblogs allowing you to turn your blog on complete auto-pilot and drip-feed it with fresh content in intervals you specify. And the best part: The posts created will be targeted to any keyword you enter and any topic you could ever think of!

Basically, you enter one keyword and turn on “auto-pilot” and you have a blog full of content. Then you place your ads and sit back while the money pours in. Blogging, as we know it, is going to get transformed into a hideous web of commercialisation. All gas and no substance.

Disgusting. If this software (or others like it) succeeds, and if people start using it on a massive scale, imagine the situation. Every time you search for information on something, you’ll end up going to a blog that’s made by a robot, purely to attract page views and make money.

If this is the future of the internet, then the internet is going to hell.

This post was originally published on my blog, Thought Overflow | For poetry and more of my writing, check out my website at Gurdit.com.

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1. Blog more often…twice or thrice a week.
2. Find blogs with high traffic and high PRs and post comments on them. Backlinks improve your own pages’ rating.
3. Find and exchange links with other sites/blogs that deal with the same topics or subject matter that you’re writing about.
4. Love your blog.

The irony of this is that with the possibly exception of point 4, I don’t follow any of these other points . In my defense, though, I’ve got the following replies to those 4 points:

1. This is just a simple personal blog, more like a journal in online form. If there’s nothing of interest to report about life, then there’s not much to write about. However, I think I should write more often at least to improve my writing.
2. Meh, I’m not really very bothered with my site rankings or my PR. I don’t plan to sell links here any time soon.
3. Yeah, I suppose I should go around looking for bloggers who write about…nothing in particular. That shouldn’t be too hard to do, but I’ll tell you something…I just can’t be bothered to do it.
4. I do…more or less.

And that’s it for today, folks.

This post was originally published on my blog, Thought Overflow | For poetry and more of my writing, check out my website at Gurdit.com.

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1. The new design for Gurdit.com : Yes, it’s coming! Just like I promised! (I did promise, I hope?) . It’s a simple, clean, blue and grey design. I’ll probably change the header image, though… the phoenix on there right now looks a bit like a peacock, like Jesal said…
2. Internal exams at college : We had our first internal exams this week. I did them quite well. I’ve got the marks for 5 out of the 6 subjects. I’ll post the marks after I get the marks for the 6th subject.

So, in a couple of days, I hope, you will be seeing a whole new Gurdit.com.

Now, how about some real blogging:

I’ve been noticing how sometimes we’re afraid of changing or think that that particular change is something beyond our capability, and then when it becomes necessary to change, you just do it so easily and calmly. For instance, I managed to get away from the computer and study for these internal tests in my room. Of course, it helped that I actually got down to cleaning the junk off my old computer table and positioning it in a nice corner of the room to use as a computer table. Having a place to sit and study does motivate you quite a bit to actually use it.

I’ve also made up my mind about one more thing… I don’t want to mention it in detail here, but I will see if I’m able to stick with my decision, or if I’m able to change into what I’m trying to change into, which is basically what I used to be before I changed into what I am now, which is something I don’t particularly like. (If you didn’t understand that sentence, I urge you to read it again a couple of times, because quite uncharacteristically of my long sentences, that one does make sense! )

By the way, the internal exams got done today, officially (descriptive and online). This means I officially have a couple of weeks of holidays, but I expect the first week will be taken up by the workshop on Embedded Systems that I signed up for… oh well…

This post was originally published on my blog, Thought Overflow | For poetry and more of my writing, check out my website at Gurdit.com.

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And today, look what site(s) I found linking back to me (I’ve kept a link back to my site by default in the theme. So anyone using my theme without removing that link would be linking back to me… so basically, this is a small list of sites which are using my theme on their blogs)  :

All of a sudden, I think I should have removed that linkback from the footer

This post was originally published on my blog, Thought Overflow | For poetry and more of my writing, check out my website at Gurdit.com.

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It’s the theme you’re looking at right now, unless you’re reading this posts months after it was posted. Just to make sure, you could take a look in the footer and see the name of the theme you’re viewing right now.

The theme supports WP 2.0 and above (I’ve updated WordPress to v2.1.2 myself).

For more information about the theme, and the download link, please view the theme page at:

http://www.gurdit.com/blog/about/bluespot/

This post was originally published on my blog, Thought Overflow | For poetry and more of my writing, check out my website at Gurdit.com.

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Anyway, about the plugin I installed today… it allows you to subscribe to the comments of any post, i.e. you will be sent an email whenever anyone comments on a post to which you have subscribed. (Note that once an email is sent to you, you will not be sent another e-mail for the same post even if there have been more than one  comments, so don’t worry about your inbox being spammed). Secondly, it’s always possible to manage your subscriptions and unsubscribe to posts. The plugin is called “Subscribe To Comments (ver 2.1)” by Mark Jaquith.

Cheers to a new version… here’s hoping the blog gets more fun.

This post was originally published on my blog, Thought Overflow | For poetry and more of my writing, check out my website at Gurdit.com.

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I took quite some time to import the Yahoo Smileys into this plugin, and it took a bit of support from the plugin author- LordMontie. (OK, well, his real name is Thomas Montague… you’d see that anyway if you download his plugins ). This chap is pretty amazing. He even let me email him (and mailed back) for a little help I needed with a couple of small issues in installing and using the plugins.
So, yeah, the plugins then:
Basically, I’ve installed 2 of them:

• LMB^Box Comment Quicktags
• LMB^Box Smileys

PS: By the way, I don’t recommend using any smileys apart from the Yahoo Smileys or the default WordPress Smileys… too many smileys are… well, too much of anything is not good By the way, I’ve tried to put in every single code that works in Yahoo Messenger for the Yahoo smileys.
PPS: Yes, I know… I’m talking a backup of my database the moment I finish entering this post :smug:

This post was originally published on my blog, Thought Overflow | For poetry and more of my writing, check out my website at Gurdit.com.

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