The blog.. it's.. it's.. alive! Irrelevant Stuff	4/30/2006 11:54:53 PM
Hallelujah!  The Nerdworks Blog is finally underway!  Phew!  I would like to say that this blog is a culmination of years of hard grinding work, only, it isn't.  It actually took me 2 days to put everything together (and maybe another 1 day hunting around for a good ASP.NET based blog site without much success).  All said and done, it was quite an exciting little project.  Here's the 50,000 foot view: Nerdworks Blogorama is an ASP.NET based website that let's me spew forth random pieces of mostly useless information at will It was written and debugged using the free Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition which by the way, is an awesome development system (really sweet of Microsoft in giving it away free).  It even let's me directly deploy my site from the local box to the hosting provider's server (using the Copy Web Site option). An admin console called the Blogorama Console was written using the freely available Visual C# 2005 Express Edition.  This console let's me create new blog entries, edit existing ones and even delete entries that kind of... you know... suck!  The admin console talks to the blog engine via a webservice that I have hosted there. The blog entries are stored in a SQL server database that my hosting provider provides.  During development however I used the SQL Server 2005 Express Edition which is, again, a free database server that Microsoft so magnanimously provides. There's quite a bit of work left though, like for instance: The UI could use some re-work so that it looks more cool. The admin console does not currently require authentication.  That needs to be fixed. Blog entries should get archived automatically every month and appropriate links need to get added somewhere in the sidebar. Must provide the ability to search by category (blog entries have a category associated with them you see). Must add a section for putting up links to my favourite places on the internet, again, somewhere in the sidebar. Implement some way for embedding images in blog entries. Implement WYSIWYG editing in the blog console (right now I paste in the HTML directly). That's a pretty large list.  But hey, the first version has gone out through the doors!  Now, if you wish to contact me you can do that in one of two ways: Leave a comment by clicking on the green Comment link below, or Click on the Email the author link in the sidebar If that doesn't work for some reason (it's still beta you know) then you can email me using this address - avranju[at]gmail[dot]com.

Sandy	4/30/2006 8:48:34 PM
Hey ranju... It looks good.. the write up is impressive.. but the site as such looks bland.. it needs a little spicing up.. otherwise.. its ok buddyy!!
Ranju. V	4/30/2006 8:50:54 PM
Ya, I know. I am working on sprucing it up. Come back and check often! -- Ranju. V http://blogorama.nerdworks.in/ --
Auyva	4/30/2006 8:53:50 PM
Nerd works is sounds good, but not very visually atrtactive.. so you need to better the look and feel.. for the nerd to inherit the Earth Frm Queen of the Universe
Ranju. V	4/30/2006 9:25:53 PM
Hey Auyva, Thanks for your note. Yep. I am on it!
Mathuram.	5/1/2006 8:15:23 AM
hey my good 'ol friend, I know UI is not your cup of tea... and i still remember u cursing me on all the UI work we have done together... But good luck on ur UI. your article on sketch up was useful... since i'm constructing my house... will surely check out ur blog often... u better keep it live and kicking... -mathu
Ranju. V	5/1/2006 10:30:26 AM
hey mathu, eppadi irukka? cursing you? poor gentle innocent me? ui may not be my cup 'o tea.. but what do you think about the layout? choice of font, colors? gradient blue translucent title bars aren't everything you know ;).. -- Ranju. V http://blogorama.nerdworks.in/ --
Suresh	5/1/2006 10:30:59 AM
Good start - surley will keep looking in and participate when I can add some value. Rigth now ... you have all the feedback you can handle! Cheers Suresh
Ranju. V	5/1/2006 10:40:54 AM
Thanks Suresh! -- Ranju. V http://blogorama.nerdworks.in/ --
ram	5/4/2006 2:54:09 PM
cool blog! lose the frames though; frames are uncool. also, whats the point of a signature that proclaims a name you have in the title of your comment and a URL that any reader obviously is already in? makes your page scroll longer, but otherwise, hmmm..... :) another minor suggestion, let commenters leave a link to their own blogs too.
Ranju. V	5/4/2006 3:25:25 PM
Yeah I agree about the name in the sig.. as for the URL, rumour has it that Google has this algorithm that computes a rank based on the number of pages that link to you.. not sure whether it will count links that point to the site from pages within the site though.. And frames are uncool? Even poochi was saying that.. What's uncool about frames? Will do that comment link thingy.. thanks for the feedback!
ram	5/4/2006 4:19:30 PM
frames give you a cluttered look and feel (try resizing this frame to hide the others; it looks much more peaceful). they also make linking a pain. if i want to link to one particular blog post of yours, i have no straightfwd way of figuring out its URL. even if i do, users wont find links to your about-blog page and so on. so its much cooler to code the header and side-navigation into your blog engine. google only recognises actual links, not text URLs.. it certainly doesnt consider links to a domain within that domain. and even when it does count links from another domain to yours, it doesnt actually count the links; it just counts the number of domains that have one or more links to you, and weighs them by their pagerank.
Ranju. V	5/4/2006 4:46:57 PM
hmm.. i have seen websites that use frames and end up looking cluttered and sites that don't use frames and still end up looking cluttered.. whatever you call the layout for this blog, i don't think you can call it cluttered! if anything, there's too much empty space.. maybe i'll give users the ability to hide the frames completely if they want more reading space.. secondly, for links, frames or no frames i think at the moment there's no easy way to directly link to a given entry.. for this i maybe i'll add a "perma link" type of thing in the title of each entry or near the "comment" link or something.. so if you want to link to a specific entry in an email or something you can right click on the "perma link" and copy & paste.. i do agree that with direct links users wouldn't see the stuff in the sidebar.. let me see what i can do.. yeah.. google will parse only actual links.. i was planning to build in some parsing to recognize URLs and automatically convert them to links one of these days.. i'll still do that but that'll probably help only ppl who leave a comment here with a link to their site or something.. thnx again for all the gr8 feedback!

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