As I mentioned in my previous post, I registered this domain for free and then didn’t renew it once the registrar started charging for it. But I was lucky enough to get the same domain name again after 2-3 years.

Anyways, I was looking for the exact date on which I registered this domain for the first time and I couldn’t find any records (no old emails). So I thought why not google it and as usual I found the answer on google. I found this website Internet Archive - archive.org. Internet Archive is like a digital time capsule, an online archive of various digital content. It uses web crawls to take a global snapshot of the web.

Luckily I was able to find some old records of my domain. The first available records for amitkothari.com was of 20th Feb, 2001. So now I’m sure that I registered this domain on or before this date.

On Internet Archive we can even see how a website use to look like a few years ago. Like for my domain, some of the data was missing for year 2001 but I can see how my website use to look like in 2006 and 2007. From the records, I can also see that this domain was inactive for almost 4 years and I think I’m really luckily to get it back after so long.

Try archive.org and see how some of your favorite web sites like hotmail, yahoo or google use to look like in past.

The main difference between a normal theme and a magazine style theme is the structure and layout. While the websites using conventional Wordpress themes look more like a blog with the home page displaying some of the recent posts, magazine style templates can be customized to show recently added posts from different categories to target different audience.

For example, if you are using a normal theme which displays last three posts on the home page and you have three categories food, movies and travel. If your last three posts are in category food, the home page wont display any post related to movies or travel. On the other hand magazine style themes can be customized to display recent post (or excerpt) from more than one category on the home page. This can be easily achieved by using tabbed menu or featured category. Using the same example, in case of a magazine style theme, a user can see recent post related to food, movies and travel on the same page. This, along with features like related posts and posts in same category are used in magazine style themes to attract more visitors and direct them to more posts related to their area of interest which is beneficial for both site visitors and blogger. Along with tabbed menu, use of featured category can also be used to advertise any selected post on the home page.

Along with improved layout, magazine style themes are easy to customize and provide in-built support for many necessary plugins. Some of the advance magazine style themes come with their own option page from where we can customize the look and content of our website with almost no code changes.

The current theme active on my site is my first attempt to develop my own magazine style theme, it still needs a lot of testing, bug fixing and plugin support, which might take another 2-3 weeks. But once this theme is ready, I might release it on my website for free download.

A lot of websites still offer sub domains and second/third level domains for free. Most of these so called free domain name services only offer basic features like URL redirection, URL cloaking etc. However, I recently found www.co.cc that offers free domain names (third level domain), with support for MX, A, CNAME and NS records.

If you already have a web hosting, you can setup the free co.cc domain by simply pointing its NS records to your host and you can also use Google apps or Microsoft Live for customized email and instant messaging.

If you are looking for free hosting with cpanel support and dont mind small ad links at the bottom of the page try - Jamroll.net. For paid hosting I personal prefer hostmonster.com. They offer unlimited shared hosting space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited addon domains with a free domain name. what else can we ask for ????? custom SRV records would be nice….

It is very easy to install, all you need to do is upload few files, create a new database and a user with permission to access that database, update the configuration file (snews.php) with database and website information and sNews is ready to run.

More about sNews coming soon ….

eyeOS is an open source operating system, which can run from a web server and can be accessed using a web browser. It allows to access the desktop and various applications from anywhere with just an Internet connection and web browser.

I have just installed my own virtual operating system ;) (www.amitkothari.com/eyeOS). I will play around with it and will write more about my experience and obersvations ..

Visit eyeOs.org to read more ….

On receiving my invitation to join twitter, some of my friends asked me what the hell is twitter and I think the most simple answer to this question is that twitter is a micro blogging web app, something like a blog but with limited sized post, without images and videos. It is a new way to communicate with the world by updating them with what you are up to….

But twitter can be used more than just a way of updating others about what you are doing, it is more than announce on the internet about what you had in dinner or what TV show you are watching.. I’m not that addicted to blogging and initially I found it not very useful for me because I dont share ever second of my private life on the Internet and I dont have exciting things everyday to announce or update on twitter.But there is something about twitter which makes it different from other similar applications.

One of the main reasons why twitter is gaining so much popularity is that it is accessible via web(twitter website and third-party applications) , Instant messaging and sms. You can send or receive updates via IM notifications or SMS on your mobile. So for someone like me who wont have updates everyday and dont want to login everytime to twitter website to check for any new tweets (twitter updates),twitter can send an sms or IM to keep me posted. So when your friends change their mobile number or new version of your favorite application is released, you directly get a notified.

This easy accessibility can be further exploited …more coming soon .

]]> http://amitkothari.com/2008/05/03/twitter-more-than-microbloging-tool/feed/ http://amitkothari.com/2008/04/14/amazing-video/ http://amitkothari.com/2008/04/14/amazing-video/#comments Mon, 14 Apr 2008 10:33:55 +0000 Amit http://amitkothari.com/?p=99

After some googling I found heaps of available options to integrate Flickr with Wordpress. Many of the plugins supports widgets to display images in sidebar and others to integrate photos or photosets directly into posts or pages. The one plugin which I liked the most was FAlbum. FAlbum is a really good flickr plugin for worpdress, easy to install and configure. The thing that I liked the most about this plugin is that other than showing photos in sidebar or posts, I can create a new page, like a photo gallery, which will list all my photosets and when I click on any of the photoset, it will display thumbnails of all the photos in the set. I can then click on the thumbnail to view the image. The gallery page is easy to customize and it didnt take long to change the layout according to my template.

But the problem with Flickr is that the standard account only allows upto three photo set and I definitely need to categorize my images in more groups. So I decided to try Flickr’s competitor Googles photo sharing tool Picasa. But unfortunately I found very few plugins to integrate Picasa with Wordpress and most of the available plugins only offer very basic functionality and Implementing a full-fledged photo gallery didnt look like an easy task. :-(.

With a decent amount of storage space still available in my hosting account, I decided not to pay anything to Flickr or any other image hosting and instead host all my photos in my web host. My search for a good photo album plugin started again and findly I found NextGen Gallery, the best photo gallery plugin I found for Wordpress so far.

After installing and activating the plugin, When I first latest news section on the plugin page, I was happy and excited to know that many NextGen add-on plugins are available and this will definitely give me more options and control on how and where I want to display my photos and implement the gallery. I was bit confused with the terms album and gallery but as soon as I added my first gallery and started upload some pictures, I found Nextgen plugin very easy to use. We create galleries , add photos in the gallery and group galleries into albums. We can add an image, a gallery or a whole album in our posts or pages. It also comes with widget support to display a fixed number of random or newly added images from a selected gallery (or galleries), or to add a slide show or image rotator (again we can select which galleries we want to include).

Currently, I’m using NextGen to display some images I have recently added to one of my gallery and also to add a slide show of another gallery on my homepage.

Now when I’m comfortable with this great plugin, I’m planning to play around with some of the NextGen addons.