A simple Thanks

Yes a simple thanks can do wonders. I have always believed that I am capable of doing many/all things, but have always found the motivation lacking. But when someone one, out of the blue, appreciates the work you did out of free will, then it makes a difference. It makes your Day.

Since last week, when I published RSS feeds and made the email notification service available for TnP notices about 175 people have subscribed to Email notifications and about 30 people are using Twitter to follow. But the good part is: 3 people have mailed me expressing thanks.

Person 1: I am quite late in saying this. Thanks a lot. This has been a great help

Person 2: I love you for the tnp service you have provided…puchhhhhhhhhhiiiiiiiiessssssss

Person 3: I visited the site for the TnP notices feed. Its so nice of you to make such an arrangement. Btw, the idea of using twitter is really cool.

 

Me on a new high… it feels good to be of use…. atleast to some.

Current Song: Hum jo chalne lage… chalne lage hai yeh raaste… manzil se behtar lagne lage hai yeh raaste…

Brain Dead !

Ok its been more than 60 hours since I last slept properly… had two stints of 3hrs in between… but the rest of the time I have been working, chatting and bryan uncle ki jai karta raha…

But I love doing small small things which are useful… and did some thing like this. Check this out. When something that I have written works… gives me satisfaction.. I feel good..and thats why I do it… bas man ko shanti milti hai….

Accha pata hai…. abhi bhi mera man nahin hai sone ka.. but my brain is not responding… matlab I have the desire to do some work… but kuchh chamak nahin raha hai abhi….. so decided ki so jaate hai abhi…. chalo tata… bye

Udit said, “Let there be RSS”

and RSS feeds were available.

Okies it has so happened that TnP work in KGP is being done through a new TnP Website. All the notices are being posted on the website itself and one doesn’t need to go to TnP to check all the notices. Cool na. But what was uncool about the website that the notices section didn’t have RSS feed. Now how in the world can you make such a website in which the notices section doesn’t provide RSS feeds.

Since the Website has been made by a group of students, I told them to put feeds, but it seems they were busy in fixing other high priority bugs. So I decided, “Bahut ho gaya, Main bar bar site pe nahin ja sakta hoon notices check karne ke liye…. ab iske feeds create karne padenge…“.

Then a few lines of Perl code, some useful regular expressions, knowledge of how to write a Feed XML file and the presence of Arpit’s external domain made it possible. Now you can subscribe to the RSS feeds of TnP notices.

The feed is available at http://www.tnp.intinno.com/tp.xml. I don’t guarantee a 100% correct feed, but whenever you find a bug, please let me know. Also since TnP site is visible from outside Kgp, I don’t think making Feeds public violates any rules. Also right now the feed content only contains the link to the notice, as I didn’t have the tempo to parse the whole notice.

Ok if you are not sure what exactly is an RSS feed, you can read here or here.

And to subscribe to this RSS feed you will need an aggregator. This can be Google Reader, your google homepage, or you could add this feed on your Orkut page by clicking on “add stuff” link on your homepage, or you could Bloglines. Since I don’t want the dependency of Web to read my feeds I use an desktop aggregator called Liferea(thats LInux FEed REAder).

 Note – Does anybody know how to track the number subscribers of this feed???

Web 2.0 and Me!

A few months back I wrote a post describing my perception of Web 2.0. Today I have been really impressed as to where the web is heading, which also serves as the motivation of writing this post.

I have this large list of RSS feeds that I read in Google Reader. But the problem is that I don’t have enough time to read all the posts and also it happens that some of the feeds share common content.So I always desired something which could monitor my reading habits and then present rank list unread feeds, with feeds that are most relevant to me appearing at the top. This way I could save time, which was previously being wasted in discarding the unimportant feeds. Also if could detect duplicate content replicated among N unread feeds and then cluster them, it would save more time.

Feeds 2.0 seems to be the solution to the problem. It learns your preferences as you use it and then presents the more relevant posts first. I have applied for the private Beta Login and am yet to use it. But what I can get from the Screencasts is that it learns the tags of the posts that you read(or say mark important) and builds up a list of your preferred tags. This list builing is a continuous process. To decide relevancy of posts, it tries to find out to which extent, the post to be ranked, can be classifed by the tags in your preferred list. This seems to be a good idea and is as simple as building up my interest areas.

However I have one concern. It often happens that we always read a post published by a person X, disregard of the topic of the post. For example, I always like to read my friend’s blog, no matter whats he writes. Thus I have a preference towards by friend’s blog not because he writes on a particular topic but because he is my friend. These kinds of relations cannot be captured by a simple list of preferred interests. To capture these relationships the following ideas might be useful:

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• The application should monitor the order in which I prefer to read the posts. For example, whenever I see a unread post written by my friend X, then my first reaction is to read this post ahead of others.
• If somehow the application can build a preference list that not only says the topics I am interested in but also the bloggers I am interested in, then the performance can really improve.
  

Feeds 2.0 also clusters similar posts and presents them in a related fashion. Man it seems that these people read my mind. Now please be more considerate and grant me login.

Some related posts:

http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/12/rss-beast.html

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/first_look_aiderss_feed_filtering.php

 UPDATE: It seems my initial impression about how Feeds 2.0 might work was too elementary. Check out the first comment for more details. 

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Also people who know me would be wondering why the change of blogs. The reason is that WordPress rocks and Blogger lacks a lot of features.

• The best thing about WordPress is that it allows me to lock individual posts via passwords. It means I can write personal posts on the same blog and lock them so that only I can read them. Also according to the FAQ section, no RSS feeds are published for the password locked feeds. Awesome! . Simply Awesome. See its web 2.0 times,
  
• Also WordPress has got a very good list of blog templates.
• I am sure I will discover more as I use it more.