Site Moved

This site has been moved to a new location - Bin-Blog. All new post will appear at the new location.

Bin-Blog

Nexty 1.0 Released

Remember Nexty, the easy to use to-Do list manager using GTD principles? Well, that is ready for public release.

Nexty is a easy to use GTD tool created in PHP. It can be installed in a local server or in a online web server. The core idea behind this software is simplicity. I wanted to make a GTD tool that is the most easy to use.

Nexty Links

The next project is ready - watch this space for its announcement.

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My Moves: A History

As you already know, I have made my move. Moving from one domain to another is not new to me - I have moved a lot before. Here is a small picture that will show all my 'domain hops'...

http://binnyva.bizland.com/ (Dead now) - My first site.

http://binnyva.tripod.com/ - Started using Tripod when Bizland stopped my free account.

http://www.geocities.com/binnyva/ - Tripod became very slow due to all their ads - so I moved to Geocities.

http://binnyva.blogspot.com/ - Decided that I have to get into this 'blog' thing.

http://www.bin-co.com/ - Finally, got a credit card - thus making it possible to by web space/domain. Once I got the card - I did not stop with just one domain - I bought some more...

Serious articles from the next post...

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I have moved my Blog

Every commenter in the last post agreed with me. As a result, I am moving the blog from http://binnyva.blogspot.com/ to http://www.bin-co.com/blog/. From the next post onwards, the post will be duplicated here and in my Bin-Co site. At the end of this month, I will abandon this blog and focus on the new one.

Abandon does not mean that I will delete the blog or its contents - that will stay. I will stop posting here. I will still carry out some maintenance tasks like weeding out the spam, repling to comments etc. However, from next month, no more new content will appear here.

So the new blog URL is ...drum roll...

Bin-Blog

Take a look - no contents yet. But still, feel free to look around my Bin-Co site too.

Content Duplication

One of my tougher decision was not to import the contents of this blog into the new one. So, the contents in this blog will not be there in the new blog. One major reason is content duplication. I don't want to be penalized for duplicate content.

Feed

Please DO NOT update/change the feed URL. I am using FeedBurner - and I will change the source feed when the time is right. So, you don't have to change the feed URL.

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Should I move my Blog?

Lately, I am under a lot of pressure to move this blog to one of my own servers. I have thought about this before. I even have moved parts of it - like BinnyVA and OpenJS - but never moved the site entirely. Moving has its advantages and its disadvantages. Before I make the decision, I thought I will ask the site's readers for some feedback. So, what do you think guys? Should I move to my own domain?

Advantages of Moving

More Serious
A blog that has its own domain will be considered by many to be more serious than a blogspot site.
WordPress!
A self-hosted WordPress blog is a better blogging platform than Blogger
Control
WordPress gives the user a lot more control than blogger
Easier Commenting
I can take the captcha out of commenting - Akismet will protect me from spam - even though there is some problems - like false positives.
Google Juice Sharing
If I move, I plan to move my blog to http://www.bin-co.com/blog/.
So all the SEO advantage for the blog will be available for Bin-Co.com and all its SEO advantage will be available for the blog. A nice setup.

Disadvantages

SEO
I have many links pointing to this site - this includes one Digg Homepage appearance. I will lose all those advantages if I move away. This is the main reason I have not moved away yet.
Maintenance overhead
even though there is automatic installation and updating for WordPress in Dreamhost.
Server Capability
In the event of a Digging, a blogger site has more chance of staying alive than a smaller site. But I believe my hosting can take a beating before going down. But still, Dreamhost has its, how shall I put it..., issues.

What do YOU think?

I am forced to consider this move because many people have asked my why I am still on Blogger - despite having many sites of my own. Look at the comments on my last post - Benedict Herold has only one thing to say. Can't blame him - he already has made the move - from Blogger to WordPress. He even has a neat picture to explain which is the better platform.

Then there is Ajay. Says he won't comment on my site unless I move to wordpress. When ever I chat with him, he wants to know if I will move to wordpress ;-). So, Ajay, here is your chance to have your say - should I move or not. Comment on this post, OK? Even if you think it is a bit slow for you.

Think of this as a voting system. If enough people ask me to move, I will move. I am sure that many of my readers will have some thoughts regarding this as well.

So, what do you think? Should I make the move? Leave a comment. Do you have any experience to share about moving your blog? Let me know.

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I am NOT Spam!

When I was making the last post, I noticed something that was not there before - a word verification for posting. It was a rude shock for me - like a surcharge in a formerly surcharge free ATM. Turns out, the great Google bots think that this is a spam blog. Guys, this is not a spam blog! I have a spam blog - but this is not it.

Your blog requires word verification

Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What's a spam blog?) Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive.

Luckily there was an option to say that this blog is not spam. Needless to say, I used that option, and they sent out real humans to test my site. Before long, I was cleared of all wrong doings :-)

We received your unlock request on April 5, 2007. On behalf of the robots, we apologize for locking your non-spam blog. Please be patient while we take a look at your blog and verify that it is not spam.

All jokes aside, I appreciate the fact that the Blogger team is working hard to get rid of the spam blogs in blogger. Blogger is just infected with those. A side effect of this is that I cannot comment on other people's blog using my blog's address(http://binnyva.blogspot.com/) as the URL. Akismet thinks that since I use a blogger site, my comment must be spam.

Just a friendly reminder to the guys using Akismet Plugin - its great for blocking spam - I use it myself. But there is quite a few instance of false positives - ie. legitimate comments marked as spam. So make sure you check the spam folder often. False negatives I can stand - but not false positives. That's bad.

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Naked Days are here again!

Once again, its time to take off your stylesheets. April 5th is the official Naked Day for websites. My sites Bin-Co and OpenJS will be naked for this day.

The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and; well, a fun play on words. I mean, who doesn't want to get naked?

I participated in this event the last year. Some thoughts from back then...

What about this site?

No - this site will not drop its stylesheets - in blogger it is just too much work.

What about You?

Will you be naked today? If so, post a comment with your URL.

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Using Twitter, Part 3 - Offline Twitter

In my last post about the use of twitter, I said that my primary purpose for using twitter is to track my time. However twitter is not created for that use. It is very difficult to track your time using twitter. But there is an easy solution to this problem - create an offline twitter.

Twitter is a huge application - but offline twitter is not. The whole application is just 4 lines of PHP code. Yes - that's right - just 4 lines. And a database.

Database

The database is just one table(OT) with 3 fields. The simplest solution is often the best.


CREATE TABLE `OT` (
  `id` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `status` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `time` datetime NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM ;

PHP Code

This code will be the entire application(if you can call it that). Just save this to a file called, say, OT.php

<?php
if(!$_REQUEST['status']) exit;
mysql_connect('localhost','root','pass') or die("Cannot connect to mysql Server");
mysql_select_db('Data') or die("No database called 'Data'");
mysql_query("INSERT INTO OT VALUES('','$_REQUEST[status]',NOW())");

If you want to use a database abstraction layer, be my guest. If you escape the $_REQUEST[status] before using it in the query, by all means do so. But, the result will be the same. An offline twitter using just 4 lines of code.

Input

So, how does one enter new status into this system? By making a small modification to the command line twitter client...

curl --data-ascii "status=`echo $@|tr ' ' '+'`" "http://localhost/tools/OT.php"
curl --basic --user "<User>:<Password>" --data-ascii "status=`echo $@|tr ' ' '+'`" "http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json"

The first line will send the status to my PHP file and the second will send it to the twitter server. Now I have all the status in the database.

View the Contents

I have still not created an interface that will use this database to show my time useage. If I want to know something, I just open up phpMyAdmin and run an SQL query.

I know - this method is not for everyone. You need to be on linux to use my command line client. You must have a web server and a MySQL server running for this method to work. But if you are working on the LAMP platform, you will have this stuff ready.

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