Another return!

I know my dear and beloved blog has been neglected for a ‘very’ long time, but that has mostly been because of college, and me being a little lazy :P I got caught up in a lot of different things at the same time, and I couldn’t do them all :P But now another semester is coming to an end, so I see some free times, and I plan to make the most of it.

There ‘are’ a lot of things that I’ve been wanting to share with all you guys, and going by my latest feed readership, most of you have hung around! Thanks a lot :) I hope to not disappoint ;)

So a quick update about my Blogger keep current date/time on post script; I’ve fixed it. I think Improbulus sent me a mail a long time back, but thanks to the reasons I’ve mentioned above, I wasn’t able to reply or respond. I got around fixing it this time, and it’s working wonderfully again :)

So, here’s to another return! :)

300!

‘The Last Word’ has officially hit the 300 subscribers mark :) This is extremely heartening, considering I have not been posting as frequently as I used to. I’d like to apologise for that, and shift the blame a little on a very stagnant blogosphere and my internal examinations (starting tomorrow :( )

The good news is, that I haven’t lost track of things happening (whatever little is happening), and I will begin posting regularly again after these set of exams get over. Thanks for all the reads! You make my day guys! :)

Cheers!

Templates for sale!

Seeing as how I have been putting this off for quite a while now, due to various apprehensions, I’m now going ahead with a plan I announced a while back. I’m going to start dedicating more time and energy to something that I love doing. Designing web pages! But not just any web page :) Starting now, I am going to start making some beautiful templates for the new Blogger, which will immediately go on sale (the moment they are through testing) for anyone who wants to use them. This will be ‘almost’ freelancing, and the earnings will go into buying myself a hosting, and get down to some serious web–app’ing! :)

The price for the template will be decided by the amount of effort I have to put to get the template out the door. They will not be high at all, something in–between the range of $10 to $25. You’re gonna simply love the $25 ones, because those will take the longest and come out the prettiest! Now, I am no professional, but I am sure you’ve seen my works in the past. So I’ll let them talk for me :)

Ofcourse, hacks will be included with the templates :) And you get to pick which ones you want! But hacks as much time and effort (if not more) as the actual designing of a template, so if it goes beyond a certain point where I’m having to go out of my way to add something in, I’ll let you know. If you really do want it, a little extra charge will get it for you. The prices will be negotiable for these, so you don’t need to worry about hidden costs anywhere.

I’d like to clear out a few things before you begin mailing me about this.

• Every new owner of a template will have his/her blog listed on an exclusive page linked to from my blogs, with a short description about the blog. Perfect way to get your blog ‘out there’.

• I am a busy person, so if I can’t get back to you immediately about a template modification, don’t think I have ditched you. Wait for a few days, and I will surely get back to you. If you can do the necessary changes on your own, nothing like it!

• My templates will work like they are supposed to only in Opera and Firefox. I have never bothered with Internet Explorer, and never will, so please don’t ask me to fix it for that. As far as Safari goes, I can’t do anything because I don’t own a Apple, so can’t test it on that. If someone is willing to help me port them, however, or buy me an Apple (preferably the latter :P), contact me and we’ll negotiate something. I will also try and make them as resolution independant as possible, but results may vary from template to template.

• These templates are not going to be ‘lightning fast’, and they’ll depend quite heavily on pictures/images and scripts (because of my hacks). Which means, they might be a little slow for <56Kbps speeds. Broadband users won’t see any change however. I’ll remove anything which you might not need however, to increase the speed. There will be no reduction in cost for this however.

• I can’t offer a lifelong maintainance promise for my templates. I will probably quit with this after a certain point of time. Whenever this happens, I will let my users know well in advance.

• None of the templates will have any built in ads, or any pre–decided place for them. We all hate ads, don’t we? But something can be cooked up for you (no extra cost :) ) Also, except for a small design credit at the end of the page, there will no other mention of my name or my blogs prefit anywhere in the template. All the rights will be transferred to you, with a clause of ‘no re–sale’ of the template or any part of it.

• All templates will be microformat and CSS standards compliant. I can’t make them XHTML compliant for the reasons I have stated in this post. Nonetheless, I will try my best.

• Request for clones of templates from other blogs can be shot off to my inbox. I will have a look, and discuss with you the pricing and the other formalities. I leave it to you to get the permission from the owner of the other blog to use (or clone) his/her template.

• I will try and entertain requests for custom templates, depending on the time and effort again required to come up with it. Throw in a mail with an attached image of what you have in mind, and I will get back to you if I need furthur clarifications.

So, I hope all the terms are agreed upon? I will edit the terms whenever necessary, so keep this post bookmarked for future reference! Cool? Great! So, let’s reveal the first template up for grabs. I call this Dark Cherry. It’s got a mysterious and dark red and black colour combination, with hints of other colours thrown in for a truly amazing contrast effect. It’s got a sidebar, and is divided into a 5 panel layout. The header, the posts (top–left), the main sidebar (top–right), comments / other info (bottom–left) and secondary sidebar (bottom–right). For more info, check out the linked blog for a live demo!

Pixel perfect!

Alright! If there are people going ‘What? Again?’, then it’s completely justified … but I was beginning to get a teensy–weensy bit sick of all the gold all over the place. I realised I can never settle for anything which doesn’t have my basic colours (the ones here) for too long. I anyway cannot settle with one look beyond a few months! :P

So, this is what I aiming at initially when I set out to make Golden Summer way back in December–January, but got severely sidetracked and went nuts with it. A simple, minimalistic template which really pushes attention to the post, while not making the whole place look too drab. I switched over to using simple and plain colours, ones which you’re probably used to seeing on pretty much every blog these days. The layout in itself breaks away from my previous two layouts, to go back to the header, post left and sidebar right normal that Blogger has gotten us so used to.

This is (as usual) not the final product, but a work in progress. I’ll be moving around widgets here and there to see which one fits the best where. I also might take this whole thing out because I have a couple of more templates in the bunk, so if I begin to like them, you might get to see them as well :P

Some of you might notice that this bears a lot of resemblance to basic Wordpress theme layouts. The truth is, I have begun to like the simplicity of those templates, and their ability to be simple, and yet strikingly concise. You can really throw anything at them, and they’ll hold up pretty well, while still looking nice and simple. I wanted to capture that essence in a Blogger blog. I had to hack my way into a couple of things to do that though, and you’ll see them turn up slowly in the next few weeks as I tinker around further.

A few things might still be ‘gold’ around here. That’s because I’ve reused them to keep things not looking out of sync. They’ll be fixed soon enough. Let me know what you think! :)

Plans, lazyness, delays and more galore

Hello there! Yes, as you would have guessed by now, the previous post was intended to be an April 1^st joke, and some people (thankfully) fell for it. In turn, it showed the amount of support The Last Word and I have from you guys, so kudos! And Thanks a ton! :) Not beating around the bush however, the reasons for the lapse of posting in that post were real. College just became a little more hectic, all of a sudden, so I’ve barely had to time to get online. My Miranda has not been touched in a week, making some friends rather angry, and I’ve tried to stay on top of all my mails, replying to them sometimes at 3 in the morning just to let people know I’m still alive :P

But that will be coming to an end soon enough, and I should be back in full form after that. However, to get things a little more, let’s say, “electric” around here, I’m going to share a few things that I’ve been thinking on the past week in boring physics and chemistry lessons :) These are more like ideas for the coming weeks.

A new home

This is the more tentative of the ideas. I’m planning to take The Last Word out of Blogger hands, and put it somewhere more under my control. Translated, that means I want to get my own domain space, begin dawdling in web application programming, and get my own domain name. Now considering I’m not a working fella’, and I don’t have that kind of money, I’m planning on beginning a little side work. One which (I hope) will be helped by you guys (my readers) and anyone else who is interested. Stay tuned for more info on this.

In case you want to donate some money, you can do so from the button on the right. Donations will definitely speed up the process of moving out :)

A new frequency

No more wonton posting about stuff that doesn’t matter so much. But then again, I’m not moving to a Phydeux3 type schedule, definitely! But I’m going to slow down. Partly because of college, partly because of other commitments. Also, I want to post quality content … better than what I’ve been putting up till now. I promise a post a week minimum.

For smaller, more frequent updates however, you can subscribe to my Twitter, which I update almost once a day with latest news that I think is worth noting. I might throw in some random updates from time to time (“I am “so” not sleepy!”).

A new name?

This one is under heavy scrutiny from my overworked brain at the moment. I want to make the name of my blog sound more technical, yet abstract. “The Last Word” somehow doesn’t cut it anymore for me. I have a few names running around my grey cells, with some of them sounding really nice. However, a new name means a new location, which means existing links will all break. I could try and work up an Oldblog redirection for Blogger, but that will still take out my page and technorati ranks.

And, with the new name should come a big change. I’ve revealed in the past that I’ve wanted to move over to Wordpress … so if the name change happens, this might happen too. But those are both big “might”s. I’m a little torn on this one …

So! That’s where my heads been roaming around these past few days. Let’s see how they fall into place. I have a lot of work on the side as wellOne of them being a software called the ‘Bunk–o–meter’ which I plan to develop to keep track of lectures attended and bunked, exam marks required to keep expected GPA … basically the complete toolset for any college going kid!. The Bloggerosphere has been quite silent recently … seems like a haunted city if you ask me. Nothing from the other bleets as well. I hope all that subsides quickly :)

You can ofcourse, drop in your comments on those ideas, if you think they can be re–planned to work better! I’m always one for suggestions :) Cheers!

Let's call it a day

There comes a time, when decisions have to be taken, things have to be said, and bags have to be packed. One realises that things are just not how you think they are, or should be. You have to hand in the keys …

You would have noticed the lapse of posts these past few days here. Plus, no post from me saying “I’m still here!”. The reason is workload just increased tons, and I’m finding it hard to balance work and blogging/coding (coding == play in my life), which is the reason you haven’t seen any new hacks after a sudden burst of userscripts. I have two exams coming up, which are taking up all my time, and after these, I have more assignments and college duties on the horizon. I guess the fun days are really over this time.

The decision

It's for this reason, that I’ve decided to take The Last Word down. It was a hard judgement call I had to make, because it was frustrating my as to how I couldn’t come up with new posts. Hitting a creative block is the worst thing that can happen to me, and now that I have, workload from college is keeping it blocked.

This is the second time I’ll be taking a hiatus, but unfortunately, it seems like it might be the last time. I am “again” anticipating a come–back, but it won’t be anytime soon. Unless something “huge” happens in the Blog(ger)osphere, ofcourse.

I plan to release the last few hacks along with a few posts that I had pending in my drafts, and by the end of this week, wrap things up. I want to apologise to all my readers for this, it was a really nice to be a part of the community for so long, and get all the support! Thank you!

Also, thanks to all the bleet who have helped me learn so much more about the ways of programming, the Internet and just generally working as a group and a team in getting things done. Finally, a hearty thanks to Avatar! I’ve probably said all I could say, without meaning even a tenth of what I’d want to. I wish him all the best with Bloggeratto—whenever it may surface—and in all future Internet and Blogger endeavours. As for you, my readers, I wish you all the best with your blogs and all the Internet–related–things that you might enter into the future. Maybe some of you would have gained enough insight from the Last Word and aim to become one of the bleet yourself? :)

The last (really) word!

So, I’m going to stop blabbering now, and leave you with a song … Take care, and cheers!

Alive (Pearl Jam)

“ … Son, she said, have I got a little story for you
What you thought was your daddy was nothin’ but a…
While you were sittin’ home alone at age thirteen
Your real daddy was dyin’, sorry you didn’t see him, but I’m glad we talked...
Oh I, oh, I’m still alive
Hey...oh...

Oh, she walks slowly, across a young man’s room
She said I’m ready…for you
I can’t remember anything to this very day
‘Cept the look, the look...
Oh, you know where, now I can’t see, I just stare...
I, I’m still alive
Ooh yeah…yeah yeah yeah...oh...oh...

Is something wrong, she said
Well of course there is
You’re still alive, she said
Oh, and do I deserve to be
Is that the question
And if so…if so…who answers…who answers...
I, oh, I’m still alive
Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah ... ”

Time for new friends to reveal themselves!

Update: I have opened up the comments for the next 24 hours, and cleared away the moderation. Which means your comments will show up without any intervention from me as soon as you post them. I hope to not get spammed ;) This is because I am going to be taking part in Shutdown Day (24 March), so my computer will be off for the next 24 hoursYou will get to read my experience next week when I return!. The first day of de–lurking hasn’t been that satisfying … let’s see if tomorrow does the trick? Cheers!

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From last year, when my blog surfaced, to today … my readership has gone from 18 to 270. Now that’s a freakin’ huge jump! :) I’m very thankful to all the people who come everyday to read whatever I have to babble about, but there are many more who like to stick around in their feed readers, quietly read a new post, and not say anything about it. I know some posts are too random to comment on, but surely you can leave something on some? ;)

Who are you?

So now, I’m going to take some time off to let you, my prized readers, show yourself. You might not have joined in the discussion about anything, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to know who you are :) Through hacks, opinions, reviews, suggestions and what not, there are so many different people who come here, and for many more reasons …

The term given to this process is de-lurking. ‘Lurkers’ are those who come around for a visit, but don’t leave any comments because it’s already been said, or they don’t have anything to add. Now, I know that it’s not the celebrated ‘de–lurking’ dayI plan to make this a regular feature of the blog however, and from next time, it’ll be on the designated day!, but let’s do the opposite of that this time around … It’s ‘de–lurking’ time! :D

It could be a simple “Hi”, or an elaborate “Hello”! It could be in English, or any language you’re comfortable with. It doesn’t really matter. I just want to get a good idea of who the people are who actually take time out to read what I write. I’ll try and not add my two cents in the comments and break the flow. Leave your name, a brief introduction about yourself, and how you bumped in here––apart from anything else you might want to say––in your comment. Since there are about 270 subscribers, I hope to see atleast 70–75% of that number of comments. Let’s see how many people come out of their closets by coming Monday. I promise to release another hack if you manage to hit those numbers!

So! Show yourself! :) Let’s see who you all really are!

Jscripts down. Repeat 'JScripts down!'

If you’ve been coming around the page in the past few days (and I know you have, yay! for stats), you’d have noticed rather strange behaviour on the page’s part. Dates don’t show, the TOC on the left doesn’t work. My Twitter status isn’t working, and nor is the post list at the bottom. Not to mention my search.

This is because Stephen’s Jscripts has gone offline. What’s strange in that, you ask? Well, the strange bit is, he didn’t take it offline. It seems like Ning goofed up somewhere. I haven’t seen or heard anything of the same from others either on Google or the various discussion forums. My own applications are running pretty healthy, so I don’t know what the problem is.

I’ve alerted Steve to this, and he has fired off an urgent mail to Ning to get this problem resolved as soon as possible. Ning Blog mentions an outage tonight for maintenance. I hope they solve this little glitch, and bring my poor little blog back to life!

Sorry for the inconvenience!

---

Update: Steve points out the Ning problem being addressed, and has come up with a (temporary?) solution. If possible, donate some funds so that he can upgrade his Ning account to Pro, which will enable more applications, bandwidth and storage.

I’ve temporarily switched over from JScripts to my Googlepages account. This is so that atleast the page looks normal again.

Feed resets and other annoyances

My feed subscribers would have seen a random reset, with the top three posts showing up as new today. It was not a FeedBurner error, or something you did. The thing is that I'm trying to work out a few things to add a little more information to my feed (considering how there are so many subscribers), so that people don't lose out on the blog info even if they just follow the feed. I am working with Stephen to get a few Feedflares up and running, and also other RSS goodies if I can throw them in while doing all this.

For all the trouble, I promise to thank you all for putting up with my indulgences with a tasty new hack. So in the end, it is all going to be very well worth it :) Sorry for all the stupidity, and thank you for seeing them through!

Cheers!

Blasts from the past

From today, I'm allowing subscriptions to another feed (we love choices, don't we? :)). With the latest buzz being piping our existing feed and re-order them by published date, I think one (annoying but) good aspect of Blogger's native way of handling feeds got overlooked. But a brief history.

How we used to do it

In the old Blogger, the feed wouldn't be altered if you edited a post from your archives, like it does in the new Blogger. Mostly, edits used to be typos, or little bits of added information. These updates didn't need the posts in the feed jumping around. However, sometime later, someone discovered the RSS feed which would be sorted by the 'Updated' date, and not 'Published' date. Steve and I came up with a 'Recently Updated Posts' widget (weren't called widgets back then) for the sidebar. That was when we had a choice between the two feeds.

The primary (ATOM) would be sorted by published order, and secondary (RSS) would reflect the updated order. All was goood.

What we do now

Now, all the feeds are sorted by 'Updated' date. This is good only if you are like Phydeaux3 who doesn't touch his posts once they've gone into your archives, unless there is a major update. It's actually the best, because then a major update brings the post back into focus. However, we have been spoilt.

We (well, I atleast do) still edit old posts if we find a typo, and that minor change makes the post jump right to the top and show up as new. That can be very irritating, because an old post might show up above a post which you just posted, and hence may steal focus away. I'm trying to change that habit though, and I guess we all will have to at some point of time, unless Google opens the Blogger feeds to all the GData queries. The Pipes method does exist though, and that's what I use as my primary feed.

But I'd like to leave the decision to you. So what happens now is that I offer two separate feeds - one ordered by the 'Updated' date (the new one), and the old one is still ordered by the 'Published' date - and you can pick which one you want to subscribe to, as per your convenience. You can subscribe from the icon in the address bar, or the syndications list at the bottom (I just love choices!). You can subscribe to both too, if you want to be extra generous and give a slight boost to my readership counts! :)

Happy weekend!

Unveiling: The Last Word (Gold Edition)

I am still keeping the blog in beta, because as has become quite obvious, changes will keep coming and going! There are a few changes I've made to the layout, and the way the blog functions now.

There is more than one post on the main page now for one, so less clicking. I've also revamped the bottom area. It'll contain the comment on the post pages, and a list of recently updated posts otherwise. The sidebar makes a return, with three widgets for now Updated to five - A colophon and the blog archives. The 'Topics' widget will be updated for asynchronous loading of the post list of a particular label has been updated with this new hack. I'll release it soon. I've removed smilies, they were becoming a little distraction. The hack still exists though, so no need to worry there :)

A good side-effect of the building from scratch is that I removed things that were unnecessary, and that's made the loading much faster. Also, as a friend pointed out, this is not exactly the 'minimalistic' that some people might have thought. To be very honest, while it had started off as minimal, I just kept on adding things which I liked, and ultimately ended up with this. This is by no means the final product, and my bad habit compels me to keep making small changes here and there. I am aware that the codes for my hacks don't show up properly. I'll be switching to a better way of displaying them, so I had to take out the old version. Please bear with me This is now fixed. Thanks to Dan Webb for the excellent code highlighting script. I've had my eyes on this one for a while :)

I think is a nice warm template to welcome the spring and summer time (it's a little far away, but I like to be prepared :) ). Hope you like it!

Another design change

You might have noticed some sluggishness in my posting. Posts are few and far apart (although they're generating quite a lot of traffic :) ). That's because I'm home on my college vacations (1st semester got over), so I'm busy with family and friends!

Don't worry, work is going on behind the scenes as well! :) I promise a 'completely' new look and more posts in the coming weeks. People might say that this look is better than 'that' one, but I am making a change for a good reason! I'll give just one clue to the new look ... 'minimalistic'. Hehe! :D

So, do not worry! All is good here! I will return in full glory very soon! Thanks for hanging around.

P.S. While you're at it, fire of a few hundred more mails to Avatar, will you? I don't know what it'll take to get Bloggeratto off it's ass! Maybe your mails will do the trick?

Bloggeratto wanted to play world of warcraft all day!

Haha! Sorry about that Blogger! :P

You would have noticed Bloggeratto suffering some downtime recently. Speaking for Avatar here, I am to say that Bloggeratto is not dead! It's very much alive, and is just undergoing a little renovation work. All comments can be directed to this post, and Avatar will be more than happy to reply to them. Please don't bombard the poor guy with hundreds of e-mails!

So, stay tuned! It'll be back ;)

While you're waiting, why not look around here for a while? It's good, I 'promise'! :)

Reborn!

Almost three months ago, I left the blogging scene because I had to attend college. There were quite a few best of lucks, and many goodbyes. I never really knew if I would be able to blog with the same vigour and enthusiasm with which I had been in the past. College is, after all, no easy feat, and it requires a lot of time and hard work. But as luck would have it, I did manage to find time to come online somewhere in the middle, and was suddenly bombarded by all the new stuff that had been happening with Blogger. I had left Beta Blogger as an infant, and in those two months, it had grown up to be a fine fine platform! How could I stay away from it?

So now, your favourite 'The Last Word' is back, and now in beta! Hehe! Yeah! I was getting a little tired of wanting to migrate and waiting for the magic link to appear in my normal Blogger, so I decided to make the change myself. Of course, I lose all my posts and comments, but I am not deleting my old blog. It'll be there existing on the Internet under the name of 'The Last Word Archives'. That's right, you can find all your favourite hacks and articles right there. But this is where all the magic will happen from now on :)

Now that looks good!

As you can see, I've completely redone the look once again, and a very big thank you goes to Phydeaux3 for that. He was extremely patient, and wrote 'freakishly long mails' answering all my questions and walking me through the (intimidating) new Blogger Layouts and template editor. And hence, the result is right in front of you. A much more polished, and cleaner look to everything. I would also like to thank Mark James, whose icons I have so generously used all over this blog. However, being in beta, things will continue to change. Features might be removed, to make place for more information or other features. Any thoughts and ideas on the template are welcome, but don't expect them all to get implemented! I'm finicky on that end! :P

The top part, as in this white and blue part, is where the main and latest post will show up. Under which is the 'My contents' area. To the extreme left is snippets from the latest three posts (after the first main post). After that is a label's list, so that you can skip right to the area you're interested in. In case you want to begin searching right away, hit Alt+Shift+S (sorry! Firefox only), and you'll see the search bar pop up on your right! :) Start typing, and you'll see the return of Search Suggest as well! Right at the end and to the extreme right is pictures from college, and my daily wanderings around campus and this new city (not that new anymore). It'll be regularly updated so that you can too share the sights of this beautiful place which is home for me for the next two years! :)

Under the my contents, is the 'External contents' area. Here you'll see syndicated feeds from other blogs which I keep a regular tab of, and would like you to keep track of as well. Again, these blogs can and will change, but at the moment you can look at the current blogs listed.

The clichés

That is pretty much what is there at the moment. But as I said, little little things will change here and there, and the posting shall continue :) I'll post whenever I can, about everything that you've come to expect from me. Expect pretty much regular updates, and as usual, subscribe to my feed to make keeping track easier. I have made my feeds available in all three formats (Atom, JSON, RSS) so that you can feed yourself in any form you like! Keep your comments flowing in! After all, thoughts are meant to be shared :) I will be modifying the relevant external data to point to this blog now, so that you get the best and most up to date content and information! Like the Feedburner feed. The moment I have a considerable number of posts, I'll change it to point to this blog. You won't have to change a thing, except for the one bookmark pointing to the main page! :) It's that easy!

So, here's raising my glass to the all new Last Word. See ya around! :)