For those of you who are in India and are travel frequently through Indian Railways, I’m sure you might be having trouble checking PNR  statuses of your multiple tickets. Well, I’ve been facing the same problem, and I’ve come up with a solution.

Head over to http://pnralerts.akashbhavsar.com and subscribe to FREE email alerts for any change in the PNR status of your multiple Indian Railway tickets.

I would really appreciate if you ask your friends to check out the page. And do not hesitate to write to me about your suggestions or ideas or even complaints.

Cheers,
Akash.

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Yes, it’s here. The WordPress release 2.7 codenamed “Coltrane”. Almost everything in the Dashboard has been raised to a whole new level. The new Dashboard gives you a unique sense of usability while being aesthetically beautiful.

Coltrane is a combined effort of more than 150 people who contributed directly to the code according to the WordPress Blog. A plethora of new features has been included based on the feedback of countless WordPress users. This set of new features, I feel, makes you focus on the content of your blog rather than managing it. Some of the major new features that you will instantly notice in Coltrane include:

• Automatic Upgrade  - Yes, freedom! No need to FTP newer files to your host anymore!
• Plugin Browser/Installer - Install plugins right from your dashboard without downloading them.
• Sticky Posts - Keep an important post or an announcement stickied on your front page for as long as you want.
• QuickPress - Post a new entry in a wink!
• Drag and Drop in Dashboard - Change the layout of your Dashboard while dragging and dropping layers.
• Bulk Editing of Posts.
• Comment replies from Dashboard.
• Add media without creating a post.
• A new design and layout.
• A revised Dashboard.
• And a whole lot more…

For a complete set of features and a video preview, head over to the WordPress Blog Post on Coltrane.

There is a poll for your favourite thing in WordPress 2.7, which was put while 2.7 was in Beta, on the WordPress Blog. You can head over and cast your vote here. I just love the new Dashboard and it is my favourite new feature in WordPress 2.7. Which feature in the new WordPress 2.7 do you like the most?

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• Socialize your browser with Yoono!
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So what is Yoono? As the tagline of Yoono reads, it helps you socialize your browser. Yoono is a browser addon for Mozilla Firefox that sits besides your browser tabs and keeps you updated with what your friends are doing across social networks including MySpace, FaceBook and Twitter. It also supports major IM services including MSN, Yahoo!, GTalk and AIM. Even Flickr, Piczo and FriendFeed are supported. You’re never gonna miss an IM while Yoono is running in your Firefox window!

Yoono in action!

Want more? Well, Yoono also synchronizes your bookmarks with its servers so that you can share your bookmarks across different computers. You can view links related to the content you are currently browsing, and you can also post Web Notes regarding something you love, something you find funny or even something you hate. This ’something’ might range from anything between links, images, text or videos. Yoono also has additional widgets that support mail, newsfeeds, videos, photos and music.

I’ve been using Yoono since a week on Firefox 3, and so far I’ve been impressed. It silently hides as a vertical bar in my browser window, showing me a popup whenever I have a message waiting. I’ve faced some minor connection issues, where it keeps on getting disconnected, but that seems to be a problem with Firefox 3. This addon is a must for people who have been addicted to IM and social network services!

Much has been already talked about Yoono. With more widgets still in the making, it might truly become the social networking browser plugin of all times!

You can install Yoono from its Firefox Addon page here. Incase you want to check out some more news and features, headover to Yoono.com.

Until next time,
Akash.

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Will soon come up with a post about all that.
Adios till then!

Akash.

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Google has launched a service named Google Lively, which it has labeled as a Chat Experience. Lively is a simulated virtual world where any user can create a room or more precisely, a space for friends to chill out and chat within. The space can be customized, with furniture and objects, video and photo streams and much more. Each user signing in gets to create an avatar and control how it looks. Although, there are not abundant customizations that are available yet. But Google sure seems to plan on going the Second Life way, allowing users to shop for customizations and apparel inside Lively.

The service is in it’s first beta. But yes, it is slow. If you have a slow internet connection, I would advise you to stay away from Lively as of now. Even after you sign into a room, loading the room environment takes up some time over an average broadband connection. Also, the service requires DirectX 9 hardware acceleration enabled on your machine, so make sure you have a nice video card installed before you end up being disappointed.

Getting Lively running is as simple as downloading their installer, installing the software and signing in. You have a good choice of Lively or user created spaces or rooms to get into. Once you’re in, you can move around, interact with objects (like, sit on chairs, move them), and ofcourse, chat with people. Although I did find the moving around part a bit unfriendly.

Google seems to to have made more of a “Mee too!” kind of an attempt with Lively, especially if you end up comparing it with Second Life. For people who have been used to Second Life, I must say Second Life has way more depth as of now. But you can sure give Google Lively a try.

Go ahead, explore Google Lively and invite your friends over. You can visit the help section in case you need to know more. Drop me a “Hi” incase you come across me having a coffee in one of the rooms.

Until next time.
Akash.

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You can go and check it out here. I’ll post a photo update soon.
Do leave me some comments!

Cheers,
Akash.

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So what exactly are Yahoo! Pipes?, you’d ask me.

Well, Pipes are tools which can allow you to gather various content from all over the web, filter it, transform it, modify it and do what not, and then present it again! That too, in a format you like! Still confused?

Okay, imagine, that you have been visiting a lot of blogs about a particular topic. You’re subscribed to a zillion feeds. At times, you would still want to look out for specific content and track it separately amongst those feeds. Now reading about something in particular across multiple feeds or sources is surely a big pain! You suddenly start to think if you could somehow combine multiple feeds so that you get exactly what you wanted. Forget feeds, imagine if you could combine content from feeds and multiple websites. Imagine if you to extract particular portions from multiple websites and generate a unified feed for them! Sounds a bit far-fetched? Enter - Yahoo! Pipes.

With Yahoo! Pipes, all that is mentioned above is possible. Well, I guess you’ve heard about pipes in Unix. Yahoo! Pipes is the web version. Pipes provides you with multiple modules, which range from simple ones like getting user input, formatting strings, and stuff to the more typical ones like applying regex expressions to content. And if you’re wondering where to get the content from, then let me tell you, you have a whole lot of like 11 modules (as of now) to get content from various sources, may it be an RSS feed, or a web page, or a CSV file on the web, or just about anything. It even as a module that searches for images from Flickr!

Using pipes is fairly simple. You just need to drag the modules and they will appear as boxes with configurable parameters on a canvas. You need to make sure that the final output you desire is connected to Pipe Output. I’ve setup a simple pipe that allows you to search the RSS feeds for AkashBhavsar.com. You can check the pipe output here and if you need to see the structure, you can do that as well here.

One incredibly good thing about the Pipes that you make is that the content output from the Pipes will be indexed by search engines. There have been some really creative ideas that have come up, like searching for an apartment on maps, searching for geo-tagged photos and so on. You can go over and browse some Pipes and get a feel for yourself. And just head over to Yahoo! Pipes and get a hands on experience in creating one yourself!

With such a powerful nifty little tool that Yahoo! has provided us with, rewiring the web doesn’t seem that tough a task!

Until next time,
Akash.

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1. Get some WordPress plugins!
   Plugins are a great way to extend WordPress. They could provide you with zillions of customizations or added functionalities for your blog. While not all may be utmost important, but I’ve listed some of the must have plugins below:
   • Akismet - Stops comment spam.
   • SEO Title Tag - Optimizes your blog’s titles for individual post pages so that your pages rank better in search engines.
   • WordPress Related Posts - Shows posts related to every post. Readers tend to read more of your blog’s content as a result.
   • Google XML Sitemaps - This one is a must must have! Just get it ASAP. It will automatically generate sitemaps for your blog, which will enable search engines to index your blog content easily.
   • WordPress.com Stats - Quite a useful plugin. It will basically generate reports of visitors and page views of your blog. You’ll need to have an account at WordPress.com to use it though.
2. Generate and submit your sitemap!
   Sitemaps are XML files that contain information about all the possible pages in your site. Typically, a sitemap provides a list of URLs of the pages that are a part of your site, along with other information like when was the page last updated, what is the frequency of the updates and how important the page is. So why a sitemap?
   A sitemap is a very easy and efficient way to tell search engines about the structure of yur site. The first thing you would want to do, even if you have a single page website is generate a sitemap and submit it to Google Webmaster Tools. It will take some time before your sitemap is verified by Google, but once it is, you will see your pages being indexed by Google really fast! If anyone of you has faced a problem in getting your blog listed in Google (or other search engines), this is probably the first thing you gotta try. In case of WordPress users, you would want to get the Google XML Sitemaps plugin which automates the entire process of generating the sitemap every time you update your blog. It also automatically notifies Google, MSN and Yahoo! about the update.
   For more information on sitemaps, you can head over to Sitemaps.org. With your sitemap updated at its place, your blog content will be indexed by search engines really fast. Which means more readers coming your way through search!
3. Enable Permalinks!
   Permalinks? Well, yes. Ever came across a link on the internet that goes like
   http://www.something.com/index.php?page=1
   Permalinks a.k.a. permanent links are restructured links that look just more sensible and are easy to track by search engines. A permalink corresponding to the above link maybe something like
   http://www.something.com/page/1
   As you can see, permalinks restructure the GET parameters of a request, making them seem to be links to static pages, thus the name permalinks. Search engines like static links, rather than ones with a hundred parameters. Enabling permalinks will make sure that search engines index most of the content on your site or your blog. Not only that, it will make your links easier to read, remember and understand.
   WordPress already has an inbuilt feature to enable permalinks for all your pages. You can find it under “Settings » Permalinks” in your dashboard. Change the link structure here from “Default” to something you like. I would recommend changing it to “Month and name”.
4. Promote your blog URL!
   Well, this is one of the basics. Don’t expect someone to come and read your blog if they don’t just know about it! Make sure you tell your friends about your blog.
   Put your blog URL under your email signature. Set it as “Homepage URL” on any networking sites or online communitites that you use. Visit other blogs, make comments and leave your blog URL there. The more incoming links to your blog, the better!
   You could also try submitting your blog URL to search engines using one of the free online services. Just do a Google with keywords like “free search engine submit” and you’ll come up with loads of results.
5. Post Frequency vs. Post Content
   No, blogs with more posts don’t get famous! Instead, blogs that have better content in their posts do. It is better to write a great post once a week, rather than writing one everyday just for the sake of doing it. Make your readers come back for more, by making them wait for quality content.

Doing these 5 basic things with your brand new blog will boost your initial readership and make sure that search engines lead more visitors to your blog. Just what a new enthusiastic blogger would want!

Comments and suggestions are welcome!
Akash.

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I am Akash Bhavsar, a software engineer currently working for a major software and services firm in India. This blog is the start of a long-awaited personal website.

To set you all clear, I absolutely love codes and I am the typical passionate romantic poet if Code is Poetry. (Lol..!!)
I have been exploring the open source PHP community since some time now, and I will treat this blog as a platform to share with you, the discoveries that I make. Here’s where you’ll find what I’m currently exploring, some nifty PHP tricks or guides, WordPress news and everything else that you can imagine related to code.

I will aso treat this blog as a platform for my own expression and to put forth my ideas and viewpoints. Ocassionally, you might also come across posts related to my personal life or how and where I’ve had fun lately. Thus, the tagline for this blog: Code, Coffee and… Life.

I’ve also had a recent interest in photography, and you can see some of my photographs on my photoblog at Perzpective. I’m currently working on putting up Perzpective alongside this blog.

I’m not much of a writer, but I’ll surely try to make this blog more interesting to read than your mobile phone’s manual.

So get ready, and bookmark this page. Add it to your RSS feeds. I would love to see your comments flowing in!

Until next time…
Akash.

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