From Ryan Carson at Carsonified comes an excellent video (tutorial) on how to build a (web) start-up. It is the first part of a series of such video/articles that he has planned to do on building startups.
Laloo Prasad Yadav is a well known political figure in India. I found this funny (and very interesting) video clip of Laloo presenting the Railway Budget in the parliament, and upon hooting by the opposition, who were probably asking him to deliver the speech in English rather than in Hindi, he renders quite an entertaining version of his speech translated into English. Watch:
One of the tools that you can readily utilize for blogging is an offline software editor to write, edit and publish posts to your blog. One (new entrant) among such editors is Microsoft’s Word 2007.
Supported Blog Providers/Engines
Word 2007 – a part of the Office 2007 suite – provides in-built functionality to connect to different types of blogging systems and perform editing and publishing tasks from within the very familiar interface of Word. Supported are some of the major blogging engines out there:
If your blogging engine is not in the above list, then Word also provides an option of ‘Other’, where you can connect to your blog through the API provided by your blogging engine. Consult your blog provider to check how to publish from a software editor, outside of you blog. Most bloggers would be pretty happy though, just like me, to find WordPress in that list.
Connecting to My Blog from Word
It was a breeze to connect Word to my WordPress blog. All I had to do was to provide the URL of my WordPress blog (relative to the xmlrpc.php file) and my username and password for the blog. That was it! Now I am composing this post of mine from within Word, and (if everything goes well) I will be successfully publishing it from within Word as well.
One Caveat
There is, however, one important thing that needs to be checked: the way Word formats HTML content, inserting its own markup and what-not into the code. This is the biggest issue when composing or copy-pasting rich-text from Word, or other word processors, into a web-based visual editor (such as TinyMCE). That is why word processors are generally avoided for HTML based content creation (not even for copy pasting) to the extent that it’s highly discouraged. I will edit this post after publishing to check what has been done with the code behind the visual layer: whether Word 2007 throws its own garbage into the code or keeps it clean and tidy XHTML.
Word 2007 Blogging Features
I will be writing a tutorial in my next post on how-to utilize Word 2007 to post on your WordPress blog. For now, a brief list of blogging features that are provided in Word 2007:
Publish: Publish the post to your blog account
Publish as Draft
Home Page: Opens the home page of your blog in web browser
Insert Category: Categorize your post from the already defined categories on your blog account, or type a new one
Open Existing: Open an already published post on your blog for editing in Word
Manage Accounts: Add, remove or modify your blog accounts
Now that it’s time to publish, I realize that Word lacks the ability to tag my post! Tagging is now supported by WordPress and I love to tag my posts with the relevant keywords of the post rather than putting them in one or two generic categories. Now this step will need to be carried out manually. Oh well. Let’s publish.
This is the third time in less than two weeks that I had to troubleshoot my installation of Wordpress 2.5.
This time, however, the issue was not with Wordpress itself, but this particular theme that I am using - Illacrimo. The feed for this blog was throwing an error:
XML Parsing Error: xml declaration not at start of external entity
Location: http://www.sawantshah.com/feed/
Line Number 2, Column 1:<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
^
I learned about the error when I tried to burn my feed through FeedBurner, which informed me that the feed (RSS XML) was not well-formed:
The URL you entered does not appear to be a valid feed. We encountered the following problem: Error on line 2: The processing instruction target matching “[xX][mM][lL]” is not allowed.
It directed me Feed Validator to check the feed’s validity, and for sure it was not well formed:
line 1, column 1: Blank line before XML declaration
So what now? Google zindabad! On Wordpress Support I found this and this, but I didn’t find any concise and to the point answer there.
If an XML declaration (<?xml ... ?>) appears in your feed, it must be the first thing in the feed, before any whitespace.
Unfortunately, with WordPress it seems all too easy for a plugin, a theme, or for your configuration file to contain a blank line. Further compounding this problem, some — but not all — feed readers compensate for this common error, allowing the error to go undetected for quite a while.
What’s the solution?
The solution is to trim/delete any blank lines outside of the <?... ?> in the PHP code of either the theme files (functions.php) or Wordpress files (wp-config.php, wp-rss2.php, wp-atom.php).
I had a blank line between two PHP code sections in the theme’s functions.php file. It was not evident at first, but thankfully, I finally got it to work! Now my feeds are working fine.
Wordpress 2.5 is finally here, and I have upgraded to it from the initial Release Candidate 1 I had installed initially. Wordpress is a blessing, and I love this new version!
The issue was with TinyMCE Visual Editor. The Visual/HTML tabs were non-functional … in short, it was messed up (as seen in the image above. Image Source)!
I found a thread in Wordpress Support on this issue, and this solution worked for me. Another post and solution here as well. Following is the solution that worked for me:
1. Compression is enabled on the server. If it’s set properly (in php.ini) the compressor for TinyMCE would detect it and not try to compress the js. To check for double compression: with Firefox, go to [your-site]/wp-includes/js/tinymce/tiny_mce_config.php. Should be a large text (js) file, starting with “var tinyMCEPreInit = …” and last line starting with “tinyMCE.init({mode:”none”,…”.
If it’s not - edit tiny_mce_config.php, looking for 'compress' => true,
change to 'compress' => false,
One subject that I didn’t really like in school was Chemistry. I was more of a Physics guy. I can’t forget those days when we had to memorize the whole periodic table - element names, their symbols and their number! Gosh! It was all so chemically charged!
Here’s a fun game to relive those days. Check how many elements you can name from the periodic table.
Software: Wordpress 2.5RC1 Problem: Media Upload Problem Status: Resolved!
As I was setting up this blog, I started out with Wordpress 2.5 RC1 (Release Candidate 1). However, I faced a major issue with the new media uploading features that they have provided in 2.5; it failed to upload any media (I was trying audio). With some search, I stumbled on WP Support Forums and found that a few others were facing the same problem.
Finally, today, a working solution was posted. Thanks to Philip Barron for coming up with the solution here.
I had been trying to find this one song from the movie Guru - Shauk Hai - it plays in the background as the theme music of the character played by Vidya Balan. The song is composed by the music maestro A.R. Rehman. Unfortunately, it was not included in the soundtrack of the movie, and it was not available anywhere on the Internet either - just one blog mentioned the song back then.
But I finally found this song, thanks to this leading to this, which revealed that the song has been released by Sony BMG in a compilation album of A. R. Rehman: AR Rehman Greatest Hits! Thank you Rehman sahab for this beautiful, magical song and thank you Sony BMG for (finally) releasing this song!
Listen to this song, it’s beautiful:
This track is truly magical! The song is about the desires of a person who is counting her days and who requires someone’s help for everything, as she is suffering from multiple sclerocis. She wants to break from all this, reach out to her desires and aspirations. She knows her fate, but she doesnt want to be depressed. It is essentially meant to bring out that “longing” feel, but without the sadness. ARR captures this mood perfectly in the song, with the lyrics adding to the beauty. The piano chords running throughout the song, add to the simple but elegant beauty of the song.
This is, without doubt, one of his all time best songs!!! It is a pity, this masterpiece wasn’t released with the Audio CD of Guru!!
Also, here are the lyrics of the song, with translation (thanks to this and this):
Raat ka shauk hai I aspire of the night
Raat ki saundhi si khamoshi ka That earthen silence of the night
Shauk hai I aspire
Subha ki roshni That light of the morning
Bezubaan subho ki aur gungunati Humming toward the mum morning
Roshni ka Shauk hai, ho shauk hai I aspire of light, oh…I aspire
San sani anwlon ka Of those pungency of amlas (I aspire to taste)
Ke ishq ke banwlon ka Of those crazyness of the lovers (I aspire to have)
San sani anwle Those pungent amlas
Ke ishq ke banwle Those crazy lovers
Barf se khelte badolon ka Of those clouds playing with the ice
Shauk hai I aspire (to touch)
Kaash ye zindagi Khel hi khel mein kho gayi hoti I wish this life were a child’s play
Raat ka shauk hai I aspire of night
Neend ki goliyon ka Of those sleeping peels (I aspire)
Khwab ke loriyon ka Of those lullabies of dreams (I aspire to listen)
Neend ki goliyan Those sleeping peels
Khwab ke loriyan Those lullabies of dreams
Bezubaan aus ki boliyon ka Of those (unsaid) words of mum dews (I aspire to listen)
Shauk hai I aspire
Kaash ye zindagi binkahe binsune so gayi hoti I wish this life had gone to sleep without saying or listening anything
Subha ki roshni That light of the morning
Bezubaan subho ki aur gungunati Humming toward the mum morning
Roshni ka Shauk hai, ho shauk hai I aspire of light, oh…I aspire
So, I have finally inaugurated my website by setting up this blog. There are lots of things that I have felt like sharing with the world. I have been sharing them with a pseudo name - an Internet nick name - on other blogs that I setup, and now defunct, elsewhere. But, it was about time that I started writing and publishing my stuff with my real name.
I wanted to give all my writings, my musings, my creative endeavors, my opinions and my rants, a tangible identity … an identity of a real person.
Zenning is the online musing space, or (as known popularly) blog, of a visionary entrepreneur, technology evangelist and ideas man, Sawant Shah.
I am going to write about things that interest me the most, and that excludes almost nothing! I am into startups, web development, new technology, social media and open source stuff.
2007:
