Archive for the 'Blogs' Category

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And More Bits of Unsolicited Advice: Getting Traffic For Your Blog

Published on September 7, 2009 in Blogs. 48 Comments

The last thing one should do to an old man on a bench is to encourage him to dispense unsolicited advice. No sooner than you do so than out comes more and more words of dubious wisdom.

In the last post, I dispensed some very general advice about the art of blogging. In this post, I get a bit more specific, focusing on what I feel is the best way to build traffic for your blog.

For those of you who believe that they blog for their own satisfaction and do not care if anybody else reads it then please skip the rest of the post. But for those of us who desire an audience but struggle to get one (as I did once upon a time and the frustrations of which I detailed previously), here are some general thoughts on the topic.

The most important thing of course remains the same. Good content. Last time I said “If you build it, they will come”. Sure. But if the water runs out and the toilet stinks, then they won’t stick around. Trust me on that.

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Five Bits of Unsolicited Advice For Bloggers

Published on August 9, 2009 in Blogs. 127 Comments

This is my 600th post (according to my WordPress dashboard). Also this month on 20th August this blog will turn five. In the accelerated world of the Net, that’s considered to be an eternity. Actually I would say that’s quite a lot of time in the real world also , enough for instance to have completed another PhD.

Which is why today I put on the cap of cranky old man and fortified by five-years and six hundred posts of wisdom, dispense five totally unsolicited bits of advice for bloggers.

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Some Cosmetic Changes

Published on July 26, 2009 in Administration and Blogs. 43 Comments

You may have noticed that “Random Thoughts of a Demented Mind” (RTDM) looks a little different today. Not as different hopefully as say Koena Mitra did after she had her disastrous nose job which in essence put a pakoda between her eyes.

But yes yahaan pe kuch to hua hain.

Well the news is that RTDM underwent a slight cosmetic enhancement over the weekend. This was necessitated by changes to WordPress, the software that I use to create and maintain my blog. In theory, WordPress is this marvelous bit of open-source community software which rules over all its competitors because of its extensive extensibility both in terms of functionality (through what are known as plug-ins) and in terms of visualization (through what are known as themes). In practice, it is riddled with security vulnerabilities and feature instabilities, requiring very frequent updates and releases (sometimes within weeks of the last) with the problem being that updates are prone to sometimes “break” your blog beyond repair. WordPress developers blame plug-in/theme developers for this state of affairs while they deflect the blame back and in the midst of all this passing the buck, the poor user as usual suffers.

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This Blog Hits Four

Published on August 20, 2008 in Blogs and Personal. 117 Comments

Random Thoughts of a Demented Mind turns four on the 20th of August. And to commemorate this occasion, I, as a proud father, join voices with Prabhuji Mithunda, as he sings, in his very own voice [audio], the following song.

“Aaj mere Munne ki saal giraah hain”

Four years in the turbo-accelerated Indian blogworld is like forty in the real considering the sheer amount of change, both in terms of the number of blogs and overall readership, one has witnessed over these years.

If on August 20, 2004 someone would have told me that in August 2008, people like Amitabh Bachchan, Aamir Khan, Ram Gopal Verma and Karan Johar would be blogging I would have laughed him off by saying: “Yeah right ! I can just see the future. Amitabh Bachchan, who we know for his strong silence and aloofness, would be using his blog, perhaps twice a day, to take swipes at every Tom Dick and Harry who criticizes him. Aamir Khan would spend his keemti time informing us of the name of his dog (which happens to be Shahrukh) . Ram Gopal Verma would be justifying his questionable creative decisions through his blog. Hah ! Dude no way is that happening in four or four hundred years. What stuff are you smoking?”

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Blog Day 2007

Published on August 31, 2007 in Blogs and Causes. 15 Comments

Today is Blog Day—it’s the day on which you are supposed to link to 5 other blogs, blogs preferably of a different culture from yours. Now I have already done 2 blog days [2005 and 2006] before and this time, I have decided to do things a bit different. Rather than blogs, I will link to four India-themed projects (I wish there were five that I had knowledge of), focussed on governance, education and finance, that I feel merit attention. Note that I am not associated directly or indirectly with any of these projects —they had been brought to my attention mostly by people who have written in.

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