Perspectives

Do you like both Blogspot and LJ? Do you have your readers split between these two lovely blog provider sites ? Well, I do. I was telling sunson the other day that I want to blog in LJ and then syndicate it into blogspot. Apparently, you can do this by paying LJ for a premium account. I dont know what else a premium account provides, but I really dont want to pay for something like this. Why would you do that when you have Greasemonkey and PHP? So, A bit of a night out and some ciggys amalgamated into the “LJ Blogspot integrator”.

What is good ?
Well, this entire thing, isint ?

What is bad ?

• You need to install this greasemonkey script. That means, you are stuck to firefox and you have to install it on all the firefox browsers you blog from.
• The backend is PHP. So you need a server to run it. Maybe, at a later point, I will write the entire thing in javascript.
• You have to switch to the “plain text mode” before you click “update”. This is because I dont know how to capture the text written inside the rich text editor. You can help me to fix this.
• LJ user links have a broken image. Will fix this later.
• Your update entries will not take effect in blogspot. Not sure if I want to fix this.

Go find the greasemonkey script from here. I am hoping you already have greasemonkey and know what I am talking about. Find the backend PHP code here.
Read up the code to see what all you have to change. And then you are all set to go!

Ensaai!
PS: If you find this blog on my blogspot, it got there because of what I just told you!

Google is probably going to tell you a much better answer about that.
But I could not resist putting thoughts about this on paper(blog, in
this case). Blogspot is full of illusion. It is like a “maya”. At the look of it,
it is fanciful and does all that you want it to do. But, you gotta get
out of it. It is not the real world.  As once mentioned, “nothing ever happens” TM . Sure, you can do a lot of things, but what happened to basics ? Blogging is the lifeline of web 2.0. And you dont have a notion of communities,
You can’t tag etc. But, my biggest problem with blogspot is the way
they have written their “Comments” module. It has to be better than
that.

 Like has already pointed out, we are talking about blog and not a website. Nobody really visits a blog ever.  Just as how
“Adsense” does not make sense, all those “Lotsa” things does not make sense either.

Just to say something original, I was talking to a first yearite in IIM
Bangalore about Business, startups ( I am damn interested in all of
these
things) and everything(Seems like my favorite hobby these days is to catch hold of an IIM MBA and talk to him about startups ).
He questioned Google’s ( How comical will it be to give an outgoing
link to “google” ? Will that increase my Page rank ? ) 
business  model.
Though not sure about the exact numbers, having close to 100% of revenues from Advertisement is not such a wise thing. Y! had a
similar stature six years ago and we all know what happened.

I told him “If newspaper(s) industry can survive close to 150 years
just on advertisement, I am sure Internet ( and hence G & Y ) can
too.”
Someone once told me, an issue of the “The Hindu” would cost Rs. 125 , but for the advts it carries.
Do you disagree ?  Leave a comment. I have a big theory behind this one and is probably material enough for another entry.