The free lunches on the Internet

The Internet is all about freedom. When we go online we have come to expect everything as free, as opposed to the real world where everything comes with a price tag. Do you crib about paying the postage when you drop your letter in the red box? However I am pretty sure there will be world wide anarchy if Yahoo or Google starts debiting money from your account for every email that you send.

For people who have newly migrated to the Internet this freebie-sm seems incredible, magical or even downright suspicious. An uncle of mine,when introduced to the benefits of free email was like ,"No way this is possible. They must be costly."

"No Uncle. You don't have to pay for sending email. In fact you don't have to pay for anything. Just create an account and start sending mails".

"But what about the costs of maintaining this service? All the wiring, all the electricity, all the pretty colours? I am pretty sure that they ask your bank account or credit card number during that account creation stage"

"Relax Uncle. I have an account and I don't have a bank account By the way I think they recover their cost through advertising. And I am pretty sure they don't pay for the wiring." This was quite some years ago and I was still not very clear about the economics of the Internet. I am a little surer now!

"Hmmm is it completely free then? I don't have to pay anything?" There was this you-are-kidding tone in his voice and he looked very hard for that data field where he would have to key in his account number when creating his email account. I think he was kind of disappointed when he didn't find any!

Since the Internet offers such a wide variety of tools for free (in rare cases they charge, but very little) it's upto us to use all of them for managing our life. One of the pioneers in offering free service is Google with everything ranging from photos, videos, web analysis tools, gadgets, maps, books and whatnot offered for free. Most of us know about or use only a minority of these features: Gmail, Picasa, YouTube, Blogger. Let me elaborate on couple of services that you can use regularly.

Google Reader: This one is a life saver for jobs like mine, where you have to read stuff from plenty of websites of all stripes. You can usually get redirected to this service by clicking on the link titled Reader which will appear on the top left of the page once you log into your google account. You can also get it by googling Google Reader. On the first try you might have to enter your password but that's about it.

"What are we supposed to do with it?". Good thing that you asked. Whenever you visit any Website look out for this orange icon either in the search bar or in the main page.

Click on this icon and you will find that all the contents of that Website added to Reader. Add as many Websites as you want and you will get the daily dose of news,photos, nonsense and fetish at one place.

Google Calendar: Did you ever forget your mum's birthday? Were there times when you got on the bus cab and remembered that you forgot to bring that discount coupon for the eatery near your office? How about forgetting to give your environmentally passionate girlfriend that card for Earth Day? Fear not, with Google Calendar there is no need to dream up last minute excuses.

Google Calendar can be accessed from the same top panel of links, or from here if you are feeling lazy. Log in and you will be presented with a calendar, the kind which is available in business planners.

The USP of GCal is its ability to talk to your phone. Depending on your service provider you can elect to receive alerts of the events in the calendar on your mobile by SMS. These alerts can be set to be received before a user specified time frame. Go to Settings and in the Mobile Setup area and validate your number. Google Calendar has saved my skin a number of times and I am a heavy user. What's cooler is that you can share your Google Calendar with other people and also send invites by Gmail.

Web apps that are free to use are a great way of organizing your life and effectively multitasking and communicating. I fully subscribe to this view but also append a note of caution: never trust your data in a single place, if it's of any importance to you. ALWAYS keep a physical backup. Multiple copies are the safest bet. Utilize the facilities of Internet but be careful not to depend on it.

I am curious as to what free apps do you use, Web based or otherwise to streamline your life and work. Fire away in the comments

Full redesign

For a long time this blog looked like a step son who was passed over by the evil step mother when the contents of her will was disclosed. Just look at the number of months between this and the last post; also look over at the archives. Notice a trend? Well, I was more enthusiastic in the earlier years (comparatively,of course. No way did I average 10 posts per month even in my best days).

Be as it were, there are quite a number of reasons for my lackluster performance. I was a bit jaded after my final semester exams last March, and what with the job hunting and all there was hardly any time or inclination to blog. Even after I got my job (and a pretty decent Net connection) there was hardly any enthusiasm, and I blogged in fits and starts. Now that I come to think of it I was simply bored by my blog design. Inspite of my articles In Digit where I repeatedly used to write how fast and easy it was to give a new look to your blog I was too lazy to do that myself.. Period. The templates in Blogger were my sticking point and I even created a Wordpress blog (it's still there) The content was exported from this blog) because Wordpress offered plenty of plug ins and beautiful templates.

However I was not ready to dump Blogger just yet. I was also not ready to give up on blogging- a big thanks to Partha, Satya, Bhupi and others who opined that I should keep blogging. But no way was I gonna write in a blog that had the default stretched denim as template. Time to move on with a complete redesign.

First was the search for a new template. I did a Google search on blogger templates and was overwhelmed with a problem of plenty. So many designs, so many choices! Sometimes I didn't like the colour, sometimes the font was the villain. I was looking for a design which would provoke a gut reaction and make me say ," This is what I want my blog to look like". After reviewing about a thousand (more or less) templates I saw this one and the reaction was "This is the ONE". Downloaded the XML file, uploaded it and I was brand new, shiny and with a crystal look. So far ,so good.

I wanted my blog to look professional which entailed adding the orange RSS icon (You can subscribe to posts using a default link, but its buried at the bottom and is simply crap). I headed over to Feedburner and created a feed. This is a point and click process and you needn't do any complex Javascript gymnastics to get this button. For a good measure I also added the option to deliver posts to email. Just click on the link on the top right corner, enter your email ID and every time the content is updated your readers get it delivered to their inbox. Sweet!

Adding search functionality is very important for any content rich website. Notice the Google search box on the top right? This can be added either the easy way by using it as page element or the hard way by copy pasting code snippet. However this feature is not available in the standard Blogger but in the Blogger in Draft. For those not in the know, this is actually Blogger's experimental service where features that are planned to be pushed out in the future are present. For all intents and purposes it is exactly the same as the parent service. The only difference that I noted is that the number and type of page elements closely resemble Google Gadgets. I selected what I wanted, viz. the search box and saved my changes.

The trickiest element in my redesign was the tag cloud. I didn't like the way Blogger's default label element displayed my tags. The tag cloud seemed prettier and more intuitive with tags that occur more frequently displayed in larger font sizes. While there are some services like ZoomClouds and TagCloud that will create a tag cloud for you just like Feedburner creates feeds I preferred to get my hands dirty with code. This was because I would have full control over the way my tags behaved and there would not be an empty space smack in the middle of my blog if the service goes offline for some reason (most of the services that I tried were down). Another reason was that if I went by the manual route I will have full control on colours, fonts, size etc of the tag cloud. After some research (actually I spent about an hour) I came upon this page which seemed to get the job done. I followed the instructions and after a fair bit of playing around with colours and font sizes got my tag cloud working. Mission accomplished.

For the moment the redesign is over. I might add some more links and other bits and pieces but the basic look and feel is locked down. I would like to ask my readers what widgets and page elements you think are invaluable for your blog. Fire away in the comments below.