My Tech Notes

Algorithm links

2009-05-26T01:15:00.001-07:00

One of my friends was asking for resources on algorithms and here is the quick one compiled. These are the web resources apart from Art of Computer Progimming books by Donald Knuth

Peteris Krumins while preparing for google interview goes through the book Introduction to Algorithms by Thomas H. Cormen (Author), Charles E. Leiserson (Author), Ronald L. Rivest (Author), Clifford Stein (Author). Has a video of the class room and notes prepared by Peteris. As this is the blog last episode will show up first go to the last page to start from the beginning. MIT Lecture video's are good and notes help too..
Good Coder code, great use - Algorithm notes

Sorting Algorithms

Wiki link on sorting algorithms. Explanation on comparing algorithms and link to detail explanation of popular algorithms as well as some new algorithms that may not be there in the text books.

Wiki Sorting Algorithms

Searching Algorithms
Wiki link on Search Algorithms
Search Algorithms Lecture Notes from Christian Schindelauer
Skiena's Algorithms Lectures

Binary Trees
Wiki article on Binary Tree
Self Balancing Trees Red Black Tree
AVL Trees

Improving boot performance of Ubuntu Hardy Heron

2008-08-31T10:58:00.001-07:00

After the Hardy release the boot time had increased to more than 1 min.

First I followed the Howto available at Ubuntu Forums. But this how to was created for Edgy and I had Hardy

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=89491

Using sysv-rc-conf altered the following.

Could not find following processes that were mentioned in the HowTo
alsa, apmd, gdomap, gpm, hdparam, hotplug and hotplug-net, hplip, ifrename, ifupdown, ifupdonw-clean, inetd, inet.real, lvm, portmap, readahead, ssh,

These were the new processes that had come after edgy
apport, atieventsd, avahi-daemon, dhcbd, hal, keyboard-setup, libpam-fo, loopback, mysql-ndb,mysql, ploicykit, powernowd, procps, rc.local, rmnlogin, rsync, vbesave

Stopped loading following based on the explaination provided in the Howto - atd, bluetooth,cupsys, dns-clean, pppd-dns
Left hotkey-setup, usplash as it is.
This changed hardly made a difference of couple of seonds. But later realized usplash was contributing to the delay and this posts suggests not to select it in the cofig.

I could not find the Boot Up manager mentioned at

http://www.zolved.com/synapse/view_content/28311/Tune_Boot-Up-Manager_for_better_performance_of_Ubuntu

Thanks to the post at

Making Ubuntu boot in 19 seconds

I found bootchart. To install bootchart run

sudo apt-get install bootchart

Bootchart creates png image of boot activities at /var/logs/bootchart From bootchart I found that usplash was using CPU during the Boot. More the CPU taken up the process the bar will have darker shade of the blue.

Fixed the issue as per the thread

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=285920&page=3

Edit usplash.conf and set resolution to 1024x768. Though actual resolution of my screen is 1280x800 that makes splash and text move to the left.

sudo gedit /etc/usplash.conf

Once this is set reconfigure the usplash package or run the below command to update the theme. You can notice the additional parameter vga=773 in /boot/grub/menu.lst after you have run this.

sudo update-usplash-theme usplash-theme-ubuntu

After this boot time was reduced to 32 seconds and my splash screen also started working. Earlier I used to get a blank screen during boot and I was thinking thats how it works!

There is a startup-manager available to handle manage Grub configuration.

Japanese Learning tools on Ubuntu

2008-08-29T11:10:00.001-07:00

I am finding these 2 tools very useful in learning Japanese.

Kanatest helps you to sharpen Hiragana and Katakana including the mixed kana. Randomly a letter is shown and user has to give the romaji equivalent of the symbol. One can also track the progress by the history of tests which contains time taken and percentage of correct answers. For installaing it run

sudo apt-get install kanatest

Langdrill has similar features and also contains vocabulary lessons. Apart from Japanese it contains drills for French and Swedish. For installing

sudo apt-get install langdrill

For more tools visit mbrass

Updated with New Template

2008-08-23T21:59:00.000-07:00

I updated the blog with new template thanks to Template Novo Blogger There are lots very good templates avaialble there. The site is in Portuguese. Used Google translate to see a version in english. Though many words will be still in portuguese, its enough to understand the instructions.
I did following modifications to the content.

At the top there are two place holders for the list of links. Included recent posts and recently read list.
Detailed explaination for including recent posts or recent comments can be found at Eblog templates

If you are using google reader, a script can be found at Settings -> Floders & Tags ->Add clips to your site. But the styles were not gelling with overall site. So used feed URL and added a feed gadget again to the template. Feed URL is nothing but reader/shared replaced with reader/public/atom in the link of public page of any folders you are sharing through google reader.

Edited links to feed icon, favourite the blog on technorati and digg option.

Next thing was finding a host for the images. Files uploaded via blogger are available as album in picasa but it when you open the album there is no link to upload the files directly. There were two options to upload the files create a dummy post or use the upload link in the first page clicking which a popup containing list of album is shown. I used the later option. If you are using the same option remember to remove file resizing path(such as /s144/ or /s288/) from the link provided by Picasa.

I have got more modifications to make such as showing tags as cloud. Now its taking lot of real estate.

Creating a External hard disk

2008-08-08T11:44:00.000-07:00

I was trying to make a external hard disk out of one of the disks in my old desktop. There was lot information available in net on that. But I could not get it right and struggled for a long time. Its easy to figure out power connection etc.
But the missing part was, "how to make the disk master". Hence this post.
To make disk as master a cap needs to be put on pins as shown in the picture. But that cap may not come with the casing. I used a cap from one of my old CD drive. If you notice cap needs to be put on only 2 pins and excluding pins on both sides.

Ubuntu upgrade from 71.0 to 8.04 Hardy Heron

2008-08-02T00:27:00.000-07:00

I carried out the upgrade from Systems -> Adminsitration -> Update Manager as per the Instructionns at Upgrading to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
Remember to update current version before installing 8.04.
Current installation updates were 300 MB and 8.04 installation changes were 800 MB. First problem I faced during installation was hang during generating locale.

Generating locales...
en_AU.UTF-8...

There are different solutions for this issue. Refer to [ubuntu] Hardy 8.04 update freezes on generating locales - Ubuntu Forums
What worked for me is, starting in recovery mode with 7.10 default kernel 2.6.22.15 , select the option open up shell as root and then run

dpkg --configure -a

And then whenever generating locales comes up kill the localegen processes using kill -9 After these installation used to abort with following error

dpkg: too many errors, stopping
dpkg: ../../src/packages.c:251: process_queue: Assertion `!queuelen' failed.

I repeated running dpkg after rebooting in 8.04 default kernel. This time locale generation worked fine but there were lot of errors with gnome configuration due to which dpkg aborted.
Next I logged in using failsafe mode in 8.04 default kernel. One can switch to failsafe mode by clicking on options available at left hand corner bottom on the login screen. Then select sessions option and popup will come up with session options. Select failsafe GNOME session. After logging in again run above dpkg comman in a terminal.

sudo dpkg --configure -a

After this rebooted the machine and it looked like things have fallen to place.

First impressions - Its hardly couple of hours since I started using Hardy Heron

Looks like wireless support has improved a lot. I could see the available networks from network icon on right hand side corner without any configuration! That was not there before.
Default background looks good and fits the release theme.
Looks like firfox 3.0.1 has issue with address text box ... It does not get updated and does not take whatever typed in . Only way I can visit the sites is through the bookmarks !
Not sure if there was a crash reporting facility earlier ...
Brasero does the disc burning.
Boot takes more time than 7.10

Update Aug 3rd
If you are on a AMD 64 machine fixing flash player follow the instructions at
Flash 9 install script for AMD64 (nspluginwrapper)
For the last instruction, creating the link in plugins directory of firefox make sure you are using directory name based on ur release of firefox. (such as firefox-3.0.1

Correction - firefox 3.0.1 address text box might have occured as I was in the middle of plugin installation. It seems to be working fine now.

Getting started with Prototype.js

2008-06-25T10:41:00.000-07:00

Performance tuning Blog

2008-04-12T10:16:00.000-07:00

My Blog was taking nearly 30 seconds to complete the loading. So I spent some time cleaning up the scripts I added over period of for experimenting etc. Firebug came in handy in finding the scripts, images that were taking to get loaded. Here is the screen shot of the information provided by

I have found firebug very useful in javascript debugging, experimenting with css and html in the browser without actually changing the files.
Here is a screencast for starters on how to use Firebug

Migrating to Rails 2.x

2008-04-09T10:04:00.000-07:00

I was using a old version of Rails that came along with Instant Rails. Migration was simple..

Updated the version of RAILS_GEM_VERSION in environment.rb to 2.0.2
Created a dummy project using the new version of rails and copied secret key for the session data integrity.
Ran the rake test available at Rails 2.0 upgrade notes to find deprecations.
Installed the auto_complete plugin I did not face issue with regard to session authentication ...
Sporadically I was facing issue with Cookies. So moved to db based sessions. There is rake task to create tables ('rake db:sessions:create')andin environment.rb uncomment session store.
Commented confg.breakpoint_server. Information is available at code snippets

As I had very little code there was any deprecated method and migration was easy. I am yet to move to new naming convention for rhtml and rjs files.

Setting up Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu 7.1 Gutsy

2008-04-01T10:29:00.000-07:00

For setting up ruby, rails and mysql used the following link.
Rails on Ubuntu
Note that the rails version installed will be 2.0.2. If you are using 1.x version you will have to make changes to the code. That's what I will be doing next. I was using 1.2.x that came with Instant Rails on Windows
Openssl lib
I had to install libopenssl-ruby. Instructions are provided in the above link, otherwise when you start the web server it will through error and come out.
Mongrel
By default Webrick comes with rails. Mongrel can be installed using
sudo gem install mongrel -y
Once mongrel is installed it becomes the default webserver.
Netbeans IDE
After reading through couple of blogs I choose netbeans(6.1 beta) as the IDE. At work I use My Eclipse and it used to take considerable amount of memory. A month back I tried netbeans on a 700 MHz 512 MB laptop and I felt it consumes less resources. Base install of Netbeans is a 24 MB download. I downloaded JavaSE base and included Ruby using updater. I had to install packages sun-java6-bin, sun-java6-jdk before I could install Netbeans.
Installing Rmagick.
Ramgick requires ImageMagick 6.3.0 or higher. So I had to download source for ImageMagick 6.3.2 and build it before I can install rmagick. Followed the instructions provided at Setting up rmagick on Ubuntu

Ubuntu installation on Dell Vostro 1000

2008-03-30T01:23:00.000-07:00

System Info : AMD Athlon 64 X2 Duo Core, ATI Radeon XPress 1150

Pre-Work
Burnt the CD and checked using the instructions provided at

Burning CD Provides instruction to download the iso and burning it using recommended software
Checking the CD Checking the CD using MD5 check sum
Note down IP Adress, Subnet mask, Default gateway, Preffered DNS Server.

Partitioning
There is good amount of information available at Partitioning Windows and Ubuntu.

But I choose to shrink the Windows partition and selected use the free space option provided by Ubuntu installer.

Setting up internet connection.
I have DSL cable modem(ADSL) connected using ethernet cable. Followed the instructions at Ubuntu forums ADSLPPPoE Make sure that all the lights on the modem are on before you run the pppoeconf. Once this is done check if repositories are enabled in /etc/apt/sources.list otherwise you may not be able to install packages using apt-get.

Enabling restricted drivers.
ATI drivers provide better visual effect than the driver that is supplied with Ubuntu installation. These drivers can be enabled using restricted driver manager from System -> Administration. For detailed steps and alternative ways of doing it refer to Ubuntu Gutsy Installation Guide
Update Apr 13 2008
Installing flash 9 for AMD 64
There is script created by Kilz and usage is explained in the sticky Nspluginwrapper Install Script for Dapper-Gutsy(Updated 3/8/08 )
I came across ia32lib problem and followed the instructions in the post flash 9 install AMD 64

Google Gadgets for your web page

2007-04-01T09:32:00.001-07:00

Google is allowing google gadgets to be added to web pages. Some time back I found it but then when I went through the google home page there were options to add to the home page only. But then some how found the link again. Though there is huge number of gadgets(at the time of blogging there were 4682) to be I found very few interesting. One of them was the Custom RSS This allows a list to be displayed based on rss feed. What I have done is used the rss feed from Google Blog search for the key word blogging tools and displaying it.
Other widget/gadget I found interesting was the picasa web album widget which displays random photos from your album.
There are lot widgets/gadgets in different categories from news, tools, communication to technology. There are many games as well. But all of them require script to be added to the web page.
Only drawback I found was customization of gadgets is cumbersome compared to other widget libraries. For example only color that can be chosen is the border color for the rest you need to give hexa decimal values. There is more needs to be done in the gadget customization.
The different part is you can leave comments for the developer of the widget and contact too! I am not sure if other widget libraries allow this.

What does Hit Tail Do ?

2007-03-21T10:26:00.000-07:00

Now I have hittail on my blog for nearly a month. What it does it do ?

Collects all the search words used to reach the website.
Segregates the keywords into Longtail and non-Longtail. Number of occurrences does not seem to be deciding factor as some key words one occurence were also classified as non Long tail keyword.
Using the non-Longtail key words it suggests topics for blogging.

In the last one month it found 49 unique search words for my blog and suggested 2 topics to blog about. The topics were blog template classic, blogger widgets. This is supposed to be arrived at using some complext algorithm. I feel that this can be a good complementary service to the existing analytics service and Its a crowded space with most of the analytics service differing only in the way the show the data.
Here are the keywords collected and their classification. Its not the complete list.

2k Bloggers

2007-03-20T11:35:00.000-07:00

Just added the 2k bloggers widget to the sight which displays 1 percent of the 2k bloggers randomly. Earlier i had a button which proclaimed I was one of the 2k bloggers. This was great idea Tino from which is being carried on by couple of interested guys. It was discontinued as Technorati thought it was a gimmick to get links. May be thats why technorati is not updating my link count? But I still like the idea and I guess there still some slots open to complete the 2k bloggers.

Blogger Templates

2007-03-10T08:20:00.001-08:00

I was trying to get a new template for my blog. Here are the links I found.
P.S.

Most of the templates are the classic templates which can be used by shifting to the classic template mode. But you can not do the page element based modification of the template.
Many templates give the image separately and ask you to host on free photo hosting service(like imageshack) and edit the links in the template. Some give the template with embedded links you may want to move them to your preferred hosting service. For one of the templates I was trying there were png and gif images which I was not able to upload to picasa. I am not sure if blogger allows anything other than jpeg format.

Here is the list I copied from digg. I wanted to clip using clipmark and blog it but it turned out be there is a limit of 1000 characters for public clips which can be blogged. Other thing I found was once you clip you can edit the content of the clip i.e. u can not remove certain characters (or was it the browser playing tricks ?)

Grand Stream Dreams: "New" Blogger Template Resources
Links about blogger template, trick tips and how to go about creating your own template
to Blogger template ... saved by 8 other people
Blogger Templates: 4.5 Million Blogspot Users are Lazy at Digital Inspiration

All the previously tagged sites are reviewed here

to blogger templates ... saved by 38 other people
Blogger Templates (Beta) at Gecko & Fly

edit / delete

Has got templates for new Blogger

to blogger templates ... saved by 43 other people ... 6 hours ago
Free Templates

edit / delete

Nearly 200 templates, Has classic templates as well as some new templates

to Blogger templates ... saved by 176 other people ... 6 hours ago
Blogger templates - noipo.org

12 templates, has a instruction guide and there is some manual work required to upload the photographs

to templates blogger ... saved by 209 other people ...
Blogger Templates

to templates Blogger ... saved by 205 other people
Blogger Templates
Has got some nice Ajax based templates but when I tried to use them I got parser error.May be they are classic templates ?
to templates blogger ... saved by 19 other people
Blogger templates
to blogger templates ... saved by 1668 other people

Blog using Clipmark

2007-03-04T06:24:00.001-08:00

I am trying out clipping using clipmarks and then blogging. Clipmarks is much more sophisticated than the google notes I have been using. It allows clip text, video, then tag them and blog them too !!

clipped from mail.google.com

FuelMyBlog has been Re-Fueled

By Drew(Drew)

A Today's Top Blogs and Latest Blogs. You will always know what blogs are added and what ones are listed as top blogs. On this page you can Add your Blog, go to the Forum and get your page Widgets (see above voting images and click ...

The BenSpark - http://benspark.blogspot.com/index.html

Hittail

2007-02-22T09:25:00.000-08:00

I have put the Hit tail on my blog. In their on words Hit tail is

"HitTail reveals in real-time the least utilized, most promising keywords hidden in the Long Tail of your natural search results. We present these terms to you as suggestions that when acted on can boost the natural search results of your site. It's that simple.

Of course, HitTail is built with sophisticated algorithms and patent-pending technology that took our Chief HitTailer a while to develop."

I would like to see the results after a week. When I put this on the other blog, it failed to detect any activity let us see what happens this time.

Site Statistics comparison

2007-02-21T09:21:00.000-08:00

Currently I have Google Analytics, Mybloglog and Feedburner stats enabled on my site here is the data shown by each.
Page Views Comparison

	20th	19th	18th	17th	16th	15th	14th
Mybloglog	12	14	10	9	9	3	4
Feedburner	10	13	5	10	3	2	13
Google Analytics	9	16	7	13	8	2	13

Readers Comparison

	20th	19th	18th	17th	16th	15th	14th
Mybloglog	10	6	9	4	8	2	4
Feedburner	9	6	3	6	2	2	7
Google Analytics	9	8	6	8	6	2	7

I do not know which one needs to be believed. May be the one showing higher number needs to chosen ? Or is it that order of javascript placement in the template matters ? In that case one of the services should consistently showing higher numbers that others. At some point of view I would like to reduce the number of widgets for loading the blog faster. At present it takes more than 6 seconds. I would have liked to have feedburner as both feed stats as well as site stats can be seen at one place. But mybloglog provides a list of offiste clicks which is not provided by google. But google executive summary and geographical representation is not there in other.

Adding links to similar content

2007-02-17T10:46:00.001-08:00

Criteo has ended the beta for Autoroll widget and open for everybody. You can add a list of blogs on similar topics ! I added this to my blog and found that the blogs listed had very similar content.

Here are other ways to
The Good Blogs - Provides a widget for adding list of posts. The posts are from other registered members. Note that autoroll just provides a list of blogs not the posts. I have been using this widget for quite sometime, though I am not sure about the relevance of the content, I get quite good number hits from the good blogs.

Criteo Autoroll - Here a list of relevant blogs is shown and again blogs are selected from other listed members. If Criteo can show the blogs, can't it show the links to posts. I feel this will generate more interests among the readers that just display of blog names.

In the above case I wonder if these tools consider the search queries that led to the blog, if that is considered the content might be really what users are searching for.I have put both of these widgets side by side so that content can be compared. Both of the above provide stats as well. I guess there are too many providing the site stats ?

Google Reader - If you are using google reader shared, starred or simply new posts from blogs you read can be displayed listed. Though I find it interesting hardly people click on the widgets I am showing. May be placement is wrong ?

And then there is good old way of doing it using Blog Roll where you maintain a list of blogs and that is displayed on your blog.

Website Plagiarism

2007-02-03T03:08:00.001-08:00

I was trying some of the website plagiarism detectors this what I found. My test case was trying to detect a copy of one of the posts put on my test blog.

Copyscape allows you search free of cost on their website. I tried by giving the blog url. There were no results found. Copyscape suggested to search by categories. Then I tried the specific URL of the blog post. I got the matching results. When you click on the results it will open up the page with copied words highlighted in different colors. I am not sure what is the significance of different colors. Here is how it looks like. I guess for premium users automatic alerts generated when copy is found.

Next one was Sentinel. Here I had to create a login. Sentinel is in beta. Couple of days after my registering still it was crawling. But the GUI looks promising. But when I clicked on the links all were taking me to the top of the page.

Offline Blog Editor - Performancing for Firefox 2.0(On Linux)

2007-01-22T10:12:00.001-08:00

I was searching for a blogging tool which can be used for off line editing of the posts and finally put it on to blogger. This way whenever I am browsing I can take notes and turn them into blogs later on. There is always a backup of the post and if you are shifting from one blog provider to another you can post from the local archive. I got the list of linux based off line blog editors from Andrea's Blog

When I tried to use bleezer java threw exception. May be it does not work with gnu java. Gnome-blog-poster (Picure on the right) was pretty much rudimentary editing options for changing the font size and including the link. I could not try out Drivel as it did not connect to Blogger 2.0. It provides option to post to livejournal as well.

Next I tried installing Performancing
when I tried for the first time blogger was throwing parsing exception later i could post the same content. ( This time I faced the same issue it was due to img tag that was being and I had include that in embed tag)
What is available

It provides the most used options(image on right side with the options) for editing
Post can be draft or published directly
It saves a history of the posts and there can be notes which can be converted to posts at a later point.
Post can be bookmarked at delicious
Can include Technorati tags. But as Blogger 2.0 supporting technorati tags need not be inserted explicitly. Read more
One can edit HTML and preview
Categories can be managed in similiar fashion to wordpress

What I could not do

Blogger is yet to support APIs for posting images. So images can not be uploaded. If you need to post a image, blog has to be posted as draft and then edit and post it.
I did not know that to use trackbacks you will have to use some tools. Performancing allows to add trackbacks. I got Shai's site to test the trackbacks but it did not get reflected in her blog. not sure if it was because of some sort moderation on trackbacks. If this works this would be one of the features that is not available when you use blogger editor.

Link to test Blog
What is badly needed
While writing this post twice I lost the content as once by mistake i clicked on clear content (There was no warning) and once i clicked on the history and both times I lost whatever was unsaved content without warning. Warning is necessary before changing but auto save will be really nice !

I also tried to see the trends about the performancing. Here is what is got from technorati
Posts that contain Performancing per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!
But this may not be an indicator of buzz around performancing blog editor because performancing also owns other things such as metrics and advertising as well. By default at the end of the post, performancing puts link to indicate created through performancing. When I searched technorati for performancing all the posts containing these wording - "powered by performancing" showed up though it may not be a post on performancing. So can this be an indicator to show how many people use this tool ? That may not be the case becuase all may not be posting daily. Otherwise it would have 200-300 people posting using performancing which I feel is very less. (Note : the similar search on Google Blog search provided better results which had relevant posts on Performancing)
The picture provided by blogpulse was entirely different with a wide fluctuations

Overall performancing is good offline blog editor when it comes to bloggers on linux !

Blogger Hack - Highlight Search Words

2007-01-20T03:19:00.000-08:00

Nearly 2 months since I started this blog and finally I have started getting some organic page views through google. So I created a blogger hack which highlights the search words whenever somebody visits the page through google search. Its not highly tested and major work needs to be done on finding the search words from referring URL. The limitations are

Currently supports only google search (includes google blog search). Though I saw that basic difference between yahoo and google is usage of p instead of q for the query input.
Parsing search words supports only basic type of queries. It does not supports queries with quotes(just found this one) or any other specialized searches. I am searching for already written code for this.
Although it supports only blogger, it should be easy to modify. Change would be the way it gets the post body elements.

Here is the code. I will have to see how to avoid the br in the text area. Also how to show the script tags. As blogger gave warning I had to remove.


<style>
       .highlighted {
           background-color :#FFFF00
       } 
   >/style<

   <script>
       function goDeep( node) {
         
            if (node.nodeName == 'a' ||
               node.nodeName == 'img' ||
               node.nodeName == 'BR' ) {
               return;
            }
            if ( node.nodeName == '#text') {
               if ( node.parentNode.className == 'highlighted' ) {
                   return;
               }
               processTextNode(node);
             
            } else {
               for(var i=0; i < node.childNodes.length; i++) {                    
   goDeep(node.childNodes[i]);                
               }             
            }                        
         }         
       function wholefunc() {

           if (!document.referrer ) {
               return;
           }

           var url = document.referrer;

           var isGoogle = url.match("google");
           var qStrs;
           if ( isGoogle == "google" ) {
               var qReg = new RegExp("q=[\\w\+]+","i");
               var qMatch = url.match(qReg);
               qStrs = qMatch[0].substring(2,qMatch[0].length).split("\+");
           }
           if (qStrs == null) {
               return;
           }

           var mStr = qStrs[0];
           for(var i=1; i < qStrs.length ; i++) {
               mStr += '|'+qStrs[i];
           }

           mReg = new RegExp(mStr,"ig");

           var allDivs = document.getElementsByTagName('div');
           for(var i=0; i < allDivs.length; i++) {
               if ( allDivs[i].className == 'post-body') {
                   for(var j=0; j < allDivs[i].childNodes.length; j++){
                      goDeep(allDivs[i].childNodes[j]);
                   }
               }
           } // All div loop
       } // end of whole func

       function processTextNode (currNode) {

           matches = currNode.nodeValue.match(mReg)

           while( matches != null ) {
               var sNode = currNode.splitText(currNode.nodeValue.indexOf(matches[0]));
               var tNode = sNode.splitText(matches[0].length);
               var felm = document.createElement('font');
               felm.className = 'highlighted';   
               felm.appendChild(sNode);
               currNode.parentNode.insertBefore(felm,tNode);
               matches = tNode.nodeValue.match(mReg);
               currNode = tNode;
           }

       }
       var mReg;
       wholefunc();
   </script>

Blogger widgets wish list

2007-01-18T09:28:00.000-08:00

I wish if blogger could provide following widgets for adding to blog.

1. Previous and Next post links - Though there are couple of hacks available they are very much dependent upon blogging frequency ? Its not straight forward. Setup archive etc etc. I checked the GData API's and found that data returned by blogger is not in any order and the entry ids looked like random numbers so I suppose based on time the blog post need to be searched and displayed.
Here is one of the hacks from freshblog Blog navigator next and previous links

2. Related articles - I see lot of people using it and wordpress has plugin for this.
Hoctro's place has a hack available

3. Ability to add trackbacks - For the time being I am using haloscan which provides real easy way of doing it. Download the template from blogger upload to haloscan, get the modified template and post it to blogger. But you will have to use haloscan for managing comments as well. Many people used to suggest haloscan as if you were move away from blogger, comments will still show up in the new blog through haloscan. With blogger allowing redirection to custom domains, it may not be good idea to have posts at one place and comments at another place.

4. Recent Comments widget - Though I do not have comments now, I am optimistic that this blog will have some discussion at some point of time :). I checked the haloscan already provides this widget.
freshblog lists 4 hacks available under this category !

Blog Directories

2007-01-11T08:27:00.000-08:00

Blog directories provide a listing of blogs. All of the blog directories have manual check in place to avoid blogs which are created just for the purpose of advertising or promoting products. I went through 6 of these and also submitted my site, some I got added and for one(blogflux) I was not added and for one I am awaiting reply.
What are the features provided by these apart from providing a valuable back link (I read somewhere today that back links from a site having google page rank of 4 and above are being sold for around $20)?
PS - rankwhere.com was used for finding the Google Page Rank (GPR)
Blogflux - GPR - 7 Blogs Listed - 25681
- Apart from the directory, blogflux provides button maker, feed reader, widgets for map stats, page rank checker, analytics. Directory can be searched using tags, language and country.

Blog Top Sites - GPR - 7 Blogs Listed - Not known
- Using the javascript embedded in the site, submitted blogs are ranked.

BlogCatalog - GPR - 0 Blogs Listed - 30788
- Browse by category and based on tags.

BlogRankings - GPR - 7 Blogs Listed - 10230
- Search by newest, popular and top rated.

Blogarama - GPR - 0 Blogs Listed - 39027
- Browse by category.

GlobeOfBlogs - GPR - 7 Blogs Listed - 52740
- Different ways to search such as search by birth date of author, title, location

Here is the traffic rank comparison as per Alexa

Permanent link for the above Graph
Observations -

Its surprising that couple of the blog directories have Google Page Rank of 0
Looking at the traffic more the features provide apart from the just categorization, more will be the traffic. When it comes to traffic blogflux is leading and it is the one provides many other provisions than just listing. On the long run can these directories sustain by just providing the categorization of the blogs? I guess some are already coming with interesting search options such as search by birth date of the author.
None of these directories making the data available through APIs. I guess when so much of effort is put to collect the data, if it is made available through APIs it can help apps and widgets around the blog directories. Otherwise these may remain mere directories for which people come to just submit the data.
Technorati claims that there 55 million blogs. But the maximum number of blogs that is listed in one directory is just 52740 that is one thousandth of the existing number of blogs. But these directories include even manual check to make sure that only serious blogs are listed. For example blogflux mandates that the blogs should have at least 5 posts and 7 days old.
All of the blog directories request for back link but do not mandate. But blogaram mentions providing a back link will increase the rankings of the blog.

How to add translators your blog ?

2007-01-08T09:31:00.000-08:00

There many services which can translate your blog and show. On click of the button the page gets translated and shown to the user. I came across two of this services.

Babel Fish of Altavista - Which provides translation in English, German, Spanish, French, Italian and Portugese and by adding javascript which generates the image like below. When the user clicks on the country flag, the page is translated to that language.

Google Translator - has more languages supported but does not provide widgets to add translation to the page. There multiple hacks available.
a) Amit Agarwal provides a way to add flags at Add Language Translation to your Website - Tutorial
b) Mani Karthik provides an alternate version using which you can add drop down box
at Google translator plugin for blogger ; I preferred this one to displaying too many flags.

As I got the error document.nav does not have properties, I have made small changes to code provided by Mani Karthik and changed the language text to respective languages. Below is the code you can use for blogger. Remember to change the my blog URLs to your own URL

<div><br /><select id="SelectURL" onchange="document.location.href=document.getElementById('SelectURL').options[document.getElementById('SelectURL').selectedIndex].value"><option selected="selected" value="http://google.com/translate?langpair=en%7Cen&u=http://blogaddins.blogspot.com">Translate this blog</option><option value="http://google.com/translate?langpair=en%7Ces&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;u=http://blogaddins.blogspot.com">español</option><option value="http://google.com/translate?langpair=en%7Cit&u=http://blogaddins.blogspot.com">Italiano</option><option value="http://google.com/translate?langpair=en%7Cfr&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;u=http://blogaddins.blogspot.com">Français</option><option value="http://google.com/translate?langpair=en%7Cpt&u=http://blogaddins.blogspot.com">Portuguese</option><option value="http://google.com/translate?langpair=en%7Car&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;u=http://blogaddins.blogspot.com">العربية</option><option value="http://google.com/translate?langpair=en%7Cja&u=http://blogaddins.blogspot.com">   日本語</option><option value="http://google.com/translate?langpair=en%7Cko&u=http://blogaddins.blogspot.com">    한국어</option></select></div>

I guess these features should be provided in blog feeds and mails !!