Sunday, January 30, 2005

there is no such thing as simple blogging

i'm not frightening anyone from blogging the stories of their life or their dog's. in fact this is a mini-guide to inform new bloggers of some options they have.there are also some rather major guides if you google enough.

i decided a few days ago that i'd put my collective thoughts and random mail ramblings into one spot so the rest of the world can dissect me and my evil double life that i reveal now and then. a few posts in, i find myself bogged down in blogtopia.
to relieve myself of the hassles of paying for a website or the blogging software (there are a lot by the way) i decided to go the way of the majority and signed up at blogger
walking through the steps was easy : select a template and some more rather simple options and you are set. i posted my first piece almost immediately and it was a piece of cake. for later posts i will just need to login with my username1 and password1

i realised that like some other blogs i read, i'll probably need to be a goodie2shoes and link to their sites and others i read so my readers get to know me more. i had two options : write the html code within the template for each of the links or blogroll, a service that allows me to add linklists to my blog that will also automatically update when someone posts something new. now thats something i could use. and just like that i had username1 and password2. like most other paranoid netizens i have a different password for each of my accounts. yet another alternative to blogrolling is del.icio.us that allows you to manage bookmarks rather easily. right now my links are just plain html. i will probably choose delicious.

my second post revealed blogger's shortcomings. nothing to be alarmed of and rather easily fixed. blogger doesnt allow photos to be stored so i needed to find a online photo storage site. being a mac user meant (apart from being in the minority) i had to be different and chose flickr to be my online album manager. username2 and password3. cos flickr needed a email address instead of a username.

then one of the other bloggers revealed his way of tracking visitors to his blog. my selfish gene was at the height of its activity now. i quickly surfed over to statcounter and got a counter for my blog. yup the tiny number thing below the blogger logo on the right actually knows where you come from, the brand of toothpaste you use and what you had for breakfast. its also a woefully small number. i must visit my blog from different machines at work and increase that number.

a few bloggers also have a relation with a authenticating website so you dont comment anonymously and flame them. so if i needed to give some feedback or point out a spelling mistake in another post, i need to let them know that i'm authorised by Typekey . So username1 and password4 (but this is more for the blog reader than the blogger)
alternatively i can choose to add a commenting site to manage the comments on my site that doesnt require a reader to sign in to anything. one such site is haloscan . that makes it username1 and password5

finally some bloggers also have a small box on their site that allows readers to instant chat with the blogger.i am not going over the top but in case you are interested to add it to your blog one such instance can be found at myshoutbox. so what could have been username1 and password6 was averted.

to summarise : 2 usernames and 5 passwords already in addition to all my email accounts, numerous online bank accounts (all of them are empty u phisher freaks), online communities and forums.
end to end all those usernames and passwords can go around the blogworld..twice.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

WHICH IS WHY WE NEED BIOMETRIC IDENTIFICATION SYSTEMS!!!

This is what you have been going through now,huh!! I think you are a lot better than me. When you start working you will have lot of woes like this. Listen to this. This is what I go through in office.

1. I have a windows login and a password for it(duh!!). This is not actually a problem, but the sysads put a password aging feature that irritates me once in in 20 days. This damn thing wants me to change the password that I have not used for the past 5 times, does not have dictionary entry passwords, has a alphanumeric within the first 3 characters, not a cyclic shift of the last 5 passwords, and a minimum length of 8 characters. Now lets start counting. This is userid1 passwd1

2. I also have a India unix id(for development) for SUN box NFS mounted. This also has password ageing of 30 days and starts the countdown after 20 days, so I can be sure there is a mail in the mail box the 21st day warning me to change my password. This is userid2 password2. My password1 rules are not compatible with password2's rules. This has got a whole bunch of diff rules, which I dont even remember.

3. There is a unix login for the US boxes (development box)which means userid3 passwd3. I cannot reuse passwd2 because this has a different cycle of ageing.

4.Production Boxes in the US. So there goes userid4 passwd4.

5.The lotus notes e-mail client takes userid5 password5.

6. The web-version of the e-mail client (to access from home) has a different userid. So there goes userid6 and passwd6.

7.There are three different HP unix boxes that has some of our servers running, so there goes userid7 & passwd7.

8. The telephone voice mail facility in the office takes my locn number (userid) and passwd8.

9. RAS access from home needs RSA securId which means I need the RSA device + userid9 and passwd9.

10. There is a version control tool where we checkin all the code, so there goes userid10 passwd10.

11. Intranet site takes userid11 and passwd11.

Thank god I dont need any logins for my home PC, which is rightly serving me to watch my DVDs peacefully.

I bet you are in lot better shape. Hopefully with the biometric identification taking shape, many of our life will be in a lot better shape <:)

--Badri--

catcharun said...

isnt microsoft supposed to be a partner in that biometric thing ? i'm sure there will be a security hole that will allow one to use windows messaging to pop up messages that will be printed on ur thumb when u press it on the biometric sensor.

u sure u want the list of systems u use out in the open on my blog ? are u sure i wont be sued for stealing company secrets?

anantha said...

very useful stuff for un-geekish junta like me. how does flickr thingy work?

catcharun said...

u just upload ur snaps to flickr ..thats it. you can then take links and automatically put them in your blog.
if ur using windows , try picasa... http://www.picasa.com/
its an awesome tool from google