Aun’s Blog

20061117-1

This was the line outside Target Nicollett Mall in Minneapolis the day before the Playstation 3 launch (20061116).

Wireless Power

Yes, no wires! Just the thought of this has got me super-excited! If you’re a geek, you’ll know what a pain wires can be. Yes, they can be made to look all nice, but when it comes time to move stuff around… do you know how painful that is? Yes, I can’t wait till the day there is NO WIRED layer 1. Of course, you can’t eliminate all wires… but you can only hope!

Wordpress Plugins

Wordpress is probably the most widely used and developed open source blogging software. I’ve finally set up my blog and have found a bunch of useful plugins:

1. Ultimate Tag Warrior: Anything you want to do with tags! Tag cloud, graph, bars, etc. You can even get keyword suggestions through the Tagyu service, while you’re writing your post. Very cool! The plugin allows you to search through tags, as well as create tag pages, which can contain search as well as clouds, and any other tag functionality you could think of.
2. Sidebar Widgets: Not all themes support sidebar widgets, but this plugin is great if your theme does, as it allows you to add different widgets to your sidebars, like calendars, google search, links, meta, etc. You don’t have to move code around to re-organize your widgets - its as easy as drag and drop!
3. Adsense Deluxe: This is a great plugin if you want to insert ad’s (YPN or Google Adsense) on your posts, or anywhere on the blog, without having to insert the whole block of code. Its as simple as creating entries for different type of Adsense code blocks, and giving them short names. All this can be set up very easily, and is available under the Options –> Adsense Deluxe page. When you need to call any of these blocks, just use the short name to call the adsense block, anywhere on the blog, be it a post or a page! You even have the option of setting it up so you have a drop-down of the short names on the menu of your Rich Text editor. I have an example of an Adsense Link Unit below. It’s easier than 1-2-3!

At the moment, these are the only plugins that came across as useful to me. If you have any suggestions, please let me know, and I’ll add them on! Happy blogging!

Blogging

I seem to suffer from a perpetual writer’s block. I’ve had this domain for quite a while now, not to mention this wordpress blog. All I’ve found myself doing is tweaking the site: playing with plugins, themes, css, etc. And oh yeah, I set up a wordpress blog for my brother-in-law on my hosting account as well. Check it out at www.deserthopper.com. At least someone is making good use of the space! Anyways, thats it for now! Look out for updates!