Sling Ink

I am moving all the websites under navakrish.com to a ageing laptop in my home. The DNS changes are propogating at the moment. In the mean while, I am taking backups of databases and files from the current hosting provider and importing them to my new system.

If everything works to my satisfaction, I’ll cancel my hosting account and make the changes permanent.

If you have a Gmail account and would like to use it in conjunction with your personal computers, this tutorial will walk you through configuring and installing the latest version of Postfix with SASL authentication and TLS encryption necessary for connecting and relaying mail to smtp.gmail.com and configuring fetchmail with STARTTLS to fetch messages from your Gmail account to your local system.

freshmeat.net: Tutorials – Gmail on Home Linux Boxes using Postfix and Fetchmail

Very useful indeed. Saved me a lot of time to configure my home server to fetch the mails automatically from Gmail.

technorati tags: Gmail, Fetchmail, Home Email

Gmail gets a new name in the UK. Following a dispute regarding the trademark of the name ‘GMAIL’ google has anounced that new accounts will be under a new domain name ‘googlemail.com’.

What will happen to those from UK who currently uses a gmail.com address. Unfortunately there is no clear message at this point of time.
This is what Google has to say about those accounts.

What if I’m a UK user who already has a Gmail address? Will that address ever change?
Unfortunately, we don’t know. We would love to say that your address will always remain the same. But the trademark issue is still unsettled, and unfortunately, we cannot predict what the other party or the courts might do here. You can always use your same username with an @googlemail.com address to avoid this issue later on. But trust that we will do the best we can to make sure your email address won’t ever have to change.

 
Update:
I tested if googlemail.com address is active for my account by sending a test message from Gmail and Yahoo. The mail from Gmail never reached my inbox. On the other hand the message from YahooMail! took more than ten minutes to reach. So the googlemail.com is working. But now comes the question. Which one should I give to others from now onwards ‘gmail.com’ or ‘googlemail.com’.
Confused

This is the second series of experiments I am conducting with the offline blog clients. The last time when I tested a few clients, I found nothing to my liking.

But this time, things look promosing.. at least at the moment. I am currently evaluating two pieces of software

• Zoundry &
• Post2Blog

This is the first test post I am doing with Zoundry.

I am looking for the following features:

• The ability to upload pictures through the client
• Spellchecker
• Support for Unicode so that I can blog easily in Thamiz
• Support for categories
• Pinging other sites from the blog client
• Ability to edit posts as HTML

Let me see how these two software perform.

Testing Zoundry:

1. Still working with Zoundry. Everything went fine. But during post it came with a error message. Zoundry still thinks that my post is not published. But I can see that this post is now visible from my Blog.
2. I still could not find out how I can directly edit the HTML code for this post.
3. Testing Unicode. தமிழ் (Good. Unicode Works)
4. Pinging works sometimes and throws up an error other times. I am not sure if this a bug or a problem with the sites I am trying to ping. (Still needs testing)
5. Slecting the category of the post and posting under multiple categories is working fine.
6. Spellchecker – Can not find any.
7. Uploading images works perfectly. However the lack of feature to edit HTML does not allow to position the image as we wish.

Pros:

• Easy to use.
• The standard features should suffice the requirements of most bloggers (especially those who are not very comfortable with HTML)
• The ability to specify the tag words for Technorati and other tagging services can come handy for those who want to increase the traffic to their websites.

Cons:

• Lack of HTML editing feature is a major problem for advanced users
• The usability of the software will be a lot better if there were shortcuts to commonly used functions. For example a shortcut for started ‘Lists’ will make things a lot easier.
• Does not seem to support a lot of basic HTML tags to align your pages. The most needed ones like headers H1, H2.. are missing.
• Spellcheck will be a very useful addition. But it is still missing.

Update: After writing this post I came across this thread in the Zoundry forums.

The resulting code of the sample page I created with Zoundry looks very close to XHTML. All in all Zoundry is an excellent software for most users. The software is still in its Beta stage. In fact the version I tested is 0.9.133. I hope that by the time they release the first public version, the software will be much more better.

Personally I am going to try this software for some time. But in the mean time I intend to test Post2Blog as well.

On the other hand there are other upcoming software like ‘Flock’ which offers a lot of promise. The future of internet looks promising indeed.

technorati tags: Offline Blogging, Flock, Mozilla Browser

As an occasional contributor to the Wikipedia project, I often visit Wikipedia pages. The amount of growth Wikipedia has gone through in recent days is just brilliant. With the decline of DMOZ, pages like these are helpful a lot.

I was in a mood to try few new ‘News Aggregators’. In olden days I would have gone to DMOZ for information like these to get the list of available products. But today this page in Wikipedia saved me a lot of time.

Another good thing is that I can see a lot of top 10 results from Wikipedia for most keywords in Google. Or is it not that good for other genuine sites?

Globalsecurity.org – Satellite Imagery of New Orleans(link)

OSS Fans Vs Fanatics – http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/08/16/fotw_1608/

I am currently playing with Pixelpost for photoblogging. The photoblog is online at http://www.navakrish.com/photoblog/.