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Showing posts with the label blogging

10 Years of Blogging

Hard to imagine that it has been 10 years since I signed up on Blogger and started blogging! My first post, which has since been moved to a different blog, was on "War and Peace" and Altavista's Babel Fish. Surprisingly the original link to Babel Fish - http://babelfish.altavista.com - still works and redirects to Yahoo's Babel Fish . Yahoo! Babel Fish

Windows Live Writer

Windows Live Writer was something that skipped my radar for a while since it’s a Microsoft product that I assumed was specific to Windows Live blogs. After a recent recommendation by Lifehacker , I learned that it supports multiple blogging platforms including Blogger and Wordpress . Adding support to an existing blog is a straightforward process – simply give Windows Live Writer the URL of your blog and it auto-discovers the blogging platform in use and prompts for your blog account information. Once setup, it’s a breeze to use. It provides a full featured WYSIWYG editor for your blog that has support for uploading images, a built-in spell checker and tagging support. It even applies your blog’s themes for previews. Being a standalone Windows application, it allows offline editing of your blogs. Here’s a screenshot of Windows Live Writer in action in the construction of this very post: Definitely makes blogging a breeze. Expect more posts with this tool in a blogger’s ar...

Seven Years

It’s been seven years since the first post on this blog. What started right after the dotcom bust of 2001, continues through the global economic meltdown of 2008. After some housekeeping in the middle of 2007, many of the early posts were removed and backed-up since they didn’t quite fit the Technobabble theme (it was just Arun’s Random Stuff at the time). Seven years ago, blogging and Blogger were still in their early days. Blogger was still an independent company. Now of course, blogging is mainstream and twittering is the in thing. Thoughts on what the next seven years will bring to the web?

Syntax-highlighting code in blog posts

SyntaxHighlighter is an easy to use syntax highlighter for posting code snippets in blogs. Here are the steps to incorporate SyntaxHighlighter into Blogger : Go to the blog dashboard and select Layout for your blog. Choose Edit HTML. In the <head> section, paste in these two lines: <link href='http://syntaxhighlighter.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/Styles/SyntaxHighlighter.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'/> <script language='javascript' src='http://syntaxhighlighter.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/Scripts/shCore.js'/> In addition, for each language that you intend to highlight, add lines to import the relevant JavaScript libraries. The full list of supported languages is here . Here's the example for XML: <script language='javascript' src='http://syntaxhighlighter.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/Scripts/shBrushXml.js'/> Finally, right at the bottom before the </body> tag, add: <script...

Performancing

Performancing is a great Firefox extension for Bloggers . It provides a split pane blog editor in the context of a page being viewed. It's very easy to drag and drop content from the page (images, text, links, etc.) onto the blog editor. It works with a variety of blogging services (like Blogger) and also has integration with del.icio.us , Technorati and a handful of pinging services.