10 Years of Blogging with Llovizna

10 years of Llovizna

When I started blogging in 2009 March, I was wondering where will my blog be in ten years. Now, 10 years have passed, and my blog Llovizna still remains active. My blog has always remained a mixture of technological and personal posts. My posts discussed what I learned and also where I have been to. I maintain a list of posts that I like to blog in the future about (Future Blog Posts) and also discuss My Travels. Most of my travels are for conference presentations anyway.

At times in between I tried to separate my personal views into other platforms, and eventually always realized it is too much of work to maintain multiple blogs and platforms. Interestingly, several platforms came and went, thus affecting a few of my posts. I tried my best to fix those broken articles. One notable example is docstoc.com where I used to post my presentations. As it closed down, I had to take down the links and embedded presentations from the posts. Despite all these changes, Llovizna has been part of my life since 2009 for the past decade.

 

Interestingly, blogspot has survived the 10 years test. Now I am curious to see where my blog will be in 10 more years later. Let's see whether blogspot will continue to survive the test of time. I hope it will, and I hope to write a similar post again in 2029.

Llovizna gets a new look

I have been busy ever since my return from KAUST on the 12th of December. I was often working 60 - 80 hours a week with many deadlines. I had the UCLouvain Confirmation at UNINOVA, Almada (the opposite side of the Tagus river). It was a rewarding experience. Besides, I also had a quick trip to Evora, exactly four years after I visited it for an EMDC Winter Event. Today, I decided to give a new look to my blog, switching from the black background to a brighter one with a larger font. More plans for March. Exciting times ahead.

Below is how my blog Llovizna (formerly known as, 'On my way home.' Renamed to 'Llovizna' on the January 6th, 2010) evolved over time.

'On my way home,' as of April 23, 2009:

As of October 2, 2009:

'Llovizna,' as of February 6, 2011:

As of February 22, 2018:

Moments with Llovizna: Random Thoughts of a Gypsy Student

I started my blog in 2009 mostly as an internship diary and then continued to blog about my Google Summer of Code projects, final year project, and the relevant findings on programming and software in general. I blogged about AbiWord almost 50 times, and never thought I would blog about something else before moving to Lisboa for my masters, EMDC. I enjoy presenting my PhD (EMJD-DC) work at conferences. Due to the mandatory mobility of my master and PhD, I travelled and migrated across the countries and continents, which made Llovizna a travel blog too.

I like to stay awake during the take off and landing, as I usually get to sit in the middle seat. However, for some unknown reason, I mostly fall asleep just before taking off and wake up immediately when the flight is almost in the cruising altitude. I like watching movies in the long flights. They come with subtitles, so that I can understand all foreign language movies - mostly I watch Asian movies. The flights that are shorter than 7 hours mostly do not have movies. The airlines in the US, specially the domestic ones, are terrible, even if they travel as long as 5 hours. I remember a flight from Atlanta to San Francisco of 5.5 hours in United Airways - not offering meals, citing that this is the norm in domestic flights.

View from the empire state building

When I do not watch movies, sleep, or have meals, I just look outside the window and see the big world outside. I often do not sleep the night before sleep, as I get busy with packing, and also because I fear not being able to wake up on time for the flight. This makes me have the typical zombie walk - a walk without realizing or sensing the environment, more like a zombie.

I enjoy conferences - meeting, listening to, and share ideas with fellow researchers. I enjoy travels. However, I must admit that it is a hard situation where you are in a new and beautiful city (which most conference venues are), but have to focus on the conference and networking instead. Recently, I have somehow mastered the balance of it, winning over the jet lag and the tiredness related to the long flights. Perks of being a gypsy student. In addition to the conference related travels, I do enjoy some small trips when I have time and money at the same time, as the recent trip to NYC during a long weekend.

We enjoyed cooking in Atlanta. It has fresh food in decent prices. YDFM was our favourite. As the time to return to Portugal comes, I am foreseeing yet another intercontinental flight of the year. Mostly I end up packing the last moment, throwing away things at the eleventh hour or packing/storing things in bulk. One exception was my move back from Rijeka to Lisboa, where I managed to finish all the food items I bought - including oils, rice, and vegetables. Since 2012, I have this weird migration pattern of Sri Lanka -> Portugal -> Sri Lanka -> Sweden -> Portugal -> Croatia -> Portugal -> USA -> Portugal -> Belgium (expected) -> Portugal (expected). This summarizes my gypsy life so far, and in the near future.

I still remember my first walk from my apartment to my lab through the beautiful lanes of Atlanta, with a map. There was a guy in front of me walking. I was under the impression that he was going to the University as well. I was wrong - he turned to the opposite direction. Luckily I was not blindly following him (which I never do actually. :) ) The summer in Atlanta is much longer. When we return to Lisboa in two weeks, it would be autumn there already, with getting colder and wet. Hope it was still warm enough for some walks at the Parque das Nações.

Docstoc is Closed

Sorry WE'RE CLOSED

Today, Docstoc service is closed - shut down permanently, after a few weeks notice. Docstoc is a service that is used to store documents such as reports and presentations. Since they informed in advance, I have migrated the files and presentations previously hosted in Docstoc to SlideShare, and fixed the links throughout this blog. Hence there should be no broken links in this blog post, unless I somehow missed something. 

This made me think: what if slideshare is closed one day as well? I have used SlideShare to host documents more extensively. So if they are too forced to close down one day, that would require more effort for me. Worst fear of all time, what if the services from Google close down during our life time? However, I hope, in that case, they will provide a seamless migration to some alternative platform that would be taking over by then (such as a migration tool from blogger to wordpress).

A Guide to Commenting on the Blog Posts

Number of spam comments on my blog posts is on the rise these days. However, since the comments are moderated, these spam comments never see the light of the day. I just delete them. This waste my time as well as the time of the spammer, assuming no bot is deployed for commenting as sign-in is required for commenting. Automated commenting would trigger the Blogger captcha which is pretty effective in filtering bots, I assume.

Here is a guide on which is accepted and which is not, as a comment.

1. A long and relevant comment - Accepted.

2. A short comment such as "Nice post", "Thanks" - Accepted.

3. A set of random links - NOT Accepted. Isn't it obvious, after all?

4. A short comment followed by a link to your shitty home page - NOT Accepted. Obviously you just wanted to post the link to your shitty site. Just do not pretend.

5. A long shitty comment followed by a link to a shitty web site - NOT Accepted. Why? See #4 for the reason.

6. A long relevant comment followed by a link to your shitty home page - Accepted. After all you have shared some useful information.

7. A long comment followed by a link to your shitty home page - Depends on the blog administrator's decision based on the contribution of the comment vs. the shittiness of your web site.

8. A random useless comment - Depends.

9. A short/long comment that disagrees with the view point of the original post - Accepted. Comments are there for positive or negative feedback.

10. A random comment followed by a link to a random site - Not Accepted. If you want to advertise in the blog, just contact the blog administrator. Posting random links in the comment section will do no good for you.

11. A well-structured comment followed by a very relevant link - May be accepted. If the link is really relevant, it should be fine. However, if you are just attempting to advertise your own web site, it is better to communicate to the blog administrator than writing it down as a comment.

Information flow..

Poster on DPRK in Ljubljana.

So I happened to check my ClustrMaps recently, and it was nice to see some dots/visitors from countries including Korea, Democratic People's Republic of (KP) and Holy See (Vatican City State) (VA). While there is a possibility that there can be a misrepresentation due to the use of proxies such as hidemyass.com, I believe it is not the case for the majority. 

It is amazing to notice how the information flows faster than our own selves. I have even learned the names of a few of the countries just from the blog visitors' list shown in the Blogger admin panel and ClustrMaps. For example, countries such as Bahamas (BS) and Belize (BZ). While I would like to visit all the countries eventually, I am genuinely happy that at least some of my thoughts have reached almost all the countries in the form of the blog posts.

North Korea is surely a country in my list to visit. When I was in Ljubljana, I noticed an advertisement poster for a photography exhibition with photos from North Korea. Again the information flow is amazing, to have reached Europe from one of the far Asian countries, that is not much connected to the outside.

Recently the majority of the comments my blog posts received were just spam comments, often with supportive sentences (such as "Nice post; thanks for sharing") followed by an array of unrelated spam links. I hope one day the comments will be more informative and involving, to create a constructive communication over the topic. At least I prefer a meaningful communication, instead of spamming with unrelated links everywhere on the Internet.

A log of my computers and my blog posts..

My current laptop in my desk at home

My first desktop computer in 2006 had a dual boot of Windows XP and Mandrake Linux, in just a 40 GB hard disk. I allocated 10 GB for Linux, as Windows was my primary operating system by then. In 256 MB memory. It ran pretty well. The Internet connectivity I got from Suntel was not so good, and was expensive at times. Each time we got a phone call, the modem disconnects the data and I had to be offline till the phone call terminates. I was able to manage with this till 2009, and it was pretty much enough for me. With memory, CPU, and virtually all the important elements replaced over time, the desktop is still somehow alive. I used to have floppy disks of 1.44 MB to have some documents with me. Also, my first pen drive by then was 256 MB.

Then in 2009, I moved to Ubuntu, with my new laptop. It had a 2 GB memory. It actually works even now without any changes in memory, CPU, battery, or any other component, though pretty slow as the current applications require a much larger memory. I stopped using Windows altogether, becoming an open source evangelist. :D

On the 11th of February, I bought my current laptop HP Envy, Intel® Core i7-4700MQ CPU @2.40GHz × 8 processor, 8 GB memory, with a 1 TB hard disk. It came with a Windows 8 (Which I later upgraded to 8.1), which made me have dual boot again. Still having Ubuntu 14.04 as the primary operating system, where Windows remains idling rarely being used. This seems pretty much enough for now; but I am sure it will look terribly small after 2 or 3 years, just how it feels when I think of the days of 256 MB RAM, and the 56 k bandwidths. Today I built OpenDay Light modules, and it takes a whole 13.7 GB with everything built and configured from source code. It would have been 1/3 of my hard disk for my first computer. :D 

 
My Internet Presence

If Google is strong enough to overcome the forces of future and keep the Blogger platform active, I will be able to see this post from a day from future and see how the things were in the past, during the year 2014 and before. :) As of now, Google (Gmail and Blogger), Facebook, and LinkedIn are three important platforms that I have invested my time on, to create a web presence. If one of them disappears in the future, that will be a loss for me (as well as many other users out there, I presume). I have done some serious blogging in 2009, 2011, and 2012. Relatively, my blogging activity has been much slower in 2010, 2013, and 2014. Hope it will improve in 2015. 

Given below are the 10-most viewed posts from this blog, along with the dates that they were originally published. I should admit that the blog views do not represent how much effort I put in writing these posts. However, I am happy that some people have found these posts useful.

Moments with Twitter.. Jun 10, 2012
Is Freelancer.com a complete scam, or a partial sc... Nov 2, 2012, 120 comments
Auto Scaling With Amazon EC2 Feb 1, 2011, 10 comments
How to apply/create an svn patch (for beginners) Apr 1, 2009, 4 comments
Moments with Twitter - II Jun 17, 2012, 1 comment
How to close an open port in unix/linux environmen... Jun 9, 2011
SVN Commit in windows [Could not use external edi... Mar 28, 2009, 2 comments
ssh: connect to host xxx.xxx.xxx.xx port 22: Conne... Dec 14, 2011
Moving data from mysql to cassandra Jun 15, 2012, 2 comments
how to ignore someone you love Apr 24, 2011, 2 comments

Moments with Twitter - III

After a few months, I did another round of tweet analysis, on my own tweets. I have shared quite a few interesting links, over the past couple of months. Also have a look at Moments with Twitter.. and Moments with Twitter - II to see some of my previous tweets.

Agia PDF Search is a useful search site that lets you search and read the PDF documents online. Oct 15, 2012

Just enter your academic email address to increase the space in your existing #Dropbox account by 3 GB or more https://t.co/GPKJrJPu Oct 15, 2012
Dropbox is interesting, and their business model is even more interesting! All the students love Dropbox, which is mostly a free cloud storage system, though paid premium packages are available.

End of Day Light Saving Time!
DST started on Sun, 25 March, 01:00 local standard time; Ends on Sun, 28 Oct, 02:00 local daylight time - http://t.co/prM3aRj4 Back to GMT. Oct 21, 2012
From the coming Sunday onwards, we will be back from the natural time, from the daylight saving time. This will make Portugal to go with GMT, and this will make the time difference with Sri Lanka, -05:30.

Changed my #twitter profile picture for the first time, since I created the account. Almost 4 years, and I didn't change much though. ;) Nov 02, 2012

Changing the profile pictures and the short bio in these profiles are becoming a harder task considering the ever increasing online presence of myself in multiple social media platforms.

An interesting, yet idiot's way to grab more visitors to your blog - Write a blog post titled, Is {SOMETHING} dead? For e.g., "Is SEO Dead?" Nov 30, 2012  
Another way, Write a silly post with a numbered title, with superlatives. For e.g: 7 worst mistakes that horse owners make in the night. :D Nov 30, 2012
OK. We all have this curiosity to click that link!

The adventures of young student backpackers with Eurail passes, 1970. 1970's photos of train travels in the Europe. http://t.co/EMN3IIMk Jan 03, 2013
Student backpackers - this term probably fits the Erasmus Mundus / Erasmus students, at least in some points of our life. One of my favourite backpacking blogs is, Breakaway Backpacker.

A ҉ Y ҉ U ҉ B ҉ O ҉ W ҉ A ҉ N ҉ Mar 03, 2013
Hello, Sri Lankan Style!

Shenzhen Window of the World.. http://t.co/w9DQqOyXct Mar 11, 2013

What is my #IP? http://t.co/DPaIw2cMtB Jul 26, 2013

CHINAKNOWLEDGE - a universal guide for #China studies http://t.co/2whemOIDrw Jul 30, 2013
This is an interesting resource to learn about China, its culture, and the Chinese language. MIT OpenCourseWare too has Simplified Chinese and other Chinese courses under the foreign languages and literature section. For me, listening to Chinese songs with the lyrics written in pinyin appears easy. Everything else seems just Chinese. :D

Collection of oddities.. the odd stuff.. http://t.co/GcXkqAP7iP Aug 02, 2013
These odd stuff are interesting. Bored Panda is a similar online magazine. However, I don't find anything these articles report odd. I find the mainstream news these days more 'odd'. One news was "Vietnam to ban discussion of news on social media sites". The situation globally doesn't look nice to me. Have a look at the Press Freedom Index of 2013.

The birth of viral contents over the Internet

Popular Content

For a scientist to become popular, it takes a considerable effort and lots of dedication. But someone who creates some creative content and uploads it over the Internet, might probably get equally famous among a wider audience.

Getting Viral

A content grabs the attention of millions and becomes an Internet meme by becoming viral, shared and spread over multiple online media. The content can be a video, a blog post, an image, or even an audio clip. Some contents become popular due to their controversial nature, and the others become popular just because of the curiosity of the people. The social media interaction makes the popular content more popular. Once a content sparks some interest to a viewer, he might probably visit the content back (say, if that is a video or an audio clip), and also share the content over the social media for the people in his network to view. This leads to an exponential growth to the popularity of the content. If an influential person shares your content to his circles of friends, most probably your content will be viewed and further shared by his circle of friends too.

Creating controversy or inducing curiosity

If we take YouTube, the mostly viewed videos are not necessarily good ones. Most of these video clips have more 'dislikes' than the 'likes', as people get disappointed with what they just saw, because of their curiosity. When the thumbnail image of the video shows some "cute stuff", it is very hard to resist the desire to click and view the clip. A sexy title and an attractive caption will be an added advantage. However, when we realize that there is nothing such interesting material in that clip, than a mere ad, we 'dislike' it. Still the 'view' count increases, and the video remains popular. Some companies work for their clients or customers to make their content viral by creating controversy around them, by posing as multiple users, or simply by sharing that content over multiple media, using multiple accounts.

Sparking the interest

There are a few genuine attempts that become viral by the fans viewing and sharing them multiple times. The most commonly stated example is the YouTube clip, "Yosemitebear Mountain Giant Double Rainbow 1-8-10", where someone shouts and expresses his extreme level of joy, looking at a double rainbow.

The Double Rainbow

It has got 31,595,276 views, 206,997 likes, 4,549 dislikes, and 91,157 comments. This was also made into a song, which also has become equally viral, with almost same number of views and likes. Comics have been written around the "Double Rainbow" and many parodies have been created around. According to an article in knowyourmeme.com, a tweet from Jimmy Kimmel was the major reason behind this video clip becoming popular. However, I am personally not supporting any such claims without a strong evident. Who knows - many others too may have shared the content and enjoyed it parallel.

Why this Kolaveri

Why This Kolaveri Di Full Song Promo Video in HD has got 6,263,365 views, 73,595 likes, 3,058 dislikes, and 30,361 comments within two weeks since it is posted. Like all the other addictions, "Kolaveri" is proven yet another rising addiction. Once watched, everyone keeps watching it multiple times, and then starts sharing. This leads to an exponential popularity growth. If this continues, it will very soon overtake the mostly known viral video - "Double Rainbow" shout. It is a song sung by the Tamil actor Dhanush, a son-in-law of the Tamil super star Rajinikanth. This song is sung in Tanglish, a Chennai slang of Tamil + Broken English, with simple words.

The girl in the green top in this clip is Shruti Hassan the heroine of the movie "3", to which this song belongs to. She is a daughter of Kamalhaasan (an award winning Tamil actor and long time competitor of Rajinikanth). The other girl in this song is Aishwarya Dhanush - Dhanush's wife who directs this movie. The debuting music director, Anirudh, a nephew of Rajinikanth can also be seen in this video. Everyone expected this song to become popular among the Tamil cinema fans due to this stardom. Nevertheless, no one including the producers of this song/movie expected it to become viral globally. The fact that the song is indeed sung in English, but with a south Indian accent and a touch of Tamil, must have helped the song becoming popular among the non-Tamil speakers.

how to ignore someone you love

For a content to become viral, it should reach the common men, and should not target a narrow niche. Among my blog posts, how to ignore someone you love can be stated as somewhat viral. It is the third mostly viewed post in my blog, along with the highest number (46) of facebook likes. I, myself didn't expect that post to become popular, since I wrote it without much effort unlike the technology blog posts, that I wrote with much effort. The attractive blog title, with the interesting common area of discussion - "ignoring facebook invitations", must have attracted more readers in, unlike the posts that are focused on a niche.

Creating a viral content is not that much easy though. No one has properly found a formula to estimate how the human brain functions. We can create some interesting content, but the audience decides its success.

A tribute to DZone..

Everyone into the information technology knows that DZone is a good way to find and read the quality articles or blog posts. The recent MVB (Most Valuable Blogger) program is yet another addition to the services provided by DZone, with interesting zones such as Cloud Zone, Architect Zone, and many more. With the success of the concept of the zones, DZone started to introduce many microzones such as HTML5 Zone, DevOps Zone, and a few others.

MVB not just merely re-posts a content as it is. But it formats and makes it better, prior to posting it, if necessary.

The below is an example:

My original post on "Amazon Autoscaling ~ Issue uploading payload?"

As appeared on cloud.zone: http://cloud.dzone.com/articles/amazon-autoscaling-issue

You can see DZone has actually improved the readability of the content by proper styling and syntax highlighting.

I encourage and recommend everyone who takes pride on their technology blogs to become an MVB. Nothing is encouraging than having our thoughts to reach a wider audience. Long live DZone!

Dynamic Views of Blogger

As announced in Official Google Blog: Dynamic Views: seven new ways to share your blog with the world, you can view the Blogger blogs in seven different dynamic views. I was trying these recently, and they look really cool, giving a different experience to the readers.

Just click the links given below to see Llovizna in all these views.

The 7 views are:
Classic: http://kkpradeeban.blogspot.com/view/classic

Flipcard: http://kkpradeeban.blogspot.com/view/flipcard

Magazine: http://kkpradeeban.blogspot.com/view/magazine

Mosaic: http://kkpradeeban.blogspot.com/view/mosaic

Sidebar: http://kkpradeeban.blogspot.com/view/sidebar

Snapshot: http://kkpradeeban.blogspot.com/view/snapshot

Timeslide: http://kkpradeeban.blogspot.com/view/timeslide

10 questions to you regarding your blog!

Your Blog is like your friend. A personal blog is owned by a person, where in most of the cases, the author has the total control over what he writes. Some of the below questions will help you in positioning your blog.

1) Who is your target audience?

Someone must be reading your blog. Who is addressed by your blog? Developers, geeks, public, or kids? Knowing the audience will help you focus on them.

When I started blogging, I used to consider myself as the audience. I write for myself. :D Later when my blog started to get readers, I changed my perception on my blog accordingly.

2) What is the theme of your blog?

It can be a personal blog, a technical blog, a photography blog, or a mixture of all. Once your blog gets branded, it is hard to change. 

I consider my blog as a mixture. It contains software stuff that impressed me, projects that I worked, some common posts like this one, or just totally random stuff. 

3) What is the title of your blog?

The title actually says more. An interesting title is always a turn-on. ;) In the commonest cases, the title represents the essence of the blog too. Many bloggers have their name as the title of the blog. Something like 'Pradeeban's blog'. It is the (default) suggested name by Google during the blog registration time.

I too had the blog name as 'Kathiravelu Pradeeban' when I started my blog in 2008, October, which I later changed to 'On my way home' in 2009. It is 2010 Jan, when my blog got the name 'Llovizna' (pronounced 'yoviz-nah'). 'Llovizna' means 'drizzle' in Spanish. It is also a waterfall in Venezuela. It is also a female name in Spanish. I picked this name, as I felt it is kinda kewl (cool). A heavy shower may be scary and annoying, but never a drizzle (Llovizna). Drizzle (llovizna) lasts longer.

4) Do your posts have proper labels?

It will be very hard to navigate to the pages of interests, without proper labels. Make sure to tag your posts with the relevant labels, at the time when the blog post was written. Make sure to show a tag cloud or a list of labels in an accessible place in your blog too.

An index with the monthly posts is similarly useful in navigating to the posts.

5) Does your blog have an introduction to yourself?

Some bloggers prefer to be anonymous. I feel, good to show your identity. At least, I am not writing anything controversial. No worries. :) Your real identity in your blog profile, adds value to your thoughts.

6) Does your blog bring you friends or foes?

I have seen several blogs becoming a spot for flame wars, just because they post bad about the project from the competitor. I don't discourage a constructive criticism or a discussion/argument. But blind comparisons praising one's own project, criticizing another is not so professional.

As a practice, I never compare the projects that I am associated with, with other projects through my blog. When you say "mine is better than yours" without proper data to back your claim, it will just ruin your own reputation. Even if you think you are analyzing something unbiased, chances are, you are highly biased. 

Let's say I am comparing AbiWord with some other word processor. In my eyes, all the features in AbiWord are important to me. However I can't make a good comparison as a freelance reviewer, as I am much experienced using AbiWord than other word processors. I always can say, my product X is good, really good, and awesome, but I am reluctant to say, my X is better than your Y, as my X has all the important features, where yours doesn't, and mine is efficient.

Better to make friends, I feel.

7) How to get updates from your blog?

Does your blog have the follow options and feeds? They enable the interested readers to get updated.

I thank all the readers of my blog. Their presence and their comments always encourage me. Readers are the most important asset of a blog.

8) What is the medium of your blog?

Most of the blogs are written either in English or the mother tongue of the writer.

Llovizna is an English blog (though it has a Spanish name), but I occasionally try to write a few posts with Sinhala or Tamil mixed, focusing the local / Sri Lankan audience. Sometimes I even have written posts in other international languages, including Spanish, Chinese, or Portuguese, using my incremental translation method with the help of the Google Translator. Believe me, those translated posts have got considerably good number of reads. I hope those posts are useful for someone. I hope to proof-read them by some native speakers of the respective languages sooner.

9) Is your blog ethical?

Some bloggers use their blog as a copy-paste medium. After copying, some just put 'Taken from the Internet'. That's pretty useless. They should at least give a link to the original post. 'Thank you - Internet' says nothing about the original author.

Using blogs to spread cracked software, or to share your personal software licenses with everyone breaking the EULA, is completely unacceptable, though it may make your blog popular. I have seen blogs on 'how to break the license of the software'. Unless you are a serious black-hat hacker, avoid these posts. They take you nowhere.

Blog is a good communication medium too. It provides everyone an easy way to convey a message to the outer world. Some bloggers misuse that by spreading hoaxes or false alarms, may be for fun, or just due to the plain stupidity, or just to get more hits. Engineered stories, photoshopped pictures, and misleading titles are a few  examples.

10) How responsive are you, in your blog?

Some blog posts have questions from the readers unanswered in the comments section. That's a sign of ignorance. If some one asks a question in your blog, he feels that you know the answer. Don't prove him otherwise, just because of your ignorance.

Have fun with your blog!

On Llovizna itself..

Since I started my blog on the 11th of November, 2008, it has seen many posts - mostly my random thoughts or product updates under the name of a blog post. With recent enhancements of blogspot, we are able to view the mostly viewed posts by time (now, day, week, month, always), which I guess worth mentioning.. ;)

How to apply/create an svn patch (for beginners) [Apr 1, 2009]

Is Delete() == Hide() for Facebook? [Feb 21, 2010]

SVN Commit in windows [Could not use external edi... [Mar 28, 2009]

libtool: link: cannot find the library `' or unhan... [May 1, 2009]

Ubuntu Lucid Lynx and the fixes [May 7, 2010]

I should mention one point. The mostly viewed pages weren't the ones that I took much time to write, nor the ones that I wrote with much care. Viewers decide what to view, themselves.. :D


Update as on the 6th of May, 2012.

Auto Scaling With Amazon EC2 [Feb 1, 2011]
How to apply/create an svn patch (for beginners [Apr 1, 2009]
how to ignore someone you love [Apr 24, 2011]
SVN Commit in windows [Could not use external edi... [Mar 28, 2009]
Google Summer of Code 2012 [Dec 18, 2011]

Motivation and Llovizna

ClustrMaps is here being awarded as the biggest motivator for me to blog. Not kidding. It does give a huge encouragement. Isn't it good to see many people from different countries taking a look at our blog posts? But I should accept the sad truth that since they archive the map once a year, all those sweet red dots indicating the visitors will be gone in a few days, making the journey start from zero once more. For my future reference, I have just archived the 'dots' here.
Bookmarks of ClustrMaps or its facebook page is also worth visiting.

Llovizna

So this is my first post under the new name "Llovizna". With these few changes, I feel this blog will be more attractive.

By the way, getting more hits to blogs?
some tips!

1. Attractive and glamorous titles to the blog entry.
2. Write a blog post on how to get more hits and share it on social networks. :D

And most importantly, a sexy title to the blog itself, even if it is technical. A good example would be 'Llovizna'.. ;) 

'Llovizna' means 'drizzle' in Spanish. I picked 'Llovizna' as the blog name on 6th of January, 2010, as it gives a sexy appeal to my then mostly technical oriented drizzle of thoughts. 'Llovizna' discusses the projects that I got involved, the coding fun that I had elsewhere, and some general thoughts on Information Technology, or even some of my random thoughts.

Llovizna is neither a pure technology blog nor an entertainment blog, though it may have both and more. It is just my personal blog. Llovizna contains a range of posts from the technology posts such as Auto Scaling With Amazon EC2 to posts like how to ignore someone you love, which are completely random. I also use Llovizna to document my past and recent travels.

Llovizna by Pradeeban Kathiravelu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.


Analytics of Llovizna.

Subscribe: [The Atom Feed]

 

Image: Llovizna (telenovela)

Llovizna was a popular 1997 telenovela from Venezuela. Llovizna means drizzle in Spanish. 

The blog's title image is Llovizna waterfalls, which is also from the same country.

 

Blog It!

In most of the cases, developers tend to blog or document the smartest stuff they have developed or found. Yes, we do. But at the same time, the solutions for the silly problems are harder to find, than those for the toughest problems. I think it is a good idea to blog about those silly mistakes we make each day, as they will definitely help someone over there damaging his head with the same issue. People mention it or not, the simple mistakes we make in computing, may be in building a project or some coding stuff, are to a considerable level, common mistakes!

Web 2.0 paradigm shift is becoming more obvious, I should say. I feel I am becoming more an information producer nowadays than being the consumer, and given below is just a proof.

Now we need a better uplink than the downlink, as active contributors to the Internet. Let's blog for the sake of sharing the knowledge and content with the world!