Dream

September 24th, 2006

It’s raining outside… The weather is so lovingly cool that there is nothing to beat this situation. Rains clattering the sun shade above the southern window, the wind chime hung on the curtain rails danced to the slight wind creating the familiar klink-klink sound. I was mesmerized by the beauty of nature.

A quick zing into the recent past… 9 months ago… It was 2.30AM in the morning. Myself and Moyeen were wrapping up the discussion for our project work. We were preparing for a review that was to be held the following day. Very tired, I washed my face and headed to bed. I immediately fell asleep. About 2 hours later, I woke up. I was riding down the dull lighted roads to a small park nearby. It was dark and there were some people doing some early jogging. Birds started chirping too. I didn’t know where to wait. Few minutes later, this girl turned up. She was wearing clothes around the orange shade and said an enthusiastic “Good Morning!”. Brightened up at the sight of her, we both walked for sometime and settled at one of the park benches.

She turned, brushed her hair aside and stared straight into my eye, the stare that you have to encounter to believe. Our knees were touching slightly. We started talking, smiling, laughing… slowly at first and then discussing 2 million things around the universe. By now, the sun is out. More joggers are up. A small team of grandpas formed a circle a few yards away and were laughing their heart out. All these distractions were immaterial to us. They happened as if it were in another world.

Slowly, my face became slightly wet. I became a bit uncomfortable. More beads of perspiration began to fill my face. They grew so much that, they started flowing. My t-shirt was suddenly so wet. In a fit of discomfort, I yelled and discovered that my mom had poured a glass of water on me to wake me up so that I could get the college bus on time….

Hi, how many of you have felt the need to create a new wordpress template and felt that the structure is too intimidating? We had the same feeling too until we realised how easy it is to create a wordpress template.

A few things before you need a template are,
1. Figure out the layout of your blog. That is, you should be clear about what should be placed where. Ofcourse, it’s entirely at your discretion.
2. Create a simple HTML page that show cases your layout.
3. Mould the simple page into a beautiful wordpress template.

Ready?? Ok, let’s start!

As said in point 1, I have just created a basic layout as shown in the screen shot below.

Sample Template Screenshot

You can definitely tell about the various sections that make up the page. They are the header, content, sidebar, footer. To abstract this and give power to the template designers, wordpress has placed the various sections into different pages.

In addition to this, you have to add proper CSS to your design. Include them in “style.css”. Therefore, the files necessary are,
1. header.php -> Header
2. footer.php -> Footer
3. sidebar.php -> Sidebar
4. index.php -> Content glued with header, sidebar and footer.
5. style.css -> CSS
That is all you need to create a basic template. Clear? Any doubts? Post them here.

Designing the Template:

The HTML for our basic layout goes like this.

Have a look at the simple style sheet for the basic layout. Save this as “style.css”. We would need it later.

Now that you have saved it, open the HTML file in a good text editor. You can see <div> sections that are tagged with “header”, “footer”, “sidebar” and “content”. Let us create the header file.

1. Open notepad, and paste the code shown below. Save this file as “header.php”.

2. Copy the fragment below and save it in a new file as “footer.php”.

3. Copy the sidebar code and save it in a new file as “sidebar.php”.

4. Last but not the least, let us create the “index.php”. If you notice, there are special lines such as “<?php get_header(); ?>”, “<?php get_footer(); ?>”, “<?php get_sidebar(); ?>”. These are the functions that are used to glue the content with header, sidebar and footer. Great! we are almost done… few more minutes.

5. Create a new folder and name it as “DarlingTemplate”. Move all the newly created files, including the “style.css” to the folder. To test the new template, upload[:1] this folder to the <Wordpress_install_location>/wp-content/themes folder. Login to your blog and you will see the new template under the “Presentation” tab.

6. Click on our template name to activate it. Well, everything is cool. The template looks just like the simple HTML file we created earlier. But, what happened to the posts?

7. Open up “index.php”, replace it with the text in the following box and save it. Make sure the modified
file is uploaded to the <Wordpress_install_location>/wp-content/themes/DarlingTemplate
folder. Refresh the blog homepage. Voila!! the posts are there.

8. Oh! we are still left with 30 seconds. Take a screen shot of your theme. Save it as “screenshot.png” and upload it to
<Wordpress_install_location>/wp-content/themes/DarlingTemplate.

Now, when you login to your wordpress account, our template will have a medium sized thumbnail picture.

We have uploaded the final sample template as a zip file for your reference. Download it here.

Happy Templating! 🙂

Note:
1. You cannot upload the new template if your blog is hosted at wordpress.com.

BlogCamp – Day 2

September 10th, 2006

Ah! amazing! is the only word I can say of today’s sessions. Karthik ‘spammer’ Kannan started the day on “Branding via Blogs”. Next on line was the best photographer, Sharad Haksar. His excellent session was on “Professional Photography”. Sharad shared his experiences in a very lucid manner. You had to be here for the session!

Sujatha from PodBazaar was live on skype at 10.30 AM. She talked about Podcasting in general and how podcasting is a great platform for promoting oneself, giving tutorials, voice advertisements, corporate alignment etc. She was also talking about free softwares, especially audacity. Infact, they are coming up with a series of podcasts on audacity so that beginners on podcasting would benefit from it.

Sunil Gavaskar, alias Sunny alias Little Master 🙂 arrived well ahead of time. He was waiting for the podcasting session to finish and started off with lots and lots of cameras clicking at him. He finished his session and also answered a couple of questions from the chat channel that is open for ‘blogcamp’ers. Hey, he even posed for a photo with us on request.

Day 2 is seriously great!

Update on BlogCamp

September 9th, 2006

I soon shifted back to the first floor mini auditorium. A small tech crowd formed there and bosky was in full flow with “Ajaxifying your Blogs”. He even showed us some really cool demos that he had developed using ajax. Check his blog. Continuing on this topic, we had another guy named Karthik. He is a long time web user turned web designing hobbyist. He showcased his skills as he unravelled his story about the way he developed his own blogging software that runs on his site. It gave a lot of inspiration for the many of us who complain of not having time to do other small things that we are passionate about.

Ford announced an iPod contest and hey, we are running live blogging, photo blogging, video blogging and podcasting contests too! Join the fun. Moving down, the sessions scheduled today were over. We have hired a bus and we are moving to the beach house in another 30 minutes. Yay!!

Catch you soon…

BlogCamp Live!

September 9th, 2006

Blogcamp is going on great :). We are almost on the end of a very energetic day 1. We had different workshops on track 2 and sessions on track 1. Track 2 was more of an unconference style. GAPP started track 2 with a preview of wordpress.org and wordpress.com, with Prasanna continuing on Beta Blogger. I did a quick 20 minute session on wordpress hacks.

Kausik, Kiruba and Ram Viswanathan continued the afternoon session with a beautiful workshop on podcasting. This session started off on a conference style. The audience couldn’t hold it long and soon started pitching in. Kausik was almost ragged towards the end of the session. Varun then started off with mobile blogging and now Bosky is on with “Ajaxifying your blog”. Amit Agarwal is on an interactive session at track 1. He is talking about “Professional Blogging”.

We are about 150+ strong bloggers, techies, podcasters, video blogers etc. etc. all at one place, having superb fun, sharing knowledge and experience. By the way, did I tell you about the 10 dedicated computers for live blogging? hey, we are also webcasting the event live! Head on to blogcamp.in and see it. My session would be up on my tech blog and on bothack shortly. More on the event coming soon……

Kids Again

August 18th, 2006

Kids have this natural ability to be so innocent. Two kids came to my house yesterday. The elder one was a nine year old boy and the younger one was a three year old girl. The boy wanted to play spiderman on my computer. I loaded the game and he started playing. He became engrossed to the extent that he didn’t know what was happening around him. Sensing that he was missing, she came looking for him. Seeing the computer monitor, she shrieked SPIDERMAN!!, her tiny hands pointing to the monitor.

Immediately, she moved to the other side of the table and started moving the mouse away from him. She was also pressing the return key. He got irritated and told her that if she came to his left side, she would also play… Lol!! As she was slowly moving, he hid the working mouse, took a broken one nearby and placed it to his left side. Seeing another mouse, she was super excited and started moving it.

As much as he was playing and making the characters on screen move, she thought she was playing and made faces to the boy.. ha ha ha!! she was also pressing some keys too. She played like that for sometime. Then, it was time to move 🙂

Ban on Cola

August 10th, 2006

Hi!! day-before-yesterday, City Express, a daily supplement for The New Indian Express carried an article on whether colas should be banned due to their high pesticide content. It also asked the readers to send their responses to cityexpress@epmltd.com. I sent mine too. Here it is,

———————————————————-
Banning colas won’t have such a widespread effect because of the levels of penetration they have had in the society. Go to party, any small gathering, pizza corner or pizza hut, you are bound to find many 2 litre bottles bottles of coke, fanta and similar fizzy drinks. Pizza Corner always has 1 offer or another round the year. Avail that offer and you get a bottomless glass of coke free. What’s more, while they serve the pizzas, they ask whether we want coke or water.

This type of penetration can be broken only by constant awareness programmes. Let pizza corner offer coke, but then let them hang medium sized awareness boards inside, which illustrates the ill effects of coke. As a first level, most of the habits of youth are formed during the schooling or college period. Therefore, the colleges and schools should refrain from using colas and serve fresh juices instead. For example, my college has a small canteen and they never sell any kind of bottled drinks, not even Slice. They sell only fruit juices and that too fresh fruit juices at very affordable rates. Seeing this for the last 4 years has made me look at the good effects of fresh juices rather than bottled drinks.

Charity and everything else beings at home. Therefore, at the second level, parents and relatives should never encourage children to drink coke, instead buy them tender coconuts or fresh fruit drinks. Home is the place where the parents can impose bans on cola and induce fruit drinks. This issue is similar to the crackers during deepavali time. Just by imposing a ban on not bursting crackers before 6am, not a single soul stopped doing so. When small children are told about the ill effects of crackers, they stop bursting them and think of more useful ways to spend time and money. The same should happen with coke also.

We cannot change anything immediately by imposing a ban. Good people will continue to be good and bad people will continue to find new ways of getting the banned thing in. It is only by constant awareness can coke be banished from the society. Only time will tell how long it will take. Till then we must show our perseverance on the awareness programmes.
———————————————————-

It got published yesterday :), on page 4 of City Express under the title, “Ban won’t help, let’s create an awareness”.

Anna University Homepage

August 5th, 2006


Wow!!! look at that! Anna University, one of the foremost universities in India has a RedHat test page.

Here’s the screenshot.

BlogCamp.In Update

August 2nd, 2006

Lot of things, yes! quite a lot of things have been happening now on the front of BlogCamp. Myself and Moyeen have designed the website for BlogCamp.In, with Hitesh giving inputs on the overall design of the page. I did the design and layout. Moyeen took care of the ajax part. Based on the homepage for blogcamp.in, I created a wordpress template for the blog so that we have a consistent look over the website as a whole. The site is now open. Ofcourse there are many things missing; like many URLs are broken except http://blogcamp.in and http://blogcamp.in/blog.

It has been an amazing experience learning the working of wordpress. Hey, did I tell you that I’m the mini webmaster? Yes, I’m managing http://blogcamp.in. If anything on the site doesn’t function as expected, I get an email or a phone call and I just love it. The wiki is getting ready now. It will be up tonight (most probably). You can check it at http://blogcamp.in/wiki.

———————————————————————–

Did a video cast in the evening with a 73 year old lady, who also happens to be my cousin’s grandma. Will upload it to youtube soon. It is in tamil.

———————————————————————–

Got the equipment for doing a podcast with Kennedi G. Have to test it and schedule the podcast :D.

Well, that’s it for now 🙂 Bye!!

The situation is pretty simple. Three people entered the Prime Minister’s residence at about 8.45 PM tonight without any documents or appointment what-so-ever. They were until gate 2 and were then turned back. A pretty serious issue in terms of the security concerned.

Now is a ripe time to blame the media. NDTV reports that their reporters had chased down the car to get an interview of the breachers. I had been seeing the news channel for about 45 minutes now and every 5 minutes, the interview is being played. Watching it was funny though. And showing the interview for every 5 minutes was like castrating those 3 young people who came upto the reception.

According to me, the 3 people are not to be blamed. As far as I saw, the media never interviewed any security personnel who let the car in. Leave off the interview, they never even showed us their god damned face. This shows clearly that the media is perfect in character assasination. They never told why the security personnel let them in. Interviewing the 3 people is only part of the story. They should have interviewed the security personnel too. More so, the security personnel should be punished for letting in a car without checking.

This security lapse clearly shows the reason behind the attack on the Indian Parliament.