Year: 2009

Most people have google as their home page. And it’s cool if you are a guy who just makes a google search about that thing which he needs to buy, checks his emails once in a while, and checks scraps at orkut.
But what if you are a person who has multiple blogs, twitter accounts, facebook, myspace and hi5 profiles; and you need to check your earnings at adsense or adbrite, the statistics of your blog at analytics, your broadband usage, your email account at hotmail, your unread feeds in google reader, the latest cricket scores, and your girlfriend’s scrapbook to see whom she is chatting with?
And you don’t want to forget doing any of these?

Do you know that I do all that without ever having to type a letter in the address bar, and not even an extra click in the Bookmarks folder.

That is what an offline home page has done to me. It has worked as a to-do list as well as a bookmarks folder, at the same time helping me saving a lot of time ease-wise.

Want to try one? Here’s help.

The first step is knowing a bit of html.
hyperlinks work with a simple html tag “<a>…</a>”. The page to which it is linked is shown by “href”. And the text which should be shown in blue is written in between the “<a>” and “</a>”.
That is, if you want to link to Change, the html tag will be “<a href=”http://asdofindia.blogspot.com”>go to Change</a>
and it will show up like this:
go to Change
Learn more about linking here, and practice linking here.

Now, that is all the background information you need. (Actually you need not even that. But when it gets messy with underlines getting under every wrong word, you will actually need those.)

Now, you need to create an HTML file with all the links you have. For this you can use Notepad, or MS Word or anything that suits the purpose.
In Notepad, you will have to type out the html tags one by one and it will soon turn out to be a cumbersome task. So, it is better to use MS Word or such softwares that has features which allow easy linking.

And to make things even simpler, you can use gmail or blogger too. If you are a blogger, create a new post (which you can discard later). Or in gmail, compose a new mail. Now copy those links you need. When copying take note of one thing you can actually select a linked text and press Ctrl + C and then paste it into your mail, post or MS Word document and the text will be pasted with the hyperlink remaining intact. That is, when you copy Change and paste it, it will automatically be linked.

To make the best of this feature I am giving a few links applicable to anyone, which you can just copy and save time.

Myspace Facebook Hi5 Blogger Orkut Twitter
Google Yahoo! Torrentz
Gmail Hotmail
Flickr Youtube
eBay Amazon
Wikipedia Wikibooks
adsense adbrite
Cricinfo live cricket score
Blank Page
(Now, a part of that, I took from the start page of Green Browser, which is an excellent online alternative to this offline home page)

Now, if you use orkut
Orkut Scrapbook Communities
Now don’t forget to add to that the scrapbooks of your dearest friends, or the forums of your favourite communities

And if facebook,
Facebook Profile Inbox

If you have many blogs, add similar links to new post, edit posts, edit layout, view blog, etc.
Similarly add links to all those pages you visit once a week at least.

Now is the bit tricky part. If you used MS Word for creating this you can just save it and set it as your home page. But what if you used Gmail, or Blogger? Of course you can copy from them again and paste it to MS word and save it. But a far better alternative is to use the “Save Frame As…” option found in the file menu of Mozilla Firefox. (Oh, aren’t you using Firefox, then switch to it immediately). By saving the frame, you save only the text box in which you typed in the links. And thus you get exactly what you want.

Now, don’t forget to add Change to your offline home page

Related Posts:
How to Make Sure That You Blog Daily or Regularly

So, you’ve set up a blog. And you’ve had some nice posts, and a decent amount of followers. Everything is going nice except for one thing. Once in a while you forget about blogging. You are so immersed in twitter or facebook or orkut that you forget to check out new comments in your blog.
You know you love to blog, but you forget to love. How do we start loving our blogs again, daily?

The solution to this is setting up your browser or PC to help you blog easily. When you need to go to your blogger dashboard to create a new post, that is an extra step and you’re most probably not going to do that every time.

So, let me introduce some tips that can make blogging easy for you.

• Add the blogger gadget to your igoogle page, (and make it your home page). This simple gadget allows easy posting from your home page itself, and that too to any of your multiple blogs.
• If you have an offline home page like me, add a link to the new post page of your blog.
• If you’re using MS Office 2007, use the create blog post feature in it.
• Use Ping.fm which allows you to post to your blog (and/or even twitter, facebook…) using your chat client. Actually Ping.fm is a tool that allows you to update your account in multiple websites like facebook and twitter simultaneously from a central hub. And when the chat feature is set up you can even send the status update to it as a chat blurb. But using @bl command you can use it to update only your blog. I use it to write my daily diary in my private blog.
• Set up e-mail posting in your blog, using the mail to post feature.
• Add the blogger posting gadget to your gmail account. This is done by enabling adding gadgets by URL in labs, and then giving the URL in the special tab that comes up in gmail settings.
• Try scheduled posts. Go to blogger in draft, create a new post, just before clicking publish, change the post date and time in post options to scheduled at and give a future date and time. Now publish the post. Sit back and relax for your holidays. This is particularly useful if you’re the kind of a person who gets a lot of ideas on one day and gets nothing worth publishing on another day. Schedule as much posts as you can for the future when you feel like. Then just relax for a few days until you get fresh ideas. But for the readers, you will be publishing daily.

That’s it from my side. What other ways do you have to make blogging a piece of cake?