Edit your blog template : The longer but simpler way.

This post is specifically for the non-techie blogger. Geeks, alpha geeks ALT+F4 please!

Now, I have started my blog and I want to edit the template the way I want. Just a simple pre-condition I DON'T want to care about html or css gibberish. For heaven's sake I m blogging and not doing web designing. All I want is a clean simple interface which will let me customize my template to my heart's content.

Try doing that with blogger's template settings and you are in for a surprise. All that is presented is the template itself with the gibberish you neither care about nor do you know what to do with it. Where's that WYSIWYG editing facility?? Should you resign to the fate that there is no such utility for you to customize your blog without learning about html? Atleast I won't. Here's what I did.

I googled googled and googled more until I discovered fckeditor which is a cool open source app that lets you generate instant html content. I am sure there are many "online html editors" but somehow this one appealed to me, simply because it let me use the application just like that! So, since I wanted to modify the template, I needed the application to work backwards from the html source to plain-text. Pretty simple, I fed in dummy text and generated its html version, then replaced that with the code of my blog template and there you go! the dummy text was replaced by the blog template just ready for editing. I can change whatever I want in my template now and that too without worrying about linking intricacies. I love this!

For the time being I have just added "Blogs I read" on the sidebar. Over time you'll see a more mature blogroll and many more changes in the blog's presentation. So if you are the "non-techie" wanting to control your blog page, this was your simple lesson in html editing, with zilch investment in html. Have fun!

Your "Freedom" from blocked instant messengers!

Just came across this wonderful site meebo, which is a web-based IM environment and lets you seamlessly login to your dearest IMs like Yahoo!, MSN, jabber, GTalk, ICQ and AIM. This shall be your freedom from blocked IMs at your organisations !!

Meebo is definitely cool because it lets u login to your favourite messenger without any registration. But is it the only known app in the web-based IM environment? Well, I thought of doing a round-up of the various known web-based IMs but Google saved me the herculian effort with a single result. Tipmonkies already has an article exploring the various sites in this domain.
Enjoy reading!

The Economist : Survey on New Media

The Economist has conducted a detailed survey on New Media, exploring its components and their effects on the changing media landscape of the internet. It argues that the era of mass media is giving way to one of personal and participatory media that will profoundly change both the media industry and society as a whole.

The survey is essentially a collection of articles which go on to describe in detail the participatory models of blogs, wikis, citizen journalism and podcast media. Strewn in throughout are views, opinions and insights from renowned thinkers and practitioners from the new and the traditional media enterprises.

Though the ultimate outcome of this revolutionary change cannot be predicted right now, it is amply clear that this change is going to have long lasting effects on the entire media landscape right from production to consumption.