When to hotlink images and when not to?

Hotlinking is a term used to signify that the images that you use in the post do not come from the same server that hosts the content. For example, consider these two images:

Both are same images and look similar - any difference attributed to showing that they are different images. The left pic is coming from the same server that hosts this content (i.e., from technosanct.com), while the pic at the right comes from my Google drive. But the image could have easily been sourced from any website (say, from Wikipedia)

Hotlinking is discouraged:

1. You are using the bandwidth of the third party site, without adding any value to that site
2. A lot of sites do not attribute the third party source (or respect copyright), which again results in loss of potential traffic and income for those sites. You get to go on a ride without paying anything
3. If the source changes, you have to manually go back and update the posts
4. When there are related images on the post, it enjoys a better ranking from a search engine perspective
5. While you may optimize your site further using CDN and other techniques, the source of the images may not enjoy the same sophistication thereby slowing your web pages

While all this is true, you find the images on this site often are sourced from my Google drive rather than uploading it here. I have my own reasons to do this.

• I hotlink from my own drive, where I upload pics specifically to be used by my blog. This image will not go away anywhere unless I wish to do so
• When I started out to blog, I was not sure whether I will stick to one particular platform. Having my images on a neutral place helped me experiment with multiple platforms, while I could easily transfer content from one place to the other. The practice just stuck
• I use screen capture tools that help me capture the whole screen or part of the screen, and upload to my Google drive all in a couple of clicks. I am lazy to move away from this option
• My choice of cheapo hosting providers are not fast, and certainly not comparable to what Google can do. Images have not been slower to render as compared to the content, and I am quite pleased by that

So then, I continue to use hotlinking in this site, and also in a couple of other sites. The biggest risk that I see – Google changing its policies to allow images to be displayed directly in other posts.

How to solve Live Writer issues with posts appearing read-only for Wordpress?

Microsoft Live Writer is an awesome tool to write blogs, this has been covered before. But, Live Writer is not a hot topic when the whole world is moving towards web apps, and is looking to the web to solve all problems including global hunger. So, what can old fashioned bloggers do? Well, they help each other. Let us deal with one nagging issue here, and see how to solve Live Writer posts getting read-only for Wordpress blogs.

Source of the Problem

Live Writer detects your blogging platform at the time of setup of the blog. You supply the URL of the blog, and the user id/password so that Live Writer can know the platform, and get the theme details that helps in writing/preview of the content. During that time Live Writer assumes defaults for the various blogging platforms, which may be an issue if you have changed the defaults. In Wordpress the default category for new posts is helpfully named ‘Uncategorized’. This default can be changed in the Wordpress settings > Writing tab.

When you change the settings, the new posts are created under that particular category. So, when Live Writer is trying to create a new post, read it and get the theme details doing it, the tool is most likely not able to find the post and assumes there is something wrong. The result – you do not get to create a post or edit the post in the ‘Edit’ tab (though Category, Source seem to remain intact).

The Solution

As you might imagine, this does not really need further explanation. You just need to set the default category in Wordpress to ‘Uncategorized’. Do not forget to ‘Save’ the settings by clicking on the button placed at the bottom of the page.
Once you have done this, do the following steps in Live Writer:

• Go to ‘Home’ tab > ‘Manage Blog Accounts’
• In ‘Accounts’ list, select your Wordpress blog and click on ‘Edit’ button
• As the next step, select ‘Editing’ options and click on ‘Update Theme’ button

That is it! Now creating your posts or editing them should work as expected. If the above steps do not work, you can also try resetting the blogging account from scratch.

Why use Wordpress premium (or paid) themes?

I absolutely love Wordpress. It is strange to type this in a blog that runs on blogger, but not so strange when you consider that it was my deliberate decision to take it easy on hosting and cut down monthly bills.

Wordpress empowers users who are not in the web development space to create and run their own web sites/blogs, and gives them tools to manage all aspects of the site.That empowerment is enhanced by the Wordpress plugins and themes. While plugins are invaluable in their contribution to the site’s functionalities and make it easier for the creator/maintainer of website, it is the theme that gets noticed and that’s what makes or breaks your blog or website at the first glance.

Themes have quite a bit of history, and have contributed a lot in increasing the popularity of Wordpress as a platform. While other CMS like Drupal or Joomla have themes as well, the ease of Wordpress combined with themes just blows you away. Wordpress provides deeper functionalities that are subject to easy manipulation through themes, and thereby makes it easier to work with. Themes change the look and feel of the website/blog, and (probably unjustifiably) is a direct indicator of the professionalism, quality of website/content, trust-worthiness and the commitment shown by the blogger to his subject of choice. Themes provide a cheaper, easier way to customize the website, and make it unique within an available framework.

The first place to visit for themes is of course the themes at Wordpress.org.

There are a lot of excellent themes here, and all of them are free. A lot of themes offer a ‘pro’ version that will provide enhanced functionalities as compared to the starter free version. Developers/designers starting up with their own Wordpress work will find the platform provided by wordpress.org one of the best to showcase their work. I have used both starter versions, and the completely free versions on my websites, and have been satisfied to various degrees. To find the right theme for the website is easier said than done.

It routinely includes browsing tens of sites other than Wordpress.org to check out reviews, opinions about the theme

Wordpress.org preview is not quite good, and I end up visiting multiple sites to preview a theme as well as compare it to its peers

I download, test the theme on my local site, and sometimes this clicks and sometimes it doesn’t

If there are minor tweaks needed, I rely on the helping nature and good will of many a Wordpress developer to get me out of trouble (I am not a core web developer, and my PHP skills are enough to write ‘Hello World’ pages)

I get frustrated by the sheer number of websites that display wrong information, are copy/paste jobs from the main theme site, and do their best to mislead people

In other words, the search for themes for me is not a straight forward affair. So, when I was getting increasingly worried about how my website looks and performs, I started thinking about themes that require hard cash. I did this because of two reasons:

I was increasingly not happy with the way my site looked. It was not exactly looking like the below pic, but was trending towards it. I had started going through a lot of internet marketing materials, and of course those polished, made-to-order websites were enough to give me a sad feeling

I believed this in a way also influenced the way users perceived the articles/posts. This was not good since with the negligible traffic I had, I wanted the content to look professional enough

Once I took a decision to pay for a theme, I started seeing better quality themes as expected. But it was not a straight forward decision either. Before selecting the theme, I did quite a bit of research on what exactly I wanted from the site and what was the best/easiest way to achieve that using a theme. I went through the routine of browsing a couple of websites to evaluate themes and gather opinions that mattered. At the end, I narrowed down my options:

A magazine/blog theme suited my needs since I published more than one topic of interest on the site

I needed something that does not require changes to the code, CSS or anything else not exposed on the user interface

Support for Google fonts was a must, I intend to make it as easy to the reader as possible

I put down by budget as USD 40 so that I have a upper ceiling for my options financially

I needed a sizable positive review. This sadly ruled out some themes with interesting use of HTML5 and animations that were more recent entries, but I was going to be really careful about my money

And, finally I narrowed further down to two themes. After spending some more time on the demos, and comparison, I selected one. The winner – Sahifa Wordpress Theme from ThemeForest.

At USD 55, this went beyond my budget but well worth the money if you ask me. I spent less than 3 hours to reset my content, and was all set. The all new website is a treat to look at – as compared to the old one that is. And, I am seriously thinking of ending all searches for free themes and go premium for all my future endeavours.

Stay tune for a slew of theme reviews from my research.

[post contains affiliate links that may earn me money without any cost to you]

Have you used Amazon appstore yet?

If you are using Android phones, Google Play is the default store from which you download additional Android apps, games and other paraphernalia for your phone. Google Play store, coming from the software creator, is good - no doubt about it. But Android also represents 'choices', and it is good to have more than one choice for your software. Especially if that choice also means you are saving some money on your favorite apps.

Amazon AppStore is not really new. Started in 2011, this is offered as the only app store for Amazon Kindle devices and other devices can install the Amazon app to access the store.
Though Amazon app store appears slower and more clunky than Google Play, it offers three distinct advantages:

1. Amazon has been long running a feature to get you one paid app for free on any day. The "free app a day" has had some interesting apps for free in the past. All this started with the ad free version of Angry Birds back in 2011.
2. You can also test-drive the apps using your browser. This runs on an Android emulator on the Amazon EC3 instance and provides a good overview of what the app is about in your browser
3. Amazon app purchases and in-app purchases are integrated with your Amazon account. Amazon coins are yet to take off as virtual currency, but with Amazon's support that looks to have some future

Go ahead and try Amazon AppStore on your Android phone. 

For a limited time (till 28-Dec-13), you get a $5 store credit when you download or update Amazon PlayStore on your Android phone.  [expired]

Prezi is Powerpoint on steroids

Microsoft PowerPoint is the standard pot for presentation recipes for quite a long time. Though there have been alternatives (e.g. OpenOffice Impress, Google Docs Presentation), none offer the same breadth, depth as PowerPoint. Like its Office siblings PowerPoint is rooted deep in the minds and hearts of the office goers and it is difficult to change that without good incentive.
Prezi has the potential to change all that. Not only Prezi has a beautiful and fresh feel to it, it offers many features for today’s user. Prezi can work both through a browser alone, as a desktop application, and as an app on iPad/iPhone. This makes it easy to create and present, and you can get started with it real quick. 
To start with, Prezi has beautiful looking templates that are easy to work with. You get to easily create presentations in the time-tested manner, but make it really interesting. The frames provided to present the information can show the presentation with context and make it powerful through intuitive flows. For each template, you can apply themes that can change colours, fonts and the like to give it a more unique feel.

Though it supports the same-old bulleted lists, now you have the flexibility to go beyond that by adding animations that do not look tacky, add background music or YouTube videos


Prezi presentations can be worked upon by multiple people over the internet, and this platform can be used to share the presentation in real-time as well.

The free version of Prezi offers 100 MB of space, and all presentations are publicly viewable. For provide presentations and for more space, the upgrade starts from $5 a month. The desktop version starts from $13.25/mo, and is needed for any offline editing.

As you would expect by now Prezi has its own proprietary format. Offline presentations can be downloaded as a Adobe Air application and that’s about it. Any online content you have included in the presentation will continue to require an internet connection.
If you are looking at something going beyond PowerPoint, but with the smae usability, Prezi can be the answer today. Go ahead and try the free version!