AmreekanDesi

Unless you have been living under a rock these past few months you would have heard of Twitter.

Alright alright, don’t come down so hard on yourself…main hoon na!

So Twitter is this new micro blogging platform that has taken the technology world blogging world entire world by storm. Suddenly there’s celebrities going around touting their twitter accounts. TV personalities are being measured in terms of the number of followers they have. News is being disseminated via short 140 character messages (including blank spaces).

Essentially everybody and their grandma’s cat has a twitter account these days.

You can tweet from twitter.com. You can tweet from the million odd applications created for this very purpose. You can tweet from your iphone. And then, you can tweet via plain old SMS.

You can get news. You can find out when your friends woke up. You can find out when your friends went to sleep. You can follow famous people and find out what they are upto. You can talk to famous people and feel famous yourself.

You can tell the whole world just what the heck you are upto.

Biz Stone, one of the co founders of Twitter, was on the Colbert Report show last night. Here’s a video. Watch and enjoy.

Twitter is the messaging service we didn’t know we needed until we had it.

Twitter is great. Twitter is awesome.

Of course, we are on Twitter.

Follow us for some inciteful  news and updates on what’s right and what’s left in this world.

http://twitter.com/amreekandesi

Welcome back to Amreekandesi! Subscribe to our RSS feed and get regular updates in your favorite feed reader.

Here’s the famous 25 random things tag; Some about amreekandesi – the blog, and some about amreekandesi – the writer. Enjoy!

1. The first choice for the blog name was americandesi, but it was taken. amreekandesi turned out to be so much cooler.
2. Ultrabrown (Manish) was the inspiration for this blog. I didn’t even know about blogs before i came across UB.
3. This blog has had three lives since it started last year. There’s usually been a burst of a few months before work catches up, then silence for a few months, followed by another rebirth. In the current life, this blog is about three months old. Hopefully the current burst will last a while.
4. For the newer readers, amreekandesi started off on wordpresss. By a quirk of fate, Google still ranks that site higher than this one!
5. When this blog started the idea was to write stories related to India and Indians. The original tagline  was Stories about India. Since those early days, we have diversified.
6. Sometimes i pat myself on the back for the current tag line “India…from the eyes of a Non Resident Insider”. Its sheer genius.
7. For the folks who cant sleep at night wondering what the hell this site’s name means – amreekan is a play on how punjabis might say ‘american’, and please tell me you know what desi means. amreekandesi is a desi in amreeka.
8. The first big feature on amreekandesi was the coverage of the Incredible India event, held in New york in 2007. That was some fun stuff.
9. Those elephants up there – aren’t they nifty?
10. It is hard to make me do something i don’t want to. Except for, maybe god. He finds a way, when he is not showing one. (more…)

Here’s introducing the first of more to come publicly available amreekandesi themes – Amreekandesi-Elegant.

Features:

Elegant is a two column theme, with a right sidebar. The theme is tested on Mozilla Firefox as well as Internet explorer, which is to say that it results in the same display on both browsers (That’s a minor achievement in itself, for non tech oriented folks).

Users also have the option to put up a custom header image, and modify the color of the text displayed in the header. If you so wish, you can turn off the text in the header as well.

This theme is compatible with Wordpress v2.7, the current version of the awesome blogging platform.

This theme is distributed under the GPL license. You are free to use it and make any modifications, as long as i get my credit

(more…)

I was a lone ranger
Doing my blogging thing
I worked through the fall
Kept going into the spring

I wrote short stories
I talked about current news
I cribbed about Indian politicians
Sometimes went overboard with my views

I am funnily sarcastic
I am sarcastically fun
Just getting started
Far from being done

Blogging made me new friends
Got to know many a interesting folk
Life’s gotten exciting
Blogging ain’t no joke

(more…)

This blog had its humble origins at wordpress before moving on to this new self hosted location. Since then, many suns have set, many Biharis have got beaten up in Mumbai, a Black man has been elected US president, India has found an Olympic champion, and the global economy has gone into the crapper.

How has our experience been? A wise old man said, “Think before you Leap“.
Our words of wisdom: “Think before you Host“.

(more…)

LinkLove that is…

You may notice a new logo on this blog saying ‘u comment i follow’. Essentially, this is a way of giving back to you readers. If you comment on your site, the link to your blogs will credited by way of search engine/technorati indexing.

(logo from randa clay’s website)

By default, wordpress adds the rel=”nofollow” tag to all commentor’s (commentator?) links. This instructs search engines to not follow this link while indexing this page. This is supposed to help reduce search engine and comment spam.

But the efficacy of this attribute is dubious:

“Link spammers will continue to spam everyone to reach the sites that do not use rel=”nofollow” [link]

“Of course it didn’t deter spammers at all. And people who comment properly and regularly on your blog weren’t getting as much value as they could from doing so.” [link]

“Worse, nofollow has another, more pernicious effect, which is that it reduces the value of legitimate comments.” [link]

So here’s my experiment.

I have taken this attribute off my blog as a little token of appreciation to you guys. If i start getting a lot of spam, i might make this a little more strict, but till then, you comment i follow.