How to add custom aboutme page on blogger

Hi There,
Here I am going to talk about a dirty hack to make custom about me page on blogger. Lets have a look what you are going to get after doing all this

.
So, Basically you are going to make an blog post which will contain "about me information" which you wanted to put on your blog. Then you will remove date entry(time stamp) / and comment option for this page so that it will not look like a post.
Note: Save your existing template before, doing anything. If you break anything , you can restore the template back.
STEP-1
Create a blog post with title "about me" and content whatever you want. Then go to Post option

STEP-2

Go to post option and click "Don't allow comment" and Set time-stamp to a very old date (may be much before your birth).

Step-3
To remove time-stamp from this post your have to wrap part of code which generates Time stamp in your template with this code.

<b:if cond='data:post.allowComments'>



</b:if>

This is basically a way to tell that whatever "post does not allow comment" will not generate few things (which is time-stamp in our case). 
Step-4
Go to layout section of your blog, and go to edit HTML. Choose "Expand Widget Templates" option.

Now select all the text from Text area and put in your favorite "Text Editor" . (FYI My favorite editor is Notepad++).

Now wrap following 2 block with code above

<h2 class='date-header'><span><data:post.dateHeader/></span></h2>

AND

<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-1'>

Part-1

Part-2

Once you are done with this editing, go paste the entire thing back to blogger text-area and save the template.

Note: You should wrap the code very carefully, basic HTML knowledge is very essential for this.  Every Div block starts and ends some where , so wrapping must be perfect.

You can link the URL of the page on "About Me Tab" Read My other post.

Thats it, Your are done!!!

Chrome Extension to analyse tweeter (Twitter User) Behavior

Recently I was looking on various sites that shows some statistics about tweeters (twitter user). They are great but they often focus on one thing, there is no single place where we can see all these analysis. So i closely analysed these websites to come-up with YQL hack to bring all of them on a single page. Mainly I focused myself on these websites.

1. http://twitterholic.com/
2. http://web.forret.com/tools/twitter-tq.asp
3. http://tweeps.info/
4. http://happytweets.com/
5. http://tweeteffect.com/

TweetChrome

[I am also trying to pull information from http://tweetstats.com]

Well if I would have hosted this functionality something like this (actually hosted ).  No one will use it, because people are very lazy. So I have created a chrome extension here.

If you use chrome then you can simple see source code here.

Thanks for reading my blog.

Demo: http://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/pmdeehablhbendnpdligdgemdgkllmih

Source: http://www.purplegene.com/static/tweeps.html (do view source)

Playing with Javascript Closure, JSON, & YQL to Visualize upcoming Android Version Names

Hi There,
As you know that First version of android was named "cupcake" and then it was "Donut" and current version is "Éclair".
People found a pattern in naming; they are alphabetical names of cake. Now many people on internet came up with the names up to the Z.
Here they are

• Cupcake
• Donut
• Eclair Cake
• Frosting
• Gelato
• Honey
• Icing cake
• Jelly
• Kiwi
• Lemon
• Marshmellow
• Noodle
• Orange
• Pudding
• Quince
• RockyRoad
• Sundae
• Taffee
• upside-down-cake
• Vanilla
• Waffle
• Xmas Cookies
• Yogurt
• Zebra Cake

I am completely unaware of some of these names; I really don’t know how they look like. So here i made a small YQL hack to get images with these names to visualize them.

DEMO

Here is the YQL Bing table query to images




function get_images_from_bing(query,callback){
var yql_url="http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20*%20from%20microsoft.bing.image%20where%20query%3D%22"+query+"%22&format=json&env=store%3A%2F%2Fdatatables.org%2Falltableswithkeys&callback=callbacks."+callback;
var div_ele=document.getElementById("myscrpts");
var scrpt=document.createElement("SCRIPT");
scrpt.src=yql_url;
div_ele.appendChild(scrpt);
}

Here I am using closure to get a call-back function which will render the my images.



function GetCallbackFunction(element){
/*
element will be accessible to inner returned function
even after outer function has returned
*/
return function(data){
/*Get randomely from top 3 images*/
var index=get_random(3);
index=index%data.query.results.ImageResult.length;
element.src=data.query.results.ImageResult[index].MediaUrl;
};
}

What is "Inbox Zero problem"? How To solve it by Twitter-way?

Inbox Zero problem is a usability problem, of which every mail system is infected with. Let me try to explain what it is?

Today, we get at least 40-50 mail every day, and our mail system marks every mail as unread when it arrives to your inbox. Now problem is, you are tempted to read all those mails to bring your inbox to zero unread count. This goes into a never ending loop often because by the time you will be able to finish each and every mail, you’ll get some new ones. 

This is a problem many other social networking platforms are infected with, may be not with the unread message count but by some other ways.

This is the only problem twitter is not infected with, because its always flowing timeline of short messages and you need to just look for few recent items posted by people, because of 2 reasons

1. Those items are not specifically posted to you (not talking about @replies).

2. Tweets are very spontaneous status update from people; significance of (most) tweets expires after sometime.

This is how people on twitter able to manage more and more people. I personally follow more than 600 tweeps around the world. Now, there is a problem!! Different people tweet at different pace, and many tweeters are so frequent on twitter is that they literally flood my timeline and kick other's tweets (from people whom i care more) out of my visible timeline. This problem is solved by lists, I group important tweeps in a list. Concept of list itself came from people and twitter client like TweetDeck & Seesmic. Think lists like this, On twitter you have public timeline which is the fastest moving timeline, and you filtered some of them to bring in our "friends" timeline by following them. When things became messy you sorted them into few smaller lists.

Twitter evolved from people's behaviour, like @replies, retweeting and many more became the built-in feature of twitter because we tweeps started using it.

So none of my time line is actually having inbox zero problem.

Now let’s come back to e-mail system, every day in office i really get more than 100 emails including companywide mails, group mail , mails from an on-going thread of discussion (where I don’t have anything to do).  Now what?? My mail client (outlook) is so cluttered with e-mail that finding the right email becomes very difficult. Ok , we have a solution “make rules to skip inbox for some known group & automated mails” BUT creating rule is not going to solve my problem because I am very lazy and don’t want to create rules even once in a six month (yes, that lazy i am). Last rule i created some 6 months back : P.

So what is the solution? Solution is simple; I call this solution "@actionItem". Which is like this, every mail which has some action item for me as individual then please include my name in a field called Action Item (like CC & To list). That’s It i will give priority to those mails first and then i will move to all other mails, and choose to skip if i don’t have much of time to spend. Inbox zero problem solved.

Twitter specific Terms : 

• Tweeps: people who use twitter.
• Tweeters:  twitter+ user
• Tweet:  Every small status update (post ) is called tweet.
• ReTweeting: when you post oneones update again is called re-tweeting. often done in "RT @TweepName : blah balh format".
• @replies : pronounced as 'at replies', are tweets which has your name mentioned, preceded with a '@' sign. 

Here is Merlin Mann Slide

Inbox Zero: Action-Based Email

View more presentations from merlinmann.

Here is video of his lecture

I know what you read on dzone last summer

You should know that depending upon how CSS is coloring your links; I can figure out that what are the links you visited already.
This is a nice hack, many people use it for knowing user interests e.g

• What social networking site you use.
• What banking site you use.
• And many more what you can think of.

I have created a hack to show all popular links from dzone, I am sorting the links based what you have read already. Before you read further Check This, (will not work in IE8)

Here is how you can inspect CSS color of a link in your browser



document.write('<style>');
document.write('#linkID:visited {color: #FF0000;}");
document.write('</style>');

/* quickly add and remove the link from the DOM with enough time to save the visible computed color. */
document.body.appendChild(link);
var color = document.defaultView.getComputedStyle(link,null).getPropertyValue("color");
document.body.removeChild(link);

/* check to see if the link has been visited if the computed color is red */
if (color == "rgb(255, 0, 0)") {

/*visited do something*/

} else {

/*not visited, do something else*/

}



DEMO

Read More about How I brought All Dzone links on 1 page

Read More About How This CSS hack works?

Read Rest of My Hacks