VOX – The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

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Yesterday I got an invitation from vox team, the new blog engine from six apart network and sined up there. What was my first impression about vox is “cool!!!”. I noticed many uptodate features. Beside those cool features I also feel lack of some necessary features as well. In this post I am going to figure out some good features, some missing features and some confusing features.

You can visit my vox blog at http://storyteller.vox.com

The Good
– Integration with Flickr, iStockPhoto, Photobucket
– Integration with Amazon. So that you can search for any item in amazon and add it in your blog. But there is no place to add amazon referral link or anything.
– Integration with YouTube.
– Personalized Collections
– A lot of colorful themes
– A web2.0 look and feel
– Use of AJAX in a smart way
– Use of ThickBoxes for adding content
– Easy navigation Panel
– Very good Neighbor Management
– Role based content display
– Thumbnail Management
– SpellChecker
– Strong Search Engine
– Powerfull Tagging
– Very good photo management
– SEO
– Choose Layout Style
– Draft Management

The Bad
– No way to add blogroll
– No way to add remote (hot linked) image
– Confusing Administration Panel and Collection Management, specially for Title Management and Sidebar object management.
– You cannot display collection objects in your frontpage but title of your collection
– No Password Protected post
– No customized comment spam management
– You cannot set external link for images
– Not sure about the size of uploaded contents. No information in appropriate place.
– Cannot Modify a part of the theme

The Ugly
– No Blogrolls (Whoa!!!, you can only connect to existing VOX members)
– No Hotlinking of Images
– It takes several hours to find out where I can change my blogs title. If it is available in my profile instead of themes section, it will be perfect.
– No HTML supported in personal details section.
– While commenting, you have to type HTML codes like <b> manually. Ni rich editor for commenting.
– No Keyboard shortcut while composing, like Ctrl+B
– I dont find any link for trackbacking to external post or from external post to my vox post.
– No public theme design documentation
– No post category, everything is tag based

So far this is my review on Vox. Vox seems extremely promising and it comes from Six apart who already have a huge blog engine development experience. Currently six aparts develops MovableType, Typepad, LiveJournal and Vox.

Bangla Chat – What I am planning right now

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I had a dream of a complete bangla chatting portal for a long long time. I worked irregularly from time to time but those never see the light, sad. However I ambeing serious day by day and just after completion of my current book in august, I will start working for a bangla chat system. Lets have a look of what could be done and whats not.

I can develop a script which works as a IRC client and people can post in bangla. Both a desktop solution and web based solution is feasible, but I emphasize for the web based one.

A localized ymsg(yahoo), msn(MSN0 or jabber(gTalk) protocol based messengers would be a fantastic (Awesome) thing. I collected resources for working and probably these would be the things I planned for my life. For yahoo messenger jYMSG would be the best resource. Also PlanetaMessenger would add some value for developers. for MSN TjMSNLib is a great piece of library. And for Jabber protocol I need to study a bit. GTalk provides information for developers too.

Third choice, last but not the least, is a total web based chat interface where I have to manage all the transactions in a local database. This could extend the development time but can bring ultimate flexibility for developers.

So what makes me disappointed? From my recent experience I am very much concerned about licensing and copyright issues. Hasan, one of my colleague from somewherein… java desk recently developed a mobile based yahoo messenger client. Everything wen fine but it was very embarrassing when comes the licensing issues. If you use yahoo messenger protocol or msn protocol for commercial purpose, you may have to pay a huge amount of money for licensing, specially for mobile based solutions.

But I am going for Both a localized version of popular messenger protocols as well as a flexible web base chatting portal. Lets see!!

Storing Bangla Unicode Text in MySQl Database

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Well, If you just set the collation as “utf8-general-ci” that wont do all the things for storing and retrieving bangla unicode texts properly. There are something more to do. Last night while working for a project I just found the solution.

You must add these two lines just after selecting the database, i.e mysql_select_db() function.

mysql_query(‘SET CHARACTER SET utf8’);
mysql_query(“SET SESSION collation_connection =’utf8_general_ci'”);

After executing these two statements MySQL will handle the rest.

Whoa!! Its a somewherein party in Water Kingdom

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Today we all somewherein people are going to water kingdom, a theme park beside fantasy kingdom. Its 9:48 AM here in my desk and we are waiting for everyone. So far here is Didar, T-poo, Shahana, Hasan, Ipshita, Saikat, Robin, Mouli, Jana, Kinnori and Arild. Deborah, Emran and Farhana are on their way.

😀 so its going to be a great party in water. 😀

Using Blog API's

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Almost every standard compliant blogs support three blogging API which are “Blogger API” , “MovableType API” and “MetaWeblog API”. Among these three, MW (or MetaWeblog) is used more than other two. WordPress also supporst these three sets of API. If you are interesetd how to interact with these API’s – then take a look at the following example.

First lets discover which XMLRPC methods are suported by wordpress XMLRPC server. After digging a bit further we found that the following methods are supported

system.multicall
system.listMethods
system.getCapabilities
demo.addTwoNumbers
demo.sayHello
pingback.extensions.getPingbacks
pingback.ping
mt.publishPost
mt.getTrackbackPings
mt.supportedTextFilters
mt.supportedMethods
mt.setPostCategories
mt.getPostCategories
mt.getRecentPostTitles
mt.getCategoryList
metaWeblog.getUsersBlogs
metaWeblog.setTemplate
metaWeblog.getTemplate
metaWeblog.deletePost
metaWeblog.newMediaObject
metaWeblog.getCategories
metaWeblog.getRecentPosts
metaWeblog.getPost
metaWeblog.editPost
metaWeblog.newPost
blogger.deletePost
blogger.editPost
blogger.newPost
blogger.setTemplate
blogger.getTemplate
blogger.getRecentPosts
blogger.getPost
blogger.getUserInfo
blogger.getUsersBlogs

so to make a new post using metaWeblog.newPost method lets take a look at the following example.

<?php
	include("xmlrpc.inc.php");
	$c = new xmlrpc_client("/wp/xmlrpc.php", "localhost", 80);

	$content['title']="XMLRPC Post";
	$content['description']="Some content posted using MetaWeblog API";
	$content['categories'] = array("frontpage");
	$x = new xmlrpcmsg("metaWeblog.newPost",
	                    array(php_xmlrpc_encode("1"),
                        php_xmlrpc_encode("admin"),
                        php_xmlrpc_encode("root"),
                        php_xmlrpc_encode($content),
                        php_xmlrpc_encode("1")));

	$c->return_type = 'phpvals';
	$r =$c->send($x);
	if ($r->errno=="0")
	echo "Successfully Posted";
	else {
		echo "There are some error";
		print_r($r);
              }
?>

Thats it!!

unicode in somewhereinblog

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Today morning, I added support for unicode in somewhereinblog. Now people can write text and display them as unicode if they just enclose their texts using [unicode] tag.

I am working for a phonetic unicode parser, i hope it will be up soon.

Just an idea – Dhaka in your cellphone

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Last night I got an idea to implement. May be I will not be able to spend time as I am totally running out of time because of my book and some small works, some of you will defnitely be able to work for it.

IDEA: So whats the idea? Well, this will be a web application where people can add an address and easiest direction to go to that place. For example, I add “somewherein office” with the following direction

<places>
<place>somewherein</place>
<direction>
come to gulshan 1, head towards gulshan2. turn left just after the shahjalal bank and you find road # 24. then seek house # 18
</direction>
</places>

People can add their places with proper direction as shown in above format. then developer can develop a sms server where people can just query from their mobile phone and kaboom, they will receive the directions back as sms from that server. Also for web based searching, we may incorporate google map with it as google is now showing dhaka in their map.

Benefit: The sole benefit of this project will be tremendous. it will be a great place where people can get directions to goto a new place. It is a participatory small database application and people can use most of it with extreme flexibility. It will be also a very useful service.

If u just make it a web 2.0 application, that will be fantastic.

The child in us

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Since I was just a kid of 7/8 I am an extreme fan of origami. When my sisters learn something new from their choolmate I disturbed them until they taught me how to make that. Among them an Inkpot, Battlestar Gallactica (Oh thanks to my friend Shahadat for teaching me that amazing piece), Boat, Glider and Bird where my favorite.

Just after I pass my HSC exam, I went to Khulna Paper Mill Collony, to my sister’s house to prepare for the upcoming adminssion exam. It was a nice house with a huge lon in front. A lot of kids play there everyday. As a new comer, how can I introduce myself to them? (Oh I forgot to say I enjoy playing with kids very much being one of them) I just took help of origami and gift them something new which they never seen… boom!! they become fan of me within a while.

I miss my childhood, I really miss it. I know the child living inside me and I want to live forever as him.

—————————————————————————————-
prasanna vadanaaM saubhaagyadaaM bhaagyadaaM
hastaabhyaaM abhayapradaaM maNigaNair-
naanaavidhair-bhuushhitaaM who is of smiling face, bestower of all fortunes,
whose hands are ready to rescue anyone from fear,
who is adorned by various ornaments with precious stones
Puer natus est nobis,
et filius datus est nobis:
cujus emperium super humerum…
For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given:
and the government will be upon his shoulder..
Some day you came
And I knew you were the one
You were the rain, you were the sun
But I needed both, cause I needed you
You were the one
I was dreaming of all my life
When it is dark you are my light
But don’t forget
Who’s always our guide
It is the child in us
——————————————————————————–
Enigma – The child in us

Kudos to Ipshita

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Ipshita is my colleague in somewhere in… and we both work in java desk. Ipshita recently did a very good job which really surprised me. Ipshita’s father and some of his friends run an orphanage in Bangladesh. Ipshita spend her salary of first month and bought a television for the kids in orphanage, so that they could enjoy the world cup. I am very surprised by her work.

Kudos to you Ipshita. You did really a great job.