After a long time I am updating my blog...
I am getting gradually adapted and accustomed to fit the shoes of Eritrea and in this process I’ve learnt some words / numbers in Tigriniya, the official language of this holy country. I felt frustration and anguish in the initial months, as it is natural for a person hailing from a low-land (below mean sea level) to a high-land (above MSL), for at least 3 months or so.
In week ends I roam in Asmara, go to cinemas, browse in netcafes, purchase groceries, some high-quality ‘Class A’ cigars like Rothmans Lights and Winston (!). Some of my friends will scold me for this...I know! I’ve learnt to boil rice and prepare tea too!
As an effort to make people know about an easy way of owning a webpage, without any prior knowledge about html or so, recently I've written an article titled ‘Blogging – a means for casting our notions and passions in web’, which has been published in the EIT magazine – ‘Horizon’.
Along with my friend, I will conduct a Workshop on ‘Six Sigma – a present-day tool for drastic quality improvement’ (the exact title we haven’t finalized yet), on 27th of this month in the college premises. From a worthy website / e-resource called ‘esnips.com’, I got some stuff about ‘Six sigma’. Please give ‘esnips’ a try…it is worth it! Thanks to British Council, in which I am a member, I got a wonderful book too – ‘Six Sigma for Dummies’. I have downloaded a trial software (35.1 MB!) for a down-to-earth explanation of the concepts.
With some new friends here, and some old ones in India calling me and my family too, I am all set to live a balanced life in Asmara. I have plans to go to India by the end of January and bring my wife and my only issue Aditya here, after a month’s vacation. The only thing that annoys me about my trip to India is, whether I will meet my close friends living in California, Salisbury and Switzerland, during that stay or not. Hopefully may they get the same vacation and come to India. Let it be so!
For the first time, my blog post is so personal. Well…at least I have given a piece of information about a web resource called ‘esnips.com’.
The contents of my article, which appeared on ‘Horizon’ are:
Blogging – a means for casting our notions and passions in web
Blogging is a smart and cute art. It is a way of expressing or registering our innate feelings, notions, passions and creations in the world-wide register…I mean web! Offered by a plethora of web portals called ‘blog sites’, blogs (‘web’ + ‘log’ shortened as ‘blog’) are the user-friendly publications of whatever we wish to showcase to the world we live in, in the web pages created by our own.
Precisely, anything and everything related to day-to-day affairs can be typed and published in our web page called blog. It is like one’s web diary kept open for the world to see / read.
Blogging comes in handy for those, who have an ardent zeal to cast their personal experience, opinions and even pictures (‘photoblogging’), with no basic knowledge about ‘html’ and related stuff. No holds barred! Though for a casual surfer who visits blogs they give a ‘déjà vu’ feeling, for the creator of the page it is a dream-come-true!
Umpteen blog portals have sprung up now, offering enrapturing features, inviting many aspirants to open an account and hence a web page in his name. I am acquainted with one ‘blogger.com’, powered by ‘Google’, which specifies a simple, self-explanatory, three-step procedure for a user to create a web page of his own, with the input of e-mail id, password, user name, display name, etc. With a set of multi-colour templates to opt from, users will be at ease to get initiated, though customization and further tweaking is still a possibility for an advanced geek. It uses a powerful editor, facilitating the conversion of what we type in the ‘Compose’ field into a blog publication, with formatting options like justify, bold, italic, font, etc.
The foremost ecstatic thing about our blog is, it can get updated in the ‘Google’ and other search engines! Provisions for submitting our web page to a search engine are at our reach, which enhances the probability of our blog page to be ranked as a candidate for the search results of search engines.
The second salient feature of blogging is its revenue potential effected through advertisements running in your own page! Opening an account with ‘Google Adsense’ will invite advertisements for getting hosted in our blog in the selected location of specified size. ‘Google search bots’ will virtually ‘crawl’ our blog (!) to ‘read’ the blog posts and will host only those advertisements which are pertinent to the contents of what we write – thus augmenting the probability of persons visiting our blog to click those advertisements…and we are paid on ‘cost-per-click’ basis, in turn. A truly amazing feature!
The added advantage of owning a blog lies in the fact that it enhances the face-value of our résumé.
Keeping aside the monetary aspect, primarily blogging serves as a platform for unearthing our writing spree and creative potential from within us, for the world to witness. Such blog interactions may be of mammoth use to many a person. Moreover, it paves an apt way for those craving minds to realize a web page by their own, with an URL, who otherwise would have fallen short of this venture for their lack of ‘html’ exposure or so.
I do run a blog in ‘blogger.com’, focusing on general articles of public interest, poems, PC game reviewettes, etc. Please visit my blog, in leisure – http://srinispree.blogspot.com. Within a fortnight’s time after the creation of my blog and subsequent submission to ‘Google’, it was an enthralling experience for me, to see a simple search for ‘Srini’ in ‘Google’, showing a link to my blog as fourth or fifth result in its window! Similar was the case with other search engines like ‘Yahoo!’, ‘Lycos’, ‘AltaVista’, etc.
Owning a webpage (or pages!), receiving comments from the world-wide readers, having advertisements hosted and consequent updation in Google or so, is an all-inspiring and altogether blissful experience for which most of us aspire and of course all of us deserve.
Unravel your inner-world;
Unveil the latent creative potential;
Unleash the inundating mind streams…
Happy blogging..!
R. Srinivasa Moorthy,
Lecturer, Mechanical Engineering,
E.I.T., MaiNefhi.
