I have been using Windows Live Writer for my blogging ever since I heard good things about it from a few fellow bloggers. I have to admit, Microsoft has done stuff mostly right with this product. I do have a few gripes but nothing major.

I use my USB drive a lot and I have a bunch of portable apps installed in it and even use exclusively from it like my GreatNews feed reader. I have missed having portable version of Windows Live Writer until I stumbled across this at Tech.Life.Blogged.

Installing it is very easy:

1. Download and unzip this file into your USB drive.
2. If you have Windows Live Writer installed, already you are all set. If not, install it but you can uninstall it after you have gone through these steps.
3. Copy all files from C:\Program Files\Windows Live Writer to the unzipped folder in your USB drive with the path \WindowsLiveWriterPortable\App\WindowsLiveWriter
4. Run WindowsLiveWriterPortable.exe

One thing to note when you are using your USB drive on multiple computers is that, your drafts may not appear right. I am still trying to figure out why but if you clicked on the ‘Open’ button in the toolbar, you’d see that you haven’t lost the drafts even if it appears that way from the sidebar. So, that’s good.

Hello newcomer, did I say welcome to ShanKri-la yet? Before you move on, just wanted to thank you for visiting and we hope you come back and see us again!

Without a doubt, one of the most exciting moments in the gadget world is today’s Apple iPhone launch. Scores of people across the United States are already in line for the official launch today at 6:00 PM.

I have written my thoughts about iPhone here a few weeks back. But, I am closely following the happenings around iPhone and find myself drawn to it like a bug to the night lamp. When I follow something or read something that may be useful to my readers I share it here. But, I don’t want to dilute the content here with a lot of talk about iPhone even if it is a technology that would be a part of our daily lives if we end up getting an iPhone.

So, a new blog has born to talk just about everything under the sun about iPhone.

With great pleasure, I present to you our Top iPhone Resource blog. I am aiming it to be a ‘one stop shop for iPhone tips, news, tutorials, accessories information, iPhone apps, etc’. This will be a niche site focused on an iPhone user and hope to be an invaluable resource with new content added everyday.

To get continuous updates on iPhone related posts at , consider subscribing to Top iPhone Resource feed.

One of my recent adds to my daily read section in my feed reader is Kyle’s Cove. Kyle authors his technology blog and I find  it very resourceful just in the few days I have been following and earned his way into our Blogroll. If you like ShanKri-la’s content, I am sure you will like Kyle’s Cove as I find our interests very similar and hopefully yours too.

Browsing through his site, I am inspired to create a reference page with links (he has a great section of links to guides & tutorials) to stuff that I look up often. I am yet to iron out how I want to organize that. I also like his way of having Blogroll in a separate page nicely categorized. I think it’s more informative that way to a reader than if it was just a long list of links.

Kyle has today posted about a great tool called Website Grader which I think every blogger should run by every now and then, like doing a quick health check. I know I am going to be doing atleast once every 2 weeks. At least as long as it is free (which it might end soon).

 What does Website Grader tell me?

• Score: It showed me a quick score telling how I scored compared to all the other (35,000) sites that were submitted by a proprietary algorithm that takes into account like Google pagerank, traffic, website structure, etc. ShanKri-la scored 74.
• Google PageRank: ShanKri-la ranks 3 right now.
• Web Page structure: It identified that ShanKri-la didn’t have Meta keywords. Kyle has suggested a few Wordpress plugins to address that.
• Domain info: I have been wanting to dig through my emails to see when it expired since I knew it was coming up. But, this quickly showed me when it was up. Also, it seems it might be bad in a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) sense to have your domain name expiring within a year! May be I’ll renew it for 2 years this time.
• Heading Summary: In my current theme, looks like my post titles are H3 and if I remember right a search engine friendly theme would have them as H2. (or am I day dreaming?)
• Image Summary: It reinforced my habit of using an ‘alt’ tag for images as those can be seen by search engines. I miss this basic feature in ScribeFire firefox extension for blogging though.
• Google Indexed Pages: I am guilty of overlooking this basic fact. I haven’t generated a sitemap and submit to Google yet! As a result, the only Google Page is indexing in ShanKri-la is the home page! No wonder I have only gotten like 20 search engine hits in the last 3 months. I have to get this done this weekend.
• Others: The report also shows Technorati rankings (45,559), number of people bookmarked me in del.icio.us (8), Alexa ranking (412,236) and readability level (5th grade - I wonder how many 5th graders are really reading this :-).

I hope, by taking a look under the hood of ShanKri-la, it makes you want to take a peek into your website and improve it.

If you subscribe to ShanKri-la’s feed, you might not notice what’s going on at the site but the visitors here might notice some changes as I play with new themes in the coming weeks. As I have mentioned before, I am looking to add some unobtrusive advertisements to monetize ShanKri-la. May be it will get me beer money or at least I’ll learn how not to do it.

I thank all the readers for giving me the motivation to do keep going and it’s worth the effort even if it helps one person. Even if you subscribe, do stop by and leave a comment once in a while as it would be great to know my readers and put a face to you.

RT Cunnigham at Untwisted Vortex graciously accepted to review ShanKri-la and offer some suggestions. Better yet, he posted the review at Untwisted Vortex. RT, thanks for the excellent review and the link love! If you haven’t been to Untwisted Vortex, it’s definitely worth a stop and I know you’ll be hooked.

I am looking at changing to a 3-column theme and maybe adding some unobtrusive ads. We’ll see how that goes this month.

RT also posted his metrics and its amazing the progress he’s making. He doesn’t stop there but he takes everybody along in the ride like helping out ShanKri-la with his review. So, I got curious and looked at our metrics and was really surprised to see the blog worth. The last I checked more than a month back, it was about $500.00. Today, it is $54,760.38! I owe it to the Technorati favorites exchange that boosted my Technorati ranking into the 50,000 range. I remember starting out at 1 million something.

Did I just win the lottery? Not really.. I don’t think I am selling my blog or anyone would be interested in buying it either. But, it’s fun to watch it’s worth and it is motivating in a weird way to blog more.

My blog is worth $54,760.38.
How much is your blog worth?

Here are the ShanKri-la metrics as of June 3, 2007:

Technorati: Rank: 48,329 Authority: 97

Alexa: 412,326

Blog Worth: $54,760.38

Blog Juice: 2.2

I have to say after installing the Alexa widget in the blog, my Alexa ranking has been getting better. I know there are mixed feelings about this among the SEO fans and I’m sure there are other factors that might have been coming into play. But, I’m really sure it has positive effect on the ranking.

Just noticed in my Dashboard that Wordpress 2.2 is out! If you are running Wordpress for your blog, go ahead and download it here.

Some of the new features in this release are:

• Wordpress Widgets (integrated in Wordpress code)
• Blogger importer (I see a massive Blogger to Wordpress conversion)
• Infinite Comment Stream
• Atom Support (including comment feeds)

The Wordpress community deserves a pat in the back for making their original goal of a once in 4-months major release cycle. Well done everyone!

I can’t wait to give it a whirl.. but I am afraid i might have to wait until this weekend to do it! Let us know your experience if you get a chance to get your hands dirty.

We are again in for another game. The last technorati favorite game was fun and I found a lot of great blogs through that and hopefully some of you have found us through it and not to mention increased exposure in the blog world.

It’s the Feed Link Train this time and it’s aimed at improving our RSS subscription. We are at 124 readers right now and I’ll update the blog in a month with the difference to see how this meme went. Matt at eJabs has tagged me and now I’m in. Bob, Madhur and Garry Conn and others have gotten it going already.

One great thing about this game is that, I already subscribe to a lot of the blogs and can’t wait to explore the others I haven’t yet. I love finding fresh and new content which keeps me in check.

Here is how it goes. Quick facts:

• Subscribe to the RSS feeds of the blogs in the list (hopefully read them daily as well )
• Post about the Feed Link Train in your blog
• Add the following list with a link to your own feed
• Add 3 more quality blogs that you would recommend and have them post about this.

List of blogs to Subscribe in your feed reader

• Subscribe to ShanKri-la
• Subscribe to Madhur’s Blog
• Subscribe to eJabs
• Subscribe to Garry Conn
• Subscribe to Untwisted Vortex
• Subscribe to Blog-Op
• Subscribe to DoshDosh
• Subscribe to Eches
• Subscribe to Shaarique
• Subscribe to Rishi
• Subscribe to Lyte Byte
• Subscribe to News Blog
• Subscribe to Life Rocks ! 2.0
• Subscribe to Shankar’s Tech
• Subscribe to Brown Thoughts
• Subscribe to MeAndMyDrum
• Subscribe to Zath
• Subscribe to A Virtual Exit
• Subscribe to Underground Revolt
• Subscribe to Bill2Me
• Subscribe to Wampago
• Subscribe to Technical Itch
• Subscribe to Ailurophile
• Subscribe to Vincent Chow
• Subscribe to BobmeetsWorld
• Subscribe to LifeisRisky
• Subscribe to Thoughtsfrommylife
• Subscribe to CountRamblings
• Subscribe to TheThinkingBlog
• Subscribe to NotsoBoringLife
• Subscribe to KumikosCashQuest
• Subscribe to Fuery
• Subscribe to Technospot.net
• Subscribe to Confessions of a Freeware Junkie
• Subscribe to Daily Cup Of Tech
• Subscribe to Leave America
• Subscribe to Me2Ultimate
• Subscribe to My Audio Book

My Additions:

• Subscribe to ifacethought (very nice read on technology and wordpress)
• Subscribe to Blogologist (nice blog on blogging)
• Subscribe to The Wrong Advices (great blog on tech)

Let’s spread the feed love! Hope you enjoy the improved readership this game brings to you.. Don’t forget to subscribe to ‘em all!

I have been just overhauling the blog with some nice additions. Hope you like it..

Contact Us

We now have a ‘Contact Us’ menu option. Please do drop us a line about anything! We would love to hear your thoughts, suggestions and comments.

Subscribe to comments

We should have had this all along, but it was my oversight. Now, you can subscribe to comments and tune into the current discussions here!

IE problem fixed

Thanks to Garry Conn for letting us know that the site was not displaying the sidebar in Internet Explorer. It was some embedded html that got into a post that was breaking it. I found the problem area by doing some XHTML validation in www.validator.ca website.

I try to check the blog in Firefox, IE and Opera now and then but I guess I have to make it a weekend chore. Our apologies to anyone who saw this problem. We do love you. I have re-installed the Copy as Plain Text firefox extension which had somehow gotten de-activated.

Call the bluff

This is pretty fun.. (it only changes twice every day at random.. but visit the site for more fun bluffs)

add blufr to your page too!