BBC Homepage just became more user friendly getting a new customizable homepage just like Netvibes or Pageflakes.

You can customize the home page by turning on or off categories that you are interested in. The few category choices are: Blogs, Business & Money, Children, Entertainment, History, Music, news, Radio, Science & Nature, Sport, TV, Weather & World Service. It sports a nice Ajax interface and you can drag and drop regions to re-arrange the topics to your liking.

They also let you choose from a variety of color options (13 to be precise) or choose to have a rotating colored homepage every time you visit. The news portlets have 3 headlines with images which change when you mouse-over on a headline.

The changes are just to the BBC Homepage and when you click on a headline you would still see the old web design and colors in the rest of the site. It is nice to see a big news outlet such as BBC recognizing the growing popularity of such customizable Homepage and deliver it nicely. It is still pretty basic compared to what you could do with a homepage such as Netvibes, PageFlakes or Symbaloo where you could pull in headlines from a variety of sources of your choice.

If you are wondering, Symbaloo is my choice homepage and you can read my review here. They have come a long way since their release and it is faster, slicker and have added a lot of user friendly features that it is begging for me to do another review soon.

[via Digital Inspiration]

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!

I delve a little bit into web development and WordPress theme customization as you can see right here. One tool I find indispensable is the Firebug Firefox extension. I can view/edit and play with live HTML/CSS code for any web page and see the possible results live for the tweak I am doing.

You can browse through the DOM tree of a webpage with Firebug. It also helps me to look up HTML & CSS code for various parts of a website using the ‘Inspect’ tool. This works great for troubleshooting or developing and viewing sites in a Firefox browser.

For those odd occasions when there is a problem in just Internet Explorer, I have always been at a loss of not having a tool like Firebug.

Until, I came across Developer Toolbar for IE developed by Microsoft recently. Even though this tool has been around for a while, it must be a well kept secret or I must have just gotten my head out of the sand.

I found it useful to troubleshoot some IE-only CSS bugs on some themes my wife and I were customizing. Let’s look at a few things this toolbar will you give after installation:

IE Developer Toolbar Quick Facts

• An easy access button to toggle the toolbar to view or hide
• Lets you view DOM for the current page in a tree view - similar to Firefox’s DOM Inspector
• Selecting an element in tree lets you view attribute and the current styles for the element
• You can disable images, javascripts and css
• Style Tracer - helps you find exactly where and which style sheet, a rule is effecting a particular element.
• Offers a View Source that lets you view source of the original page, currently rendered page or just the selected element. I like the way it shows the current styles associated with elements right in the view source.
• An Outline option outlines DIVs, images, tables, table cells, etc.
• A Validator tool cal validate HTML, CSS, Feed & Links in a webpage
• I like the Find & Cache options as well.

If you have used Firebug or Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox, a lot of these features will be very familiar to you.

Download IE Developer Toolbar

Even if you are not a web developer, if you occasionally tweak HTML & CSS for your website/blog, I highly recommend getting used to a tool such as this one. I use it as a learning tool to see how someone has coded something or used CSS to style an element that I find interesting when I am surfing the web.

Plus, I can make changes to fonts or any CSS code for my blog in Firebug without and have a preview without having to modify any code in the server.

What kind of tool do you use for your web development needs?

It’s exciting times around here. We just recently hit 200+ RSS subscribers and we have a Diwali 2007 Giveaway going on. In the midst of all this, I had won a contest at the ProBlogger Birthday Bash. The prize was a logo design by the famous Graphic Designer, David Airey!

He was wonderful to work with and provided so many iterations with all my change requests. If you are looking for a graphic designer, I recommend David whole heartedly. He is your man. The final version of the logo is what you see now at the top. You will also see the new Favicon in your browser window/tab.

If you had read our About page and actually not fallen asleep reading it, you might have read our motto. That is to be a ’shining beacon in the web’, helping you find the jewels & gems that are usually drowned out by the ones that aren’t. That’s the theme of this logo design. I am thinking of changing the title description reflecting this. Something like ‘A Shining beacon in the web for your technology needs’. Think it’s corny? Got something better? Let me know in the comments.

A logo for a blog is very important for building branding as well as easy recognition by readers. Without a logo, the blog name may not stick with them if they visited us months later. I had postponed creating a logo and a favicon for the 7 months of this blog’s existence. That has changed now! I am real excited about this significant addition amongst other changes like our new theme.

Thanks David for the great design! My wife and I love it.

I would love to hear what you think.

It’s been a while since I participated in meme’s. I have tried to stay away from some for obvious reasons but when my friend Stephen Cronin of Scratch99 tagged me with the Blog Improvment Zone meme, I had to take it.

It couldn’t have been better timing to be tagged with a ”How Can I Improve My Blog‘ meme. I am just in the process of finishing an overhaul of ShanKri-la and I have made some improvemnts. I still do have a list of improvements I would like to work on in the coming weeks.

Improvements I just made

• Cleaner Layout: I think this layout is visually more appealing than the last theme. I was losing a bunch of above-the-fold space in the previous theme.
• SEO Benefits: My previous theme loaded the sidebar before the content area. This has some negative effects in terms of SEO and when I tinkered with changing the loading order, I managed to completely mess up the theme. Another ill-effect of that was that if one of the sidebar widgets like BlogCatalog took time to load, it appeared like ShanKri-la was loading real slow. With the new theme, even if it the zillion things in the sidebars took its sweet time to load, you will see the content right away.
• Customization: Because of the way the header graphics were used, customizing my header or other parts of my theme was harder than it should be. One of my big interests is in learning a little bit of web design and tinkering wtih ShanKri-la is my learning experience.
• Better Comments Section: The comment section is now much more easier on the eyes.

Improvements I would like to make

• Pillar posts: I would like to write a few pillar posts that would serve as a reference for myself as well as others.
• Increase RSS subscribers: I have been postponing running a contest to gain a little bit more exposure and increase .
• Comment Avatars: I would like to add a face to the commentators by implementing one of the Avatar plugins.
• SEO: The new theme instantly gives me some SEO benefits with the content area appearing before the sidebar. But, right now the pages have 2 H1 tags and I would like to remove the other. Also, the content headers and the sidebar headers are all H2 tags. I am planning on making the sidebar headlines to a H3 to emphasize the content title’s importance. With these and other changes, I hope to increase the search engine traffic.
• Monetizing: I haven’t made any serious attempts at monetizing ShanKri-la besides running Google AdSense. So far, my search engine traffic has been just around 20% of the total. With improved SEO, I hope to attract more search engine traffic. Plus, I am planning on looking at other monetizing options in the coming months. But, I am only looking at options that wouldn’t be interfering with your reading experience.With a predicted Google PageRank of 5, I was hoping to use services like ReviewMe, PayPerPost to write sponsored posts in between regular content. But, it looks like Google PR update may never come.
• Favicon: I would like to get a logo designed for ShanKri-la and get a favicon as well. Right now, you are just seeing the default favicon that came with the WP theme.

Now, since this is a meme I have to tag a few people to keep it going. Please feel free to ignore this tag if you don’t like participating or have already participated. I just think this is a good opportunity to look back at what you have accomplished and what kind of improvements you would like to make to your blog. There is something about writing things down for me, I usually get them done.

Now I would like to tag

• Mark of MeAndMyDrum
• Brown of Brown Thoughts
• Kyle of Kyle’s Cove
• Chris of Blog-Op
• Tish of ChattieKat

I have mentioned a few improvements that I think are important. But, what matters the most are the improvements you would like to see here. Let me know in the comments and it will not be falling in deaf ears.

For those who are following ShanKri-la via your RSS reader, we are sporting a new look! As much I loved the old theme, it had a few flaws that bothered me. I have been in the lookout for a new & clean theme and I finally found one this weekend.

Here is a little sneak peek of the new look! Let me know what you think.

Here are a few things I did:

• Upgraded to WordPress 2.3
• Cutomize the excellent Saur them a little bit
• Upgraded WordPress Plugins to their current version

My good friend Stephen Cronin just tagged me in his first meme named ‘How Do I Improve My Blog‘. This is excellent timing by Stephen. I will follow up with the meme post with reasons for my upgrade and how I hope to improve ShanKri-la.

I wouldn’t be so motivated without your ever increasing support. So, I thank everyone of you reading ShanKri-la and I hope to be showered with your love in the future as well.

That’s a crafty domain name for a site that let’s you find out what a site is built with.

 BuiltWith is a web page technology profiler that analyzes a website and gives a detailed listing of technologies that it finds on a web page. In their words,

BuiltWith’s goal is to help developers, researchers and designers find out what technologies pages are using which may help them to decide what technologies to implement themselves.

Quick Facts about BuiltWith

• They compare known settings for various technologies in their database to what’s found in a web page and report on it.
• False positives are possible if it finds a matching string but the technology actually may not be used by a web page.
• BuiltWith caches results for a web site so changes may not be picked up immediately.
• BuiltWith identifies the use of
  • Widgets (snap preview)
  • Analytics (Google, Nielsen)
  • Frameworks (.Net, Java)
  • Publishing (WordPress, Blogger)
  • Advertising (Adsense, Doubleclick)
  • CDNs (Amazon S3)
  • Standards
  • Hosting Software
• Shows what percentage of the profiled sites use a particular technology you are looking at in a web page.

Using their own app, I found that BuiltWith is running on an IIS server, Yahoo User Interface (YUI) Library, ASP .NET framework and sports AddThis & Digg widgets.

I think a lot of this information can be hidden from prying eyes as was evident from ING Direct’s website. BuiltWith was able to just figure out the kind of advertisement running on ING and that they were using Flash. For a financial site, that would be one layer of defense against potential malicious attacks.

Here is how ShanKri-la looks like with BuiltWith.

Agreed that I don’t know much about hacking but I know that any little piece of information about a server would be graciously welcomed by a real word hacker.

That is just one way of using BuiltWith. How do you plan on using BuiltWith?

Nothing. I just wrote a post with them all and hence the title. Got you interested didn’t it?

So, for your reading pleasure, a few very useful tips that I came across this week in no particular order .

Future Proofing your CSS edits

This is for the bloggers or web masters on self-hosted platforms out there who are brave enough to tweak their CSS style sheets to create a unique look to their blog. This is especially handy for Wordpress users who rely on themes publicly available and that are constantly updated by the theme authors.

I am trying my hand at it right now and came across Chris Pearson’s article on Future Proofing CSS Styling. Chris Pearson is a web designer and is the author of the famous CopyBlogger theme. In this article, Chris shows in easy steps on how to create custom CSS without having to update every time your theme of choice is updated.

Turn off Google Personalized Search Results

Google Personalized Search can keep track of your searches so you can view your trends and get some cool stats but if you are put off by the fact that Google collects so much data like Big Brother, there is a cure for it without having to log off your Google sign-in. (I think there is an option to opt out totally as well if I remember right.)

Wrong Advices points us to a tip by Matt Cutts on how to turn this off on a per search basis. Simply add “&pws=0″ without the quotes to the search query like

http://www.google.com/search?q=shankrila&pws=0

What do you do if your computer has a virus?

Tim from Daily Cup of Tech has an excellent to do list in case you suspect your computer has a virus and exhaustively covers everything you need to do. Even if you don’t have a virus, I think it is a great read to get prepared as well as store some great free utilities he references for that inevitable day looming in the future. I owe DCOT a great thanks as they pushed ShanKri-la to the level it is at today by awarding the ’Tech Blog of the Week’ honor.

Check out your IP neighbors

Chris at Blog-op writes about a medley of topic and is a daily read for me. He posted about a http://www.myipneighbors.com/ that shows all your IP neighbors if you are on a shared hosting. I run ShanKri-la on shared hosting and I knew I was sharing the ip address with few other people but I was in for enlightment when I found out that there were 178 other webites sharing this IP number! Atleast, I wasn’t surrounded by questionable websites.
As Chris wisely points out, this tool has a use beyond the cool factor of checking out the websites sharing the space.

The reason this is important is that you will share your I.P. address with the other websites residing on your server, and if you’re blog is surrounded by large numbers of splogs (spam-blogs) blackhat-SEO types, hate sites etc. you could find yourself getting tarred with the same brush. Most banning tools work by banning I.P.s as a starting point, and you could find your blog dropping out of search results, comments getting blacklisted and emails from your domain treated as spam.

Hope you enjoyed these tips as much as I did and hope you found them useful. Do you have a better way of doing any of this but not sure if you should say it? Don’t worry. ShanKri-la readers are the best and you will find them welcoming you with open arms. So, comment away..