Update

Its been a long journey which began a couple of years back for me. As I had mentioned in the post due to academic reasons I had to quite blogging at Webtalks in lieu of preparations for IIT JEE, a competitive exam in India to get admission into the prestigious IITs at undergraduate level. With God’s grace, I was able to make it to the top 5,000 at the country level with more than 4,72,000 appearing for it, henceforth, I am currently pursuing my B.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee which is the oldest technical institution in entire Asia. This institute has produced many world-class engineers and also the first problogger from India, Amit Agarwal, who runs Digital Inspiration blog is an alumni of this institute .Two years of complete inactivity did have an impact on my enthusiasm of blogging impact, but it steel feels great to publish a post and be back again. As for my current situation, my parents bought me a brand new Dell laptop via which this post is being published. Apart from that, along with my academics, I’m actively participating in hobby clubs relating to Software Development and various other workshops to enrich my knowledge base. I’m really pleased to see the encouraging atmosphere here at IIT for co-curriculars. As for my planning for my near future


• With so many new ventures, I’ll be engaged in learning new languages for web development and then working on projects

• Webtalks is not up for sale. This blog was buid for learning purposes, though it uses monetizing services of Google AdSesnse, but the sole reason behind it was just to get some experience.

• There’s no Blogger>>Wordpress migration for Webtalks in the recent furture.

Apart from that, Blogger has really grown up, The Template Designer tool is awesome(even though it has kick assed my template business) and stats widget makes the thing less messy in terms of code implementation for non-geeks. A sincere apology to all those mails shot at me for any error/ suggestion regarding my templates and which were un replied. I would be looking for your cooperation in the future.

Blogger introduces inline comment form

The most annoying feature of blogger, the commenting system, has been finally been looked upon by the blogger team as it pushes out much desired inline comment forms out of the draft version of blogger. Good move, I would say though and as I anticipated, this would create a bit of mess for people like me who completely revamped their widget templates.With the help of some html tweaks, thankfully this blog now runs inline comment forms which I hope will increase the participation of those lazy people who simply hated that popup

If you too are running a heavily modified template, following html tweak might work for you
Important: I'm giving directions for widget templates and not for classic templates

First of all follow basic instructions given on blogger blog.Check your post page, if comment form is visible then no problems, but if not, then the following steps may help you out.

Step 1: Open your dashboard, Follow the Layout link, Select Edit HTML

Step 2: Backup your template(don't be lazy, this may prove very costly)

Step 3: Look for this line
<b:if cond='data:post.allowComments'> <a expr:href='data:post.addCommentUrl' expr:onclick='data:post.addCommentOnclick'><data:postCommentMsg/></a> </b:if>
            and replace it with
<b:if cond='data:post.embedCommentForm'> <b:include data='post' name='comment-form'/> <b:else/> <b:if cond='data:post.allowComments'> <a expr:href='data:post.addCommentUrl' expr:onclick='data:post.addCommentOnclick'><data:postCommentMsg/></a> </b:if> </b:if>

 There may be one/ more than one places where u'll find this code, just be sure where you want comment form to be dislayed

 Tip: For saving time, you can copy the html code to notepad, save it as a text file first and then use the find option to quickly jump to the required code.

Step 4: Save the template code, and have a look on any of your bog's postpage.

Should work, if not, comments welcome.

Why I do not shift to a custom domain

If you are seriously engaged in blogging, it is always recommended to have your own domain and preferably Wordpress hosted on it.Many Internet friends and some blogging professionals recommended me to have my own domain.Webtalks is making enough bucks for me to buy hosting and a domain for it.I'm a big WP fan and I too want to join the self hosted Wordpress community.Still there are few reasons that restrict me

• Domain Age.With the blast of links everyday towards this blog (say thanks to templates), I believe Google will put this blog in the Sandbox.Since I'm currently on Blogger, Google counts the domain age of blogspot.com which well is a pretty old one(1999).
  
• Time.As a student it isn't easy to come online everyday.Which leaves me with two alternatives.Either sell off my blog like Rishi did or keep the posts on blogger till I pass out.I'm not comfortable selling this blog as this is connected to my Google Account.So keeping it live on Blogger is the only option(Don't say that I can also delete the blog).
  
• Hosting.Though many web hosting providers promise 0% downtime, still there is a risk.On blogger, I haven't yet encountered any downtime for this blog.Blogger currently gives undisclosed bandwidth to its blogs, so no problems how much traffic I receive when I'm absent

The shift will definitely take place
You read it right.I will for sure move Webtalks to a custom domain.All I can currently tell you is that you'll have to wait a bit for it.I believe by May 2010.Yes I know its long after.But I will continue posting on Webtalks when I'm free.I had already bought a domain (ashtech.info) back this summer.But afterwards I came to know (.info) domains are full of spam, so next time I'll buy a (.com) only

I'm currently looking for a good domain name (.com). If you have any thoughts, feel free to share them in comments.By 2010, I hope it will gain some age and then we'll shift Webtalks to it.

During this period I will go through intensive studying as these 3 years will be determining for my career.If you are an Indian you would be quite familiar with IIT-JEE which is what I'm going to be preparing for.But still I need wishes from all you for cracking IIT isn't possible without your blessings.

Will miss you all.

Do you really need to update blog everyday?

It has been well over a fortnight since I last posted on Webtalks [you can still be with me and my mates at the Ashtech Blog]. It would have been a prediction that this blog did experience a traffic slump, a decrease in feed count and obviously a decrease in earnings.I'll say a big NO to it.There was a slump but nominal one and has fully recovered now.



Instead of decreasing, the feed count is showing its highest yet(125)



As for earnings, Google AdSense team narrowed down the click able region of AdSense which had its effect but not that big. But now, accidental clicks are negligible and hence we prove we are promising :)

Now let me tell how did the poor posting frequency didn't effect my blog

Evergreen Posts As a part time blogger(or I must say occasional blogger) it is essential for me to write posts which are useful to for visitors even though they are reading it after a long time.
For eg, posting about new AdSense feature will not be as effective as a review with your personal touch of that feature.

Give your blog a break. Some of your posts are really good and deserve to stay on the homepage for long, so why to refuse them?

Google Juice. No new pages(post pages) gave Google a chance to index this blog deeply, which I believe it didn't do previously even though having a blast of back links

Be evil. (Just a personal opinion) No new updates I believe would have forced the regular passerby visitors either to subscribe to the RSS feeds, or to forget this blog.Losing such visitors isn't that costly because they hardly click on any of the ads and just contribute towards the page impressions, which hardly matters to a growing blog. If they would have subscribed to the RSS feed to receive the update automatically, I got few more readers.

You might be also interested in reading what to do when your internet server is down

Manage Ads: A promising feature in AdSense

Google AdSense, few days back added a new feature in their AdSense program for all publishers.You may be knowing about this feature from a coming soon status message in your AdSense dashboard or from a sneak peek previous post from the AdSense Blog or from a Breaking news post from Problogger still here is a quick definition for it

This new ad management feature means that your ad unit settings (such as colors and channels) for new AdSense for content ad units will be saved in your AdSense account every time you generate ad code. Then, if you'd like to change any of these settings in the future, all you do is make the update within your account -- you'll no longer need to manually replace the ad code on all of your pages. For instance, you can quickly change the borders of all your 300x250 medium rectangles from red to blue with just a few mouse clicks.

As a blogger I think the key lies in experimenting with your Ad slots.For even changing the border of an Ad unit, I had to generate new ad code, parse it and then finally add the script to my XML template.This was a bit time consuming and a hectic process.This feature just makes the same results available with a few lesser mouse clicks.

I found this feature interesting and gave it one of my blog's slot.I always thought that perfectly blended ads performed much better than one having a distinct border and when I tried border for one day, the results amazed me(I only changed the colour pal latte). I saw a good spike in CTR and CPM.

Concluding it...
Likes

• A short and simple process for changing the look of the Ad unit
• Import feature which allowed me to import ads from other channels.
• Preview Ad feature.
  
• A bit short script :)

Dislikes

• It permits to change the colours of the Ad unit but not it's size.
• Once the script is uploaded, it takes around 10 minutes for the Ad slot to deliver Ads.
  

I will be giving more slots to this new feature soon and I recommend you to do the same and experiment.