Chandigarh Bloggers Alliance launched their website www.ChandigarhBloggers.com officially on a special date 08/08/08 (August 8, 2008) with an aim to transform India into a better nation by channelizing the youth – their talent, capabilities and all the potential, positively by helping them realize their passion, live it and express themselves freely.

The launch was publicly made in the the sector 17 market, the heart of the City Beautiful, Chandigarh. The founder members of Chandigarh Bloggers Alliance (including me) who come from diverse fields like web design and development, marketing, management, literature, media and finance, etc. introduced the crowd in Sector 17 about the concept of blogging that is still nascent in North India. We told people how easy it is to set up a blog, how you can start blogging without any investment, that is for FREE and that you don’t need to be very tech-savvy person or be the nerdy geek to jump into mainstream blogging.

The presence of Reet and her sister (who is a graduate in Psychology, and blogs about the same) at the launch event further showed the people that blogosphere is not a man’s world and at least in the virtual world of blogging, the fairer sex is actually advancing shoulder-to-shoulder with men. Their presence served as an add-on to encourage the people to blog besides Shanker Bakshi telling them how to monetize a blog and generate significant revenue from it.

The website www.chandigarhbloggers.com will serve as a platform for the new bloggers to learn about what blogging is, why and how it is emerging as the “new social media” and how it can help you to make money online and prove to be an asset to your career. All the questions related to blogging can be asked in the Community forums where they will be answered by other members in the least possible time. Chandigarh Bloggers team will also offer any kind of help via email or telephone.

Apart this the website aims to integrate all the existing bloggers of in Chandigarh and neighboring North Indian states of Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir. The membership is however not restricted to people from this region, but all are welcome to join and participate as a healthy community of bloggers.

The community blog is going to be the center of activity in the days to come when it will be used by the contributing members to share their experiences with a vast readership about topics including (but not limited to) the society, the government and politics, environment and climate, travel, education, industries, etc. – anything ( ! ) that they’d like to write about. Everyone is welcome to Chandigarh Bloggers, register for free. Members are welcome to come up and express themselves freely, seek or offer any help to fellow bloggers and play their part to form a better India.

You see, experimentation is not the first thing to do when you’re stuck.

Search for a solution. Someone might have already had the same problem as you are facing and maybe someone already found a way out of trouble. Now, how you search matters.

The first thing I do when I am stuck is (not panicking, actually.. but) to ask some of my online chat buddies who I think might have the solution to the problem. I ask my programmer friends when I am tweaking wordpress plugins and themes to my advantage, the seniors from college when I need to fix something up with the Training and Placement Cell, classmates if I am in a rut with the homework and they happen to be online. And then there was this very recent case when one I needed to talk to one of my ex-girlfriends who is leaving for Delhi in a few days time for higher studies and I couldn’t think of the best words to talk to her. One of the girls in my yahoo contacts helped me with that.

Google is just a click away, but I prefer IM chats as the primary option because:

1. Anyone who has a first hand experience can guide you out better than a static tutorial. In case the issue is technical, the platform on which the tutorial is based might be different, or it might be that the solution provided for your problem on your platform is outdated. Or even, that the tutorial is not comprehensive, or not complete, or whatever. If someone can dynamically help you out its well and good. If not, Google is anyone’s buddy
   
2. Sometimes, I may not get time to talk to my online chat buddies if I am caught up with my work. Whether you’re going to chat about your problems and solutions – you get a chance to say a quick hello and most of the times, it has a positive impact and assists in healthy social networking.

Now, what if I need to go retrieve my chats for reference at a later point of time? Searching for a page on the internet, and bookmarking it (if useful) is pretty easy (CTRL + D). You can chose to archive (save) your chats in almost any Instant Messenger you might be using- Yahoo, MSN, Google Talk, etc. The method of archiving might be different. For me, because I discuss so many issues which are important to me (regarding my blog, programming, college, friends, life, etc.) archiving chats becomes as important as backing up my databases!  I might need to use these saved chats for reference any time.

TUTORIAL :

Archiving Chat in Yahoo Messenger

You can not only save all of your chat history in Yahoo messenger but also your voice call history! To save your chats in Yahoo archive :

Sign into your account using the messenger. When signed in, click on the messenger tab in the menu bar. From there, choose Preferences. In the preferences dialog window, navigate to Archive. And you’ll see something like this:

Chose the options “Yes, Save all of my messages” and “Yes, Save my call history” and Apply the changes. You can view your saved chat history from this very place, as you can see in the image above.

Archiving Chat in MSN (Windows Live Messenger)

Chat history in MSN Messenger (Windows Live Messenger) is saved in XML files at a location that you specify. These XML files can then be opened in your browser and they’ll show you the chat history in tabular form – From, To, Message, Sent On, etc.

Let us first see how to enable saving chats in MSN :

Sign in to MSN messenger using your username and password and once logged in, click on Tools in the Menu Bar. From the drop down menu that opens, choose Options. In the options dialog window, navigate to the tab called Messages. This image will show you what to do next:

You select the option to keep a history of your chat messages, and also specify the location where you wish to save the chat history. To view the chats later, you goto the location you specify here and open the XML file in your browser (I recommend that you use Mozilla Firefox over Internet Explorer. You can get it from the badge in the sidebar.)

Archiving Chat in Google Talk

The chats in Google Talk are not saved on your hard disk, if you enable archiving them – but in your GMail account as emails with the title Chat With [PersonName]. To save chats in Google Talk, you need to sign into your account using the messenger. Then you click on settings on the top right of GTalk window. Further, under the chat tab you choose to save chat history in GMail account:

Apply the settings, and you’re done.

Not Archiving Chat History but Only Saving Specific Chats

In case you don’t wish to save each and every chat session you ever had, you can just save a specific chat as a text file (.txt) onto your computer. To do this, when you’re chatting with someone and wish to save the chat, simply press CTRL + S and a familiar Save As dialog box will open. Specifiy where you want to save the file, save and there you are! And the good thing about this method of saving chats is that this works on any instant messenger.

So now whenever you need to look back into your chat histories for reference; it’ll be easy and convenient. Did you like this post? Drop a comment using the form below.

The event was attended by 12 people who made their presence felt in a strong way and are now helping Chandigarh Bloggers Alliance into a wider network that covers Chandigarh region and neighboring (North Indian) states of Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir. The attendees have been listed alongside with the links to their blogs…

Rajiv doesn’t have a blog of his own but was a significant part of this conference, as he  helped Shankar in deciding the venue. got the event ID cards ready and presented his respectable true self by showing his genuine concern for the society and socal issues that we are facing in India. Chandigarh Bloggers Alliance has pledged to create awareness about the prevalent social problems by writing about them on all the member blogs collectively, a few times a month- Inspired from his personal experiences and the passion he infused in us to make India a better place to live in.

Attendance List
Abhinav Sood	Inspirit Blog
Shanker Bakshi	Shanker Bakshi
Mohit Aneja	Mohit Aneja
Gaurav Sharma	Gaufire
Jasdeep	Jasdeep
Preeti	Entertainment and Humor
Sukhbir	Internet Marketing and SEO
Reet Aneja	Reet Aneja
Sameer Relan	Vantage Webtech
Abhishek Vaid	Vantage Webtech
Saurabh	Saurabh
Rajiv	-

As it was the first ever meeting of its kind and we were a bunch of young hearts gathered there, we decided to keep it an informal affair. It all started with Shankar’s unique idea of introducing each other by each person sitting in the lead chair assuming himself to be the boss and talking about his personal / professional life  and blogging journey.

Jasdeep introduced himself as an engineering graduate who has a fond passion for Punjabi literature and poetry. He is a talented programmer with in-depth knowledge in Object Oriented Programming using C++. If you have any kind of programming job (Python, Java, etc.) , feel free to contact him. He’d be useful.

Preeti and Sukhbir both SEO experts who worked together in the same software development and internet marketing company based in Chandigarh talked about how they came from an entirely different line and got into blogging, internet marketing and SEO stuff.

Mohit Aneja, a blogger, web designer and developer by passion was an enthusiastic speaker at the meet. His talks showed what a genius he was. Mohit has registered the domain www.chandigarhbloggers.com for the Chandigarh Bloggers Alliance community website. Mohit, unmatched in terms of generosity, was accompanied by his wife Reet Aneja for whom the bloggers meet up was a different experience altogether. You’d love to read how Chandigarh Bloggers Meet-Up inspired her to kickstart her blog that uses a theme that Mohit specially designed for her.

Shanker Bakshi is the one single person who got all of us together by saving Gaurav’s idea of aggregation just at the moment when it was about to die out of unproductivity. Shanker converted it well and today we stand as a strong undivided community that strives to work for the better of new and exisiting bloggers alike. Shanker Bakshi blogs in the Make Money Online (MMO) niche and has been generating handsome revenue from his blog while at the same time helping his readers to do the same.

Sameer Relan and Abhishek Vaid are partners in Vantage Webtech that they have recently formed. Sameer’s parents run the Stepping Stones School in Sector 37, Chandigarh. Sameer and Abhishek have taken up a great initiative by starting training workshops on blogging for the students of this school as a part of their IT curriculum. These guys plan to spread this cult far and wide by doing more workshops on blogging in prominent colleges and schools. The duo also provides SEO and SEM services to their clients besides various other modules.

Gaurav, the initiator of the Bloggers Meet Up is a (chemical engineering) student of NIT Warrangal ( *Wow* ) and blogs about hacking, cracking, reviews hardware and offers products for downloads. I am not sure whether he should offer serial keys to proprietary products like that- but anyways, his blog is resourceful with those tips and tricks on Windows.

Saurabh introduced himself as a fickle minded person, who has created (and then deleted) over a hundred blogs- I believe him and about his nature, after a chat session or two with him.

All in all, we were such a technical curry there and we discussed various things related to blogging- awareness about blogs, bloggers and blogging; ways to market our blogs effectively; how we could generate extra income from blogging and finally, How could we use our blogs for bettering up the society we live in.

Ravi P. Tiwari from Hindustan Times’ – Hindi Daily, covered the event. He had recently registered a blog for himself as well, and plans to put in some activity once he gets time from his job. Shanker has invited him to the next meet-up as well, where he should be present as a reporter and a blogger as well

I am the first from the right in here. You can view more photos of the event in Shanker Bakshi’s Flickr Photo-Set

If you’re in North India, and you’re a blogger – you’ll have to be there for the next CBA Meet-up! No excuses will be entertained See you.

I’ll share a very recent experience. If you have been visiting Inspirit Blog for a while now, you’ll have an idea that I published my last post before this one, on 24th May. That means, I am posting today after a gap of exactly 21 days! I could not post for so long because I started to prepare for the 2nd semester university exams 5 days before they started on 29th. The exams lasted till the 10th of this month (they went all good, thankfully), and in the past 3 days I was engaged in a major theme upgrade and customization round.

A gap of 21 days is not a no-deal, and you probably know that things like this can simply kill your blog. Whenever I didn’t save for a rainy day, and the urgent need to skip blogging arose due to travel, studies, project work, or any other reason… The number of daily visitors and page-views, the number of RSS subscribers and other important metrics at my blog dropped considerably. And when I used to get back to blogging, I had to almost wear myself out, to revive my position in the blogosphere. Just like one does for a new blog, I had to start building my readership base over and over again, many times. The longest gap that ever happened to be between two consecutive posts, before this one was 11 days! And at that time, I lost over 60 subscribers and my Alexa ranking rolled back by a few thousands. Yeah, it hurts!

But this time, even after a gap of 21 days, the statistics at Inspirit have been amazingly stable! I have been getting 160+ unique visitors each day this month, on an average and the number of RSS Subscribers has incredibly rose from ~100 to a stable 180, after touching a peak value of 206, a few days ago. The only loss that I have noticed this time is a slight drop in my Google Adsense earnings, and an Alexa rank roll-back. I am hopeful, I’ll build it back, soon.

What does this tell me?

After an exhausting yesterday, I was checking out some blogs that started around the same time as this one. Those blogs, that offer equally good and informative content and were as much read as Inspirit Blog 21 days ago, have either the same number of subscribers as me, or probably less. Even when they are active and serving their niches well !

I do acknowledge that there also exist those blogs that have risen much above me, but that’s a principle. If you don’t work- you definitely pay a price. If you don’t run, you lose the race.

But I am just glad that I am not out of the game and am probably going in the right direction with my blog. I could have advanced much quicker than my competition if I could continue. But nasty life. Anyway, I am back and all geared up. Stay tuned for some insightful articles that I have been building up all these days.

How did I do it?

The readers kept visiting all the days I was away. Why? Simple. They liked the content. The first and the foremost thing to do when blogging is to write in the best way you can. Offer content that your readers find useful. I have stressed it a number of times that, discouraging anyone from reading your blog is bad! You should take special care that you’re not doing this.

Is that all?

I had to be away for a good number of days. One would get bored every time he saw the same blog-post over at the top of the blog. I needed a special formula to keep my visitors interested in my blog, through the same static page that they would see again and again. The idea that then struck my mind was amazing!

The Winning Idea

Instead of putting up a notice at the blog, that I was going to be away for a while, I only notified my followers at Twitter and other social networks that I use. I did this because I thought the notice would discourage the visitors to visit till I was inactive. But, in the few minutes that I spent online to check my emails in study-breaks, I used to interact with my readership through twitter, instant messaging and Blog Catalog, etc.

Someone visits your blog only if they know you are there! Interaction like I talked about above, kept sending visitors, subscribers and comments flowed in, to many posts.

The next part of the Winning Idea is the cleverer part. Read on, here’s what it is–

Instead of writing a post on a particular topic, I wrote a list. This was no ordinary list. I compiled a list of all the useful tutorials, blogging-related discussions, posts about RSS and subscriptions that I had ever published at Inspirit Blog into a single post called the list of most useful and popular posts at Inspirit Blog.

A blog post on a single topic would not interest some one every time he visited over the days I was inactive. However, with this list of useful blogs, I offered my readers not one post to read but many. And they all were indeed the most useful and popular posts that I published. The best ones that I wrote here.

I offered the visitor 30+ posts to read in a single post!

How many posts do you read at a blog in one go? Two, Three, Four or Five?

Even if my new visitors, coming from search engines as well as from forums, social networks, and not to forget StumbleUpon read one, two or three posts a day.. they had enough posts still left to benefit from. And in the mean time they were done with it all, I would be back again and give them more stuff.

The Positive Side-Effects:

Building traffic at this single blog-post meant building traffic at more than thirty other posts published here. The number of page-views and hits thus increased manifold. The bounce rate decreased. A large number of comments flowed in to the component posts, than the list itself. Then, I reaped the benefit of better internal linking (I revised a few posts mentioned in the list).

All the side-effects of a writing this ‘one’ list were POSITIVE.

Are you blogging in the right direction?

I am quite confident that I am going the right way with my blog. Are you?
Did you learn something from this post? Your comments are welcome.

Ask yourself a question? How did you start blogging?
I came to know of the word “blog”, when I was reading a website that talked about it. It was actually a blog itself, but I didn’t have the slightest idea of it at that time. That was when I started reading more and more blogs. I read on many topics like life, sports, technology, culture, food, etc. and it was through reading so many blogs in different niches that I was able to discover my interest primarily in technology and meta-blogging than anything else. Its not that I don’t read blogs in any other niches now! Will Taft’s healthy living for people that talks about food, health & fitness and environment, and though written in broken English, Graphic-Identity’s design blog are one of my favorites to read being very informative!

Helping you find your interests is not the only way in which reading blogs helps. Reading is what helps you to learn how to write and more importantly how to do it effectively. Do you know of a person who learned to write meaningfully without learning to read? Let me know if you know any such person as I will be glad to feature him here at Inspirit.

Let us now look at a few important aspects of reading blogs, and learn how reading can positively impact our blog’s content, promotion and traffic:

Learn to market better: When you read various blogs, you get to know how people market themselves or the content/ideas they are trying to sell and have successfully become some kind of micro-celebrities in the blogosphere.

Improve your grammatical skills: Improve your grammar, vocabulary and formatting skills by reading various blogs. If you read good blogs and try to learn from someone’s style of writing… you’ll definitely see your blog entries getting better every time you publish.

Learn to communicate effectively: I think that in a large number of cases, writer’s block is not experienced because of lack of ideas for writing but because bloggers do not understand how to communicate to the target audience effectively. You’ll observe means and methods employed by bloggers to present their ideas only by knowing how they write.

Build a social network and a stronger readership base: Being displayed on someone’s BlogCatalog or MyBlogLog widgets often, can help you get more visits from the blog where you are displayed. Being a frequent reader and an active participant at a blog helps the blog owner to know you better. It helps you to socialize and make friends with other bloggers and increases your chances of being read by a wider audience.

Reap the EntreCard benefit: You’ll all agree that chain-dropping on EntreCard widgets is actually a misuse of the concept, even though it maybe beneficial to both the parties! Dropping cards at the blog to read is a wiser and healthier practice. EntreCard is now well-known for bringing in a lot of traffic to your blog and why won’t you want to benefit from it.

Pass your time: Whether you are experiencing the writers’ block, or you’re not feeling well or simply don’t have the mood to write… spend some time in reading blogs. By reading different kinds of blogs, you can boost your knowledge, sharpen your thinking capability, have an hearty laugh on reading a fresh joke or simply pass time. An Idle Mind is a Devil’s Workshop! Spending your free time of reading blogs is not that bad an idea!

Gather new ideas: Honestly speaking, most of my ideas come from reading other blogs. In fact, this very post comes as a result of my observation of benefits of reading, when I was reading other blogs! Even, in case you don’t get any new ideas to write about on your blog, from reading… you can write about what you read. Such reviews are generally interesting to read and are a channel of sharing valuable resources across the blogosphere.

When it comes down to making a decision, it all depends on why you are blogging. Decide what is important to you and what you hope to achieve.Every minute you spend in reading will pay you back in the same coin as a positive impact on your blog’s readability, subscriber base and ranks, etc. Finding some time for reading is definitely good. However do not cut on something more important that you might have got to do.

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I just received a newsletter from Twitter that details out the recent developments with them. Here are some details:

New Team Members:  Four new full time employees have joined the Twitter team since their last update that happened as back as in November, last year. This makes a total of 16 team members working on bettering up this awesome service that Twitter is. They are now starting to fill up their San Francisco office, finally, says the newsletter.

Twitter Usage & Statistics: Twitter has been gathering interesting statistics over some time now. These statistics can be found here at the Twitter Blog. From the email newsletter:

Some stats are fun– like the number of mentions per US presidential candidate, or the
annotated spikes during the Super Bowl. Other stats are more
relative to usage. For example, people who have 10 followers and
are following about 10 people represent 50% of all Twitter-ers. If
you have more than 80 followers and you’re following more than 70
people, then you are in the Twitter minority at about 10%.

Well, I wasn’t aware that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, who are running for the US presidential elections had twitter accounts till I read this in the newsletter. You can follow them on twitter at:

Hillary Clinton: http://twitter.com/hillaryclinton
Barack Obama: http://twitter.com/barackobama

Partnering Up: Did you know that Twitter works with the folks at Ericsson to manage the text and SMS traffic! We’ve partnered with Digital Garage to help us create the official Twitter Japan service. Another interesting part of Twitter stats is that 60% of Twitter web traffic comes from outside the US and 39% of that is from Japan. Twitter has chosen NTT America Enterprise Hosting to keep Twitter running strong because of their global reach and history of reliability.

New Reply Feature: Noticing lots of folks sending @replies to each other, Twitter has added an easy way to reply to another person on Twitter. Just click the little swoosh icon after an update in your timeline. This will automatically insert the correct “@username” text in front of your next update.

ShortCode for India: Now twitter-ers from India can access Twitter via SMS using the new shortcode: 5566511 for the Indian twitter-fan following. Indians can send one text message to this new local number and Twitter will route that message to all their friends and family at no charge. What a useful for update for a SMS-Junkie like me!

Besides all this, more great news is that Twittervision, a popular Twitter API project, is included in a show at the New York Museum of Modern Art titled “Design and the Elastic Mind.” The show explores the relationship between science and design and is open from February 24 to May 12, 2008.

Twitter also developed a distributed queue server to route vast numbers of messages and they named it Starling. Last month, Starling was released as open source. In addition to giving back to the open source community, Starling improves as the open source community makes enhancements and upgrades.

Also,Twitter has won the first Ever ‘Crunchie’ as the first annual awards show sponsored by TechCrunch was held at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco last month and the very first award given out that night was to Twitter for “Best Mobile Startup.”

Now that is some great development going on. I hope to see more impressive features coming in for Twitter and Twitter-ers. For all of those, who aren’t yet on this microblog! You can join Twitter by using this link and follow me there.

Out of the many, one reason I particularly like BlogCatalog over MyBlogLog is the ability to shout out messages to everyone in your friends-list (mutual friends, actually!), which is more properly termed as “Broadcast” over there. Ability to broadcast a message helps you to engage actively inside the social network that you have created for yourself by interacting with other bloggers.

You can use Broadcasts to share the latest post on your blog or to notify/announce something to your friends who can potentially be the readers at your blog (or the to-be-readers, if you do it right!) But like everything else, this can be done effectively only if you don’t misuse this feature.

Try broadcasting every time you pick your nose or brush your teeth and soon your broadcasts will find a place in nothing better than the recipients’ trash folder in his mailbox. Then, it’s quite probable that your broadcasts won’t even be read before deletion, later, even if they might contain something that deserve their attention.

So, let us discuss how to create an effective BlogCatalog broadcast that will potentially bring in readers & comments to a blog-post and probably even more subscribers to your blog.

There are 5 prime aspects to creating an effective broadcast that you should take care of while writing one for sending out to your friends.

• · Title of the Broadcast: Some bloggers in my network are in the habit of posting broadcasts with titles such as “Hi, Please Read This”, “Ultra-Useful Post” or “Check my latest post out!” etc. I click the delete button the very instant I see such broadcasts. I may like your site for the great content I saw when I visited once… But such broadcasts can never bring me back to your blog to read a post that you linked to in the broadcast!Generally, non-informative and non-descriptive titles are irritating and tend to be ignored very easily. Write the title of your broadcast wisely. You can safely use the title of your post itself as the title of your broadcast. In the simplest terms you should chose such a title that relates to and describes your blog post nicely. It’s very obvious that catchy titles will bring in more readers. But take care, be catchy but not confusing!
• · Structure of the Broadcast:
  Refrain from writing very long broadcasts. Giving away the entire post in broadcast defeats the meaning of this feature to help you promote your blog/blog-post. Bloggers can reply to broadcasts just as they can comment to your blog-entry. Where do you want them to leave some feedback and share their opinion?You can follow my 3-parts rule in structuring your broadcast to make it all the more effective.The simple 3-parts rule goes as follows:
  Write your broadcast in 3 short parts, namely
  1) the content,
  2) the link, and
  3) the end-note.By the use of short parts, I mean to say that you should only outline the very necessary elements of your blog post in such a way that it catches a recipient’s attention. But, it’s important that you take care not to eat up the vital description or someone might not be able to comprehend the message you want to convey. Be Short yet so Complete.Let us now see, how to use these 3 aspects of the 3-part rule as the elements of your broadcast.
• · Content of the Broadcast:
  The content of your broadcast should only be a brief introduction to the subject of your blog post. Instead of copy-pasting a part of your blog entry as the content of your broadcast, try reviewing your own post and describe it in your own few words. You can explain the objective of the particular blog entry you are promoting and how it can interest the recipients of your broadcast such that it compels them to check out your blog entry at once.
  DO NOT make it too long and DO NOT give away your entire post as I have fore-stated.
• · Linking to your Blog/Blog Post:
  If you review some of the broadcasts that you receive, you’ll notice that some bloggers post broadcasts with nothing except the title and a link to their blog post. This is a bad strategy and will not help you much with your blog promotion. The only readers who might visit you will, generally, be those who read your blog regularly and find this way of notification better than checking your blog out every other time, manually.The best way to link to your blog/blog-entry is to write the title of your post and then providing the link to it in the next line. This can add to the “catchiness” of your blog-post when combined with the content that you include in your broadcast (as stated above.)
• · Add an end-note to your broadcast:
  Adding an end-note to your broadcast is generally a very good idea. Use a one sentence footer to thank your readers who’ll take time to read your blog entry, ask them to share their opinions and experiences regarding the subject of your post or ask them for feedback and criticism through a comment. You may even ask your readers to bookmark your post at their favorite social networks or subscribe to your RSS feed if they like what they read.

This is your guide to posting powerful and effective broadcasts at BlogCatalog.

Also, if you write multiple posts a day, do not post a broadcast for each of them. Instead, prepare a compilation of all in a single broadcast using the guide-lines I shared above, and post the broadcast at the end of your blogging day. This way, you can make the maximum out of your BlogCatalog broadcasts and feed your blog with more readers, comments and some respect from your social circle at BlogCatalog.

Recommended:

• This post may be a bit lengthy, so if you find it hard to read in one go then read in parts.
• If any part of this post is unclear, give it another quick read. If something is still unclear, feel free to ask it in a comment.
• Read the review and comparison test of MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog & BlogRush to educate yourself about various features available with these social networks, in case you don’t know and decide what will be the best for your blog.
• You can bookmark this page for reading in future by pressing CTRL + D
• If you liked this blog entry, bookmarking it to various social networks by using the buttons below would be so cool.
  

The funny thing is that this doesn’t inspire me, in the least, to start studying harder and post less, for the purpose (though, Inspirit is always open for guest-bloggers who are interested in writing here). I think I am content with my progress report at the college. LOL!

Well, I have agreed to contribute to Another Pointless Blog as I can comfortably write one or two posts per week. Another Pointless Blog, (believe me, the name is misleading!) talks about blogging, web and Apple besides some other things! I am thankful to Matt for getting me back into one of my favorite niche: technology, in which I have blogged for more than a year at my previous blog, techXtreme, before kick-starting Inspirit.

I am flattered to know that Matt was so influenced by this post I made, in which I wrote about 7 Ultimate Reasons Why You Should be Guest-Blogging. I look forward to publish my first guest post at Another Pointless Blog soon and also hope to gather some feedback from you as well as the readers of Another Pointless Blog. I’ll probably make a mention here, when I publish but make sure you don’t miss out anything by subscribing to my RSS Feed.

Jason listed 9 free, open source and phenomenal platforms that you might not know of, in this post at OpenJason. This is from where I came to know about Vanilla, a free forum software loaded with the goodness of being Open Source.

After being heavily engaged in forums till a few years back, I was once again introduced to forums and started participating heavily when Blog Engage forums were recently launched. Occasionally, I surf through The Admin Zone & Authority Blogger forums for my regular dose of informative stuff to effective blogging.

I have always fascinated owning a board for myself. I have set up and used phpBB and Invision Power Board on free hosts in the past, but this is my chance to own one and use it on my host and have it integrated with my blog.

Why a Free Forum Software?

Like I said, It has always fascinated me to own a board for myself and administrate a large active community. But to be very frank, I don’t have enough money to buy a vBulletin setup and I don’t really want to spend money on a phpBB board as it doesn’t provide the ultimate functionality as vBulletin forum software does. So, the optimum way out for me was to look around for a free forum software.

Okay! You can’t expect a free forum software to be as great as the market dominator forum software like vBulletin in functionality and usability, but when you don’t have money in your pockets, compromising is the best thing to do instead of complaining and giving up on the idea. Instead you should be working hard to extract the maximum of out of what is in easy reach.

Why Open Source Forum Software?

There are many proprietary forum softwares available for free use but the problem is that they can not be self-hosted or integrated with your blog/website. The benefit of using an open Source software (free forum software, in our case) is that you can use it on your own host & integrate with your own blog. You can easily get huge support from the open source community that is always working for some kind of improvement in the software. Bugs are found and fixed every minute and new stable releases are rolled out every now and then. Open Source is a good way to go while choosing versatile software to suit your needs.

It feels great to have come across Vanilla. I am eager to give it a shot and see how it turns out.

Forums at Inspirit:

I have finished setting up the vanilla forums for Inspirit | Blog. The forums will be named Inspirit | Blog | Forums & will aim at helping the blogging community and work towards blog promotion for small & new and big & established blogs alike.

Till the development work on the forums is complete, I do not want to publicize them only to kill ‘em before they actually start up… Instead I will stick to the invite-only membership option and anyone who wants to help me in the development work like reviewing features, suggestion categories and discussions and/or provide feedback of any sort is most welcome.

Please comment to this post if you are interested, so that I can send you an invite. Your support is so much needed and will be greatly appreciated.

Feel free to add me to your social circle and if you need any help with promoting your blog, feel free to send me a message through any of the networks where you need any kind of support, or simply ping me using an IM-client like Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, MSN, etc. or drop an email.

* We can’t grow without helping others to grow. To rise, we need to BUILD the support that will help us climb higher!