Today is September 5, which is celebrated as Teacher’s Day in India. 5th September is the birthday of a great teacher Dr. Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan. When Dr. Radhakrishnan became the (second) president of India in 1962, some of his students and friends approached him and requested him to allow them to celebrate 5th September, his “birthday”. In reply, Dr, Radhakrishnan said, “instead of celebrating my birthday separately, it would be my proud privilege if September 5 is observed as Teachers’ day”. The request showed Dr.Radhakrishnan’s love for the teaching profession. From then onwards, the day has been observed as Teachers’ Day in India.

Teachers’ Day Celebrations

In some countries, Teachers’ Days are intended to be special days for the appreciation of teachers. Some of them are holidays while others are celebrated during working days. Teacher’s Day in India is a tribute to the hard work that is put by the teacher all year long to educate a child.  Teachers and students report to school as usual but the usual activities and classes are replaced by activities of celebration, thanks and remembrance. At some schools on this day, the responsibility of teaching is taken up by the senior students as an appreciation for their teachers. They go to the junior classes, teach the subjects of their choice and try to maintain discipline as their teachers would have. In a lecture or two, the students and teachers interact in the auditorium and exchange messages of wisdom, knowledge and successs. On this particular day, teachers are made to feel how important they really are, to the students who’ll become the citizens of tomorrow and hold the key to the future of the nation.

Who is a Teacher? What is Education?

This is a question that has been bothering me since my senior secondary certification days. Things aren’ better today, nor do I hold the hope that they’ll get better in the near future. This question bothers me because I don’t know the answer is false. I know and understand it well. But the said part is that those who implement education in India don’t understand it. The controllers of the Indian Education System don’t get it.

Who is a teacher? What is Education?
I’ll quote an excerpt from the Indian President, A.P.J Abdul Kalam’s address on the eve of Teachers’ Day in India , 2003.

…I am reminded of my childhood days when I was studying in 8th class at the age of 13. I had a teacher, Shri Siva Subramania Iyer. He was one of the very good teachers in our school. All of us loved to attend his class and hear him. One day he was teaching about a bird’s flight. He drew a diagram of a bird on the blackboard depicting the wings, tail and the body structure with the head. He explained how birds create the lift and fly. He also explained to us how they change direction while flying. For nearly 25 minutes he gave the lecture with various information such as lift, drag, how the birds fly in a formation of 10, 20 or 30. At the end of the class, he wanted to know whether we understood how birds fly. I said, I did not understand. When I said this, the teacher asked the other students whether they understood or not. Many students said that they also did not understand. He did not get upset by our response since he was a committed teacher.

Our teacher said that he would take all of us to the sea shore. That evening the whole class was at the sea shore of Rameswaram. We enjoyed the roaring sea waves knocking at the sandy hills in the pleasant evening. Birds were flying with sweet chirping voice. He showed the sea birds in formations of 10 to 20 numbers. We saw the marvellous formations of birds with a purpose and we were all amazed. He showed us the birds and asked us to see that when the birds fly, what they looked like. We saw the wings flapping. He asked us to look at the tail portion with the combination of flapping wings and twisting tail. We noticed closely and found that the birds in that condition flew in the direction they desired. Then he asked us a question, “Where the engine is and how it is powered”?

The bird is powered by its own life and the motivation of what it wants. All these things were explained to us within fifteen minutes. We all understood the dynamics from this practical example. How nice it was. Our teacher was a great teacher; he could give us a theoretical lesson coupled with a live practical example available in nature. This is real teaching. I am sure many of the teachers in schools and colleges will follow this example…

…In an integrated way it can be said, that any enlightened human being can be created by three unique characteristics. One is moral value system. That I got from my father the hard way. Secondly, the teacher becoming a role model. Not only does the student learn, but the teacher shapes his life with great dreams and aims. Finally, the education and learning process has to culminate in the creation of professional capability leading to confidence and will power to make a design, to make a product, to make a system, bravely combating many problems…

When we are kids, or we are young and wild, or old.. When we are watching the birds fly.. When we are sitting in the park listening to what the silent nature says.. Whether we are reading a news item in a newspaper or a blog post on the internet.. WE ARE ALWAYS LEARNING some thing or the other at all points of our life. I just wish all your teachers are so good and make you a better human being at each turn.

Happy Learning. Happy Teachers Day.

Eerik from XP tricks has won this jump-the-queue blog review worth $150 as a prize in the Lets Win This Contest Together that ran for a month at Shanker Bakshi’s blog and concluded on 1st September. Inspirit Blog had sponsored the contest with prizes worth $185. Today I am going to review Eerik’s blog XP tricks jumping over the queue of so many blogs already waiting for a free blog review from Inspirit Blog.

Having said that, I’d start with this blog review that will cover all the elements of a blog from its design and eye candy to the add-ons and content, from the management of navigation bar to the sidebar widgets, and everything else that is significant for a blog. Whatever I’d tell through this review will (of course) be related to this particular blog, but I’d recommend that all of you read through and try to pick the maximum tips from this review to better up your own blog.

Navigation Overview

5 posts on the home page is optimal and the read more tag has been sensibly used to optimize the length of the home page. You can dig through the previous posts by clicking on the Older Entries link below the 5 posts on the main page. However I am disappointed not to see the archives anywhere. Its hard to navigate older entries beyond a few pages without the archive in place. No having or listing an archive virtually kills the prospects of your previous blog posts getting their due exposure. You might get some search engine traffic to them but unless people read that buried comment, rate or review it, social-bookmark it, you’re not going to get good rankings in the SERPS (Search Engine Results PageS) even!

The navigation bar at the top is minimalistic with only the most basic pages listed there : About | Contact | Register. However when I ran through the links in the rightmost sidebar just above the footer, I figured a link to the Link Exchange page. That can come in the top navigation bar as well, instead of being down there so neglected! My personal recommendation yo all of you is to list all the pages on your blog together at one place, be it the navigation bar or a prime spot in the sidebar.

Besides all this, the posts have not been categorized (or labelled) and hence there is no categories widget in the sidebar or anywhere else on the blog. Sorry Eerik, but I am not at all pleased with the navaigation on your blog and I really recommend you add the archives in the sidebar, and tag or categorize your blog posts appropriately so that they can be easily accessed from the tags/categories widget. Also, move the Link Exchange page to the navigation bar from the bottom where no one will easily notice it. Your Link Here looks more like a text link ad-spot.

Sidebars and Footer Overview

The very essential features that I feel should always be there in a blog’s sidebars are navigation elements (as we talked above), feed subscription options, social bookmarking, social networking and blog promotion widgets, blogroll and resources link-list ( and advertising elements - if you wish to). Out of these basic elements, you have the feed subscription options in the right place on the home page, and social bookmarking buttions like digg, reddit, etc. on the single post page. You may add the RSS subscription options on the single-post page as well.

You should start working on other elements as well. The prime aim of any blog is building traffic. As soon as possible, join social networking sites for bloggers like blog catalog and mybloglog, entrecard, etc. and work on growing your blog’s community. Build a healthy readership base so that all your hard work doesn’t go in vain. If you’re investing your peace and time in publishing useful content, you should market it in the right way so that people actually see it. It’s important to build traffic and grow your blog’s readers community.

Considering that your blog is now 8-9 months old (Yes, I read back till the first welcome to XP tricks post), the MyLinks section just above the footer should not be empty as it is right now. See below how I use that space on my blog. A very basic footer with copyright information is okay. You may add a privacy policy or disclaimer there. Else, its fine.

About Page

Another important thing that you should take care of while writing an About page is that it should give the reader an idea of what the website or blog is about and who’s the person behind it. You’ve briefed about XP tricks in 2-3 lines but I did not see your name anywhere in the whole blog. I would have never known that you’re Eerik if you’d not told your name while entering the contest.

Advertising

You’re using Google Adsense smartly on the main page with text-links unit just below the title and an ad-block below the post. Nice places to put those ads, actually. However consider avoiding the in-line ad placement in your blog. I find that quite distracting as your blog’s content container isn’t as wide that it’ll accumulate the ad quite well. You should consider this post of yours and see how the image used in the post is being pushed out of view due to the ad placed along with it. You may consider placing adsense somewhere in the sidebar, instead.

Content Overview

Overall, you’re blog has quite some content worth reading but not everyone is as patient as me to navigate through all the older entries through the link at the bottom. Work on your blog’s navigation bar so that posts and pages are easily accessible. Try to minimize writing content that can be found elsewhere on the internet and bring up more original and interesting tutorials, tips, tricks and tweaks unless the intent of your blog is to share the goodness of internet that is already there.

I hope that this review helps you optimize your blog and build some traffic and a healthy readers’ community. Feel free to drop your comments, share ideas and opinions and write about this review on your own blog to share with your readers.

Peace.

Shanker Bakshi’s third contest on his blog Lets Win This Contest Together successfully concluded on 1st September after running for a month. There were 208 entries in total considering 5 entries from a blog post about this contest and 3 entries from subscribing to the blog by email. All the entries were processed using random.org and a list of winners was generated.

Inspirit Blog had sponsored the contest with a 125 x 125 ad spot for a month worth $35 and one jump-the-queue blog review worth $150 ! That totals to prize worth of $185. The 125 x 125 ad spot worth $35 for a month is won by Amor Francis, a 31 year old female pinoy blogger from Manila, Philippines. And, the jump-the-queue blog review goes to Eerik. Congratulations to you - Amor, Eerik and all the lucky winners of Lets Win This Contest Together.

You can find the complete list of all the winners at Shanker’s blog. I am looking forward to another good blog contest coming up at Shanker Bakshi dot com soon. I am working on setting up the ad-spots as I lost the configuration while switching from windows based hosting to linux based webhosting, recently. Amor, you can email me the 125 square banner so that I can put it up here. And Eerik, your blog’s jump-the-queue review will be published tomorrow itself around this time. I recommend that you subscribe to Inspirit Blog through email to keep track of any updates.

Once again, I’d like to congratulate all the lucky winners of Lets Win This Contest Together.
Peace.

If you visited Inspirit Blog in the last few days you probably might have encountered a HTTP 404 - Page Not Found or even a Error Establishing Database Connection page! Before Inspirit Blog went down, I had somehow managed to set up pretty permalink structure even as I was on an IIS based server over the default (SEO-unfriendly) ugly permalinks which look like http://www.inspiritblog.com/?p=134. But then I found myself in another trouble, which usually happens when you go off-the-track! I was cool with having the SEO friendly pretty URLs set up on my blog, but in my previous posts (and on other blogs that linked to posts on Inspirit Blog) the links were directed to the older permalink structure AND those links didn’t redirect to pretty permalinks like they should do.

301 redirects that never worked fine

So, I decided to use 301 redirects on my blog to redirect the old ugly permalinks to the new pretty permalinks. I tried many available wordpress plugins like Yoast’s Permalink Redirect, Deans Permalinks Migration, FUcoder’s Permalinks Redirect and Advanced Permalinks to serve the purpose but nothing seemed to work. The level best that I could achieve was with Scott Yang’s permalink redirect plugin which reloaded a page with new permalink after it had already loaded with old permalinks. This meant that a page was loaded twice for a one time access! And besides this, what really sucked was that my homepage started reloading infinitely in loops. While I left this up while working on finding a solution, for some days - I didn’t realize how much bandwidth Inspirit Blog was eating up like a monster!

I realized this only when I talked to my friend Leo about it when I found Inspirit Blog not opening up once, and other time when I saw a database error. Leo had been so generous to me (And I am really thankful to him for that), he had provided me webhosting on his host for so long! and this silly plugin ate so much bandwidth that it might have costed him some extra bucks!

Decided to move to a Linux based host

Well, I was already giving up on editing that plugin and nothing else seemed to work. Also, I had earned some money from this blog that I could use to buy some webhosting for myself. This was the time when I made up my mind that I’d finally move to a Linux based web host and free myself from all these issues! Plus, if I got my own hosting and space, I’d also start some new projects that I have in mind. More control with cPanel, fantastico support, webmail, mod_rewrite support, etc. I just so wanted it all!

Error Setting Up Inspirit Blog on Sameer’s Host

I talked about my plan to switch host with my friends Sameer and Mohit and wow, these amazing people were so ready to support me on their own respective hosts when I was thinking to BUY webhosting for myself! In fact, I really liked a plan at NetFirms and decided to go for it, but they don’t accept Paypal and I don’t have a credit card. So, the netfirms idea was dropped and I couldn’t afford the hosting packages at other sites…

Sameer helped me move the Inspirit Blog files and database to his host and I pointed the domain to his host. I updated Leo, that I had moved to a linux based host and that I had changed the DNS and I’d be fine if he removed the database and files from his host. I had all in the backup. But for some unknown reasons, things didn’t work out. Probably that was an error in my database that Inspirit Blog redirected to the root of the directory in which Inspirit Blog was installed, instead of opening my blog from its own directory!

Finally on linux based hosting with HostGator - Thanks Mohit!

Then, Mohit helped me set up Inspirit Blog on Hostgator. We put the database and the files where they should be. Then Mohit created an add-on domain for Inspirit Blog and I pointed the DNS to Mohit’s host and erased the ones pointing to Sameer’s host. I knew it would take a couple of hours for the DNS update to take place and in the meanwhile I reviewed my database in order to manually remove some clutter that I didn’t want and thought, might be causing the problems.

That is when I spotted a problem in siteurl and home field under the wp_options table. Even after the DNS update had taken place, opening InspiritBlog.com still redirected to the root of the directory in which Inspirit Blog was installed at Sameer’s host, instead of opening my blog from the installation on hostgator. I cleared and updated the set parameters in siteurl and home under the wp_options table in the database, and lo! God smiled on me.

A Better “Inspirit Blog“

Everything is now back to normal. In the last 4 or 5 days that Inspirit Blog has been up again on its new host, I have optimized the blog’s theme, removed some plugins that I don’t use and installed some new ones. I have also made some changes to the navigation bar. Its better organized now and more comprehensive. Another major change is integration of Google Custom Search into the blog. I have replaced the default Wordpress search with a Custom Search Engine powered by Google. How I did it without using any extra pages, posts or plugins is interesting and useful as well, and I will cover that in a dedicated post soon.

I am now going to catch up the free blog reviews thing soon. I am planning to set up a sub-domain here that will be dedicated to free blog reviews. Thus, I’ll clear the main site off all the reviews and keep them in one place at the sub-domain. I believe it would be nicer, that way. Anyway until further update, dig through my previous posts. I hope you find them helpful. Enjoy your stay here.

Its 15th August today, the 61st Independence Day of India. Today, I’d like to salute all the martyrs who laid their lives for the country’s freedom, those immortal freedom fighters like Bhagat Singh, Raj Guru and Sukhdev who kissed the gallows at unripe ages. I salute those great people who gave us the free air that we breathe in today, the great saints and holy sages who spread the message of love, harmony and peace. Today, I bow my head before the Indian Flag, and pledge to devote my life and all my work to progress of this nation.

I designed this image to set as my wallpaper on my widescreen laptop! And even sent it to all my friends so that they could use it.. If you wish to, feel free to download it and use on your systems, but this is best suited for widescreens.

Happy Independence Day…
Preserve your freedom, celebrate your independence…
Jai Hind. जय हिन्द।

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.

Shanker Bakshi is holding yet another contest on his blog which goes by the name “Lets Win This Contest Together“. The coolest thing about the contest is that the current weight of the contest is prizes worth over $850. This includes so many text link ad spots, 125 square ad blocks, over 15000 entrecredits and free designs and reviews from some of the best blogs around the blogosphere.

Inspirit Blog is also sponsoring the contest with a 125×125 square ad block worth $35 for one month and a free blog review jumping the queue of over 100 blogs that are still waiting to get a free blog review from Inspirit Blog. I have been associated with Shanker Bakshi and this contest since the idea was born and he shared it with me but some running errands kept me from announcing this to you.

Lets Win This Contest Together closes on 31st August, 2008. Participating is very easy and I should say you must definitely go participate in this one. All you have to do is either (or both) blog about the contest in minimum 100 words in a blog post on your own blog with a link back to the contest. This counts as 5 entries for the contest. You can also subscribe to Shanker Bakshi by email for 3 entries in the contest. The winner will be chosen at random and announced on 1st September, 2008.

Sponsors and Prizes:

Entrecard Credits

• 10,000 Entrecard Credits from Shanker Bakshi dot Com (worth $95)
• 1000 Entrecard Credits from Ragnarok (worth $10)
• 1000 Entrecard Credits from The Delano Observer (worth $10)
• 1000 Entrecard Credits from Newz Around Us (worth $10)
• 1000 Entrecard Credits from Michael Aulia dot Com (worth $10)
• 1000 Entrecard Credits from Rumbling Lankan (worth $10)
• 1500 Entrecard Credits from Gyutae Park - Winning the Web (worth $15)

125 x 125 Square Ad

• 125×125 Entrecard Widget Design by Mohit Aneja (worth $15)
• 125×125 block ad for one month on iLUVcontests (worth $15 )
• 125×125 block ad for one month on Shopping (worth $15 )
• 125×125 block ad for one month on XSrealities (worth $25 )
• 125×125 block ad for one month on Inspirit Blog (worth $35)
• 125×125 block ad for permanent on Fundraiser Support (worth $10)
• 125×125 block ad for one month on Lemback -Potpourri (worth $25)
  
• 125×125 Block ad for four months on Shanker Bakshi dot com (worth $60)
• Two 125×125 Blocks ads for one months from LegitGeeK.com (worth $320)

Text Link Ad

• Text Link Ad for a month on Ragnarok (worth $10)
• Text Link Ad for a month on WebTrafficROI (worth $10)
• Text Link Ad for a month on Mr. Javo dot Com (worth $10)
• Text Link Ad for a month on Blogging From Scratch (worth $10)

More Prizes

• 250×250 ad spot for a week at ROCKFUSE (worth $20)
• 468×60 ad spot for six months on Brood online (worth $100)
• One Free Blog Review (jumping the queue) by Abhinav Sood at Inspirit Blog (worth $150)

Isn’t this simply amazing? Well, if it is, what are you doing here. Go visit the Lets Win This Contest Together page, and when you have entered either through a blog post about the contest or through the email subscription, drop a comment to let Shanker know that you are in. If you want to sponsor the contest, too! you can drop Shanker Bakshi an email : shankerbakshi@gmail.com. And yes, if you visit his blog through this post, drop him a comment and let him know that you came from Inspirit Blog

In fact, I designed the above 250 x 250 square banner to help Mr. Bakshi promote his blog contest because Let Us Win This Contest Together is one simple and amazing contest that I have come across in a long time. If you wish to use this banner in your blog entry (which would really please Mr.Bakshi) you can use this code and paste it in HTML mode.

<a title="Lets win this contest together. Image designed by Abhinav Sood" href="http://shankerbakshi.com/2008/08/01/lets-win-this-contest-together" target="_blank"><img title="Lets Win This Contest Together. Design by Abhinav Sood" src="http://www.inspiritblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/wincontesttogether.jpg" alt="Lets Win This Contest Together. Image designed by Abhinav Sood" width="250" height="250" /></a>

Good Luck Folks!

Recently I saw this blog post by Brian Top Blogs @ Blog Engage - 5 Most Voted Blogs! on the Blog Engage blog. Though I have always secured good response to my posts that ever get submitted to BE, I wasn’t expecting to see Inspirit Blog on the list this time, because I had been quite inactive for some time. But to my amazement, Inspirit has been placed on #2 just after Raivyn’s meta blog- Idiot’s Guide to Blogging.

Its good to see that even though I fail to catch up with activity on my blog sometimes, but people still love to read the content published at Inspirit Blog. In the comments to that post and otherwise on their blogs as well, members have stated that they like Inspirit Blog as much as they like ProBlogger or CopyBlogger. Its such an honor, and I am done with the I-am-Happy dance to celebrate this already.

Scott R. Sheaffer, CSE, ATM, requested a free blog review for his sales tips blog - Sales Vitamins. Scott is a contributing writer for other books, sales blogs and publications and has worked in sales, sales management and sales training for over 20 years in companies ranging from small enterprises to Fortune 500 companies.

If you’re looking for a blend of good design to go with good content - this is the blog to look at. There is no clutter in the sidebars but it does not miss out any of the essential features like the subscription options (via RSS and via Email), tags, categories and archives. The blog can also be viewed using a mobile device as the site is also available in a optimized-for-mobile-devices version.

And if you need some effective sales tips to boost your off-line or online affiliate business - you must read Sales Vitamins. Scott has exclusive tips to offer for sales representatives and sales managers. There are also posts that share sales tools and resources. If you wish to, you can do reciprocal link exchange with Sales Vitamins.

I was reading this post Are you killing your customers with a shotgun? and must say I love his comprehensive style of writing. The way he puts his idea forward through points is the way I like to read posts.

Overall, Sales Vitamins is a very good blog if you’re looking for some commendable sales tips and dons a sporty outlook with its dark 3 column theme. But one important thing that he’s missing is using social networks to market his blog. I don’t know if he’s using BlogCatalog or MyBlogLog but I don’t see the widgets. In a way, having those widgets is an indicator of the activity on your blog in case you don’t have a good page rank or Alexa rank. It is worth all the extra traffic and subscribers you get through these networks. Social networking is the essence of sales, sales marketing and affiliate business. Scott, I highly recommend that you use these services to build a solid readership base for your blog. Your blog looks good, it has good content so you should exploit every opportunity that you get to market Sales Vitamins.

To let your readers know about your blog’s review, Post this badge on your blog.Copy-paste this code where you want to display the badge:<a href=”http://www.inspiritblog.com/archives/free-blog-review-sales-vitamins/” title=”Sales Vitamins reviewed by Inspirit Blog”><img src=”http://www.inspiritblog.com/reviewed-badge.jpg” alt=”Sales Vitamins reviewed by Inspirit Blog”/></a>

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.