Johny Learns To Blog » blog

Taking control of life [Part I: New venture]

Pranav — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 03:33:49 +0000

I’m starting up the new venture. And I’m feeling great about it; well all my past or present projects seem exciting to me but this one is special. The reason is: I am working on a project with my father. It’s about social entrepreneurship. And yes, it’ll be launched on the same website amrute.me! I’ll utilise couple of sub-domains of the site for this project (ah! Do they call it micro-site?)
When I moved from free blogging service, blogger (blogspot.com) to premium blog of wordpress with self hosting website, it was clear that I have to spend money for my publishing pleasures every year. Over the time, my articles writing frequecy reduced marginally and so my Amazon or Google Adsense earnings. Although I’ve never been a regular blogger and never expected steady income through blogging. I thought to buy domain-name to look at it seriously. That was late 2008; I booked amrute.me and moved my all blogs to pranav.amrute.me. I could never give proper justice to parent site & had to keep it static html for long 2 years. My time was more spent on serving clients than building my own website. And when you have local customers, website doesnt have ‘business showcase’ role anyways.
But this month, I’m finally working on building website. So expect my home office business on its root site. (hey, by the way did you happen to see my home office tour? Things haven’t changed much since Nov 2010. & yeah! Sorry for the accent. ) In the process, I’ll make some changes in blog- write my unfinished articles, schedule my article-series. link within the network, check some basic SEO, might add book-shelf for Indian viewers who can buy GMAT books from flipkart instead of amazon. All in all I’ll be working majority of my time re-building this website amrute.me; which also includes my social entrepreneurship project.
We have been thinking about launching an informational website related to social entrepreneurship. There’s certainly big gap in the market infact a void space if I dare say & our project could be popular & go big, who know! I’m very excited about it. So stay tuned. You’ll see a lot of changes in & google bots gonna go crazy indexing new pages in coming months

Removing Feedburner please update your feed url

Pranav — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 14:16:58 +0000

Hello dear subscribers,
here’s a quick update -=->
(This blog post is especially made for those who read my blog through feed reader such as Google reader, bloglines, my yahoo, MS Outlook, or Linux akregator etc. For rest of you, just ignore the post. Thank you.)

I am deactivating Feedburner, a feed manager/ distributor service from Google. If you subscribed to my blog recently that is in last 6-8 months, chances are you’ve automatically subscribed me via feedburner url. In that case please change my feed url to simple n straight feed://http//pranav.amrute.me/feed/

I think it’s wise to switch back to basics, also I think it’s bit annoying seeing adsense ads in your RSS feeds. So I’ve removed it. No adds on feeds

If you want GMAT specific articles, simply click on that right cartoon sitting on the bench.

Although dont panic, if you dont understand a word here; this post wasn’t even necessary. But WTH! Following figure will help you understand & google will take care of rest.

All new favicon for our site & blogging network!

Pranav — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 04:15:20 +0000

Yeah, I’m really excited to finally put favicon/logo for this blog, parent site and all blogging network.

favicon

Notice that the picture is of five hands with “V” sign (sign of victory) together forming a star. A start team! ~~ ah! enough of philosophy~~

This jpg picture I could convert into ico file using a fantastic site called favicon.co.uk, where you can convert picture files into icon files with any size you want. I chose 32×32.

So new start mark you can now see on top left of web browser or RSS contents feed.

There’s one more note I wanna share, in wordpress run blogs you have to upload favicon file in your theme’s main folder and on root directory, so that you can have it appeared on your rss list too.

GMAT topic specific RSS feeds

Pranav — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 03:11:58 +0000

I merged my all blogs and made my GMAT strategy blog pretty diluted. I was aware of the loss I would face but I had to do it in order to make it simple. After the consolidation, my only concern was that I should at least give my visitors who come only for GMAT news the GMAT specific RSS feed. So that they dont have to subscribe to my non-sense posts.

There’s simple way to stay away from irrelevant posts of any wordpress blog or follow only specific topics. All you need is adding ‘/feed’ to its category. That means, if you want to follow my marathon related posts only, you can simply subscribe to http://pranav.amrute.me/topic/marathon/feed

So ideally, all my visitors who just want GMAT related posts should subscribe to beating GMAT & beyond category.

But if you’re not sort of techie, you probably would have ended up subscrbing whole blog. Well, I’m sorry that I didn’t post it before, it’s something that I should have mentioned first after merging other blogs with GMAT stuff. Anyways, on the right column can you see cartoon of the man seating on the bench reading my RSS feed? OK, now I’m changing it’s Feeds url to GMAT specific topics. So if you follow that man, you’ll get GMAT articles on your PC, without having to visit my site! (And this feed will be ad free! so enjoy the man seating on bench!)

beating GMAT & beyond to JLTB

Pranav — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 18:06:07 +0000

If you’re a regular visitor or even visited this blog in past at least once/twice, you’d notice that I have changed my blog’s name from Beating GMAT & beyond.

As you might know this blog is inspiration from Beat The GMAT blog & I liked its title too, infact it was the title of that blog that attracted me on the first look! Sigh!! it’s 2005 I am talking about! & when I thought of making a GMAT related blog I want something similar name yet I wanted to address beyond GMAT topics as well. Hence the name

Now you can guess where we’re heading… yeah since I moved this blog from blogger to wordpress (& my personal domain/website.) I’ve made it clear that this blog is not gonna be ‘only GMAT specific’ but I’d add some other stuffs along with my personal updates.

“Johny Learns to Blog” was my signature (yeah MLTR is my fav. you have problem? ) in one of the online forums later I must have changed it as I dont remember now where I’d used that line.

Now I’m in dilemma as should I use my real name? instead of Johny? It’ll be then “Pranav Learns To Blog” hows that sound?

leave a comment & tell me. Is JLTB is OK or should it be PLTB?

word of mouth ebook for grabs

Pranav — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:29:14 +0000

What I’m reading currently?

Well it’s not a regular book, it’s an e-book, yeah this is the first time I’m getting some success in reading an e-book.

Thats why they say “easy read”, I think the book is an easy read as I could read it; otherwise I’d made thousands of attempts reading several ebooks but I somehow never read more than 10 pages of any ebook.
Word of mouth Manual

As you can guess from its title the book is about viral marketing or below the line marketing/advertising The book is easy read, written is plain English (avoided jargons). I liked the tone of this book it has subtle humor which you’d enjoy if you know what exactly author wants to convey.

This is offset to my blog title & not at all related to GMAT, but as I hinted some time back I want to make this blog more general and want to write about other topics I like… (so I would gradually reduce the font size of GMAT phrases in tag cloud ) haha, that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop or reduce writing GMAT related articles, matter of fact it’s not going to get affected. I’d rather fill the gap between my articles and increase my posting frequency. Thats the point. … anyways enough of personal comments. I think I should add a ‘now reading’ category or tags now.

Actually I wanted to share it using Scribd, it’s ready preview feature so wouldn’t have to acutally download it. But they thought it to be inappropriate to upload such document so I had to upload it on my website server. It’s a shareware so feel free to distribute it to your network if you liked it.

time to add spam filter

Pranav — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 05:43:23 +0000

oops, this morning spam bots attacked my blog… I’ve been delaying/postponing adding spam filter pluggin.
But it’s high time I just deleted some 50 spam comments. Akismet is inbuilt (?) spam filter for wordpress so I am going for that.
Good that I moved to wordpress blogging now. It’s easier for humans and makes things difficult for robots

Theme modified

Pranav — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 13:04:54 +0000

Can you see the colour combination and looks changed?
Yeah I modified the theme that I have been using. I made a lot of changes, made according to my needs.
& it actually taught me a bit of php I am so happy now as I didn’t give this project to some designer or developer. I must confess it was (is) time-consuming but it’s fun. There’s still a lot to be done … lot of content building is due…especially at the parent site

Google friend connect

Pranav — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 20:09:26 +0000

Playing with my blog is my past-time-hobby ( & I must confess I play more, blog less ). In past I had made lot of efforts to make this blog more interactive & today I am introducing a new feature in the blog.

Yes, you can see the new box on the right column & see some people already joined it. & did I tell it’s Day 1 of this blog… (Obviously I asked them to join ) check this short and quick video to find out what exactly I am talking about:

Google Friend Connect is not just new for my blog but it’s new for the internet. It’s recently launched and has much to evolve. I’ll make it more interactive, may be enable facility to make comments or give 5 star ratings etc. But that depends on how this box grows at this site.

It’s in a way a small online/virtual social networking among the visitors of this site. So what are you waiting for? hit the “Join” button. If you’re a regular visitor, just do it. If you think you’re not gonna visit this site again, just do it leaving your footprints. Yeah, both ways “join” it’s hassle free. Now why I encourage you to join because it needs no-registration. All you need is already-existing-id with one of the big players: GMail, Yahoo or AOL. thats it.

It’s competition to mybloglog but I think google went a step ahead in terms of features, though they launched it later…

socialme

Pranav — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 06:54:08 +0000

I have just added “My profiles” item in the sidebar. Can you see it in middle column? yeah, thats right. Thats all my other profiles. You can see the the “& more“ which lauch this page:

yes that means I can add some sites in the list or can remove some depending upon your choice. Obviously I’ve made that list for your convenience so if there’s no-one among my readers visit LinkedIn, there’s no point in listing it here. Also if large percent of you have MySpace account I can add my link in the list. Got my point?

So do comment & let me know if you think I should edit this link.. whichever social network or forum among the listed you’re associated with , feel free to add me there…

See you later