Recently I found out that LiveJournal has started asking for code number to become a member of the community. This is the only reason I have to drop this site from my favorites.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/shantanuo/
Other websites I am dropping now after testing are...
http://teenopendiary.com/
http://www.freeopendiary.com/

I have also found out that pitas is very easy to use and is one step ahead of free website hosts like geocities or tripod. It has made publishing easy. But it is not the "blog" site in its true cense. Therefore
http://shantanuo.pitas.com
is not in the top sites list either.

http://oksoft.qlogger.com
is added to the list. It has almost all features one might look for while creating his blog. OnClave was almost out of my favorites list. But I had to add it again since the e-mail to post feature seems to have started working again.

http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=shantanuo
Xanga is a new entrant in the list of community blogs.

You don't need to learn complex password protection using JavaScript or PHP. If you want to access the confidential information and if you are accessing it from a particular location that has a static IP address, then the life can be much easy. I access the net from my home. I have an IP address 202.63.174.20 I found it out by googling "what is my IP address?" This IP doesn't change. If you are using dial up then the next time when you connect to your ISP, it will allocate you a new IP. In that case this tip won't work.
I have created a .htaccess file with following code and I will put it in the directory that I want to protect. If I put it at the root, my entire site will become private, intranet sort of!
(Limit GET)
order Deny,Allow
Deny from all
Allow from 202.63.174.20
(/Limit)

The script (change the ( with <) will deny access to all except the one mentioned above to the directory and sub directories below it.If my IP address is shared by more than one computer (and that is possible since unique IP is very costly)then all those computers have access to the directory. This limitation is actually a blessing for small and medium size companies. Since everyone in the company is using the company network that has a single unique IP address, you can make information available to everyone in your company without providing access to the world. Thus you can create an ultra user friendly protected directories or site without writing a single line of code!

You can use Favorites Menu or quick launch toolbar near Start button.
Visit the site you will like to add to quick launch toolbar and then drag the address to the toolbar by clicking and dragging the icon that looks like a piece of paper with the Internet Explorer logo on it in the Address field to the toolbar. Now right click on the newly created shortcut and change the icon or set a shortcut like Ctrl + Alt + y for yahoo.
You can also increase the size of the icons (view-large) and have the name of shortcut written next to it (show text). Just right click anywhere in the blank space of the quick launch toolbar to change it's appearance!

How to Check If You Have the Microsoft VM
To determine if you have the Microsoft VM installed on your computer:
If you are running Microsoft Windows 98 or Windows Millennium Edition (Windows Me)

• click Start, and then click Run
• Type: command
• At the command prompt, type: jview

If you'd prefer to use Favorites instead of an address book to organize your email, do this:
In Internet Explorer, click on Favorites and Add to Favorites. Type the addressee's name in the Add Favorite dialog box and click OK. Then, right click on the newly added Favorite and select Properties. Replace the information in the URL text box with "mailto:" (without the quotes) followed by the email address and click OK. Selecting this favorite now opens the email composition window with the desired email address already entered. Go one step further by right clicking on the new Favorite, select Send to and clicking on Desktop to place the Favorite as an icon on your desktop. For even greater convenience, right click on the desktop icon and assign a shortcut key in the space provided.

Craig Silverstein, director of technology Google, presented his thoughts on "Google, Innovation, and the Web" at O'Reilly Emerging Tech Conference 2003 held at Santa Clara, CA April 22-25, 2003.

Part I
He explained the process at google:

• Good ideas can come from anywhere inside and outside the company.
• Design for users: The beginner should be able to use your site easily. Getting the Google frontpage as simple as it is takes a lot of effort.
• Compile, discuss, prioritize. We keep a list of the 230+ projects that Google would like to do. We keep a list of what's important and in some vague priority order, lets us focus on our whole mission.
• Small teams, fast and agile: every product has a 3-person team that owns it from start to finish, design coding testing launching and maintenance. Two people -- Jillzilla and Kingston -- run the crawl, the billions of pages spidered by Google!

• We use Sparrow, a Wiki-like tool from PARC, that allows *anyone* in the company to add ideas to the list of to-dos
• Product discussion forums: brainstorm new ideas from Sparrow.
• People in the company do weekly TechTalks (which are archived) that describe the projects -- if you inherit a project, you can review it later.
• We have search tools for our internal site -- i.e., we google Google.
• We have signoff-checklists on our site what need to be checked off by everyone in the chain before a new project is launched.
• We use internal blogs to communicate.

Googling for a keyword is easy. Type "saddam Husain" and click on search. But what if you want to find what does the sites like cnn or bbc say about saddam? Each of them have their own search facility. But I don't have time to use the sites' search one by one. So I type Saddam Husain site:bbc.co.uk OR site:cnn.com OR site:news.com OR site:nytimes.com OR site:timesofindia.com to find more info only from those sources. Google, unfortunately, doesn't let you construct queries that are longer than 10 words long, which means that you can't search more than 9 sites at a time. Yahoo and All The Web both support searching through as many sites as you want.

How do I stop users from hitting the submit button twice?
Use the JavaScript code...

(BUTTON ID="tuition" onclick="javascript:document.getElementById('tuition').disabled=true") Charge My Account!(/BUTTON)

Here are a few reasons...

• Its fast: The home page as well as searches are very fast.
• Relevant results: The first result is normally what you are looking for. You will hardly need to go to the second page!
• Simple design: There are a very few links and graphics on google home page as well as search page.
• Focus on search: Google is search. It's not a portal. At a time when all the websites were trying to provide everything (for e.g. mail, calendar) google focused on search. It was a risk, but it worked.

There are some reviews those say that google name itself has helped to create the brand. I don't agree. I have seen many people typing the wrong spelling to reach to google. for e.g. goggle.com, goglee.com

Thus the "confusing name" is the weak point of google. Now Yahoo has refrained it's search to take on google. It has introduced a new Yahoo! search on April 8, 2003.
http://search.yahoo.com/
Revolutionary concept:
Users can now save their preferences through their Yahoo! ID to use Yahoo! Search the way they want from any computer. for e.g. if I normally search for english pages and open search results in a new window, I will set it up in the preferences. Now whenever I search (while logged in) I will get the english pages only.
This revolutionary step towards user identification will immensely help yahoo to provide more relevant results. And I think this is going to be the next wave on the net after google.
Yahoo knows too much about me. My birth date, location, credit card number all is there in the yahoo database. Now all they need to do is find out the pattern of search queries by saving all what I am looking for. Try to learn what I mean and don't just throw results based on keywords typed.
Is it difficult? Not at all! Let's see if yahoo is willing to do it.

You don't learn from your mistakes. You learn from the experience that you get while doing something. If the outcome is not favorable then it's called a mistake! In fact there no such "mistake" possible, therefore no question of repenting!