Best Wishes In This New Year - 2011

At the dawn of year 2011, I wish you all (readers of All about Linux blog) a very happy and prosperous year :-).

Linux Help blog gets a fresh new look

Your favorite blog on Linux - "All about Linux" has been overhauled and given a fresh lease of life through a massive redesign. The design is unique to this site as I have built it from scratch. Compare the old design with the new one in the images below and gauge for yourself which one you like better.

Linux is used by Hollywood extensively to create movies.

A few features worth noting of this new design

• Stress has been given to minimalism. There are very few images.This translates to faster loading of the web page. I am a sucker for minimalist web designs with plenty of white space.
• The design is devoid of tables. In fact, the number of tables you will find on this site (design wise) are zilch ... Nada.
• The site uses Google Custom Search which helps a visitor to this blog find what he is looking for very fast. And the search is prominently displayed at the upper right corner of the site.
  
  Try it out, it is really good. You can search through over a 1000 articles on this site.
• Non-English speaking visitors to this site can read the articles in their language of choice through the Google Translate widget displayed on the right hand side.
  
• I have even incorporated some of the best SEO practices into the design. Though it is early to say what effect (positive or negative) these changes will have on the site traffic.
• The "Do you Know?" box - an optional feature, allows me to prominently displays some data and links not related to the parent post.
• All the javascript (or most of it) has been moved to the bottom of the page as recommended by Google's webmaster guidelines.
• The site has a functional footer where some text is actually embedded.
  

The fine tuning is still in progress and will be done on a case by case basis. But the major work has been finished.

Can you share this blogger theme with the rest of us?

Well, I believe a unique design helps a site maintain its identity. Having said this, now that I have understood the process of designing a website, I might create further blogger designs which I promise to provide as a free download. Of course, anybody with some knowledge in CSS and HTML can easily figure out what I have accomplished here.

Please tell me what you like and what you don't about the new design of this site. All your opinions (critical or otherwise) are most welcome.

Introducing New Commenting System

Your favorite Linux and Open Source blog has gained a new commenting system. It will be in a test phase for some time before it will be made a permanent feature of this blog.

Taking into consideration the less than friendly and rather inflexible commenting system provided by blogger.com, I have always been on the lookout for a third party commenting system which I can integrate with this blog.

And I found the answer in Disqus.com which is a commenting system which is rich in features such as threading, easy moderation and integration with the template. So do tell me your thoughts on the new system of commenting. This new commenting system is enabled for posts starting with this one and the older posts will still retain all the comments and moderation that Blogger provides.

Of course if this doesn't work out, we always have the choice of rolling back to the original blogger way of commenting. Btw, I will be replying to comments as 'ravik' instead of 'ravi' because the user name ravi was already taken.

Introducing a new installation wiki in the neighbourhood

If you ask me to start naming some content management system, I can start with Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and so on and then will not know when to stop. Seriously, there are innumerable content management or blogging systems around. Someone told me that he started counting the blogging tools available in order to get an idea in numbers and he was still counting when he reached the number 200.

Now add to this backend programs such as databases and web servers which play a pivotal role in the working of CMSes and we have a whole lot of software on our hands. Keeping this huge mountain of software in mind, Packt Book publishers who are on the forefront in publishing books related to CMSes (they publish books related to other subjects too) has rolled out a new Wiki called InstallationWiki.org which caters to explaining how to install most of these software on your machine either locally or remotely. It has divided the tutorials into 8 broad categories namely "Open Source", "Content management systems", "Web development", Databases, Java, PHP, "Microsoft and .NET" and finally "Networking and telephony".

Already there are a growing number of tutorials and howtos mostly related to CMSes on this site. But considering that this is a Wiki, which anyone can edit, this project shows a lot of promise. Also one should keep in mind that the tutorials listed on the Wiki bear the seal of approval of Packt Books thus one can expect to find quality articles on this site. Do check out the article on PHPMyAdmin for instance to know what I mean... In the past, I have reviewed a couple of Packt books such as the one on Oscommerce ,IPCOP, Wordpress, Drupal and so on and I have found each of them to contain very useful information.

Buy two O'Reilly books and get another book free

O'Reilly is celebrating February 2007 as the Web Design and Development month. And they have put together a special resource page dedicated to web development essentials including books, PDF Short Cuts, articles, and author events.

The highlight of the event is the above average discounts they are providing for all these web development titles which includes a massive 35% off for each title you buy (use the code 'DSUG' on their site) and if you buy two titles, you get a third one free (use the discount code 'opc10'). It is one option or the other. You cannot obviously get 35% off and a free book simultaneously as the discount codes are different. But seeing the line up of books, I can only say that this is a good opportunity to pick up a couple of web development books. I especially find the "Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide" book rather tempting. Explore more web titles on the special resource page. There's also free ground shipping in the US on orders over $29.95.