It is almost 3 months since I wrote anything on this blog! I almost forgot that I had this blog It is another year and let me restart this blog. You see, that is my new year resolution

I have been exploring couple of new stuff recently. I have been neck deep in Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Ruby is a very compact and expressive language. More importantly, the code you write in Ruby style automatically appears elegant.

On the rails, I have mixed feelings. From the initial look, rails looks a lot more productive than say J2EE. But when it comes to a large project development, I don’t see much of a difference. The productivity in Web applications is more dependent on your team than the technology you choose!

Talking about productivity, another tool I have been exploring is the Yahoo’s User Interface toolkit (YUI). This is a great way to add AJAX capabilities to your Web application. I have been developing server side components based on these and it turned out be real good. The documentation is pretty good but there is still scope for improvement.

On the J2EE front, the new Struts framework (Struts2) is getting stable. I think the upcoming version 2.1 is perfectly suited for any Web application you are planning in future. One feature of Struts2 is the out of the box support for portlets. If you are planning on a large enterprise application suite, portlets is the way to go.

What is the easiest way to blogging stardom? Here are some suggestions,

1. Follow John Chow and become an ‘evil’ blogger.

2. Follow Amit Agarwal and become a ‘useful’ blogger.

3. Follow Seth Godwin and become a ‘non-stop’ blogger.

If everything above fails, start a blog on “daily blogging tips”.

This post is part of Daniel’s group writing project called “3″.

I am so addicted to setting up domains, blogs and other stuff that I created another blog! The idea is to keep this blog as a personal blog and move all the technical stuff and programming stuff to the new blog. So naturally posting frequency on this blog will come down.

Check out my new technology/programming blog. You can subscribe it here.

Looking at it again, I think I am beginning to get a kick out of creating all the “About” pages. It is amazing how much an “ego” booster it can be

PixelPost is a photo blogging platform based on PHP and MySQL. It is much better than WordPress if your intention is to host photos only. In this page you will find my work on PixelPost.

PixelPost Themes

Simple Reloaded 1.1 (XHTML compliant) - This is an enhanced version of the simple theme included in the default PixelPost installation. Comments are inline and navigation appears at the bottom of the image. The theme is designed to host photos which are 640 pixels wide (my requirement). Check out my photo blog to see this theme in action!

Some of you would have already noticed the new photo blog link on this site. This photo blog is powered by PixelPost, a CMS exclusively for photo bloggers. It is pretty easy to setup and like WordPress, you can customize it using themes. For my blog, I have taken the “simple” theme and modified it a bit to have comments on the same page. I have named the changed theme as “simple reloaded for PixelPost” and it is released under the license  Creative Commons Attribution 2.5.

Photos are a very powerful medium. Every photo tells a story and for the photographer it is a very intimate story! These photographs will give a glimpse of my life.

WP Google Page Rank Display plugin can be used to show off your Page Rank anywhere on your WordPress blog.  Page Rank is displayed as an image which can be replaced by your own version if needed. Page Rank value is cached for 24 hours and hence there is no load on the Google servers or on your blog.

If you want to apply styles to the page rank image, you can override css style “img_jj_pr“. This ensures that the style is applied only to the page rank image. Following is an example,

.img_jj_pr  {

border:none;

}

This  plugin is released under GPL license.

Important : This is tested only on WordPress 2.1+ versions. Please contact me if you came across any problems with earlier versions.

DOWNLOADING

Download WP Google Page Rank Display Plugin 1.0 | Download Page Rank Image Library (optional)

INSTALLATION

1. Upload to your plugins folder, usually wp-content/plugins/ and unzip the file, it will create folder jj_google_pr and all files required inside it. This includes images subfolder.

2. Activate the plugin on the plugin screen.

3. Now open the WordPress template file where you want to add the Page Rank display. In my case I use sidebar.php. Add the following line to the place of display,

<?php @jj_google_pr(); ?>

4. Customize the image CSS properties by adding CSS style img_jj_pr in your stylesheet.

5. If you want to change the default images provided, you can replace the images inside images subfolder of jj_google_pr.

DEMO PAGE

In this blog, you can find the plugin in action on the right side bottom. Unfortunately as of April 7, 2007 I have a Page Rank of zero!

DONATE

If you like this plugin and would like to donate something, please donate your prayers. Next time when you pray, think about “Jayson Joseph Chacko”. 

Welcome to my WordPress code library. In this page,  you will find various WordPress plugins and themes created by me. You will also find various WordPress tutorials and articles written by me.

WordPress Plugins

WP Google Page Rank Display - This plugin can be used to display your Google Page Rank in the blog. The Page Rank is cached on a daily basis and hence is an improved plugin compared to other plugins out there. Page Rank display can be easily customized by using a different image set!

Google Blog Search Preview - This is a very simple plugin which shows you a preview of Google blog search links for your blog! This appears on the Dashboard at the bottom of the activity section.

Google Blog Search Preview is a simple plugin for Wordpress which displays incoming links from Google Blog Search. This is similar to Technorati incoming links and hence is displayed on the Activity tab of WordPress Dashboard.

I found that Google Blog Search sometimes shows me inbound links which are not yet detected by Technorati. Hence this plugin! This plugin uses “link:” feature of Google Blog Search to identify incoming links.

This  plugin is released under GPL license.

Important : This is tested only on WordPress 2.1+ versions. Please contact me if you came across any problems with earlier versions.

DOWNLOADING

Download Google Blog Search Preview 1.1 | Download as text file

INSTALLATION

1. Upload to your plugins folder, usually wp-content/plugins/ and unzip the file, it will create jj_gblogsearch.php file.

2. Activate the plugin on the plugin screen.

3. Go to WordPress Dashboard and verify that incoming links from Google Blog Search are displayed at the bottom of activity section.

SAMPLE SCREENSHOT

CHANGE LOG

1. Released 1.0 on 1st April 2007 (PHP 5 only)
2. Released 1.1 on 17th April 2007 (PHP 4 and PHP 5 support)

Following is a set of notes I made during my study of PHP programming language. This assumes that you are familiar with one of the OOP languages (Java, C++ or C#). I hope this would be really helpful if you are looking for a 10 minute quick tutorial for PHP!

0. Starting PHP development

1. Introduction to PHP

2. PHP types and variables

3. Control structures and functions in PHP

4. Object oriented programming in PHP

In this page you will find all the tutorials I have written in my blog. All the posts are grouped here based on the topic. This is continously updated so stay tuned for more tutorials!

1. PHP Notes for a practising programmer

First of all, I am sorry if the title was insulting. But I couldn’t find a better title than it for what I am going to say!

Some of you would have already noticed the presence of Google Adsense on this blog. The primary aim of this blog is not to make money, but at the same time I hoped that it would atleast cover my hosting expenses ($100 a year).

Now here is the interesting part. This blog is completing 2 months this week. So far I had around 1800 page views as you can see from the following Google Analytics report. I know, it is pretty low compared to A-list blogs, but still I was expecting some earnings from these impressions.

Next let us look at my Google Adsense earnings from this site. There is no surprise there! - It is a total of $0.00!

Now frankly this is very discouraging. But I know adsense does work. As you can see, guys like John Chow (a nasty guy who would probably bring down the whole internet!) and Amit Agarwal does make sacks of dollar notes every month. So what is the reason why I am not getting any adsense revenue?

I did a bit of research and I think there are mainly two reasons for this,

1. I don’t have enough ad units on the page. Some think that having less ads gives more money. In my blog, I don’t think it works!

2. The most important reason I think is that most of my blog readers are intelligent. Even those who come to this site via Google search are pretty intelligent. I guessed it from what my readers are searching to reach this blog.

So in order to get more advertising money, I need to gather an audience which is less intelligent. If I could get an army of idiots coming to this site, I am sure my adsense income will skyrocket!

I think the easiest way to do that would be to write about Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and American Idol. Don’t worry I have no such plans, yet.

This blog is powered by Wordpress blogging software installed on a dreamhost machine. Dreamhost is an employee owned Web hosting service and is popular with bloggers. Dreamhost offers “one click installs” for a lot of Web applications and Wordpress is one of them.

Within a week of Wordpress 2.1 release, Dreamhost has enabled an auto upgrade link! With a single click I could upgrade my existing Wordpress 2.0.5 installation to Wordpress 2.1. Before upgrading, I did take a backup of my blog (there was nothing much in it :)), but the upgrade went through without any issues.

But then I noticed that there were some database errors under the category link. First I thought it was due to some error in the upgrade script. But looking closer, I found that the problem was with theme I was using! Interestingly, Wordpress 2.1 release broke a lot of themes out there and mine was one of them. It was to be expected since 2.1 release had major changes.

And hence I switched to the typoxp theme. It appears to be an ideal 3 column theme for a “text heavy” blog.

When I started this blog, I thought I will write about technical topics. But after a gap of 1 month I am back to blogging and decided to expand the topic to “Jayson’s Thoughts” which will also include technical topics. I, like many of the bloggers, suffer from “bloggers block” time to time!

Who is Jayson?

My full name is Jayson Joseph Chacko. I was born in Thodupuzha (a small town in Kerala, India) and spent most of my early days in Kannur.  I belong to the Narimattom family. Later I shifted to Trivandrum where I completed my electrical engineering degree.

After graduation, I joined TCS, Delhi and spent about 3 years there. Later I shifted to TCS, Chennai and finally in December 2005, I moved to Trivandrum.  During my stay outside Kerala, I had visited UK, Netherlands and Denmark on official deputation. Currently I am working in Infosys Technologies Ltd, Trivandrum.

I am a geek and I love programming and driving. Also I spent lot of time on internet (only thing my wife doesn’t appreciate!).

I have a lovely wife and a cute daughter and my parents also stay with me.

About this blog 

This blog is hosted on dreamhost and is powered by Wordpress. You can subscribe to my posts using RSS feed (powered by FeedBurner) or through email. The relevant links are available in the META section on the right sidebar.
 

Disclaimer

Please note that all opinions expressed in this blog are my personal opinions and it has no relation to my work or my company.