IndiBlogger – Development blog

This is a beginner to mid level blogger tutorial – on how to add the IndiRank widget to your blogspot blog in 6 easy steps . I hope it helps

1. Login to www.blogger.com and click on ‘Layout’ under your blog as shown in pic.

1. In the resulting page, click on Add Gadget from the sidebar where you would like to display your Indi Rank Widget. See pic below:

1. You will get a pop-up where you can choose the gadget to add to your sidebar. Select HTML/Javascript gadget by clicking on the ‘+’ sign to the right of the gadget title. See picture below:

1. Now, keep these web pages open and log in to www.indiblogger.in. Then you need to visit the IndiRank page and select the widget from http://www.indiblogger.in/widgets_indirank_customize.php. To copy left click inside white box and then CTRL+C on your keyboard. Picture below:

1. Come back to the pop-up window where you would see a place to enter the title of the widget and also a large space for entering the code. In the larger area paste the earlier copied code from IndiBlogger.in by pressing CTRL+V on your keyboard.

   Then click on ‘SAVE’. As in picture below:

1. And Voila’ your blogspot blog can now show the IndiRank widget. Follow same procedure for other widgets and badgets too.

Cheers and all the best!!!

Our Christmas update is here – albeit a few days late!

Our last two Christmas updates were blogger meets in 2007 and the forum in 2008. Considering how successful both these features became, we sure did have a lot of pressure to come up with something really useful. Thankfully, as always, there were bloggers who came to the rescue and told us what they needed. The discussion evolved into a plan, and the plan evolved into our latest feature, IndiMail.

If you’re thinking “who needs another email service?”, allow us to clarify. IndiMail is not a wannabe replacement for Gmail, nor does it provide you with an email address. It’s a simple, private, 1-to1 messaging system that bloggers can use to communicate with each other, similar to the messaging on Facebook . IndiMail can only be sent between bloggers who are on each other’s networks, giving the networking feature a greater purpose than before.

Here’s a screen capture of my inbox with a couple of messages from Anwin, our team’s tattooed bug-finder.

But wait, there’s more!

• We’ve revamped our homepage.
• We’ve made an all-new dashboard. You can use it as a starting place for all your IndiBlogger activity.
• The ETA of the next IndiRank update is now shown on the dashboard.
• Mutual connections are now shown separately on the network as well as directory pages.
• A little email icon now sits beside the mutual connection icon; allowing bloggers to easily send messages to people in their network.
• Notifications are now sent when a post on IndiVine gets a vote.
• An updated settings page allows you to control the alerts you receive from IndiBlogger.
• Fixed an error on the IndiRank stats page: if a new user who doesn’t have a rank as yet tries to access the stats, it used to say that there was an error with the blog’s feed.

We owe a big thank you to Sudama and all the others on the forum who gave us their support and made IndiMail possible. IndiBlogger would be nothing but a simple directory if it wasn’t for all of you.

We hope you all had a great Christmas, and we wish you an awesome year ahead.

Keep blogging!

Renie & The IndiBlogger Team

After completing the successful upgrade to IndiVine, we got down to the next task in our list – the big IndiRank updgrade. Apart from several small bug fixes and performance tweaks, all bloggers who have an IndiRank can now view detailed stats about their blogs under their account.

The new dashboard will tell you:

• If we were able to crawl your feed properly
• Your IndiRank history
• Your Pagerank performance and history
• Your Alexa performance and history
• How often you blog
• Tips on how you can improve your IndiRank

Of course, this dashboard is still pretty basic, and will be updated based on community feedback. Hope you all find it useful!

One major bug that some of you wrote to us about has been squished; the bug where a newly approved IndiBlogger doesn’t find his/her blog in the directory until the IndiRank crawler hits their blog. Now bloggers will find themselves on our homepage the second that they are approved – just like old times.

We’re pleased to announce a major feature addition to IndiBlogger- the completely revamped IndiVine.

IndiVine originally started as a knee jerk reaction to the Mumbai terror attacks, as a collection of blog posts on the crisis and it’s aftermath. In fact, the original IndiVine was built in a day and had more than 100 posts before the Taj stopped burning. Since then, we added more topics to IndiVine such as the “Pink chaddi campaign”, the elections and the Tata Nano. IndiVine in it’s present avatar is a direct result of the collaboration among bloggers on the forum, where Vipul Grover and all the usual suspects decided how it should be in order to help the Indian blogging community. Now bloggers can submit their blog posts to virtually any category, and vote for the most deserving blog posts.

The IndiVine voting system is integrated with IndiRank, where a vote for a higher ranking blog gets more weightage.

We hope IndiVine is a useful tool for bloggers and readers alike!

Friends, Bloggers and Countrymen – we’re pleased to announce the launch of IndiRank, an automated system to identify the best blogs in the Indian blogosphere.

IndiRank is a system we built to rank the blogs in the IndiBlogger network. Although we manually verify every blog before it’s allowed into the network, the IndiRank system is completely automated.

Using IndiRank, the IndiBlogger community will choose one blogger every month to be the “IndiBlogger of the Month“. The final winner will be chosen by the bloggers on our forum. The “IndiBlogger of the Month” will receive the following:

• A plethora of prizes sponsored by Microsoft, of which the winner gets to pick one that they want the most. Check out the prizes here.
• Promotion across the IndiBlogger network
• A custom designed badge for their blog

Read our FAQs for more info, join us on the forum to talk about it and as always,  send us your feedback!

Friends, bloggers and ice cream lovers! IndiBlogger.in now comes to you in three flavors.

Use this button at the top of any page to select your theme:

We have the original blue, the new Indi-Red, and a theme for those days when you feel… well, a bit dark.

Send us your feedback, and let us know which theme you like the best on the forum.

http://www.indiblogger.in

It’s time for another special post, where we thank our bloggers for the support, encouragement and enthusiasm they have shown. At the time of writing this post, the IndiBlogger forum we launched 2 weeks ago has over a hundred topics and 400 replies.

As a techie, I’ve noticed that the average Indian who frequents various forums only does so to seek help – and does not do much to help others. I’m glad to say that Indian bloggers are different, cause the spririt shown on the forum is simply inspiring!

Special thanks goes to the most active bloggers on the forum: Sriharsha, Amitabh, Binaryday, Shanker, Ram, Ankit, Kabeeranban, Debajyoti, Pavan and Archit. Your ideas and suggestions which resulted in several new features to the forum will benefit the Indian blogging community for a long time to come.

Here are a few excerpts from the forum:

“We need to have a nice blog ranking system only for Indian Blogs. Then we can have beautiful badges to show off our rankings too!”

“The quality of discussion is the best I have ever found on any forum. But how do we bring in more people to participate here?”

“Renie, I would like an e-mail to be generated if someone responds to a thread that I am interested in. Basically, a small box appears at the bottom of each thread and I should be able to check it, if I want a trigger (similar to Xing, if you are aware of that platform).”

“For me, I love this forum because it is the only one that allows me to communicate with other bloggers. For a change I do not feel like an alien or rather as I said earlier, I feel like an alien in a land of aliens ”

“But what I would really like to see is the time spent by each visitor as a factor in the popularity besides the ratio of comments to posts. Thus, popularity = function of (no. of hits, duration of stay per visit, ratio of comments to post).”

“Some Blog collection sites allow readers to ‘rate’ blogs (5-stars or Thumbs up & down). This does come with the risk of ballot-stuffing. Note that ranking of blogs is also subject to the power-law behaviour (i.e. the rich-get-richer). In other words, only the highly rated blogs get read and continue to be rated.”

“Well, I like this forum because, this is the first place I’m feeling “at home”. All other forums didnt appeal to me so much so as to post more than 2 or 3 threads.”

What more can I say? Go on and check out the forum!

Thank you, dear IndiBlogger!

Our Christmas update is here again!

Last Christmas, we announced the launch of blogger meets on IndiBlogger, aside from a number of bug fixes. This time around, we’ve just launched our discussion forum for all of you Indian Bloggers in the IndiBlogger community. We think it’s the perfect place for bloggers to:

• Help out and inspire new bloggers
• Connect with other bloggers over shared interests and social causes
• Discuss ethical issues such as plagiarism
• Get feedback from the community on your blog’s design, content and strategy
• Promote yourself as a blogger within the community
• Exchange tips on monetization and SEO

Also, since only registered bloggers can post topics or replies – no spam! (Fingers crossed)

Besides the forum, we’ve replaced the old Tag, Name, City and Google search boxes with a single search box that achieves the purpose of all four. Internally, this somehow became known as the “4 in 1 update”!

As always, please do send us any bugs you may encounter, or any ideas you may have which would help IndiBlogger.in do it’s thing a little better.

The big difference between this year and the last – we’re going to refrain from the usual Xmas wishes. We have not forgotten Mumbai.

Start a new topic at the discussion forum now >

Join the IndiCommunity!