ReviewSaurus – Technology Rocks!

For those of you using a Linux OS, you might have wanted to start a particular program or application at start up – when you login.

Windows has a StartUp folder, and placing a shortcut there does the job. What about Linux?

This is something I have done on my setup – Ubuntu Feisty Fawn. But I am sure that it is available in other Linux distribution, because it is a reminiscent of Unix.

Here is what you need to do. Go to the home folder, and edit your login’s .profile file. In Ubuntu, the steps would be as follows:

(There is a easy way in Ubuntu. Skip the steps and read the end of the post).

1. Application > Accessories > Terminal
2. Open the file in VI Editor.
   vi .profile
   You can use any editor that you are comfortable with.
3. Go to the end of the file.
   [Shift]+g
   If the .profile was never changed after the install, then just follow these steps. But if you had edited it, then you know what we are doing. We are just going to the end of the file where all the environment setups are completed.
4. Enter the command-line syntax of the application. Every Linux application has one. For me, I wanted to fire up the IM client.
   gaim &
   That fires up the GAIM. The ‘&’ is to specify it to make it a background process.
5. Save it.
   [Esc]
:wq
[Enter]
   That is it. Next time you login, the application you specified would have started up. You can choose any application you want and if you have more than one application to be put on startup, put them on separate lines.

In Ubuntu, there is a simpler way. Go to System > Preferences > Sessions. Then, with the ‘Startup Programs’ as the selected tab, click on Add. Give the name and command, and hit OK. You are done.

So, why do we need to know the hard way when there is a simpler solution? Well, the GUI setup does not have facility to order startups of more than one application. By working with the .profile, you have much more programmatic control over it.

Update :  Andy has shared with us the tip to do the above mentioned task (i.e. configuring startup programs) in Kubuntu and most likely these steps will work with any KDE. Here are the steps mentioned by Andy.

PS: To find more posts by Vyoma, visit Splat and KalaaLog.com.

This is a part of the Blog Topic Idea series.

This is something I have been following to retain the stray thoughts that come to my mind.

The human brain is one creative machine with all its interconnected synapses.  But it is real bad at retaining those weird ideas. 

Make it a habit to note down everything that comes to your mind when you are awake.  (If you can write when you are asleep, make it 24×7)  Make it easier to record them.  You need not write out the full text – just some stray words should suffice.  You can use an online method but I would advice against it.  A small notebook should be good, as you are not always hooked on to the internet.

Every week, go through your notes and you will find a lot many things to write about.  Complement this with the other tips, and you will turn into an idea generating machine. :)

This is a part of the Blog Topic Idea series.

This is something I have been using lately.  It is not something ground breaking – but if you use the right tools, it can save you a lot of hassles wading through a lot of feeds in your feed reader.

You already will be having feeds to established blogs in your feed reader.  But there will be a lot of blogs, and it can be a pain reading through all of them.  Luckily for us, there are quite a lot of tools out there that can do most of the mechanical work for us.

Let me go by example of how I use this technique to generate topic ideas for my art blog, KalaaLog.com.

Among other things, “digital painting” is a key phrase that is very relevant to this blog.  I go to Google Blog Search and Technorati search, and pop in this key phrase.  They give me results, but what I am interested in is the feed to that result.  If you are a bit less geeky than me, you can just use these feeds as it is.

But I went ahead and did a few more things with these feeds. I used the Yahoo Pipes to do some more of the mechanical works for me.  I created a pipe, that took these feeds, aggregated them, filtered them for spammy words (you know them, don’t you?) and then sorted them by publish date.  The result is not as glamorous as I want, but it is workable.  I take the feed of the output of this pipe and use it in my choice of feedreader.

I just schedule a time of day as per my convenience and sift through them.  By end of it, I have my head filled with topic ideas.

This is a part of the Blog Topic Idea series.

This tip will convince you, if not for other reasons, that you should analyze your traffic.  It will help you get topic ideas.

I use Google Analytics for all my sites, and for Wordpress driven blogs, I use the Wordpress.com Stats Plugin.  When I need to get new blog topic ideas, I go to the search terms that were used to land into your sites.

You will notice that most of the search terms will be a ‘bulls eye’ target on your blog posts.  But you will also notice that there are many misfires.  Some of the misfires are quite stupid and are not usable.  (’How to make apple pie’ landing on your Mac blog).  Some others are with in your niche but it would be a tiny part of one of your blog post.

Collect all such misfired search phrase, and write blog posts around them. 

For example, here is a misfired search phrase that lands them at KalaaLog.

I have no blog post specific to that, and I am working on writing a blog post targeted at that.

The logic behind choosing these misfired searches is that you know there are people looking for information on them.  And it is quite probable that the specific topic would be useful for your readers since it is already with in your niche.

It does not matter what analytics you use.  But be aware of all the search terms that lead to your site, and it can give you a lot of topic ideas.

This is a part of the Blog Topic Idea series.

The comment section can be a treasure trove for getting topic ideas. Every now and then, one of your blog posts would garner a lot of comments. This shows that your readers care more about that particular part of your niche more than the rest. This is quite an obvious hint that you should elaborate and write more about it.

Also, a post loaded with comments, gives you more than a handful of perspectives for a particular topic. These individual perspectives can themselves be blog post on their own.

For example, at KalaaLog, I wrote a blog posts: No More Photoshop – Use GIMP. I got a lot of comments there – and they were in depth views of the readers. Just reading through those comments, I could make out some of the strong points that people raise to justify piracy, and it was quite easy for me to write another spin off – Top 3 Reasons To Pirate Photoshop.

I guess there will be some new bloggers who think that they cannot use this tip. You see – I said Reader Comments – and they may not be readers of your blog. Go ahead, and look at other established blogs in your niche. See which one got more comments that the other posts and you can apply the same technique.