Deep ka Blog

I attended Headstart even in Mumbai last Saturday. I was hoping to see really interesting startups but I was left pretty much wondering and thinking, why these guys start companies without even thinking about the future once. There were only couple of companies with proper business plan, rest of them lacked it. Many of the startups copied concepts from the international well established companies. I will list out some of the examples (without giving out the names obviously) of the so called startups with no plans ahead.

• There was were bunch of kids trying to start a website which will allow the users to setup websites in just few clicks. The concept was pretty good but their idea was broken, they decided to implement something social, where as a user will make template and share it with other users, so everyone can use it. I am not sure how practical it will be as the business model. Apart from this, they were not even ready for the alpha stage and they were having demo at the demo pit. In short, they were not “ready” yet..  They did not have clear picture of what they are going to do in the future. (And if they had, they could not convey it to me…)
• There was another team with the idea of making something on the basis of Getsatisfaction.com, again, no clear business plan, the voting manipulation wasn’t taken care of. The making money part wasn’t so promising at all.
• Another one was based on GetAFreelancer.com, again no proper business plan. There were no answers when I asked, there are plenty of other biggies providing same kind of services, why would people come to your site? Frankly, speaking, this guy was pretty much new to this and needed some boost, I gave him few ideas and if he works on those ideas, the things should work out for him. 
• There were many others, from something like Google docs / MS live document sharing clone, to some educational portal with great idea in mind but no proper planning etc..

I am not going to list them one by one but if you notice, everyone had some kind of base idea ready, be it based on any international site or not, but none of them had proper process lined up. No business model. Infact many of these guys never thought of any business model. They were like, we will see when things work out..

From what I understand, their thinking might be like.. we will make a good product and sell it off to any company and earn some good bucks.. (Well, I might be wrong too) But I don’t think this is what business all about… You need absolutely planning and clear picture keeping the worst conditions in mind. You should have a backup plan ready.

And most importantly, the high focus should be on money, profit.. you are spending lot of time over the project.. and for what? Social service? Just to make your name? Don’t you want your daily bread and butter? Think about money.. make a proper business plan and then just into so called startup bandwagon. If you don’t have any plans ready, I don’t think you have any right to start any business..

I know I know.. there will be people with examples like Twitter, Facebook etc.. but they all have a proper business plan, it is just that it’s been kept under the wraps and they are waiting for the right time…

I think people should not simply get into the hype of “startup” and all.. they need to sit, get back to the basic and make a plan, think about the future and think about the worst conditions.

That’s it.

Oh Yea, I am not any so called “startup guru” or anything. I am just a businessman. I understand money, profits, loss along with the great ideas. That’s it. So these are the things which always run in my mind and thought of sharing with everyone, so atleast some of the guys planning to do something new can get tips from this topic.

Okay, I have just spent 10+ hours on a single site, the site was for almost 12 hours.. It is basically a BuddyPress, BBPress and Wordpress MU installation. Everything was working fine so far but suddenly in the morning, the site stopped working. And since then, I have been banging my head on it to see what could be wrong.

First, I noticed around 3000 odd tables in the DB, thought it might be the reason (spambot attack) but later found out that this is how BuddyPress RC 1 behaves.. it creates 3 activity tables for each user.. and we have around 1400 users. (I figured it out quite late actually haha)

So, after spending numerous hours finding the issue, I got on to IRC channel of BuddyPress, got in touch with the user Burt (Burtadsit), We spent around 2 odd hours, tried out few things and then we moved on to the plugins section, disabled all the plugins, enabled every plugin one by one and finally found the issue.

The plugin Sexybookmarks was trying to connect to its server and the server was throwing back 500 error code (actually, 403 error, this means mostly mod_security rules are blocking it). So, our server was retrying or getting stuck and causing the page to load very slow.. (it used to take around 12 minutes to load the page).

Finally I traced the issue and fixed the things up.

So, the purpose of this post is to make you guys aware that, whenever you feel something wrong with your Wordpress installation, first thing you should do is, check the plugins. (Apart from the normal routine checks, DB check and all)

That’s it guys..

Cheers,
Deep

Note: If you wish to see detailed issue, you can check this thread on BuddyPress forums

I was working on a theme and wanted to display multiple link widgets (with options like display links from specific categories etc..) in the sidebar, since there was no option in Wordpress to do so, I was looking around on the net to display multiple links and luckily found this article on Twitter by SmashingMagazine.com and got to know about Wordpress Shortcodes. It was kind of heaven for me, as it was exactly what I wanted..

I started around playing with it and wrote a small piece of code to display multiple links in the widgets.

Here is how I did it…

First of all, add following code in the functions.php file of your theme

add_filter('widget_text', 'do_shortcode');

Above code will allow, Wordpress shortcodes to be called from the Widgets.

Now, you need to create a function which will contain the code for the links.

function show_links($atts) {
$show_links = "<ul>".wp_list_bookmarks($atts)."</ul>";
return $show_links;
}

add_shortcode('links', 'show_links');

Here, I have made a call to wp_list_bookmarks function and added shortcode called “links” for the same. I have customized the code according to my need. I am basically wrapping the list in <ul>. (Adding UL’s HTML code in the widget bar doesn’t seem to be working fine)

Once this is done, save the file, logon to your Wordpress admin panel, click on Widgets under themes, add a text widget and call your recently created shortcode:

[links title_li="" categorize="0" category="2" echo="0"]

In above shortcode, I am setting the title as blank, calling the links from the category ID 2 and setting the echo to 0, so that my wp_list_bookmarks does not echo the data (The data will be echoed from the variable show_links)

I guess, that’s about it.. I am sure, there might be better way to achieve the same results but at this point of time, I found this pretty simple, so implemented it.

I hope it helps

Also, do let me know, if you feel the code can be improved using different methods.

For past few hours I have been struggling to transfer a .co.uk domain from other registrar. I was in impression that the transfer process will be same as other TLDs (mainly .com) but to my surprise the process is very much different here.

This is how it works:

1. Contact your new registrar and ask for their IPSTAG – IPSTAG is basically a code which is given to every registrar.

2. Once you get that, login to your old registrar’s domain control panel, change the IPSTAG to the one provided by new registrar. This basically means that, you want to transfer away the domain name to your new registrar.

3. After this step, a transfer request will be sent to your old registrar, new registrar will also receive the same kind of request and it will mail back the security key to the domain holder. (This is an automated process – old registrar will approve the transfer and send details to new one, new registrar will send the secret key to you)

4. Once you receive the key, start the transfer process at your new registrar, put in the secret key you have..

5. Rest of the things are same as other TLDs.

That’s about it.. I hope it helps someone

HAHA another iPhone bashing post? LOL.. No, this is gonna simply outline features which will be useful for the normal users and will outline why you should buy iPhone and why you should not buy iPhone.. so, in short.. I am leaving you guys to decide what to do..

So, let’s cut the crap and start off with the stuff..

Why you should not buy an iPhone?

1. Way way too costly.. Rs. 31,000 is what official price from Vodafone..Read the info on their page here. So this makes more than 3 times of the original price.. (USD 199)
2. No 3G – atleast for now.. I have heard that it’s gonna be out on Vodafone in December and all but nothing confirmed. And even after it is out, I am pretty much sure that, their data plan are gonna suck.. plans will be way too costly.
3. No copy paste – Yes, till now no official support for copy / paste. I personally use copy / paste thing a lot on my SE W810i, useful in many things.
4. No Bluetooth file transfer – Yups, you cannot transfer files via Bluetooth.
5. You cannot use it as Modem.. Yea.. Yea.. I know you can install some Apps and get it working but I am not sure whether it will break the warranty or not. And no normal user is gonna go through that pain of doing all those things.

I guess, these are the MAJOR disadvantages that a normal user. I know there are things like MMS and all but I guess… not many people care about it.

So, why you should buy an iPhone?

1. It’s SEXY.. no one can beat the looks of iPhone.. I mean come on guys… HTC Touch Diamond too can’t beat that sleek look.
   
2. Fast and less buggy compared to other phones in the market. (Compare with touch screen phones only) Currently, there is HTC Touch Diamond in the market.. but I have not heard so good reviews about it.
   
3. Usability – No one can simply beat it.. try the browsing…. try composing any message.. you will forget using anything else. The picture zoom and web page is superb.
   
4. Apps – I am 100% sure that no one can beat this App Store thing. (Which Apple introduced with version 2 of their software.) So many innovative apps, so many games.. I have never seen this kind of thing with any phone. There is a sexy iLightr, FlashLight and many other things. It’s simply fantastic.

I think that’s it.. I am not gonna make this post more lengthier with more pros and cons but covering the important one does the job.

So, in short.. if you do not have any problems with the hefty cost of the phone, then just go for it.. you are surely not gonna regret this beauty. Or simply you can wait for sometime, the rates should reduce soon.

Important Links:

• iPhone Pricing details in India (Vodafone)

• iPhone 3G Review
• HTC Touch Diamond Review