Deep ka Blog

Sorry guys, I seriously could not think of a better post title.. was thinking for like 10 minutes and gave up..

Let me start with an example..

You are driving the car, suddenly RTO stops you in the middle of the road and asks for your car papers.. you realize that your car’s PUC has been expired or you have left it at home.. so? the officer tells you, you have to pay Rs. 1,000 as fine.. and.. the process of pataofying mama starts.. you end up paying him Rs. 2oo 0r 300 bribe and feel proud that you saved Rs. 700..

But did you even bother to check if there is actually fine of Rs. 1,000 for the PUC? or he was just fooling you to get the bribe money?

Well, if you are not sure, then you should do something to make sure that, you know the fine you have to pay.. so that no one can fool you with some bogus charges or figures..

I have been into this kind of situation more than twice.. we have even fought with the RTO guys in their office and made them read their own rule book… and realized that, the charges which were told to us did not exist at all.. the fine was 10 times lesser than what they had told us..

Obviously this does not happen all the time but we never know when it will happen to us.. so it’s better to be prepared…

Not many of us know about this.. Traffic Police of Mumbai website has a PDF document with the list of all the charges.. you can download it from here, take a print of it and keep it in your vehicle.. so next time, if someone tries to slap you any charge.. you better be ready with the exact figures

I hope it helps..

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.

We have seen many Indians trying to woo foreign nationals but this is the first time, I have come across a foreign national owned company trying to woo Indians.. I mean, the concept was kind of good but I personally found it very badly implemented..

This is how the mail goes…

You already know that here in the U.S. we are outsourcing almost everything!  For you to acquire new clients might you consider this possibility?

Alexa, Ranking, and Compete.com all rank xxx as #1 in its category with more than 100,000 absolutely unique start-ups and online & eCommerce Business Owners per month (plus we operate the #1 ranking Web Hosting Directory with more than 300,000 monthly owners/visitors at xxxx)  …and xxxx for SEO interests.   And note that more than 50% of our 300,000 monthly visitors at xxx are in India with 25% in the U.S.

The mail ended with…

  Stay well,
  xxx

I am not sure what exactly was in their mind while planning out these kind of mailers but I personally find these things pretty funny.. I mean, writing couple of words in Hindi doesn’t make you familiar to India.. get some info on what’s happening around in India.. write those things in the mail, so Indians feel a personalized mail.. and it will make more sense too..

So, the point of this post: If you are planning to start marketing campaign to woo people from other country, make sure you do good amount of home work about that country and then you start sending out the mails..

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.