Vyoma

A book. A door. A welding mask. Man! Do I really conceptualize that bad! Anyway, thanks for your review abhiram. I think I will keep things as they are for the time being. When I do future revisions, I will try to keep the things you all have stated in mind, and redesign it. I will definetly try to make a more book like logo. But for now, I think I will start building the 'brand-image' of WiseTome. I am off to start work on Frequently Asked Questions. I think I will add a "What is that logo?" to it. That way, I will brainwash everyone to think of it as a book, and I need not redesign.

I am not sure what the problem would be, but I can give you these set of instructions: > First, clear all the files that you have installed presently. > Get a fresh download of XAMPP from the net. > Install it with all default options. For now, install at C:\xampp itself. > Once that is done, start the Apache server, the MySQL server. You can leave the FTP and Mercury servers off. > Then, fire up your browser, and type the following in the address bar: LOCALHOST> If it shows LOCALHOST/xampp/ - an orangish webpage, then all is fine. If it does not, copy paste the error message here, and we can try to help.

isMohbam, thanks for confirming on this news, and it really is a great news for me. I am a Drupal buff these days, and I am quite thrilled that our cPanel's Fantastico has been upgraded. It was about couple of weeks back when I had started to tinker around with Drupal, when I noticed that it was installing a 4.5. That is when I did a manual install of 4.7. Yes - it does not make much of a difference to me, but anyone else who wants to start of with Drupal, and seeks help, I can say, just click on Drupal Install in the cPanel's fantastico. And yes again, Opaque handle is quite well. I do not know much about running hosting sites, but keeping track of all the latest softwares that are being provided with the hosting account seems to be one hell of a job, and Opaque is doing it quite well.

Are you sure the Fantastico at Xisto's account installs a Drupal 4.7? Because when I last checked it, it was installing a Drupal 4.5. If it installs a 4.7, then definetly it is not a problem, as you can just take the two patches and upgrade it to Drupal 4.7.2.And regarding knowledge with databases - I meant it this way: If one has the knowledge on working with databases, it would be easy to follow the installation instructions of Drupal, as the major process in installing Drupal is setting up the database itself.

Yes, doudou, once you have the permissions set correctly for the particular files and directory, then, installation of Drupal through the Fatastico is a walk in the park. It does all the cumbersome database setup for you. Ofcourse, if one has worked in any database system before, it wont be cumbersome - but that is another issue.The only drawback of this method is that, it does not install the latest Drupal. The current Xisto account cPanel's Fantastico installs Drupal 4.5 which is not supported at Drupal.org. Only Druapal 4.6 and 4.7 is supported. (The latest patch release is Drupal 4.7.2). There will be mostly security patches that we need to keep track of on the Drupal installation done. For this to happen, we would need to install Drupal on our own. It is a bit difficult than the Fantastico method, but not that difficult. They have got good documentation on the installation procedure. Ofcourse, if one just wants to check out how Drupal is and wants to experiment around, there is no problem for going with the Fantastico auto-installer.

Well, I do not have my Google Adsense account terminated yet. I almost got a heart attack few minutes back because I came over to a net cafe to check my site and there was no site of the Google Ads. They were not even present at the other place I put it - at my blog.Then I figured out that there were some security settings, that once I changed, the ads started to comeback again. Yes, sid.calcutta. I do not think I need to be worried about it now. The only thing that concerns me is that I have not yet got a reply from them for the mail I sent.

Well, it is actually a book ><. OK. I am a bit crappy on the vizualization. Now that I think about it, both things open on a hinge like thingy - so I am pretty close, eh? I am not sure if Word is a good image editing program, but it worked for the present senario because all I wanted was a bunch of basic shapes in vector so that I can easily change its shape and size and skew, and mix and match the all the properties and the colours. Then, I combined it with the WiseTome text, and after some long brainstorming with some of my friends, I settled down on the Trebuchet. You should have seen the first few of those logos littered around the workspace. All the fonts like Verdana, Curlz, to Jokerman (yes, Jokerman!) were used. Then we had to choose between Gills Sans and Trebuchet. In the end it was my call, and I went for Trebuchet, because I wanted something that was a bit more common and easily found, so that in the future, if I had to reproduce the same logo under some other software I would be able to do it. So, in the end, it came out to be four round edged rectagles to form the 'Tome' or the book (common word ) and the text 'WiseTome' in Trebuchet MS. Now about the height. I think I may reduce it, but when we were mixing and mashing it on the MS paint... ok. Now before I tell anything else, I should say that I used MS Paint too. We grabbed a screen print of the site, and then laided it on the Paint program. After getting the finalized logo and banner text, we would copy it to the paint program and see how it looked at various positions. If something did not fit in many of the locations, it was back to the drawing board (or MS Word), and then redesign, and the process again. We went through some five of six cycles like this. Now, continuing what i was saying before this paragraph: ... we were moving it to the center or the right edge and trying out different things. We found that we should leave the space alone and keep the Logo + Banner small in terms of width. About the space that remains in the header, I have not thought about it, but that I think should hold something else. Not the logo + banner. Another purpose of keeping it that dimensions is to have a handy set of logo and banner that can be placed at various places. Hey guys, do you have any ideas on how I can use that space to the right of the logo+banner on the header? Adspace? Would it sell? Obviously not now, but I might think about it in the future. Anyway, may be I should reduce the size of the logo+banner. That way, I get more space for the other things.

Now that you ask sid.calcutta, I went and checked up in my Google Adsense account and pulled out a report. It does not seem like there are any clicks recorded on the Jul 5 by the Google. I am not sure if they have removed it or what has happened. And it has been about more than a day and a half since I sent that mail. I have not got any relply from them, and neither have I been denied access of my Google Adsense account page. I do not know what to make out of it. It is a pretty anxious situation for me, because I was really hoping on this working out. I think I need to wait and see.

I have suggested to the Google people that they can wire it into the system so that when someone clicks on a ad from a particular ad unit, it should be turned off for that IP for a particular amount of time. Even if it is not turned off, the click should not be awarded by any monetary gains. That way, both the advertiser does not loose money, and neither does a Publisher get accused of foul play when a rival does such an act.I am not sure if Google would act on this, but it seems logical to me. On the other hand, who am I to say? I do not even know the amount of resources such a system would consume and is Google capable of doing it.

It may look pretty dumb here, but please have a look at http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ Well, in the begining I used simple text as logo and banner for my site. Then, I went to some banner generator and got the banner for my site. I never was satisfied with it. So, I sat down and designed the logo-banner for my website, WiseTome. It is a vector art done in Microsoft Word. I know, that is the unlikliest tool, but I chose that because the driving aim during the design was simplicity. The logo was desigined as follows: - only 4 basic shapes: earlier I had gone for more colors, but then I setelled for monochromatic] - the font for "WiseTome", which is 'Trebuchet MS' I was always aiming at branding. I did not want something in my Logo and Banner that was too complicated to be replicated. Hope my website grows and I can start selling merchandize based on that. Ok. I think now I am dreaming too big.

The logs that I have used is due to a module in Drupal. It is called the Adsense module. It places ads. After few configurations, you can have it record the clicks on the ads. The logs are stored in the database, and so, I do not think that creating such a log would be quite cumbersone as one would face if one is writing to a file. I get it neatly inserted to the database table, that is retrieved through a query or something like that. I studied the code of the Module and it not anything that can be considered as rocket science. If you want to have a look, try the following URL: https://www.drupal.org/project/adsense You can driectly download it from this URL: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ Once you unzip it to the folder, check the adsense.module file. It is a PHP and should open in any text editor. Then, if you know PHP, you should be able to see how the clicks are tracked.

AC compartments in Indian Railways are a bit on the expensive side, but they are preferable if one is travelling during the summers because the heat would be unbearable. If the weather is fine, I do not mind going in a Sleeper Class compartment. But I have been in General class too. Had a six hour journey once, that really gave the experience of what India really is. Ah! And I hope I can get a Digital Camera. As I stated earlier, that was my friend's camera. I never till now pooled enough cash to buy it. Not that I did not pool cash at all, but I would always spend on other things. A year after my job, I collected enough and went for a Royal Enfield Machishmo, my Bullet bike. Then, spent a few months giving the EMI to the loan I had to take to buy that bike. When that got over, (that is very recently), I have been spending it on other things. Like fixing my computer (needs to be fixed again, though), getting a TV tuner card and such stuff. Hmmm. I think miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG can give some good pointers. But it is quite hard to catch him these days. He popped into the forum only yesterday. Yo! miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG! Can you hear me? And more over miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG was supposed to make an article on composition. I had asked him for that. Hope he is reading this.

Well vujsa, you have given a good article about how to write a good post in a technical forum. I had the same problem when I was running a play-by-post roleplaying forum. People with Player Characters would just write a line or two about what their Character did and expected the Moderator or the Game Master to spin a great story out of it. They found it hard that roleplaying in forums meant making or weaving a story with a team effort. I could write beautiful posts, both as a Player Character and as a Game Master but I just did not know how I did it. I could not formalize it. Then, I had this friend (online), who too was good with his words. But he was better than me, in terms that he made an artilce similar to what vujsa did here, and explained all nuances of writing a good RPG post in a forum.

I did that just now. miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG, I think I was doing that when you were typing the post. I just wrote to Google Adsense with all the logs, and explained to them that I had no intent of doing any foul play. I am not even sure who did it. First I had doubts that it was because of my collegues who browsed my site sitting behind a proxy. But I am not sure. That IP in the 'IP' heading or the 'host' heading matches our proxy. It definetly must be some one who either did not know what he was doing, or someone who knew a lot more than that and systematically went <- snipped -> (I mean, I am not sure, but can someone be dumb enough to go on clicking systematically on all ads thinking those are links going to internal webpages? ). As you say miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG, worst comes worst, it definetly is worth a shot. Huh. Anyway, do you have any idea of which other Ad-Providers I can try? I may use them at begining, but in the near future, I am thinking of directly selling the spaces to advertisers.}

OK guys. I think I am going to loose my Adsense Account. I was always paranoid about it, and so, when I started my site WiseTome, I saw to it that before even I put Adsense on it, I have somethings to monitor what is going on. I even set it up so that it gets disabled whenever I log in - that way, I do not click on it by mistake. But I never really thought of what use it would really be even if I get to know there have been unnatural clicks on the Adsense ads. I was going through the logs and this is what I found out: Time Stamp IP HostJul 15 8:29 IP1 IP2Jul 15 8:28 IP1 IP2Jul 15 8:24 IP1 IP2Jul 15 8:23 IP1 IP2Jul 15 8:19 IP1 IP2Jul 15 8:19 IP1 IP2IP1 and IP2 are actual IPs, but I have not put them due to forum policies. As you can see these are continous log entries into the adsense click logs. Thats it I think. I am a goner now. I need to look at other options of monetizing from ad-space on my site.

Arrg. I feel so dumb. I did not notice the capitalizations. Good catch Houdini. PHP is case sensitive.

OK. I never had any MySpace account. I never found it necessary. But now that all the AstaHosters are there at MySpace, I think I will give it a try. I do not think I would be putting many things there, I would just be joining there just so I can get to the Xisto Group.So, now I am member at Orkut and at MySpace.

lonebyrd, I am not sure if I can help at present, but could you tell us which one is the line number 33 in your db_connect.php. This line: mysql_connect($host, $user, $password) or die (mysql_error()); Or the one following it: mysql_select_db($database) or die (mysql_error()); I am not sure it would help, but as far as I know, the use of these set of fuctions is as follows: $conn = mysql_connect($host, $username, $password); mysql_select_db($dbname, $conn); And later you can use it for querying by: mysql_query($query, $conn); Of course, I am not sure this is the problem, and hence, it would help if you could tell which line is line number 33, because it is failing exactly at that point. Could you also show what the original script was? Another thing you can do is wait for some one who has more expertise to come over this thread and answer your question.

Now that you mention it, it was sleeper class compartment I got tickets for on that occassion. I rarely travel, and I did not even know if I had to take an AC compartment or the sleeper. Luckily, the climate then was good and it was a nice journey. Also, taking a sleeper did help because, I have been in AC and they are so closed. Those trains only have a small peek hole kind of thing, where you do not have much room to move around the camera. And abhiram, I do not think the reason why the pictures are not phenomenal is because you are from India. It is like I said before, I still do not have the knack to get a good composition. All my photos seem to come out with mediocre results even with good lighting conditions. I still need to practice a lot more.

From what you have said about your game, I am not sure CMS would be of much use to you. But to answer the questions that you posed: A CMS can do site wide or selective changes by just doing it at one place - in the administration panel. It also lets one to go down to one particular page and go and edit it.I am not sure how much space you have but CMS do not take that much space. Yes, of course, PHP-Nuke takes about 20+MB of space but most of it is the multi-languange pack. Other CMS, like Drupal, take as less as 3 to 5 MB depending on the modules you install. Maybe, as Houdini said, you should try out some of the CMS and play around with it to get a feel of does it suit your requirements or not. One of the sites that lets you do this is OpenSourceCMS.com as was mentioned by someone else, elsewhere on this section. But to help you more lonebyrd, I think may be it would help us if you ask some things specific and show us what you already have and what changes do you want to make.

I actually have to thank you isMobham. I have learned a lot about Drupal today on the pretext of getting information that I can put up on this thread. I even learned a thing or two about SEO. And over that, my site too has now become SEO friendly by having better and cleaner URL. I though have to check out the Pathauto Module of Drupal. I do not have access to Xisto's Admin Panel from the present network. I would be getting that module installed and checking it out by the end of this week when I can try from else where. Will let you all know what I come up with when using that Module. And isMobham, I think you should take a closer look at Drupal. Till now, I have found almost all the features that I wanted in Drupal.

I already have an Orkut log in. I joined the community.

Thanks a lot dhanesh, that Drupal Module is working like a Module made in heaven. I had no problems installing it and getting the SiteMap. I submitted the Sitemap to Google Sitemaps, and in two minutes flat they could verify it as a Sitemap and everything is OK now. I think though that the Googlebot would take some time before it crawls my site. And then, it will stay down because of the Google Sandbox effect.

Now that I have mulled over things, I think I know of a free software that is very valuable and as good as most of its competitors. I have been using it for quite some time, and I got it for free. Of course, I paid for the internet charges to connect to their website and download it and I also paid for getting it burned onto a new CD, but I never paid for the program. The software I am talking about is Blender. It is awailable, freely, (yes, freely), at Blender.org.

Not a problem isMobham. Now, if I could figure out what more is required to be shown up in the URL to improve the Search Engine Ranking, I might aswell start working on it. May be I should discuss it over at the Drupal groups but I am not sure. Anyway, is not having /node/1 better than /?q=node/1 ? What more can be done in terms of SEO. Could someone please throw some light on it, please? I am not very sure of these SEO tatics. Edit: Ok. I just discovered something more. I think Drupal already has a solution for it. Check out this documentation for Drupal: https://www.drupal.org/node/15365 I followed those things, and it allows us to rename the URL when posting the content. That means that, I can have the permalink kind of URLs for my posts, so that they are SEO friendly, right? For example, my About Page looked something like this: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ Now, after doing all the things said in Drupal, and then going and naming that node URL as "about", I can access it easily by the following URL: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ That way, I can name all the URLs so that they contain the title of the article, and there by search engine can find them easily, right? Boy, now I have quite some work to do. I have to name all the articles, and resubmit the Google Sitemap. Edit 2: OK. Things are happening quite fast. Earlier in this post I said that one cannot automatically generate these SEO freindly permalink kind of URLs in Drupal and you had to give them all manually by hand as you created each node of the content. I think I have to swallow my words becase I found a Module (not a core Module, but an extra-installable Module) that can do just that: https://www.drupal.org/node/17345 It can generate path aliases automatically when no explicit alias is provided by the user. The Module for Drupal 4.6 had some problems but the same for Drupal 4.7 has been fixed.