But somehow, the value at post_permalink key was wrong. Instead of pulling out my hair, I downloaded the Jetpack plugin’s source code, opened the file stats.php and copied a few lines and now the following works awesomely well.

I hope this helps people looking for a quick fix to this problem.

A lot of cool features are coming up with this release especially in the beloved link plugin,

1. link plugin: allow users to share links to audio sharing sites such as soundcloud, 8tracks.
2. Repost the attachments along with status (similar to re-share and re-tweet functionality), supported by link and photo plugin.
3. link plugin: inline editing of title and description, cool JS.
4. link plugin: edit the title and description field of the attachment.
5. Support for processing GET parameters in the URL.
6. link plugin now allows to share the URL using the flink GET parameter. More…

The complete list of features and bug fixes can be found in the release notes.

I hope you enjoy creating amazing sites using the new features and share them here for the world to know how cool this module is

GSoC 2011

Google announced its consecutive 7th year for Summer of Code program on January 24, 2011. Google Summer of Code program encourages students from all over the world to engage in open source project development of their choice for 3 months.

Look out for the details of the program here: http://socghop.appspot.com/ and the timeline: http://www.google-melange.com/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2011/timeline

Although the applications for students will be accepted only after 28th March, here are a few tips that might help you:

1. Accepted list of organizations will be announced on 18th March, but it is expected to remain almost similar to the last year. So you should find out more about the organizations before hand (http://socghop.appspot.com/gsoc/program/accepted_orgs/google/gsoc2010).
2. If you feel passionate about an organization/technology or even a bit interested, get in touch with people on respected forums/IRC. It will let you know more about the organization, expectations from the program and in certain cases, you are expected to submit patches/code which is reviewed before your application is accepted by an organization. Moreover if you are really interested then start contributing now, and everybody will know you when you finally apply for the program.
3. If you have an idea, put it forward asap. Try to put as much details as possible or even a proof of concept. Even if your idea is rejected by the community, you know it before the GSoC program even starts. And if you get support for it, there are much more chances that your project will be selected by the organization. A win-win situation for you, isn’t that amazing!!!
4. Don’t be disheartened if you do not have an idea (most of us don’t). Many organizations will publish a list of ideas, which they want the potential GSoC students to work on. Make sure you research a lot, take part in discussion on forums on the idea before submitting your application. If possible set up a personal repository, code something and provide a link to it with your application. This will not only show that you are interested in the project but will also showcase your coding skills.
5. Do not forget to follow the coding practices if published by the organization or common guidelines which will make your code more legible. http://drupal.org/coding-standards
6. Last, communicate yourself properly. As you would be working online for 3 months, and mostly you & your mentor will be interacting online, try not to be confusing while explaining yourself in writing. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/02/how-to-write-without-writing.html

I will go over the list of reasons on why you should apply for the program in short. You get to work on what you like and you get paid for that. You will also meet a lot of interesting and intelligent people and will be amazed how helpful they are to your silly questions. Last but not the least, you will have something big on your CV after college, NICE.

If you are looking for inspiration, you can go through this discussion which I started when I was about to apply for the program last year: http://groups.drupal.org/node/57743. I received a lot of suggestions and criticism which mostly turned into features for the project: http://dupal.org/project/fbsmp.

I am proud to be a Google Summer of Code student, would you like to be next?

1. 300 years of fossil fuel in 300 seconds

2. google shit

3. revenge of the spider
   

   i remember too.

   – fya

for those of you wondering where the heck uppercase letters went, google killed them.

What’s in the box
As of today, FBSMP supports the following features:

• Attaches content using AHAH which keeps everything smooth.
• Publishes links, photos, videos, documents (ppt, doc, pptx, odt, etc) out of the box.
• Extensible to publish any kind of content.
• Integration with Activity 2, Rules, Heartbeat, Triggers/Actions, Input Filters, Views, ImageCache, Token, Application Toolbar(Appbar), Emvideo, Userpoints (through Rules), SlideShare.net API and more.
• Extensive developer API (including hooks) and theming methods.

It is difficult for me to elaborate on all the plugins (a plugin allows to publish one kind of content, for example Link plugin allows you to share your favorite links, Photo plugin allows you to share images on your site.), so you will have to explore them yourself. You can look at the documentation here: http://drupal.org/node/876500

How to get involved

• Play with it and share your site creativity here in the comments
• Write about this module so other folks can find it (http://drupalmodules.com/module/facebook-style-micropublisher)
• Report bugs or help in the support issues queue (http://drupal.org/project/issues/fbsmp)

Enjoy it with your holidays, wish you all a Merry Christmas and a great year ahead.

Note: Feature and Support requests should be made through the Facebook-style Micropublisher Forum. I may not be able to answer them here.

Today, I am happy to say that Drupal now has a complete Micropublisher which can be used to create any kind of microblogging platform such as Facebook, Google Buzz, Twitter, etc. I will be posting the first release of the module soon, but before here is the small list of features and a few screenshots.

Among a lot of other features, Facebook-style Micropublisher :

1. Publish links, photos, videos, documents (ppt, doc, pptx, odt, etc) out of the box.
2. Attaches content using AJAX which keeps everything smooth.
3. Extensible to publish any kind of content.
4. Integration with a lot of other modules, such as:
   • Activity, Heartbeat: Create a stream of your statuses, or log messages or status posts/delete.
   • Emfield/Emvideo: Post links directly from YouTube, Google Video, Dailymotion, and others.
   • LightBox2: Create slideshows for your photos and videos (from youtube, etc or directly posted).
   • SlideShare.net: Post documents such pptx, ppt, docs and pdf.
5. Extensive API (good news for developers) and theme overrides (never forget the designers).

I am posting a few screenshots of the module, which will soon have a stable release. Till then, you can download the development build and play with it (which will be actually the stable release in a few days) and report issues if any or just enjoy the module.

(Click on the images to see full view in a ThickBox)

In such times, IMHO, the mobile network operators are forced to either improve their services or put lucrative offers in front of transitioning users which they are unable to resist. The former can’t be done in a day (which user won’t wait before switching) and latter brings an interesting problem from our data mining class, back in 2009.

Dr. V. Iyenger, once in our class posed an interesting problem, which was quite similar to the above. “How will a mobile company choose the customers to offer free promotional coupons, so that they are not lost?” The promotional coupons offer sounded plausible, I mean if I am offered no less than Rs. 1000 recharge, I won’t change my service provider for at least another one month.

All of us (okay, just the few frontbenchers!!) came up with a lots of different parameters with lots of different algorithms but they all could agree upon at least “the customers who made the most complaints in the past few months”. Of course, we didn’t know about MNP then otherwise we could have disappointed our professor a little less with more satisfactory answers.

Moral: So even if you are happy with your mobile operator but want free recharge, START COMPLAINING. Damn, flood those customer care executives now.

Hotel Jayaram @Hotels.com

Before I could call it a bug with the site, I jumped on travelguru.com and checked their rates. It was less than Rs 1200 per night for the same hotel and same dates. I am left wondering if I can somehow get the difference in the amount per night for the hotel I didn’t book

But what if you have a bad (read horrible) experience during the pre-sales chat? Would you still pay for the product, no matter how good you have heard about it?

Live Sales Chat

I was recently looking for a change in web hosts. Although I have no problem with my present host, HostGator, I just wanted to cut the cost of hosting a little (I was on a Business plan which costs 15$ a month). But believe me, if you can afford, you won’t get a better shared hosting service in the industry. I went through a lot of reviews and narrowed down my search to two hosts, DreamHost and Bluehost. Both were priced around 7-9 $ a month, offered 99.9% uptime, unlimited disk/bandwidth, etc, etc and were good for me. I still had a couple of questions about their server configuration, so I jumped on their website and clicked the button which said “Live chat”.

I started with Dreamhost, asked the guy(or girl) if he would be able to answer a few technical questions and then asked him a couple like the memory limit, cURL support, image library (GD or ImageMagick), etc and he wasn’t able to answer one of them. Only after I showed discomfort on his lack of knowledge about the product the company was selling, he did some search for the answers. The answers were satisfactory and were upto my hosting needs. But overall, it was a very bad experience and took 44  minutes to get answers to a few basic questions (not more than 5). I was seriously turned off and stroked DreamHost off the list. I may have over-reacted but how can I trust a company who can’t even train their sales people about the products/services they are offering?

I turned to Bluehost’s sales person, and asked if she would be able to answer a few technical questions. She wasn’t sure if she can but still asked me to fire those questions. I was amazed to see the thoroughness of the responses and all I could say at the end was “I guess, I would be soon associated with Bluehost“. JFYI, I asked the same set of questions and it took less than 10 minutes for the whole chat. Within minutes, I signed up for a 2 year contract on Bluehost.

All I want to say is that if you decide to provide the option of live sales chat on your site, make sure you are offering nothing but the best. A customer creates an impression about the whole company from this chat and you don’t want to spoil it if you are offering the best services in the industry. Do Not Lose Customers, at least not from your sales chat!!

One thing to notice here is that the ‘%’ character must be the last in the $reserved array. This makes sure that the already encoded values are not lost or encoded again.

Note: This might not be the best solution but well, it works. If you are using something better, let me know in the comments.