Here’s a softcopy of the article as it appeared in the newspaper.

Mumbai Mirror is a newspaper focused for Mumbai that comes along with The Times of India.

Though, I must say that I didn’t see much traffic coming out here because of the article, I am pleased that my review was considered newspaper worthy

Thank you Mumbai Mirror! And, thanks to @rahuljrark of Cool Tricks N Tips for pointing this out to me.

As a result, our feed url has changed. The old feed url has been deleted and is currently being redirected. If you are subscribed to my FeedBurner feed, then please update your feed reader.

The URL to subscribe to is http://ajaydsouza.com/feed/. Subscribing to this URL will ensure that any updates at our end will not affect you.

If you prefer to receive feed updates via email then please use the following form:

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I decided to give Yahoo! Pipes a shot as I originally intended to. The interface is easy to use but it doesn’t look at all welcoming. I haven’t let a single interface to this date benumb and I don’t intend to let Yahoo! Pipes be the first!

Got down to understanding how Yahoo! Pipes actually works and I was shocked to realize that it was actually really really easy to mix my feeds together!

All you need is a single Fetch module into which you feed in the locations of all your feeds. The output of this module is then sent to your Output module. You save and publish your pipe and you’re done!

I next got the RSS for the pipe and modified the Feedburner feed to point to this new RSS feed.

The result is a faster and possibly more reliable interface. Easy customization in case I wish to add or remove feeds. I’m sure I can do a lot more like limiting the number of articles and so on, but will take a bit more trial.

Have you tried out Yahoo! Pipes so far?

Planet Ajay

I’ve been searching for services that offer this but will confess I’ve been largely unsuccessful. I ran across Feedblendr which aims at establishing just that.

I’ve combined the following feeds:

• Main Blog Feed
• Comments Feed
• Podcast
• Ajay on WordPress
• Support Forum

The new feed is served by Feedburner as usual and I’ve chosen to call it Planet Ajay. It’s also set to auto-discovery, so you’re browser or feed reader can pick it up.

Planet Ajay is perfect for readers who are subscribed to all my feeds. This eliminates the need for you to track several feeds.

I’m still looking for a better option than Feedblendr, because its refresh rate is slow. Do you have any suggestions for a better service?

Bye Bye MBL widget

I’ve also knocked off the MyBlogLog recent visitors widget for my community. I really like the widget, but MBL has become a lot slower than the early days and the widget has been really slowing down the loading of the page.

I may add the widget back in the future, but as of now it is knocked off. I’ve still maintained the code that will display the MBL Avatar next to your comment as that wasn’t too much of a problem (yet).

Suggest

I’m still looking for suggestions to improve visitor experience on the site. I’ve cut down on images to speed up the site, made more feeds available and have also ensured your comments count!

What is it that you find missing out here?
Do you have any suggestions for improvement? What can I do to make your visit here more memorable (in the good way) and what do I do to keep you coming back?

Waiting to hear your comments.

My comments have finally risen and I’ve always believed to make it worth the while for you to comment out here.

I’ve had the DoFollow plugin for a long long time already. DoFollow removes the nofollow that WordPress adds automatically. This means that now when you leave a URL with your comment, you will receive a clean link back to your site.
Google will follow this and ensure you are benefited by the pagerank of the post and site.

I have also recently added the Show Top Commenters plugin on this blog. As you can see the sidebar now displays a list of all the top commenters. I’ve set it to seven days which is a rolling window. Only the top ten commenters of the past week are listed.
If you provide a URL, you’re name is linked to the URL.

This list is displayed on over 1000 pages on the site, many of which are in the range of PR4 to PR6. It doesn’t get any better.

And, all you have to do is comment and make sure you leave a URL in the right place.

Do you need anymore reasons to comment? If so, I’d like to hear it.

I thought polls were something that people loved and I did ask a relevant question. Anyway, I’m going to try my luck again and implore my 250+ readers plus the thousand or so who wander along here to take the poll below.

It asks a simple question, which is your reason for having visited the blog.

The idea behind this poll is to help generate content that you would like to read. I want you to read and join the participation and what better way than to get you to tell me what you want to see.

Read the rest of my article on Techtites and digg it