Inside Orkut On My iPhone? (Plus Other Orkut Blogs)

Thanks to everyone who contacted me while this blog took a little "vacation" (with special thanks to Rahul over at Devils Workshop).

Before I dispense with the mobile news, I just want to let everyone know that the Orkut Blogs section (on the right) has been updated, which thanks to a new beta feature by Google will highlight the latest post from an Orkut Related blog.

These are blogs that I usually read daily (and would recommend subscribing to) so make sure you add these to your daily Orkut diet if you have not already.

• Devils Workshop (Orkut Posts)


• Orkut Plus (who recently updated to OrkutPlus.org, so update your links!


• Ortuk (no, its not a type, that is how its spelled)


• Beyond Satire (an Orkut Googler)


• Os Humanos Do Orkut (in Portugese--note the new skin)


• Orkut Champ (a newcomer on the scene)

There are other sites as well, so be sure to check them out!

Now, as far as the iPhone announcement goes, I am proud to inform everyone that Inside Orkut is now iPhone friendly!

Whether your iPhone is committed or jail broken, you can now visit this site over at m.InsideOrkut.com/iPhone/ (and if you have a regular cell phone, you can access it over at m.InsideOrkut.com).

Note: For those of you wondering, the mobile version is powered by Mofuse, (see my review on The Blog Herald) which for $3 a month will make your blog/site mobile friendly.

Updated Weblog...

Just to let everyone know, I'll be updating the layout of Inside Orkut (thanks Rishil for the suggestion!).

I'll be testing to see if Google's new "xml template import" feature can speed things up a bit, so don't try to laugh too hard if the site looks ugly for 10-20 minuets.

~Darnell

Update: Finished updating 99% of the weblog (although there are a few bugs I have yet to work out).

The new design reflects the new version of Orkut, which I was fortunate enough to test last night.

I discovered a new feature on Orkut (at least it was new to me) which I'll also post later on. Until then...

~Darnell

Orkutsphere Chatter (What Do You See?)

Note: Credit has to go to Danny Piccirillo for inspiring this idea on Inside Orkut. Be sure to check out his forum, Suicide, Self-harm, Depression which has been added to the Forums of Note section.

One item that I really enjoy about Orkut is the fact that you can find many interesting conversations, debates, artwork, video's, etc. to entertain you while catching up with friends and strangers from around the world.

Unfortunately, there is not enough time in the day to write up a post on all the fun things I find and (more often) items that friends email me. So instead of trying to highlight 50 random forum conversations (as that would take up way too much time), I decided to simply link to them above.

For those of you visiting this site, you may have noticed the Orkutsphere Chatter box above the post section. Here you can find interesting conversations that either friends email me about or I stumble upon while surfing Orkut.

So if any of you find something interesting in Orkut (or want to show off a cool community) let me know by either sending me a scrap or emailing me.

In case you missed the previous five highlights, here's a recap:

• President Bush: Defender of Muslims? Heh.


• All silent on the (orkut) Jewish front?


• Kiran's Album: It's all in the eyes


• How To: Painting oil paintings on wood


• Suggestion: Add Video/Audio profiles to Orkut

Note: And don't forget to check out the latest post from the Official Orkut blog!

Resolving The "404" Domain Issue

I am currently attempting to resolve the domain "404" issue faced with this blog, otherwise known as the weird duality problem.

Inside Orkut may at times disappear from the world wide web, but it should be accessable from either InsideOrkut.com or www.InsideOrkut.com.

Stay tuned...this could get a little rough.

Update (1/16): This is now working. See my personal blog for details.

Google, Blogger And The World Wide Web

I must thank Rupesh for informing me about this.

Apparently it seems that the new Blogger Custom Domains is having some trouble hosting this site.

Ironically for some strange reason Inside Orkut can only publish at www.InsideOrkut.com or http://InsideOrkut.com, but not both.

I've contacted Google about this, and they have already fixed one of my other blogs (Colony Worlds) regarding this problem, but since they are swamped with upgrading the new blogger (as well as fixing the old one), it may be a while before they are able to correct the rest of my sites hosted by Google.

So for now I will be publishing at www.InsideOrkut.com, until they can resolve their server woes.

Note: Is it me, or is the comment system for blogger down?

Update: Comment system seems to be back up. Thanks Google!

InsideOrkut.com Is The New Address...

Wow...that was a very painless process! (well, mostly).

InsideOrkut.com is the new address for this weblog, although Google will redirect it from the blog*spot one fairly soon.

Now all I have to do is update all of the blog directories (plus resubmit a link to Google's server). :-)

You Gotta Love Google...

This post is totally unrelated to Orkut, but nonetheless it does affect this blog site in an indirect-sort-of way.

(Blogger Buzz) The new version of Blogger now supports using a custom domain for serving your blog. If you already own a domain named, say, mysite.com and want your blog to be served at that address instead of at a blogspot.com address, we can host your blog on that domain for you — for free. Your old Blog*Spot address will forward to your new custom domain, so the switch will be seamless for your readers.

Ironically, it was not too long ago that I was considering "going pro" with this blog by having it on its own domain. I've already dabbled with Word Press, Vox and Moveable Type, and with the exception of Vox was not too thrilled over the "overall feel" of the sites.

Vox was great, but you could not host in on your own domain (so that left me at square one) while the Blogger FTP reminded me of the reason why I hated the old Blogger.

Until I can work out all of the bugs on the migration (with this blog as well as others) there will not be any new posts for a day (or two at most).

I will however be checking my email and scrap book, as well as checking out some of those cool forums you guys (and girls) have been sending me. :-)

Inside Orkut Just Made Blogs Of Note!

I just received a tip from Anand that I made the ever coveted Blogs Of Note (well at least for Blog*Spot users anyways).

For those of you visiting from the front page of Blogger, welcome to Inside Orkut, a blog focuses mainly on Google's bluest (and coolest) social network, Orkut.

Of course, if you do not use Orkut than this blog is of no use to you, but then you would be missing out on all the fun that happens inside.

For my American Friends: Orkut is basically the MySpace of Brazil, or the Facebook of India (not to mention a host of other countries).

If you ever needed a crash course on international culture, Orkut would be the one place where you could interact with people from various cultures, faiths, philosophies and meals (via cooking recipe's).

But in order for you to really understand Orkut, you'll have to find out about from the inside.

Note: If this is your first time on Orkut, be sure to check out the India Pakistan Friendship Club and see what all the cultural exchange is all about!

Blogger Beta Adds FTP! (Finally)

It seems as if the boys and girls at Google have added another early Christmas gift to beta blogger users!

They are now giving us the ability to post via FTP which means that we can post a weblog on our own site!

(Blogger Buzz) If you use FTP on the older version of Blogger, you should definitely log into the beta and set up a test FTP blog to make sure it can publish properly to your ftp server. We did a ton of FTP testing on several different popular hosting services, but if you experience any publishing weirdness, let us know via the Contact form -- use the "Report a bug or problem" -> "I found a bug with Blogger in beta" selection to send in reports, 'cause we wanna fix the bugs ASAP.

I have already bought out the domain InsideOrkut.com (which redirects here) but will be testing this new feature on a couple of other weblogs before possibly considering migrating to the new server.

Hopefully I've bought up enough bandwidth to handle the traffic of the site, and it will be interesting to finally "go pro" with blogspot for the first time.

Gee Google, Where's The Warning?

Props to the Feedburner for alerting me about this!

Apparently Google (without warning) decided to change all of the beta users feed url.

No email was sent warning all of us about this, and users of the new beta may want to change their feed url on their weblog (or inside Feedburner) as you will receive a "clunky" sound when trying to subscribe (okay, you will not hear anything, but it was really annoying).

Google better inform everyone on the Blogger Buzz because some have already started to vent.

Update Complete...

I've uploaded all of the posts, although I am still in the process of "tweaking" the site and getting use to the new code.

Should be back up later on today or tomorrow. ;)

Note To Google...

Just in case you come across this post, I want to let you know that this is NOT a spam blog, as I am importing posts from Inside Orkut to the new beta because is ROCKS!!! (okay, enough with the caps).

Thanks for coming out with this feature...now to finish importing these posts!

Importing posts from the past...

This should be fun. ;)

Blogger Just Got Cooler

It looks like Blogger just got cooler which means I will finally have what I always wanted from Google--labels within my blog posts.

Del.icio.us is fine, but being a Google loyalist, the less I use of Yahoo, the better I feel.

There will be no new posts on Inside Orkut as I will be transferring 300 plus posts from the old blogspot to the new, but if you were looking for ways of improving Orkut you can start by reading this.

Beta Version...

Testing out the specs of a future Inside Orkut.

Resistance...Produces Growth

Aside from life, I have been busy putting out mini web fires that I recently became aware of, and trying to take advantage of future opportunities/warnings that I see on the horizon.

1. First, I discovered today that the email subscription service Yutter got shafted by their server host SteadFast Networks, which meant every post since July 27^th may have not reached many people's inboxes.
   
   I've switched over to Sqeet.com for now, which should allow users to customize how frequent they receive updates to this weblog. (a good thing).



2. Second, I discovered that Congress may pass a bill that would ban all types of social networking sites at public arenas (not a good idea) although some libraries may fight back.
   
   I've registered the site InsideOrkut.com (which redirects back here) and may go to professional hosting to (hopefully) avoid this as banning blogs seems to be a pattern around the world.



3. Last, I discovered a cool tool by Google called Google Related Links which will display relevant content (hopefully related to Orkut) on this site.
   
   I am also going to go through the forums listed below and update the list as some of them have been either flooded with spam, hi-jacked (no, I am not joking here) or have become abandoned. I am also adding some forums, and if you want yours added to the right sidebar, let me know by scraping me.
   
   I'll be working on these updates tonight (while I have time) before Google begins to operate on Blogger.

There is more to discuss, but I don't want to bore my readers. I'll update this post when the updates are complete.

Update (12:48 AM): I've screened all of the forums on the sidebar and finished installing the Google Related Links on the side as well. I should be back up to full speed later on today (after I get some sleep and finish tomorrow's chores/work/etc.)

Revamped Site

Some of you may have noticed the new "Orkutish" look of this weblog.

I decided to revamp this site again for two reasons.

• Despite the disclaimers, people were mistaking it for an official Google site.
• I got bored with the look and decided to mimic Google's deep blue forums.

I think I was able to master most of the coding, although Ad sense is acting up a bit (Google should resolve this pretty soon--or else).

Note: Now that I've documented the many, many changes within Orkut, I can now talk about what I love most--what goes on inside the deep blue forums.

Did Google Force Fake Orkut Site Offline?

Earlier I reported on a site that was allegedly stealing Google passwords by pretending to be a legit site of Orkut.com. Because identity theft is a pet peeve of mine, I decided to report this to Google's Orkut team and they informed me that they had passed this message to "the appropriate team."

Not long after I received a reply from Google the site no longer was online as you can see from this screen shot below.



Apparently whoever owned the site was either contacted directly by Google or decided to quit after the blogosphere had picked up on this phishing scheme.

Since the site was registered by someone in West Orange, New Jersey, authorities may have the legal means to arrest and hopefully remove another internet thief from cyberspace.

Vacation, Terrorism And More (Oh My!)

Well, I have not had time to post yesterday, as I have been either busy or blogging elsewhere, or both. I'll be away from Inside Orkut until Tuesday, so you probably will not see any posts from me. However, these sites below should entertain you until I get back.

• Orkuttando (english version over here)


• Joga.com: a project between Orkut and Nikefootball.com


• Beyond Satire: A Googler who I think works on Orkut

Moving on, today saddens me as both Israel and India have been hit with terrorist attacks over the past several days, with a war in the former case as Israel seeks to find its missing soldiers.

One item I would like to highlight though is what Divyanth said in the End Religious Violence forum:

[...] I have noticed something interesting. These terrorists aren't killing to "terrorise" people into giving them what they want, or "preach" islam and "Jehad" to the world in an "Islamic" way. One the contrary, these very anti-islamic feelings that we all have today, is simply and exactly what they wanted. They want to disintegrate India on communal lines, and through these "anti-islamic" feelings of ours', they have succeeded in doing so.

Therefore, what I am saying, is that we have become those terrorists' pawns. It is good that we have already realised this. Let us not hate islam and muslims anymore. That is not what muslims want.

In all my experiences with Muslims, most of them have been pretty cool. We may disagree over Muhammad, but they have no desire to kill me by slitting my throat (and yes, I've met Muslims like that...and that is a story for another day). May God be with the victims families as they cope with the losses over these incidents.

Last but not least, next week I'll post the top Orkut programs, hacks or tricks that I have seen while posting at this site. I've encountered at least two dozen (and perhaps three) but I'll go over the top five ones either Tuesday or Wednesday. So stay tuned!

Email Subscription Working Now

Well, I've returned back into cyberspace (although I still have to catch up on emails) and I found to my horror that the email subscription was not alerting me to newbie's signed up on the list.

I've updated the list so those of you who were missing out on the action before have been updated and hopefully this problem will not occur again.