mEgo - Interactive Portable Online Profile

While surfing net I just got this exiting tool - mEgo. It is a next generation portable online profile. With this online tool you can create personal avatar to share your online existence from a single place. You can create an animated widget profile and can integrate your photo, video, feed, etc. into this profile with few clicks. Then can publish it into MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, Orkut, Tagged, Blogger, Hi5, TypePad, iGoogle, PageFlakes and more. When you update your profile on mEgo it updates your avatar profile on all these online profiles. It is very simple to create a profile - Create Your Looks, Add Content, Add Feed & Share Your mEgo. Here are few screenshots and instructions about how to create profile into mEgo:

mEgo Home Page


Select A Body


Select Hair Style


Select Background


Select Animation


Enter About Yourself

Here is my mEgo Profile. Place your mouse pointer over the following widget and click icons to view more:

Blender - Revolution in 3d industry

When the first time I met with Blender I was amazed. It is a tiny little open source 3d content creation suite. Relative to its size, its power of creating 3d animation is unbelievable. The windows installer is just about 8MB. You can run this software even very low power computer. But you can't believe what type of animation you can create using it. Watch the following short film Elephants Dream created using blender:

The most exciting thing about the blender is - 3d movies created using this software is called "Open Movie". That means you can use all production files from the creators. Here is what the Elephants Dream website says:

Elephants Dream is the world’s first open movie, made entirely with open source graphics software such as Blender, and with all production files freely available to use however you please, under a Creative Commons license.

The short film was created by the Orange Open Movie Project studio in Amsterdam during 2005/2006, bringing together a diverse team of artists and developers from all over the world. More about the project...

There is another open movie Peach coming in this April. You can pre-order the DVD from here. I am very much excited to view this movie.

Blogger Tutorial: Create Expandable Post Summary

I have setup several blog site using blogger or blogspot. I like it very much. But one most obvious thing I was missing is the option to create expandable post summaries. By default blogger shows full story in the first page and all comments in the own page of the post when you click the post's title. The main problem is most of the time people leave after reading the article. They do not view the comments and hence can't participate on the discussion about that post. Moreover, the first page become longer and longer with full stories. I was seeking for a solution where only few lines will display in the first page as introduction and people will read the full story & comments after clicking "Read More..." link. In help.blogger.com I have found a solution. But it has few disadvantages. Main problem is - you have to write a css code manually with your each post. It will be the worst situation if you already have posted lots of articles. Then I have developed a solution with javascript where you do not need to worry about creating post summary. It automatically hides the rest of the post. Here you go -

In this method first paragraph will be used as post summary. You will view the full post after clicking "Read More..." link. Note, you must enable post pages in order to using this feature. Also backup your template html before editing it.

Now follow these instructions:

1. Go to your blogger setting panel -> Template -> Edit HTML

2. Check on "Expand Widget Templates"

3. Search for </head> & replace it with following javascript code:

<script type='text/javascript'>
function truncate_body (postid) {
var id = document.getElementById(postid);
var postbody = id.innerHTML;
var len = postbody.toLowerCase().indexOf(&quot;&lt;br&quot;);

if(len&gt;0)
postbody = postbody.substring(0, len);

id.innerHTML = &quot;<p>&quot; + postbody + &quot;</p>&quot;;
id.style.display=&quot;block&quot;;
}
</script>
</head>

4. Search for <p><data:post.body/></p> & replace it with following code:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != "item"'>
<div expr:id='"postid_" + data:post.id'>
<data:post.body/>
</div>
<script type='text/javascript'> truncate_body(&quot;postid_<data:post.id/>&quot;); </script>
<p>
<a class='read_more' expr:href='data:post.url'><b>Read More...</b></a>
</p>
<b:else/>
<p><data:post.body/></p>
</b:if>



That's it. Now let me describe the code. It is not necessary to understand the code. You may skip it if the above procedure works for you.

In the 4th step I have created a div with an unique id. Then a javascript function truncate_body is called which is declared between the head of the html. In the function call it passes the id of that div.

The truncate_body function loads the full post into a varible name postbody. Then it search for the index of the fist occurance of html &lt;br from the post. I searched &lt;br instead of <br /> in order to avoid errors. If the &lt;br is found in the body, it creates a sub string from the post's beginning to &lt;br position & replaces the postbody to that substring.

If in your blog that code do not find &lt;br then search for &lt;p or check the html source for solution.

Hope this will work for you. But If it does not work then just post a comment here with your blog url. I will try to solve it.


Update (18 Nov, 2009): I am very glad that all of you like my tutorial and using it. BTW, if you need professional blogger or wordpress template then check here. You will love this collection.


Read More:

Essential tools for your blog

Blogging is very much popular now a days. It is a great way to publish whatever you like. But promoting a blog site & attract visitors attention is not so easy. You need several tools/widgets to make your site popular. After visiting various blog I have found few great tools/widgets which may help your site to become rich.

Entrecard
It's an amazing tool you can't believe. It is a an easy and free method to place your blog ad into other people website. Just visit www.entrecard.com and create your site 125x125 pixel ad. From the site copy a widget code & place into your site. Then approve few advertisers from your entrecard dashboard. You will get Entrecard Credit or EC for placing other people ads into your site. With this EC you can promote your site to other people blog. Visit the following link to learn more:
http://entrecard.com/page/guide

Digg Tool
Add a digg tool/widget with your each post. If your blog is created with blogger.com then place the following javascript code into your Template HTML before <data:post.body/>. Others can place this code by replacing <data:post.url/> with your post's url.

<div style="float:right; margin-left:10px;">
<script type="text/javascript">
digg_url="<data:post.url/>";
</script>
<script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"/>
</div>

After posting an article click that tool to post it into digg.com

Recent Comments Widget
People like to view recent comments of the site to check if there is any comment posted after their comment. In the following link you will find a tool to generate javascript code for your blog. Copy the code and place into your site. Here you go:
http://blogger-templates.blogspot.com/2007/03/recent-comments.html

Shoutbox
Place a shoutbox where people can post comments, news or even chat easily. It refresh automatically after 60 seconds. Visit www.shoutmix.com and create a widget matching your site color.

Visitor Counters
Here are two cool free tools to check visitor numbers. First one is Branica Blog Counter - which count total hits of your blog. Another is Users Online - which shows numbers of visitors last 5 minutes.


These are tools/widgets I like most. Post your comments here and let me know which tools/widgets you like most. I will update this post based on your comments.

AdToll.com - Placing Ad in cost per week method

Recently I have discovered that other than Google AdSense there is another excellent way to earn via Ad. It is AdToll. Among its various Ad service I like most is "Cost per week". Here I can set how much I want to get paid for placing Ad into my site. For example, I have placed a Ad space at the top right of this site for initially $0.20/week. In this space 30 Ads will be displayed in rotation, which means I will get paid maximum $6/week from this space. There is an option to auto pricing, so the cost will be increased automatically based on different factors. But you can also select other methods like pay per click.

Actually advertising is not only to earn money, but also it is a fun to watch how many people are visiting & clicking on that space and what is your site price. You can also view the current price, average view/week, pay per click cost of your site from a Rate Card. Following is an example of my Rate Card. Here is the link of my Rate Card:
http://www.adtoll.com/rate-card-for-its-a-fun-2730-ref=2593-s=5836

AdToll has recently arranged a contest. The prizes are 13,000 Entrecard.com credits. Entrecard is a very much popular & cost-free way to promote your website. With these credits you can place your site ad into hundreds of websites absolutely free. The prizes are as follows:

• 1st Prize: 10,000 credits
• 2nd Prize: 2,000 credits
• 3rd Prize: 1,000 credits

The winners will be selected from 3 random entries who have placed a reivew of this service into their site. Now visit this link read the instructions.

Viewdle - Facial Recognition from on-screen video

At last video indexing is possible with www.viewdle.com. I am sure you will be amazed when you will visit the site. It can recognize a person in real-time from a video. You can search a person video & can view how many times he/she appears on screen.

In the site it says:

Viewdle is a video indexing and reference system that fuses pioneering, facial-recognition visual analysis technology along with other leading search techniques to automatically look “inside the video” and identify true on-screen appearances with unrivaled accuracy and relevance. Viewdle’s frame-by-frame analysis provides search results based upon the actual video assets, not just the associated metadata. Viewdle solves the inefficiencies inherent in using text-based metadata and other existing tools for indexing, searching and retrieving moving media.

For example to see real-time face recognition of Benazir Bhutto visit this link & click a video link: Benazir Bhutto

Following image describes how the system works to index & recognize a person from a video: