Yahoo Pipes and Google Mashup Editor both allows you to create mashups with RSS feeds. The following is a brief comparative review.
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Many like Darren Rowse suggest that you should create a stack of ideas to blog about and then use them in lean periods to tide you over.

Now Darren is an amazing blogger. He regularly talks informatively about a subject which I could probably summarize in 5 minutes flat - about blogging. He does a good job out of it and has many dedicated followers.

I do not have his predisposition. Firstly I am not a professional blogger like him. In other words I do not blog for living even though it makes me a decent income. I blog only when I have something to blog about. I blog when I have some new ideas or technologies or code tips to share. If I don't have something interesting to share, I don't. I don't spend time making an uninteresting topic interesting. Read more (536 words) »

Much has been written about Yahoo Pipes and lots of how-to tutorial. I was pleasantly surprised to see the ease of use of Yahoo Pipes and how easily I could create a simple pipe to get data in RSS feed format. Yahoo Pipes contains lots of ready-made objects for easy filtration of data. So I became bolder and started creating more complex pipes with advanced filtration and that's when my problems began.

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I am continually amazed at how relevant ads (context sensitive advertisement) AdSense serves on certain articles. Here is a recent example on my post about future WordPress plugins.

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Translator Plugin Gold (for WordPress blogs) provides automatic machine translation of blogs in 32 languages (more will be added soon) - German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Arabic, Dutch, Greek, Russian, Norwegian, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hungarian, Icelandic, Latin American Spanish, Filipino, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Slovenian, Swedish, Welsh, Turkish and Latin. We provide unlimited free updates and upgrades and 6 months of free support.
Translator Plugin Gold has a lucrative affiliate program too. You can make a cool 30% from each sale!

The new features and fixes in version 1.2 (free upgrade for existing customers) are:

New Features

1. Directory browsing of translator plugin directory has been disabled for better security.
2. The ability to switch off translation statistics (from translator option page under Basic->Statistics->Disable Statistics section). You may gain some performance by switching off the statistics simply because it uses a database query to store the data. You can still use the Statistics widget to display your existing statistics. However it will not be updated if you decide to switch off stats. You can again switch it on any time.
3. In Translator Plugin Gold 1.2 we added a new hook / callback facility to enable you to view and process the translated page before it is served to the end user. Please refer to developer guide to know how to use it. The importance of this hook cannot be understated.
   You can use the tgTranslatorPostFilterHook to edit / modify the content of the translated pages before it is served to the user. You can also take action based on the content or engine used to translate the page.
   This hook can be used to handle errors in translation or even catch and process new types of errors. The actions include 1. ability to send custom error pages, 2. re-direct to original pages (for example in case of error), 3. displaying custom error messages and more. Few use cases for this hook are:
   • Provide customized title, meta tags & descriptions for translated pages to eliminate concerns about duplicate content. Check out the translated pages in simple thoughts for some usage examples (hint: look at the meta tags and title).
   • Provide custom error pages or re-direct to original page when translator is unable to translate a page (due to overload or temporary unavailability of engines).
   • Filter translated pages
   • Add your own content to translated pages like advertisements etc. You can also do it using existing translator API. However this provides full control over processing translated pages before it is served to the end-user.

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Just after announcing its quarterly results Google lost over 16 billion dollar on Friday. The last trade was at 481.32, down from its previous day high of 534.75.

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In Linux wine (or crossover office if you like to pay) is used to execute Windows applications. wine normally open exe files only. However you can also use it to open msi files as follows:
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I am seeing Amitabh Bachchan's blog's AdSense ads on my blog. How is Amitabh's blog relevant to my blog? AdSense quite often does a real poor targeting these days. I am looking forward to move this blog over to alternate ad providers.

Electrolux India has very carefully hidden its service center number on its website. The only option you have is to drill-down to the local customer service center. Unfortunately the number given for Ms. Millenium Service Center for South Kolkata (033-24573470 / 24451120 ) doesn't work. I had to hunt down a certain executive to finally find the real phone number for booking complaint across India.

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Google search bot (Googlebot) parses robots.txt file to find excluded sections of the site like any good webbots. However unlike the other bots, Google bot behaves differently when you have a section for all bots (*) as well as a section specifically for Googlebot.

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