self.machine

So here is a quick snapshot at how to get all your wordpress blogposts using python [or wordpresslib to be specific]

–

#!/usr/bin/env python

import wordpresslib

import tinyurl

wordpress = raw_input('Wordpress URL:')

user = raw_input('Username:')

password = raw_input('Password:')

# prepare client object

wp = wordpresslib.WordPressClient(wordpress, user, password)

# select blog id

wp.selectBlog(0)

posts = wp.getRecentPosts(100)

for p in posts:

if p.title.find("p=")<0:

    print p.title," - ",tinyurl.create_one(p.link)

So here are some dead easy ways of getting munin and munin-node installed on your RHEL5 server.

First add RPM Forge repository
rpm -Uhv http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/i386/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm

Then just fire

yum install munin munin-node

Now, you have your munin running. Lets turn our attention to monit.

First add this new repo to you
rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm

Then go ahead and install monit using
yum install monit

Now this my friend was real easy ! Have fun , more later.

Well, working on freeBSD right now some immediate learnings for most linux users

• Ports is as good as apt-get [and i would say much better, when i started installing stuff]
• You will need to start with installing vim and bash to make your life a lot easier

So the target was to install python and nginx, both of which are very easy to install once you understand how the whole ports collection system works. So here is the guide to installing nginx

portsnap fetch – This gets the portsnap collection file

portsnap update – This updates the collection directory at /usr/ports

Then goto /usr/ports/www/nginx and use make, it throws up a very nice module selection menu which i really like. I do wish that apt-get was like this when it came to installing stuff like this. The final step is a make install Simple is it not.

Python is very similar when you want to install as well ! More as i finish my installation and tweaking, having some issues with nginx latency !

It has been something that has been going on in my head for a significant amount of time and I believe that it is the right time for politicians and famous individuals to take their online reputation management as seriously as the offline one. Here, i will outline a very basic strategy that i believe will equip celebrities and politicians to strengthen their brands.

So lets start with some assumptions that will make our lives easier as the post goes on.

• Paid advertising stand-alone is not an effective way of reaching out.
• A holistic or integrated approach towards internet marketing is what will allow long-term gains.
• Like most blog posts, this is highly subjective. Feel free to improve, argue, debate any points.

So with this initial setup we can charge into how a politician X can become an online brand.

Goals

To plan for the next coming elections, which means that it has to be a sustained campaign over the next 2-3 years to make a meaningful impact.

It also has to ensure that he remains at a peak during his election times, and is able to sustain public interaction at a locality level.

Mechanisms available

We all seem to assume that social media, by default is the internet. In a country with nearly 430 million wireless connections, a strategy also needs to address the offline, but mobile populace.

So here is a list of potential ways of reaching the user using social media

• Internet – Blogs / content
• Mobile (SMS, MMS or GPRS)
• Internet – Social networks
• and many more …

The list can go on, but it is all dependant on the target audience which may be some remote district in West Bengal (India).
Why ? Why not ?

“One does not fit all”, and that is the reality. I would love to use social media to create and enhance everybody’s reputation. For an example, an MLA from a remote bihar village has no use for social media in his political career (unless of course he has national / state level ambitions).

Cosmopolitan cities like kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore have all shown that the internet may emerge as a potentially important mechanism for party propaganda as well as reputation management.

So if you guys want to have a chat with me discussing this further, do comment or email me at me@dipankar.name.

Working on a very basic twitter background generator, right now focusing on how to get the sidebar width right. It is very much under use at my twitter handle @dipankarsarkar (http://twitter.com/dipankarsarkar). The core idea is to be abe to communicate more information about what i do as a person using the background image. Some features that I personally want are

• Transparency for the sidebar – The image underneath should be visible, right now its a grey opaque color.
• A right sidebar – After some research , I figured out that the safest and optimal width to cater for is 1200px, with the core content on the left sidebar though. More thoughts on that as I deploy some new changes.
• Better fonts – Although new fonts / languages can be deployed. The code is not flexible enough right now to add new fonts.

That is a long enough list for the day , attaching the background with this as well. Let me know in case having cool backgrounds excite you.