Yesterday, I rolled out the first of supposed many releases of Enjoy Studies. (I really have a bad rep with projects that start and never end…)
For all those who are wondering what this is all about, Enjoy Studies is an attempt to help students who want to learn and are facing some trouble with it. This is an idea in progress and everyone can have a say in this. Our final aim is to provide an alternative to conventional education which engages and provides an awesome intellectual framework for anyone willing to learn anything.
That being a really generalized statement and idea, I will list out the detailed motives and steps on the Enjoy Studies blog

This being my personal blog, I’ll try to keep to non-tech parts of the site. The first of them is what exactly does the site do? Right now, it just provides a box for you to post any doubt/question you have. We do not restrict you to be confined in streams of conventional education, career, life in general. May be, we are named such that you kinda get a feel that they you to ask questions only related to education. :P
When we have an answer for you, we mail you back. In case of questions related to academia, it might end with only 1 reply. In case of *deeper* questions, its more like a series of mails / chats etc than a single question and answer format. When we finally do find a generic for-public answer, we save it with us so that it can be used to help. So from where I see it, its going towards being some mix of a QnA site for V1. The major differences between a standard QnA site and Enjoy Studies are,
#1 The mentor gets personally involved in many cases. (did I mention we have an open mentor/mentee concept? more on that on the Enjoy Studies blog later)
#2 In many cases, we can have a non-generic reply. So we need to more or less make a model sometime in future which actually helps figure out answers most relevant to you.
#3 In case of 1 answer questions, we keep only the best answer and try to use it as a means for self assessment and fill voids in course content (Yes creating an alternative course is in V2 release plan, but that may change entirely)
#4 Discussion boards. Similar to mentor/mentee, we are to make a discussion board for users to interact among themselves. The final outcome of those discussions are also gonna go into the QnA model.
Apart from the content itself, almost everything on Enjoy Studies is a community effort, right from planning to release. If anyone of you is a great designer or kick ass developer looking to save the world, we can find some task for you and give you some rep for it :)
Do comment on any issues you find with using/ rendering of the site, I am a terrible designer. As the title says, Ask a doubt!

1. You can not judge the future
   No matter how hard you try, you can never judge what the outcome of something will be. You can make a best guess based on how things have been in the past and trying to put yourself in that situation and playing out roles in your mind. This may be a good idea while trying to figure things out with code its way more difficult and almost a waste of time when doing this with people and utterly ridiculous when you are doing it with people whom you really don’t know that well…
   The best you can do is know your goals.
2. Know your goals
   Not knowing what to do next is like the worst thing that can happen to a person and that happens only in two occaisions. Not really having anything on mind or having too much at a time. While I would have loved discussing the first one, I have no personal experience in that region so I can not empathize with you if you are there. So I’ll pick the one I am facing right now. After an initial round of thinking, I figured out that my current goals are the plugin manager for DokuWiki and making the future of Enjoy Studies. I love the idea behind Stalk Ninja and am somewhere in the team (not very sure what role I am playing). So here are three major things that I have to be concerned about right now. Apart from these, there’s a client turned friend’s project which has been ultra delayed due to various reasons (one of them is me!) and he’s been very patient and supportive about all the college semester exams and now with GSoC taking most of my time. Then there’s sambhuti, WP FB Comments, VSSUT.com, moving everything to linode, fundakid, codeitout, hacktard, open-graph plugin, fb-merge and a lot of ideas that keep adding and piling everyday…
   Isn’t it insane to actually have that many goals at once?
   Does that seem like your life? If your answer is yes, you need to drop some things and group goals
3. Drop things and group goals
   From the huge list of goals you have right now, like it or not, you’ll have to scratch some out and pick only the ones which are in best interests of your future and of the future of others involved. Divide them into groups of tasks you can cut easily, tasks you can not avoid and the gray area.
   In my case, first victims would be Codeitout, hacktard, fundakid and a bunch of other ideas. As I haven’t started with any of them, I probably should wait a little longer. may be also VSSUT.com.
   The things I can not delay at all are the DokuWiki Plugin manager (Because of a deadline, commitment to a huge community and failing the summer of code), the client site (Because he’s a great guy and has been so patient with me). I can’t leave Stalk Ninja and Enjoy Studies (Because they are things I love a lot).
   In the gray area come WP FB Comments(Sorry Ankit, I had to…), moving all sites to linode and sambhuti (it is pretty much stable now)
   Once you have this list, pick the things you cannot avoid and start prioritizing
4. Start prioritizing
   When you have just a bunch of really super important stuff left, you need to assign weights to them. According to these weights, you need to devote time and effort for each goal. The best way to understand your priority would be checking in what sequence you wrote the list in the previous step.
   For example in my case DokuWiki Plugin manager is the most important thing. I can not let it pass at any cost (I have let it slack a little in the past 3 days and am feeling terrible already, I need to get to speed again on it)
   Next is the client site. This is something I am not very sure about because there are multiple variables here and according to #1 above, I can not determine which day I’ll get my next task for the project. So I keep it in the important-if-I-have-a-task category.
   Now I have Stalk Ninja and Enjoy Studies. One is my idea and I am somewhere between an evangelist and a team member on the other. I love them both equally and I see (read: I am bent on making) their fate intertwined in a very deep sense in future. Enjoy Studies has not yet been pushed to a full throttled launch and Stalk Ninja is already there, ready to “pivot” (the famous and often misused startup word, meaning scaling. origin: more or less pivot in popularity chart or sales chart).
   When faced with a decision like this, you have to make your best guess and go with it without blaming yourself 2 years from now.
   In my case, I pick Enjoy Studies… Partly because of a plan Pocha Bhaiya gave me for Enjoy Studies (surprisingly, Kushal Bhaiya came up with a similar plan. both unaware of each other) and mostly because Stalk Ninja has already two minds giving probably more than their 100 percent into it. IMHO, Gaurav and Pocha bhaiya are the best people you would want to hand over your new startup to if you want it to work. (This is the reason I would advise startups to float their projects on SN). I feel we have come to a point that they’ll ask me for help whenever they need me without hesitating and I would do the same. :)
5. Practice Implementation
   Now that you have a clear weight based analysis of things, you should fix a time based deadline and stop thinking anymore about the need to re-organize this priority list. Unless of course, something really urgent comes up that you need to fit in somewhere…. After this its just plain implementing it over and over again till you find the perfect balance between the goals ;-)
6. Thinking and Doing
   There can never be a scenario where you can do anyone of the two, they need to go together. When you overdo Thinking, remember step #1 and when doing doesnt give any results repeat step 2-5.

I am sure there must be better authors than me who have written articles like this one. But if you have reached this line, I think I did a pretty good job :P

If you have any problems with the plugin, comment below. We’ll try to fix it in the future versions.

Read the release article here : Wp-Fb Comments -The next generation Wp-Fb integration

I have added 2 actions and a few functions for governing the meta data WP sends to the browser.
The actions are
‘open_graph_head_pre’ and ‘open_graph_head_post’. Both run before meta data is echoed to the browser so both can be used to edit the meta data.
‘open_graph_head_pre’ action is run before the meta data is setup. So you can edit all defaults with this action. (set_home_type( $type ) , set_default_img( $url ) )
‘open_graph_head_post’ action is run after the meta data is setup. So you can use this and set_og_data( $key, $value ) to edit/add any number of meta data before executing it.
Always use open_graph_instance() to get the instance of the class. I can change the class name in future but will always keep this function constant

Alternatively, you can use the method echo_meta( $meta_array ) with ‘wp_head’ action for your own meta data (keywords description etc etc etc)

Another cool method is get_image_url();

I will add some code examples in next few days.
Use dependency to check if this plugin is active if you plan to use it.

If you’ve any doubts please post a comment below.

Download link for the plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/open-graph

Note: attachment added. Save this as a php file
Sample code for open graph plugin extension

If anyone is interested in helping me out with the website send me an email and we can get started on the site.

Its time present and popular search engines started paying attention to the social layer or we will soon see the rise of a new era in search… In earliest forms of search, things were done by a small group of people, then some innovators automated it and figured crazy cool search algorithms which led to revolutionizing search. Now its time for a new revolution where people start coming back into the equation but not from the search engine side, from the user-contributor side… There are a few social search engines and the trend is shifting one small search at a time. Hope I see new search engines that integrate the current social sites and find their correct place in the current equations of search engines…

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/6258977.cms

This made me remember a short documentary kinda film I had seen some years ago on cyber crime and role of cyberspace in future. Then I remembered about a rumor I had once heard about some cool programmer being taken from his college by the government to hack into enemy defence networks… At that time, I thought that the person spreading the “rumor” was trying to be cool by passing out fake information. But now when I see this article and the way the whole world is moving in the cyber domain. For example, almost all banks, telecom companies, postal and railways in India now have a core server managing most of the traffic and data. though this helps in much more co-ordinated and sped-up process, this also makes us more vulnerable to any attacks as the security of the few central servers doesnt have the same importance of data:security ratio as  the securities that each individual had within its own server.

Let me put it this way, say you have a new company transporting something precious, say gold, from one part of India to another, say from Kolkata to Mumbai.  That involves 10 security personnel guarding it for a caravan of 5 vans full of gold. Which makes it 2 people per van. Say this policy holds good and the smaller transporters who had been robbed and had to face huge losses died out. Local traders start putting their gold in this Transport company.  Eventually with more and more gold coming up, number of vans will increase much more say at some point it reaches 30 vans. Obviously, security of the caravan will also go up, they increase the number of security personnel to 30 and give them new weapons to protect the vans.  The people per van ratio cannot be said to be 1 per van as they now have better weapons but the efficiency of a person guarding the van never doubles with more weapons. And even if it equalled 2 per van, we fail to consider a lot of things.
The people who used to loot small batches and stayed content arent getting that simple and regular supply of money will surely come up with something. With more security their number will come down but will never come down to zero.
We have a new vulnerability with more gold going together which will make the loot worth it for more planned.
With the whole gold business between Kolkata and Mumbai having a single channel, this loot can cripple the business on both ends.
What would you do if you got the soft spot of your blood enemy? Let go?

Take that example in terms of the ratio of importance of some information to its security. We have a much less secure system than what we had when we used thin distributed channels instead of a single fat one. With cyber armies coming up, we will have more training and idea sharing, legally between hackers of different kinds under the same roof. If you are having trouble understanding this, see this TED video http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex.html . With this kinda culture, it wont take long before people start realizing that you donot need huge armies to defeat and take over a nation, all you need is a few good hackers, a few people who can gain access to all the important networks in a country. It can be as simple as pushing in batches of 10-15 people for all networks within a country, pushing them to remote areas so that gaining access if simpler with bribing. Kill its economy by disturbing the railways and banks wherever you can find them off guard and while the country recovers and figures out whats going on, carry out a planned raid on it.

We donot pay as much attention to security on economic centers as we do to our borders. We really need to get out of the mindset where we considered geographical borders as the places where can be infiltrated and taken down, that concept,like any religion, is too old to hold true in the present society

Kushal bhaiya(hindi for elder brother. Full name-Kushal Shah ) and I were doing our usual baseless bakwaas (hinglish for baseless chat). there’s something with this guy(Kushal bhaiya), you just sit with him for 30 minutes and you just cant avoid being a your creative best. Ask anyone of the stupid-seven( students who went to “study” at bhaiya’s Asha Institute of Excellence batch2005-2007 11th-12th). :)

I was buying the domain for his school website(http://www.sanvid.com).
We both have this strange overwhelming feeling of  promoting knowledge and we started planning a site for it.

I guess all of you must be aware of the situation India is facing in terms of good teachers (I don’t mean knowledgeable). We have too many students getting into colleges for our present teaching strength to handle. You might think that its the case with just lower level colleges. If you think so, ask an IITian. The problem is same everywhere… There is a huge reason behind this mess but I will get to that later.

We started talking on the basic aims of the website…

26th March, 17:25 IST

We had to go down from education for all to education for just btech electrical n possibly rest of btech coz of limited resources(we need a community of like minds for other courses)

Finally it was decided that we start a knowledge chain reaction kinda thing. We provide list of good books in each subject, references to good video courses, create discussion groups of max 4 ppl to avoid clutter. Create basic rules for a discussion group and try to find supportive teachers to help the doubts that arise from discussions…

A semi-public wiki is another option to create a good course material but I think we shall have that feature later on…

We had to drop SanviD as that was being maintained by a panel of investors and they may not approve of the idea.
We had to get a new name now (grrr)Luckily, I was on call with pooh(Poonam Prusty) and she got in the name searching as well. She suggested the name Enjoy Studies, bhaiya agreed and I got the domain :)

27th March, 14:39 IST

Kushal bhaiya suggested the nick “e-stud“  and thats how we got our nick :)

29th March, 18:35 IST

We started working on the actual specifications of the site.
Whiteboard came up as a great tool for discussions. (We need an actionscript and flash developer help for this)

Basic site layout was discussed that day

3rd April, 17:16 IST

The basic design parts were finalized. I know I am a noob designer. Whats more? I was trying to make it html5 css3 :P

4th April, 13:52 IST

Mr.Splashy Pants :P
We started finding out our pics that would suit the site. hehe it seemed funny yet important to be on the front page of our dream.
Felt like we are going to rock the world. hehe, I wasnt high guys, was just a bit senti…
Colors and gradients were added to the layout, we were making good progress yay!!
“Does this look good?”, “Should I put this image here?”,”Where should the rounded corners go?”
Questions flew and were answered :). Design was edited and re-edited and it finally reached our first beta stage…
I added the name and e-mail basic survey for the site and we were up.

for more info and downloading the plugin visit http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/comics-gone-bad/ :)