phoxis GNU+Linux+FOSS, Tutorials

WordPress.com IRC Channel

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Support is one of the best features in wordpress.com . The official documentation, the email support and the mainly volunteer driven forums make a very strong and fast support system. Except these three there is another support system in wordpress.com which almost no one is aware of. The freenode IRC channel of wordpress.com .

IRC is a text-based chat system that allows millions of people around the world to communicate in real time.

The IRC chat will enables you to communicate with other people in the chat room and get direct support, discuss about topics and a lot more.
Read more to know how to configure wp.com IRC

phoxis GNU+Linux+FOSS, Reviews

Do Really ALL of us want to Reblog ?

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After a huge wave of excellent features and themes from wordpress.com in the last months, wordpress.com included a new feature what they call “Reblogging”. At the fist look i thought it was something like the facebookish “Like” button on the top for bookmarking, or subscribing it in readomattic, or like in StumbleUpon. But it read like this :

If you decide that you want to share the post with your own readers, you can click the “Reblog this post” link and you’ll be taken to the new QuickPress tab on the WordPress.com home page. This will auto-fill a snippet of the post text, a link back to the original post, and a link to the blog. If the post includes any images we’ll also automatically add a thumbnail image to the reblog post. Finally you can add your own comments to the reblog post then select which blog you’d like to post it to (if you have more than one).

I thought okay, wordpress.com is trying to get “social” (were we unsocial or anti-social before?), but i discovered the feature was like this:
Continue reading my view about the wp.com Reblog feature

phoxis GNU+Linux+FOSS, Reviews

WordPress.com Top 10 Features

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WordPress.com is a free web-blogging service which uses WordPress CMS software as their blogging platform. Here are the free blog feature list : http://en.wordpress.com/features/

Before starting a blog in wordpress.com , I tried some CMS softwares offline. I used Joomla, Drupal, Vox, Plone, etc. WordPress CMS matched my exact needs. Self hosting was a tedious task with the work of creating content as well as an extra burden of administration. I decided to go with the free blogging services. I registered with blogger.com and spent some time testing it. Although it is feature rich with allowing editing theme XML, CSS, allowing JavaScript, Flash embeds, but somehow it was not a match for me. At last I finally tried wordpress.com . After starting it felt a bit bad as there was no manual theme customization options which became a habit that time, no free CSS editing, no JavaScript, and had limitations. As time passed, I was getting into wordpress.com the more I discovered the features and adjusted myself, and started to post more content. At last I am now fixed in wordperess.com, and mapped a domain with their domain upgrade feature.

Continue reading to get the Top Ten

phoxis GNU+Linux+FOSS, Tutorials

Re-Enable WordPress.com random blog surfing

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Wordpress.com blogs you have Tag and subscribed Blog surfing features with which you can surf your subscribed blogs, and get the update information from the blogs. You can also have the list of Blog of The Day in here http://botd.wordpress.com/ . There seems to be no random blog surfing, and blog hopping and just hovering over different blogs in wordpress.com at this time. Earlier WordPress.com had a Next Blog link on the admin bar on the top, when you are logged in into your wordpress.com account, (http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2006/02/08/blogs-where-to-next/). But it was removed. But although the link was taken out, the feature is still there. This post will describe how to re-enable the Next Blog feature, and let you visit blogs randomly .

Continue Reading to enable the Next Blog feature

phoxis Coding Discussions, Computer Science

wcat : A GNU cat implementation

Everybody has used the GNU or UNIX cat program in the command line. It is used to concatenate files and dump it into the standard output, or can simply be redirected to another file. Long ago i started to write my own version of the cat program. I have implemented each and every function which cat supports, and also made it look identical, except some messages. Although this is not a cat clone, and has no connection with the source code of GNU cat. This code was made by inspecting the output behaviour of GNU cat. This is named wcat. I started this because this was the most simple code to write and was intended for the Whitix OS project run by Mathew (http://www.whitix.org/). This is a very good OS development project for the beginners to start with. I could not at present actively participate in this project because of the time limitations here at my end.
Check out the code

phoxis Writings

Me and My Diary

Every new year companies distribute diaries to their clients, people gift diaries to their friends. What I see the most of the time at least here, is the wastage of the diary. Blank pages of the diaries are kept blank. The most of the times those are used to take class notes, used to keep home expenditure log, or other calculations. Some write poetry and stories in the diary, and also some write daily schedules, or office appointments in a diary, which I think is a good use. But I have never seen any person whom I know, write diary in a diary.

Continue reading “Me and My Diary” →

phoxis Computer Science, GNU+Linux+FOSS, Overview, Tutorials

What are ID3 Tags all about?


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When you play a music file in your favourite music player, or in your portable media player the track name, album, artist, lyrics gets displayed. You can search the songs with artists, album names. Even some of the tracks come with album art too, but there is no image file anywhere. The question generally arises, where does these information come from? The answer is straight forward; this metadata about the audio track is stored inside the audio file itself. The different audio files need different codecs. Different audio format files also have different such metadata systems. For example The Vorbis comments, APE tag, ID3 tags etc.

The most common and popular audio media (although not the best) is the mp3 . Mp3 audio format stores this metadata inside the music file, either at the beginning or at the end or at both locations. The music metadata system used with mp3 is called an ID3 Tag.
We will rip off the ID3 tag and check out what’s inside it in this article. We will discuss about ID3v1.x and ID3v2.x tags.

Continue reading “What are ID3 Tags all about?” →

phoxis Coding Discussions, Computer Science

An ID3v1 Tag Parsing Library

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ID3 tag is an mp3 audio media file tagging system. The ID3 tags are stored in a pre-defined location in the mp3 media file, either in the start or at the end (or both). There are two major versions of the ID3 tags. ID3v1 and ID3v2. The tag store data about the song, like track name, album name, artist name, genre, track no, year, composer, licensing information, lyrics, even multiple images inside the tag. To get more information about ID3 tag please check the official website of ID3 tag: http://www.id3.org/, also check this article What are ID3 Tags all about?

Continue reading to get the library

phoxis Coding Discussions, Computer Science

Synchronization Safe Integer

Synchronization safe integers are related to ID3v2 tags. ID3v2 tags has a dynamic structure where the length of the tag is variable and inside the tag, there can stay a lot of frames which again can be of dynamic sizes. The size of the tag is stored in the ID3v2 tag header is of length 4 bytes long. These 4 bytes are stored in a special format which is called a synchronization safe integer. Also from ID3v2.4 tags also the frame size bytes which are stored in the frame headers, describing the frame’s length, are stored as 4 byte synchronization safe integer.

Continue reading “Synchronization Safe Integer” →