All posts by Abhishek Nagekar

Guide To Online Passport Application In India

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If you read my recent posts, you know I went to the passport office for the purpose of document verification. It went as smooth as it could, but before all this, before submitting the form, I didn’t have the slightest clue what all I had to do, and I learnt most of the technicalities from various sources on the Internet. So here I am, writing this guide.

There are three parts to this guide, as well as the entire process. Firstly, there is the online form filling part, followed by the onsite documents verification and lastly the police verification. Before you get into the process, make sure you have some documents. Documents that are required vary person to person according to your details (you can use the document advisor on their official website), but you’ll basically need one proof of date of birth, one residential proof and a Non ECR category proof. Ideally, you should keep at least 2 of the former two proofs handy (You’ll know why in a moment). For most of you reading this, the Non ECR would mean SSC (matriculation) certificate. Yes, that is all. In my case, I had my birth certificate as the proof of date of birth, BSNL landline bill as the residential proof and matriculation certificate as the proof of non ECR.

Form Filling

  • Handy tip; Since the form is quite large compared to other forms you might have filled and requires your attention, if you happen to take a break while filling in the form, you can click the ‘Save my details’ link at the bottom of the page to save your progress in case of any failure.
  • Go to Passport India’s website and click “New User Registration” link. Create an account on the following page. NOTE that this is just an account so the details here are of little value.
  • After setting up the account and verifying the email address, go to ‘Applicant’s Home’ and select apply for a fresh passport. You will be presented with options to either download the form or fill it up online. Since you are reading this article on the Internet, you can freely select the ‘fill online’ option.
  • Passport Type: You should select the ‘fresh passport’ radio button, since this is your first application. Otherwise, accordingly. The type of application can be any one of ‘normal’ or ‘tatkal’ depending on your need, and so is the option for passport booklet size. It will increase the total cost of the application, if you go for them. I kept it to normal and 36 pages.
  • Applicant Details: Add your personal details here. Triple check everything for spellings and numbers. It will save you a lot of headache. Try to enter as much information as possible, and also cross check if the same details are present on your document proofs. Give special attention to spellings in your name.
  • Family Details: Fill in your family details. Same instructions as that for applicant details.
  • Present Residential Address: Fill in your address, and make sure it matches with the one on your bills and other documents that you are planning to submit at the passport office. You’ll need to provide previous address proof if your current address is newer than 1 year (i.e. you are living in your current residence for less than 1 year)
  • Emergency Contact: Person to contact in any case of emergency.
  • References:People in your neighbourhood who can confirm your identity and address, like friends, relatives or any neighbours.
  • The next few pages should be usual form filling, and doesn’t carry much information weightage, compared to the previous sections. Once done, verify the details of your passport. Verify it again, and ask someone else to do it too.
  • Verify the self declaration, and when sure everything is all right, submit the application.
  • This will do for now. Your application is filled and ready. Now you can browse to the ‘View Saved/Submitted’ applications and your application should be there. There are some things that you can do from here. First of all, you will have to ‘pay and schedule the appointment’. If you had been following as per the normal procedure, you should have an invoice of INR1500 here. You can either pay online or as a chalan from SBI. I would, of course, recommend you to pay it online, and save yourself the hassle.
  • The payment process is similar to any online transaction. No surprises here.
  • After the payment, the system will show you available appointment dates and their locations. Select one from those, or you can schedule it later. Select the nearest one and note the exact time. They don’t tolerate latecomers and you would have to reschedule the appointment if you miss it, even by 10 minutes.
  • After confirming the appointment date, take a printout of the application, get your documents attested with 2 copies of each.
  • You are now ready for the next step, visit to the PSK – Passport Seva Kendra

Passport Seva Kendra

  • Depending upon how far you stay from the PSK, try to reach the place at least 30 minutes ahead of reporting time. PSK will have an ATM machine, snacks counter, zerox machine, PCs with Internet access and washroom, in case you were wondering. Make sure you carry the application letter’s copy, document proofs (original and attested zerox), extra documents that you have.
  • Keep the documents handy. When it is time, you will first be checked by the security for valid documents and application letter, along with other security stuff. Only the applicant is allowed inside the PSK, unless there is a special exception or your applicant is a minor.
  • After you get inside the PSK, you should notice queues, with some marked ‘tatkal’. Get into the non-tatkal queue (of course, if applicable). You will be asked to show your originals and zeroxed documents. The person at the counter should inspect them and put them into a folder marked ‘confidential’. Along with it, you will receive a token slip. Keep it infront of you and note the token number.
  • Next up, you will be waiting for your token number to appear on the screen. When it appears, note the associated counter number (like ‘A13’) carefully.
  • Counter A: Here, you will have to show your documents. The person at the counter will assess them, ask you to add something if something is missing and point out other errors. It is likely that you will get stuck at this stage if there are any problems with your documents. If not, then you’ll be asked to smile for a photo, and give away your finger and thumb prints. You’ll also be asked if you would like to have SMS alerts for further notifications at INR35. Get it if you need, although not necessary. If all goes well, they’ll ask you to move to the next counter.
  • Counter B: Same procedure goes here, only the document verification is done strictly at this stage. Every detail is cross checked line by line, and errors are noted. You’ll be told if you have any errors that need to be taken care of. Otherwise, you are good to go.
  • Counter C: Here, the person will check the originals lightly, question you a thing or two if there were any errors at the B or A counter, and if everything goes right, the person will keep your zeroxed documents’ folder and ask you to submit the token slip.
  • Submit the token slip at the next counter, and you will receive an acknowledgement stating the status of your application, and the token slip back. Fill in the feedback form on the back of the token slip, and submit it to the exit security.
  • If your acknowledgement form reads ‘status: granted‘ then it means all went well. You can return home and wait for the call from your local police station for police verification. In case it doesn’t, then the exact error will be written. Rectify those and visit the PSK on the given appointment date, and get your application granted.

Police Verification

Now that you are done with things from your side, you can wait for a call from the police department of your area. Meanwhile, you can visit your profile and click ‘track application status’ to check on what stage your application currently is. During this time, authorities will inspect your civil/criminal records and stuff like that to make sure you’re a good citizen. It should not be a problem for most of us.

This section will be updated with more details as soon as I go through this phase.

The police verification step for me involved visiting the police station with identity proof, along with two references who came with me to the police station. For me, it was my school friend and other school friend’s dad. Didn’t take much time, a couple of hours and we were done.

Next

Assuming that you are done with the police verification, the police will send the recommendations back to the passport office. It would contain details and depending on those, they’ll further enquire and review your application or they will send the passport to print. If the latter is the case, then you can expect your passport within a month via speed post.

Edit Got the passport via mail in about 15 days after the police verification. All in all, a good experience.

Passport Office

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Today, I had an appointment at the passport office for document verification at 10.30 in the morning. To be honest, I was worried, not because I had any problem in any of the documents, but because the thought of visiting a government office makes me nauseatic.

Have you ever visited a Government office, where you spent hours rushing from one counter to other, facing people at every stage who don’t give the tiniest bit of importance to your existence, and you felt like you are in a totally different hostile country altogether? If yes, then you know exactly what I’m talking about here.

But today was something different. Although the reporting time was 10:30, I reached the place by 10, just in case. I was expecting hour long queues and chaos, but to my surprise, it was not that way. There was a queue, but there were hardly 10 people in it. After about 10 minutes of reaching, the security guard, who stood by the entry gate, called upon every one who had the reporting time of 10:30. He looked at our documents at a glance, did the physical security checks and we were in. It was still 10:20 on my watch. I went inside, where there were multiple counters. I stood in one of those. When my turn came, the lady at the counter took all my zeroxed documents and attached them to a file along with the application form. She gave me a form which had a token number on it. I was unsure about what to do next, but a helpful voice again called me and guided me towards the next room.

The next room was a large air conditioned hall, with a canteen, a zerox machine and many such convenience stuff. More importantly, it had three large LCD displays which displayed a table of token numbers and their corresponding counter locations. I sat there for around 10 minutes when I saw “N150 – A7” on the screen. I got up and went to the A7 counter. A lady there read all my documents and asked me to zerox a few more things. I did as she said. Then she captured my photograph, took my finger and thumb prints, and asked me to go ahead. All in all, the entire main hall and ‘A’ section took 30 minutes.

Next up, I was in a waiting room with other people, where there were the same monitors. Here I had to wait around 15 minutes before I saw “N150 – B3”. On this ‘B’ counter, a lady verified every detail line by line, going through each minor issue. After this, she returned my documents and told me to wait for the third counter. I went into the same room as that earlier and waited for the next call. Somewhere around 15 minutes later, I saw “N150 – C7” on the screen. Here, I was greeted by a very pleasant man, who smiled as I entered. He looked at the documents, doing some typing at the same time. After about 30 seconds, he kept the folder, returned me my originals, and said, “You’re done here. Submit the token, and then you may leave”. I smiled and gathered my originals, giving way to the next guy standing behind me. I checked my watch. It was 11:15. I returned the token slip, and went towards the exit. A very polite guard asked me to fill the feedback form, which had all sorts of questions. It should not be surprising that they deserved an ‘excellent’ in almost all questions. I then left the premises, got into a rickshaw and went home, with a totally changed mindset for Government offices. Oh boy, I wish all government offices were like that.

Summarizing my experiences, the entire process was smooth as silk. It was because of the excellent management of the people who worked there. They deserve the entire credits. Not a single person looked like he/she was forced to work there, something you often see in such places (My personal experience with SBI bank). Everyone made me feel good, and my work important. I was treated nicely, even though I didn’t get down from a VIP car at their premises, or had a call from a bureaucrat beforehand. The entire process was way better then what I could have ever imagined.

Lastly, a big thank you on behalf of me and the thousands others who visit these Passport Seva Kendra all over the nation with dreams in their minds. While I was sitting in the initial hall, I noticed a quote from Mahatma Gandhi, that hung down a large poster. I couldn’t photograph it since it was prohibited, but this was the exact quote. I am happy that they didn’t just put it, but were following it on every step. Thank you!

“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.”

CSS Crash Course

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I have a friend, who happens to be a good C and assembly programmer, but simply hates anything related to web, then be it HTML, CSS or anything way too much abstracted for that matter. Since it was compulsory for us to make our own web application project for college, he struggled to learn it (CSS and HTML) from here and there, cursing it at the same time. Hence this little guide, for all those of you who hate it, but still want to get your work done.

A thing or two about CSS

CSS isn’t a markup language. It is a styling language, and hence, it won’t really work if you have no document in the first place. Creating a document simply means adding some data to HTML tags in a web page. Here onwards, document would mean the HTML page that we are working on. Let us create one as an example.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
  <title>Testing</title>
</head>
<body>
  <h1>Awesome Site</h1>
  <h3>A little heading</h3>
  <p>A paragraph containing some text</p>
  <h3>Some information</h3>
  <p>More text...</p>
</body>
</html>

This is a very basic example that would display something like the following. You can guess what each tag stands for here, if not, ‘h’ tag stands for heading, ‘h1’ being the largest to ‘h6’ being the smallest. ‘p’ stands for paragraph, and there are many such tags, which are used as and when required.

Now it is time to style our document. I will place all the CSS styling in a <style> tag, which I will be placing into the <head> of the document. Now you must know that I could do the exact same thing by using an external CSS file and linking it, or by styling individual elements using inline CSS. We will see what those are later. I think the main heading should be red, the subordinate headings should be green and the paragraphs should be orange. I also think the background should be a little off white. Let’s see how that translates into CSS.

body {
  background-color: #eee
}
h1 {
  color: red
}
h3 {
  color: green
}
p {
  color: orange
}

Now that we have styled our page, let’s take another look at it.

Looks like it works, although it is looking ugly. Anyways, what we have used here is the element selector of CSS which, not surprisingly, selects the elements matching the tag name and applies the properties defined for it.

ID and Class selectors

Now, there may be times when you have multiple elements with same tag names but you want to apply CSS properties to only specific element(s). That is where the ‘id’ and the ‘class’ selector comes in. Note that however, the class here does now refer to anything from your object oriented programming books. It only gives those elements with that class a particular grouping. You can use any one of ‘id’ and ‘class’ as per your liking for now, but conventionally, we use ‘id’ for uniquely identifying elements and ‘class’ for grouping similar elements. Technically, there is an additional difference of precedence here, with the ‘id’ having more precedence than ‘class’. My personal rule is that, for custom CSS use ‘id’, since frameworks like Bootstrap (which we will check out later on) usually use ‘class’.

Now we shall rewrite the document adding an id attribute to each tag name.

<body>
  <h1 id="logo">Awesome Site</h1>
  <h3 id="heading">A little heading</h3>
  <p id="content">A paragraph containing some text</p>
  <h3 id="other-heading">Some information</h3>
  <p id="other-content">More text...</p>
</body>

and we shall change the CSS accordingly

#logo {
  color: red
}
#heading {
  color: green
}
#other-heading {
  color: olive
}
#content {
  color: orange
}
#other-content {
  color: purple
}

The resulting page looks something like this, with each of the individual elements appearing in different color.

Note that we could have well written ‘class’ instead of ‘id’ in our document, but then instead of #logo it would have been .logo, which is the class selector. Having learnt two selectors, we can now combine them to get the desired result. For example, h3#heading { color: blue; } would turn blue all the h3 tags that have a id=”heading” attribute declared. Similarly, h3.heading { color: blue; } would result in the same thing to all the h3 tags with class=”heading”.

Group selectors

Group selectors are used to apply properties to multiple elements at once. Multiple elements are separated by commas.

#logo {
  color: red
}
#heading {
  color: green
}
#other-heading {
  color: olive
}
#content {
  color: orange
}
#other-content {
  color: purple
}
/* Selecting all three tag names at once. */
h1, h3, p {
  background-color: yellow
}

Which will look like

Descendant selectors

Sometimes, CSS properties needs to be applied only to tags within a specific tag or id. In such situations, the descendant selector comes in handy.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
  <title>Testing</title>
  <style>
    ul em {
      font-size: 1.25em
    }
  </style>
</head>
<body>
  <p>Look what I've <em>got for ya!</em></p>
  <p>
    <ul>
      <li>item 1</li>
      <li>item 2</li>
      <li>item 3</li>
      <li><em>this looks abnormal</em></li>
      <li>item 5</li>
    </ul>
  <p>
</body>
</html>

And this will render

Look how the emphasis at the top is normal but the one in the ‘ul’ is enlarged. There is another similar selector called the child selector. It works similar to descendant selector but demands the child to be DIRECT descendant of the parent. For example, p > a { color: green; } will cause only the anchors directly children to any paragraph to look green. These are the various selectors that you would see and probably use when dealing with web applications. Simple enough, aren’t they?

<div> and <span>

Although div and span are html tags, any modern web application that you will write will heavily make use of these to group sections of the web page together. You might be familiar with the layouts of most websites these days, with a header on top, one or two column in the center with content and other options, and a footer at the bottom. Even on my blog, you’ll notice these three things. How are they made, and how to make them look so distinct that on the first glance, your visitors know what their purpose is. The answer lies in making proper divs and adding appropriate CSS to it. Div is a block element, which means that it is used to style multiple elements at once. Span, on the other hand, is inline, that is, it is used to style little chunks of content.

I will write the 4 sections of a website I mentioned earlier, using divs. Read the code and you would understand what is happening.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
  <title>Testing</title>
  <style>
    * {
      text-align: center 
    }
    #header {
      background-color: red
      height: 50px
    }
    #container {
      width: auto
      margin: 0 auto
    }
    #body {
      width: 75%
      float: left
      background-color: grey
    }
    #side {
      width: 25%
      float: right
      background-color: blue
    }
    #footer {
      background-color: green
    }
  </style>
</head>
<body>
  <div id="header"><h3>Header Text</h3></div>
  <div id="container">
    <div id="body"><p>Content goes here</p></div>
    <div id="side"><p>Sidebar</p></div>
  </div>
  <div id="footer"><p>Copyrights</p></div>
</body>
</html>

This sure looks beautiful, doesn’t it?

This completes the CSS syntax part. I did mention that you can write all your CSS in a file.css and include them in your document head with <link href="/assets/style.css" rel="stylesheet"> so that it is easier to maintain the code. There is yet another way to add CSS, which makes use of @import syntax. It is better avoided for the linked reasons.

Now that you are well equipped with the necessary things to learn some actual and practical CSS, you must be really excited to read from w3schools. It is a great site to begin, and since it comes on top each time you search for anything related to CSS (or web programming, for that matter), you may use it as your sole reference guide. Nothing bad, but keep in mind that after leaving your nutshell, you should avoid that site, and start using some reputed docs instead, like the ones from Mozilla.

CSS Frameworks

To speed up the development process, you might want to check out some libraries out there that would ease your life. One of the best is Bootstrap. It would enable you to do rapid development, with minimal typing. Bootstrap comes with jQuery, a Javascript library which also helps a lot dealing with web application stuff you are about to deal with. There is not much point reading the official docs if you only want to get the work done. Instead, I would suggest you to Google out things, pick up code on the way, keep going. That is exactly how I used to do stuff back then, when I hated to write CSS and HTML. Bad advice, but gets the job done most of the times.

Outro

CSS is amazing. Web is amazing. Today is a time when you either have to love the web, or keep fighting a losing battle convincing yourself that you don’t need it. Either way, knowing a thing or two about how the web pages that you spend more than half of your time on, are styled, is always a plus. As always, for anything, the comment box is always there. Corrections, please. Liked the article? Suggest it to your friends! Thank you for reading.

Birthday Week

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Here it comes, finally, my birthday. Not that it is something new this time, but surely one of the special ones because I passed another decade here on Earth. Last time this happened, I didn’t realize how important it was, maybe because I was just 10 back then. But this time, it would be different. I realized I have moved around the Sun 20 times now, which is amazing, because I have travelled around 18.8 trillion kilometers, since my birth, relative to the sun. That is a lot.

On 3rd of October this year, I will have lived some 7305 days which comes to about 613 million seconds. Woah! Good going. I travel a lot, and almost all of it is from and to my college. My college is 61 kilometers from home, and I am into it for the last 2 and a half years. Considering a usual semester to be of 3 months (which is lower bound for most semesters) and a usual month to have 22 working days, in the last 5 semesters I have travelled around 40,260 kilometers; a little more than the circumference of the earth at the equator. I wish I had had the fortune to visit another country or even distant parts of my own, but that’s all right.

20 years is a lot of time. From a pilot, to astronaut, to a star gazer and now a computer guy who talks code and science. My ambitions never ceased to motivate me. There have been some really nice moments, like getting into an engineering college, getting a personal computer and a mobile phone, good friends who love food and all. I was fortunate enough to be born in a family where I get all that I needed, to do things that I love, because what I am looking at is 20% of poverty in India

Also, I am sharing my birthday with Free Software Foundation and GNU project. They have turned 30 this year, which is cool. RMS would be real proud at where his initiative has reached today. I would like all of the people reading this to hit the link once and read about GNU and it’s philosophy. I feel they are amazing people, and their contributions to the community, especially.

[ Celebrate 30 years of GNU! ]

You Are Insignificant

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I have a lot to write at this point, so much that I am not even sure where to start. Humans are such wonderful creatures, we make things happen, world spin, or at least believe it to be that way. We have a self-imagined feeling of superiority. We are desperate to feel important, to feel blessed, to feel we have some purpose in life, and no one has to right to point at the way you walk on the face of this planet. We humans are so vulnerable.

Life goes up and down all the time, with just about everyone. We all have bad times, spend some days talking about it, and then everything gets back to normal. Now the interesting part comes when you have a logical mind. I judge myself and the decisions I take. It just turned out, when you’re sad, it is not that the day is a little too gloomy, or that the trees are all looking down, or that the world is a little too quite. It is just that you’re sad. That’s it. Done. No one, other that your little brain in there, feels a damn thing. The world is a pretty large place. The Universe, a little larger. You, me, we are too small. No one cares about you, or your thoughts, let alone the Universe as a whole. You only matter if you can make money, and that is very temporary, only applicable on earth. So basically, you are worth a rock floating in space, even less.

I see people crying over little things, things so little that it almost feels a shame to cry over. You can’t ask people to live according to you, of course not. What you can really ask is to show a little respect to the 3.5 billion years of evolution, that they are at the front of right now. Life wasn’t easy. From the hot geysers, to the half dozen catastrophic disasters that shock everything on our little planet. Life made it through them, and for every specie that you see today, at least 1000 have perished, and then you tell me that this guy is trying to ignore you and you are feeling left out. Come on people, don’t be that weak. We are a race that has been here from quite some time. The end might be near somewhere, in the next 100 or 1000 years, if we stop thinking about our individual existence and our special place in this Universe we might make it out to a few thousand years. And unless we move to some other world before that, there is not much probability that we can save us from ourselves. World would completely reset itself, and your current values would be deep buried inside some fossils down the surface. The sun would expand into a red super giant and eat up the earth’s atmosphere. Our galaxy Milky Way would collide with it’s sister galaxy Andromeda. Artistic fiery show of stars and nebulas it would be, for some other civilization far way just opening their eyes to the Universe. The sun would soon die, and there would only be darkness after that, for eternity. No one, yes, NO ONE, would ever know how much you struggled when you existed for those 60 years in that entire 11 billion years of solar system’s history.

So shall we begin the discussion about your life’s struggles now?

Need For An Alternate Social Network

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About a week or so ago, we were asked to choose our ‘web-technologies’ project, that would be among a group of two or three, and to be completed within the course of the semester. After forming team with two of my buddies at the college, we started to discuss about the possible theme of the project. From the very beginning, I had this idea to create a social network. After discussing with the other two, or I would rather say after convincing them, we finally settled to create a ‘social network’ model.

You can call me an avid social networker. I spend most of my free time staring at my computer’s screen and most of the times, I am not actually working but surfing the social networks I have unnecessarily signed up with, which eat up most of my productive time. Well, at least that was the truth up to a few months ago. I have made some interesting, and more appropriately, disturbing observations about most of the people on these social networks. Social networks are not the online social places anymore. They have become more anti-social networks. How?

Well, when was the last time you saw an ugly or not-so-perfect photo of your friend on Facebook? Or when was it that you read his or her tweet that didn’t have that touch of wit in it? Hard to remember, isn’t it? Not all do it, but one thing you might admit, most do. We hate to feel inferior. We want ourselves to be perceived better than the rest, and in that struggle to keep our fake identity updated, we keep adding tiny bits of false facts to that image. We have image editing and filter apps more than ever. Sites that provide humorous one liners are now full time. There is a rivalry to stay on top of the popularity ladder. People consider themselves less of a user, and more of a brand. Everyone wants to have an identity online, start a vogue, get famous, all in the easiest possible way. Who want to take the effort to create or discover something? Scientists are fools. Better is to use what you got at your disposal. Make stupid statements about others to get those 5 seconds of fame. Expose your body to get followers, is what exactly happens on Instagram half of the times. Click-bait headlines are all over the place, no site to trust over it’s content. News websites have started to look more like link exchange sites. The Internet is not the same good old place to share thoughts anymore, but a shameless self-promotion hub.

So what might be the possible solution to this? First culprit, in my opinion, is the followers thing. The problem lies in inequality in the distribution of followers. Some famous people get more followers, and in turn, get more ‘likes’ and ‘retweets’ even on their lamest posts. On the other hand, if some random guy posts a very interesting research, he doesn’t have the audience, so maybe his research won’t get that far. Now maybe he won’t mind it this time, but in the long run, when he and countless others like him, don’t get the appreciation they deserve but see crappy content making it to the trending news, maybe they will stop their research and get into making the content that makes it to the top. From experience, we know what content actually does. This is exactly how we are discouraging quality content on the Internet. Some sites have kept up very well (see Reddit) but for most, the future doesn’t look as good. The only apparent solution to this is to keep the ‘followers’ thing for topics, and not for people. That way, a celebrity and a commoner gets equal chance to be heard, and hence, reach out to the millions of other users typically found on any average sized social network today.

The second thing concerns me more, because it is not about the technology, but about the users of it. We are raising a generation which will never know the joy of meeting friends after a while, the joy of hanging out together and the joy in laughing over yourself. Because today fun is what is made of the poor and the powerless, and laughter is what you have when someone gets hurt. News is what the celebrities are up to, and sports is what the richest guys bet. The world has more of everything than ever, still life is more monotonos than ever. Let’s be honest, how many birthdays would you actually remember if there had been no reminders on Facebook? Not many, but still we go to the extent of doing a formality of typing ‘hbd’ on our friend’s wall on his or her birthday. Interesting.

The online social universe is degrading each day, and we are not doing much to help it. Good sources of news and content are like one in a thousand, if not less. The things must be changed, or it may not be long before Internet loses it’s meaning, and not stay worthy of spending time on, much like the television these days.

4th Semester And Then

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It was in June that I appeared for my 4th semester exam (we have 8 in all, 2 each year). That makes me one half of an engineer, as far as the certification thing is concerned. Apart from that, I would not consider myself anywhere near to what standards I have for an Engineer in my mind. Nevertheless, the results were displayed late last month, and I managed to clear all the subjects, proudly entering the 3rd year of the course.

But since the exams, I did a few interesting things that I would like to let you know. Just after the exams, I took to Qt framework in C++ which I did for the next one month or so. Not much, but I did the QWidget class well enough to have coded some simple GUIs. It was quite interesting, and a useful asset that I think I own now. Later the interest turned towards web [again! :]. I started working on a social network written in Python, Django. I will update you once I get the base ready, and since it is the largest of all the projects I have worked on, I am quite proud and happy for it. Lastly, something even more amazing happened. I found my lost interest in Physics and Astronomy back. It is quite interesting, as to how it happened, but I will save that for a separate post.

The past two months have been great, from my personal perspective. I have basically transformed into someone else, hopefully wiser than I was before. Hopefully. There is a strong reasoning I found for making that statement. I started reading a lot, doubting even more and I found that it opened doors to newer dimensions to living my life. Everything, everyone exists just because they do. That’s it. Nobody, nothing, especially the universe, owes you an explanation to things that seem incomprehensible. Learn to accept it. Maybe it is a part of growing up, which I seem to have realized now. For what it’s worth, I will still stay curious, for that is what drives me and most of the people. Good night.

Social Share Counts Python Implementation

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I wrote this little script that grabs the count of shares on popular social networks, using their APIs. I have listed the documentation on the project page on Github. I will copy the relevant pieces of readme here.

Social Network APIs

Facebook

Request:
https://graph.facebook.com/?id=https://www.github.com

Response:

{
   "id": "https://www.github.com",
   "shares": 31684
}

Twitter

Request:
https://cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=https://github.com

Response:

{"count":14,"url":"http://github.com/"}

Google Plus

Request:
https://plusone.google.com/_/+1/fastbutton?url=https://github.com

This returns the +1 button. I extracted the counts using regex window.__SSR = {c: ([d]+)

LinkedIn

Request:
https://www.linkedin.com/countserv/count/share?url=https://github.com&format=json

Response:

{"count":0,"fCnt":"0","fCntPlusOne":"1","url":"https://github.com"}

StumbleUpon

Request:
https://www.stumbleupon.com/services/1.01/badge.getinfo?url=https://github.com

Response too large.

Pinterest

Request:
https://api.pinterest.com/v1/urls/count.json?url=https://github.com

Response:

receiveCount({"url":"https://github.com","count":0})

Reddit

Request:
https://www.reddit.com/api/info.json?url=https://github.com

This returns a lot of data, which can be easily used to extracted counts.
Note that the Reddit guys don’t really like automated requests and may cause the call to return HTTP 429.

Vkontakte

Request:
https://vk.com/share.php?act=count&index=1&url=https://github.com

Response:

VK.Share.count(1, 419

This marks the end of the documentation. I hope that serves some purpose. The reason I wrote this was that I wanted social sharing buttons on this blog. I could not afford any of the mainstream buttons like Addthis and Sharethis. They kill the load time, and I’m already struggling with Disqus and Adsense overload. More on that soon. I hope to create a ‘dynamic looking’ static set of buttons for this blog, and I’ll update you if I get time to complete it.

First Anniversary Of My Blog

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Last month, I was reminded by Bigrock.in about the pending renewal of nagekar.com. It was through an email. I had completely forgotten the date of registering the site and it came in as a handy reminder. 6th of June it was, in 2014.

I had an affinity towards blogs and blogging right from when I was 15. That was when I had seen the first blogs and shortly after that, it was when I created my first blog. It was in the morning, of 5th March, 2011. I knew I was up to something awesome. 7 in the morning, I was home alone. I remember mom and dad had to go out early, to receive some guests. I spent an effort filled three hours and finally got the site up at around 10 am. The domain was geekystuffforall.webs.com (It reads, Geeky Stuff For All, if you had trouble). It felt good, to have an identity. I wrote a paragraph for the homepage, which was the first post for me, ever.

Hi everyone, if you are searching for someone who thinks spending 8 hours in front of a PC is normal, you are at the right place 😉
You will not find any amazing new hacks or such stuff here.Then why this site ? It is because I am not a computer expert but computer enthusiast just like you. I will try to share whatever new I come to know. I would be extremely pleased to hear from you.
By the way I am Abhishek Nagekar. You can meet me on Facebook(If you like to !!)

March 5, 2011

And that was also the last thing I wrote on that blog. It was not that I got bored or anything, but I was quick to realize more amazing platforms are available that gave more control to bloggers. I created something called cyber-outlaws.blogspot.com to post all the tricks and hacks I then knew. I worked pretty well. I had around 800 views in the first month, which is good number compared to even this blog. Then came many more blogs on numberous subdomains on almost every popular free hosting out there. My ‘niche’ had changed from hacks and tricks to mobiles and gadgets, news and reviews alike. I though about moving on from something.somehost.com to something.com, mostly because of the fact that I could have a [email protected] like email address. I registered my first top level domain, lulztec.com on Godaddy. It costed about INR 99, or USD 2, under a promo scheme. It was back in May or June, 2013. I was just out of junior college, and it was time to make some money. I blogged and blogged, but did not get the traffic I was expecting. After 2 or 3 failed attempts to signup for Google Adsense, I finally settled for Chitika and Infolinks. I didn’t make anything for the next 6 months I kept them on my site (I did actually make $2.80, but I will call it nothing because the cashout was $100, so I never actually got anything in hand).

I thought there was more to blogging than just posting new stuff everyday. I moved everything to a paid hosting company called Visiba. They were charging around $2/month back then. I was really impressed by their service and kept my blog there for another three months. Later, not seeing any improvements, I had to think what next to do, that would work. I purchased a small VPS from DigitalOcean, where I moved the blog and started writing Linux tutorials. I was paying $5/month to DigitalOcean, which is considered low for a VPS. Still, there was no sign of revenue and I was spending a great deal of time on blogging. I knew I had to change things. I registered a new domain called tutshub.net, where I decided to post technical tutorials. It worked only a little better with this one. Meanwhile, I was accompanied by my school friend, who used to be a blogger too. Together, we managed to get our blog under alexa 400k which was cool, I thought. Also, we tried our hands in the web development world, and registered nakshtra.org, which failed miserably. Tutshub.net was going good and it was mostly because of my partner Harshal, who worked harder than me. Here’s a snapshot I found at archive.org

But we decided to stop that blog. The last post was made in February 2014, and then we orphaned it. Blogging helped me to realize there is much more I can do, than just write about other people’s achievements. I got to be better than that, I thought. I still don’t know if it was a good decision but it definitely helped me concentrate on myself. It was a few months later, in June, that I got this blog. It was not aimed to be a traffic scoring blog, because I know for sure now, I cannot blog for traffic. One year passed, 30 articles written, tried many new languages and frameworks, got accepted by Adsense, did average in academics, made some great friends in college and many great things happened in just this year. I am glad I decided to start this blog which, as I have always said, is a diary to me.

As it happened, many people have appreciated the things I write, and there have been a lot of feedbacks, positive and constructive alike. I share this one year with you’ll, who took the time to read my thoughts. The past is history, quite a beautiful one. You, me, we grew wiser each day, and we’ve no intention of changing that. Finally, happy birthday! to my blog. Here’s to more good content in future.

Blog Moved To Github

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Take a look around. Everything’s changed. Yet again. I am sure you’re probably sick of me changing the total appearance of this blog every 3 months or so, and you’re right in being so. Let’s go back into a little history. Around a year from now, I stumbled across Ghost blogging platform. It was clean, neat and beautiful. I knew I always wanted something like that to write. I didn’t have this (nagekar.com) domain at that time. I went ahead and started their trial, which gave me a subdomain at ghost.io to blog on. It was beautiful, visually and the overall experience. After having dealth with most of the popular opensource PHP content management systems like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, this was something new altogether.

I registered this domain, about a week later and started using their minimal plan of $5 per month, which included 10k pageviews. It took me not long to realize that I couldn’t afford those $5 because, 1) it was a personal blog from which I wasn’t making any revenue, and 2) because being a student, I have to save money to utilize in other areas like books and all. I got off there, with the half dozen articles I published while I was there for a month and a half. I, with those articles in my backpack started wondering like a hunter, looking for a new shelter, cheap and simple. Svbtle was another platform that I liked, unfortunately I didn’t have an invite at that time, and even when I got the invite, the custom domain feature, which I needed, was only available to paid customers. Of course not everything can be free, and I have no complaints, rather I am grateful to them for such a wonderful platform. I had to settle for Blogger, as the forced ads in WordPress were something that made me hate WordPress.com. Initially, with a custom theme, a little complicated, but later reverted to simple one. Then I went to code my own, which turned out to be successful, as far as my goal was concerned. It was perfect. No foreign code and nothing that increased the load time.

There is a problem with near perfect things. They are boring. And so, I thought, was my blog. No new problems to troubleshoot and no commandline to work with. Blogger is everything what a writer sometimes needs, but we computer people are a different breed. We need problems, then be it in our own personal blogs. While randomly surfing, I came across Jekyll, a blog-like platform created to be used with Github, to publish static pages. I knew not much about how Ruby applications are, or how to set one, but thanks to their excellent documentation, I was able to set it up in less than a day. There is no database, simple text files which become posts and pages. Github automatically parses markup or markdown in the post, and you have a nice little blog which is free, easy to manage and test locally, everyone can see the source, plus new stuff can be published with a mere git push.

I liked the way the blog looks and feels. It is important for me to like it since I mostly blog for selfish reasons, haha, but I hope it is comfortable for others to navigate too. I would like to hear anything regarding the new look of my blog down in the comments, and constructive suggestions are welcome. Keep visiting.