Splat | WiseTome.com

Those of you who have been visiting Splat regularly, might have seen a lot of changes that are happening around here in the past 24 hours. These changes have been made after quite a bit of considerations on the mission of WiseTome.com.

The mission of WiseTome is to become a continuously expanding library of articles and information on growing number of topics.

The topics were initially around interests of my own, and after that - around interests of people who joined the wagon. Splat, the blog of WiseTome.com, was meant to be the place-holder for all the information that we came across. We did put some research in to it, but not enough to deem it to be fit in WiseTome.com. And Splat has served the purpose well to that extent. There are 150 short articles on the different categories posted at Splat over the course of roughly an year.

The other things we are involved in made it difficult for us to concentrate on compiling the information we had amassed and put it in a digestible format. This point of time, I will be concentrating on that. So expect to have less frequent or even absent posting at Splat.

Here are some of the changes applied to Splat and WiseTome.com. This process has involved tradeoffs between ideal setup and not breaking anything up.

• Common theme for WiseTome.com and Splat. Splat is after all a part of WiseTome and to this extent, the Garland theme is used for both. I might put in some customizations, but focus would be on the content. There would be nothing fancy, as the goal of WiseTome.com is to provide information.
• Common navigation at high level. The main navigation section is a horizontal strip of links that would let you navigate between sections of the site easily. No other URL structure has been changed and that means, none of you nice people who have tracked back to any articles here will be left broken links. All links work as they would earlier.

So - what should you expect for the near future of Splat and WiseTome.com?

• Less frequent and less regular posting at Splat. I would be working on compiling the mass of information that we have at Splat into WiseTome - so there would be no posts from me. There might be few guest posts peppered. This would be for at least a couple of months if my estimates hold true.
• Compiled articles at WiseTome. There would be work done at compiling all the works of information from myself and other authors. I am yet to figure out the best way to do it - so if you have any suggestions - you are most welcome.

I think I would be tackling one section at a time. Expect round ups of those works here.

We have had several extensive articles on each levels of the technology stack that makes up the abstract system of computer and internet.  We had a basic overview of it, and mildly in depth view on different levels from transistor to chip level units.

For the next level - the processor level - I thought I should let some one with more expertise in the field talk about it.  Tomorrow, you will see the next part of the series, Journey Of Code, by Sundeep Prabhu.

For some time now, Splat has been providing feeds for you keep yourself updated.  As of now, there is another option - email subscription - if you are not using any feed readers.

Just pop your email address into subscription form in the sidebar, and confirm it by clicking the link that comes in your email.  (If the email does not show up in few mintues, check your spam folder).

The email would be solely used for the purpose of sending you updates and would not be sold to any one. Rest assured that the email address would not be mis-used.

I am not sure what are the factors - chat, email, forums, text messages, or just the fact that people do not have time. There does not seem to be an effort to write properly, leave alone beautifully. There seems to be not much of an effort put into spelling and grammar.

As I write this, I know I feel more like my father than myself. But even then, when I grumbled and went on to correct my mistakes he found in something I wrote, I used to learn. I am sure, many of us would have done the same. There was a genuine effort put into learning the correct way of using the language, and learning new words.

Few would also have dictionaries next to them when they were reading some book they got from the library. Language, and the way we communicate, was something that was given the same importance as the ideas we wanted to communicate.

Going through the forums, the mailing lists, and even the forwards that I get in the mail box, are filled with language which has been abused to the extent that when you use correct language, it is seen archaic. It is seen as something that came out of a time machine.

The effect of all this is a general language degeneration, and also degeneration of writing skills.

It would all seem like there is no hope, but a recent fad seems to have contributing to turning the tide around. We may not be able to point to any particular product of Internet to blame for the degeneration of the writing skills, but I feel we can blame another product of Internet for contributing to improve the writing skills of the people. That would be blogs.

Blogs, in its struggle to take the online role of journalism, has attempted to emulate the writing skills of the journalists. We all have to agree, that no matter how obnoxious they might turn out to be, they have good skills in terms of writing, either by practice or by education.  We were all told to read the newspapers (not the tabloids) to improve our language skills. Blogs, in their struggle to be recognized have driven the bloggers to write better.

It all is now left on time, to see how these bloggers effect the rest of the Internet savvy crowd towards improving writing skills.

For all the aspiring pro-bloggers out there, you must have already read Darren’s post on future publishing. But many times, the post is in a state when it cannot be published and needs a bit more input before hitting the road. That is when we save it as a Draft. And quite often, if you are like me, things can go out of the hand, and you will end up with more of those links (assuming you are using Wordpress).

Wordpress.com seems to have added a new feature that shows all these Drafts in a neat tabular format (and in multiple pages if you have too many). This is a nifty feature, I will be waiting for them to include in the Wordpress engine. It will be very useful for me.

Via: Got Drafts? Filter.

Well, it seems natural to me that I came across ISSN as I looked around to know more about ISBN and UPC.

There is nothing much, to state about ISSN, other than the fact that it is International Standard Serial Number.

ISSN is given to a periodical, or a magazine. It does not matter if it is print media or online media.  It just has to be a periodical publication.

ISSN is a nine digit number, written as two four digit number separated by a hyphen, and the last digit being a checksum digit like with the other international numbers.  Each periodical will be having a unique nine digit ISSN number that can be registered using the national based ISSN centers.

Note that ISSN is given to the entire periodical, and specific issue or volume cannot be specified using ISSN.

Considering that ISSN is for periodicals, be it print or online, are blogs (weblogs) entitled to get a ISSN.  There seems to be quite a bit of argument going on for the case and also, there seems to be no consistency in the way, ISSN registrars of different countries act towards blogs. (See link).