Here’s wishing all of you a very happy and prosperous new year. I’ve been writing rather infrequently in 2009 and thats likely to continue into the first couple of months in 2010.
I’m going to be in Ahmedabad around 15-20 th Jan. If anyone wants to meetup, drop me an email.
I’m looking for some data entry work to be done — can you recommend a reliable service provider if you’ve used one ? Leave a comment or drop me an email – contact [at]startupdunia[dot]com.
Wishing you a very Happy Diwali & for those who celebrate their new year, wish you a happy & prosperous new year as well.
Yesterday marked the 3rd anniversary of StartupDunia. Wow – its hard to believe its been 3 years already. Its been an amazing journey so far, of course with its share of ups and downs. Along the way, I’ve made some awesome contacts and friends and come in touch with folks whom I would have never come across otherwise.
I know that this year I’m not posting as frequently as I’d want to – I’d actually attribute that to two reasons.
1) Honestly, there isnt a whole lot of startups happening in India – doesnt matter what anyone says or how many events / b-plan competitions you have. Of course, I could always rinse and rehash tech news, but I’d prefer to post original thoughts on this blog, even if thats infrequent. I’d rather post when I have something to say rather than just posting for the sake of it.
2) There have been some ongoing transitions in my life leaving me with less time to blog
Its been about a month since I last blogged. Even though I could have squeezed in the time to blog, I chose not to. As preposterous as it sounds, last month I decided to embark upon an experiment, wherein, I decided to forgo reading any blogs or blogging myself for a month. I decided to forgo reading news, nyt, hacker news and techmeme as much as possible. My access to computers and Internet would be limited to what was required at work and nothing more.
So why did I, at the risk of alienating my readers, make such a drastic decision ?
Well, I needed to bring some order and focus into my life and make it less chaotic. Before this hiatus, every free / spare moment of my time was spent reading news / blogs etc. It always seemed like a mad rush and frenzy – so little time and so many posts / news to catch up on. What if I missed any important ones ? I always felt stressed out for no reason. I felt compelled to blog. Not to mention that the number of distractions was slowly increasing – Twitter, FF etc. I was losing focus and suddenly priorities seemed irrelevant.
A total online burnout you can say !
While struggling to find an effective solution, I tried to read up on stuff related to increasing productivity, reducing stress, prioritizing etc. But nothing helped. I realized that the only way out of this mess was to pull the plug and start with a clean slate. During this time off, I enjoyed doing other things that I’d stopped doing – coding, eating out, going out for movies, hanging out with friends, tennis etc. I started meditation (had been putting it off forever). For a month, I cared less about what Twitter was upto or what new startup had launched around Twitter. And I enjoyed the month just relaxing and being stress free. I also spent time contemplating on what I want to do next.
Now that the month long period is over, I’m back to blogging, but I’ve set some personal guidelines to keep things structured and hopefully I’m able to abide by these rules. Prior to writing this post, I just hit the ‘mark all as read’ in my Google Reader and had no qualms about it (making progress already 
). We’ll see how long I’m able to keep up, but I sure’ll give it my best shot.
Regular blogging should resume this week. And a big thanks to those who dropped in a note asking about my well being.
A vacation away from the usual distractions – laptop, cellphone, tv, Techmeme, Google News, Twitter, Facebook etc is great.
But settling back into work after a long vacation has become dreadful for some, nightmarish for several others.
Other than the long list of unread messages in your inboxes, you have the hajjar unread items in Google Reader, the several hundreds of Twits (depending on how many folks you follow) and countless other to-do things.
There’s no better way to recover than hitting the ‘mark all as read’ button – if you know a better alternative, do let me know.
I call it the post vacation decluttering stress disorder !!
Ah, the times we live in !!
I’ll be out on a much needed vacation next week so there’ll be very little or no blogging this next week.
If you have been subscribing to my blog feed via RSS or email, you might have noticed that over the past several months, links in my feed point to the site www.feedplusplus.com. Here’s some insight into the whats and the whys.
I started Feedpluplus as a personal project in an effort to get additional analytics data on my feed subscribers. FeedBurner does a decent job at estimating the number of feed subscribers, email subscribers, reach etc. However, it does not provide any data on what links were clicked from within your feed.
So for example, this post that I did on Monday provides a link to Andrew Chen’s blog. Feedburner does not provide any data on how many people clicked on that link. Or where the links originated from. In fact there’s no other service available that will provide you that data. I started working on FeedPlusPlus in an effort to collect this data. It is mainly a url redirection service – think of it as TinyURL but for the links in your RSS feeds. So, when you click on a link from within my feed, you get forwarded to FeedPlusPlus, which redirects you to the original link. But before doing that, does the analytics bit of it.
Here’s wishing you and everyone a very happy Holi. Have fun and enjoy !!
happy holi
(photo credit bobby)
Sorry about the feed republishes — there were some syncing issues with Feedburner and while tweaking it around, got feeds republished by mistake.
Apologies !!
