I'm sure that most of you have more than once searched for obscure or little researched information on the internet and come up dry in spite of the power of google and other search engines. I've often run into this situation because there are some topics that are so specialized (or of lesser interest to people in general) that it's well nigh impossible to find authoritative sources of information on them.

Here's where I would like my readers to help out. If you find a lesser-known website on an uncommon subject (examples, but not limited to: rare literature, forgotten authors, great webcomics or less popular FOSS applications) please bring them to my notice. I'll definitely give them a look and post a link here on this blog if I find them worthy.

I've already been doing this, but I would appreciate help from my readers as well.

Over the last few days, more than one of my Geeky and Meeky toons have been submitted to StumbleUpon by a few of my online friends.

While I appreciate your gesture, I request my regular blog readers not to submit any more of my "Geeky and Meeky" cartoons to StumbleUpon.com as it has already featured there a few times and I'm not sure it's helping generate any real interest among users of that community. Yes, the number of visitors does increase for a very short time, but that doesn't mean a thing to me. I also removed the StumbleUpon.com icon from here, so that I'm not seen as actively encouraging people to submit my articles there.

This probably goes for most other social bookmarking sites.

Call me anti-social

There's a neat little trick in b2evolution, which allows you to get RSS/Atom feeds for any category of posts on this blog.

If you wish to get updates only to a single category on Hari's Corner rather than the full feed, just do this:

• Copy the URL of the category or click on the category link in the sidebar.
• Add the text ?tempskin=_rss2 to the end of the URL.
• Use that URL as the feed URL in your favourite RSS reader.

You can also use ?tempskin=_atom to get an Atom feed instead of RSS if you prefer that format.

So instead of getting updates for every single post I make on this blog, you will be alerted only if I've made a post to that particular category. Use that feature as you wish!

Disclaimer: This policy obviously does not apply to those I consider my friends..

Er... no, I'm not going to move my blogroll to a separate page of its own.

Rather it's something I've been annoyed about for a while now. It's called "reciprocity" and it's a word I've used recently in a different context. I've removed a couple of links from my blogroll as a result of this.

When I link to a blog, I do expect some reciprocity from the other side. When I say that I have given people a fairly prominent link on my home page. What I don't appreciate is my link being buried among hundreds of others in an obscure blogroll page. Mind you, I don't care about the SEO benefits. What I care about is (there is that word again) reciprocity. If I give you a prominent link, I expect a prominent link in return or your friendship and regular participation on my blog's discussion page. If I get neither, I am naturally upset.

So here's a new rule I'm going to follow on Hari's Corner from now on. If you want a link back from here, I expect one of the two (or both if you prefer ):

• Being a (reasonably) regular commenter on my blog. (Obviously there's no need to comment on every article I write; I just need to know once in a while that you're still following my blog) OR
• Giving me a link on your home page or finding some other way to link to this blog meaningfully (for example, in articles.)

I'm sorry to have to implement such a system in any case and if I had been more careful in the past, such a rule wouldn't have been necessary. But I have been generous enough in linking to other bloggers and even commenting on their blogs (most of my regular readers will confirm this), so naturally it's time to expect something in return.

Link or comment - it's your choice. Fair enough?

I've figured out a couple of things in b2evolution today.

• The plugin system is really powerful. Many options I was never aware of earlier are configurable using the plugin management system. For instance, I have just now enabled smilies in comments and it automatically displays the list of smilies for commenters as well. Took me this long to figure out that smilies could also be rendered in comments.
• b2evolution rocks. Much better than WordPress in my opinion because it is so configurable. This along with a far, far superior widget management system, easy multi-blogging and a powerful, yet intuitive templating system, I am so glad I moved to b2evolution.

On a side note, I also discovered how to remove the rel="nofollow" attribute in comment author links, but this one took me a while longer to figure out because the anti-spam plugin was automatically re-inserting the nofollow. This confused me for a while, but it turns out that even this behaviour can be configured within the plugin's options.

Finally, I've enabled Gravatars here on an experimental basis, but based on user feedback, I'll either keep it or remove it.