One way around the problem was to mail a zipped folder containing all 'to-update' contents to a friend and tell him the username and password to my account on the server where the pages are to be uploaded. It involved putting my pleading skills to use and a lot of half-hearted effort from my friend's part. Well one cannot blame him if for this simple job he had to download and install a brand new FTP client, create my profile and upload it. It takes 5 complete minutes to do that. Being December time, one cannot expect anyone inside IIT, already consumed by home-sickness caused by extended stay thanks to December placements, to be in a mood to do any favors. So I took upon myself to infiltrate the firewall or rather what I did was circumvent it.
Thanks to another lukkha friend- Varun's advice, I came upon an esoteric piece of knowledge. There is a way to infiltrate IIT internet. Inside IIT, two depts- CSE and EE have kept 2 of their ports (ssh and telnet) receptive just for this purpose. I cursed myself for being in ME, and started out on this new found hope. On ssh-ing into the dept server, I logged into his account and accessed my dept web server. Now I could download my own files into the local directory- Varun's account and edit them at will on the terminal. But fate had more shenanigans planned for me.
The thing about websites is that just the written content of a page is not what one wishes to update. To improve the look of a page, one has to link images and other visually pleasing elements in the html code. So I had to find a way to upload image files from my ThinkPad to Varun's account. Everything seemed to be on song that day as I immediately found a solution. There exists a virtually unknown terminal-based mail client called 'mutt', with the exceptions of total linux geeks, that allows you to access emails like Outlook and Thunderbird but at a very economical price- it eats only 0.6Mb of the memory. Pronouncing 'mutt' the Marathi way gives it a new perspective! As luck would have it, mutt was already installed for all accounts by the generous soul of EE's system administrator. All I had to do now was to learn to configure mutt.
They say the 'man' command is the best tutor, better than any book on a linux software. Believing in that age-old linux-adage, I typed in 'man mutt'. After scrolling down a few lines of almost gibberish, I came upon this-
Here is a nice tutorial on how to do it- LinuxJournal. I gave up on the idea of configuring mutt shortly afterwards as I had run out of fuel and my mom was virtually begging me to eat my dinner.
The next day, I started exploring this much talked about page-ranking business. Google is smart because it 'ranks' higher the sites which are popular. Hence these sites show in the first few pages of google search. This ranking is based on their own unique page-ranking algorithm. This algorithm is far too complicated as the details would fit a book. So I will just bring out the important points...Every site has a page-rank associated with it. Initially all sites have rank 0. The ranking is based on how many 'back-links' are available to the site. There may be many other sites that are linked from the site under consideration, but back-links are those which link TO that site from other sites. The number of these back-links and their respective own page-ranks decide the page-rank of the page. Things can get really complicated and thus there are the 'SEO' (Search Engine Optimization) companies that provide advice on how to increase your page rank. Those who are really interested in how page-ranking works may look this up. Based on this advice, I provided the link to my website where-ever my public account was active- facebook, orkut, flickr, linked-In, Twitter...I also included the google-analytics javascript code in the source html to track my website. There are many free 'counters' available that also track down the number of hits on the website and their locations, like clustermaps. I used flagcounter along with google-analytics. The real reason behind that was it gave me in situ information on the web traffic from different geographies on my page...which looks cool. To cap off the day, I came across a joke-
Amitabh Bacchan to Shashi Kapoor: Mere paas paisa hain, bangla hain, gadi hain, naukar hain..tumhare paas kya hain, oin?
SK to AB: Mere paas Maa hain..for a while AB looks stumped, then-
Amitabh Bacchan says:Fooled you..mere pass Paa hain..ab bol.
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